October 12, 2025 • 40 mins
What happens when two seasoned hunters head deep into the north Georgia mountains looking for a problem bear—and stumble onto something they can’t explain? This story has been buried for more than forty years. Now, for the first time, one of the only two men who lived through it is ready to talk about what really happened in the fall of 1983.It all started in a quiet corner of north Georgia where dogs began disappearing, cattle were turning up dead, and the locals were convinced a rogue bear was to blame.
But not everything lined up. There were strange howls echoing through the valleys at night, and tracks that looked almost like bear prints—but not quite. Even the livestock were acting nervous in ways old ranchers couldn’t make sense of. That’s when two lifelong friends decided enough was enough. They packed up their rifles and gear and hiked into the backcountry determined to find whatever was responsible. What they discovered on that October hunt would change them forever—and bind them to a secret they carried for decades. This story comes straight from one of those men. He’s in his seventies now, and after his hunting partner passed away in 2019, he decided it was finally time to talk. He’s not looking for fame or attention—he just wants to tell the truth before it dies with him.
As he tells it, the deeper they pushed into the forest, the stranger things became. A deer carcass was wedged high in a tree—nearly twenty feet up—with its neck twisted completely backward. Enormous footprints appeared in soft mud, too wide and too deep to belong to any known animal. Trees were bent and splintered, clawed and gouged as if something massive had moved through. And then… came the moment that still haunts him to this day. The face-to-face encounter with something that, by all accounts, shouldn’t exist. What makes this account so gripping is its honesty.
There’s no embellishment, no dramatics—just the plain words of a man who’s lived with the memory for over forty years. It’s a story about what happens when ordinary people come up against something extraordinary, and how that kind of truth can weigh on a person for the rest of their life.He doesn’t ask you to believe him. He just wants to tell you what he saw—and let you decide for yourself.
So settle in. We’re heading back to the north Georgia wilderness, 1983.
Two hunters went into the mountains looking for a bear. What they found was something much bigger—something that walked upright—and something that’s been hiding in those woods long before any of us ever set foot there. This is his story. This is what happened. And after more than four decades of silence, it’s finally being told.
But not everything lined up. There were strange howls echoing through the valleys at night, and tracks that looked almost like bear prints—but not quite. Even the livestock were acting nervous in ways old ranchers couldn’t make sense of. That’s when two lifelong friends decided enough was enough. They packed up their rifles and gear and hiked into the backcountry determined to find whatever was responsible. What they discovered on that October hunt would change them forever—and bind them to a secret they carried for decades. This story comes straight from one of those men. He’s in his seventies now, and after his hunting partner passed away in 2019, he decided it was finally time to talk. He’s not looking for fame or attention—he just wants to tell the truth before it dies with him.
As he tells it, the deeper they pushed into the forest, the stranger things became. A deer carcass was wedged high in a tree—nearly twenty feet up—with its neck twisted completely backward. Enormous footprints appeared in soft mud, too wide and too deep to belong to any known animal. Trees were bent and splintered, clawed and gouged as if something massive had moved through. And then… came the moment that still haunts him to this day. The face-to-face encounter with something that, by all accounts, shouldn’t exist. What makes this account so gripping is its honesty.
There’s no embellishment, no dramatics—just the plain words of a man who’s lived with the memory for over forty years. It’s a story about what happens when ordinary people come up against something extraordinary, and how that kind of truth can weigh on a person for the rest of their life.He doesn’t ask you to believe him. He just wants to tell you what he saw—and let you decide for yourself.
So settle in. We’re heading back to the north Georgia wilderness, 1983.
Two hunters went into the mountains looking for a bear. What they found was something much bigger—something that walked upright—and something that’s been hiding in those woods long before any of us ever set foot there. This is his story. This is what happened. And after more than four decades of silence, it’s finally being told.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
(00:22):
dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
This all happened back in the fall of nineteen eighty
three in the North Georgia Mountains, where I've lived my
(01:07):
whole life. I was thirty two then, had a wife
and two young kids, and made my living running a
small cattle operation on about two hundred acres of land
that had been in my family for three generations. My neighbor, Myers,
lived just over the ridge from me, maybe a mile
and a half. As the crow flies. We'd been friends
since we were boys, grew up hunting and fishing together,
(01:30):
and we helped each other out with our properties when needed.
The thing about living up in these mountains is you
get used to a certain rhythm. You know what sounds
belong and what sounds don't. You know how the wildlife
moves through the seasons. You know when something's off, And
in the late summer of that year, something was definitely off.
It started small, the way these things do. Myers lost
(01:53):
one of his rabbit dogs. First. He had three beagles
he used for small game, and one evening, the smallest
one didn't come back from a run on. Now, dogs
go missing. Sometimes they chase something too far, they get lost,
they get into a fight with another animal. It happens.
We figured a coyote or maybe a bobcat got it.
(02:13):
Myers was upset, but not alarmed. Then about a week later,
I lost one of mine. I had two coon dogs,
both walkers, both good animals I'd raised from pups. The
older one, a male named Duke, went out one evening
and never came home. I walked the property calling for
him until my voice gave out. Nothing. No tracks, no blood,
(02:35):
no sign of struggle. He was just gone. That's when
Myers and I started comparing notes. Two dogs gone in
less than two weeks, and both of us noticed our
cattle were acting strange, skittish. They'd bunch up together in
the pastures during the day instead of spreading out to graze.
At night, they'd low and pace along the fence lines.
(02:56):
Cattle aren't known for being smart animals, but they've got
good instinct when it comes to predators. The real trouble
started in mid September. I went out early one morning
to check on the herd and found one of my
calves missing, just gone. I walked the entire fence line
looking for a break, thinking maybe it got out somehow,
but the fences were intact. I expanded my search into
(03:18):
the woods at the edge of my property, and that's
where I found the blood. It wasn't a lot, just
some spots on the leaves and a smear on a
tree trunk about four feet up, but it was enough
to tell me something had taken that calf. The tracks
around the blood were confusing, though there were some marks
that could have been bare, but they weren't quite right.
(03:39):
Two elongated in places, and the stride seemed off. I'm
not a professional tracker, but I've hunted these mountains my
whole life, and I know bear sign when I see it.
This wasn't that. I called Myers and he came over
to look. We followed what trail there was for maybe
one hundred yards into the woods before we lost it
in some rocky terrain. We didn't find the cave. We
(04:00):
didn't find much of anything except a bad feeling that
settled into both of us. Over the next few weeks,
things got worse. Myers lost two more dogs and another
one of mine disappeared. Then one of his heifers vanished,
a full grown heifer, probably six hundred pounds, just gone
without a trace. We started keeping our remaining animals locked
(04:21):
up at night, but even that didn't seem to help much.
The dogs would bark and howl at something out in
the darkness, and in the morning we'd find scratches on
the barn doors, like something had been trying to get in.
Other folks in the area started reporting problems too. The Henderson's,
about three miles south, lost several chickens. One night, the
whole coop torn apart. Old Man Bradley, who lived up
(04:45):
the mountain from us lost his best hunting dog and
swore he heard it screaming in the woods, but couldn't
find it. The Wilsons reported something got into their smokehouse
and made off with a whole side of pork, ripped
the door clean off its hinges. And then there were
the sounds. I'd lived in these mountains my entire life
and thought I'd heard every sound the woods could make,
(05:05):
the screech of a panther, the howl of coyotes, the
huffing of an angry bear. But this was something else entirely.
It would start late at night, usually after midnight, a
vocalization that was part howl, part scream, part something I
can't even describe. It was loud, loud enough that you
could hear it echoing off the ridges, and it had
(05:27):
a quality that just made your blood run cold. The
first time I heard it, I was in bed, and
it woke me from a dead sleep. My wife grabbed
my arm so hard she left bruises. It wasn't like
anything I'd ever heard before. It went on for maybe
ten or fifteen seconds, then cut off abruptly. My dogs
went absolutely insane, barking and carrying on in their kennel.
