October 4, 2025 • 35 mins
Sean's 21st birthday is a memorable one - mostly because of the cameo appearance of Bigfoot, who was not happy he didn't get an invitation!
Originally Published on YouTube on 12/15/2020
YouTube: https://youtu.be/MLfos_yXogU
If you have an encountery you'd like to share, email it to: Contact@buckeyebigfoot.com
If you've enjoyed this episode, there are hundreds more on the youTube channel.
Find us on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@BuckeyeBigfoot
Originally Published on YouTube on 12/15/2020
YouTube: https://youtu.be/MLfos_yXogU
If you have an encountery you'd like to share, email it to: Contact@buckeyebigfoot.com
If you've enjoyed this episode, there are hundreds more on the youTube channel.
Find us on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@BuckeyeBigfoot
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Tonight's encounter comes to you from long ago.
(00:03):
We're pulling this one out of the vault.
[Birds chirping]
[Birds chirping]
It was my 21st birthday, an unlike most people who go out on the town to celebrate.
Me and two of my friends headed out to the cabin that was on my family land.
(00:25):
Our plan was to eat a lot of pretzels, chip, and other crap.
Maybe drink some beer and play cards till dawn.
This was agreeable to all of our families because it meant we weren't out getting drunk.
We were staying in and staying safe.
The cabin was out almost in the middle of my grandfather's land.
(00:47):
He had 43 acres.
At that time he lived down on the southeast end of the parcel.
My parents had another niche up on the north end.
This was in Minnesota, somewhere east of Foothill State Forest.
Since this all happened, our family land has been subdivided a few more times and now more family lived there, so I don't want to be more specific.
(01:13):
The cabin is a basic square with a single wall dividing the back third of the cabin.
The back third was commonly used as a bedroom, and sometimes it doubled as extra storage.
The rest of it is one single room.
It had a few wood shelves in a table that basically formed a kitchen, some open space for sitting, and there was a wood stove for both heating and cooking.
(01:40):
It's very rustic. There's no running water or electricity.
The cabin had been used by everyone in our family at one point or another for many, many years.
Both my parents and my grandfather lived on parts of the land, as I said.
So if something happened out there, help was close by. All we had to do was click the mic on the walkie-talkie.
(02:04):
That was before cell phones back then, but we did have walkie-talkies and we all used them.
We all had walkie-talkies. There was some at my grandparents, some at my mom and dad's, and then I took one out with us, or whoever went out, always took one with them.
43 acres is a lot of acreage. All kinds of things can happen. So yes, we always carried walkie-talkies that my dad had picked up at an Army surplus.
(02:30):
We got out there that night, and we settled in and were playing cards for a while.
We did bring beer, but it was still pretty early, and we were more into playing cards and eating all the chips and pretzels we'd bought than actually drinking.
One of my friends, Trevor, had asked if he could bring his dog with him. I liked Pepper. That was his dog. She was an Australian blue healer, and she was pretty chill for a dog, so I said, "Okay."
(02:59):
When it got dark that evening, Pepper acted funny from time to time. Sometimes she would pace and wine.
Trevor thought maybe she needed a bathroom break, so he took her out, but she wouldn't go, he said, so he brought her back in. This happened two or three times. She would pace and act like she needed to go out, so Trevor would take her, but she wouldn't do anything.
(03:24):
Now, the last time while he was out there, Trevor said he didn't step more than a few feet from the cabin door. By that time, it was completely black out there. There was no light, no ambient moon, nothing.
He could only see what little he could see from the light streaming from inside the tiny cabin. He had left the door open. There was no moon to see by. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face out there.
(03:52):
When Trevor came back in, he said, he didn't want to go back out there. He couldn't see anything in it. He felt odd. We teased him, and we called him a sissy, and all kinds of things like that.
And he said, no, he was serious, and he didn't think Pepper wanted to be out there either. And she wouldn't go out into the dark further away from the cabin when he urged her to go do her business. She stayed right by him and whined, and then she wanted right back in.
(04:23):
I told him to take one of the lanterns next time. Pepper's a girl, so maybe she was just afraid of the dark. We played it off.
After a while, we all got settled back down, and we're playing cards again. By this time, Pepper had come over, and she had laid near us on the floor right under the table. She was between me and Trevor. And every now and then I would see her head raise up.
(04:48):
When she did raise her head like that, I would see that her ears would twitch back and forth like she was listening to something. Then after another minute of that, she would just lay her head back down on her paws.
At the most, I thought maybe there was something out there like a bear. Now, Pepper, to my knowledge, would never have seen a bear in her life.
(05:12):
But I remember reading or hearing somewhere that all animals recognize real predators by their scent. Even if they've never encountered one in their life, that's why they sell tiger urine to keep cats off your lawn.
Most cats have never encountered a tiger, but one with, and they know there's a predator.
(05:34):
Well, it's something instinctual I read. I figured that's what was going on with Pepper, and I ignored it. But as time went on, I did hear some weird things outside.
Now, most people think that there's not much that goes on at night in the woods, but they're very wrong.
I hear more at night out there than I ever hear in the daytime. Lots of creatures out there are nocturnal. You don't hear them during the day, but when the sun goes down and the wind, it usually dies down in the evening, so that stillness amplifies every sound out there.
(06:15):
You hear every bush branch that a deer moves when it walks through. You hear every snap from a fat raccoon that's walking over stuff. And if there's any kind of river or creek or flowing water nearby, it's like someone turns up the volume on that water.
