The Navajo Connection with Sasquatch

The red-headed bones, burning bones, fingers crossed. That's how you start to get into your electric Ford Explorer again. To get up again. Ready with a speed of 602 kilometers. And virtually almost 212 euros per month. Book your test on Ford.nl. Ready, set, Ford. Corps for eight years and I spent my professional career in law enforcement. I had my first encounter with Sasquatch when I was 12. I didn't know anything about Sasquatch then. I came from a family of outdoorsmen and hunters and loggers, but no one ever talked about Bigfoot. It was February of 1981 and I had been running trap lines and hunting the Canyon Creek area for muskrats, red foxes, bobcats, and the like. In the winters, I would make upward of a thousand dollars. That was great money for a kid my age, but it did take a lot of work. When my friends were playing youth sports and watching cartoons and going to movies, I was building up for the grueling cold and heading out to run my lines. It gets brutally cold in Montana, 20 to 30 degrees below zero without the windchill. But every morning, while the rest of the kids I knew were still fast asleep, I would start the coffee on the stove and pack my bag full of food, and I would insulate my entire body layer over layer until I looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and that was before I even put the parka on. When I was all geared up, I tied my dad's Coleman lantern around my wrist with a length of rope in case it fell in the creek, and then I'd grab my gun. The creek was only a few miles away. It was so cold and the air sparkled with the frost and the moonlight bounced off the snow, providing relatively good lighting for old dark 30 in the morning. I used my knotted rope that I'd tied to the bridge and I started the 30-foot climb down to the bottom of the draw through the knee-deep snow and down the steep slope. I let go of the rope, fired up the lantern, and trudged to my first trap, 200 feet downstream from the bridge. The creek was frozen a good 12 inches thick, except for where I set my muskrat traps. I ran my land traps in a zigzag pattern with no set spacing, each trap about 500 feet from the next. I finally made my way to my first trap, only to find it had been ripped out of the ground and torn to pieces. It was pure steel and all of it bent and pulled apart like tinfoil. It had been set off to the side of the game trail midway up the draw. It wasn't a large trap, but it was strong enough to hold a large bobcat or a coyote. For something to tear it apart was impressive and disturbing unless they used a sledgehammer. I was stumped about the whole thing and I was angry. Those traps were expensive, especially for a kid. I threw the trap in my bag and hoisted it over my shoulder, and I headed to the second trap. I noticed immediately how the snow had been trampled around it, and packed so hard it was impossible to tell what the tracks were. It wasn't normal. Not only that, my trap was gone. All that was left was a hole in the frozen dirt, scattered around where my two-foot-long rebar stake had been ripped from deep out of the ground. I was more than pissed. Someone had been messing with my traps. I knew it wasn't an animal. It couldn't have been an animal. And now I was on a mission. I headed to my next trap, this time following the trail that had been plowed through the snow. Like the last two, it had been ripped out of the ground. I kept going, my pace picking up and dreading what I'd find at the fourth trap, one that I'd sit in the ice. That's when my life changed forever. At the sight, I saw big footprints with long strides freezing over in the ice and heading toward and leading away from my trap hole. The trap was trashed, and the hole it had been set in was broken around the edges. Something didn't sit right with me as I looked around. The ice was four inches thick. It would have taken brute force or something enormous to bust through it. I knew a black bear couldn't do that. they weren't heavy enough to break through the ice that thick. I had seen cattle walk across thinner ice than this and they weighed a lot more. We didn't have grizzly bear or moose in the area and I started wrecking my brain trying to understand it. It was still an hour or so from dawn. Something had torn up my traps. My skin was crawling and I knew something was very wrong. I turned off the lantern so my eyes could adjust to the darkness. I wrapped my scarf around my mouth so that the steaming air wouldn't block my vision. I started to turn in a slow circle, trying to catch any movement, listening for sounds that didn't belong. After a few minutes, I heard it. The distinct sound of ice breaking and something dunking into the water. It was coming down the creek toward my next trap. I heard it again, ice cracking and water splashing and over and over. Something was walking over the ice, breaking through with each step, and it was getting louder. It was getting closer. That's when the smell hit me. It smelled like rotten flesh and moldy onion and curdled milk and trap bait, the foulest thing I had ever smelled. And it was so intense I vomited, loud and unbridled. When I recovered, the crashing stopped. I looked down the creek and I saw a shadow lit by the moonlight moving from around a bend in the creek and disappearing into the sand cherry bushes. It was taller than anything around it. It had the outline of a human, but it couldn't be. It was the biggest damn thing I'd ever seen, standing at least two feet over those six-foot-tall bushes. I knew it wasn't a bear, and unless Andre the Giant had been hanging around my town and stealing my traps, I knew that I was in trouble. I heard it huffing heavy and deep from its diaphragm as it glided around the bushes and kept coming toward me. I was stunned by its movements, feline and graceful despite its impossible size. I dropped the lantern and dropped my gun into my hands. I couldn't make out what it was other than it had two legs and two arms and shaggy hair covering all over it. There was no way I would get up the steep side of the draw through all of that snow. I was a mile and a half from the bridge and my rope. I needed to do something, so I yelled at it. Hey, stop right there! Hey, hey, stop! To my surprise, it stopped. It didn't growl or bellow, it just stopped. you probably didn't know what to make of me. Here was a kid wrapped in 18 