(05:51):
The cattle in the near pasture started lowing and running around.
Even the chickens started making noise. I got my rifle
and went outside, turning on every light I had. Didn't
see anything, didn't hear anything else. But I stayed up
the rest of the night, sitting on my porch with
that rifle across my lap. Myers heard it that same night.
(06:11):
The next morning he came over and we compared experiences.
His place had the same reaction, animals going crazy, that
same awful sound echoing through the darkness. We decided something
had to be done. The prevailing theory around the area
was that we had a rogue black bear on our hands,
a big male probably that had lost its fear of
(06:32):
humans and was killing livestock. It happened sometimes a bear
gets a taste for easy food and becomes a problem.
The game warden even came out and looked around, agreed
it was likely a bear, and said he'd put out
some traps and notified the Forestry Service. But Myers and
I weren't so sure it was just a bear. Something
about the whole situation didn't add up. Bears are strong,
(06:56):
but they don't carry off full grown cattle. They don't
make those kinds of sound, and the few tracks we'd found,
the ones that looked almost like bear tracks, were just
different enough to make us wonder. We decided to go
into the woods ourselves and see if we could track
down whatever this thing was. This was early October by then,
and we'd been dealing with this situation for almost two months.
(07:18):
The leaves were starting to turn and the weather was
cooling down, good hunting weather. We figured if it was
a bear, we could either kill it or at least
get some solid evidence for the game warden. If it
was something else, well we deal with that. One we
found it, we packed up for a serious expedition. This
wasn't going to be a quick day hunt. We brought
(07:39):
camping gear, enough food for three days, extra ammunition, and
all the tracking equipment we had. Meyers brought his thirty
ought six and I carried my three to eight, both
good rifles for large game. We also brought a camera,
one of those older thirty five millimeter types, figuring if
we found something unusual we'd want documentation. We headed out
(08:01):
before dawn on a Saturday in mid October. The plan
was to start from the area where I'd found the
blood from my calf, and work our way deeper into
the mountains from there. That seemed to be roughly where
most of the activity had been centered. Behind my property,
the National forest stretched for miles thousands of acres of
wilderness that got real remote, real quick. The first day
(08:22):
was uneventful. We followed some game trails deeper into the forest,
marked our path and looked for signs of our predator.
We found plenty of normal animal sign deer tracks, turkey scratchings,
some coyote scat, but nothing that seemed connected to our
cattle killer. As evening approached, we set up a basic
camp and a small clearing near a creek. We built
(08:44):
a fire, ate some food, and settled in for the night.
That's when we heard it again. It must have been
around ten o'clock. We'd let the fire die down to
coals and were sitting there in the dark, just listening
to the night sounds. Then from somewhere up the mountain,
maybe half a mile away, that sound split the darkness,
(09:05):
that same howl scream roar that defied description. But this
time we were out in the woods with it, not
safe in our houses, and I can tell you the
effect was even worse. Every hair on my body stood up.
Myers grabbed his rifle and I grabbed mine. We sat there, frozen, listening.
The sound came again, and this time it was answered
(09:26):
by another one from a different direction off to the east.
Than silence, complete silence, No crickets, no owls, no rustling
in the underbrush. The whole forest had gone quiet. We
didn't sleep much that night. We kept the fire going
and took turns keeping watch. Nothing approached our camp, but
(09:46):
we could feel something out there. You know that sensation
when you're being watched, that prickling on the back of
your neck. We both felt it all night long. Come morning,
we were tired, but determined whatever was out there were
going to find it. We broke camp and started moving
uphill toward where we'd heard that first sound the night before.
(10:07):
The terrain got rougher as we climbed steep slopes covered
in mountain laurel and rhododendron thickets, rocky outcroppings that required
careful navigation. This was old growth forest up here, trees
that had probably never been logged. Some of the massive
hemlocks and poplars that blocked out most of the sunlight.
Around midday we found something. We'd stop to rest and
(10:30):
get our bearings when Myers pointed up into the canopy.
At first I didn't see what he was looking at.
Then I did, and my stomach dropped. There was a
deer in the tree. Not a small deer either, a
full grown dough maybe one hundred and thirty pounds, and
it was at least twenty feet up, wedged into the
fork of a large oak tree. That alone was strange enough.
(10:53):
I've heard of bears or big cats dragging kills up
into trees, but twenty feet is really high for that,
and the branch configuration didn't seem right for a cat's cash.
But the really disturbing part was how the deer looked.
We got closer and studied it through our rifle scopes.
The deer's neck was twisted around backwards, not just broken,
(11:14):
but actually rotated, so the head was facing the complete
wrong direction, and the way it was positioned in the
tree wasn't natural. It looked like it had been placed there,
almost arranged. The front legs were dangling down on one
side of the branch, the back legs on the other,
and that twisted head was facing back toward the trunk.
Myers and I looked at each other. Neither of us
(11:36):
said anything for a long moment. We both knew that
what we were seeing didn't make sense. A bear couldn't
do that, A mountain lion couldn't do that. Hell, I
wasn't sure anything could do that. The deer had been
there for a while, at least a few days. Based
on the smell and the condition of the carcass, animals
had been feeding on it. You could see where birds
(11:57):
had picked at the exposed parts, but none of that
explained how it got up there or what had twisted
its neck like that. We took some pictures, though I'll
be honest, I don't know what happened to those photos
after everything that came later. We didn't really talk about
the trip much, and I never saw the developed film.
Myers might have destroyed it. I might have destroyed it.
(12:18):
Memory gets fuzzy on details like that. After so many years,
standing there looking up at that deer, we both realized
we'd gotten in deeper than we'd planned. This wasn't about
a rogue bear anymore. This was something else, something we
didn't have a name for. The smart thing would have
been to head back right then, but we'd come this
far and we wanted answers. We kept going. The forest
(12:42):
got even darker as we moved deeper. The canopy was
so thick that, even though it was early afternoon, it
felt like twilight. The temperature dropped too. There was a
heaviness to the air, a pressure that made it hard
to breathe normally, and that silence continued. We'd been looking
for hours and hadn't heard a single bird call or
(13:02):
seen any squirrels. The woods felt dead. Late in the afternoon,
we came across something else strange. A tree, a good
sized maple, probably eighteen inches across, had been broken off
about six feet up. Not snapped by wind or lightning,
but broken like something had just grabbed it and wrenched
it apart. The break was relatively fresh, sap still sticky
(13:26):
on the exposed wood. The top part of the tree
lay on the ground nearby, and more trees around it
had deep gouges in their bark, like something had raked
them with claws or fingers. Myers examined the gouges. They
were deep, cut through the bark into the wood beneath.
There were four parallel marks, roughly evenly spaced. They started
(13:47):
about seven feet up the tree and dragged down for
a couple feet. Whatever had made them was tall and strong.
We were both getting spooked now. The light was starting
to fade and we needed to either find a place
to camp or start heading back. We decided to push
on just a little farther see what else we could find.
That was probably a mistake. As we walked, Meyer suddenly
(14:09):
froze and put his hand up. I stopped immediately. He
pointed ahead and to the left. At first I didn't
see what he was indicating. Then I noticed it footprints.
We approached slowly, rifles ready. The prints were in a
muddy patch near a small seep spring. They were huge,
at least sixteen inches long, maybe longer wide too, probably
(14:33):
seven or eight inches across. They had five toes that
you could clearly see, and what looked like a heel impression.
The stride between prints was massive, close to six feet.
These were not bear tracks. I've seen hundreds of bear
tracks in my life. These were something else. They were
shaped more like human footprints, but way too large. There
(14:55):
was a clear midfoot and heel, and the tow impression
showed something with a lot of flexibility in the foot.
Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back
After these messages. We found more tracks leading away from
the spring, heading uphill into even rougher terrain. They were
relatively fresh, probably made within the last day or two.
