My First Bigfoot Sighting - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 10/7/23

Guest Host Connie Willis and Jeremiah Horstman discuss the first time Jeremiah saw a bigfoot near his childhood home.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Let's go to our guest, Jeremiah Horseman. He was telling us, Jeremiah,
you were right in the middle of the climax part
where I think it was your mom telling us the
story of setting you and your brothers and sister down
to see what was going on, what was happening to
talk about it.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Yes, we sat down for the second time to discuss
what was running by the windows at night. This time
was a little different. She seemed she had a little
bit more of a serious look on her face, and
she said, you know, I tried to let the dogs
out and they wouldn't go out. And she said, there
was a smell in the air, is a very heavy
smell of a sulfurous maybe a trash smell or rotting smell.

(00:45):
And I think something else is going on here, because
right before I tried to let the dogs out this
time and seeing this shadow running past the windows, she said,
whatever it was was making a noise. And I remember,
look at, you know, my brother, like, what is she
getting at? What is she talking about? And she said
the noise was like a grumbling sound. It was something

(01:07):
that was irritated. It was upset because the dogs were
barking and growling and snarling. She said it was making
this grumbling sound as it ran, and she said I
could actually hear this time individual footfalls. It was something
really big, really heavy, and she was very certain it
was Bi beetle. And so again my brother and I
were looking at each other, like, what is she talking about.

(01:28):
She said, I'm really worried that we have a very
large prowler and that there might be somebody that's mentally ill.
So I want you boys to be on the extra alert.
And she reminded us again when she's not there, I
don't answer the door for strangers and so on. We're
both thirteen years old, so we're thinking, oh, oh, well,
you know, we're not worried about somebody coming to the door.
We know what to do. So fast forward maybe a

(01:51):
week or so, and I had a chiropractor appointment. And
as I'm waiting for my chiropractory, there was a magazine
it may have been the Pittsburgh magazine, I can't remember
which now, and the feature article was about Stan Gordon's
group PASU, the Pennsylvania Association for the Study of the unexplained,

(02:15):
and I flipped to that page where the story started
and read an incredible story about the Textburgh UFO crash,
which I had never even heard of, and I lived
a short distance from Textburgh, Pennsylvania, and how it inspired
Stan Gordon to start his organization. In it, it talked
about his investigators looking into things such as poultergeist activity,

(02:38):
UFO sightings, UFO abductions, and big foot sightings, and it
stressed that there were a lot of bigfoot reports that year.
And then it went into describing the signs that people
had bigfoot in their area, and my heart started to
beat really rapidly, because as I was reading, the article

(03:00):
was describing more or less the same things that my
mother just described, the strange sounds at night, It was
describing the kind of Q tree smell that comes with
these creatures. And then it had I think they set
up a one eight hundred number that you could call,
and so I remember, after reading the article, I was

(03:21):
thinking myself, I wonder if that's what's going through our yard,
that's actually pretty frightening. And so I went home and
I wrote down the number and without even consulting with
my mother or telling my brother, but I went ahead
and called the group of Stan Gordon's this PASU, and

(03:42):
I talked to one of the people what PSU. I
described to them what my mother had been experiencing to
describe the smell, and they said they would have one
of their investigators called back, and in a short period
later they did have an investigator of theirs who called back,
a man named John, and he wanted me to redescribe

(04:05):
what my mother had experienced. He asked if she was
there if he could talk to her, and I said no,
she's at work right now. She works at the state hospital.
She's a psyche nurse. He said, okay. He mentioned a weekend.
They said, you boys are probably in school now, and
I'd like to catch you obviously when you're home. So
I have somebody to show me around, and I just

(04:26):
want us to show up on property. He said, be
certain to have your mother call me so she knows
what's going on. Well I didn't. I didn't bother mentioning
her till virtually the last minute that these strangers are coming.
And she was a bit upset with me. She said,
who is coming? I described to her the article that
I read described to her how they virtually had every

(04:48):
detail of what she was describing that making like gurgling sounds,
screeching sounds. That's a bad smell then, So she was
a bit upset with me at first for calling these guys,
but I think within hours of them showing up, she
realized these are stoutch professionals. They were really incredible guys.
The group that Stan had, they had had mostly professors.

(05:14):
Some of them were high school professors and some of
them were college professors, chemists and engineers and so on.
And the two guys that they sent were both also
experiencers themselves. John and Devin were the first two guys
I met. I remember Devin was a huge man. He
was like six or five with a big red beard.

