BWBS Ep:190 What Came Out of My Inbox

Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace. Some blame wild animals. Others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in. But those who have survived, they know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, dogmen, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out. Others aren't so lucky. Are you ready? Because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember, some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto-downloads, and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Over the past several months, I've been getting emails from listeners and from folks who've stumbled across the show while searching for a place to tell their story. And I want to be clear about something before we get into these. Every single one of these accounts came to me unsolicited. These people reached out to me. I didn't go looking for them. They found the show. They listened to a few episodes. And they decided it was time to get something off their chest. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between somebody who's spinning a yarn and somebody who's been carrying something heavy for a long time. And I'll tell you right now, these six people, they've been carrying something heavy. Some of them for decades. A couple of them told me they'd never shared their full story with anyone before. Not their wives. Not their hunting buddies. Not their best friends. One guy told me he almost deleted the email three times before he finally hit send. So what I'm going to do tonight is read these to you in their own words as close as I can to how they wrote them. I've changed a couple of small details here and there for privacy, and I'm only using first names. But the core of every story is exactly how it was told to me. These aren't dramatizations. These aren't campfire tales. These are real people describing real experiences that change the way they look at the woods. I'll let you make up your own minds, but I'll say this much. After reading all six of these back to back, I didn't sleep real well that night, and I've been doing this for close to 40 years. All right, let's get into it. Brian, I've been going back and forth on whether to write this for about three weeks now. My daughter sent me a link to your show and told me I should listen to it. I did. Heard a few episodes and thought, OK, this guy's not going to laugh at me. So here goes. In the fall of 1978, I was 26 years old and living outside of Sequim, Washington. I'd been hunting the Olympic Peninsula since I was old enough to carry a rifle. And by that point, I knew those mountains about as well as anybody could. I grew up in that country. I knew where the elk bedded down, where the creeks ran even in drought years, where the old logging roads went and where they dead-ended into nothing. I'm telling you this because I need you to understand that I wasn't some flatlander who wandered into the woods and got spooked by a bear. I knew what was out there. Or I thought I did. That October I went out alone for a five day elk hunt. My buddy Carl was supposed to come with me. But his wife had just had a baby and he couldn't get away. I almost called it off. But I'd been planning the trip for months and I had the time off work. So I figured I'd just go solo. I'd done it before. Didn't think much of it. I drove my truck up an old Forest Service road that didn't even have a number on it anymore. The gate was open, so I kept going until the road got too rough. Then I parked and hiked in about four miles to a spot I'd camped before. It was a little bench on a ridge above a creek drainage. Good visibility downhill, thick timber behind me, and a clear game trail running along the slope about 80 yards below. The kind of spot where you could sit with a cup of coffee at dawn and watch elk filter down to water without them ever knowing you were there. I set up my tent, got a fire going, ate some dinner, and turned in early. The silence out there was total. No engines, no voices, no planes overhead. Just wind in the fir trees and the creek running far below. First two days were normal. Cold mornings, quiet woods, saw some deer and a couple of does but no bulls. I covered a lot of ground, glassing ridges and working my way through the drainages. On the second evening, I was sitting by the fire and I heard something moving through the timber behind my camp. Heavy, slow, deliberate steps. Now, I've heard elk move through brush a thousand times and this wasn't that. Elk crash. They snap branches and they don't care about noise when they're just traveling. Whatever this was, it was stepping carefully, placing its feet. I could hear a branch crack every few seconds. Then silence. Then another step. like it was trying to be quiet, but it was too big to pull it off. I grabbed my rifle and shined my flashlight into the trees, but I couldn't see anything. The beam only cut about 40 or 50 feet into that timber before it just swallowed the light. Everything beyond that was just black. I stood up and moved to the edge of the firelight and listened. The footsteps had stopped. I waited there for probably 20 minutes, rifle up, ears straining, and nothing. Whatever it was either left or it stopped moving and waited me out. I went back to the fire and sat there until the flames burned down to coals. I didn't sleep much that night. Kept hearing things that might have been footsteps and might have been nothing. When you're alone in the woods at night, your mind does things to you. I told myself that's all it was. Day three is when things got bad. I'd hiked about two miles from camp following a ridge that dropped down into a big drainage. The timber was old growth in there. Massive firs and cedars with almost no undergrowth. The canopy was so thick it felt like twilight even at noon. I was moving slow, glassing the hillsides, when I caught a smell that stopped me in my tracks. It was like nothing I'd ever encountered in the woods. The closest I can describe it is if you took a wet dog, rolled it in rotting garbage, and then added something else underneath. something almost chemical like a musk that burns the inside of your nose. It was so thick in the air I could almost taste it. I stood there trying to figure out what I was smelling when I heard a sound from the drainage below me. It started low almost like a diesel engine idling a long way off. Then it built into something I don't have a proper word for. It wasn't a howl and it wasn't a scream. It was somewhere between the two but lower than anything I've ever heard come out of an animal. It vibrated in my chest. I could feel it in my teeth. It went on for maybe 10 seconds and then cut off like someone flipped a switch. I'm not ashamed to say I almost ran. I'm a Korean War baby. My father fought in the Pacific. I was raised not to panic and not to run from anything. But every instinct I had was telling me to get out of that drainage. I started backing up the way I'd come, keeping my rifle up. and that's when I saw it. It was standing in the trees about 60 yards below me, just off the game trail. At first my brain tried to tell me it was a stump, a burned stump, because it was dark and it was big and it wasn't moving. But stumps don't have shoulders and they don't turn their heads. It was watching me. It was standing slightly behind a big cedar, almost like it was using the trunk for partial cover and its head was tilted to one side. The thing that got me, The thing I still think about was how still it was. It wasn't fidgeting or shifting its weight. It was standing there with the patience of something that's been watching things move through those woods for its entire life and knows it doesn't need to hurry. I couldn't tell you exactly how tall it was from that distance and that angle, but it was big. The shoulders were enormously wide, much wider than any man I've ever seen. and they were rounded forward in a way that reminded me of an ape I'd seen at the Woodland Park Zoo when I was a kid. It was covered in hair that was dark brown, almost black, but where a little bit of light came through the canopy it had a reddish tint to it. The hair wasn't uniform. It was thicker on the shoulders and the arms and it looked matted in places, like an animal that lives outside and doesn't care about grooming. The face is what I remember most. It was flat, much flatter than a gorilla. The brow ridge was heavy and it cast a shadow over the eyes, but I could still make them out. They were dark and they were locked