November 21, 2025 • 23 mins
He Killed it With a Hatchet
In 1932 in Short Gap, West Virginia, a grandmother placed her nearly one-year-old daughter (the narrator’s mother) on a baby blanket in the yard to get some sunshine while she washed dishes at the kitchen window. The girl’s grandfather was chopping wood at the nearby smokehouse when he saw an enormous black bird—described as a “Thunderbird”—casting a huge shadow as it swooped straight down toward the helpless baby. Realizing he couldn’t reach her in time, he hurled his hatchet and struck the bird dead. When the family measured the carcass stretched across the smokehouse wall, its wingspan was an astonishing 16 feet 4 inches. Neighbors came from around to view the mysterious giant bird, and a photograph was taken (though it has since been lost). The narrator saw the photo as a child and heard the story many times from his mother, who is now 91. It remains one of the family’s most legendary tales.
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In 1932 in Short Gap, West Virginia, a grandmother placed her nearly one-year-old daughter (the narrator’s mother) on a baby blanket in the yard to get some sunshine while she washed dishes at the kitchen window. The girl’s grandfather was chopping wood at the nearby smokehouse when he saw an enormous black bird—described as a “Thunderbird”—casting a huge shadow as it swooped straight down toward the helpless baby. Realizing he couldn’t reach her in time, he hurled his hatchet and struck the bird dead. When the family measured the carcass stretched across the smokehouse wall, its wingspan was an astonishing 16 feet 4 inches. Neighbors came from around to view the mysterious giant bird, and a photograph was taken (though it has since been lost). The narrator saw the photo as a child and heard the story many times from his mother, who is now 91. It remains one of the family’s most legendary tales.
Join my Supporters Club for $4.99 per month for exclusive stories:
https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/what-if-it-s-true-podcast--5445587/support
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
I found a job working the afternoon shift, and I
started listening to Bigfoot podcast when I went to bed.
The house I shared with my family had farmland five
minutes down the road. There was also a large parcel
of wilderness land that had not been developed because of
the swampy areas. That area has many ponds with Canada
(00:30):
geese and it is connected to the surrounding subdivisions by
nature trails. One night, after work, I was listening to
the Bigfoot Outlaws. This podcast features bigfoot calls and interesting lee.
They come with a warning not to play them out
loud and accidentally summon a bigfoot. My dog and I
(00:52):
went to bed and I listened to the podcast with
my YouTube on AutoPlay. I woke up at one am
with the Bigfoot Call podcast still playing, and I cursed
at myself. I turned off my phone and I went
back to sleep. At three am, awoke again to the
loud sound of rock clacking. I cursed at myself again
(01:14):
and I reached to turn my phone off, thinking what
a moron I was. I tried to turn the phone
off and I realized it wasn't even on it at all.
A loud rock clacking was coming from the backyard through
my window. Now I didn't look. My dog and I
stared wide eyed at each other, terrified, and we didn't
(01:34):
move for an hour. It all finally stopped and we
went to sleep. But I was left wondering who could
clack rocks together at three am out in my backyard.
I think Bigfoot may go around the neighborhood at night,
searching through the garbage for food. I grew up on
(01:56):
a small farm in southern Johnson County, thirty miles south
of Indianapolis. Until the nineteen seventies, the area was nothing
but farms and sparsely populated spots of homes. Nowadays, it
seems there's a house on every hill that includes the
family farm I grew up on. The sixty acres at
(02:17):
once encompass now has five homes dividing up the land.
I guess that's the price of progress. The first strange
experience there took place in nineteen sixty. My grandfather came
over and he and my dad went to the back
pasture to try to figure out what had killed one
of our calves. Of course, being a curious six year
(02:40):
old boy, I tagged along. I remember that poor calf
was pretty gruesome looking. My father and my grandfather both
thought it was killed by a big cat. I remember
my brother coming to the house and telling Dad that
something was in the woods out beyond our pond. He
never said what he thought it was, only that he
must have startled it and it ran off through the thicket.
(03:04):
In the fall of that year, we were having a
family gathering at the pond when something came up to
the dam and it screamed. Our dogs stood on the
bank and they were going nuts barking, but they weren't
brave enough to go and chase whatever this thing was.
Dad and a couple of my uncles went to the
house and came back with guns, and by the time
(03:25):
they made their way to the dam, whatever it was
had left. But through all this that never stopped me
from wandering through our fields and woods. I was thirteen
years old when the Patterson Gimlin film came to light.