(15:17):
Whatever had made them was big, walked upright on two legs,
and was somewhere up ahead of us. The sun was
getting low now, shadows growing long between the trees. We
had a decision to make follow the tracks and risk
being caught out in the dark, or make camp and
try to stay safe for another night. Looking back now,
I can see both options were stupid. The smart thing
(15:40):
would have been to get the hell out of those
mountains as fast as we could. But we were younger then,
maybe more brave than smart, and we were committed to
finding out what was terrorizing our properties. We decided to
follow the tracks for another hour, then find a place
to camp before full dark. We moved carefully, stopping frequently
to listen. The tracks led us up a steep incline,
(16:03):
over a rocky ridge and down into a small valley.
The trees here were even bigger, old giants that created
a canopy so thick that very little light made it
to the forest floor. Fog was starting to settle into
the low areas. That's when the smell hit us. It
came on suddenly, carried on a slight breeze from upwind.
(16:24):
It was the worst thing I've ever smelled. Imagine a
combination of wet dog, rotting meat and something musky that
you can't quite identify. It was strong enough to make
your eyes water, strong enough that it coated the back
of your throat. Myers actually gagged. We knew we were
close to something. The tracks led toward a thick stand
(16:45):
of rhododendrons at the far end of the valley. The
plants formed an almost impenetrable wall of twisted trunks and
evergreen leaves, but there was a break in them, like
a tunnel, and the tracks went straight toward it. The
smell was coming from that direct two. We approached slowly.
Every instinct I had was screaming at me to turn around.
(17:06):
My hands were shaking so bad I could barely hold
my rifle steady. Myers was in the same state. I
could see his jaw clenched tight and sweat on his face.
Despite the cool air. We got within maybe thirty feet
of the rhododendron tunnel when we saw movement. At first,
it was just a shadow shifting in the deeper darkness
under the plants. Then it moved again and we could
(17:27):
make out a shape. It was massive, I'm talking seven
and a half maybe eight feet tall, and broad, wider
across the shoulders than any man I've ever seen. It
was covered in dark hair or fur, though in the
dim light it was hard to tell the exact color,
brown maybe or dark reddish. It was crouched down doing
(17:49):
something with its hands that we couldn't quite see. Its
back was to us. We stood there frozen, neither of
us breathing, just staring at this thing that shouldn't exist.
Then it stood up. When it straightened to its full height,
my mind just couldn't process what I was seeing. It
was enormous. The proportions were wrong for a human, but
(18:11):
wrong for an ape too. The arms were long and
heavily muscled. The shoulders and back were massive. The head
sat on a short, thick neck, and even from behind
you could see it was cone shaped, almost pointed at
the top. The legs were thick and powerful and When
it took a step, it moved with a kind of
fluid grace that something that big shouldn't have. It hadn't
(18:33):
seen us yet, or maybe it had and just didn't care.
It was still focused on whatever it was doing. Then
we heard a sound that I'll never forget, a crunching,
snapping sound, followed by a wet tearing. It was feeding
on something. Myers and I looked at each other. His
eyes were wide, and I imagined mine were too. We
(18:54):
needed to decide what to do. Shoot it, run, try
to back away slowly. Before we could do anything, the
thing turned around. I don't have adequate words to describe
its face. It wasn't quite human, but it wasn't quite
ape either. It was somewhere in between, something that fell
into that valley of almost familiar that just makes your
(19:16):
brain reject what you're seeing. The eyes were the worst part.
They were set deep under a heavy brow ridge, and
even in the dim light, they seemed to reflect what
little light there was. They were intelligent eyes, not animal eyes.
They looked at us, and I could see recognition there, awareness, understanding.
(19:37):
We stood there for what felt like an eternity, but
was probably only a few seconds. The thing tilted its
head slightly, studying us the way we were studying it.
It was holding something in one hand, something that had
been alive not long ago, a turkey, I think, though
it was torn up pretty bad. Then it made a sound,
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not the howl scream we'd heard before. This was quieter,
a low rumbling that seemed to come from deep in
its chest. It was a warning. I've heard bears make
similar sounds before they charge, and I recognized the meaning,
even if the sound itself was alien. My rifle was
already up, but my hands were shaking so bad. I
don't think I could have hit the broadside of a barn.
(20:21):
Myers was beside me, his rifle up too. The thing
watched us, made that rumbling sound again, and took a
step forward. That broke the paralysis. Myers fired. The sound
of the shot was deafening in the quiet forest. I
saw the thing flinch and stagger back a step. Myers
had hit it somewhere in the chest or shoulder. I
(20:42):
couldn't tell exactly where. It roared that full throated scream
we'd heard at night, and in that moment I understood
true fear. I fired too. My shot caught it high
in the chest. Then Myers fired again, and I saw
this one hit square in the center of mass. The
thing stumbled backwards, still roaring, still on its feet, We
(21:03):
both fired again, almost simultaneously. This time it went down.
The creature fell backwards, crashing into the rhododendrons behind it.
The sound it made as it fell was awful, part roar,
part something almost human. It thrashed for a moment, branches
snapping under its weight. Then it went still. Myers and
(21:24):
I stood there, frozen, rifles still aimed at where it
had fallen. Neither of us moved, neither of us spoke.
We just stood there, waiting to see if it would
get back up. It didn't. After a minute or two,
Myers took a cautious step forward. I grabbed his arm
and shook my head. We weren't getting any closer. We'd
(21:44):
seen what we needed to see. The thing had gone
down and wasn't moving. That was enough. We backed away, slowly,
keeping our rifles trained on that spot. We didn't turn
and run this time. We moved deliberately, carefully, our eyes
on the rhododendron thicket where the creature had fallen. Only
(22:04):
when we'd put some serious distance between us and that place,
did we finally turn around and start walking faster. The
light was fading fast now and we needed to get
out of those woods. We moved as quickly as the
terrain allowed, constantly looking back over our shoulders. Part of
me expected to see that thing come charging after us,
injured and enraged, but nothing came. I don't remember a
(22:28):
lot of the trip out. It's a blur of stumbling
through darkening forest, jumping at every sound, expecting that thing
to come crashing out of the shadows at any moment.
We used our flashlights, even though it made us visible,
because the alternative was breaking our necks in the dark.
We made it back to the edge of the National
Forest sometime around midnight. My legs were scratched up from thorns,
(22:51):
my clothes were torn, and I'd lost my hat somewhere
along the way. Myers was in similar shape. We'd also
somehow lost most of our camping gear. We must have
dropped it when we ran, but neither of us remembered
doing it, and neither of us was about to go
back for it. We drove back to my place in silence.
What do you say after something like that. We just
(23:12):
encountered something that wasn't supposed to exist, and we'd shot
it multiple times, and it had barely slowed it down.
My wife was frantic when I got home. She'd expected
us back that evening, and when we didn't show up,
she'd started to worry. I told her we'd gotten lost
in the dark, which was partly true. I didn't tell
her the rest. How could I? How do you explain
(23:34):
something like that? Myers and I talked the next day.
We compared stories to make sure we'd both seen what
we thought we'd seen. We had. We'd both seen it,
we'd both shot it, and we'd watched it go down.
The question was what to do about it. We just
killed something in the national forest, something that wasn't supposed
to exist. Do we report it? Do we go back
(23:57):
and try to find the body? Do we tell any
one one what we'd seen. The more we talked about it,
the more we realized we couldn't tell anyone who would
believe us. At best, they'd think we'd shot a bear
in a panic. At worst, they'd think we were crazy.
And if we led authorities back to the body, assuming
we could even find it again, in that vast wilderness.
(24:19):
We'd have to explain why we'd shot it in the
first place. That could mean legal trouble, maybe even criminal charges.
So we made a decision. We'd keep quiet about it.
We'd monitor our properties carefully. If the predator problem continued,
we'd know we'd been wrong about killing it. If the
problem stopped, well, that would be confirmation enough. We gave
(24:42):
it a week. No more missing animals, no strange sounds
at night. The cattle calmed down almost immediately, the dog
stopped acting spooked. It was like a switch had been flipped.