on me. There was no expression I could read. It wasn't aggressive. It wasn't curious. It wasn't afraid. It was just watching, studying me. And the intelligence behind those eyes was obvious. This wasn't a dumb animal staring at something it didn't understand. It knew exactly what I was, and it was deciding what to do about it. The mouth was closed and the lips were thin and dark. I couldn't tell if there was hair on the face or if the skin was just dark enough to blend with the surrounding hair. The whole head sat forward on the neck at a slight angle, not hunched exactly, but positioned in a way that put the face ahead of the chest, like it was leaning forward to get a better look at me without moving its feet. I had the overwhelming sense that it was studying me the same way I was studying it, taking inventory, measuring. We stood there looking at each other for what I'd estimate was about 30 seconds. Neither of us moved. The forest around us was dead silent. No birds, no wind, nothing. Just my heartbeat pounding in my ears and that thing standing in the shadows below me. I remember my mouth was completely dry. My hands were sweating against the stock of my rifle, but I never raised it. Part of me thought about it. I was a good shot, and 60 yards was nothing with the rifle I was carrying. But something stopped me. It wasn't fear. It was more like a sense that I was witnessing something I didn't have the right to interfere with. Like I was a guest in those mountains and I just realized it for the first time. Then it took one step back, still facing me, and sort of melted into the timber. I don't mean it disappeared. I mean it moved so smoothly and so quietly into the shadows that my eyes couldn't track it anymore. It was like watching something dissolve. One second it was there and the next it was just trees and darkness. Not a sound. Not a branch breaking. Nothing. Something that size should not be able to move like that. But it did. I went straight back to camp, packed up everything I could carry, and hiked out to my truck. I left the tent stakes and some of my cook gear behind because I didn't want to spend the extra five minutes pulling stakes out of the ground. I just grabbed the essentials and moved. The hike back to the truck felt different than the hike in. Every shadow looked like something. Every creak of a tree in the wind made me flinch. I kept the rifle in my hands the whole way, safety off. And I've never done that before or since while hiking. That's how you have accidents. I didn't care. I drove home that evening. The whole drive I kept replaying what I'd seen, trying to find a way to explain it that didn't require me to accept what I already knew. A man in a suit. A bear standing up. Some trick of the light and the shadows and my own tired eyes. None of it held up. I knew what I saw. I saw something that isn't supposed to exist, standing in the timber and looking at me with eyes that understood exactly what they were looking at. I never went back to that spot. Not once in almost 50 years. I tried to go back once, about five years later. Got in the truck and drove up the Forest Service road and got to the gate and sat there with the engine running for about 10 minutes. Then I turned around and drove home. My hands were shaking on the steering wheel. I told my wife about it when I got home from the original trip, and she could tell I was shaken up. She didn't say she didn't believe me, but she didn't say she did either. We just never talked about it again. Carl asked me why I cut the trip short, and I told him the weather turned bad. I've been telling people that for 47 years. I'm 73 years old now. I've got grandkids. I don't hunt anymore because my knees won't allow it. But I still think about that drainage and that thing standing in the trees. The part that bothers me most isn't that I saw it. It's that I'm pretty sure it had been watching me for days before I ever knew it was there. Thanks for taking the time to read my story. I really enjoy all of your podcasts. Danny. Hi, Brian. I found your podcast last month and I've been binge listening ever since. I never thought I'd tell anyone this story, but here I am. I guess there's something about hearing other people talk about their experiences that makes you feel less crazy. In the summer of 96, I was 22, and I'd just finished my junior year at the University of Florida. My boyfriend at the time, Kevin, was really into the outdoors, and he'd been wanting to do an overnight canoe trip through the Ocala National Forest. He'd done it once before with some friends, and he said it was beautiful, just paddling through the spring runs and camping on the banks of the Oklawa River. I wasn't really a camping person, but I was trying to be a good sport about it. And honestly, it did sound kind of nice. We put in at a launch point off Highway 40 and paddled south for most of the day. The plan was to find a good sandbar or clearing along the river and camp there for the night, then paddle out the next morning. The river was gorgeous. Crystal clear spring water, palm trees, big cypress knees sticking up everywhere. We saw alligators and turtles and all kinds of birds. It felt like we were a million miles from civilization, even though Ocala was only about 20 miles away. We found a spot to camp around 4.30 in the afternoon. It was a sandy clearing on the east bank of the river, maybe 30 feet wide, with thick palmettos and scrub pine behind it and a wall of cypress trees along the water. Kevin pulled the canoe up on shore and we set up the tent and got a fire going. We ate hot dogs and drank some beers and watched the sun go down. It was actually really nice. I remember thinking, okay, maybe I am a camping person after all. But things changed after dark. The first thing I noticed was the noise. Or really, the lack of it. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles. Designer, marketer, logistics manager. All while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify dot NL. That's Shopify dot NL. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. We'd been hearing frogs and insects all evening. A constant wall of sound the way it always is in Florida at night. And then around 9.30, it just stopped, like somebody pulled the plug. One second, there was a full chorus of frogs and crickets, and the next second, it was dead quiet. I've never experienced silence like that. It was so complete, it felt wrong, like the air pressure had changed. Kevin noticed it too. He looked at me and said something like, that's weird. And we both just sat there for a minute, listening to nothing. Then we heard a splash in the river. Not a small splash like a fish jumping. A big splash. Like something heavy had stepped into the water. Kevin grabbed his flashlight and pointed it at the river, but we couldn't see anything. The beam hit the water and the cypress trees on the far side, and that was it. We sat there for another couple of minutes, and then the frogs started up again, and we both kind of laughed it off. Kevin said it was probably a gator sliding off the bank. That made sense. So I went with it. We stayed up for maybe another hour and then crawled into the tent. I fell asleep pretty quickly, but I woke up sometime later. I don't know what time it was, and Kevin was sitting up next to me. He had his hand on my arm and he was squeezing it hard. I started to say something and he put his hand over my mouth. That's when I heard it. Something was walking through the palmettos behind our tent. And I need you to understand what palmetto scrub sounds like when something moves through it. The fronds are stiff and they rattle and scrape against each other. A raccoon going through palmettos sounds like a person. A deer sounds like a truck. Whatever was behind our tent sounded like somebody was driving a car through the brush. The amount of vegetation it was pushing through with each step was enormous. And the steps were bipedal. Left, right, left, right. Not the scuffling pattern of a bear or the quick trotting of a deer. Two legs, slow and heavy. It walked past the back of our tent, maybe 10 or 15 feet away. As it passed, I could feel the ground vibrate through the tent floor. Each footfall had a slight thud to it that I could feel through the sand. Then it stopped. Kevin and I were both frozen. Neither of us was breathing. The tent was one of those cheap dome tents from Walmart, the kind with the mesh windows covered by a rainfly. There was no way to see out. and no way to lock anything. We were