layers of clothes standing in the middle of the creek making a fuss. I was a fearless kid raised by hardened men. It made perfect sense to me to stand my ground and make myself big and try to scare the threat away just like I'd been taught. So that's what I did. Hey, go on and get, get now. But it just kept coming. But it wasn't quick, not cautiously, it was just interested. When it maneuvered within charging range, I pointed my gun in the air above its head and I pulled the trigger. I have done brighter things in my life and pulling the trigger wasn't one of them. At first, the shot sort of had the desired effect. The monster man let out a scream that really angry people make when they're startled. I could handle that until the scream mixed with a murderous roar that vibrated through my bones. Some people say that when they had an encounter, they were frozen in time. Well, that's not what happened to me. Everything I had been taught by the proud men in my family went right out the window, baby with the bathwater. I knew at the moment that I had screwed up very bad. I dropped the rifle and took off as fast as my tightly packed legs could run. I flew over that icy creek, certain the devil and all his hellhounds were on my tail. My lungs were on fire and my legs were numb, but I could not stop, because if I did, I would have been the monster's breakfast. The sun was breaking the horizon. I could see glints of pink light glowing on the silver painted iron bridge ahead of me. Blood pounded in my ears and my head felt like it was splitting. The coppery taste of blood came with each breath. My lungs aching like I'd torn something. I never ran so fast in my life. I was almost there. I was almost safe. I hit that rope and I flew up the draw and I scrambled over the edge and I collapsed on the road. There was nothing left in me. If the monster man thing was behind me, I was done. Every breath was agonizing. I was coughing and sobbing and throwing up, and I lay there and waited to be murdered. I was sure I wouldn't see my parents again. I was sure I'd be the next kid on the side of a milk carton. But I don't know why the Sasquatch didn't tear me into pieces. it easily could have. Maybe it followed me for a bit, long enough to laugh at the puny little human marshmallow chugging up the creek and slipping over the ice and arms and legs flailing, screaming bloody murder with a stupid lantern bouncing all over the place behind me. If I were that Sasquatch, I would have been in tears laughing. I like to think that that's what happened, but in reality it probably wasn't remotely interested in me after it realized the minuscule threat I posed. I never went back down that draw again. I never picked up my traps. I didn't go back for my rifle or my bag. I got in trouble for losing my rifle, but I didn't care. Dad told me that we were going back to get it, but I refused. He couldn't drag me down there if he wanted to. I would have fought him tooth and nail, and I never ran a trap line again either. Instead of being the kid who woke up hours before daylight bundling up for the grueling cold and heading out to run my lines, I became the one who played youth sports and watched cartoons in the morning and I went to the movies and I became a normal teenage boy. A normal teenage boy with a crippling fear of the dark. It's a shame really that a wholesome, hardworking kid had his life turned inside out like that. The Montana I grew up in has changed so much that I no longer recognize it. The fields I used to hunt are now housing subdivisions, and the creek I used to run my trap lines on now runs through 10 miles of drain culverts. Evidence of my childhood was slowly paved over for the sake of progress, not unlike the fear I carried from that life-changing morning. a terrible memory paving over my innocence. Over 40 years have passed since my encounter, yet still I find myself half-tensing when I drive past a familiar bend in the road from my youth, afraid of what I saw, afraid of what may be out there. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night to close the curtains over and the windows that look out into the woods behind our house. I know there are monsters out there lurking in the shadows they're watching us and they're waiting hey before we get into then this next story I wanted to tell you about a book I'm reading I think it came out a year or two ago it's called Hail Mary it's written by Andy Weir it's a science fiction story I think they made a movie about it that should be coming out this March or April or May or maybe this summer, I'm not sure. You know, I don't often recommend books, but I've read the book and my son has listened to the audio book several times. He says he never listens to audio books more than once, but he said it is so good that he's listened to it like three times driving to working back. He has a 45 minute drive to working back. So I want to recommend that to y'all. My son said the audio book is great. I haven't got the audio book, but I read the print book. It is exceptional. It moves really fast. If you're not a committed reader and, you know, like reading one thing after another, kind of sort of like I do, I don't read that much. My wife does, but I don't. I probably read one book a month. That is a book to get. You cannot put it down. Even someone who doesn't read much, you will really enjoy this book. So get it on Kindle or order the paperback or go to your local bookstore and pick it up. It's called Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I think you'll really love it. Okay, let's go to another Bigfoot story. Years ago in 1964, my family went to visit a friend of my father's. He had two kids my age and the three of us quickly set out into the woods to check out a treehouse that they'd built. We ran all over those woods, checking out the treehouse and playing chase. Before I knew it, we became lost. We couldn't find our tracks in and couldn't distinguish one identical tree from the next and brush mirrored itself everywhere. We had no idea where to go. We started walking slowly, packed tightly together, eyes alert, trying to stay calm as we worked our way out. Somewhere in the trees we heard a grunt and then a long slow exhale We didn make a sound We couldn move Something was out there checking us out but we couldn see it The sound of it felt completely out of place. It was deep and big and deliberate. We