After two weeks, we were pretty sure. After a month,
we were certain, whatever that thing was, we'd killed it.
The predator that had been terrorizing the area for months
(25:04):
was gone. Words spread around the community that the bear
problem seemed to have resolved itself. People stopped losing livestock,
the strange sound stopped, Life went back to normal. Nobody
knew what had really happened except Myers and me. We
talked about going back to find the body, maybe get
proof of what we'd seen, but the more we thought
(25:26):
about it, the less sense it made. What would we
do with proof, Take it to a university, sell it
to a museum, call the newspapers. None of those options
seemed right. This thing, whatever it was, deserved better than
to become a circus side show. And truthfully, neither of
us wanted to go back into those woods, not to
(25:47):
that place, not after what we'd seen and done there.
Some places carry a weight to them, a memory that
seeps into the ground. That valley felt like that to
both of us. It was better left alone, so we
let it be. We carried the secret between us, Myers
and me. We check in with each other every now
(26:07):
and then, usually just a simple conversation about how things
were going. The predator problems never came back. The cattle
stayed safe, the dogs lived long, normal lives. The area
returned to the peaceful mountain community it had been before.
But the experience changed us. Both. Myers became more serious,
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less likely to venture deep into the woods. He'd still hunt,
but he stuck to areas closer to home, places he
knew well. He didn't talk about what happened, not even
to me unless I brought it up first. It was
like he'd locked that memory away somewhere deep and didn't
want to open the door. I found myself doing the
same thing. I'd go about my daily life, tend to
(26:50):
my cattle, raise my kids, live a normal existence. But
There'd be moments when I'd catch myself staring at the
tree line, remembering I'd be in the woods for some reason,
and I'd get that feeling of being watched, and every
hair on my body would stand up. We never told
our wives the full story. How could we explain it.
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They knew something had happened on that hunting trip, something
that had shaken us both. My wife would ask occasionally,
and I'd give her vague answers about seeing something unusual,
about being scared in the woods. She eventually stopped asking.
Myers's wife did the same. The years went by, our
kids grew up, the farms kept running, Life moved forward
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the way it does. But Myers and I carried that
October day with us everywhere we went. It was a
weight we both bore, sometimes heavy, sometimes barely noticeable, but
always there. I thought about the creature, sometimes wondered what
it had been, where it had come from. Was it
alone or were there others? Had it lived in those
(27:54):
mountains for years, decades maybe longer? What had driven it
to start taking livestock to reveal itself by coming so
close to human habitation. I'd never know the answers to
those questions. None of us would. Whatever it was died
in that rhododendron thicket and became just another mystery of
the mountains, another story that would never be told. Sometimes
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I felt guilty about killing it. It had been living
its life in those woods, probably for years, without bothering anyone.
Then we came along with our rifles and our fear,
and we ended it. But then I'd remember the missing dogs,
the dead cattle, the terror in my wife's eyes when
she heard those sounds at night. I'd remember standing face
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to face with that thing, seeing the intelligence in its eyes,
and knowing that if we didn't shoot first, we might
not leave those woods alive. It was self defense, That's
what I told myself, That's what Myers and I agreed
on the few times we talked about it directly. We'd
been protecting ourselves, our families, our livelihoods. Any man would
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have done the same in our position. But knowing something
intellectually and feeling it in your heart are two different things,
and I never quite shook the feeling that we'd killed
something rare and ancient something that maybe had as much
right to those mountains as we did. Meyers started having
health problems in the late nineties, heart trouble. The doctor
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said it was genetics, poor diet, the normal things that
catch up with men as they age. But I wondered
sometimes if carrying that secret for so many years had
taken a toll on him. Stress can kill you just
as surely as any disease. He had bypassed surgery in
two thousand and three and kind of went downhill from there.
Wasn't the same man after that. The fire went out
(29:41):
of him. We'd still talk occasionally, still sit on his
porch or mine and share a beer. Sometimes the conversation
would drift toward that fall of nineteen eighty three, though
we never spoke of it directly. We'd just reference it obliquely,
talk about how the cattle were doing these days, mention
how peaceful the mountains had been. Stay tuned for more
(30:01):
Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The
last real conversation we had about it was maybe a
year before he died. We were sitting on my porch
on a cool October evening, and he suddenly said he
wondered if we'd done the right thing. Not about shooting it,
he clarified, but about keeping it secret. Should we have
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told someone, should we have gone back for proof. I
told him what I'd come to believe over the years,
that some things are meant to stay mysteries, that some
secrets are worth keeping. That creature had lived and died
in those mountains, and maybe it was better that it
remained unknown to the wider world, better than being dissected
in a laboratory, or put on display in a museum,
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or becoming a sensation in the tabloids. He nodded, and
we sat in silence for a while, watching the sun
go down over the ridges. Then he said something I'll
never forget. He said that in all his years, all
the things he'd seen and done, that October day in
the woods was the most real he'd ever felt, the
most alive, standing there, face to face with something that
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shouldn't exist, knowing that the next few seconds would determine
whether he lived or died. He said he'd never felt
anything that intense before or since. I understood exactly what
he meant. Myers died in twenty nineteen. Heart attack went quick,
which is how he would have wanted it. I spoke
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at his funeral and stood there looking at the people gathered,
all these folks who'd known him for decades, and I
thought about how none of them knew the most important
thing about him. None of them knew what he'd seen,
what he'd done, the secret he'd carried for thirty six years.
After he died, I started thinking more seriously about whether
to tell the story. Our pact of silence died with
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him in a way. But even then I hesitated, what
purpose would it serve? Who would believe me anyway, an
old man's crazy story about seeing a mon in the
woods decades ago, without myers to corroborate it, without proof,
it was just another tall tail. But then I thought
about the young hunters and hikers and campers who go
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into those mountains every year. I thought about them, venturing
deep into the back country, confident in their equipment and
their skills, not knowing what might be out there, and
I thought maybe they deserved a warning, even if they
didn't believe it. So here I am seventy three years old,
finally putting this story down in writing. I don't expect
everyone to believe me. Hell, I wouldn't believe me if
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I hadn't lived through it, but it happened. Every word
of this is true. Myers and I saw something in
those mountains that October in nineteen eighty three, and we
killed it, and we've kept it secret ever since. The
problem stopped after that day. The cattle stayed safe, the
dogs lived, the strange sounds never returned. Whatever that creature was,
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there was only one of it in our area, and
we ended it. Sometimes I wonder if there are others
out there, deeper in the wilderness, in places humans rarely go.
The mountains are vast, and there's a lot of territory
that's never been properly explored. But in our corner of
North Georgia, in the mountains where I've spent my entire life,
that October marked an ending, the end of the predator problem,
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the end of the fear, and the end of something
ancient and unknown that had probably lived in those hills
long before my family settled here. I still live on
the same property. I'm old now and my kids are
grown with families of their own. The farm is smaller
than it used to be, easier to manage. I don't
venture into the deep woods anymore. I'm too old for
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that kind of thing, and truthfully, I don't have the desire.
I've seen what I needed to see. I know what's
possible out there, even if most of it stays hidden.
On quiet October evenings, when the air gets that particular
chill and the leaves start to turn, I sometimes find
myself thinking about that day, about standing in that forest
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with myers, about seeing something that wasn't supposed to exist,
About the weight of the rifle in my hands, and
the decision we made in a split second, about watching
that creature fall and knowing we'd crossed a line we
could never uncross. We killed something that day, something rare,
something that had probably lived in those mountains for years,
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maybe decades, without anyone knowing it was there. We ended
a life that science doesn't even acknowledge exists, and we
buried the evidence not in the ground, but in our silence.
I don't know if that makes us heroes or villains.
We protected our families and our livelihoods. We eliminated a
threat that had been terrorizing the community, but we also
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destroyed something unique, something that can never be replaced, the
last of its kind in our mountains. As far as
I know, Myers made his peace with it before he died.