You hear it, even if it's just a tiny trickle of water.
(06:37):
Maybe we hear it, because as humans, we've developed that over the millennia to be more aware at night, which is when most dangers came at us. I don't really know. I just know that you do hear more at night. You hear everything.
But that was just it. I wasn't hearing anything.
(07:02):
There were two old casement, crank style windows in that cabin. There was one just to the side of the front door, and there was one in the back bedroom area.
They were directly opposite from each other. You could look straight through from one to the other. And if you open both of those windows and left the bedroom door open in the cabin, it usually had a breeze that pulled through the whole cabin.
(07:27):
Now we had both windows open that night. I got up, and I got the other bag of chips that was still in the grocery sack, which was sitting near the open window by the front door.
I bent down, I got the chips, then I stood up and I looked out the window. That is when I realized it was dead quiet out there.
(07:50):
I told Trevor and Mitch to be quiet, and they were. My ears were ringing. It was so quiet.
Anyone who knows anything about the woods knows that doesn't happen.
Now I'm ready to tell the guys all about that, but I stopped because of a loud sound that I heard.
(08:16):
It made my skin crawl. It was a moaning sound, kind of mixed with a lion's roar. A roaring moan, I guess you'd call it.
My hair stood up on my head when I heard it. It was like nothing I had ever heard in my life.
Pepper barked once or twice, but in a half-hearted way when she heard it. Then I saw her back up further under the table.
(08:43):
Watching her do that made the rest of my hair all over my body just stand right up.
My dad and my grandpa had always told me to trust the dogs. Even our house cat alerted us once when a bear was nearby our house.
So yeah, I was taking Pepper's action pretty serious.
(09:05):
She was standing up under the table, and from the sideways view that I had of her from where I stood, I saw her fur was hunched up all along her spine.
She was growling low, and her lips were pulled back in a fearsome snarl.
The one eye that I saw of Pepper's from that side was large. You can see all kinds of the white that went beyond the blue of her pretty eye.
(09:32):
She was terrified. That was the only word for Pepper. Terrified.
Mitch looked at me, and when the moaning roar stopped, he said, "What kind of animal is that?"
Like it was something I heard every day. I looked at him and I said, "I have no idea. It wasn't anything like I'd ever heard."
(09:57):
Right then, the walkie-talkie that was sitting on one of the shelves crackled. My dad said that we need to stop it. We were frightening mom, whatever we were doing out there.
I grabbed the walkie-talkie off the shelf. I clicked the mic, and I told him, "That was an us. We didn't know what it was."
(10:19):
There was a pause in the walkie-talkie. I expected him to fire right back an answer, but he didn't.
After another second and a half, I clicked the mic again, and I repeated, "It was not us. We didn't know what it was."
And just before I let off the mic, I said, "I was scared, shitless, dad." My friends were silent when they heard me say that.
(10:44):
They thought up until then that I was just playing with them. Neither of them lived out on land. They lived in a city, so they thought that I was just messing with them, trying to scare them by saying, "I didn't know what it was out there."
I know for a fact that Mitch up at that point had never spent the night anywhere but inside a proper house. He told me that when I invited him on this whole 21st birthday excursion.
(11:10):
Trevor had done some hunting in his life, and there were some things he'd done in the woods with relatives. But I don't know if he ever had been out there in the dark for a whole night in the woods.
I really wish that I had had a camera back then to take a picture of their faces when I let go of that walkie-talkie mic after saying that to my dad.
(11:33):
When they realized that I really didn't know what it was, and neither did my mom and dad, "Oh, the look on their face?" Well, I've never seen anything like it since.
I glanced under the table. I saw that Pepper was still acting the same. She was terrified. Trevor looked down and saw what was going on with Pepper as well.
(11:56):
And I don't think he knew where Pepper was until that second. He tried to coax her out from under the table, but she snapped at his hand.
That really surprised all of us. Pepper was a very even-keeled dog. She had never, ever done that, ever.
All these things were coming together and happening all at once. Pepper's actions, the dead silence, the weird animal sound out there. My dad getting on the walkie telling us to stop it and that we were scaring mom.
(12:28):
It was all rolled together, and it all happened in maybe twenty seconds, maybe thirty seconds.
I was waiting for my dad to say something.
Finally, I heard the walkie-talkie crackle, and all he said was, "He was heading out. He'd be on the utility vehicle. Don't shoot at him."
(12:49):
He knew that I had brought out the Winchester 70, that old bolt action that my grandfather had given me years ago.
I only brought it out for defense, and I'd never had to use it, ever.
But I wasn't allowed to come out into the woods without some kind of protection. When I was younger, that was usually my dad or my grandfather who carried the gun.
(13:11):
But as I got older, they taught me how to hand the gun properly, and they taught me how to shoot.
And from then on, I carried my own protection, and that's when Grandpa gave me his old Winchester 70.
Now, there's not a lot that roams those woods, but there could be something dangerous. I had never fired that gun ever, except at practice targets.
(13:38):
I wasn't a hunter, and I didn't think that I ever would be, but I also didn't want to become the meal for some bear that I ran into.
I just told my dad okay. It was a few minutes later, and I finally heard the motor of his utility vehicle coming down the path.
I was keeping watch near the window, and when I saw the headlight coming down the wide track toward the cabin, I was both relieved and suddenly frightened.