looked at each other, all of us hoping the other had an idea what the hell this was. It was just out of view. And then that rancid smell was all over us. we couldn't get away from it. We were even more confused than before. We were on the verge of gagging, and then the trees erupted into noise. Branches were swinging and leaves were rustling like a storm was passing through. Our backs were pressed together. One of the other kids had the courage to call out, Hello? The trees went still. There was no answer. We stared at each other again, baffled into silence and disoriented, and that stench was unrelenting. And then the noise erupted again. Trees were rustling as if something were shaking their bases. Limbs were nearly breaking off. We backed away slowly until the noise shifted, and then we backed the other direction, and it got closer, and we backed up some more. That creature herded us right back to the trail where we entered the woods, and not once were we able to lay eyes on this thing. We made it back to the house in one piece more confused than we were afraid. Something out there was helping us, and miraculously, my parents believed me. I think the confusion on our faces must have said it all. Oh, that's a good story. That's a good Bigfoot story where you go in the woods, kids go in the woods, they get lost. Apparently, the Bigfoot doesn't want you in there, and he kind of herds you back. And he actually saved them from getting lost. Those kids could have been out there wandering around for days with search parties and all the things that go along with that. That was a great story. I know that this person who wrote this must have been terrified, but I really appreciate them sharing it with us because it's kind of a lighter side of Bigfoot. Sometimes they help you. Sometimes they just run you off. Great story. Thank you for sending it to the writer. I grew up in Australia's island state of Tasmania, east of the capital city, Hobart. I'm descended from Scottish free settlers and Irish and English convicts who were transported to what was then called Van Diamonds Island for petty crimes in the 1830s. Tasmania still has remnants of many convict-built historical buildings and other structures. An old friend of mine from school had a holiday house on the Tasman Peninsula about 10 miles as a crow flies from the infamous penal station of Port Arthur. The station was operational from the 1830s to the 1880s. Convicts relegated to places like Port Arthur and the Tasman Peninsula were repeat offenders or had committed worse crimes, and the peninsula is hard to escape from due to the surrounding shark-infested waters. My friend's holiday home was in the former convict hospital at Saltwater River, which wound down around 1880 and then was sold off. In its heyday, it would have primarily served the convicts who worked the nearby infamous coal mines, but also harvested big timber from the native forests or quarried sandstone by hand. Conditions for the convicts at places like the Tasman Peninsula were harsh. and terrible accidents were not uncommon. So the convict hospital at Saltwater River probably saw a lot of action back in the day. In the early 1990s, a year or two after we had all finished school, my friend held a party at her holiday house. A heap of us friends attended, each of us either at the university or starting out in the workforce as young adults. We drove down for the weekend and camped out on the floors and beds of the old convict hospital. We had set a fire in the backyard in the ruins of what had once been a large wooded fire brick oven, the bricks made by the convicts and coveted by collectors even today since they bear the single thumbprint from the convict who pressed the wet clay into the brick mold. At one point on that Saturday evening, I found myself alone out in the backyard. and I was enjoying the warmth of the fire with a cigarette leaning on one of the high tables set in a fan shape in front of it. It was a cool night and the fire was big. I was just close enough to feel the warmth. It was probably three or four beers in and I was feeling fine as I stared at the bush TV, which is what we called a campfire in Australia. I watched the flames climb the inside of the old chimney walls and the occasional spark shoot into the dark night. I noticed what looked like a person sitting at a table to my right. I turned my head thinking it was one of my friends, but then the shape disappeared. As soon as I looked back at the fire, the person came back. By keeping my head straight ahead, I realized I could use my peripheral vision and the figure would stay in place. After a while, I could make out the person's features and soon it was clear she was an older lady, maybe in her late 50s or early 60s. She had long, flowing, curly, sandy-colored hair, and she was wearing a long, formal summer dress. She was leaning forward on her elbows and had her hands cupped under her chin, supporting her head as she smiled at the fire. She looked really happy and content. Somehow I managed not to freak out as I didn't feel threatened in any way. I was more fascinated than anything. But after several minutes of observation, I realized we weren't alone. At my 10 o'clock, just to the left of the fire, was another visitor. This time it was a taller man standing in the shadow of the chimney. I instinctively turned my head and he disappeared. I turned to the woman's table and she was gone too. And when I turned back to the fire, they both materialized in the same positions as before. The man looked angry and he wasn't looking at the fire either. He appeared to be glaring at the woman. She was still happily watching the fire oblivious to him in his terrible stare. The man had dark set eyes and dark hair with big Neil Young style lamb chops. He wore a flannelette work shirt. After several more minutes, I decided to make my move. This guy was looking pretty cranky and his presence was starting to unsettle me. I got myself up and went back inside the shack where everyone was having a good time. I eventually found my friend in the hallway and I blurted out that I had just seen two ghosts. She didn't instantly dismiss me as I'd half expected and ask me what had happened. I explained the two people I had seen in as much detail as I could remember. The more I described each of them, the more interested and then concerned she grew. And when I was finished, I