I saw that in our last conversation he'd accepted what
we'd done and why we'd done it. He'd carried the
weight of it for thirty six years, and he'd borne
it with dignity and silence. Now it's just me left
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to carry it, Me and this written account, and soon
enough I'll be gone too, and the story will be
all that remains. I'm not writing this for fame or attention.
I'm not looking for validation or forgiveness. I'm writing it
because it happened, and because Meyers and I were the
only ones who knew it happened, and because I think
maybe people should know the truth about what's possible in
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these mountains. There are things in the wilderness that we
don't understand, things that have learned to stay hidden, to
avoid human contact, to live in the spaces between what
we know and what we think we know. We encountered
one of them. We did what we thought we had
to do, and we've kept the secret ever since. But
secrets have a weight to them. They get heavier as
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you get older. And I'm tired of carrying this one alone.
So now you know. You know what happened in the
North Georgia Mountains in the fall of nineteen eighty three.
You know what two men saw and did in the
deep woods. You know the truth that Myers and I
kept between us for all those years. What you do
with this information is up to you. Believe it or
(36:15):
don't believe it, share it, or keep it to yourself.
It doesn't matter much to me anymore. I've told the
truth as I lived it. I've honored Meyer's memory by
finally giving voice to the experience that defined both our lives.
The creature is gone, Myers is gone. Soon enough, I'll
be gone too. But the mountains remain. They keep their
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secrets well. And somewhere deep in those woods, in a
rhododendron thicket that I could probably never find again, lies
the answer to a question that science hasn't even thought
to ask. I hope it stays there. I hope the
forest reclaims it completely. I hope it returns to the
Earth without ever being found, without ever becoming a specimen
(36:58):
or a curiosity or proof of anything. Some mysteries are
meant to stay mysterious. Some questions are better left unanswered,
and some secrets are worth keeping even after the people
who made the promise are gone. This is mine, this
is ours, this is what happened, and now finally I
can let it rest. The ne
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
(00:22):
dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
This all happened back in the fall of nineteen eighty
three in the North Georgia Mountains, where I've lived my
(01:07):
whole life. I was thirty two then, had a wife
and two young kids, and made my living running a
small cattle operation on about two hundred acres of land
that had been in my family for three generations. My neighbor, Myers,
lived just over the ridge from me, maybe a mile
and a half. As the crow flies. We'd been friends
since we were boys, grew up hunting and fishing together,
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and we helped each other out with our properties when needed.
The thing about living up in these mountains is you
get used to a certain rhythm. You know what sounds
belong and what sounds don't. You know how the wildlife
moves through the seasons. You know when something's off, And
in the late summer of that year, something was definitely off.
It started small, the way these things do. Myers lost
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one of his rabbit dogs. First. He had three beagles
he used for small game, and one evening, the smallest
one didn't come back from a run on. Now, dogs
go missing. Sometimes they chase something too far, they get lost,
they get into a fight with another animal. It happens.
We figured a coyote or maybe a bobcat got it.
(02:13):
Myers was upset, but not alarmed. Then about a week later,
I lost one of mine. I had two coon dogs,
both walkers, both good animals I'd raised from pups. The
older one, a male named Duke, went out one evening
and never came home. I walked the property calling for
him until my voice gave out. Nothing. No tracks, no blood,
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no sign of struggle. He was just gone. That's when
Myers and I started comparing notes. Two dogs gone in
less than two weeks, and both of us noticed our
cattle were acting strange, skittish. They'd bunch up together in
the pastures during the day instead of spreading out to graze.
At night, they'd low and pace along the fence lines.
(02:56):
Cattle aren't known for being smart animals, but they've got
good instinct when it comes to predators. The real trouble
started in mid September. I went out early one morning
to check on the herd and found one of my
calves missing, just gone. I walked the entire fence line
looking for a break, thinking maybe it got out somehow,
but the fences were intact. I expanded my search into
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the woods at the edge of my property, and that's
where I found the blood. It wasn't a lot, just
some spots on the leaves and a smear on a
tree trunk about four feet up, but it was enough
to tell me something had taken that calf. The tracks
around the blood were confusing, though there were some marks
that could have been bare, but they weren't quite right.
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Two elongated in places, and the stride seemed off. I'm
not a professional tracker, but I've hunted these mountains my
whole life, and I know bear sign when I see it.
This wasn't that. I called Myers and he came over
to look. We followed what trail there was for maybe
one hundred yards into the woods before we lost it
in some rocky terrain. We didn't find the cave. We
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didn't find much of anything except a bad feeling that
settled into both of us. Over the next few weeks,
things got worse. Myers lost two more dogs and another
one of mine disappeared. Then one of his heifers vanished,
a full grown heifer, probably six hundred pounds, just gone
without a trace. We started keeping our remaining animals locked
(04:21):
up at night, but even that didn't seem to help much.
The dogs would bark and howl at something out in
the darkness, and in the morning we'd find scratches on
the barn doors, like something had been trying to get in.
Other folks in the area started reporting problems too. The Henderson's,
about three miles south, lost several chickens. One night, the
whole coop torn apart. Old Man Bradley, who lived up
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the mountain from us lost his best hunting dog and
swore he heard it screaming in the woods, but couldn't
find it. The Wilsons reported something got into their smokehouse
and made off with a whole side of pork, ripped
the door clean off its hinges. And then there were
the sounds. I'd lived in these mountains my entire life
and thought I'd heard every sound the woods could make,
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the screech of a panther, the howl of coyotes, the
huffing of an angry bear. But this was something else entirely.
It would start late at night, usually after midnight, a
vocalization that was part howl, part scream, part something I
can't even describe. It was loud, loud enough that you
could hear it echoing off the ridges, and it had
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a quality that just made your blood run cold. The
first time I heard it, I was in bed, and
it woke me from a dead sleep. My wife grabbed
my arm so hard she left bruises. It wasn't like
anything I'd ever heard before. It went on for maybe
ten or fifteen seconds, then cut off abruptly. My dogs
went absolutely insane, barking and carrying on in their kennel.
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The cattle in the near pasture started lowing and running around.
Even the chickens started making noise. I got my rifle
and went outside, turning on every light I had. Didn't
see anything, didn't hear anything else. But I stayed up
the rest of the night, sitting on my porch with
that rifle across my lap. Myers heard it that same night.
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The next morning he came over and we compared experiences.
His place had the same reaction, animals going crazy, that
same awful sound echoing through the darkness. We decided something
had to be done. The prevailing theory around the area
was that we had a rogue black bear on our hands,
a big male probably that had lost its fear of
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humans and was killing livestock. It happened sometimes a bear
gets a taste for easy food and becomes a problem.
The game warden even came out and looked around, agreed
it was likely a bear, and said he'd put out
some traps and notified the Forestry Service. But Myers and
I weren't so sure it was just a bear. Something
about the whole situation didn't add up. Bears are strong,
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but they don't carry off full grown cattle. They don't
make those kinds of sound, and the few tracks we'd found,
the ones that looked almost like bear tracks, were just
different enough to make us wonder. We decided to go
into the woods ourselves and see if we could track
down whatever this thing was. This was early October by then,
and we'd been dealing with this situation for almost two months.
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The leaves were starting to turn and the weather was
cooling down, good hunting weather. We figured if it was
a bear, we could either kill it or at least
get some solid evidence for the game warden. If it
was something else, well we deal with that. One we
found it, we packed up for a serious expedition. This
wasn't going to be a quick day hunt. We brought
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camping gear, enough food for three days, extra ammunition, and
all the tracking equipment we had. Meyers brought his thirty
ought six and I carried my three to eight, both
good rifles for large game. We also brought a camera,
one of those older thirty five millimeter types, figuring if
we found something unusual we'd want documentation. We headed out
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before dawn on a Saturday in mid October. The plan
was to start from the area where I'd found the
blood from my calf, and work our way deeper into
the mountains from there. That seemed to be roughly where
most of the activity had been centered. Behind my property,
the National forest stretched for miles thousands of acres of
wilderness that got real remote, real quick. The first day
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was uneventful. We followed some game trails deeper into the forest,
marked our path and looked for signs of our predator.
