November 23, 2025 • 41 mins
Bigfoot Chased and Attacked Teenage Boys
In midsummer, two friends camped near their hillside garden in a remote pine forest on California's northern coast. While the others tented, he slept in a makeshift shelter under a fallen tree, boots on and rifle at hand for wildlife protection. Awakened by heavy bipedal footsteps shaking the ground, the narrator froze as a large creature peered into the shelter, sniffed around, and pushed past a branch barrier. It probed the space before grabbing the his leg, prompting a mutual scream—his piercing cry startling the beast into a high-pitched wail as it fled, tearing the top off a friend's tent. Terrified, the group huddled until dawn, then fled on dirt bikes. As they escaped, a baseball-sized rock struck the narrator's head, knocking him off his bike, but they sped away and never returned.
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In midsummer, two friends camped near their hillside garden in a remote pine forest on California's northern coast. While the others tented, he slept in a makeshift shelter under a fallen tree, boots on and rifle at hand for wildlife protection. Awakened by heavy bipedal footsteps shaking the ground, the narrator froze as a large creature peered into the shelter, sniffed around, and pushed past a branch barrier. It probed the space before grabbing the his leg, prompting a mutual scream—his piercing cry startling the beast into a high-pitched wail as it fled, tearing the top off a friend's tent. Terrified, the group huddled until dawn, then fled on dirt bikes. As they escaped, a baseball-sized rock struck the narrator's head, knocking him off his bike, but they sped away and never returned.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
This encounter took place in a small town on the
coast of northern California. A friend and I decided that
we wanted to grow a garden on his property. The
trail to get there was half a mile through some
thick pine forest and huckleberry bushes. The garden itself was
trellised on the hillside with a small man made pine
(00:33):
that we used to water the plants. My friend and
I would ride our dirt bikes to check on it daily.
One day in midsummer, we decided to camp there with
another friend. My two friends pitched a tent, but being outdoorsy,
I made a shelter underneath a fallen tree. I used
the branches to close off the back of the sides,
(00:55):
and I had a large branch for a door. Also
had a blanket. Knowing it would get chili that night.
Before going to bed, I had the thought to leave
my writing boots on to protect against any would be
critters trying to get frisky. Mountain lions and the occasional
bear are a thing, although they are rare, Better safe
(01:16):
than sorry, I thought, keeping my feet. Toward the opening
of the shelter, we talked about our day and what
we had planned for the garden. The three of us
fell asleep. I woke up some time later to something
heavy walking right next to my shelter. It shook the
ground when it walked, as if it wanted to make
a point and say that it was the biggest thing around.
(01:40):
My immediate thought was that a big bear was rooting
around the camp. That is until I noticed it was
walking on two legs. As if that wasn't alarming enough,
it started looking into my shelter. I froze stiff, and
I could hear it breathing and sniffing as it made
its way inside through the door that I had made.
(02:01):
I had a big branch pulled in to block the door,
but this thing didn't seem to care. I had a
three three rifle laying next to me, but the thought
of protecting myself with it never crossed my mind. I
was too stunned to move or think straight. The sniffing
and probing went on for what felt like hours, and
just when I thought it would finally back out and
(02:23):
leave me be, I felt its giant hand grab my
leg and tug on it, as if trying to see
if I was a piece of wood or something else,
and when it grabbed me, I screamed like a pack
of stuck pigs. I must have scared it as bad
as it scared me, because it let out a high pitched,
horror stricken scream, and it took off toward the woods,
(02:45):
ripping the top off my buddy's tint along the way. Well,
we were terrified. All three of us had heard and
seen it. We stayed as quiet and as still as
we could until the first light showed over the mountains,
and then we got to our bikes. No sooner had
I gotten to my bike and got it moving when
(03:07):
a baseball sized rock hit me in the side of
the head and it knocked me off my bike. My
buddy behind me stop and helped me back up, and
we hotailed it out of there and we never went
back to that area again. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
My name is Cameron Buckner. This is the Dixie Cryptid
(03:28):
YouTube podcast, also known as the what If It's True Podcast.
On any podcast app that you're using, just do a
search for Dixie Cryptid or what If It's True podcast
on your Apple podcast app Spotify. Any podcast app you're
using should be right at the top and you can
(03:48):
follow along. I'm gonna tell you something about the audio
only podcast. People complain about the ads that run in
my videos on YouTube. I have nothing to do with it.
That I do have a little control. There is a
little button when I upload a video that I can
place ads, but they YouTube never uses it. I spent
(04:10):
four or five years doing that, just placing my own ads.
But the ads if I place three in a one
hour long video, they're still going to put six. But
here's what I want to tell you. If you go
to the podcast app, if you look me up on
the podcast app, you may have one ad interrupt your
(04:30):
listening experience. On a podcast app, there are not near
as many ads on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker. You can
listen on on the Spreaker app. S p R e
A K e R. You can download all these apps
for free. Starting account doesn't cost you anything. Look up
(04:52):
all the podcasts you want to listen to look mine
up first, and you won't get interrupted with ads. I
don't know why people don't use it. I use it
all the time now. I watch a lot of YouTube,
but I only watch that for visual stuff. This podcast
is an audio podcast. The stuff you see running on
the screen is just stuff I have to put in
(05:14):
there simply because YouTube is a visual platform. Anyway, I
just want to drop that. What do they call them hacks?
That's an ad hack. Go to Apple podcast or Spotify,
or I use Podbean the pod Bean app. It seems
to work really well, but it really doesn't matter. These
(05:34):
podcasts are streamed anywhere. So anyway, enough of that, onto
the story. I think I've got six or seven in
this podcast. I certainly hope you guys enjoy it. So
all right, here we go. When my son was four,
we went Noword to visit my aunt and uncle. At
(05:56):
the time, they lived on a beautiful property spanning eighty
are not too far from Huntsville, Ontario. My uncle was
born and raised in rural Quebec, and he grew up
in the woods among the wildlife. Later, as a young man,
he lived and worked in logging camps in Ontario and Quebec.
(06:17):
Their property was a nature lover's dream. Deer routinely wandered
into their backyard, along with bears and other wildlife, and
a host of other birds and smaller wildlife. It was
one of my favorite places to be on this visit.
It was winter, and we were sitting around in their
living room as the woodstove chugged out heat, and the
(06:39):
conversation worked its way around to strange things my uncle
had seen and heard in the forest in his lifetime.
He began telling a story about a deer hunting trip
that he took part in many years prior. Near North Bay, Ontario.
He and his hunting partner had come up dry since
(07:00):
it was getting dark, they were heading back to the
warmth of their lodging and a hot meal. As it was, though,
they got somewhat off the beaten path and ended up
taking the scenic route. It was dark by that point
and they were cold and miserable, when all of a
sudden they heard the sound emanating from the woods. They
could only be described as an angry monkey scream. My
(07:23):
uncle and his buddy froze solid when it went off again,
only louder. By this point, they were starting to mentally
take inventory of what animals could have made that sound,
but they came up empty. They stood there for a minute,
facing out into the dark woods. The ensuing silence was
every bit as scary as the noise they had just heard.
(07:46):
They decided not to wait around for an encore and
instead to double time it back to their cabin, where
not one more word was said about this incident. Now,
my uncle never once mentioned the word sosquatch or even
and heinted at it. But given his location at the
time and the sheer ferocity of the sound, and the
(08:06):
fact that it froze him, a seasoned hunter in his tracks,
I would not discount sosquatch. In August of twenty eighteen,
I took my son to visit my aunt and uncle
again on their property. While we were there, we had
a great time exploring the woods and walking down to
the beautiful beach about a mile away. But in typical fashion,
(08:29):
my internal clock went into overdrive and the first day
there I found myself awake at four am. Well, I figured,
rather than lying beds doing about being awake, I'd go
downstairs and do some painting until everyone woke up. This
house did not have air conditioning, so they routinely left
windows open to create a cross breeze. Between that and
(08:52):
the shade from the huge trees all around, the house
was always at an nice temperature, even when it was
sticky out. And there I was in the dining room
table with my watercolors in front of me, beside a
huge open window, listening to the birds in the forest
as they began to wake and go about their daily routine.