I remember reading about it in Argasy magazine, and I
found the subject of Bigfoot fascinating and terrifying. I don't
(03:48):
think I slept without the drapes closed in my bedroom
window until I was in my twenties. In the early
nineteen seventies, I had graduated from high school and I
took a job work looking nights at a factory in Greenwood.
I got off work and was usually home by two
in the morning. My parents had taken a vacation and
(04:09):
I was at home alone. I'd just gotten home from work,
took a shower, and had fallen asleep in bed when
something outside let loose with a god awful growl. Whatever
or whoever it was continued this growl and chatter for
a good while. I rolled over and dropped to the
side of my bed, and I low crawled through the
(04:31):
house and I retrieved one of our shotguns from the
hall closet, and I sat there the rest of the night, awake,
alert and scared. Whatever it was it stopped and eventually
wandered off. My brother usually got home about four in
the morning, and when I saw that he was up,
I asked him if he had heard anything or seen
(04:52):
anything when he got home, but he said that they hadn't,
and we just left it at that. Next summer, my
dad woke me up at one in the morning and
handed me a shotgun. Our dogs were throwing a fit.
My dad was a World War II veteran, and he
did not spook easy. We went outside and he told
(05:15):
me to wait by the garage. Some of the dogs
were barking, and some were whimpering, and some were just
flat out crying. Dad went out as far as the
old corn crib twenty five yards away, and then came
back not long after that, and he was unnerved. We
best get in the house, son, he said. The next morning,
(05:37):
he and I both called in and didn't go to work.
We found two of our dogs cowering in the barn.
The third one we found back by the lake, beating
up and in shock. Though he did recover. One of
the neighbors had two big german shepherds. He found one
of them in the same shape. The other one he
never saw again. Said what fear drove him back to
(06:02):
the house that night, but he did utter the word
bigfoot in a joking matter the next day. I doubt
this is very interesting, but I'm glad to get it
off my chest. After fifty years. My parents and my brother,
as well as the old farm are all gone now.
I still drive by there now and then. Though the
(06:23):
old place may be gone, I still have those memories.
Oh man, this, what do you mean this wasn't interesting.
It's very interesting, especially the part about your dad coming
back and saying joking about it being a bigfoot, and
you could tell he was unnerved. To me, that made
the whole story perfect. It was just awesome. But I
(06:43):
bet you do have memories, and I really appreciate you
sending this story. Thanks a lot. The ghost stories I'm
about to tell come from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I
moved to Morehead in August of nineteen ninety five. My
little sister had been attending Moorhead State University for two
(07:05):
semesters and had been pastoring our mom the entire time
to pay for her an apartment. Mom finally told her
that if I agreed to move there and go to college,
she would get us an apartment. At that time, there
were limited opportunities back in Pike County, and Mom wanted
me to move away to perhaps have a better life.
(07:27):
Confident in the outcome, my sister had already located a
place to live and had made arrangements to get it
when the ladies who occupied it moved out. The apartment
was located on Christy Creek Road and it faced the
Blue Zoo Trailer Park. We had been living in the
apartment for very long when I noticed that my sister
(07:50):
was sleeping on the couch. She had the bigger bedroom
because she had more stuff. She told me that she
didn't feel comfortable being in the apartment alone. Well, I
thought that was odd. All the neighbors were her buddies
and swarty sisters or guys from friendly fraternities. Trying to
be a big brother, I bought a chain lock and
(08:12):
put it on the door, hoping that extra thing would
ease her mind. But even with the new lock, she
started staying over at her boyfriend's house. I decided that
her own ease had to be an excuse for sleeping
over at his place, but it wasn't any of my business.
The first time I experienced something odd was on a
(08:33):
Friday night. I was alone and my sister was away.
The door was locked and the new chain was in place,
and I had no sooner turned off my bedroom light
to go to sleep when the front door slam. I
don't mean it closed hard, I mean it was a
grown man, two handed swing the door slam. I jumped
(08:54):
up and ran to the confront. Whatever was going on.
The front door was closed and the chain was in place.
I proceeded to clear the apartment, checking all the rooms,
in closets in any corner someone might hide, but no
one was there. I went back to my room, climbed
into bed. I turned the lights off. Slam. It happened again,
(09:18):
and I ran back out and everything was just like before.
I checked everything again and went back to bed. I
kept the lamp on, but I had no further strangeness
that night. In the nineteen eighties, I had developed a
weight problem that happened to coincide with my acquisition of
an Nintendo. In nineteen ninety two, I started lifting weights
(09:42):
and riding a stationary bike like it was my religion.
Now I managed to lose seventy pounds in the Moorhead apartment.