We found plenty of normal animal sign deer tracks, turkey scratchings,
some coyote scat, but nothing that seemed connected to our
cattle killer. As evening approached, we set up a basic
camp and a small clearing near a creek. We built
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a fire, ate some food, and settled in for the night.
That's when we heard it again. It must have been
around ten o'clock. We'd let the fire die down to
coals and were sitting there in the dark, just listening
to the night sounds. Then from somewhere up the mountain,
maybe half a mile away, that sound split the darkness,
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that same howl scream roar that defied description. But this
time we were out in the woods with it, not
safe in our houses, and I can tell you the
effect was even worse. Every hair on my body stood up.
Myers grabbed his rifle and I grabbed mine. We sat there, frozen, listening.
The sound came again, and this time it was answered
(09:26):
by another one from a different direction off to the east.
Than silence, complete silence, No crickets, no owls, no rustling
in the underbrush. The whole forest had gone quiet. We
didn't sleep much that night. We kept the fire going
and took turns keeping watch. Nothing approached our camp, but
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we could feel something out there. You know that sensation
when you're being watched, that prickling on the back of
your neck. We both felt it all night long. Come morning,
we were tired, but determined whatever was out there were
going to find it. We broke camp and started moving
uphill toward where we'd heard that first sound the night before.
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The terrain got rougher as we climbed steep slopes covered
in mountain laurel and rhododendron thickets, rocky outcroppings that required
careful navigation. This was old growth forest up here, trees
that had probably never been logged. Some of the massive
hemlocks and poplars that blocked out most of the sunlight.
Around midday we found something. We'd stop to rest and
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get our bearings when Myers pointed up into the canopy.
At first I didn't see what he was looking at.
Then I did, and my stomach dropped. There was a
deer in the tree. Not a small deer either, a
full grown dough maybe one hundred and thirty pounds, and
it was at least twenty feet up, wedged into the
fork of a large oak tree. That alone was strange enough.
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I've heard of bears or big cats dragging kills up
into trees, but twenty feet is really high for that,
and the branch configuration didn't seem right for a cat's cash.
But the really disturbing part was how the deer looked.
We got closer and studied it through our rifle scopes.
The deer's neck was twisted around backwards, not just broken,
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but actually rotated, so the head was facing the complete
wrong direction, and the way it was positioned in the
tree wasn't natural. It looked like it had been placed there,
almost arranged. The front legs were dangling down on one
side of the branch, the back legs on the other,
and that twisted head was facing back toward the trunk.
Myers and I looked at each other. Neither of us
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said anything for a long moment. We both knew that
what we were seeing didn't make sense. A bear couldn't
do that, A mountain lion couldn't do that. Hell, I
wasn't sure anything could do that. The deer had been
there for a while, at least a few days. Based
on the smell and the condition of the carcass, animals
had been feeding on it. You could see where birds
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had picked at the exposed parts, but none of that
explained how it got up there or what had twisted
its neck like that. We took some pictures, though I'll
be honest, I don't know what happened to those photos
after everything that came later. We didn't really talk about
the trip much, and I never saw the developed film.
Myers might have destroyed it. I might have destroyed it.
(12:18):
Memory gets fuzzy on details like that. After so many years,
standing there looking up at that deer, we both realized
we'd gotten in deeper than we'd planned. This wasn't about
a rogue bear anymore. This was something else, something we
didn't have a name for. The smart thing would have
been to head back right then, but we'd come this
far and we wanted answers. We kept going. The forest
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got even darker as we moved deeper. The canopy was
so thick that, even though it was early afternoon, it
felt like twilight. The temperature dropped too. There was a
heaviness to the air, a pressure that made it hard
to breathe normally, and that silence continued. We'd been looking
for hours and hadn't heard a single bird call or
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seen any squirrels. The woods felt dead. Late in the afternoon,
we came across something else strange. A tree, a good
sized maple, probably eighteen inches across, had been broken off
about six feet up. Not snapped by wind or lightning,
but broken like something had just grabbed it and wrenched
it apart. The break was relatively fresh, sap still sticky
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on the exposed wood. The top part of the tree
lay on the ground nearby, and more trees around it
had deep gouges in their bark, like something had raked
them with claws or fingers. Myers examined the gouges. They
were deep, cut through the bark into the wood beneath.
There were four parallel marks, roughly evenly spaced. They started
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about seven feet up the tree and dragged down for
a couple feet. Whatever had made them was tall and strong.
We were both getting spooked now. The light was starting
to fade and we needed to either find a place
to camp or start heading back. We decided to push
on just a little farther see what else we could find.
That was probably a mistake. As we walked, Meyer suddenly
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froze and put his hand up. I stopped immediately. He
pointed ahead and to the left. At first I didn't
see what he was indicating. Then I noticed it footprints.
We approached slowly, rifles ready. The prints were in a
muddy patch near a small seep spring. They were huge,
at least sixteen inches long, maybe longer wide too, probably
(14:33):
seven or eight inches across. They had five toes that
you could clearly see, and what looked like a heel impression.
The stride between prints was massive, close to six feet.
These were not bear tracks. I've seen hundreds of bear
tracks in my life. These were something else. They were
shaped more like human footprints, but way too large. There
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was a clear midfoot and heel, and the tow impression
showed something with a lot of flexibility in the foot.
Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back
After these messages. We found more tracks leading away from
the spring, heading uphill into even rougher terrain. They were
relatively fresh, probably made within the last day or two.
(15:17):
Whatever had made them was big, walked upright on two legs,
and was somewhere up ahead of us. The sun was
getting low now, shadows growing long between the trees. We
had a decision to make follow the tracks and risk
being caught out in the dark, or make camp and
try to stay safe for another night. Looking back now,
I can see both options were stupid. The smart thing
(15:40):
would have been to get the hell out of those
mountains as fast as we could. But we were younger then,
maybe more brave than smart, and we were committed to
finding out what was terrorizing our properties. We decided to
follow the tracks for another hour, then find a place
to camp before full dark. We moved carefully, stopping frequently
to listen. The tracks led us up a steep incline,
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over a rocky ridge and down into a small valley.
The trees here were even bigger, old giants that created
a canopy so thick that very little light made it
to the forest floor. Fog was starting to settle into
the low areas. That's when the smell hit us. It
came on suddenly, carried on a slight breeze from upwind.
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It was the worst thing I've ever smelled. Imagine a
combination of wet dog, rotting meat and something musky that
you can't quite identify. It was strong enough to make
your eyes water, strong enough that it coated the back
of your throat. Myers actually gagged. We knew we were
close to something. The tracks led toward a thick stand
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of rhododendrons at the far end of the valley. The
plants formed an almost impenetrable wall of twisted trunks and
evergreen leaves, but there was a break in them, like
a tunnel, and the tracks went straight toward it. The
smell was coming from that direct two. We approached slowly.
Every instinct I had was screaming at me to turn around.
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My hands were shaking so bad I could barely hold
my rifle steady. Myers was in the same state. I
could see his jaw clenched tight and sweat on his face.
Despite the cool air. We got within maybe thirty feet
of the rhododendron tunnel when we saw movement. At first,
it was just a shadow shifting in the deeper darkness
under the plants. Then it moved again and we could
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make out a shape. It was massive, I'm talking seven
and a half maybe eight feet tall, and broad, wider
across the shoulders than any man I've ever seen. It
was covered in dark hair or fur, though in the
dim light it was hard to tell the exact color,
brown maybe or dark reddish. It was crouched down doing
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something with its hands that we couldn't quite see. Its
back was to us. We stood there frozen, neither of
us breathing, just staring at this thing that shouldn't exist.