asked if she'd ever seen a ghost there. She paused and she said no, and then she told me who she thought they were. Nearly a decade earlier, a woman who lived in a nearby cottage decided to return to her home in England to visit family. Unfortunately, she passed away while she was there. My friend's description of her was exactly the woman I'd seen watching the fire. And around the same time of her passing, another neighbor had sadly committed suicide. suicide. He had lived in a small house a hundred yards away, which my family friends had purchased from his estate. The way she described him was exactly the man I saw. We decided not to tell anyone about this. Years later, my friend and I would occasionally talk about that night. Her family sold the hospital house 20 years ago, but they kept the small house next door, and she and her new family still holiday there. That's it for now, Cam. Convict heritage and convict hospital, a bit of a convict history and some contemporary ghost. I've got another story to write and send you one day about a UFO I experienced in the Northern Territory Desert in 1996 and there were zero beers consumed when I saw it. Keep up the good work and all the best to you and your listeners. Haru, mate, a.k.a. see you later in Australian. And he signs off Tim. What a nice guy. What a nice letter. What a great story about ghosts in Tasmania. Oh, that was very intriguing. I'm not sure what to make of these ghosts and these apparitions people see. I have my opinions on what they are, but I could be wrong. I could be terribly wrong, but I don't think I am. But I don't know for sure. You know, until you just know for sure, you have to say, this is what I think they are, but I don't really know. So you got to say that. That would be the same as Bigfoot, but many people don't do that. They're pretty sure about everything about Bigfoot. Ghosts or something else, UFOs or something else. That's kind of why I like them. Anyway, Tim, thanks for the email. It's a very, very well-written story, and I certainly do appreciate it. Thank you. In 1999, my job had moved me to Denver, Colorado, where my brother lived. I hadn't seen him in seven years, so when I surprised him one day at his door, we were both over the moon. My brother suggested that we take a cruise up and down Berthard Pass so we could talk and catch up. We were driving and laughing and having a good time and enjoying the incredible mountains. As we came around the bend, I slowed down so I wouldn't slide over the edge. I slowed down enough to notice something in my rearview mirror. It was a big black furry thing. I pointed it out to my brother who said it was just a bear. I pulled over 20 yards from the animal and I grabbed a bag of apples that we bought before the drive. I tossed one at it and I accidentally hit it on the side of the head. It stopped what it was doing and it looked at the apple. And then my fight or flight kicked in. I watched it reach out and grab that apple with the biggest hand I'd ever seen. I heard my brother behind me whisper, that's not a bear, it's a Bigfoot. My brother and I are Navajo. We grew up hearing stories about Bigfoot, and we were told what to do and what not to do if we were confronted by one. Well, I stood my ground and I watched him stand up and he studied me. and I swear my soul tried to leave my body. He was nine feet tall. His head was massive, but he had no neck. His thick eyes were alert, knowing and watching every move that I made. And his chest looked like two 50-gallon drums stuck together, and his skin was like hard leather. I turned to my brother behind me. He started to shake his head, eyes pleading, knowing full well what I was about to do. I was going to hand this thing a bag of apples. He's going to kill you, my brother hissed. You're crazy. I told him to go sit in the car and wait for me. If something did happen, I wanted him to be able to tell our family. I know the decision was reckless, but I couldn't pass up the chance of a life-altering interaction with a creature of this type of lore. I wanted to show it my respect, even if it meant risking my life. I finally got the nerve to walk up to it calmly and slowly, as confidently as I could. When I was only several feet away, I could smell him. It was so intense that my eyes watered and my skin began to itch. The smell must have been a defense mechanism because he lifted his arms and it intensified. Woo! To show him I meant no harm, I dropped to one knee and I set the bag of apples in front of me. and then I put my head down to show him the back of my neck. I was staring at his big hairy toes and I felt his hand grab my neck. I can still feel the oil from his palm. At that point, I was sure my brother would watch my head get popped off like a grape. Then suddenly, he let me go. He took the apples and he left. I stayed there kneeling for longer than I can remember. I was shocked and scared, but mostly honored. The sound of my brother backing up and stopping the car beside me broke my days. I got in, a changed man, and we drove off. Thank you for reading this and many blessings from my family to yours. And he signs off, Nightwolf. I love getting these stories from Native people. they seem to have a calmness and I'm reluctant to say connection but for lack of a better term they seem to have some kind of connection with these animals or with these creatures and it uh it really it it really illuminates my mind if that makes sense it makes me think at a higher level speaking of having a connection with animals like the Navajos I wish I had a connection with animals You know, we have chickens around here. We've had probably 200 chickens. We get them as chicks. We raise them up. They die off. Predators get them. We keep about 20 or 30 on hand all the time. We love the eggs, but mainly I just like having them around the yard. I like watching them, and they're easy to keep. And anyway all that time I only had one hen and that was our first batch of hens and it was a big Orpington one of these big blonde or I think they call them buff Orpingtons When I would sit out my wife would sit out in the yard in a lawn chair would jump up on our legs and just sit there and let us pet them and all that. Since then, 200 chickens later, not a single chicken will let me touch them. Now, they won't run off when I walk up because they know I'm a source for food. Usually, they follow