lying in a nylon bag in the middle of nowhere, and something enormous was standing right outside. Then it made a sound. It wasn't loud. It was almost quiet, actually. And that made it worse. It was a low, guttural chattering, like teeth clacking together rapidly, mixed with a breathy, huffing sound. It reminded me of the sound a dog makes when it's frustrated, that impatient whining through closed lips, but much deeper and with a rhythm to it that sounded almost like language, like it was muttering to itself. The smell hit us next. It came through the mesh of the tent like a wave. It was foul, rancid, like a dumpster behind a seafood restaurant in August, but mixed with a heavy animal smell, wet fur and body odor and something sour underneath all of it. I gagged. Kevin's hand tightened on my arm so hard I had bruises the next day. It stood there for what I'd guess was three or four minutes. I could hear it breathing. Slow, deep breaths. Each inhale sounded like a bellows a long draw of air through wide nostrils and the exhale was heavier almost like a sigh At one point I heard a sound like knuckles wrapping on wood two quick knocks and then the chattering sound again Then it shifted its weight. I could hear the sand compress under its feet, and it took a step. Then another. Not toward the tent. Sideways. Like it was circling. It moved about ten feet to the left and stopped again. I could track its position by the smell. It was so strong my eyes were burning. Then the palmetto started crashing again and it walked away. Not running, just walking. Moving south along the river and away from our camp. The crashing got fainter and fainter until I couldn't hear it anymore. Then the frogs started up again, tentatively at first. A few croaks here and there. And then the full chorus resumed as if someone had turned the volume dial slowly back to normal. We didn't move for at least an hour. We just lay there in the dark, not talking, barely breathing. Finally, Kevin whispered that we should pack up and get on the river. I didn't argue. We broke camp in the dark, threw everything into the canoe and started paddling south, which was the direction the thing had gone. But it was also the direction of the takeout point, and there was no way I was paddling back the way we came in the dark. We paddled for maybe 20 minutes, both of us trying to be as quiet as possible with the paddles. The river was narrow in that stretch, maybe 40 feet across, with heavy vegetation on both sides, hanging over the water. And that's when I saw it. It was standing on the west bank, partially behind a cypress tree, and the moon was bright enough that I could see it clearly. My first thought was that it was a man, a very large man standing in the water up to his shins. but then my eyes adjusted and I realized what I was actually looking at. It was tall. I'm 5'6", and Kevin was 6'1", and this thing would have dwarfed both of us. It was lean in a way I didn't expect, not bulky like the ones you hear about in the Pacific Northwest. It was built more like a basketball player, long-limbed and rangy, with narrow hips and wide shoulders that sloped downward. The arms were disproportionately long and hung past where a man's would. The hair covering it was thin in places, especially on the chest and the inner arms, and underneath it the skin was dark, grayish or dark brown. It was hard to tell in the moonlight. The head was small compared to the body. Not tiny, just smaller in proportion than a human head on a body that size. The face was dark and the features were hard to make out, but I could see the brow and the jaw, and I remember the jaw being very pronounced, almost jutting forward. The eyes caught the moonlight for just a second, and they reflected back at me. Greenish. Like a deer's eyes in headlights, but not as bright. It was watching us float by. It didn't move. It didn't make a sound. It just stood there in the shallows and watched us pass. Its head tracked our movement, turning slowly as we drifted, and I could feel those eyes on me the whole time. There was no hostility in its posture. No curiosity either. It was watching us the way you'd watch a car go by on a rural road, noting our presence. Nothing more. I grabbed Kevin's shoulder and he looked over and saw it, and I felt his whole body go rigid. His paddle stopped moving for a second, and then he started paddling harder and harder, digging into the water, and I started paddling too. And we rounded a bend, and it was out of sight. The sound of our paddle slapping the water seemed impossibly loud in the quiet. I kept looking back over my shoulder, expecting to see it following us along the bank or wading in behind us, but the river behind us was empty. Neither of us said a word until we reached the takeout. We loaded the canoe onto the car in complete silence. The foam pads on the roof rack were wet, and we just strapped the canoe down, crooked and left it. Didn't care. We drove to a Waffle House on Highway 40 and sat in a booth under fluorescent lights and didn't talk about what happened. We just ate waffles and drank coffee and stared at the table. The restaurant was mostly empty. A couple of truckers at the counter. A waitress who called us both hun and refilled our coffee without asking. I remember the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and thinking that was the most comforting sound I'd ever heard. Artificial light and other human beings. That's all I wanted. Kevin and I broke up about a year later for unrelated reasons. But in the short time we stayed together after that trip. We tried to talk about it twice. Both times the conversation just kind of died. Neither of us had the words for it. It's not that we disagreed about what we saw. We both knew exactly what we saw. We just couldn't fit it into anything that made sense. There's no category for it. There's no file in your brain where you put, I saw a seven-foot creature standing in a river in the middle of the night in Florida. Your brain just rejects it and moves it to the back and puts other things on top of it. and you spend years pretending it's not there. I'm 49 now. I live in Jacksonville. I haven't been camping since that night, and I have no plans to start. People think I just don't like the outdoors. The truth is, I don't trust it anymore. All the best. Rachel. Brian. I don't really know how to start this, so I'll just start. My name's Marcus, and I grew up in a little community outside of Williamson, West Virginia, down in Mingo County. If you know anything about that part of the state, you know it's nothing but hills and hollers and coal mines. My daddy worked in the mines. His daddy worked in the mines. And I worked in the mines for 11 years before my back gave out. The thing I'm going to tell you about happened in February of 1983. I was 19 years old. My truck had broken down that morning. The fuel pump went out. And I didn't have the money to fix it. So I'd been bumming rides to work. My shift ended at 11 that night and the guy who usually drove me home had called off sick, so I was stuck. The mine was about four miles from my parents' house. It was cold and I didn't want to walk, but I didn't have much choice. Nobody else lived in my direction and I wasn't going to sit in the parking lot all night. The road between the mine and our community was a two-lane blacktop that followed a creek through a narrow valley. On both sides, the hills went straight up, covered in hardwood timber that was all bare in the winter. There were a few houses scattered along the road, but most of them were dark by that time of night. There were no street lights, no shoulders, just road and creek and woods. I'd walked it before in the daytime, and it was nothing. At night, it was a different thing. I had a flashlight, and I was wearing my coveralls and my hard hat, because it had a light on it. Between the two, I could see the road pretty well. It was cold, probably in the low 20s, and there was a thin layer of old snow on the ground that crunched under my boots. The sky was clear and the stars were out, and I could see my breath. The hills on both sides of me were just black walls against the sky. You could see where the ridgeline met the stars, but nothing below that. Just darkness. There were no cars on the road. I hadn't seen headlights since I left the mine parking lot. The only sounds were the creek running off to my right and my boots crunching through the snow. I was tired and sore from a full shift, and I just wanted to get home and get in bed. I'd