Outside it was washed with a silvery blue pre dawn light,
(09:16):
and except for the birds, everything was quiet. I was
painting away happily, when all of a sudden I noticed
that even the birds had stilled. I felt little of it,
and I kept on painting until in the distance I
heard the distinct sound of wood hitting hard against another
piece of wood. My head shot upright and I listened.
(09:37):
There were three knocks, and then a pause, and then
a couple more, and then a short, distant, lyrical whood
sound that started low and went higher towards the end.
No freaking way, I thought to myself. I immediately realized
my son would be furious with me if I didn't
capture the sounds, so I reached for my cell phone
(09:58):
and turned on the video. Even though there was another
faint moan in the distance. When I played back the recording,
the only audible sound was that of my rather excited breathing.
I told my son at breakfast what I'd heard, but
he thought I was kidding with him to this day,
I'll never be convinced that what I heard that morning
(10:18):
in the twilight was not a sisquatch. The wood knocking
was intentional, and the whooping sound was like nothing I'd
ever heard before or since. Keep doing your good work.
Your non judgmental approach and fantastic accent make you one
of the best on YouTube. And my son and I
(10:39):
love your channel. Sign Nancy, that was a really nice compliment.
Not many people compliment my accent, but I can't change it,
and I just roll with it. And there's plenty of
people that talk like me. So we go through life
not understanding each other. Hay yack, Get all right. Thank
you Nancy for the story. This was great. Thank you.
(11:05):
My encounter occurred in the summer of nineteen seventy five.
I was thirteen years old at the time. My cousin Jim,
and I decided to go camping near my home, located
in the southeastern corner of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina,
in an area of woods that is known as Colonel
Francis Bady Park. This section of the country was remote
(11:29):
in the nineteen seventies, with sparse development. The woods comprising
several hundred acres included a beautiful section where several large
creeks converged with a mature section of hardwoods and pines.
There's a high tension power line extending through the eastern
corner of this track, which I now realized may have
(11:50):
been the pathway for our visitor. The land was bordered
by planet fields on two sides and a road on
the other two sides in some development. Essentially, it was
an oasis of hardwoods surrounded by fields. By the age
of thirteen, I was already an accomplished camper, having camped
(12:11):
in the wilderness areas for week long stretches with my
father since I was six. I was accustomed to being
in the woods at night, having taken several frog gigging
trips with my father to remote ponds throughout Union County,
where we would spend hours tromping around the darkness up
to my chest and water. It was not unusual for
(12:34):
us to encounter snakes, deer, raccoons, and other wildlife. Jim
and I hiked about two miles and made camp in
a clear area of hardwoods just above a waterfall in
the creek in the center of the track. Accompanying us
was my dog, Alicia. She was a German shepherd who
(12:54):
was fiercely loyal and followed me everywhere. Back then, there
were no leash laws, and she patrolled my family's seven
acre home site religiously, chasing off all manner of animals.
She was accustomed to the wildlife in our area, and
it was common for her to wake us up after
cornering a possum or a raccoon on our patio late
(13:17):
at night. After exploring the area all day, we settled
in for the night with a knight's fire. Sometime late
in the evening, we were both awakened by my dog.
Lesha was making a weird combination of noises, sort of
a mix of whining and growling. She came in the tent,
(13:38):
pacing and cowering between us. She had never done anything
like that before, and it baffled me. She couldnot be consoled.
Lesha would bark incessantly at strangers, dogs or wildlife, or
she would chase them off without hesitation. But I had
never seen her behave the way that she did that night,
(13:58):
nor did I see her act that way again after.
As we sat awake pondering what was causing her reaction.
There were noises out in the woods. The first one
that got our attention was a tree falling. We heard
distinctive cracks and then the sound of a massive tree
hitting the ground. It was a familiar sound to me
(14:21):
because we would push over rotten pine trees and kill
pine beetles for the fun. This usually required at least
several boys to slowly push a tree at its base
until it began to sway, and then push into each
sway until the momentum caused it to break near the
base and fall. It wasn't an easy feet but we
would get it done. Dead or rotten tree fall and
(14:44):
living tree fall has distinctively different sounds. When the dead
tree falls, the cracking is dry and quick, there is
no resistance. But when a healthy tree falls, you hear
the moisture in the wood protesting. You hear the tearing
of the bark and the trunk resisting as the fiber split.
Several of us would never have been able to push
(15:07):
over a living tree, no matter how hard we tried.
The tree we heard was green, it was alive. The
sound of hitting the ground was heavy and dense with
moisture and shook the earth under our tent. When I
heard it break in the middle of the night, in
the middle of nowhere, I got a shiver. I knew
(15:27):
that whatever had made this happen was something big, and
my dog was afraid of it. I shared my concern
with Jim, and we began to hear distinctive footfalls in
the dry leaves. The foot falls were heavy and they
sounded like a person slowly walking. The footsteps grew fainter.
We heard another living tree fall, and then silence. It
(15:50):
took some time for my dog to settle down, but
she never barked or chased after whatever it was. We
did not go to sleep at all after that, and
we couldn't wait for daylight to get out of the woods.
I still live in this area and frequently travel through
that section of woods. Because it has now been converted
into a public park, I have continued to camp and
(16:14):
hunt in and around this area for as long as
I can remember. That particular area was, for many years
prior to the park's establishment, my favorite deer hunting area
due to the abundance of the animals. The northern section
is surrounded by farmland and the entire track is intersected
by several creeks which now form a big lake. In
(16:38):
all my time in the woods, I have never encountered
anything that would explain what we heard that night. I
recently became interested in the Bigfoot phenomenon, and I've been
researching accounts in folklore. This unusual childhood experience remains vivid,
and it is now quite evident to me that sosquatch
(16:58):
explains everything we heard. It is, in my opinion, the
only creature that would have had that kind of effect
on my German shepherd, and the only creature that would
have had the ability to push over a massive, green
living tree. I grew up in a small town outskirts
(17:22):
of Cincinnati, Ohio. My father and I lived in an
old log cabin situated in the middle of the woods.
He used to always cut trees for heat in the winter,
and on the weekends I would help him load the
truck and whatnot. Our white German shepherd named Duke was
my favorite companion. He was beautiful and in the winter
(17:43):
he would come busting out of the woods on either
side of the trail and look like a majestic wolf.
He was my best friend. One day, my father, Duke
and I were walking the creek after a day of swimming,
when we came up on a set of tracks that's
about ten years years old at that time now. I
asked my father if they were dukes. He said, no,
(18:05):
they weren't. They were from a feeline, probably a big
bobcat or something of that nature. Well, put it out
of my mind and we continued on. I'm not sure
how much longer this was, since when you're a kid,
time really does fly. But Duke and I were outside
of the log cabin, playing in the yard as kids do,
(18:26):
when all of a sudden, Duke got so close to
me that I couldn't walk without tripping over him. That's
when I looked up at our long gravel driveway and
I saw what made those tracks. It was a massive
eight foot long black cat slinking its way from us
up the long gravel driveway. I know things seemed larger
(18:48):
when you're a kid, but this thing really was big.
I never saw its face, just its long, slender body
and its tail whipping left to right. I know a
cat when I see one, just like everyone else in
the world does. It had the grace and agility and
stealth of an assassin. My German shepherd was a good size,
(19:09):
maybe eighty pounds, but this cat dwarfed him. That's what
I realized. Duke had saved my life. If I had
been out there alone, that cat would have easily killed me.
If you search the internet for black panthers living in
North America, the answers you will get or that they
flied out don't exist here. But I know what I saw.