me around. I love dogs. I have a way with dogs. I know how to pet dogs and approach dogs. I think I do. I've never been torn up by a dog, even mean dogs. I just don't have, you know, you see all these videos on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram of these people who find a little fawn deer and they raise it up and it lives in the house with them. There's one, I think it's a TikTok I've been following where this deer lives in the house with the dogs and the people. It sleeps on the dog beds with the dogs. It'll snuggle up with the dogs. I've always wanted to have an interaction with a creature like that, but I just never have. I never have. I have found fawns where does will leave them in the grass in the summertime. And matter of fact, my grandson ran over one. I don't think it was hurt we picked it up moved it off to the woods but the I think the does will get them to get real low in the grass and they'll go to the woods and just leave them there and then they'll come back and get them whenever the danger's gone but I'm hoping that that mama found that deer but I just can never develop that kind of relationship with an animal other than a dog we've had cats before that they're kind of cool but cats are independent but anyway so we throw out corn right in front of our house the deer will come in the yard every two or three days late in the evening right now you know maybe an hour or two before dark and we'll my wife and i'll sit in the living room we got a big window that looks out front and we'll just watch those deer and they're really close they're you know 20 or 30, 40 feet away in our front yard, and they're just munching on corn. Well, the other day, I felt like I had a connection with an animal. Now, I didn't touch it. It didn't come up to me or anything like that. But normally, when those deer are out there, like I'll be in my office sometimes. My office is detached from my house. I'll look out, and I'll see those deer, and I'll stay in here just so I don't disturb them because I know my wife is watching them more than likely. I'll wait till it gets a little darker and then I'll walk in. But generally, every time I walk out, they run off. But this time, there were four deer out there, two small ones and two full adult does. And one of the yearlings was munching on my wife's azalea. And one of the does, the bigger deer, came over beside her and was, I don't know, just kind of standing there beside her like maybe keeping watch over probably not I don't know the psychology of deer but the other two when I walked outside they ran off in the woods like they normally do but this young deer would she she just sat there and she was about 40 feet from me and I walked a little closer to it to the edge of the driveway and stood behind my truck and both of those deer just stood there and looked at me and I thought maybe I had a connection with a wild animal and it's those deer just stood there and I I wasn't going to go any closer because I didn't want to run them off and I eventually just turned around walked in the back door and went in the house and when I got the house they were gone so they must have run off not long after I turned around and headed out but that's my animal connection story uh one of those young deer if the deer are in the front yard during the day and again this is maybe twice a week that we see them out there the dogs will see them and the dogs will go crazy i let the dogs out and they run them off just to let the dogs do what they do and they're and i think it's the one that was munching on that azalea aren't azaleas toxic to animals i don't know i could be wrong about that i saw that and i thought man they must be hungry if they're munching on azaleas but i could be totally wrong anyway that one deer and i think it's this one deer this one small one she will and i'm saying it's a she i don't know for sure but all three or four of them will run off in the woods but that one will stop and watch my dogs now my dogs won't run right up to the deer they're small dogs they're just barking and carrying on and it's almost like that little deer wants to maybe and i'm imagining this in my head but it's almost like she wants to play with the dogs i get that sense anyway it's like that little deer i have some kind of mild connection with it and it's probably just in my head but i love it i love watching that little deer that's my favorite deer in our area and i hope she comes around some more so anyway that's my deer connection story i'm not a navajo i'm not a native person i'm a pure scots-irish european of european descent i have no native blood running in me at all never had my dna tested i might so i'm not comparing myself to a navajo but maybe i don't know maybe i had a connection with a deer Anyway, boring story. Just thought I'd tell you all that. Thanks again to the writer. I appreciate the Navajo man sending me that story. It was wonderful. Thanks. Okay, after this, I'm going to put an archive story behind this. This story was written by my friend Randy. He lives in eastern Kentucky. I've seen him at the Bigfoot conferences before. He's one of these strong men, you know, the guys that rip phone books in half. and they've been big pieces of rebar and stuff. He's a very devout Christian and a hard worker. This guy's a hard worker. I think he still works his farm like a madman. But I always love these stories from him and I thought I'd share it again. It was posted probably three or four years ago and I hope you guys enjoy it. My name is Randy Ritchie. I'm 58 years old. I'm an ordained minister and have been ministering for 24 years. I'm a logger, farmer, and I'm a strong man, you know, the kind that tears phone books into, flips cars by hand, and bends steel bars, etc., while preaching the gospel along with it. I have lived on the same farm all my life, and what I'm about to tell you is the God's honest truth. I live in south-central Kentucky, and all of these encounters except two were within three miles of each other. My first encounter was in 1972 when I was 10 years old. My parents and I were coming home one night. We lived on a large farm as I have all my life. We were driving down the little country gravel road that goes through our farm. I was in the back seat and my parents were up front in our car. My mother called out to my dad. You didn't see that big black thing step across the road? She