been walking about 20 minutes, maybe a mile and a half, when I started hearing something keeping pace with me on the hillside to my left. The creek was on my right, and to my left, the ground went up steeply through the bare trees. The sound was footsteps in the snow and dead leaves. Not constant. More like something would take a few steps. Stop. Wait for me to get a little further ahead. And then take a few more steps to catch up. I figured it was a deer. Deer are all over Mingo County and they move around at night all the time. I shined my flashlight up the hill but the trees were thick and the slope was steep. And I couldn't see anything past the first 20 or 30 feet. I kept walking. After another few minutes, the footsteps were still there and they'd gotten closer. Not right next to the road, but closer to it than before. I stopped and shined my light again, and this time I heard whatever it was stop at almost the exact same time. I did. That bothered me. Deer don't do that. Deer either run when you stop or they freeze and stay frozen. They don't time their movement to yours. I started walking faster. The thing on the hill started moving faster too. Its steps were heavier now, or maybe it was just closer and I could hear them better. Branches were snapping. Not twigs. Branches. Thick ones. The kind that take real weight to break. And the footfalls had a cadence to them that was unmistakable. Two legs. Step. Step. Step. Matching my pace almost exactly. Then it did something that made my stomach drop. It got ahead of me. I could hear the footsteps accelerate, moving faster than I was walking. And then they swung downhill slightly and got out in front of me. It was flanking me, moving along the slope at an angle to get to a point on the road ahead of where I was. I've hunted enough to recognize that behavior. I've seen coyotes do it when they're running deer. One will chase from behind while another cuts a diagonal line to get ahead and cut off the escape route. Whatever was up there on that hill, it wasn't just following me. It was positioning itself. I'm not going to pretend I wasn't scared because I was. I was 19 and I was alone on a dark road in the middle of the night, and something was hurting me through the darkness and it wasn't a deer, and it wasn't a dog, and it wasn't a person. I knew it wasn't a person, because no person I've ever met could walk that hillside in the dark, at that speed, without falling on their face. The slope was at least 45 degrees and it was covered in loose rocks and dead leaves and snow. A man would have been sliding and stumbling all over the place. Whatever this was, moved through it like it was flat ground. There was a section of the road ahead where the hillside came down close to the pavement. The trees thinned out a little and the slope wasn't as steep. As I got closer to that section, I slowed down because I realized that whatever was up there was going to be close. Real close. And that's when I heard it make a sound. It was a grunt. Low and short. Almost like someone clearing their throat but with more force behind it. then another one then a rapid series of them five or six in a row getting louder it sounded frustrated or impatient like it had been holding back and was losing its patience I stopped walking and turned to face the hillside I put both lights on it my flashlight and my hard hat lamp and I saw it it was crouched behind a downed tree about 30 feet up the slope stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories we'll be back after these messages starting a business can be overwhelming you're juggling multiple roles designer marketer logistics manager all while bringing your vision to life shopify helps millions of business sell online build fast with templates and ai descriptions and photos inventory and shipping sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl that's shopify.nl it's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. The tree was a big oak that had fallen sometime that year, still had some brown leaves on the branches, and this thing was hunched down behind the trunk with its head and shoulders visible above it, and it was looking right at me. The first thing my brain registered was the eyes. They were spaced wide apart, and they caught the light from my headlamp and threw it back at me. Not the bright green flash you get from a coyote or a cat. This was duller, more amber, and it didn't flash and disappear when the thing moved its head. It was a sustained reflection, like the light was sinking into the eyes and coming back out warmer than it went in. The face was broad and dark. The skin around the eyes and nose and mouth was exposed, no hair on it, and it was the color of old leather. The nose was wide and flat with nostrils that were flared open. The mouth was set in a line that wasn't quite a frown, but wasn't neutral either. It looked tense. The brow was heavy, a thick shelf of bone over the eyes that cast shadows, even in direct light. And the whole face was framed by hair that was dark brown and thick and hung down past the jawline in clumps that looked almost matted, like dreadlocks. It was massive. Even crouching behind that fallen tree, the shoulders were wider than any man I've seen before or since. The arms were braced against the top of the trunk, and they were thick, heavily muscled, and covered in the same dark hair. The hands were wrapped over the bark of the tree, and I could see the fingers. They were long, and the skin on them was that same dark, leathery color. They were gripping the tree hard enough that I could see the tendons standing out along the forearms. We stared at each other. I couldn't move. My legs wouldn't work. My hands were shaking so bad the flashlight beam was jumping all over the place. I remember thinking very clearly that I was going to die on this road. I remember thinking about my mother finding out in the morning. I remember the cold on my face and the sound of the creek behind me and the way my own breathing sounded ragged and loud in the silence. Then it stood up. I don't know how to describe what it's like to watch something that big stand up from a crouch. It didn't struggle or push itself up. It just rose. Smoothly. Like it was unfolding. And it kept going up and up until it was standing at its full height. And I understood for the first time how completely outmatched I was. It was enormous. I'm 5'10 and I felt like a child looking up at it. It had to be close to 8 feet. Maybe more. And the body was proportional to the height. Thick torso. Thick legs. Long arms that hung down past its thighs. It stood there with its weight slightly forward, the shoulders rounded, the head tilted down just enough to keep its eyes on me. I took a step backward and my boot hit the pavement. The sound of it, just that small scrape of rubber on asphalt, seemed to break whatever spell we were both under. It turned its head to the side, looked back up the hill, then looked at me again. It opened its mouth and made a sound that was half bark, half cough, short and sharp and loud enough that it echoed off the hills on the other side of the road. Then it turned and walked up the slope and into the dark. Not running. Walking. Like it had somewhere to be, and I wasn't worth the detour. I ran the rest of the way home. Two and a half miles in coveralls and steel toe boots, and I ran every step of it. I could feel my heart slamming against my ribs so hard it hurt. I kept my headlamp on and my flashlight pointed behind me, and I swung it back every few strides to make sure nothing was following me. The beam hit nothing but empty road and dark trees and snow. But I didn't slow down. Not once. I came through the front door at about midnight, sweating and gasping and white as a sheet, and my mother came out of her bedroom and asked me what was wrong. I told her a dog chased me. She believed it, or she pretended to. I never told her the truth. I went to my room and sat on the edge of my bed, and my legs were shaking so bad, my heels were bouncing on the floor. I didn't turn the light off until the sun came up. The next day at work, I walked past that section of road in broad daylight, and I looked up the hill where the thing had been. The fallen oak was there. I could see scuff marks in the snow and leaves behind it, where something heavy had been crouching. There were depressions in the ground on both sides of the trunk, where hands or feet had pressed down. I followed the marks up the slope for about 20 feet, and then lost them on a stretch