If I wanted to ride my bike and watch TV,
I would have to sit with my back to the hallway.
I couldn't do it. I had to sit so my
back wasn't exposed to the hall or else. It felt
(10:02):
like somebody was staring a hole through my back. A
few years later, my little sister had dropped out of school,
met another guy, and she had moved out. I was
still at that apartment, living alone. I was coming home
from the gym and I saw all of our neighbors
had gathered at the apartment number twenty seven, two apartments
(10:24):
over from mine, to watch the UK Wildcats play in
the tournament. Someone invited me in as I was passing,
and I sat down on the couch for a bit.
While I was watching the game, the others were talking
about the ghost. My ears perked up and I asked
what they were talking about. Someone told me to listen
(10:45):
toward the steps. Well I did, and sure enough, it
sounded like someone was walking up and down the stairs.
Then they told me to look up to the steps
to the second floor, but to use my peripheral vision.
Sure enough, there was a dart shape moving back and
forth between the rooms up there. If you look directly,
(11:06):
you couldn't see it, but if you look peripherally, there
it was. I was floored and couldn't believe it, but
it did explain so much. The upstairs of number twenty
seven extends over to number twenty eight. The nursing students
told me that on weekends, when the guys in number
(11:26):
twenty seven were out of town, they could still hear
people walking around upstairs, and sometimes the TV or the
radio would come on in the empty apartment. When my
little sister made her exodus, she left most of her
stuff in Moorhead. I had eventually decided that she wasn't
coming to get her crap, so I moved all my
(11:47):
stuff into the big bedroom and all her stuff into
the little one. The big bedroom had to walk in
closet that connected to the bathroom. It was really strange.
I didn't like the room either. I had to sleep
with both doors closed and locked. One night, I was
in the room in the dark and both doors locked.
(12:08):
When something sat on the bed right beside me. That
was not cool. I turned on the light and ended
up sleeping with the lamp on. Oddly enough, I too
ended up sleeping on the couch. Imagine that. In the
year two thousand, I was working at a local movie theater.
My buddy worked there too, and she was into the
(12:31):
coult She and her husband came over several times and
they hung out watching movies with me. Every time she
was over, she was very withdrawn and would sit with
her knees pulled up to her chin, and that wasn't
like her at all. One night, I was asleep on
the couch and had a dream that a dark shape
with no face was strangling me. I fought myself awake
(12:55):
and made sure that my blanket or shirt hadn't been
strangling me. But everything was as it should be. I
told my buddy it worked the next day, and she said,
your ghost just tried to kill you. What could I say?
I knew it was real, and I actually believed her.
In two thousand and one, I moved to a new
(13:15):
place with my girlfriend who's now my wife. I told
my buddy that I was moving and why she was
happy for me. I was kind of shocked. I told
her that it was a great apartment and she said, yeah,
but your bathroom is a pit of hell. She explained
that something really dark was there and in the bathroom
walking area. Again, how could I argue with that? I
(13:39):
had experienced what I had experienced. I was working at
the movie theater in two thousand. I never experienced anything there,
but my buddy did, so did my future wife. On
Thursday nights, the new movie would be put together in previewed.
If you were one of the cool kids, you got
to watch the preview. My buddy said that sometimes there
(14:02):
would be more people in the room watching the movie
than there were supposed to be. She said that sometimes
there would be an extra person down near the front,
near the corner, watching the movie, and they were always
gone by the time the movie was over. Her mother
told me a story about another theater that had been
across from the police department. It was called the Trail
(14:23):
Theater and it had been closed for a few years.
She said that one night, while she was cleaning, she
was all alone in the building and mopping the lobby,
and that she heard a voice from the stairs to
the balcony. It called her name and it said come here,
she said. She laughed and wagged her finger at it,
saying I will not be doing that. She left her
(14:47):
mop and buckets sitting there and never went there at
night without her revolver. In the University theater, my wife
said that one night she saw a ghost in action.
There was a fellow working there, and all the ladies
could not stand him. He was a know it all
and he was very disrespectful. One busy night, my wife
(15:08):
was working concessions. She was handling the register and the popcorn.
The guy was working the door, and since it was
so busy, he was helping her filling drink orders. She
said that she watched several large sodas fly off the
drink machine and pour all over him. She thought it
was awesome. She normally came home mad after having to
(15:30):
work with him, but that night she was happy. In
two thousand and four, I joined the local police department.
I just completed my twenty first year on the forest,
and during that time I've had some experiences. The old
police department building was formerly a United States Post office.