(05:34):
And they asked me to show them where this being
or whatever was leaving the shadow up against the house
who had been running. So I took them there, and
I remember they paid particular attention to the fact that
we had a huge mature apple orchard to the rear
of the house on the north end of the property,

(05:56):
and they kept mentioning, Oh, there's another apple tree, And
I remember ask him what makes the apple trees a
part of this and they said, well, what are the
things that tends to attract these creatures? Or apples, especially
very sweet apples, and you've got that here. They said.
Another thing is you have this railroad that runs through
the forest behind your house. They said, these creatures tend
to use railroads to get from point A to point B.

(06:19):
And they said, we noticed on the map before we
got here a short distance of ways the shark Tears Creek.
They also tend to be near to bodies of water,
and you have all three of those here. The next
thing they asked, they said, do you have any old
mines or caves here? And I said, we sure, Dore's
there's several coal mines nearby. There was the old henderson
Ville coal mine patch just a short distance away, and

(06:40):
so they seem to not. And I said, what's that?
What does that have to do with it? And they
said that's another thing that tends to be a quality
in common with areas where big foot sightings are. And
I went curiosity then peaked. I said, do you have
other calls of other people having the same sort of
thing going on here? And they both look at each
other and they said, we do, but those are what
we call silent case, which is when people don't want

(07:01):
to be identified and they don't want their exact location
to be divulged. I said, oh, that's fascinating, And so
I'm picking their brains. I think I got to be
annoying to them because they're trying to concentrate on searching
the property for footprints and so on, and I'm assaulting
them with questions about big foot slightings. And I remember
we got to the absolute rear of the property, right

(07:24):
before the belt of forest which the Chargers Valley Railroad
cuts through, and I remember the big man Devin with
the red beard, shouting out to John John Kamer and
I started to walk over to and he put his
hand up and with a very stern voice, he said,
you stop. Stop. So I did, and he was pointing
at the ground and whispering something and then they both

(07:46):
looked at me, and John walked over and he said,
now listen. He said, I'm not much for pranksters. He said,
you wouldn't be pulling my chain if you and your
brother were making anything up and leaving footprints about, would you?
And I said no, why? He said, we just found
a set of very deep footprints. At the edge of

(08:08):
your garden going into the forest. And he said, we don't.
We don't have time for pranksters. And he said, you
mentioned that you love to watch movies, you love thrillers
and so on, and he said, you wouldn't be pulling
our chain, would you. I said, no, absolutely not. I said,
in fact, this is this is my mother's bag. My
mother is the one that saw these shadows. I haven't

(08:28):
seen anything of them yet. He said all right, and
they said, come here, I want to I want to
show you something. So they walked me over to the
forest belt, which was on the north end of the property,
and sure enough, there was a set of very deep
footprints from the edge of our garden into the forest.
And I was shocked. It was something I hadn't seen before.

(08:50):
I hadn't noticed that. And we spent a lot of
time walking the railroad. We had our own little path
that went down through that patch of forest into the railroad,
and there's kids. That's where we spent a lot of
our time. And just my mind was spinning. I had
so many thoughts about what was going on. But they
asked us if they could come back, and by this

(09:10):
time my mother's down there looking at the footprints. She
also is shocked because she was a tomboy growing up.
She was always out in the forest. She was a hunter.
She was always hunting, and so she thought she knew
the Pennsylvania forest really well. She had seen some spooky
things in her youth while hunting, but never anything like this,
and so she said, sure, you can come back whenever

(09:32):
you like. And he said, what we do. We call
them steakouts, he said. John introduced himself as a master
chess player. He went to all these different chess competitions.
She said, I can sit still without moving for hours.
He said, I'm going to find a place on your
property where I can observe. He said, probably in the
apple orchard or watching the apple orchard, and I'll place myself.

(09:54):
And he said, I'm going to pick a position for
my colleague Devon where we can just between the two
of us triangulate the good view of this area where
this creature had been running through. And I need to
tell you too, I think there's more than one creature.
And that made all of us, you know, we kind
of took that. We're taken back by that, and our
eyes weren't really wide and my mother said, what makes

(10:15):
you think that? He said, the set of tracks we found,
there's actually two different measurements, so that's indicative of two
different creatures that have been passing through here. So I
think there's at least two. And we were all just
kind of speechless about that. So they came back, I
think a week later, and John got up into a

(10:36):
tree one of our apple trees. Said it was a
very mature apple wortrod. And Devon was on the ground
and they had voice activated headsets so they could talk
to each other. And they asked if I would go
out with them, and I said absolutely was I wasn't
going to miss this. Devon was supposed to be mobile,
and he said, I don't know this area so well.
I need you to show me where things are. He said,

