BWBS Ep:144 The Shadow In The Corn

In the summer of 1978, Minerva, Ohio became ground zero for one of the most credible Bigfoot encounters ever investigated — the now-legendary Minerva Monster case. The Cayton family’s reports of a large, hair-covered creature on their property drew law enforcement, journalists, and national attention that forever changed their quiet lives.

But what most people don’t know is that the Caytons weren’t the only ones seeing something extraordinary that summer. Just two miles away, another family on Byard Road was living through their own nightmare — a series of encounters they never reported, never shared, and never wanted to relive.This is their story — told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl who watched the impossible unfold in the cornfield behind her home.

While the world focused on the Caytons, this family locked their doors at sunset, fortified their windows, and prayed the shapes moving through the stalks wouldn’t come any closer. She spent her nights at her bedroom window, notebook in hand, documenting what she saw — towering, upright figures that moved with intelligence, communicated in low tones, and showed both power and something that felt unsettlingly human. 

Night after night, she recorded their behavior, trying to understand what her family was living through while the rest of the town looked the other way.As the visits continued, fear became routine. Her brother’s nightmares worsened, her parents grew more withdrawn, and the cornfield became a place no one dared to enter.

When three of the creatures finally appeared together in the yard, everything changed — and silence was no longer enough to protect them.

This is the story that was never told — the encounters that stayed off the record while the media swarmed the Cayton home. It’s a haunting, deeply human look at what happens when legends step out of the woods and into ordinary lives, and when a family’s quiet resilience is tested by something the world still struggles to explain.

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Episode Transcript

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,

(00:23):
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.
Some secrets are too heavy for a child to carry,
Some truths too terrible to speak aloud. In the summer

(01:09):
of nineteen seventy eight, when I was twelve years old,
something came out of the woods behind our farmhouse in Minerva,
Ohio and changed everything I thought I knew about the world.
While the Caton family down the road became famous for
their encounters, while news crews descended on our quiet corner
of Stark County, while the whole country learned about the
creature they called the Minerva Monster. My family and I

(01:32):
suffered in silence. We had our own visits from that
thing in the darkness. We had our own nightmare. But
unlike the Catons, we never told anyone, not really, not
the whole truth until now. This is the story of
what happened to us that summer, the summer the monster came.
This is the story I've kept locked inside me for

(01:54):
over forty years, the story that still wakes me in
the middle of the night, heart pounding, straining for sounds
that shouldn't exist. This is the story of how a
young girl learned that some things are better left in
the shadows, and how sometimes the worst monsters are the
ones that nobody believes exist.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
This is my story, and.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
It begins on a humid August evening, when the corn
was high and the cicadas were screaming, and something that
shouldn't have been there walked upright through the fields behind
our house. The summer of nineteen seventy eight started like
any other summer in rural Ohio. School let out in June,
and I spent my days helping Mama with the garden,

(02:34):
playing with my younger brother Tommy and the creek that
ran along the eastern edge of our property, and reading
Nancy drew mysteries on the screened in porch. While Daddy
worked third shift at the steel mill in Canton. We
lived on Bayered Road, about two miles from where the
cat and brothers had their properties, in a white farmhouse
that had been in Daddy's family since before the depression.

(02:55):
Behind our house stretched twenty acres of corn, and beyond
that the woods that seemed to go on forever. I
loved those woods. During the day, Tommy and I would
explore the trails, build forts out of fallen branches, and
pretend we were pioneers discovering uncharted territory. But at night,
those same woods became something else. Entirely at night, they

(03:18):
became a wall of darkness that pressed against the edges
of our property, full of sounds that seemed too close,
and movements that might have been wind, but might have
been something more. It was August fourteenth when everything changed.
I remember the date because it was two days after
my twelfth birthday, and I was still riding the high
of finally being allowed to stay up until ten o'clock

(03:39):
on school nights, even though school was still weeks away.
Mama had made my favorite dinner, fried chicken and mashed potatoes,
and we ate on the porch because the house was
too hot from the afternoon sun. Tommy kept kicking me
under the table, the way he always did when he
wanted attention, and Mama kept telling him to settle down.
Daddy wasn't there horse. He wouldn't be home until seven