(19:32):
Maybe it was a pet that got too big to
keep and was set loose. In the nineteen eighties and nineties,
people had a thing for exotic pets intended to let
them loose when they got too big. All I know
is that I saw a monster panther that day, and
my German Shepherd saved my life. I'll never forget that day.
(19:53):
I'll never forget that cat or my dog, Duke. Thank
you for reading this. Signing off. In two thousand and ten,
I lived in an old house with a couple of
acres and a swamp nearby. It was in southeast Georgia
and Bullock County, about an hour northwest of Savannah. There's
(20:17):
a ditch between my property and my grandmother's property that's
four feet deep. Red swamp maple grows on both sides
of it, and you wouldn't know it was there unless
you're paying attention when you're passing it from the road.
It runs in a tee from the front of the
property back to the swamp behind the house, and then
into a vernal pond that dries up every summer. It
(20:39):
hadn't rained, so the ditch was dry as a bone.
Our family reunion was held at my grandmother's property every
April and has been held every year there for sixty
five years. My brother and I and our families were
always last to call it a night. It was getting
late when we heard a strange sound outside. One of
(21:00):
my brothers said it could have been a screech owl.
We left it at that and said our goodbyes, and
I headed for bed. I had become disabled the year before,
and I used a wheelchair. I could stand, but I
couldn't walk for because the cartilage in both of my
hips had worn out. I had learned that sleeping on
the couch was easier to get out of than getting
(21:22):
out of my bed, so I'd taken to sleeping in
the living room. I never left any lights on because
the windows faced east and west, and the yard light
lit up the interior of the house enough for me
to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
There were three windows in the living room, each three
feet wide and five feet long. These were old windows
(21:44):
that my dad had removed and rebuilt, and were made
of that thin old glass that looks like it's melting.
The window that faced west was five feet off the ground.
That night, it was just me and my pug, Blinky,
who was then eight years old. He was a good
little watch dog, and he sounded like he was ten
feet tall when he went on alert, even though he
(22:07):
only weighed twelve pounds. I just laid on the couch
and blink. He laid down on the floor beside me.
I was almost asleep when all of a sudden, an
ungodly scream came from the ditch. It sounded like the
one my brothers and I had heard earlier, but it
was closer and louder and wilder this time. I started
(22:30):
to sit up when Blinky sailed up to my chest,
knocking my breath out of me and banging like he
was a huge dog. He barked for a good five minutes.
His fur was bristling like I'd never seen before. He
wouldn't let me sit up, and he kept jumping onto
my chest every time I moved him down to my legs.
(22:50):
I found my big flashlight, which I kept between the
couch and the cushions, and I shined it out into
the swamp maples, shining it back and forth and then
up and down the tree. Blinky finally got off me
and I was able to sit up. I turned off
the flashlight, using my furniture as a support. I went
into the bathroom with Blinky following me, looking through the
(23:13):
window in the bathroom outside, but I couldn't see anything.
I was still afraid. That night, Blinkie and I slept
in my master closet with the interior door shut tight
and lock. I've heard a black panther before. There's one
in the Pennsylvania Zoo that screamed right at me, so
(23:34):
I knew what I heard wasn't a panther. We had
bobcats and foxes on the farm, and it wasn't either
of them. We don't have porcupines and raccoons and possums
don't scream like what I heard that night. I don't
know what Blinky and I heard, but I've never been
so scared in all my life. Blinky passed away in
(23:55):
my arms in twenty sixteen at thirteen years old, and
I moved to the Arizona Desert last year. There are
no trees here, and that means that there's nowhere for
any large animals or mystery creatures to hide, or so
I'm told. Now, I just have to be aware of rattlesnakes, tarantulas,
and bark scorpions. Oh that was a great story, but
(24:20):
I'm so sad about your pug, Blinkie. We have a
little pug. Her name is Lily. Oh my gosh, I
love that dog. She's a stinky little thing and she's
a snorty snorter. You know how pugs are. They're just
little footballs and their faces are all alienike. Have you
ever looked in a pug's mouth. They have the weirdest
(24:40):
skull structure of any dog I've ever seen. But it's
one of the oldest breeds in human history that I think.
They come out of China, but they're the I want
to just tell y'all, if anybody's looking for a family pet,
a pug is the absolute best family pet you can buy.
I love labs. I have a little pit bull mix.
(25:04):
We have a hairless Mexican Terrier. He's a great dog.
And all of our dogs are good, but that pug
she may or may not be my favorite. But if
you're looking for just a family pet, a dog that's
good with kids, it's a lap dog that's lovable. I
mean their faces are shapes so that they just can't
(25:25):
hardly bite you. They're a great dog to raise with
a family. So anyway, that's my dog advice for the day.
Thank you to the writer for the story. I thought
it was good. Thanks. In July of two thousand and nine,
I moved to Murphisboro, Tennessee, to begin graduate studies in
(25:46):
the biology program at Middle Tennessee State University. It was
during the tail end of a recession, and I had
been working for a surveyor who could only pay me
for three days a week, so I didn't have a
lot of money. I drove around downtown Murphisborough and was
overtaken by a nostalgic mood. This quiet, old downtown neighborhood,
(26:10):
in the tree lined streets leading up to the old
courthouse on the Square was where I had lived ten
years prior to this. I ran these old streets in
the fall of nineteen ninety nine, with their turning leaves
the orange and yellow of the sugar maples leading up
to the square. I would be attending Navy Officers Candidate
(26:31):
School at the beginning of the next year, and I
wanted to get in shape. A decade later, I had
come to take advantage of the educational opportunity my service
had afforded me. I saw a four rent sign at
an old building on Lydall Street, just a block from
the campus. I walked into the open front door. There
(26:54):
was an apartment on either side. I walked up the
creaky wooden stairs to find two more apartments up top.
The door stood wide opened to one of them. It
was dirty. Animal feces was on the floor. A large
old window was open, letting in the ninety degree air.
(27:14):
While this could have been a sign to run away,
to me, it was a sign that the rent might
be cheap. I called the number on the sign out
front and was told to drive up the street to
the owner's law office and sign the rental agreement. I
chose apartment three upstairs, across the hall from the one
I had walked into on my initial visit. It had
(27:38):
just been repainted and the floors were swept. A small
air conditioner did what it could do to cool the
large rooms with the old drafty windows, but I didn't
mind the heat too much. Air Conditioning in the summer
has always given me chills. Some friends helped me move
my belongings down from Nashville. Everything I owned at the
(27:59):
time could be carried in two loads in the bed
of my Ford Ranger pickup truck. I settled into my
new apartment and in a couple of weeks classes began,
and I enjoyed being back on college campus, pretty girls,
thought provoking conversation, not being on a tight work day schedule.
There was a learning curve also as a graduate student,
(28:22):
I had earned extra money teaching biology labs. I had
forgotten statistics, and my first lab found me teaching students
about the tea test, which I did not recall having
ever heard before this lab. Incidentally, it was invented by
the head brewmaster at Guinness in the early nineteen hundreds
(28:42):
as a way to do a statistical quality control on
batches of that fine stout. Some days I would walk
back home between classes and take a nap. I've always
been a napper, but rarely do I fall into a
deep sleep, definitely not enough to enter a dream state.
I was surprised to suddenly be awakened by a loud whistle,
(29:04):
sharp like when someone puts their thumb and finger in
the edge of their mouth and really blows. I looked
outside and saw that the school two doors down was
letting out, and cars lined up the street waiting to
pick up their children. Other kids were running down the sidewalk.
Shortly after this, I was asleep one night when again
(29:25):
I was awakened by that whistle. I rose up and
the only sound in the room was a steady hum
of my fan. I looked out the open window by
my bed, but I didn't see anyone walking around in
the darkness. The hair on the back of my neck
stood up a little, and I didn't sleep well for
the rest of that night. A short time later, I
(29:47):
was out in the front yard smoking a cigarette and
talking with my neighbor. She, with her husband and daughter,
lived in apartment one downstairs. The other two apartments were
still empty as IRA call. Now. This doesn't have much
to do with the story, but I believe it bears
pointing out that she was a witch. She always wore black,
(30:09):
but this, being Murphers Burro goth was always in style.