said it cleared the road in two steps. My father turned around at our shop and drove back, but it was already gone. He told my mother that she was crazy. Some years later, she told me that my grandmother had told her for years that they had seen something from time to time. She referred to it as the old man. Several years went by and I grew into a teenager and then a young man. But years before that, there was more to tell. My second encounter. A mile and a half behind our farm was in an abandoned old rock quarry from the 1940s. My friend Mark and I one day hiked down to the old quarry with Daisy BB guns in hand. The old quarry was grown up with trees and bushes, pretty much what we would call the thicket here in south-central Kentucky. The old quarry was 125 feet long, 70 to 80 feet wide, and 65 feet deep. My friend and I were on the left side, about a third of the way down from the top, admiring the beauty of the wilderness. And then it happened. We heard the most god-awfulest roar, which turned into a blood-curdling yell that would stand the hair up on your head. Mark said, what was that? I don't know, I replied. And then whatever made that awful sound did so again. Let's get out of here, Mark exclaimed. I wanted to see what it was. Me being a 12-year-old boy said, we can shoot it in the eye with our BB guns. Well, how stupid was that? and then it yelled again and started throwing rocks from the bottom of the old quarry. It hit the side that we were on from some distance away with rocks the size of softballs or larger. It roared one more time and my friend said, to hell with this and took off in a flash down the side of the hill back to the holler. I took off right behind him and we ran for three quarters of a mile before we just collapsed in a pasture field. But a large bull came down off the grassy hill right for us, so we pulled ourselves up and climbed a large tree, wondering if that would get us past the bull and the thing that ran us off from the old quarry. We finally got down and got home. No one would believe us except my mother, because she'd seen something a few years prior. We went to school the next week and told our close friend about our encounter. He would be the man who would later be the best man in my wedding, and his name was Wendell. I said I wanted to go back down to see if I could see what it was, but I wanted someone to stay with me. Wendell said if I'd let him go, he would take his 20-gauge shotgun and that he would not run. Well, of course I agreed. Wendell and I took a hike down the old quarry. I decided that we would go in towards the top of the old quarry this time, about 30 feet above the opening. As we were hiking towards it, we were stopped in our tracks by the same roar that again turned into a blood-curdling scream that you could feel hit you in the chest like a brick. I turned back to see Wendell's reaction. He, with his shotgun, was now in a crouched position and he was trembling. I turned back towards the sound and here it came again. I turned back to see Wendell tearing through the briars with the shotgun in hand, obviously not wanting anything to do with whatever was roaring. And so there I was alone with my rifle in my hand and I took out right behind him. And when we got home, he said, what in the world was that? All I could say was, I don't know. so we told our neighbors they were some of our running buddies one Scotty who was like a little older and then there was me and one a little younger Tracy Scotty was bold and said by God I'll stay as long as I have a gun so he was all in for us to take the hike back down and my fourth encounter was about to begin two weeks after Wendell and I had gone in with all three of us having guns in hand we went back and I took the lead. I took the same path that Wendell and I took. As we closed in on the top I was standing less than two feet from where I was standing the previous time. The same roar yell scream all over again and I turned to see Tracy and Scotty and they were already retreating fast. In less than six weeks time I had personally experience something life-changing. I didn't go back for years, but what I experienced in those weeks is why there is a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum pistol in my bedside nightstand to this day. Tyler and Justin's Stories. Tyler said his brother, Justin, had an encounter. As he was taking the garbage to the end of the road on a dark night, something very large spooked him. He caught a glimpse across the road of something very large standing between two ponds. As he got back in the vehicle to turn the headlights on, it stood up and ran. It leapt the fence in two steps, and it was in the road, and then it leapt the fence on the other side. It startled him pretty good, so he retreated back to the house very quickly. In another encounter, Justin and another man were out scouting for deer because the season would open soon. They were at the end of a hollow in a vast thicket when they came across a deer hanging from its hindquarters in the middle of nowhere. If that wasn't strange enough, its hindquarters were up to about 12 feet in the tree, putting the deer's neck at six feet above ground level, and that was too high for a coyote or most dogs to reach. The deer's neck had a large bite taken out of it. Justin and Tyler also described another encounter involving their cousin James as he walked to his deer stand before daylight. This is the same holler that separated our two farms. The holler runs by the springs from the old quarry. James had just climbed into his deer stand and heard the blood-curdling roar yell scream. He was so terrified that he didn't move for about seven or eight hours. Tyler and Justin had heard it also. Around that same time, my good friend and neighbor and godson Cody found a structure made of cedar trees that had been bent and broken to keep the wind and rain off of whatever had been using it. Cody had also had an encounter while frog gigging. Just up from the lake one night in the holler that parallels the old quarry, large rocks were thrown at them as they made their way up the holler. Cody's wife also had her encounter around the same time as she was driving one night. Her sightings were very close to where my mother had her sightings some 40 years earlier The location is less than 200 feet apart Caitlin recalls what she saw as very large and tall It stepped over a