(04:02):
the next morning. Bleary eyed and exhausted, smelling like metal
and sweat. After dinner, Mama sent us upstairs to take
our baths while she cleaned up the kitchen. The bathroom
window faced the backyard and the cornfield beyond, And while
I was washing my hair, I heard something that made
me stop mid scrub. It was a sound I'd never

(04:22):
heard before, something between a howl and a scream, deep
and powerful and wrong. It came from somewhere out in
the corn far enough away that it should have been faint,
but somehow it seemed to fill the whole night. I
stood there with shampoo running down my face, listening. Tommy
was in his room, probably playing with his hot wheels

(04:42):
instead of actually getting ready for bed.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Like Mama had told him to. The house was.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Quiet, except for the sound of dishes clinking downstairs and
that terrible noise from outside. It lasted maybe ten seconds,
then cut off abruptly, leaving only the normal sounds of
evening cricket and the distant bark of the Reynolds dog
three houses over. I told myself it was coyotes. We
heard coyotes, sometimes packs of them, singing to each other

(05:09):
in the pre dawn hours. But this had been different.
This had been a single voice, and it had been
much much bigger. After my bath, I put on my
nightgown and went to my bedroom window, the one that
also faced the back of the property. The corn was
about seven feet tall at that point in the season,
a dark mass swaying slightly in the evening breeze. The

(05:31):
moon was almost full, bright enough to cast shadows, and
I could see the tree line beyond the corn, a
jagged black edge against the slightly lighter sky. I stood
there for a long time, watching, though I couldn't have
said what I was watching for, something in me, some
instinct I didn't yet understand, knew that the sound I'd

(05:51):
heard was important, knew that it meant something Nothing moved
in the corn nothing emerged from the tree Lineally, Mama
called up the stairs to tell me it was bedtime,
and I left my post at the window, though reluctantly.
I climbed into bed with my latest Nancy Drew book,
but I couldn't concentrate on the words. My eyes kept

(06:13):
drifting to the window, to the moonlit corn beyond. I
must have fallen asleep with the light on, because the
next thing I knew, Mama was shaking my shoulder gently,
telling me to turn off my lamp and go to
sleep properly. I mumbled something and reached for the switch,
and that's when I heard it again, the scream, the howl,

(06:33):
whatever it was. But this time it was closer, much closer,
so close that it seemed to vibrate the window glass.
Mama froze, her hand still on my shoulder. In the
dim light from the hallway, I could see her face
go pale. We stood there together, mother and daughter, listening
to that impossible sound roll across the cornfield and slam

(06:56):
into our house like a physical thing. When it stopped,
the violence that followed was somehow worse than the noise
had been. Even the crickets had gone quiet. Mama's fingers
tightened on my shoulder, hard enough to hurt. Then she
seemed to collect herself, and her voice came out steady,
though I could hear the fear underneath it. She told

(07:16):
me it was just an animal, probably a bobcat or something,
nothing to worry about. She told me to go to sleep,
and pulled my blanket up around my chin, the way
she used to do when I was little, But her
hands were shaking, and she kept glancing at the window,
as if something might appear there at any moment. After
she left, I lay in the darkness and tried to

(07:36):
believe her. Tried to tell myself it was just an animal,
nothing to be afraid of, just part of nature doing
what nature does. But I'd lived in the country my
whole life. I knew what animals sounded like. I'd heard
coyotes and owls, bobcats and foxes, raccoons fighting in the garbage,
and possums hissing under the porch. This wasn't any of

(07:57):
those things. This was something else, something bigger and stranger
and infinitely more terrifying. I don't know how long I
lay there, ears straining against the silence before.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
I heard it.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Not the scream this time, but something almost worse. Footsteps,
heavy footsteps moving through the corn The stalks made a
distinct sound when something passed through them, a rustling, swishing
noise that was different from the sound of wind. These
stalks were being pushed aside by something large, something moving
with purpose through the rows. My bedroom was on the