Then it stood up. When it straightened to its full height,
my mind just couldn't process what I was seeing. It
was enormous. The proportions were wrong for a human, but
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wrong for an ape too. The arms were long and
heavily muscled. The shoulders and back were massive. The head
sat on a short, thick neck, and even from behind
you could see it was cone shaped, almost pointed at
the top. The legs were thick and powerful and When
it took a step, it moved with a kind of
fluid grace that something that big shouldn't have. It hadn't
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seen us yet, or maybe it had and just didn't care.
It was still focused on whatever it was doing. Then
we heard a sound that I'll never forget, a crunching,
snapping sound, followed by a wet tearing. It was feeding
on something. Myers and I looked at each other. His
eyes were wide, and I imagined mine were too. We
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needed to decide what to do. Shoot it, run, try
to back away slowly. Before we could do anything, the
thing turned around. I don't have adequate words to describe
its face. It wasn't quite human, but it wasn't quite
ape either. It was somewhere in between, something that fell
into that valley of almost familiar that just makes your
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brain reject what you're seeing. The eyes were the worst part.
They were set deep under a heavy brow ridge, and
even in the dim light, they seemed to reflect what
little light there was. They were intelligent eyes, not animal eyes.
They looked at us, and I could see recognition there, awareness, understanding.
(19:37):
We stood there for what felt like an eternity, but
was probably only a few seconds. The thing tilted its
head slightly, studying us the way we were studying it.
It was holding something in one hand, something that had
been alive not long ago, a turkey, I think, though
it was torn up pretty bad. Then it made a sound,
(19:58):
not the howl scream we'd heard before. This was quieter,
a low rumbling that seemed to come from deep in
its chest. It was a warning. I've heard bears make
similar sounds before they charge, and I recognized the meaning,
even if the sound itself was alien. My rifle was
already up, but my hands were shaking so bad. I
don't think I could have hit the broadside of a barn.
(20:21):
Myers was beside me, his rifle up too. The thing
watched us, made that rumbling sound again, and took a
step forward. That broke the paralysis. Myers fired. The sound
of the shot was deafening in the quiet forest. I
saw the thing flinch and stagger back a step. Myers
had hit it somewhere in the chest or shoulder. I
(20:42):
couldn't tell exactly where. It roared that full throated scream
we'd heard at night, and in that moment I understood
true fear. I fired too. My shot caught it high
in the chest. Then Myers fired again, and I saw
this one hit square in the center of mass. The
thing stumbled backwards, still roaring, still on its feet, We
(21:03):
both fired again, almost simultaneously. This time it went down.
The creature fell backwards, crashing into the rhododendrons behind it.
The sound it made as it fell was awful, part roar,
part something almost human. It thrashed for a moment, branches
snapping under its weight. Then it went still. Myers and
(21:24):
I stood there, frozen, rifles still aimed at where it
had fallen. Neither of us moved, neither of us spoke.
We just stood there, waiting to see if it would
get back up. It didn't. After a minute or two,
Myers took a cautious step forward. I grabbed his arm
and shook my head. We weren't getting any closer. We'd
(21:44):
seen what we needed to see. The thing had gone
down and wasn't moving. That was enough. We backed away, slowly,
keeping our rifles trained on that spot. We didn't turn
and run this time. We moved deliberately, carefully, our eyes
on the rhododendron thicket where the creature had fallen. Only
(22:04):
when we'd put some serious distance between us and that place,
did we finally turn around and start walking faster. The
light was fading fast now and we needed to get
out of those woods. We moved as quickly as the
terrain allowed, constantly looking back over our shoulders. Part of
me expected to see that thing come charging after us,
injured and enraged, but nothing came. I don't remember a
(22:28):
lot of the trip out. It's a blur of stumbling
through darkening forest, jumping at every sound, expecting that thing
to come crashing out of the shadows at any moment.
We used our flashlights, even though it made us visible,
because the alternative was breaking our necks in the dark.
We made it back to the edge of the National
Forest sometime around midnight. My legs were scratched up from thorns,
(22:51):
my clothes were torn, and I'd lost my hat somewhere
along the way. Myers was in similar shape. We'd also
somehow lost most of our camping gear. We must have
dropped it when we ran, but neither of us remembered
doing it, and neither of us was about to go
back for it. We drove back to my place in silence.
What do you say after something like that. We just
(23:12):
encountered something that wasn't supposed to exist, and we'd shot
it multiple times, and it had barely slowed it down.
My wife was frantic when I got home. She'd expected
us back that evening, and when we didn't show up,
she'd started to worry. I told her we'd gotten lost
in the dark, which was partly true. I didn't tell
her the rest. How could I? How do you explain
(23:34):
something like that? Myers and I talked the next day.
We compared stories to make sure we'd both seen what
we thought we'd seen. We had. We'd both seen it,
we'd both shot it, and we'd watched it go down.
The question was what to do about it. We just
killed something in the national forest, something that wasn't supposed
to exist. Do we report it? Do we go back
(23:57):
and try to find the body? Do we tell any
one one what we'd seen. The more we talked about it,
the more we realized we couldn't tell anyone who would
believe us. At best, they'd think we'd shot a bear
in a panic. At worst, they'd think we were crazy.
And if we led authorities back to the body, assuming
we could even find it again, in that vast wilderness.
(24:19):
We'd have to explain why we'd shot it in the
first place. That could mean legal trouble, maybe even criminal charges.
So we made a decision. We'd keep quiet about it.
We'd monitor our properties carefully. If the predator problem continued,
we'd know we'd been wrong about killing it. If the
problem stopped, well, that would be confirmation enough. We gave
(24:42):
it a week. No more missing animals, no strange sounds
at night. The cattle calmed down almost immediately, the dog
stopped acting spooked. It was like a switch had been flipped.
After two weeks, we were pretty sure. After a month,
we were certain, whatever that thing was, we'd killed it.
The predator that had been terrorizing the area for months
(25:04):
was gone. Words spread around the community that the bear
problem seemed to have resolved itself. People stopped losing livestock,
the strange sound stopped, Life went back to normal. Nobody
knew what had really happened except Myers and me. We
talked about going back to find the body, maybe get
proof of what we'd seen, but the more we thought
(25:26):
about it, the less sense it made. What would we
do with proof, Take it to a university, sell it
to a museum, call the newspapers. None of those options
seemed right. This thing, whatever it was, deserved better than
to become a circus side show. And truthfully, neither of
us wanted to go back into those woods, not to
(25:47):
that place, not after what we'd seen and done there.
Some places carry a weight to them, a memory that
seeps into the ground. That valley felt like that to
both of us. It was better left alone, so we
let it be. We carried the secret between us, Myers
and me. We check in with each other every now
(26:07):
and then, usually just a simple conversation about how things
were going. The predator problems never came back. The cattle
stayed safe, the dogs lived long, normal lives. The area
returned to the peaceful mountain community it had been before.
But the experience changed us. Both. Myers became more serious,
(26:28):
less likely to venture deep into the woods. He'd still hunt,
but he stuck to areas closer to home, places he
knew well. He didn't talk about what happened, not even
to me unless I brought it up first. It was
like he'd locked that memory away somewhere deep and didn't
want to open the door. I found myself doing the
same thing. I'd go about my daily life, tend to
(26:50):
my cattle, raise my kids, live a normal existence. But
There'd be moments when I'd catch myself staring at the
tree line, remembering I'd be in the woods for some reason,
and I'd get that feeling of being watched, and every
hair on my body would stand up. We never told
our wives the full story. How could we explain it.
(27:11):
They knew something had happened on that hunting trip, something
that had shaken us both. My wife would ask occasionally,
and I'd give her vague answers about seeing something unusual,
about being scared in the woods. She eventually stopped asking.