fence in front of her and crossed the road. It turned to look at her in the headlight, its eyes reflecting red as it stepped across the other fence. She never took that road home again. My fifth encounter. My next episode was a few years later when I was 14 or 15. I was with a friend of mine, Donovan, who had lost his mother some years earlier and would come and stay with us for a couple of weeks at a time. He would later become our city's assistant chief of police. We were on the backside of the farm where there was a very steep hill in our woods. I was climbing the hill in my Yamaha dirt bike like a lot of us here in Kentucky do. Donovan was standing at the top of the hill watching me climb over it. And as I pulled up to start my third ascent of the day, Donovan came running down the steep hill. As he got to me, I saw that his eyes were wide open and he was as white as a ghost. We jumped on the back of the motorcycle and he says to me, go, go, go. I said, what is it? He said, please just go. So I tore out. And when we got within sight of the house, I slowed down and stopped. He said, what are you doing? And encouraged me to keep going. And I said, no, what is it? And he said, I saw it. You saw what? I said, he said it had to be what we had heard a few years earlier. So he had my attention. And I said, well, what did it look like? He said, it was big and black and it cleared the border fence in just one step. Fast forward a few years when we were 19 years old. Myself and my friends Mark and Robin went back with a solid agreement between all three of us that no one would run. We all had high-powered rifles in hand. This was the first time that Mark had returned to the old quarry. We took the hike down and braved our way all the way to the inside of the old quarry and poised ourselves for a standoff that we might encounter. We stood our ground for four hours, from 2 to 6 p.m. When we retreated at dark, we had seen or heard nothing. And was the legend gone? It would cross my mind from time to time, but I saw and heard nothing for about 30 years, until I was in my late 40s. My neighbor Tyler, who had lived on the next farm over had at one point given me the honor of performing his wedding ceremony. He was over helping me unload the firewood one day when he mentioned doing some deer hunting with his family. I casually said to him, well don't go down by the old rock quarry without a gun. And he looked at me with a funny look on his face and said, Randy, why would you say that? Well, I looked back and said, why would you ask like that? And he said, I didn't think anybody else new. This encounter is from one of my neighbors and Christian strength team members. This young man is almost as big as a Bigfoot. He's six feet seven inches tall, weighs 380 pounds, and wears a size 16 shoe. Paul was walking to his favorite fishing hole one day when he heard a large stick break off to his right. He glanced over to see what had made the noise and couldn't believe what he was seeing. He was looking at a dark figure that was crouched down and he recalled its facial features including heavy eyebrows and dark eyes and it was huge. Paul kept walking but sped up his pace to get out of the area fast. Coming back from his fishing hole he stumbled upon a very large footprint in the wet ground. It was filled with water from the night before but he said it was huge. It made his size 16 look small. Paul wasted no time on his route to get back home. When I was 49, I was coming home one night from the gym about 10 30 p.m. As my boxer dog Turbo and I walked up towards the house, in the distance I heard a distinctive, very familiar sound. I got Turbo still and leaned up against my home and again heard the roar, yell, scream that I'd heard so many years ago in my childhood. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I said to myself, it's back. I told two of my neighbors and my wife Carolyn what I heard. We all dismissed it, but the next year I turned 50 and I was diagnosed with a leaking aortic heart valve that could only be taken care of by God or a heart surgeon, so I was in my backyard in my hammock. We live in a remote place, just a few farmhouses around. It was on Tuesday night around 11 p.m. Carolyn was already in bed. I was pouring my heart out in prayer, trying to reach the throne room of heaven. I'm praying hard and out loud, and as I'm wailing through the trees, I hear something repeatedly using something to strike a tree. I cried to remove it from my thoughts and my hearing, and I kept praying. The louder and harder I prayed, the louder and faster the wood knocking got. When I would stop, it would stop. So I said to myself, who in the world would be down in my holler next to my house at this time of night and on a Tuesday in the middle of July? So I started putting it all together, the yelling, the rock throwing, and now the wood knocking. It can only be one thing, A Sasquatch, a Bigfoot, or whatever you call it. I still don't know what I and my friends and my neighbors have experienced, but there's something out there, and I personally have never seen it, but I know what I heard. It's big and it's real. I don't think it means us any harm, but I would not want to corner it or provoke it. Clay's story is in Halfway, Kentucky, which is in Allen County. Clay is also one of the original team members of my Christian Strongman team. Clay is a big man. He's 6'5 and he weighs 260 pounds. He's no sissy or coward. Clay's an avid deer hunter and travels all over the United States hunting big game. I would call him a professional big game hunter and he has all the trophies to prove it. He's been hunting on one of the largest farms in Allen County. His first encounter was a vocal while he was in his deer stand overlooking a large bluff. The roar, yell, scream was very loud and robust. Clay says the roar was so loud that he said whatever made that sound was really large. He was startled by the intense sound and he said to himself, what in the world is that? Clay, being the sportsman he is, went back the next year to hunt for the big trophy buck while in his stand with a bow and arrow in hand. He heard animals scurrying out of the large woods below the bluff he's hunting, and then the same thing he witnessed the year before, the roar, yell, scream, happened again. The deer came running out first. They were followed by livestock, and then birds flew out. At this