(08:33):
second floor, but the window was open a few inches
at the bottom to let in the night air. The
screen was latched, but suddenly that seemed like the thinnest
possible protection. I wanted to get up and close the window,
lock it, maybe even close the curtains, but I couldn't move.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Fear had turned my muscles to stone.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
I could only lie there and listen as whatever was
in the corn moved closer to the house. The footsteps
stopped at the edge of the cornfield, right where our
mode lawn began. I heard heavy breathing, deep and rhythmic,
like something catching its breath after a long walk. Then
I heard something even scarier, sniffing, long, deliberate inhalations, as

(09:14):
if something was testing the air, catching sense. Learning about
the people who lived in this house, I don't remember
making the decision to move, but suddenly I was out
of bed, pressed against the wall beside the window, too
terrified to look, but unable to stop myself. Slowly, I
leaned toward the window frame and peered down into the backyard.

(09:36):
The moonlight was bright enough that I could see everything clearly,
the vegetable garden. Mama was so proud of, the old
tire swing hanging from the oak tree, the lawn chairs
we'd left out after dinner, And there, right at the
edge of the corn stood something that shouldn't have existed.
It was massive, at least seven feet tall, covered in

(09:57):
dark hair that looked almost black in the moonlight.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
It stood on.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Two legs, but it was far too large to be
a man, too broad across the shoulders, too thick through
the chest. Its arms hung down past its knees, ending
in hands that looked almost human, but tipped with something
that might have been claws. I couldn't see its face
clearly from my angle, just the suggestion of a profile,

(10:21):
but even that was enough to tell me this thing
was not human, and not any animal I'd ever seen.
It stood there for probably less than a minute, head
moving slightly as it scanned the back of the house. Then,
without warning, it raised its head and looked directly at
my window, directly at me.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
I jerked back.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
From the glass so fast I almost fell, and pressed
myself against the wall, heart hammering so hard I thought
it might burst out of my chest. I waited for
the sound of breaking glass, for the thing to come
crashing through the window, but nothing happened. After a long moment,
I heard the footsteps again, moving away, this time back
into the corn. The stalks rustled and swished, and then

(11:03):
the sounds grew fainter and fainter until they disappeared, entirely
swallowed by the night. I didn't sleep at all that night.
I sat on my bed with my back against the headboard,
knees pulled up to my chest, watching the window and
waiting for dawn. When the first gray light finally began.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
To seep into the sky, I.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
Felt something inside me unclench. Just a little daylight meant safety,
daylight meant the thing in the corn couldn't hurt me.
But even as I thought that, some part of me
knew it wasn't true. Whatever had been in our backyard,
whatever had stood at the edge of the corn and
looked up at my window. It was still out there,
and something told me it would be back. I woke

(11:45):
to the sound of Daddy's truck rumbling up the driveway.
Apparently I'd fallen asleep after all, my body finally surrendering
to exhaustion despite my fear. The clock on my night
stand said it was seven point fifteen, and sunlight was
streaming through my window, turning everything warm and golden and normal.
For a moment, I wondered if I'd dreamed the whole thing.

(12:07):
Maybe the sound I'd heard had just been a strange
animal after all, and my imagination had conjured up the rest.
Maybe there hadn't been anything in the backyard at all.
Then I looked at my fingernails and saw the little
crescents where I dug them into my palms during the night.
I looked at my bed and saw that I'd never
gotten under the covers after Mama left, had spent the

(12:28):
whole night on top of them, fully dressed in my nightgown.
I looked at the window and remembered with perfect clarity
the thing standing at the edge of the corn, its
enormous body silhouetted against the moonlit field, its head turning
toward me. It had been real. All of it had
been real. I heard Daddy come in through the kitchen door,

(12:50):
heard Mama's voice greeting him, heard the familiar sounds of
breakfast being prepared. Everything was so normal, so ordinary, that
the events of last night seemed even more impossible by comparison.
How could something like that exist in the same world
where Daddy came home from work and Mama made coffee
and bacon. How could both things be true at the