But one day I had seen her and her husband
walking across the backyard slowly ceremoniously. Her husband was a
normal enough ponytail guy who worked at the bunny bread
plant in town. Or maybe it was Pillsbury, I can't remember,
(30:30):
it's irrelevant. She carried a round mirror with a candle
and a pentagram made from dried weeds on top of it.
They walked to the dilapidated woodshed out back. Hours later,
I walked out and found the mirror and pentagram of weeds.
It was still setting in that shed when my girlfriend
(30:51):
and I moved out to our apartment several years later.
I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Talking with
my neighbor, who was sitting in the arm of a
dogwood tree on an overcast November day after general pleasant trees,
she asked me if I had ever experienced anything strange
(31:13):
in the house. No, not really, I said, why do
you ask? Just wondering, she said. I was about to
walk back inside when I said, you know, there is
one thing I think it's strange. You get the whistle
don't you, she said. Suddenly a shudder ran over me. Yeah,
(31:34):
I said, My daughter gets the whistle too. She said
she's learned to ignore it. We said about talking some more,
and we talked about supposed haunted houses in downtown Murphisboro.
My neighbor told me about one house she had heard
about with a child's handprints that couldn't be painted over.
(31:55):
She heard that they just kept bleeding back through. Oh
that's creepy, I said, and then walked back inside. Either
that night or the next, I was sitting on the
hardwood floor in my living room working on a project
for a class. Not having an overhead light, I had
set the lamp in the floor next to me so
(32:15):
I could see while I glued leaves and stems to
some thick paper. The light at this low angle cast
a room in a new perspective, and looking up, I
saw it. In the corner on the wall next to
the kitchen door were two small handprints. It appeared to
be two right hand prints from a child, and my
(32:37):
jaw dropped. I ran down to my neighbor's apartment and
got her and her husband to walk up. I didn't
tell them what for, I just said you're not going
to believe this. My neighbor reacted as expected, with a
string of expletives signifying incredulous surprise. They walked back downstairs,
(32:59):
still dumbfound by the prints on the wall. I finished
my work for the night and I went to bed,
and I rationalized the hand prints as being from a
child who had left an indelible mark in a workman's
fresh plaster many years ago. Well time went on, and
I would occasionally show the handprints to friends who came
(33:20):
over to the house, a curiosity in an old house
that would elicit a reaction of creepy surprise, but little more.
Also don't remember getting the whistle anymore by this time.
A year later, in November of twenty ten, I was
taking a course in statistics and had a mild romantic
(33:40):
interest in a pretty girl in the class. She came
over one evening before a test to study. Heated up
some frozen chicken nuggets, and we sat on my bed
studying and watching TV. After a while, we got tired
of studying and just talk for a while. I poured
her a glass of wine and I had a beer.
(34:01):
Around eleven o'clock, she went home. I took her wine glass,
and I set it on the counter by the sink,
and I went to bed. I woke up sometime in
the night and walked to the kitchen to get a
drink of water, and there it was, the wine glass,
sat upright on the kitchen floor, eight or ten feet
from the sink, in the middle of the doorway where
(34:22):
the handprints were. Now. Maybe I was preoccupied with my
date that evening, but for whatever reason, I didn't think
anything of it. I was just glad the glass hadn't broken.
The next morning, I got up and made my oat meal,
heating up the water in a little red camping cup.
After eating, I washed my travel mug for coffee, and
(34:45):
I sat on the counter and began washing my spoon
and bowl. The travel mug fell off the counter somehow,
traveling halfway across the kitchen. It struck me as odd,
but then again, things could easily fall off around it
edge of an old enameled countertop if placed too close
to the edge. So I walked onto class with my
(35:06):
coffee in hand. I think I had to teach labs
that day, because I didn't come back until four or
four point thirty that afternoon. As I walked up the sidewalk. Levi,
who lived downstairs, and our friend Jason were sitting on
the points drinking a beer. Over the course of that day,
I thought about the wineglass being moved across the kitchen,
(35:28):
and to some extent, my coffee mug flying across the counter.
I told them what had happened, and was met with
the dude that's weird reactions that I had expected. I
sang a few bars of the Twilight's On theme and
then suggested that we go up to the booro and
get some beers. They agreed that was a good idea.
(35:49):
So I walked upstairs to drop off my backpack, and
my draw dropped and chills ran all over my body.
When I walked in the door, the little red cup
that I had heated water that morning was now sitting
in the kitchen doorway, exactly where the wine glass had
sat the night before. I ran back downstairs and I
(36:09):
got my buddies to come up. We all looked at
each other in disbelief, and then we walked back downstairs
and went to the bar. I don't recall if it
was later that evening or the next, but Levi and
I were sitting up in my apartment. It may have
been the same evening, because I remember I was a
little scared to be there by myself. I sat at
(36:31):
my desk, which was right beside the kitchen door, right
across from the handprints. Levi stood in the kitchen doorway.
We drank beer and talked about girls and guitars and songwriting,
and are usually topics of conversation, but we also talked
about the unexplainable events of the last twenty four hours.
(36:52):
And that's when I saw it move. A metal yard
stick was leaning up in the corner where the handprint
and swere five feet from where I sat. I looked
in the corner and the yarchstick began to shake vigorously.
I grabbed Levi and pointed to the corner. The yardstick
shook for a couple of more seconds, and then it stopped.
(37:15):
At this point, the kitchen door, which was always open,
slammed on Levi's back and shoulder. We looked at each
other because this was just too odd. But as soon
as he pushed the door back, it slammed again. I
don't recall for sure, but it may have slammed a
third time. We both stood in the doorway, jumping and
(37:36):
leaning hard into the door, trying to make it close again,
just to see if Levi could have jarred the door
causing it to close. We never got it to move.
After a while, Levi went downstairs to go to bed
because he had to go to Worth. The next morning,
I crawled into my bed, but sleep was hard to
come by. The Next day, I was talking to a
(37:59):
girl who sat next to me in my medicinal plants class,
and I told her about the strange events that I
had experienced. She told me that this sounded like a
spirit that was about to manifest itself and it could
be in a terrifying form. Well, this was not encouraging,
since I thought perhaps this was just a friendly ghost.
(38:21):
She suggested that I burned sage to clean the house.
Without going into a long sidetrack as to why, I'll
just say that I already had a bundle of sage
in the house. I went home that evening and sat
on the front porch with Levi's roommate, who was named Mike.
After a beer, we walked upstairs and we lit the sage.
(38:44):
Only the kitchen light was on, and I don't recall
why I didn't turn on any of the other lamps.
I walked through the apartment with the sage and making
up a cleansing ritual as I went. There's nothing but
love here, I said, I bring nothing but love, but
I live here. I pay rent. You don't belong here.
(39:05):
And then Mike interjected, but if you're here, show yourself. No, no,
I never want to see you. I have nothing but love,
but you need to go wherever you're supposed to go.
I pay the rent here, I continued to say. Afterwards,
Mike went back downstairs, and I sat alone in the apartment,
(39:25):
and the aroma of the sage strong throughout the rooms.
I went to bed that night and slept well. I
slept well from then on. There were no other ghostly occurrences.
Those events so many years ago left me with a
good ghost story to tell. But the event has also
left me with something more. When someone I love passes
(39:47):
away and friends and family attempt to comfort us by
talking about the afterlife, I tell them, I know we
live on past our earthly bodies. Don't say this based
on faith. I know it from experience. I learned that
ghosts are real on Lytle Street, on those overcasts. November
(40:08):
days many years ago. The building still stands with its
quadruplex of apartments, creaky wooden floors and stairs, but it
has been completely renovated now with modern windows that keep
out cold drafts and modern cabinets and countertops. No one
I know lives there any longer, but I would like
(40:29):
to stop by one afternoon and strike up a conversation.