(15:51):
Late at night, something would move about the place. The
dispatchers could be in the building by themselves in here,
filing cabinet drawers opening in the squad room. I first
became aware of it one night when a dispatcher told
me about the ghost and asked me to listen for it.
It sounded like someone was walking down the hall jangling keys.
(16:14):
Then in the sergeant's office, it sounded like someone was
using a whole punch. She and I started exchanging ghost stories,
and it turns out she was one of the girls
who had lived in my old apartment, number twenty nine,
right before my sister and I moved in, and she'd
had her share of freaky occurrences as well. One night,
(16:36):
the police department. Ghost was being extra loud, so I
yelled at it and I said, be quiet, George. Immediately after,
there was a crash in the sergeant's office. The dispatcher
and I ran down the hall and we saw that
a big fan had been pushed over. From then on,
the ghost name was George, and people still refer to
(16:58):
him by that name. In twenty nineteen, the downstairs flooded
and everything was moved to the second floor. George didn't
like that, and he began to act out. He had
done things in the past. It had scared the dispatchers,
but he was apt to do it more often. You
(17:18):
could see the papers fluttering when there was no breeze.
And one night a deputy was bringing the dispatcher her
lunch and he walked through a cold spot. He said
he looked to his left and saw a dark shape
in the kitchen, and when he investigated, there was no
one there. And then in twenty twenty two we moved
(17:39):
to our new building, and thankfully George did not move
with us. On June sixteen, twenty twenty five, I had
my first bigfoot experience. I stepped out of my house
carrying my cat and a pet carrier when she let
out an unhappy yell from her crate. At the same time,
(18:00):
one of the semi feral outside cats broke cover and
darted down the street away from the woods. The Daniel
Boue National Forest has just passed my house, and right
after the cats made their commotion, the wood knocking began.
I couldn't believe it. I've lived in this house for
nearly eight years and I've never heard anything like this before.
(18:23):
Right after the first knocking started, a second set started
up further into the woods. You know the scene in
Jaws too, when the chief is banging on the electrical
line with the boat oor. That's exactly what it sounded like.
I was so mad at myself for not recording it.
There's a dead tree right behind the house. That is
(18:43):
all the bark stripped off, all except a couple of
feet at the top. There had been one in front
of the house on a game trail, too, and the
bark was stripped off up to about fifteen feet off
the ground. I had always thought those trees were odd
deer that high, I don't think so. On a few
(19:03):
occasions I had been huffed at from the dark. I
thought it was a buck I had sometimes seen on
the property on at least two occasions. I was growled
at one occasion, I was walking toward the house from
my car when something growled at me, low and guttural.
It scared me. As I've said, I'm a police officer,
(19:24):
I'm no sissy. I worked nearly eighteen years on the
midnight shift. Can't be a sissy and be a successful
police officer. Well, I thought you'd get a kick out
of hearing these tales. Feel free to use them however
you wish. Thanks for all you do. Well, Thank you, sir,
for that was a long email. Thank you for spending
(19:44):
so much time and remembering all those things in your life.
Ghost stories and the Bigfoot story. I thought they were great.
Thank you much. I hope everything's going good for you
in Kentucky. I appreciate the email. Thanks. Here's a story
about something other than Bigfoot. Thank goodness. I love Bigfoot stories,
(20:06):
but I like doing different stuff just to break up
the routine. This is short little story about a thunderbird.
In nineteen thirty two, my mother was almost a year old.
It was a sunny spring day and my grandmother wanted
to put her baby daughter out to get some sunshine.
She selected her favorite baby blanket and later on it
(20:28):
on the grass near the kitchen window, where she could
be washing the dishes. The house faced a mode feel
that stretched out about five acres from the kitchen to
the state Road twenty eight in Short Gap, West Virginia.
Fifty feet up the hill from the main house was
a smokehouse. My great grandfather, my mom's grandfather, was there
(20:51):
chopping blocks of wood with a hatchet when he noticed
a large shadow fly across the sun. It was a
huge bird with a cold black plumage, dropping from the
sky and flying directly toward my mother, who was lying
on her baby blanket. My great grandfather knew he could
never run fast enough to grab up the baby, so
(21:13):
he aimed his hatchet and he threw it at the bird,
and he killed it. When my grandfather came home, they
stretched the huge dead bird across the wall of the smokehouse.
It was sixteen feet four inches from wingtip to wingtip.
Many neighbors stopped by to see the thunderbird, though nobody
(21:34):
knew what it was. At the time, no one had
seen anything quite like this. A picture of the bird
was taken, but now ninety years later, it has been misplaced.