(14:07):
That meant my dad was out there with whoever, or whatever, in the dark.
My insides turned cold. When I saw that headlight, I went black for just a second, and then reappeared in my vision.
My stomach turned. Something had walked across my field of vision, and more disturbingly, I was pretty sure it was just a few feet away from the window.
(14:35):
My dad was probably 50 feet from the cabin, and he came to a complete stop right then. I heard the engine out there just puttering at idle.
I grabbed my rifle, and was checking it when I heard my dad yell out, "Get your butts inside. I could have damn near-shot you!" I yelled back through the window. "Dad, we're all inside!"
(15:01):
I heard my dad gun the utility vehicle, and he came roaring up to the cabin. I thought he was almost going to hit it before he stopped.
Just a few minutes ago, we were all enjoying ourselves, eating pretzels and chips and playing cards.
Now, here we were, what felt like in the middle of an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Dad got inside, and he looked a little shook. He wanted to know what exactly was going on out here.
(15:30):
I told him everything that happened. And when I was telling him everything, it didn't seem like it was much to tell, but feeling it and experiencing it had been a lot more.
I asked him about the person outside and what he saw. He said that whoever it was, he almost shot them because they're in a big costume, and they made him think it was some kind of a bear getting in the cabin.
(15:58):
And then he thought, "The way it walked away, that it was one of us." He also said that when it walked away from the cabin, that's when he knew it wasn't a bear.
But it might have also been an awfully large person.
During all of this, Mitch and Trevor were also talking. "We were all talking."
(16:19):
Dad's utility vehicle was still outside the cabin. It was pointed right at the front of the cabin wall, maybe four feet outside the door.
He really did come that close to hitting the cabin before he came to a full stop.
The light from the utility vehicle outside was still on, and it was coming right through the window by the door.
(16:41):
We all fell silent and turned. When the light was momentarily blocked, like something had walked out in front of it again.
We all stopped talking.
Dad came out carrying his 45, but now he grabbed my rifle and he went to the side of the window and he looked long ways from there.
(17:03):
Then he went to the other side of the window. He said, "He saw someone out there off to the side of the cabin."
And then he said they moved away when he saw them. He said they were well over six feet tall, and it looked like they were prepared for battle with some kind of football gear on under all that dark clothing or costume or whatever they were wearing.
(17:25):
Now a person out there like that was scarier sounding than a bear to us.
That meant that someone was out there up to no good. We'd all rather it be a bear.
Dad used our walkie-talkie to call back to mom and tell her to call the sheriff because we had a trespasser out here, and they were probably up to no good.
(17:50):
You see, if someone had come that far onto our property, that deep into the woods just a trespass, and they were dressed all in black like that?
Well, they weren't out there to borrow a cup of sugar, now were they?
And he told mom that, and mom knew what he meant when he said that. That was their code for trouble. They would say, "They ain't here to borrow no cup of sugar."
(18:15):
And that was their line about trouble, whatever kind, wherever they were. It didn't have to be in person.
A few minutes later, the walkie-crackled to life again, and mom said she had called the Sheriff's Department.
Now we knew it would be a while before anyone would get out there. I also forgot to tell you at the beginning of this, that cars could only come within about 200 feet or so of our cabin.
(18:42):
There was a little area that was level where you could park, which is where my car was.
From that little parking area, you had to wind your way down through a bunch of thick trees along a trail track to the cabin, and it was down a light slope.
It was twisty, rough, and uneven, and the slope was pretty steep. So we just parked up there and usually walked down to the cabin.
(19:05):
The only thing that you could come right up to the cabin with was the utility vehicle.
The thought of walking through the dark to get to my car was really unsettling with someone or something out there.
Even getting on the utility vehicle meant that we would be open to attack from whoever.
(19:26):
We're all standing in the middle of the front part of the cabin, quietly discussing our options and what we think is going on.
When we hear a big thud behind us in the bedroom area, I had forgotten that window back there was open.
We turned and we looked through the bedroom doorway, and we saw a possum, a bloody possum with no head, and I guess it had been thrown through the back window.
(19:53):
We heard it when it hit the wood floor.
To this day, I don't know what that was supposed to be, what it was supposed to mean.
I have never heard of anything else like it in regards to Bigfoot.
This and this alone, this bloody possum with no head, is the only thing that has made me question if maybe it really was a person out there.
(20:18):
But I don't think so given everything else that happened.
Now we realize that both windows were open.
Dad told me to start closing the front one, and he walked to the back and started cranking the window back there closed.
There was no light out there, so he isn't sure exactly what happened.
He just said that all of a sudden he couldn't crank the window anymore.
(20:41):
There was some kind of resistance, and then all he said that happened next was something ripped that window right out.
He could hear the crunch of the metal and all the glass breaking.
Yes, something had grabbed that swinging casement window from the outside and tried to rip it right out of the frame.
(21:02):
Well, the next day in daylight we saw that it was really more of a twisted aluminum and shattered panes of glass that were still there on the window frame.
It didn't really pull it out of the frame, but in the dark we didn't know what had happened.
The casement was from the 1950s I think.
It was the kind with tiny panes set in individual aluminum squares.
(21:23):
They were two squares wide and three squares high.
It also wasn't very strong.
They were all single panes of glass, not like today's double and triple pain.
And they were real glass too, and pretty thin.