of bare rock. I didn't go any further. I turned around and walked to work, and I never looked at that hillside again. I left Mingo County in 89 and moved to Ohio. I go back for family stuff sometimes, but I don't drive that road at night. I won't do it. My brother thinks it's because I'm afraid of hitting a deer. I let him think that. I don't know what that thing was. I know what people say it is. I know the word for it. But saying the word out loud still makes me feel like people are going to look at me a certain way. And I've spent 40 years avoiding that look. Your show is the first time I've heard other people describe the same eyes, the same smell, the same feeling of being watched and followed in the dark. It's the first time I've thought maybe I'm not the only one. Marcus, hey Brian, I'm going to try to get through this as clearly as I can. It's been 20 years and I still can't talk about it without my hands getting shaky. So bear with me if this gets a little scattered. In October of 2004, I was 38 years old and working as a wilderness guide in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area up in northern Minnesota. I'd been doing that work on and off for about 12 years. It was seasonal, mostly spring through fall, taking groups out on canoe trips, teaching people how to portage, how to set up camp in the backcountry, how to hang bear bags, that sort of thing. I loved that job. The BWCA is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and I felt like I knew it better than I knew my own apartment. This particular trip was a five-day excursion with a group of six clients, all women, all in their 30s and 40s, who'd booked it as a kind of retreat. They were friends from college getting together for a big birthday weekend. Nice group. Enthusiastic. In decent shape. Good attitudes. My co-guide was a younger guy named Pete who'd been working with the outfitter for two seasons. We'd done several trips together, and he was solid. The first three days were textbook. We paddled through a chain of lakes, did our portages, caught some walleye, sat around campfires and told stories. The weather was perfect. Clear skies, cold nights. The leaves were turning and the whole landscape looked like a painting. On the third evening, we made camp on a small island in the middle of a lake that I'd used many times before. It was a good sight, elevated, with a flat clearing for tents, a natural fire ring, and a small rocky point that jutted out into the water. The nearest shoreline was about 200 yards in every direction. Being on an island always made clients feel secure. Nothing's going to bother you when you're surrounded by water. At least that's what I used to tell people. That night I woke up to the sound of something hitting the water. Not a fish jumping. It was a rhythmic splashing, like something waiting. I checked my watch and it was around 2.15 in the morning. I unzipped my tent and looked out toward the rocky point. The moon was three quarters full and the lake was calm, and I had a decent view of the water on that side of the island. There was something in the lake, moving toward the island, waiting. At first I thought it was a moose. Moose are common in the BWCA and they feed on aquatic plants and they wade into lakes at all hours That was my first assumption and it made sense for about three seconds Then I realized it was waiting on two legs I could see the silhouette against the moonlit water It was upright, moving steadily, and the water was somewhere around its waist. Given that the lake bottom sloped gradually from the shoreline, and that stretch of water was probably chest deep for a person, whatever this was, it was standing much taller than a human would in that same depth. It was pushing through the water with a steady gait, arms swinging slightly, creating a V-shaped wake behind it. I couldn't process what I was seeing. My brain just kept looping back to moose, because that was the only large animal that made any sense in that context. But it wasn't a moose. The shape was wrong. The movement was wrong. Everything about it was wrong. A moose is front heavy, big head and shoulders, and it plows through water. This thing was upright and balanced and it moved through the water with a purposefulness that looked almost casual. Like wading across a lake in the middle of the night was something it did regularly. Just a commute. Nothing special. I grabbed Pete's tent and shook it and whispered for him to wake up. He came out groggy and annoyed and I pointed at the water and the look on his face went from irritated to blank. He saw it too. We stood there side by side in our long underwear and watched this thing wade up out of the lake and onto our island. The water got shallower as it approached and more of its body emerged and each inch of it that came out of the water was wrong. The proportions, the shape, the movement, all of it. My brain kept trying to make it into something I recognized and failing. It came out of the water on the far side of the rocky point, about 40 yards from where we were standing. The water came off it in sheets. I could hear it dripping. It stepped up onto the rocks and stood there for a moment, and in the moonlight I got a clear look at its profile. It was tall and it was heavy. Not fat. Thick. Built like someone who'd spent their entire life doing hard physical labor without ever missing a meal. The proportions were close to human, but often ways that made my stomach turn. The legs were shorter, relative to the torso than they should have been. The arms were too long. The neck was almost non-existent, like the head just sat on top of the shoulders without much connecting the two. The hair covering it was dark and wet and slick to its body, and where it was thin, mainly around the ribcage and the front of the thighs, I could see the underlying musculature moving as it shifted its weight from foot to foot. It stood on the rocks like a person stands on cold ground, rocking slightly, adjusting. Pete grabbed my arm and whispered something I couldn't hear. I could feel him trembling through his grip. Or maybe I was the one trembling. Hard to say. The thing turned and looked in our direction. I don't know if it saw us, or heard us, or smelled us. But it turned its head and its body followed and for a moment it was facing us dead on. The face was the worst part. Not because it was ugly or monstrous. Because it was almost human. Almost. but not quite. The eyes were deep set and the brow bone was pronounced and the lower face projected forward more than a human face would. But there was an intelligence in that face, a recognition that made it so much worse than if it had looked like an animal. It was looking at us the way a person looks at a person, with awareness, with consideration. It took a step toward the tree line on the interior of the island, then another. It was heading into the same patch of boreal forest where our client's tents were pitched, maybe 60 yards behind us. Pete and I looked at each other and I saw the same thought in his eyes that I was having. Six women were asleep in those trees and this thing was walking toward them. Pete grabbed a hatchet from the fire ring and I picked up the biggest piece of firewood I could find. We didn't discuss it. We just started walking toward the thing, making noise, talking loudly, trying to sound confident and aggressive while internally, I was falling apart. I started banging the firewood against a tree trunk. Pete was yelling. Not words. Just noise. My voice came out higher and thinner than I wanted it to, and I remember thinking I don't sound threatening at all. I sound terrified, and this thing probably knows exactly how scared I am. The thing stopped. It turned back toward us. I could see it now in the indirect light from our campfire. which we'd built up pretty well that evening. It was standing about 30 feet from the nearest client tent. Its arms hung at its sides, and it looked at us with what I can only describe as annoyance. Not fear. Not aggression. Annoyance. Like we were an inconvenience. And it made a sound that I will never be able to adequately describe. It was a combination of a deep groan and an exhale, almost like a sigh, but with a base to it that didn't seem possible from a biological throat. It resonated. I felt it in the ground. It went on for maybe three seconds and it vibrated in my sternum, the same way standing too close to a subwoofer does. Then it stopped and the thing turned away from us and walked to the edge of the island and