I saw it when I was a boy. My mother
is ninety one now, and it will always be a
great family story. Oh my gosh, that is a great
(21:55):
family story. Wish that picture had survived. If that picture
sure had survived and someone had scanned it. You you
had scanned it and put it on the internet, it
would be all over the internet. You may have could
even made some change with that picture. Anyway, I thought
this was a great story. I really appreciate the writer
(22:17):
sending in. I love these different stories. We do get
mostly Bigfoot stories because that's how I started the channel
several years ago, and we just did Bigfoot for a
couple of three years, and so everybody kind of thought
we were just doing Bigfoot. But I got a little
burnout on Bigfoot. I still get burnt out on Bigfoot.
But some of the stories, the stories are great. It's
(22:39):
just a great change up to do something different. Like
this thunderbird story. What a crazy story. Killed it with
a hatchet? What that's awesome. It dude, was like Daniel
Boone or something. Very good story. I really appreciate it.
Thank you to the writer.
I found a job working the afternoon shift, and I
started listening to Bigfoot podcast when I went to bed.
The house I shared with my family had farmland five
minutes down the road. There was also a large parcel
of wilderness land that had not been developed because of
the swampy areas. That area has many ponds with Canada
(00:30):
geese and it is connected to the surrounding subdivisions by
nature trails. One night, after work, I was listening to
the Bigfoot Outlaws. This podcast features bigfoot calls and interesting lee.
They come with a warning not to play them out
loud and accidentally summon a bigfoot. My dog and I
(00:52):
went to bed and I listened to the podcast with
my YouTube on AutoPlay. I woke up at one am
with the Bigfoot Call podcast still playing, and I cursed
at myself. I turned off my phone and I went
back to sleep. At three am, awoke again to the
loud sound of rock clacking. I cursed at myself again
(01:14):
and I reached to turn my phone off, thinking what
a moron I was. I tried to turn the phone
off and I realized it wasn't even on it at all.
A loud rock clacking was coming from the backyard through
my window. Now I didn't look. My dog and I
stared wide eyed at each other, terrified, and we didn't
(01:34):
move for an hour. It all finally stopped and we
went to sleep. But I was left wondering who could
clack rocks together at three am out in my backyard.
I think Bigfoot may go around the neighborhood at night,
searching through the garbage for food. I grew up on
(01:56):
a small farm in southern Johnson County, thirty miles south
of Indianapolis. Until the nineteen seventies, the area was nothing
but farms and sparsely populated spots of homes. Nowadays, it
seems there's a house on every hill that includes the
family farm I grew up on. The sixty acres at
(02:17):
once encompass now has five homes dividing up the land.
I guess that's the price of progress. The first strange
experience there took place in nineteen sixty. My grandfather came
over and he and my dad went to the back
pasture to try to figure out what had killed one
of our calves. Of course, being a curious six year
(02:40):
old boy, I tagged along. I remember that poor calf
was pretty gruesome looking. My father and my grandfather both
thought it was killed by a big cat. I remember
my brother coming to the house and telling Dad that
something was in the woods out beyond our pond. He
never said what he thought it was, only that he
must have startled it and it ran off through the thicket.
(03:04):
In the fall of that year, we were having a
family gathering at the pond when something came up to
the dam and it screamed. Our dogs stood on the
bank and they were going nuts barking, but they weren't
brave enough to go and chase whatever this thing was.
Dad and a couple of my uncles went to the
house and came back with guns, and by the time
(03:25):
they made their way to the dam, whatever it was
had left. But through all this that never stopped me
from wandering through our fields and woods. I was thirteen
years old when the Patterson Gimlin film came to light.
I remember reading about it in Argasy magazine, and I
found the subject of Bigfoot fascinating and terrifying. I don't
(03:48):
think I slept without the drapes closed in my bedroom
window until I was in my twenties. In the early
nineteen seventies, I had graduated from high school and I
took a job work looking nights at a factory in Greenwood.
I got off work and was usually home by two
in the morning. My parents had taken a vacation and
(04:09):
I was at home alone. I'd just gotten home from work,
took a shower, and had fallen asleep in bed when
something outside let loose with a god awful growl. Whatever
or whoever it was continued this growl and chatter for
a good while. I rolled over and dropped to the
side of my bed, and I low crawled through the
(04:31):
house and I retrieved one of our shotguns from the
hall closet, and I sat there the rest of the night, awake,
alert and scared. Whatever it was it stopped and eventually
wandered off. My brother usually got home about four in
the morning, and when I saw that he was up,
I asked him if he had heard anything or seen
(04:52):
anything when he got home, but he said that they hadn't,
and we just left it at that. Next summer, my
dad woke me up at one in the morning and
handed me a shotgun. Our dogs were throwing a fit.