So I'm not saying that whatever did this took superhuman strength, but I really don't know that I could have done it at 21 years old.
(21:49):
By this time we're all pretty concerned that goes without saying, but I won't go so far as to say that we were frightened.
But we also knew that none of this should be happening like this, whether it was a person or a bear.
My dad was a Vietnam veteran and he didn't get rattled easily.
Dad was in the lead on this and we happily let him take point.
(22:14):
He told us to stay away from the windows and to be quiet.
We listened and we heard something walking around out there, but we never could see it from the window.
It was just too dark beyond our vision from the window, but whatever it was, we all agreed.
It was big and heavy, whatever it was.
(22:38):
We stood there in the middle of the cabin and tried to be quiet while we waited.
Pepper remained up under the table and refused to come out.
When the deputy arrived at my parents' house, mom called out to us on the walkie-talkie and let us know and said to look for him, they'll be out shortly.
(23:01):
We turned all the lanterns up inside the cabin so that he could see us when he got out there.
We didn't know how easily he would find us, but it turned out when he got there to the cabin, mom had written out there with him in the cruiser.
She said because he had no idea where he was going.
It was all private land and he'd never been out there before and we had all kinds of trails leading everywhere on that acreage.
(23:28):
Dad was fit to be tied when he realized that she was out there, even if she was up in the police cruiser sitting in the parking area.
When he found that out, darkness or not, scary thing or dangerous human out there or not,
Dad tore through the darkness on foot and went and stood guard by the cruiser where mom was.
(23:52):
He wouldn't let her get out of the cruiser either. He was mad as a hornet.
But mom was right. That deputy, well he could have gone down any one of our other trails and he may not have found us right away.
I mean we had trails that went out to our pond, trails that went to different hunting stands we had,
and while most of those weren't big enough for a car to go down, well who knows, maybe he would have tried to.
(24:17):
The deputy did look all around outside. We all went out in a group. Dad stayed up at the car with mom.
I didn't care about looking around at that cabin. By that point we all just wanted to get the heck out of there.
So with the deputy waiting and more lights outside, we packed up our stuff and would dad at one end and the deputy of the other, we got our stuff, closed up the cabin and headed up towards the car.
(24:45):
I had given Trevor my keys so that he and Mitch could drive my car back up to the house.
The hardest thing to get out of that cabin was Pepper. She did not want to come out from under that table for anything.
So we picked the table up and Trevor had to pick her up while she snapped and growled at him and he carried her out to the car.
(25:07):
That was the only way we could get her out of there. Dad came down and he got the utility vehicle and turned around.
I rode behind him and we put her slowly up to the car with the deputy on foot.
Then we on the utility vehicle headed down the trail and the deputy followed us. His head lights lighting up behind us.
(25:30):
Once we got to the house, we all stood around out front and we talked for quite a while.
I have to say the deputy was very non-committal about what he thought was going on.
He flat out told Dad he did not see evidence of a bear, but he wasn't quite sure that we'd had a trespasser out there either, at least not a human one.
(25:53):
No matter what we said, he wasn't committing to anything. That made me more suspicious.
And while we're outside the house talking, I'll be dang if there wasn't another one of those weird moaning roars that we had told him about.
The deputy turned and looked back to the woods and he was looking at us like, "I did not just hear that."
(26:16):
We told him, "That was what we had been hearing out there. I don't know how he wrote that up or if he did."
He came back out the next afternoon, I think because he was more curious on a personal level because it was before his shift started, although he was in uniform.
We all went back out there and we looked all around in the daylight. That's when we saw what had really happened to the window out back and that it was still technically in the frame, just a mangled mess.
(26:48):
There were prints everywhere all around the cabin, but the ground all around it was compacted and hard enough that all you could see was there was some scuffling, but there were no clear prints.
In all of this, never once was the word "bigfoot" uttered by anyone.
But I also didn't hear anyone say the word "bear" "man" or "trust passer."
(27:15):
Yes, my mom and dad still lived there on that land. They're getting to be elderly now and I'm wanting to move back to help them out.
My wife and kids, however, aren't up to that idea right now. They don't want to move. I understand where they're coming from.
Over the years, before I moved away, I did stay out there at that cabin several other nights. In each time, I was on high alert and listening for everything.
(27:42):
But nothing ever happened. The moaning from the woods happened many more times at summer and fall.
Then it all stopped. I guess whatever it was had moved on or maybe it died out there. I don't know.
Maybe it was really just someone pulling a prank on us. But none of us, not even that deputy, thought so.
(28:08):
Now, I hope this is something that you think is really a bigfoot story and you will tell it on your show. I believe in all my heart that we had a bigfoot out there.
Trevor and Mitch also think so. But we didn't come to that agreement until almost a year later. I figured that was what it might be, that very day that the deputy came back out.
(28:31):
I had thought about it all night. What else could it be? I told dad what I thought. He didn't say yes and he didn't say no.
But I kept talking to him about what he saw that crossed in front of the cabin while he was out there coming on the utility vehicle.
And he was always squarely with his answers. But a few years ago, I talked to him about it all again.
(28:57):
And he did actually verbally agree that he does think we had a bigfoot that night.
What he described, he said the more he thought about it, the more what he saw. It had to be a bigfoot.
And then a funny thing, he actually apologized to me for leaving me in the cabin that night when he ran out to where mom was in the deputy's car.