(13:11):
same time. I got dressed, slowly, pulling on shorts and
a T shirt, and went downstairs. Daddy was at the
kitchen table with his breakfast, still in his work clothes,
and Tommy was eating cereal while reading the back of
the box. Mama was at the stove scrambling eggs, and
when she saw me, she smiled, but I noticed it
didn't quite reach her eyes. She remembered the sound from

(13:34):
last night. She was trying to pretend everything was fine,
but she remembered. I sat down at the table and
poured myself some cereal, though I wasn't really hungry. Daddy
was talking about something that had happened at the mill,
some problem with one of the machines, and Tommy was
only half listening, the way he always did. Nobody mentioned

(13:55):
the sounds from last night. Nobody said anything about being scared.
We're all just going through the motions of a normal mourning,
as if normalcy could protect us from whatever was out
there in the corn After breakfast, Daddy went upstairs to sleep,
and Mama started her daily chores. Tommy wanted to go
down to the creek, but Mama said no. She wanted

(14:15):
us to stay close to the house today. He whined
about it, the way little brothers do, but she was firm.
We could play in the yard, she said, but we
weren't to go into the cornfield or the woods. We
were to stay where she could see us. Tommy eventually
gave up arguing and went outside to play with his
trucks in the dirt by the garage. I should have

(14:36):
gone with him, should have tried to act normal. But
instead I found myself drawn to the back door, to
the screen that separated me from the yard and the
corn beyond. I stood there for a long time, looking
at the place where I'd seen the creature standing. The
grass looked undisturbed. There were no giant footprints, no broken
stalks of corn, nothing to prove that anything unusual had happened.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Stay tuned for more.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. But
I knew what I'd seen, and as I stood there,
I noticed something that made my stomach drop. The vegetable garden,
which had been perfect yesterday, was damaged. Several tomato plants
had been knocked over, and there was a trail of
destruction through the green beans, as if something very large

(15:24):
had walked right through them. Mama hadn't noticed yet. She
was inside doing laundry, but she would. And what would
she say then? Would she acknowledge that something had been
in our yard? Or would she find some way to
explain it away. I went outside and walked over to
the garden, careful not to step on any of the plants.
The damage was worse up close. The tomato cages were bent,

(15:48):
the plants themselves torn from the ground. Several of the
bean poles had been knocked over, and there in the
soft earth between the rows was something that made my
breath catch in my throat. A footprint, a single, enormous footprint,
at least twice the size of Daddy's boot, pressed deep
into the soil. The shape was almost human, but not quite.

(16:10):
The toes too long, the whole thing too wide. I
heard the screen door open and spun around, my heart racing,
but it was just Tommy carrying two of his toy trucks.
He started to say something, then saw the garden and stopped.
His eyes went wide, and for a moment we just
stared at each other, brother and sister, both understanding that

(16:32):
something was very wrong. I told him not to say
anything to Mama, not yet, told him we should clean
it up before she saw it. I don't know why
I said that, what instinct made me want to hide
the evidence. But Tommy nodded and set down his trucks. Together,
we did our best to repair the damage, straightening the
tomato cages, replanting what we could, brushing away the footprint

(16:56):
until it was just a vague depression in the soil.
It wasn't perfect, but maybe Mamma wouldn't notice. Maybe she'd
think a deer had gotten into the garden, or a raccoon,
or any of a dozen explanations that didn't involve a
seven foot tall monster. We were just finishing when Mama
called us in for lunch. As we walked past the cornfield,

(17:16):
I couldn't help but look at the spot where the
creature had emerged last night. The corn there looked normal,
no different from any other section of the field. But
I knew deep in my bones that it would be back.
Whatever it was, whatever reason it had for being here,
it wasn't finished with us yet. That afternoon, while Daddy

(17:37):
slept upstairs and Tommy watched cartoons on the television, I
did something I'd never done before. I went into Daddy's
study and pulled out the big dictionary he kept on
the shelf, the one he'd inherited from his father. I
didn't know what I was looking for exactly, but I
started looking up words, trying to find something that might
describe what i'd seen, ape, monster, beast. None of them