Myers's wife did the same. The years went by, our
kids grew up, the farms kept running, Life moved forward
(27:33):
the way it does. But Myers and I carried that
October day with us everywhere we went. It was a
weight we both bore, sometimes heavy, sometimes barely noticeable, but
always there. I thought about the creature, sometimes wondered what
it had been, where it had come from. Was it
alone or were there others? Had it lived in those
(27:54):
mountains for years, decades maybe longer? What had driven it
to start taking livestock to reveal itself by coming so
close to human habitation. I'd never know the answers to
those questions. None of us would. Whatever it was died
in that rhododendron thicket and became just another mystery of
the mountains, another story that would never be told. Sometimes
(28:18):
I felt guilty about killing it. It had been living
its life in those woods, probably for years, without bothering anyone.
Then we came along with our rifles and our fear,
and we ended it. But then I'd remember the missing dogs,
the dead cattle, the terror in my wife's eyes when
she heard those sounds at night. I'd remember standing face
(28:38):
to face with that thing, seeing the intelligence in its eyes,
and knowing that if we didn't shoot first, we might
not leave those woods alive. It was self defense, That's
what I told myself, That's what Myers and I agreed
on the few times we talked about it directly. We'd
been protecting ourselves, our families, our livelihoods. Any man would
(28:58):
have done the same in our position. But knowing something
intellectually and feeling it in your heart are two different things,
and I never quite shook the feeling that we'd killed
something rare and ancient something that maybe had as much
right to those mountains as we did. Meyers started having
health problems in the late nineties, heart trouble. The doctor
(29:18):
said it was genetics, poor diet, the normal things that
catch up with men as they age. But I wondered
sometimes if carrying that secret for so many years had
taken a toll on him. Stress can kill you just
as surely as any disease. He had bypassed surgery in
two thousand and three and kind of went downhill from there.
Wasn't the same man after that. The fire went out
(29:41):
of him. We'd still talk occasionally, still sit on his
porch or mine and share a beer. Sometimes the conversation
would drift toward that fall of nineteen eighty three, though
we never spoke of it directly. We'd just reference it obliquely,
talk about how the cattle were doing these days, mention
how peaceful the mountains had been. Stay tuned for more
(30:01):
Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The
last real conversation we had about it was maybe a
year before he died. We were sitting on my porch
on a cool October evening, and he suddenly said he
wondered if we'd done the right thing. Not about shooting it,
he clarified, but about keeping it secret. Should we have
(30:22):
told someone, should we have gone back for proof. I
told him what I'd come to believe over the years,
that some things are meant to stay mysteries, that some
secrets are worth keeping. That creature had lived and died
in those mountains, and maybe it was better that it
remained unknown to the wider world, better than being dissected
in a laboratory, or put on display in a museum,
(30:45):
or becoming a sensation in the tabloids. He nodded, and
we sat in silence for a while, watching the sun
go down over the ridges. Then he said something I'll
never forget. He said that in all his years, all
the things he'd seen and done, that October day in
the woods was the most real he'd ever felt, the
most alive, standing there, face to face with something that
(31:08):
shouldn't exist, knowing that the next few seconds would determine
whether he lived or died. He said he'd never felt
anything that intense before or since. I understood exactly what
he meant. Myers died in twenty nineteen. Heart attack went quick,
which is how he would have wanted it. I spoke
(31:28):
at his funeral and stood there looking at the people gathered,
all these folks who'd known him for decades, and I
thought about how none of them knew the most important
thing about him. None of them knew what he'd seen,
what he'd done, the secret he'd carried for thirty six years.
After he died, I started thinking more seriously about whether
to tell the story. Our pact of silence died with
(31:50):
him in a way. But even then I hesitated, what
purpose would it serve? Who would believe me anyway, an
old man's crazy story about seeing a mon in the
woods decades ago, without myers to corroborate it, without proof,
it was just another tall tail. But then I thought
about the young hunters and hikers and campers who go
(32:10):
into those mountains every year. I thought about them, venturing
deep into the back country, confident in their equipment and
their skills, not knowing what might be out there, and
I thought maybe they deserved a warning, even if they
didn't believe it. So here I am seventy three years old,
finally putting this story down in writing. I don't expect
everyone to believe me. Hell, I wouldn't believe me if
(32:33):
I hadn't lived through it, but it happened. Every word
of this is true. Myers and I saw something in
those mountains that October in nineteen eighty three, and we
killed it, and we've kept it secret ever since. The
problem stopped after that day. The cattle stayed safe, the
dogs lived, the strange sounds never returned. Whatever that creature was,
(32:57):
there was only one of it in our area, and
we ended it. Sometimes I wonder if there are others
out there, deeper in the wilderness, in places humans rarely go.
The mountains are vast, and there's a lot of territory
that's never been properly explored. But in our corner of
North Georgia, in the mountains where I've spent my entire life,
that October marked an ending, the end of the predator problem,
(33:21):
the end of the fear, and the end of something
ancient and unknown that had probably lived in those hills
long before my family settled here. I still live on
the same property. I'm old now and my kids are
grown with families of their own. The farm is smaller
than it used to be, easier to manage. I don't
venture into the deep woods anymore. I'm too old for
(33:42):
that kind of thing, and truthfully, I don't have the desire.
I've seen what I needed to see. I know what's
possible out there, even if most of it stays hidden.
On quiet October evenings, when the air gets that particular
chill and the leaves start to turn, I sometimes find
myself thinking about that day, about standing in that forest
(34:02):
with myers, about seeing something that wasn't supposed to exist,
About the weight of the rifle in my hands, and
the decision we made in a split second, about watching
that creature fall and knowing we'd crossed a line we
could never uncross. We killed something that day, something rare,
something that had probably lived in those mountains for years,
(34:24):
maybe decades, without anyone knowing it was there. We ended
a life that science doesn't even acknowledge exists, and we
buried the evidence not in the ground, but in our silence.
I don't know if that makes us heroes or villains.
We protected our families and our livelihoods. We eliminated a
threat that had been terrorizing the community, but we also
(34:46):
destroyed something unique, something that can never be replaced, the
last of its kind in our mountains. As far as
I know, Myers made his peace with it before he died.
I saw that in our last conversation he'd accepted what
we'd done and why we'd done it. He'd carried the
weight of it for thirty six years, and he'd borne
it with dignity and silence. Now it's just me left
(35:09):
to carry it, Me and this written account, and soon
enough I'll be gone too, and the story will be
all that remains. I'm not writing this for fame or attention.
I'm not looking for validation or forgiveness. I'm writing it
because it happened, and because Meyers and I were the
only ones who knew it happened, and because I think
maybe people should know the truth about what's possible in
(35:32):
these mountains. There are things in the wilderness that we
don't understand, things that have learned to stay hidden, to
avoid human contact, to live in the spaces between what
we know and what we think we know. We encountered
one of them. We did what we thought we had
to do, and we've kept the secret ever since. But
secrets have a weight to them. They get heavier as
(35:54):
you get older. And I'm tired of carrying this one alone.
So now you know. You know what happened in the
North Georgia Mountains in the fall of nineteen eighty three.
You know what two men saw and did in the
deep woods. You know the truth that Myers and I
kept between us for all those years. What you do
with this information is up to you. Believe it or
(36:15):
don't believe it, share it, or keep it to yourself.
It doesn't matter much to me anymore. I've told the
truth as I lived it. I've honored Meyer's memory by
finally giving voice to the experience that defined both our lives.
The creature is gone, Myers is gone. Soon enough, I'll
be gone too. But the mountains remain. They keep their
(36:36):
secrets well. And somewhere deep in those woods, in a
rhododendron thicket that I could probably never find again, lies
the answer to a question that science hasn't even thought
to ask. I hope it stays there. I hope the
forest reclaims it completely. I hope it returns to the
Earth without ever being found, without ever becoming a specimen
(36:58):
or a curiosity or proof of anything. Some mysteries are
meant to stay mysterious. Some questions are better left unanswered,
and some secrets are worth keeping even after the people
who made the promise are gone. This is mine, this
is ours, this is what happened, and now finally I
can let it rest. The ne
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