(29:21):
I had to laugh and I told him I didn't think it was wrong for him to do that. And he said he figured that by 21 years old, I should be able to pin for myself even against bigfoot.
So that's still our joke that he would pick mom over me in a bad situation.
But dad says he knows he raised me right so he wasn't worried one bit about me mom on the other hand. Well she had trouble handling a pairing knife.
(29:50):
Anyway, thanks a lot, Nance.
I've had fun reliving this.
Tonight's encounter comes to you from long ago.
(00:03):
We're pulling this one out of the vault.
[Birds chirping]
[Birds chirping]
It was my 21st birthday, an unlike most people who go out on the town to celebrate.
Me and two of my friends headed out to the cabin that was on my family land.
(00:25):
Our plan was to eat a lot of pretzels, chip, and other crap.
Maybe drink some beer and play cards till dawn.
This was agreeable to all of our families because it meant we weren't out getting drunk.
We were staying in and staying safe.
The cabin was out almost in the middle of my grandfather's land.
(00:47):
He had 43 acres.
At that time he lived down on the southeast end of the parcel.
My parents had another niche up on the north end.
This was in Minnesota, somewhere east of Foothill State Forest.
Since this all happened, our family land has been subdivided a few more times and now more family lived there, so I don't want to be more specific.
(01:13):
The cabin is a basic square with a single wall dividing the back third of the cabin.
The back third was commonly used as a bedroom, and sometimes it doubled as extra storage.
The rest of it is one single room.
It had a few wood shelves in a table that basically formed a kitchen, some open space for sitting, and there was a wood stove for both heating and cooking.
(01:40):
It's very rustic. There's no running water or electricity.
The cabin had been used by everyone in our family at one point or another for many, many years.
Both my parents and my grandfather lived on parts of the land, as I said.
So if something happened out there, help was close by. All we had to do was click the mic on the walkie-talkie.
(02:04):
That was before cell phones back then, but we did have walkie-talkies and we all used them.
We all had walkie-talkies. There was some at my grandparents, some at my mom and dad's, and then I took one out with us, or whoever went out, always took one with them.
43 acres is a lot of acreage. All kinds of things can happen. So yes, we always carried walkie-talkies that my dad had picked up at an Army surplus.
(02:30):
We got out there that night, and we settled in and were playing cards for a while.
We did bring beer, but it was still pretty early, and we were more into playing cards and eating all the chips and pretzels we'd bought than actually drinking.
One of my friends, Trevor, had asked if he could bring his dog with him. I liked Pepper. That was his dog. She was an Australian blue healer, and she was pretty chill for a dog, so I said, "Okay."
(02:59):
When it got dark that evening, Pepper acted funny from time to time. Sometimes she would pace and wine.
Trevor thought maybe she needed a bathroom break, so he took her out, but she wouldn't go, he said, so he brought her back in. This happened two or three times. She would pace and act like she needed to go out, so Trevor would take her, but she wouldn't do anything.
(03:24):
Now, the last time while he was out there, Trevor said he didn't step more than a few feet from the cabin door. By that time, it was completely black out there. There was no light, no ambient moon, nothing.
He could only see what little he could see from the light streaming from inside the tiny cabin. He had left the door open. There was no moon to see by. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face out there.
(03:52):
When Trevor came back in, he said, he didn't want to go back out there. He couldn't see anything in it. He felt odd. We teased him, and we called him a sissy, and all kinds of things like that.
And he said, no, he was serious, and he didn't think Pepper wanted to be out there either. And she wouldn't go out into the dark further away from the cabin when he urged her to go do her business. She stayed right by him and whined, and then she wanted right back in.
(04:23):
I told him to take one of the lanterns next time. Pepper's a girl, so maybe she was just afraid of the dark. We played it off.
After a while, we all got settled back down, and we're playing cards again. By this time, Pepper had come over, and she had laid near us on the floor right under the table. She was between me and Trevor. And every now and then I would see her head raise up.
(04:48):
When she did raise her head like that, I would see that her ears would twitch back and forth like she was listening to something. Then after another minute of that, she would just lay her head back down on her paws.
At the most, I thought maybe there was something out there like a bear. Now, Pepper, to my knowledge, would never have seen a bear in her life.
(05:12):
But I remember reading or hearing somewhere that all animals recognize real predators by their scent. Even if they've never encountered one in their life, that's why they sell tiger urine to keep cats off your lawn.
Most cats have never encountered a tiger, but one with, and they know there's a predator.
(05:34):
Well, it's something instinctual I read. I figured that's what was going on with Pepper, and I ignored it. But as time went on, I did hear some weird things outside.
Now, most people think that there's not much that goes on at night in the woods, but they're very wrong.
I hear more at night out there than I ever hear in the daytime. Lots of creatures out there are nocturnal. You don't hear them during the day, but when the sun goes down and the wind, it usually dies down in the evening, so that stillness amplifies every sound out there.
(06:15):
You hear every bush branch that a deer moves when it walks through. You hear every snap from a fat raccoon that's walking over stuff. And if there's any kind of river or creek or flowing water nearby, it's like someone turns up the volume on that water.
You hear it, even if it's just a tiny trickle of water.
(06:37):
Maybe we hear it, because as humans, we've developed that over the millennia to be more aware at night, which is when most dangers came at us. I don't really know. I just know that you do hear more at night. You hear everything.
But that was just it. I wasn't hearing anything.