(10:57):
if there's a fence that we might trip over a wire,
I want to know where it's at. And he said generally,
just needed to tell on you to be quiet. He said,
if you can be quiet and do as you're told,
I'll give you a flashlight. He said, do not turn
it on unless I tell you to. I said that's fine.
So this gets to be September late September of nineteen
ninety one, and this particular September of nineteen ninety one,

(11:21):
there had just been it was the twenty first, there
had been a lot of thunderstorms, and it was extremely
humid and muggy for September, and Pensum anutely cooling off
by that time, but I remember it was very hot,
and I remember the man in charge, John had asked

(11:41):
me to take Devin down to the railroad tracks. They said,
what I want you to do is just to be mobile,
and I want you to go back and forth on
these railroad tracks. And he said, if you hear anything,
see anything smelly thing, report back to me. He said,
otherwise I'll call you with further instructions. And these headsets
were loud. At the time. I had good hearing. I
could actually hear them talking each other over the headset.

(12:04):
Now I couldn't hope to because with the reenacting hobby
of gut tonight is so my hearing is very bad.
But I remember as it got dark, we had gone
back and forth a number of times, and I think
Devin was getting agitated Nancy. They wanted to move up
to where he believed the action would be and I
remember he asked John if we could return to the property,

(12:26):
and John said, no, I'd like you to stay down
there and keep going back and forth. So we were
coming back from the trestle with the Chartiers Creek under it,
walking toward our property, and the trees that were in
the forest belt with which the Chartiers Railroad goes through
are so thick and they intertwine over the top. It

(12:46):
makes more or less a tunnel or a canopy over
that area. So even with any starlight or moonlight, it's
pitch black, and this man wouldn't let me turn a
flashlight on. So I'm stumbling over railroad ties. And at
that time I'm hungry and tied, and I don't think
anything's going to happen. I think I'm never going to
see anything. And suddenly we heard movement to our upper left,

(13:09):
which was on the same side as our property. We
weren't quite behind our property yet, and the men put
his hand out and stopped me from walking, and I
started to ask him what is it, and he went
sh He shook me, and I remember my heart started
to race, and then suddenly there was a crash right
in front of us, and a huge boulder who was

(13:29):
thrown down on the railroad tracks in front of us,
and there was just enough light that we could see
that the boulder was very big and it had shattered.
Part of it had hit the iron rails and it
had shattered made this massive ringing sound, and then the
dust from the boulder shattering was all around us. And
then suddenly we could smell the smell, this really horrific, awful,

(13:51):
sulfurious smell that almost smelted, like a rotting smell. As well.
Once you smell you never forget that smell. And again
my heart's raising, unfrightened, and I have no recollection of this.
But the other man that was in charge, John, so
he could actually hear me screaming over the headset, though

(14:12):
I don't actually recall screaming out of fright I don't
doubt that I did, but I actually don't remember screaming.
Because several more boulders landed right in front of us.
It was if something was telling us not to go
any farther by throwing boulders in front of us. It
was trying to scare us away. So we stood still.
After I think the third boulder came down, and again
part of that had hit the rails and shattered, and

(14:32):
there was just dust around us, and Devon asked for
permission from John to turn lights on, which John said yes.
So we turned on our lights and we're looking around
and I'm thinking to myself, this is incredible. There's something
really powerful up there throwing boulders, and this is definitely
something more strong than man to be able to heave

(14:53):
these boulders, because you could also hear them crashing through
the tree branches up above. Now, the ravine that we
were in is very deep. They had to actually blast
when they were making that railroad to get the grading
level down to where it had to be. So there
was a cliff more or less on both sides, and
that cliff were these massive fits of rock and different

(15:14):
types of rock, and that's where whatever this was with
pulling these boulders out, and we were shining our lights.
I remember up on the embankment and we could see
where something had ripped out freshly rock and heave and
down upon the railroattracks in front of us, but we
couldn't see anything there. So after I don't know how

(15:34):
much time had transpired, It seemed like forever to me
at the time because I was so frightened and my
adrenaline by this time was going that the man told
me to turn off my flashlight, which I did, and
he was standing very still, staring at that embankment. And
then again I remember he grabbed my shoulder and said
stay still, and he was looking up there, and I

(15:55):
remember he said, John, I see two silhouettes. There's two
of them. And I remember John saying over again, keep
your eye on them. Are they moving? They said, no,
they're staring at me.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
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