time, Big Clay decided it was time to get his happy hunt in, down, and out of the tree stand. He hurried very quickly to his truck and retreated. Clay said he didn't see it, but it had to be very big to make chest-shaking sounds like that that he heard. Clay said, wow, what else could it be other than a Bigfoot? One day, David was out on the farm doing his farm work, and he heard a sound that was not familiar with anything he had heard before, and he had been on this farm 40-plus years. Whatever it was, David said it was very loud and had to be coming from something really big. Seth said to his dad, what in the world is that? He said, I don't know, but we're going to the house. Seth lives on a farm in Halifax, Kentucky, which is in Allen County. His farm has been in his family for three generations. The farm backs up to an even larger farm, which is 300 acres of wilderness. While deer hunting one evening, Seth was sitting on the ground leaning against the log when he heard something take a step to his right. Seth looked over and raised his deer rifle up and looked through the scope. He saw something that was around seven feet tall. It had long arms and it was all brown in color. While looking through his rifle scope, Seth whistled and it looked right dead at him for a few seconds and then it just kept walking away from him. Seth said he was proud he kept walking because he didn't think his deer rifle would have taken it down. Seth and Cooper were out one night coyote hunting, trying to call up some coyotes. After a while of calling, they laid down. Seth heard something coming through the woods and it was crashing through the woods and breaking down small trees and limbs as it was coming closer and closer. They were beginning to wonder what it was. It was definitely not coyotes. It started getting closer, and then it was right on top of them. Cooper said, shoot it, Seth! While laying down, Seth spun over and pulled the trigger of his 12-gauge shotgun right at the sound, which was less than 20 feet away. The minute Seth shot, Cooper flicked the big light on, and there was nothing there. They both said, where did it go? It was just right there. It was a very intense moment for both of them. This story comes from my neighbor that lives about a mile down the road from me, but as the crow flies less than a mile from my farm. He's lived on the farm all of his life. This is his encounter. When I was young, me and my brother and a friend that was staying the night got bored and went to the pond. As we did many times, we would gather rocks and try to sneak up on the frogs that lined the banks of the pond. As anybody that grew up with a pond knows, the frogs would all jump in as soon as they knew a predator was near. The goal was to sneak up on the frogs and see if we could hit one before they all jumped in. After I'd thrown my stones, I heard something in the woods. I turned to see a hairy beast running on two legs through the forest, tearing saplings away side to side to make its way through. The breath was taken from me and it's like everything else stood still. When it was gone, I yelled that I had seen something running through the woods. No one saw it. No one believed me. I just remember dark hair. I had nightmares of werewolves for years after that. I had not been exposed to Bigfoot at that time. I was however exposed to the monster movies of werewolves to my young eyes and mind that's what it was uh let me just break in and say that could have been a dog man if you're thinking werewolf subconsciously maybe that's what you saw Derek I don't know I'm sorry to interrupt uh Randy's stories here let's go to the last story and it is called Matt Pettigo's Experience I'm the editor and publisher of our local newspaper in Randy's hometown in Kentucky. Randy is a good friend. He's a fine man and as truthful a person as you will ever know. I'm originally from Northern California and I still have relatives in California and Oregon. In the summer of 2009, I was visiting my now late grandfather in Bend, Oregon, when I took a ride up into the nearby Cascade Mountains. At an elevation of 5,400 feet above sea level, between two peaks high enough to host snow year-round, lies Scenic Sparks Lake. It is a lake of snow melt between the peaks, and it fluctuates in size. Looking for that perfect postcard landscape shot with my camera, I ventured far out onto the dry lake bed until it began to get marshy. I leapt over a small stream of clear cold snow water draining into the main body of the lake and I landed on a small island and into something unexpected. I weigh 260 pounds and I estimate landing from a jump that I hit the packed sandy volcanic soil with the impact of over 300 pounds. My hiking boots sank in about an inch into the dense soil, paling in comparison to the footprint I was now seeing. For scale, I laid my six inch wide Panama Jack sunglasses beside it and I snapped this photo. The print was two inches deep at one point, 14 inches long and more than six inches wide. Based on the soil condition and my jump, you can see my print on the left side of the tuft of grass. Whatever made this print had to weigh over 500 pounds. What's more, whatever made the print had dug its front toes into the soil as it walked, ripping frontal soil upward and scrunching the other soil towards the center of the print as it pulled its foot upward. Thus, whatever made the print seems to have had a hinged foot, a trait often seen in great apes. At the upper left of the print is the impression of a very large big toe. It doesn't show well in the photo, but it had dermal ridges, the mark of natural skin. I saw nothing else and I heard nothing strange, but there it was, a good reason for me to head back to the car. I never knew what to make of the Bigfoot mystery. Is it fact or fiction? I can say with certainty that something large, heavy, and barefoot made this track in the wilds of central Oregon. Randy and his family, friends and neighbors, and thousands of other people around the world and through the ages are seeing, hearing, and experiencing something that science can't always explain. And as Randy said in his conclusion, something is out there. Okay, just two stories in that podcast. I thought they were both fantastic and I really appreciate the writers. And thank you for listening. I really appreciate you. And we will see you guys on the next podcast. Thanks. Bye.