(07:02):
There were two old casement, crank style windows in that cabin. There was one just to the side of the front door, and there was one in the back bedroom area.
They were directly opposite from each other. You could look straight through from one to the other. And if you open both of those windows and left the bedroom door open in the cabin, it usually had a breeze that pulled through the whole cabin.
(07:27):
Now we had both windows open that night. I got up, and I got the other bag of chips that was still in the grocery sack, which was sitting near the open window by the front door.
I bent down, I got the chips, then I stood up and I looked out the window. That is when I realized it was dead quiet out there.
(07:50):
I told Trevor and Mitch to be quiet, and they were. My ears were ringing. It was so quiet.
Anyone who knows anything about the woods knows that doesn't happen.
Now I'm ready to tell the guys all about that, but I stopped because of a loud sound that I heard.
(08:16):
It made my skin crawl. It was a moaning sound, kind of mixed with a lion's roar. A roaring moan, I guess you'd call it.
My hair stood up on my head when I heard it. It was like nothing I had ever heard in my life.
Pepper barked once or twice, but in a half-hearted way when she heard it. Then I saw her back up further under the table.
(08:43):
Watching her do that made the rest of my hair all over my body just stand right up.
My dad and my grandpa had always told me to trust the dogs. Even our house cat alerted us once when a bear was nearby our house.
So yeah, I was taking Pepper's action pretty serious.
(09:05):
She was standing up under the table, and from the sideways view that I had of her from where I stood, I saw her fur was hunched up all along her spine.
She was growling low, and her lips were pulled back in a fearsome snarl.
The one eye that I saw of Pepper's from that side was large. You can see all kinds of the white that went beyond the blue of her pretty eye.
(09:32):
She was terrified. That was the only word for Pepper. Terrified.
Mitch looked at me, and when the moaning roar stopped, he said, "What kind of animal is that?"
Like it was something I heard every day. I looked at him and I said, "I have no idea. It wasn't anything like I'd ever heard."
(09:57):
Right then, the walkie-talkie that was sitting on one of the shelves crackled. My dad said that we need to stop it. We were frightening mom, whatever we were doing out there.
I grabbed the walkie-talkie off the shelf. I clicked the mic, and I told him, "That was an us. We didn't know what it was."
(10:19):
There was a pause in the walkie-talkie. I expected him to fire right back an answer, but he didn't.
After another second and a half, I clicked the mic again, and I repeated, "It was not us. We didn't know what it was."
And just before I let off the mic, I said, "I was scared, shitless, dad." My friends were silent when they heard me say that.
(10:44):
They thought up until then that I was just playing with them. Neither of them lived out on land. They lived in a city, so they thought that I was just messing with them, trying to scare them by saying, "I didn't know what it was out there."
I know for a fact that Mitch up at that point had never spent the night anywhere but inside a proper house. He told me that when I invited him on this whole 21st birthday excursion.
(11:10):
Trevor had done some hunting in his life, and there were some things he'd done in the woods with relatives. But I don't know if he ever had been out there in the dark for a whole night in the woods.
I really wish that I had had a camera back then to take a picture of their faces when I let go of that walkie-talkie mic after saying that to my dad.
(11:33):
When they realized that I really didn't know what it was, and neither did my mom and dad, "Oh, the look on their face?" Well, I've never seen anything like it since.
I glanced under the table. I saw that Pepper was still acting the same. She was terrified. Trevor looked down and saw what was going on with Pepper as well.
(11:56):
And I don't think he knew where Pepper was until that second. He tried to coax her out from under the table, but she snapped at his hand.
That really surprised all of us. Pepper was a very even-keeled dog. She had never, ever done that, ever.
All these things were coming together and happening all at once. Pepper's actions, the dead silence, the weird animal sound out there. My dad getting on the walkie telling us to stop it and that we were scaring mom.
(12:28):
It was all rolled together, and it all happened in maybe twenty seconds, maybe thirty seconds.
I was waiting for my dad to say something.
Finally, I heard the walkie-talkie crackle, and all he said was, "He was heading out. He'd be on the utility vehicle. Don't shoot at him."
(12:49):
He knew that I had brought out the Winchester 70, that old bolt action that my grandfather had given me years ago.
I only brought it out for defense, and I'd never had to use it, ever.
But I wasn't allowed to come out into the woods without some kind of protection. When I was younger, that was usually my dad or my grandfather who carried the gun.
(13:11):
But as I got older, they taught me how to hand the gun properly, and they taught me how to shoot.
And from then on, I carried my own protection, and that's when Grandpa gave me his old Winchester 70.
Now, there's not a lot that roams those woods, but there could be something dangerous. I had never fired that gun ever, except at practice targets.
(13:38):
I wasn't a hunter, and I didn't think that I ever would be, but I also didn't want to become the meal for some bear that I ran into.
I just told my dad okay. It was a few minutes later, and I finally heard the motor of his utility vehicle coming down the path.
I was keeping watch near the window, and when I saw the headlight coming down the wide track toward the cabin, I was both relieved and suddenly frightened.
(14:07):
That meant my dad was out there with whoever, or whatever, in the dark.
My insides turned cold. When I saw that headlight, I went black for just a second, and then reappeared in my vision.
My stomach turned. Something had walked across my field of vision, and more disturbingly, I was pretty sure it was just a few feet away from the window.
(14:35):
My dad was probably 50 feet from the cabin, and he came to a complete stop right then. I heard the engine out there just puttering at idle.