I want to ask, do you ever hear a strange
whistle at night? Okay, I think that's going to do
it for this podcast. I certainly appreciate you finding me
out on the podcast network, whether you're listening from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbeam,
any podcast app a good five star review if you
(40:53):
enjoyed it would be a huge help to me. If
you can find that in the app. I can never
find it, but some people leave me review and I
would appreciate that it helps my podcast grow and helps
me keep doing this. Gives me a lot of encouragement.
So thanks for listening, and we'll see you guys on
the next one.
This encounter took place in a small town on the
coast of northern California. A friend and I decided that
we wanted to grow a garden on his property. The
trail to get there was half a mile through some
thick pine forest and huckleberry bushes. The garden itself was
trellised on the hillside with a small man made pine
(00:33):
that we used to water the plants. My friend and
I would ride our dirt bikes to check on it daily.
One day in midsummer, we decided to camp there with
another friend. My two friends pitched a tent, but being outdoorsy,
I made a shelter underneath a fallen tree. I used
the branches to close off the back of the sides,
(00:55):
and I had a large branch for a door. Also
had a blanket. Knowing it would get chili that night.
Before going to bed, I had the thought to leave
my writing boots on to protect against any would be
critters trying to get frisky. Mountain lions and the occasional
bear are a thing, although they are rare, Better safe
(01:16):
than sorry, I thought, keeping my feet. Toward the opening
of the shelter, we talked about our day and what
we had planned for the garden. The three of us
fell asleep. I woke up some time later to something
heavy walking right next to my shelter. It shook the
ground when it walked, as if it wanted to make
a point and say that it was the biggest thing around.
(01:40):
My immediate thought was that a big bear was rooting
around the camp. That is until I noticed it was
walking on two legs. As if that wasn't alarming enough,
it started looking into my shelter. I froze stiff, and
I could hear it breathing and sniffing as it made
its way inside through the door that I had made.
(02:01):
I had a big branch pulled in to block the door,
but this thing didn't seem to care. I had a
three three rifle laying next to me, but the thought
of protecting myself with it never crossed my mind. I
was too stunned to move or think straight. The sniffing
and probing went on for what felt like hours, and
just when I thought it would finally back out and
(02:23):
leave me be, I felt its giant hand grab my
leg and tug on it, as if trying to see
if I was a piece of wood or something else,
and when it grabbed me, I screamed like a pack
of stuck pigs. I must have scared it as bad
as it scared me, because it let out a high pitched,
horror stricken scream, and it took off toward the woods,
(02:45):
ripping the top off my buddy's tint along the way. Well,
we were terrified. All three of us had heard and
seen it. We stayed as quiet and as still as
we could until the first light showed over the mountains,
and then we got to our bikes. No sooner had
I gotten to my bike and got it moving when
(03:07):
a baseball sized rock hit me in the side of
the head and it knocked me off my bike. My
buddy behind me stop and helped me back up, and
we hotailed it out of there and we never went
back to that area again. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
My name is Cameron Buckner. This is the Dixie Cryptid
(03:28):
YouTube podcast, also known as the what If It's True Podcast.
On any podcast app that you're using, just do a
search for Dixie Cryptid or what If It's True podcast
on your Apple podcast app Spotify. Any podcast app you're
using should be right at the top and you can
(03:48):
follow along. I'm gonna tell you something about the audio
only podcast. People complain about the ads that run in
my videos on YouTube. I have nothing to do with it.
That I do have a little control. There is a
little button when I upload a video that I can
place ads, but they YouTube never uses it. I spent
(04:10):
four or five years doing that, just placing my own ads.
But the ads if I place three in a one
hour long video, they're still going to put six. But
here's what I want to tell you. If you go
to the podcast app, if you look me up on
the podcast app, you may have one ad interrupt your
(04:30):
listening experience. On a podcast app, there are not near
as many ads on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker. You can
listen on on the Spreaker app. S p R e
A K e R. You can download all these apps
for free. Starting account doesn't cost you anything. Look up
(04:52):
all the podcasts you want to listen to look mine
up first, and you won't get interrupted with ads. I
don't know why people don't use it. I use it
all the time now. I watch a lot of YouTube,
but I only watch that for visual stuff. This podcast
is an audio podcast. The stuff you see running on
the screen is just stuff I have to put in
(05:14):
there simply because YouTube is a visual platform. Anyway, I
just want to drop that. What do they call them hacks?
That's an ad hack. Go to Apple podcast or Spotify,
or I use Podbean the pod Bean app. It seems
to work really well, but it really doesn't matter. These
(05:34):
podcasts are streamed anywhere. So anyway, enough of that, onto
the story. I think I've got six or seven in
this podcast. I certainly hope you guys enjoy it. So
all right, here we go. When my son was four,
we went Noword to visit my aunt and uncle. At
(05:56):
the time, they lived on a beautiful property spanning eighty
are not too far from Huntsville, Ontario. My uncle was
born and raised in rural Quebec, and he grew up
in the woods among the wildlife. Later, as a young man,
he lived and worked in logging camps in Ontario and Quebec.
(06:17):
Their property was a nature lover's dream. Deer routinely wandered
into their backyard, along with bears and other wildlife, and
a host of other birds and smaller wildlife. It was
one of my favorite places to be on this visit.
It was winter, and we were sitting around in their
living room as the woodstove chugged out heat, and the
(06:39):
conversation worked its way around to strange things my uncle
had seen and heard in the forest in his lifetime.
He began telling a story about a deer hunting trip
that he took part in many years prior. Near North Bay, Ontario.
He and his hunting partner had come up dry since
(07:00):
it was getting dark, they were heading back to the
warmth of their lodging and a hot meal. As it was, though,
they got somewhat off the beaten path and ended up
taking the scenic route. It was dark by that point
and they were cold and miserable, when all of a
sudden they heard the sound emanating from the woods. They
could only be described as an angry monkey scream. My
(07:23):
uncle and his buddy froze solid when it went off again,
only louder. By this point, they were starting to mentally
take inventory of what animals could have made that sound,
but they came up empty. They stood there for a minute,
facing out into the dark woods. The ensuing silence was
every bit as scary as the noise they had just heard.
(07:46):
They decided not to wait around for an encore and
instead to double time it back to their cabin, where
not one more word was said about this incident. Now,
my uncle never once mentioned the word sosquatch or even
and heinted at it. But given his location at the
time and the sheer ferocity of the sound, and the
(08:06):
fact that it froze him, a seasoned hunter in his tracks,
I would not discount sosquatch. In August of twenty eighteen,
I took my son to visit my aunt and uncle
again on their property. While we were there, we had
a great time exploring the woods and walking down to
the beautiful beach about a mile away. But in typical fashion,
(08:29):
my internal clock went into overdrive and the first day
there I found myself awake at four am. Well, I figured,
rather than lying beds doing about being awake, I'd go
downstairs and do some painting until everyone woke up. This
house did not have air conditioning, so they routinely left
windows open to create a cross breeze. Between that and
(08:52):
the shade from the huge trees all around, the house
was always at an nice temperature, even when it was
sticky out. And there I was in the dining room
table with my watercolors in front of me, beside a
huge open window, listening to the birds in the forest
as they began to wake and go about their daily routine.
Outside it was washed with a silvery blue pre dawn light,
(09:16):
and except for the birds, everything was quiet. I was
painting away happily, when all of a sudden I noticed
that even the birds had stilled. I felt little of it,
and I kept on painting until in the distance I
heard the distinct sound of wood hitting hard against another
piece of wood. My head shot upright and I listened.
(09:37):
There were three knocks, and then a pause, and then
a couple more, and then a short, distant, lyrical whood
sound that started low and went higher towards the end.