My dad was a World War II veteran, and he
did not spook easy. We went outside and he told
(05:15):
me to wait by the garage. Some of the dogs
were barking, and some were whimpering, and some were just
flat out crying. Dad went out as far as the
old corn crib twenty five yards away, and then came
back not long after that, and he was unnerved. We
best get in the house, son, he said. The next morning,
(05:37):
he and I both called in and didn't go to work.
We found two of our dogs cowering in the barn.
The third one we found back by the lake, beating
up and in shock. Though he did recover. One of
the neighbors had two big german shepherds. He found one
of them in the same shape. The other one he
never saw again. Said what fear drove him back to
(06:02):
the house that night, but he did utter the word
bigfoot in a joking matter the next day. I doubt
this is very interesting, but I'm glad to get it
off my chest. After fifty years. My parents and my brother,
as well as the old farm are all gone now.
I still drive by there now and then. Though the
(06:23):
old place may be gone, I still have those memories.
Oh man, this, what do you mean this wasn't interesting.
It's very interesting, especially the part about your dad coming
back and saying joking about it being a bigfoot, and
you could tell he was unnerved. To me, that made
the whole story perfect. It was just awesome. But I
(06:43):
bet you do have memories, and I really appreciate you
sending this story. Thanks a lot. The ghost stories I'm
about to tell come from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. I
moved to Morehead in August of nineteen ninety five. My
little sister had been attending Moorhead State University for two
(07:05):
semesters and had been pastoring our mom the entire time
to pay for her an apartment. Mom finally told her
that if I agreed to move there and go to college,
she would get us an apartment. At that time, there
were limited opportunities back in Pike County, and Mom wanted
me to move away to perhaps have a better life.
(07:27):
Confident in the outcome, my sister had already located a
place to live and had made arrangements to get it
when the ladies who occupied it moved out. The apartment
was located on Christy Creek Road and it faced the
Blue Zoo Trailer Park. We had been living in the
apartment for very long when I noticed that my sister
(07:50):
was sleeping on the couch. She had the bigger bedroom
because she had more stuff. She told me that she
didn't feel comfortable being in the apartment alone. Well, I
thought that was odd. All the neighbors were her buddies
and swarty sisters or guys from friendly fraternities. Trying to
be a big brother, I bought a chain lock and
(08:12):
put it on the door, hoping that extra thing would
ease her mind. But even with the new lock, she
started staying over at her boyfriend's house. I decided that
her own ease had to be an excuse for sleeping
over at his place, but it wasn't any of my business.
The first time I experienced something odd was on a
(08:33):
Friday night. I was alone and my sister was away.
The door was locked and the new chain was in place,
and I had no sooner turned off my bedroom light
to go to sleep when the front door slam. I
don't mean it closed hard, I mean it was a
grown man, two handed swing the door slam. I jumped
(08:54):
up and ran to the confront. Whatever was going on.
The front door was closed and the chain was in place.
I proceeded to clear the apartment, checking all the rooms,
in closets in any corner someone might hide, but no
one was there. I went back to my room, climbed
into bed. I turned the lights off. Slam. It happened again,
(09:18):
and I ran back out and everything was just like before.
I checked everything again and went back to bed. I
kept the lamp on, but I had no further strangeness
that night. In the nineteen eighties, I had developed a
weight problem that happened to coincide with my acquisition of
an Nintendo. In nineteen ninety two, I started lifting weights
(09:42):
and riding a stationary bike like it was my religion.
Now I managed to lose seventy pounds in the Moorhead apartment.
If I wanted to ride my bike and watch TV,
I would have to sit with my back to the hallway.
I couldn't do it. I had to sit so my
back wasn't exposed to the hall or else. It felt
(10:02):
like somebody was staring a hole through my back. A
few years later, my little sister had dropped out of school,
met another guy, and she had moved out. I was
still at that apartment, living alone. I was coming home
from the gym and I saw all of our neighbors
had gathered at the apartment number twenty seven, two apartments
(10:24):
over from mine, to watch the UK Wildcats play in
the tournament. Someone invited me in as I was passing,
and I sat down on the couch for a bit.
While I was watching the game, the others were talking
about the ghost. My ears perked up and I asked
what they were talking about. Someone told me to listen
(10:45):
toward the steps. Well I did, and sure enough, it
sounded like someone was walking up and down the stairs.
Then they told me to look up to the steps
to the second floor, but to use my peripheral vision.