I grabbed my rifle, and was checking it when I heard my dad yell out, "Get your butts inside. I could have damn near-shot you!" I yelled back through the window. "Dad, we're all inside!"
(15:01):
I heard my dad gun the utility vehicle, and he came roaring up to the cabin. I thought he was almost going to hit it before he stopped.
Just a few minutes ago, we were all enjoying ourselves, eating pretzels and chips and playing cards.
Now, here we were, what felt like in the middle of an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Dad got inside, and he looked a little shook. He wanted to know what exactly was going on out here.
(15:30):
I told him everything that happened. And when I was telling him everything, it didn't seem like it was much to tell, but feeling it and experiencing it had been a lot more.
I asked him about the person outside and what he saw. He said that whoever it was, he almost shot them because they're in a big costume, and they made him think it was some kind of a bear getting in the cabin.
(15:58):
And then he thought, "The way it walked away, that it was one of us." He also said that when it walked away from the cabin, that's when he knew it wasn't a bear.
But it might have also been an awfully large person.
During all of this, Mitch and Trevor were also talking. "We were all talking."
(16:19):
Dad's utility vehicle was still outside the cabin. It was pointed right at the front of the cabin wall, maybe four feet outside the door.
He really did come that close to hitting the cabin before he came to a full stop.
The light from the utility vehicle outside was still on, and it was coming right through the window by the door.
(16:41):
We all fell silent and turned. When the light was momentarily blocked, like something had walked out in front of it again.
We all stopped talking.
Dad came out carrying his 45, but now he grabbed my rifle and he went to the side of the window and he looked long ways from there.
(17:03):
Then he went to the other side of the window. He said, "He saw someone out there off to the side of the cabin."
And then he said they moved away when he saw them. He said they were well over six feet tall, and it looked like they were prepared for battle with some kind of football gear on under all that dark clothing or costume or whatever they were wearing.
(17:25):
Now a person out there like that was scarier sounding than a bear to us.
That meant that someone was out there up to no good. We'd all rather it be a bear.
Dad used our walkie-talkie to call back to mom and tell her to call the sheriff because we had a trespasser out here, and they were probably up to no good.
(17:50):
You see, if someone had come that far onto our property, that deep into the woods just a trespass, and they were dressed all in black like that?
Well, they weren't out there to borrow a cup of sugar, now were they?
And he told mom that, and mom knew what he meant when he said that. That was their code for trouble. They would say, "They ain't here to borrow no cup of sugar."
(18:15):
And that was their line about trouble, whatever kind, wherever they were. It didn't have to be in person.
A few minutes later, the walkie-crackled to life again, and mom said she had called the Sheriff's Department.
Now we knew it would be a while before anyone would get out there. I also forgot to tell you at the beginning of this, that cars could only come within about 200 feet or so of our cabin.
(18:42):
There was a little area that was level where you could park, which is where my car was.
From that little parking area, you had to wind your way down through a bunch of thick trees along a trail track to the cabin, and it was down a light slope.
It was twisty, rough, and uneven, and the slope was pretty steep. So we just parked up there and usually walked down to the cabin.
(19:05):
The only thing that you could come right up to the cabin with was the utility vehicle.
The thought of walking through the dark to get to my car was really unsettling with someone or something out there.
Even getting on the utility vehicle meant that we would be open to attack from whoever.
(19:26):
We're all standing in the middle of the front part of the cabin, quietly discussing our options and what we think is going on.
When we hear a big thud behind us in the bedroom area, I had forgotten that window back there was open.
We turned and we looked through the bedroom doorway, and we saw a possum, a bloody possum with no head, and I guess it had been thrown through the back window.
(19:53):
We heard it when it hit the wood floor.
To this day, I don't know what that was supposed to be, what it was supposed to mean.
I have never heard of anything else like it in regards to Bigfoot.
This and this alone, this bloody possum with no head, is the only thing that has made me question if maybe it really was a person out there.
(20:18):
But I don't think so given everything else that happened.
Now we realize that both windows were open.
Dad told me to start closing the front one, and he walked to the back and started cranking the window back there closed.
There was no light out there, so he isn't sure exactly what happened.
He just said that all of a sudden he couldn't crank the window anymore.
(20:41):
There was some kind of resistance, and then all he said that happened next was something ripped that window right out.
He could hear the crunch of the metal and all the glass breaking.
Yes, something had grabbed that swinging casement window from the outside and tried to rip it right out of the frame.
(21:02):
Well, the next day in daylight we saw that it was really more of a twisted aluminum and shattered panes of glass that were still there on the window frame.
It didn't really pull it out of the frame, but in the dark we didn't know what had happened.
The casement was from the 1950s I think.
It was the kind with tiny panes set in individual aluminum squares.
(21:23):
They were two squares wide and three squares high.
It also wasn't very strong.
They were all single panes of glass, not like today's double and triple pain.
And they were real glass too, and pretty thin.
So I'm not saying that whatever did this took superhuman strength, but I really don't know that I could have done it at 21 years old.
(21:49):
By this time we're all pretty concerned that goes without saying, but I won't go so far as to say that we were frightened.
But we also knew that none of this should be happening like this, whether it was a person or a bear.
My dad was a Vietnam veteran and he didn't get rattled easily.
Dad was in the lead on this and we happily let him take point.