No freaking way, I thought to myself. I immediately realized
my son would be furious with me if I didn't
capture the sounds, so I reached for my cell phone
(09:58):
and turned on the video. Even though there was another
faint moan in the distance. When I played back the recording,
the only audible sound was that of my rather excited breathing.
I told my son at breakfast what I'd heard, but
he thought I was kidding with him to this day,
I'll never be convinced that what I heard that morning
(10:18):
in the twilight was not a sisquatch. The wood knocking
was intentional, and the whooping sound was like nothing I'd
ever heard before or since. Keep doing your good work.
Your non judgmental approach and fantastic accent make you one
of the best on YouTube. And my son and I
(10:39):
love your channel. Sign Nancy, that was a really nice compliment.
Not many people compliment my accent, but I can't change it,
and I just roll with it. And there's plenty of
people that talk like me. So we go through life
not understanding each other. Hay yack, Get all right. Thank
you Nancy for the story. This was great. Thank you.
(11:05):
My encounter occurred in the summer of nineteen seventy five.
I was thirteen years old at the time. My cousin Jim,
and I decided to go camping near my home, located
in the southeastern corner of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina,
in an area of woods that is known as Colonel
Francis Bady Park. This section of the country was remote
(11:29):
in the nineteen seventies, with sparse development. The woods comprising
several hundred acres included a beautiful section where several large
creeks converged with a mature section of hardwoods and pines.
There's a high tension power line extending through the eastern
corner of this track, which I now realized may have
(11:50):
been the pathway for our visitor. The land was bordered
by planet fields on two sides and a road on
the other two sides in some development. Essentially, it was
an oasis of hardwoods surrounded by fields. By the age
of thirteen, I was already an accomplished camper, having camped
(12:11):
in the wilderness areas for week long stretches with my
father since I was six. I was accustomed to being
in the woods at night, having taken several frog gigging
trips with my father to remote ponds throughout Union County,
where we would spend hours tromping around the darkness up
to my chest and water. It was not unusual for
(12:34):
us to encounter snakes, deer, raccoons, and other wildlife. Jim
and I hiked about two miles and made camp in
a clear area of hardwoods just above a waterfall in
the creek in the center of the track. Accompanying us
was my dog, Alicia. She was a German shepherd who
(12:54):
was fiercely loyal and followed me everywhere. Back then, there
were no leash laws, and she patrolled my family's seven
acre home site religiously, chasing off all manner of animals.
She was accustomed to the wildlife in our area, and
it was common for her to wake us up after
cornering a possum or a raccoon on our patio late
(13:17):
at night. After exploring the area all day, we settled
in for the night with a knight's fire. Sometime late
in the evening, we were both awakened by my dog.
Lesha was making a weird combination of noises, sort of
a mix of whining and growling. She came in the tent,
(13:38):
pacing and cowering between us. She had never done anything
like that before, and it baffled me. She couldnot be consoled.
Lesha would bark incessantly at strangers, dogs or wildlife, or
she would chase them off without hesitation. But I had
never seen her behave the way that she did that night,
(13:58):
nor did I see her act that way again after.
As we sat awake pondering what was causing her reaction.
There were noises out in the woods. The first one
that got our attention was a tree falling. We heard
distinctive cracks and then the sound of a massive tree
hitting the ground. It was a familiar sound to me
(14:21):
because we would push over rotten pine trees and kill
pine beetles for the fun. This usually required at least
several boys to slowly push a tree at its base
until it began to sway, and then push into each
sway until the momentum caused it to break near the
base and fall. It wasn't an easy feet but we
would get it done. Dead or rotten tree fall and
(14:44):
living tree fall has distinctively different sounds. When the dead
tree falls, the cracking is dry and quick, there is
no resistance. But when a healthy tree falls, you hear
the moisture in the wood protesting. You hear the tearing
of the bark and the trunk resisting as the fiber split.
Several of us would never have been able to push
(15:07):
over a living tree, no matter how hard we tried.
The tree we heard was green, it was alive. The
sound of hitting the ground was heavy and dense with
moisture and shook the earth under our tent. When I
heard it break in the middle of the night, in
the middle of nowhere, I got a shiver. I knew
(15:27):
that whatever had made this happen was something big, and
my dog was afraid of it. I shared my concern
with Jim, and we began to hear distinctive footfalls in
the dry leaves. The foot falls were heavy and they
sounded like a person slowly walking. The footsteps grew fainter.
We heard another living tree fall, and then silence. It
(15:50):
took some time for my dog to settle down, but
she never barked or chased after whatever it was. We
did not go to sleep at all after that, and
we couldn't wait for daylight to get out of the woods.
I still live in this area and frequently travel through
that section of woods. Because it has now been converted
into a public park, I have continued to camp and
(16:14):
hunt in and around this area for as long as
I can remember. That particular area was, for many years
prior to the park's establishment, my favorite deer hunting area
due to the abundance of the animals. The northern section
is surrounded by farmland and the entire track is intersected
by several creeks which now form a big lake. In
(16:38):
all my time in the woods, I have never encountered
anything that would explain what we heard that night. I
recently became interested in the Bigfoot phenomenon, and I've been
researching accounts in folklore. This unusual childhood experience remains vivid,
and it is now quite evident to me that sosquatch
(16:58):
explains everything we heard. It is, in my opinion, the
only creature that would have had that kind of effect
on my German shepherd, and the only creature that would
have had the ability to push over a massive, green
living tree. I grew up in a small town outskirts
(17:22):
of Cincinnati, Ohio. My father and I lived in an
old log cabin situated in the middle of the woods.
He used to always cut trees for heat in the winter,
and on the weekends I would help him load the
truck and whatnot. Our white German shepherd named Duke was
my favorite companion. He was beautiful and in the winter
(17:43):
he would come busting out of the woods on either
side of the trail and look like a majestic wolf.
He was my best friend. One day, my father, Duke
and I were walking the creek after a day of swimming,
when we came up on a set of tracks that's
about ten years years old at that time now. I
asked my father if they were dukes. He said, no,
(18:05):
they weren't. They were from a feeline, probably a big
bobcat or something of that nature. Well, put it out
of my mind and we continued on. I'm not sure
how much longer this was, since when you're a kid,
time really does fly. But Duke and I were outside
of the log cabin, playing in the yard as kids do,
(18:26):
when all of a sudden, Duke got so close to
me that I couldn't walk without tripping over him. That's
when I looked up at our long gravel driveway and
I saw what made those tracks. It was a massive
eight foot long black cat slinking its way from us
up the long gravel driveway. I know things seemed larger
(18:48):
when you're a kid, but this thing really was big.
I never saw its face, just its long, slender body
and its tail whipping left to right. I know a
cat when I see one, just like everyone else in
the world does. It had the grace and agility and
stealth of an assassin. My German shepherd was a good size,
(19:09):
maybe eighty pounds, but this cat dwarfed him. That's what
I realized. Duke had saved my life. If I had
been out there alone, that cat would have easily killed me.
If you search the internet for black panthers living in
North America, the answers you will get or that they
flied out don't exist here. But I know what I saw.
(19:32):
Maybe it was a pet that got too big to
keep and was set loose. In the nineteen eighties and nineties,
people had a thing for exotic pets intended to let
them loose when they got too big. All I know
is that I saw a monster panther that day, and
my German Shepherd saved my life. I'll never forget that day.
(19:53):
I'll never forget that cat or my dog, Duke. Thank
you for reading this. Signing off. In two thousand and ten,
I lived in an old house with a couple of
acres and a swamp nearby. It was in southeast Georgia
and Bullock County, about an hour northwest of Savannah. There's
(20:17):
a ditch between my property and my grandmother's property that's
four feet deep. Red swamp maple grows on both sides
of it, and you wouldn't know it was there unless
you're paying attention when you're passing it from the road.