Sure enough, there was a dart shape moving back and
forth between the rooms up there. If you look directly,
(11:06):
you couldn't see it, but if you look peripherally, there
it was. I was floored and couldn't believe it, but
it did explain so much. The upstairs of number twenty
seven extends over to number twenty eight. The nursing students
told me that on weekends, when the guys in number
(11:26):
twenty seven were out of town, they could still hear
people walking around upstairs, and sometimes the TV or the
radio would come on in the empty apartment. When my
little sister made her exodus, she left most of her
stuff in Moorhead. I had eventually decided that she wasn't
coming to get her crap, so I moved all my
(11:47):
stuff into the big bedroom and all her stuff into
the little one. The big bedroom had to walk in
closet that connected to the bathroom. It was really strange.
I didn't like the room either. I had to sleep
with both doors closed and locked. One night, I was
in the room in the dark and both doors locked.
(12:08):
When something sat on the bed right beside me. That
was not cool. I turned on the light and ended
up sleeping with the lamp on. Oddly enough, I too
ended up sleeping on the couch. Imagine that. In the
year two thousand, I was working at a local movie theater.
My buddy worked there too, and she was into the
(12:31):
coult She and her husband came over several times and
they hung out watching movies with me. Every time she
was over, she was very withdrawn and would sit with
her knees pulled up to her chin, and that wasn't
like her at all. One night, I was asleep on
the couch and had a dream that a dark shape
with no face was strangling me. I fought myself awake
(12:55):
and made sure that my blanket or shirt hadn't been
strangling me. But everything was as it should be. I
told my buddy it worked the next day, and she said,
your ghost just tried to kill you. What could I say?
I knew it was real, and I actually believed her.
In two thousand and one, I moved to a new
(13:15):
place with my girlfriend who's now my wife. I told
my buddy that I was moving and why she was
happy for me. I was kind of shocked. I told
her that it was a great apartment and she said, yeah,
but your bathroom is a pit of hell. She explained
that something really dark was there and in the bathroom
walking area. Again, how could I argue with that? I
(13:39):
had experienced what I had experienced. I was working at
the movie theater in two thousand. I never experienced anything there,
but my buddy did, so did my future wife. On
Thursday nights, the new movie would be put together in previewed.
If you were one of the cool kids, you got
to watch the preview. My buddy said that sometimes there
(14:02):
would be more people in the room watching the movie
than there were supposed to be. She said that sometimes
there would be an extra person down near the front,
near the corner, watching the movie, and they were always
gone by the time the movie was over. Her mother
told me a story about another theater that had been
across from the police department. It was called the Trail
(14:23):
Theater and it had been closed for a few years.
She said that one night, while she was cleaning, she
was all alone in the building and mopping the lobby,
and that she heard a voice from the stairs to
the balcony. It called her name and it said come here,
she said. She laughed and wagged her finger at it,
saying I will not be doing that. She left her
(14:47):
mop and buckets sitting there and never went there at
night without her revolver. In the University theater, my wife
said that one night she saw a ghost in action.
There was a fellow working there, and all the ladies
could not stand him. He was a know it all
and he was very disrespectful. One busy night, my wife
(15:08):
was working concessions. She was handling the register and the popcorn.
The guy was working the door, and since it was
so busy, he was helping her filling drink orders. She
said that she watched several large sodas fly off the
drink machine and pour all over him. She thought it
was awesome. She normally came home mad after having to
(15:30):
work with him, but that night she was happy. In
two thousand and four, I joined the local police department.
I just completed my twenty first year on the forest,
and during that time I've had some experiences. The old
police department building was formerly a United States Post office.
(15:51):
Late at night, something would move about the place. The
dispatchers could be in the building by themselves in here,
filing cabinet drawers opening in the squad room. I first
became aware of it one night when a dispatcher told
me about the ghost and asked me to listen for it.
It sounded like someone was walking down the hall jangling keys.
(16:14):
Then in the sergeant's office, it sounded like someone was
using a whole punch. She and I started exchanging ghost stories,
and it turns out she was one of the girls
who had lived in my old apartment, number twenty nine,
right before my sister and I moved in, and she'd
had her share of freaky occurrences as well. One night,
(16:36):
the police department. Ghost was being extra loud, so I
yelled at it and I said, be quiet, George. Immediately after,
there was a crash in the sergeant's office. The dispatcher
and I ran down the hall and we saw that
a big fan had been pushed over. From then on,
the ghost name was George, and people still refer to
(16:58):
him by that name. In twenty nineteen, the downstairs flooded
and everything was moved to the second floor. George didn't
like that, and he began to act out. He had
done things in the past. It had scared the dispatchers,
but he was apt to do it more often. You
(17:18):
could see the papers fluttering when there was no breeze.