(22:14):
He told us to stay away from the windows and to be quiet.
We listened and we heard something walking around out there, but we never could see it from the window.
It was just too dark beyond our vision from the window, but whatever it was, we all agreed.
It was big and heavy, whatever it was.
(22:38):
We stood there in the middle of the cabin and tried to be quiet while we waited.
Pepper remained up under the table and refused to come out.
When the deputy arrived at my parents' house, mom called out to us on the walkie-talkie and let us know and said to look for him, they'll be out shortly.
(23:01):
We turned all the lanterns up inside the cabin so that he could see us when he got out there.
We didn't know how easily he would find us, but it turned out when he got there to the cabin, mom had written out there with him in the cruiser.
She said because he had no idea where he was going.
It was all private land and he'd never been out there before and we had all kinds of trails leading everywhere on that acreage.
(23:28):
Dad was fit to be tied when he realized that she was out there, even if she was up in the police cruiser sitting in the parking area.
When he found that out, darkness or not, scary thing or dangerous human out there or not,
Dad tore through the darkness on foot and went and stood guard by the cruiser where mom was.
(23:52):
He wouldn't let her get out of the cruiser either. He was mad as a hornet.
But mom was right. That deputy, well he could have gone down any one of our other trails and he may not have found us right away.
I mean we had trails that went out to our pond, trails that went to different hunting stands we had,
and while most of those weren't big enough for a car to go down, well who knows, maybe he would have tried to.
(24:17):
The deputy did look all around outside. We all went out in a group. Dad stayed up at the car with mom.
I didn't care about looking around at that cabin. By that point we all just wanted to get the heck out of there.
So with the deputy waiting and more lights outside, we packed up our stuff and would dad at one end and the deputy of the other, we got our stuff, closed up the cabin and headed up towards the car.
(24:45):
I had given Trevor my keys so that he and Mitch could drive my car back up to the house.
The hardest thing to get out of that cabin was Pepper. She did not want to come out from under that table for anything.
So we picked the table up and Trevor had to pick her up while she snapped and growled at him and he carried her out to the car.
(25:07):
That was the only way we could get her out of there. Dad came down and he got the utility vehicle and turned around.
I rode behind him and we put her slowly up to the car with the deputy on foot.
Then we on the utility vehicle headed down the trail and the deputy followed us. His head lights lighting up behind us.
(25:30):
Once we got to the house, we all stood around out front and we talked for quite a while.
I have to say the deputy was very non-committal about what he thought was going on.
He flat out told Dad he did not see evidence of a bear, but he wasn't quite sure that we'd had a trespasser out there either, at least not a human one.
(25:53):
No matter what we said, he wasn't committing to anything. That made me more suspicious.
And while we're outside the house talking, I'll be dang if there wasn't another one of those weird moaning roars that we had told him about.
The deputy turned and looked back to the woods and he was looking at us like, "I did not just hear that."
(26:16):
We told him, "That was what we had been hearing out there. I don't know how he wrote that up or if he did."
He came back out the next afternoon, I think because he was more curious on a personal level because it was before his shift started, although he was in uniform.
We all went back out there and we looked all around in the daylight. That's when we saw what had really happened to the window out back and that it was still technically in the frame, just a mangled mess.
(26:48):
There were prints everywhere all around the cabin, but the ground all around it was compacted and hard enough that all you could see was there was some scuffling, but there were no clear prints.
In all of this, never once was the word "bigfoot" uttered by anyone.
But I also didn't hear anyone say the word "bear" "man" or "trust passer."
(27:15):
Yes, my mom and dad still lived there on that land. They're getting to be elderly now and I'm wanting to move back to help them out.
My wife and kids, however, aren't up to that idea right now. They don't want to move. I understand where they're coming from.
Over the years, before I moved away, I did stay out there at that cabin several other nights. In each time, I was on high alert and listening for everything.
(27:42):
But nothing ever happened. The moaning from the woods happened many more times at summer and fall.
Then it all stopped. I guess whatever it was had moved on or maybe it died out there. I don't know.
Maybe it was really just someone pulling a prank on us. But none of us, not even that deputy, thought so.
(28:08):
Now, I hope this is something that you think is really a bigfoot story and you will tell it on your show. I believe in all my heart that we had a bigfoot out there.
Trevor and Mitch also think so. But we didn't come to that agreement until almost a year later. I figured that was what it might be, that very day that the deputy came back out.
(28:31):
I had thought about it all night. What else could it be? I told dad what I thought. He didn't say yes and he didn't say no.
But I kept talking to him about what he saw that crossed in front of the cabin while he was out there coming on the utility vehicle.
And he was always squarely with his answers. But a few years ago, I talked to him about it all again.
(28:57):
And he did actually verbally agree that he does think we had a bigfoot that night.
What he described, he said the more he thought about it, the more what he saw. It had to be a bigfoot.
And then a funny thing, he actually apologized to me for leaving me in the cabin that night when he ran out to where mom was in the deputy's car.
(29:21):
I had to laugh and I told him I didn't think it was wrong for him to do that. And he said he figured that by 21 years old, I should be able to pin for myself even against bigfoot.
So that's still our joke that he would pick mom over me in a bad situation.
But dad says he knows he raised me right so he wasn't worried one bit about me mom on the other hand. Well she had trouble handling a pairing knife.
(29:50):
Anyway, thanks a lot, Nance.
I've had fun reliving this.
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