waded back into the lake. No hesitation. No looking back. It just walked in like the 50 degree water meant nothing to it. We watched it cross the water. It waded to the north shoreline, climbed out onto the bank, and disappeared into the forest. The whole thing from the time it first came ashore to the time it left was maybe four or five minutes. Five minutes that rearranged everything I understood about the natural world. Pete and I stayed up the rest of the night. We didn't talk much. We built the fire up high and sat next to it and stared at the water. Every ripple, every splash from a fish, every loon calling across the lake made both of us tense up. I held that piece of firewood in my lap until my fingers cramped. Pete kept the hatchet on his knee. At one point, maybe around four in the morning, we heard something moving through the timber on the north shore of the lake. Branches breaking. Heavy steps. It was far away, maybe the full 200 yards across the water, but the sound carried perfectly in the cold night air. We sat and listened until it faded and neither of us said a word. None of the clients woke up. None of them ever knew what happened. When they came out of their tents at sunrise, they found us sitting by the fire looking like we'd aged 10 years. And one of them joked about us pulling an all-nighter like college kids. I forced a laugh. We paddled out the next morning a day early. I told the group that weather was coming in, and I wanted to get ahead of it. They were disappointed, but they trusted me. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify dot NL. That's Shopify dot NL. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. I felt guilty about lying to them, but I felt worse about the alternative, which was spending another night on that lake with that thing on the shoreline and only 200 yards of open water between us. and it. 200 yards that it had already proven it was willing and able to cross. Pete quit at the end of that season, took a job at an REI in Minneapolis, and never came back to guiding. I saw him a few years later at a gas station in Uli, and we talked for a minute, and he brought it up, and I shut the conversation down. I wasn't ready. He looked hurt, but he understood. I think he needed to talk about it, and I couldn't be that person for him. I still feel bad about that. I kept guiding for another six years after that. I never went back to that lake. I told the outfitter the campsite was deteriorating, and I recommended we stop using it. They took my advice. I wonder sometimes if anyone else has had an experience there since. I wonder about it more than I should. I'm 60 now and I'm retired from guiding. I teach environmental science at a community college. I still love the outdoors. I still canoe. But I don't camp on islands anymore. And every time I wake up in the middle of the night, for whatever reason, the first thing I do is listen for the sound of something moving through water. Linda. Brian. Found your show about six months ago, and it's the reason I'm finally writing this down. I've told pieces of this to a couple of people, but never the whole thing start to finish. Not sure I'm ready for that, but I'm going to try. I live in Angelina County, Texas, in the Piney Woods region about 20 miles east of Lufkin. My wife and I bought 40 acres out here in 2014. It's mostly pine and hardwood mix, with a creek running through the back section, and a couple of small clearings. We built a house on the front portion near the road, and the back 30 acres is just raw timber. We bought it because we wanted privacy and space, and that's exactly what we got. Our nearest neighbor is about half a mile away. For the first couple of years, everything was great, quiet, peaceful. We'd see deer and turkey and the occasional coyote, and that was about it. Then in the spring of 2017, things started happening that I couldn't explain. It started with the dogs. We had two dogs at the time. A German Shepherd named Ruger and a lab mix named Dolly. Both of them were outdoor dogs, spent most of their time in the yard or on the property. And they were both good alert dogs. They'd bark at deer, bark at coyotes, bark at the UPS truck. Normal dog stuff. But starting around March of that year, they started doing something I'd never seen before. They'd stand at the edge of the yard where the mowed grass met the tree line, and they'd stare into the woods, not barking, not growling, just standing there rigid, tails down, ears flat, staring, sometimes for 10 or 15 minutes at a stretch. And when I'd call them, they wouldn't come. They'd whimper and shuffle sideways, but they wouldn't take their eyes off the trees. Ruger was 75 pounds of German Shepherd who'd treat a black bear once and never backed down from anything. Seeing him stand there shaking was the first thing that really unsettled me. Around the same time I started finding things on the property that didn't make sense. Branches broken at seven and eight feet off the ground on trees along the trail I'd cut to the back section. Not snapped by wind or ice. Twisted. Wrenched sideways and left hanging. Some of them were green branches as thick as my wrist. You'd need serious leverage and serious strength to break a live branch that size. I also found trees that had been pushed over. Not old dead trees. Living pines, six or seven inches in diameter, pushed over at the base with the root ball partially pulled out of the ground. It looked like somebody had grabbed them and just shoved. Then the sound started. My wife heard it first. She woke me up one night in April and said there was something screaming in the woods. I listened, and at first I didn't hear anything. Then it came again. It was coming from the back of the property, maybe four or five hundred yards from the house, and it was unlike anything I'd ever heard in my life. It wasn't a coyote. It wasn't a bobcat. It wasn't an owl. It was a sustained vocalization that started with a low moan and built into a full-throated scream that carried across the property and echoed off the hills on the other side of the creek. It held for maybe eight or ten seconds, and then it just dropped off into nothing. The silence afterward was almost worse than the sound. It happened again, a week later, and then again. It became a regular thing, every week or two, always between midnight and three in the morning, always from the back of the property, or the creek bottom. The dogs would come to the door when it happened and scratch to be let in. Ruger would wedge himself under the bed and shake. In May, I decided to go out there and see what I could find. Not at night. I'm not stupid. I went on a Saturday afternoon, bright sunshine, and I walked the trail back to the creek with my rifle and a video camera. The woods were quiet. Not regular quiet. Abnormally quiet. No birds, no squirrels. Nothing. Just the sound of my own boots and the creek. When I got to the creek, I found something. On the muddy bank of the creek, in a stretch of wet clay that was basically a perfect medium for tracks, there were footprints. They were human-shaped, but they were not human-sized. The impression was clear. Five toes, a defined heel, an arch, the ball of the foot. But the print was roughly 17 inches long and maybe 7 inches across at the toes. The stride between them was enormous. I stepped it off at close to 5 feet. and the depth of the impression in that clay was deeper than my own boot print by a significant margin and I weigh 210 pounds. I stood there looking at those prints and I felt the hair on my arms stand up in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature. I took photos. I took video. I measured them with a tape I'd brought along and then I got the feeling that I was being watched. I can't explain that feeling to anyone who hasn't experienced it. It's not paranoia. It's not imagination. It's a physical sensation, a tightening in the gut, and a prickling at the back of the neck that every human being on this planet has inherited from ancestors who survived because they trusted that feeling. Something was watching me. I was certain of it, the way I was certain of gravity. I scanned the tree line across the creek, and that's when I saw it. It was standing among a cluster of loblolly pines about 60 yards away on the opposite bank. It wasn't hiding. It was just standing there in the open, between the trunks, looking at me. The first thing that struck me was the color. Everything I'd ever read about these things described them as dark brown or