And one night a deputy was bringing the dispatcher her
lunch and he walked through a cold spot. He said
he looked to his left and saw a dark shape
in the kitchen, and when he investigated, there was no
one there. And then in twenty twenty two we moved
(17:39):
to our new building, and thankfully George did not move
with us. On June sixteen, twenty twenty five, I had
my first bigfoot experience. I stepped out of my house
carrying my cat and a pet carrier when she let
out an unhappy yell from her crate. At the same time,
(18:00):
one of the semi feral outside cats broke cover and
darted down the street away from the woods. The Daniel
Boue National Forest has just passed my house, and right
after the cats made their commotion, the wood knocking began.
I couldn't believe it. I've lived in this house for
nearly eight years and I've never heard anything like this before.
(18:23):
Right after the first knocking started, a second set started
up further into the woods. You know the scene in
Jaws too, when the chief is banging on the electrical
line with the boat oor. That's exactly what it sounded like.
I was so mad at myself for not recording it.
There's a dead tree right behind the house. That is
(18:43):
all the bark stripped off, all except a couple of
feet at the top. There had been one in front
of the house on a game trail, too, and the
bark was stripped off up to about fifteen feet off
the ground. I had always thought those trees were odd
deer that high, I don't think so. On a few
(19:03):
occasions I had been huffed at from the dark. I
thought it was a buck I had sometimes seen on
the property on at least two occasions. I was growled
at one occasion, I was walking toward the house from
my car when something growled at me, low and guttural.
It scared me. As I've said, I'm a police officer,
(19:24):
I'm no sissy. I worked nearly eighteen years on the
midnight shift. Can't be a sissy and be a successful
police officer. Well, I thought you'd get a kick out
of hearing these tales. Feel free to use them however
you wish. Thanks for all you do. Well, Thank you, sir,
for that was a long email. Thank you for spending
(19:44):
so much time and remembering all those things in your life.
Ghost stories and the Bigfoot story. I thought they were great.
Thank you much. I hope everything's going good for you
in Kentucky. I appreciate the email. Thanks. Here's a story
about something other than Bigfoot. Thank goodness. I love Bigfoot stories,
(20:06):
but I like doing different stuff just to break up
the routine. This is short little story about a thunderbird.
In nineteen thirty two, my mother was almost a year old.
It was a sunny spring day and my grandmother wanted
to put her baby daughter out to get some sunshine.
She selected her favorite baby blanket and later on it
(20:28):
on the grass near the kitchen window, where she could
be washing the dishes. The house faced a mode feel
that stretched out about five acres from the kitchen to
the state Road twenty eight in Short Gap, West Virginia.
Fifty feet up the hill from the main house was
a smokehouse. My great grandfather, my mom's grandfather, was there
(20:51):
chopping blocks of wood with a hatchet when he noticed
a large shadow fly across the sun. It was a
huge bird with a cold black plumage, dropping from the
sky and flying directly toward my mother, who was lying
on her baby blanket. My great grandfather knew he could
never run fast enough to grab up the baby, so
(21:13):
he aimed his hatchet and he threw it at the bird,
and he killed it. When my grandfather came home, they
stretched the huge dead bird across the wall of the smokehouse.
It was sixteen feet four inches from wingtip to wingtip.
Many neighbors stopped by to see the thunderbird, though nobody
(21:34):
knew what it was. At the time, no one had
seen anything quite like this. A picture of the bird
was taken, but now ninety years later, it has been misplaced.
I saw it when I was a boy. My mother
is ninety one now, and it will always be a
great family story. Oh my gosh, that is a great
(21:55):
family story. Wish that picture had survived. If that picture
sure had survived and someone had scanned it. You you
had scanned it and put it on the internet, it
would be all over the internet. You may have could
even made some change with that picture. Anyway, I thought
this was a great story. I really appreciate the writer
(22:17):
sending in. I love these different stories. We do get
mostly Bigfoot stories because that's how I started the channel
several years ago, and we just did Bigfoot for a
couple of three years, and so everybody kind of thought
we were just doing Bigfoot. But I got a little
burnout on Bigfoot. I still get burnt out on Bigfoot.
But some of the stories, the stories are great. It's
(22:39):
just a great change up to do something different. Like
this thunderbird story. What a crazy story. Killed it with
a hatchet? What that's awesome. It dude, was like Daniel
Boone or something. Very good story. I really appreciate it.
Thank you to the writer.
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