It runs in a tee from the front of the
property back to the swamp behind the house, and then
into a vernal pond that dries up every summer. It
(20:39):
hadn't rained, so the ditch was dry as a bone.
Our family reunion was held at my grandmother's property every
April and has been held every year there for sixty
five years. My brother and I and our families were
always last to call it a night. It was getting
late when we heard a strange sound outside. One of
(21:00):
my brothers said it could have been a screech owl.
We left it at that and said our goodbyes, and
I headed for bed. I had become disabled the year before,
and I used a wheelchair. I could stand, but I
couldn't walk for because the cartilage in both of my
hips had worn out. I had learned that sleeping on
the couch was easier to get out of than getting
(21:22):
out of my bed, so I'd taken to sleeping in
the living room. I never left any lights on because
the windows faced east and west, and the yard light
lit up the interior of the house enough for me
to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
There were three windows in the living room, each three
feet wide and five feet long. These were old windows
(21:44):
that my dad had removed and rebuilt, and were made
of that thin old glass that looks like it's melting.
The window that faced west was five feet off the ground.
That night, it was just me and my pug, Blinky,
who was then eight years old. He was a good
little watch dog, and he sounded like he was ten
feet tall when he went on alert, even though he
(22:07):
only weighed twelve pounds. I just laid on the couch
and blink. He laid down on the floor beside me.
I was almost asleep when all of a sudden, an
ungodly scream came from the ditch. It sounded like the
one my brothers and I had heard earlier, but it
was closer and louder and wilder this time. I started
(22:30):
to sit up when Blinky sailed up to my chest,
knocking my breath out of me and banging like he
was a huge dog. He barked for a good five minutes.
His fur was bristling like I'd never seen before. He
wouldn't let me sit up, and he kept jumping onto
my chest every time I moved him down to my legs.
(22:50):
I found my big flashlight, which I kept between the
couch and the cushions, and I shined it out into
the swamp maples, shining it back and forth and then
up and down the tree. Blinky finally got off me
and I was able to sit up. I turned off
the flashlight, using my furniture as a support. I went
into the bathroom with Blinky following me, looking through the
(23:13):
window in the bathroom outside, but I couldn't see anything.
I was still afraid. That night, Blinkie and I slept
in my master closet with the interior door shut tight
and lock. I've heard a black panther before. There's one
in the Pennsylvania Zoo that screamed right at me, so
(23:34):
I knew what I heard wasn't a panther. We had
bobcats and foxes on the farm, and it wasn't either
of them. We don't have porcupines and raccoons and possums
don't scream like what I heard that night. I don't
know what Blinky and I heard, but I've never been
so scared in all my life. Blinky passed away in
(23:55):
my arms in twenty sixteen at thirteen years old, and
I moved to the Arizona Desert last year. There are
no trees here, and that means that there's nowhere for
any large animals or mystery creatures to hide, or so
I'm told. Now, I just have to be aware of rattlesnakes, tarantulas,
and bark scorpions. Oh that was a great story, but
(24:20):
I'm so sad about your pug, Blinkie. We have a
little pug. Her name is Lily. Oh my gosh, I
love that dog. She's a stinky little thing and she's
a snorty snorter. You know how pugs are. They're just
little footballs and their faces are all alienike. Have you
ever looked in a pug's mouth. They have the weirdest
(24:40):
skull structure of any dog I've ever seen. But it's
one of the oldest breeds in human history that I think.
They come out of China, but they're the I want
to just tell y'all, if anybody's looking for a family pet,
a pug is the absolute best family pet you can buy.
I love labs. I have a little pit bull mix.
(25:04):
We have a hairless Mexican Terrier. He's a great dog.
And all of our dogs are good, but that pug
she may or may not be my favorite. But if
you're looking for just a family pet, a dog that's
good with kids, it's a lap dog that's lovable. I
mean their faces are shapes so that they just can't
(25:25):
hardly bite you. They're a great dog to raise with
a family. So anyway, that's my dog advice for the day.
Thank you to the writer for the story. I thought
it was good. Thanks. In July of two thousand and nine,
I moved to Murphisboro, Tennessee, to begin graduate studies in
(25:46):
the biology program at Middle Tennessee State University. It was
during the tail end of a recession, and I had
been working for a surveyor who could only pay me
for three days a week, so I didn't have a
lot of money. I drove around downtown Murphisborough and was
overtaken by a nostalgic mood. This quiet, old downtown neighborhood,
(26:10):
in the tree lined streets leading up to the old
courthouse on the Square was where I had lived ten
years prior to this. I ran these old streets in
the fall of nineteen ninety nine, with their turning leaves
the orange and yellow of the sugar maples leading up
to the square. I would be attending Navy Officers Candidate
(26:31):
School at the beginning of the next year, and I
wanted to get in shape. A decade later, I had
come to take advantage of the educational opportunity my service
had afforded me. I saw a four rent sign at
an old building on Lydall Street, just a block from
the campus. I walked into the open front door. There
(26:54):
was an apartment on either side. I walked up the
creaky wooden stairs to find two more apartments up top.
The door stood wide opened to one of them. It
was dirty. Animal feces was on the floor. A large
old window was open, letting in the ninety degree air.
(27:14):
While this could have been a sign to run away,
to me, it was a sign that the rent might
be cheap. I called the number on the sign out
front and was told to drive up the street to
the owner's law office and sign the rental agreement. I
chose apartment three upstairs, across the hall from the one
I had walked into on my initial visit. It had
(27:38):
just been repainted and the floors were swept. A small
air conditioner did what it could do to cool the
large rooms with the old drafty windows, but I didn't
mind the heat too much. Air Conditioning in the summer
has always given me chills. Some friends helped me move
my belongings down from Nashville. Everything I owned at the
(27:59):
time could be carried in two loads in the bed
of my Ford Ranger pickup truck. I settled into my
new apartment and in a couple of weeks classes began,
and I enjoyed being back on college campus, pretty girls,
thought provoking conversation, not being on a tight work day schedule.
There was a learning curve also as a graduate student,
(28:22):
I had earned extra money teaching biology labs. I had
forgotten statistics, and my first lab found me teaching students
about the tea test, which I did not recall having
ever heard before this lab. Incidentally, it was invented by
the head brewmaster at Guinness in the early nineteen hundreds
(28:42):
as a way to do a statistical quality control on
batches of that fine stout. Some days I would walk
back home between classes and take a nap. I've always
been a napper, but rarely do I fall into a
deep sleep, definitely not enough to enter a dream state.
I was surprised to suddenly be awakened by a loud whistle,
(29:04):
sharp like when someone puts their thumb and finger in
the edge of their mouth and really blows. I looked
outside and saw that the school two doors down was
letting out, and cars lined up the street waiting to
pick up their children. Other kids were running down the sidewalk.
Shortly after this, I was asleep one night when again
(29:25):
I was awakened by that whistle. I rose up and
the only sound in the room was a steady hum
of my fan. I looked out the open window by
my bed, but I didn't see anyone walking around in
the darkness. The hair on the back of my neck
stood up a little, and I didn't sleep well for
the rest of that night. A short time later, I
(29:47):
was out in the front yard smoking a cigarette and
talking with my neighbor. She, with her husband and daughter,
lived in apartment one downstairs. The other two apartments were
still empty as IRA call. Now. This doesn't have much
to do with the story, but I believe it bears
pointing out that she was a witch. She always wore black,
(30:09):
but this, being Murphers Burro goth was always in style.
But one day I had seen her and her husband
walking across the backyard slowly ceremoniously. Her husband was a
normal enough ponytail guy who worked at the bunny bread
plant in town. Or maybe it was Pillsbury, I can't remember,
(30:30):
it's irrelevant. She carried a round mirror with a candle
and a pentagram made from dried weeds on top of it.
They walked to the dilapidated woodshed out back. Hours later,
I walked out and found the mirror and pentagram of weeds.