black. This one was reddish, cinnamon colored. The hair was maybe three or four inches long over most of its body, and it was a warm, ruddy brown that blended remarkably well with the pine bark behind it. If it hadn't shifted its weight at the moment I looked in that direction, I might have stared right through it and never known it was there. It was big, but not as tall as some of the descriptions I've read. I'd estimate between six and a half and seven feet, but it was wide. The chest was barrel-shaped and the shoulders were thick and heavily muscled in a way that looked almost swollen. The arms were long and the hands were hanging at its sides, slightly open, the fingers visible even at that distance because of their length. The legs were stocky, shorter than a human's legs would be on a torso that size, and they were slightly bent at the knee even while it was standing still, like it was always ready to move. The face was partially obscured by the angle and the shadows from the pines, but I could see enough. Wide set eyes under a prominent brow. A flat, broad nose. A mouth that was closed and set in a neutral expression. The skin on the face was darker than the hair on the body. Almost a deep reddish brown. And it had a weathered rough quality to it. Like old wood. There was no hair on the face from the brow ridge down to the upper lip. But the cheeks and jawline had shorter, thinner hair that blended into the longer hair on the neck and shoulders. It watched me. The way a landowner watches a trespasser. That's the best comparison I can make. There was no aggression in its posture. It wasn't threatening me. But there was a clear sense of authority in the way it stood there. Completely calm. Completely unafraid. Watching me stand on its creek bank and look at its footprints. I felt like I was the one who'd been caught. I didn't raise my rifle. I didn't reach for the camera. I just stood there and looked at it. And it looked at me. After maybe a minute, it turned its body to the side, still keeping its head turned toward me, and walked into the deeper timber. It didn't rush. It took long, smooth strides, and it was out of sight within a few seconds. Not because it moved fast, but because the forest just absorbed it. The color of its hair matched the pine trunk so perfectly that it was like watching something fade rather than walk away. I went home. I didn't tell my wife everything. I told her I'd found some tracks, and they were bigger than I could explain. I didn't tell her about what I saw because I knew it would scare her, and I knew she'd want to sell the property, and I wasn't ready for that conversation. The sounds continued through that summer and into the fall. I found more tracks, more broken trees, more twisted branches. Twice I found what I can only describe as structures in the woods, small trees bent over and woven together into crude X shapes or arches. They weren't natural formations. Something had built them. I saw it one more time in August of that year, at dusk. I was sitting on the back porch drinking iced tea and watching the tree line the way I'd gotten into the habit of doing. The light was going orange and the shadows under the pines were getting long. I saw movement at the tree line at the edge of the mowed grass. It stepped out of the timber for just a moment, fully upright. that same cinnamon colored hair catching the last of the daylight and it looked toward the house. It stood there for maybe five seconds, long enough for me to register it and for my body to go cold, despite the August heat. Then it stepped back into the timber as smoothly as it had stepped out, like a door opening and closing. My wife was sitting next to me. She grabbed my arm and said, what the hell is that? And I didn't answer because I didn't have an answer I was willing to give her. She asked me again, and I said I didn't know. She said it looked like a person. I said, yeah, it kind of did. We sat there for another hour watching the tree line, and neither of us saw it again, but we both felt like it was still there. Watching. The way it always seems to be watching. We still live on the property. The activity died down over the winter of 2017 into 2018, and it's been sporadic since then. A few times a year I'll find fresh tracks or a new tree structure, or the dogs will do their staring routine. The screams come back every spring. I've learned to live with it, not comfortably. But I've accepted that we share this land with something, and as long as it keeps its distance from the house and my family, I can coexist with that. What I can't coexist with is the feeling that it's always watching. Even when I don't see it, even when there's no evidence it's around, I feel it. every time I walk to the back of the property every time I step into those woods there's a presence there that wasn't there when we first bought the place or maybe it was there all along and I just didn't notice thanks for all you do your shows mean more to people than you realize Travis Brian my son set up this email thing for me so I could write to you I 84 years old and I don use computers So forgive me if this isn formatted right He's going to send it for me when I'm done. He doesn't know what it says. Nobody does. In the summer of 1962, I was 20 years old and working on a logging crew in Siskiyou County, California, up near the Oregon border. The company was Fruit Grower Supply and we were cutting timber on the western slope of the Cascades, in country that was about as remote as you could get in those days. The roads were all logging roads, dirt and gravel, and some of the cuts were 20 miles or more from the nearest paved highway. There was nothing out there. No houses, no ranches, no phone lines. Just timber and mountains and creeks. Our crew was eight men. We lived in a camp that the company set up for us. Canvas tents on wooden platforms with a cook shack and an outhouse. We'd work six days and get trucked out on the 7th for our day off. It was hard work and low pay, but I was 20. And I didn't know any better and the mountains were beautiful. So I didn't complain. Everybody on the crew had heard the stories. The guys who'd been in the timber industry for a while all talked about it. Especially after a few beers on our days off. They talked about tracks in the mud on logging roads. They talked about hearing screams at night that didn't match any animal they knew. A few of them talked about seeing something. Always at a distance. Always briefly. A shape moving through the timber or standing on a ridgeline or crossing a road in the headlights. The old timers called it different things. Bigfoot was what most people said by then because of the tracks they'd found up at Bluff Creek a few years earlier, which wasn't far from where we were working. Some of the older guys just called it the wild man. I didn't take any of it seriously. I was young and I thought I was tough and I figured they were just trying to scare the new guy. I'd been on the crew about two months when I found out they weren't. We'd been cutting a section on a steep hillside above a drainage that dropped down into a creek canyon. The canyon was deep and choked with old-growth Douglas fir and the creek at the bottom was running hard from snowmelt. The terrain was brutal, all loose rock and downed timber and brush that grabbed at your boots. We'd cut a spur road into the hillside and we were skidding logs down to a landing where they could be loaded onto trucks. One afternoon in late July, I was sent down to the creek to rig a cable that had gotten snagged on a boulder. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify dot NL. That's Shopify dot NL. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. It was a two man job, but the other guy on the rigging crew had cut his hand that morning and gone to town for stitches. So I went alone. The foreman told me to get it done quick and get back up the hill before dark. I said no problem. Getting down to the creek took about 30 minutes of picking my way through steep terrain. The canyon walls were sheer in places and I had to detour around rock outcrops and deadfalls. The deeper I went, the darker it got because the canopy overhead was almost solid. At the bottom, the creek was loud, maybe 20 feet across and running fast over smooth rocks. The cable was snagged about 50 yards downstream from where I came down. I freed the cable in about 20 minutes. Not complicated, just had to unloop it from around a big granite boulder, where it had gotten wrapped during a log pull. By the time I was done, the light was starting to go. The sun was still up above the canyon rim, but down where I was, it was already deep shade. I started back up the way I'd come. About halfway up the slope, I stopped to catch my breath. The climb was steep, and I was carrying tools, and I was winded. I leaned against a tree and took my hat off, and that's when I heard something in the canyon below me. At first I thought it was a bear because the sound was heavy footsteps and breaking brush, and bears were common in that country. I looked down the slope toward the creek and I could see movement in the shadows. Something was walking along the creek bank, walking upright, on two legs. The light was bad and I was maybe a hundred feet above the creek bottom, looking down through tree trunks and brush, but I could see enough to know it wasn't a man. The way it moved was wrong. It had a stride that was too long and the upper body swayed with each step in a way that human bodies don't. Human beings lead with their heads when they walk. This thing led with its shoulders. The whole upper body rocked side to side with a rolling fluid gate that covered ground fast without appearing to hurry. It was following the creek downstream moving in the same direction I'd been working and it passed through a gap in the canopy where a shaft of late afternoon light came down to the creek. In that light, I saw it clearly for the first time and I stopped breathing. It was covered in hair that was the color of dead pine needles, yellowish brown, lighter than I expected. The hair was long on the arms and shoulders, maybe four or five inches, and it moved when the thing moved, swaying with the momentum of each step. The body underneath was enormous. The torso was thick and deep from front to back, wider than any man I've ever known. And the muscles moved under the hair in a way that reminded me of watching a horse. That same kind of effortless power. The legs were thick and the calves were massive and there was a heaviness to the lower body that made it look anchored to the ground, even while it was moving. It turned its head and looked up the slope. Not at me. Not directly. It was scanning the hillside the way a person scans a crowd, looking for something in general rather than something specific. Its head swiveled and for just a moment its face was angled in my direction, and I saw it in profile against the bright water of the creek behind it. The face was dark, darker than the body hair, and the features were heavy and coarse. The jaw was wide and the chin was almost absent, the lower face sort of sloping back from the mouth to the throat without much definition. The forehead rose steeply from the brow ridge and the skull behind it was peaked, rising to a point or a ridge at the top that was higher than a human skull would be. It gave the head an angular shape that was distinctly not human. The nose was broad and set back against the face, almost flush with the brow and cheeks, not protruding the way a human nose does. It continued downstream and I watched it until it went around a bend in the creek and the terrain blocked my view. It never saw me. Or if it did, it didn't care. Either way, it didn't look at me directly and it didn't change its pace or direction. It was just moving through its home. I climbed the rest of the way up the slope in a state that I can only describe as calm terror. My body was functioning fine. I put one foot in front of the other and I didn't stumble, and I didn't drop my tools. But inside my head, there was a kind of white noise, like my brain was trying to process what I'd seen and couldn't do it, so it just produced static. I made it back to camp just as the light was fading, and I sat down on my bunk and stared at the canvas wall for about an hour. That night at dinner, I almost said something. The crew was eating beans and cornbread and telling the same jokes they always told, and I almost opened my mouth and said I'd seen it. But I looked around at those men and I thought about what would happen. They'd either believe me and be scared or they wouldn't believe me and I'd be the crazy kid on the crew. Either way, it would change things. So I kept my mouth shut and ate my beans. Three nights later, something came through our camp. It was around three in the morning. I woke up to the sound of the cook shack door banging. It was a wooden frame door with a spring hinge, and it had a distinctive sound when it opened and closed. Bang. Then silence. Then bang again. I lay in my bunk listening and thinking one of the guys had gotten up to get water or use the outhouse. Then I heard footsteps outside my tent. Heavy ones. Slow. And a smell drifted through the canvas that was so putrid and so strong that my eyes watered. I heard one of the other guys in the next tent cough and then swear. I heard another guy whisper, you smell that? The footsteps moved between the tents, slow and deliberate, and I could track them by sound. They went from the cook shack past my tent, past the next tent, and out toward the tree line. Each step shook the platform my cot was sitting on. Whatever was walking through our camp was heavy enough to vibrate the ground through the gravel and the wooden platform. Nobody got up. Nobody looked outside. Every single man on that crew lay in his bunk and listened to something walk through our camp in the middle of the night, and not one of us did a thing about it. In the morning, we all acted like nothing happened. The foreman drank his coffee and talked about the day's cut. The rigging guys checked their cables. I ate my oatmeal. Nobody said a word. Later that day, one of the older men on the crew, a guy named Charlie who'd been logging for 30 years, pulled me aside and said, you heard it last night. It wasn't a question. I nodded. He said, don't go down to the creek alone anymore. That was all he said. That was all he needed to say. I finished out the season and I never went back. I worked in lumber yards and sawmills after that. Indoor stuff. Nothing in the deep timber. I've lived a full life. I raised three kids. I built a good business, but I never went back to the mountains and I never told anyone what I saw in that canyon or what walked through our camp that night. I'm 84. I've got maybe a few more years left if I'm lucky. I figured it was time to tell somebody before I can anymore. You seem like the right person. I hope you'll treat this story the way it deserves to be treated because I've been carrying it for 62 years and it's heavier than you'd think. Gene. All right, folks, that's all six of them. I told you these were heavy. I want to thank Danny, Rachel, Marcus, Linda, Travis, and Gene for trusting me with their stories. That's not a small thing. When somebody carries something like this for years, sometimes for decades, and they finally decide to put it in writing and send it to a stranger, that takes courage. I don't take that lightly, and neither should you. If you've got a story of your own, my inbox is always open. You can reach me through the website or my direct email address is Brian. That's B-R-I-A-N at paranormalworldproductions.com. I read every single email that comes in. You don't have to use your real name. You don't have to give me your location if you don't want to. Just tell me what happened. That's all I'm asking. Until next time, stay safe out there. And if something in the woods is watching you, trust that feeling. It's there for a reason. starting a business can be overwhelming you're juggling multiple roles designer marketer logistics manager all while bringing your vision to life shopify helps millions of business sell online build fast with templates and ai descriptions and photos inventory and shipping sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl that's shopify.nl it's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. 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Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. starting a business can be overwhelming you're juggling multiple roles designer marketer logistics manager all while bringing your vision to life shopify helps millions of business sell online build fast with templates and ai descriptions and photos inventory and shipping sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl that's shopify.nl it's time to see what you can accomplish with shopify by your side starting a business can be overwhelming you're juggling multiple roles designer marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.