It was still setting in that shed when my girlfriend
(30:51):
and I moved out to our apartment several years later.
I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Talking with
my neighbor, who was sitting in the arm of a
dogwood tree on an overcast November day after general pleasant trees,
she asked me if I had ever experienced anything strange
(31:13):
in the house. No, not really, I said, why do
you ask? Just wondering, she said. I was about to
walk back inside when I said, you know, there is
one thing I think it's strange. You get the whistle
don't you, she said. Suddenly a shudder ran over me. Yeah,
(31:34):
I said, My daughter gets the whistle too. She said
she's learned to ignore it. We said about talking some more,
and we talked about supposed haunted houses in downtown Murphisboro.
My neighbor told me about one house she had heard
about with a child's handprints that couldn't be painted over.
(31:55):
She heard that they just kept bleeding back through. Oh
that's creepy, I said, and then walked back inside. Either
that night or the next, I was sitting on the
hardwood floor in my living room working on a project
for a class. Not having an overhead light, I had
set the lamp in the floor next to me so
(32:15):
I could see while I glued leaves and stems to
some thick paper. The light at this low angle cast
a room in a new perspective, and looking up, I
saw it. In the corner on the wall next to
the kitchen door were two small handprints. It appeared to
be two right hand prints from a child, and my
(32:37):
jaw dropped. I ran down to my neighbor's apartment and
got her and her husband to walk up. I didn't
tell them what for, I just said you're not going
to believe this. My neighbor reacted as expected, with a
string of expletives signifying incredulous surprise. They walked back downstairs,
(32:59):
still dumbfound by the prints on the wall. I finished
my work for the night and I went to bed,
and I rationalized the hand prints as being from a
child who had left an indelible mark in a workman's
fresh plaster many years ago. Well time went on, and
I would occasionally show the handprints to friends who came
(33:20):
over to the house, a curiosity in an old house
that would elicit a reaction of creepy surprise, but little more.
Also don't remember getting the whistle anymore by this time.
A year later, in November of twenty ten, I was
taking a course in statistics and had a mild romantic
(33:40):
interest in a pretty girl in the class. She came
over one evening before a test to study. Heated up
some frozen chicken nuggets, and we sat on my bed
studying and watching TV. After a while, we got tired
of studying and just talk for a while. I poured
her a glass of wine and I had a beer.
(34:01):
Around eleven o'clock, she went home. I took her wine glass,
and I set it on the counter by the sink,
and I went to bed. I woke up sometime in
the night and walked to the kitchen to get a
drink of water, and there it was, the wine glass,
sat upright on the kitchen floor, eight or ten feet
from the sink, in the middle of the doorway where
(34:22):
the handprints were. Now. Maybe I was preoccupied with my
date that evening, but for whatever reason, I didn't think
anything of it. I was just glad the glass hadn't broken.
The next morning, I got up and made my oat meal,
heating up the water in a little red camping cup.
After eating, I washed my travel mug for coffee, and
(34:45):
I sat on the counter and began washing my spoon
and bowl. The travel mug fell off the counter somehow,
traveling halfway across the kitchen. It struck me as odd,
but then again, things could easily fall off around it
edge of an old enameled countertop if placed too close
to the edge. So I walked onto class with my
(35:06):
coffee in hand. I think I had to teach labs
that day, because I didn't come back until four or
four point thirty that afternoon. As I walked up the sidewalk. Levi,
who lived downstairs, and our friend Jason were sitting on
the points drinking a beer. Over the course of that day,
I thought about the wineglass being moved across the kitchen,
(35:28):
and to some extent, my coffee mug flying across the counter.
I told them what had happened, and was met with
the dude that's weird reactions that I had expected. I
sang a few bars of the Twilight's On theme and
then suggested that we go up to the booro and
get some beers. They agreed that was a good idea.
(35:49):
So I walked upstairs to drop off my backpack, and
my draw dropped and chills ran all over my body.
When I walked in the door, the little red cup
that I had heated water that morning was now sitting
in the kitchen doorway, exactly where the wine glass had
sat the night before. I ran back downstairs and I
(36:09):
got my buddies to come up. We all looked at
each other in disbelief, and then we walked back downstairs
and went to the bar. I don't recall if it
was later that evening or the next, but Levi and
I were sitting up in my apartment. It may have
been the same evening, because I remember I was a
little scared to be there by myself. I sat at
(36:31):
my desk, which was right beside the kitchen door, right
across from the handprints. Levi stood in the kitchen doorway.
We drank beer and talked about girls and guitars and songwriting,
and are usually topics of conversation, but we also talked
about the unexplainable events of the last twenty four hours.
(36:52):
And that's when I saw it move. A metal yard
stick was leaning up in the corner where the handprint
and swere five feet from where I sat. I looked
in the corner and the yarchstick began to shake vigorously.
I grabbed Levi and pointed to the corner. The yardstick
shook for a couple of more seconds, and then it stopped.
(37:15):
At this point, the kitchen door, which was always open,
slammed on Levi's back and shoulder. We looked at each
other because this was just too odd. But as soon
as he pushed the door back, it slammed again. I
don't recall for sure, but it may have slammed a
third time. We both stood in the doorway, jumping and
(37:36):
leaning hard into the door, trying to make it close again,
just to see if Levi could have jarred the door
causing it to close. We never got it to move.
After a while, Levi went downstairs to go to bed
because he had to go to Worth. The next morning,
I crawled into my bed, but sleep was hard to
come by. The Next day, I was talking to a
(37:59):
girl who sat next to me in my medicinal plants class,
and I told her about the strange events that I
had experienced. She told me that this sounded like a
spirit that was about to manifest itself and it could
be in a terrifying form. Well, this was not encouraging,
since I thought perhaps this was just a friendly ghost.
(38:21):
She suggested that I burned sage to clean the house.
Without going into a long sidetrack as to why, I'll
just say that I already had a bundle of sage
in the house. I went home that evening and sat
on the front porch with Levi's roommate, who was named Mike.
After a beer, we walked upstairs and we lit the sage.
(38:44):
Only the kitchen light was on, and I don't recall
why I didn't turn on any of the other lamps.
I walked through the apartment with the sage and making
up a cleansing ritual as I went. There's nothing but
love here, I said, I bring nothing but love, but
I live here. I pay rent. You don't belong here.
(39:05):
And then Mike interjected, but if you're here, show yourself. No, no,
I never want to see you. I have nothing but love,
but you need to go wherever you're supposed to go.
I pay the rent here, I continued to say. Afterwards,
Mike went back downstairs, and I sat alone in the apartment,
(39:25):
and the aroma of the sage strong throughout the rooms.
I went to bed that night and slept well. I
slept well from then on. There were no other ghostly occurrences.
Those events so many years ago left me with a
good ghost story to tell. But the event has also
left me with something more. When someone I love passes
(39:47):
away and friends and family attempt to comfort us by
talking about the afterlife, I tell them, I know we
live on past our earthly bodies. Don't say this based
on faith. I know it from experience. I learned that
ghosts are real on Lytle Street, on those overcasts. November
(40:08):
days many years ago. The building still stands with its
quadruplex of apartments, creaky wooden floors and stairs, but it
has been completely renovated now with modern windows that keep
out cold drafts and modern cabinets and countertops. No one
I know lives there any longer, but I would like
(40:29):
to stop by one afternoon and strike up a conversation.
I want to ask, do you ever hear a strange
whistle at night? Okay, I think that's going to do
it for this podcast. I certainly appreciate you finding me
out on the podcast network, whether you're listening from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbeam,
any podcast app a good five star review if you
(40:53):
enjoyed it would be a huge help to me. If
you can find that in the app. I can never
find it, but some people leave me review and I
would appreciate that it helps my podcast grow and helps
me keep doing this. Gives me a lot of encouragement.
So thanks for listening, and we'll see you guys on
the next one.
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