(18:00):
felt right, none of them came close to capturing the
reality of that thing standing in the moonlight, then buried
in a column of text, I found something that made
me stop. Sasquatch, a large, hairy, ape like creature said
to inhabit forests in the Pacific Northwest, also called bigfoot.
I'd heard the word before, of course, there had been

(18:22):
stories on the news, grainy films and blurry photographs, people
who claimed to have seen something that science said couldn't exist.
I'd always thought it was nonsense, the kind of thing
that only crazy people believed in. But now, sitting in
my father's study with sunlight slanting through the window, I
wasn't so sure. What if those people weren't crazy, What

(18:44):
if they'd seen what I'd seen. I closed the dictionary
and put it back on the shelf, my mind racing.
If there were others who'd seen these creatures, Maybe there
was information about them, Maybe there was a way to
make them leave. I thought about going to the library,
but I was only twelve, and Minerva's library was small
and old fashioned. I doubted they had much information about

(19:07):
cryptids and monsters. I thought about telling my parents, But
what would I say I saw a bigfoot in our backyard.
They'd think I was making it up, or having nightmares,
or reading too many scary books. No, I needed to
be sure. I needed to have proof before I said
anything to anyone, as if the universe had heard my thoughts.

(19:28):
That evening, at dinner, Mama mentioned something that made my
ears perk up. She said that the Catens, a family
who lived a couple miles down the road had reported
seeing something strange on their property, something big and hairy
and walking on two legs. The sheriff had gone out
there to investigate, Mama said, and he'd found some damage
to their chicken coop, but no real evidence of what

(19:51):
had caused it. She said it all in a light,
gossipy tone, as if it was just another piece of
local news, nothing to be concerned about.

Speaker 2 (20:00):
But I was concerned.

Speaker 1 (20:01):
Because if the Catens had seen something too, that meant
I wasn't crazy. That meant the thing in our backyard
was real, and it wasn't just visiting us, It was
visiting multiple properties in the area. And if the Catens
were brave enough to report it, maybe they knew something
I didn't. Maybe they had information that could help me
understand what was happening. I made a decision right then,

(20:24):
sitting at the dinner table with my untouched pot roast
getting cold on my plate. I would go talk to
the Catens. I would find out what they'd seen and
what they knew, and maybe I could figure out how
to make this nightmare stop before something terrible happened to
my family. It took me three days to work up
the courage to bike over to the Caton property. Three

(20:46):
days of waiting and watching and jumping at every sound
in the night, the creature had come back twice more
in that time, always after dark, always announcing itself with
that terrible howling scream, before appearing at the edge of
the corn. I'd watched it from my window both times,
my whole body shaking with fear as it stood in

(21:06):
our backyard and looked at the house. It never tried
to come closer, never attempted to break in or harm us,
but its presence alone was enough to turn me into
a nervous wreck. Mama had noticed the damage to the garden,
of course, and she'd blamed it on deer, just like
I'd hoped, But I could tell she didn't really believe it.
I'd catch her looking out the back windows, sometimes her

(21:29):
face tight with worry, her hands twisting in her apron,
And at night, after Daddy left for work, she started
checking all the locks twice, something she'd never done before.
She was scared, even if she wouldn't admit it out loud.
Tommy was having nightmares. He'd wake up crying in the
middle of the night, saying something was outside his window.

(21:50):
Something was trying to get in. Mama would comfort him
and tell him he was just dreaming, but I knew better.
Tommy's room faced the same direction as mine. He'd probably
seen the creature too, though he was too young to
fully understand what he was seeing. I couldn't let this continue.
I had to do something, even if I didn't know what.

(22:11):
So on August seventeenth, a Thursday afternoon, when the heat
was thick enough to taste, I told Mama I was
going to ride my bike to my friend Jennifer's house.
It wasn't exactly a lie, Jennifer lived on the same
road as the Caton's, but it wasn't exactly the truth either.
Mama said, fine, be home before dinner, and I grabbed
my bike and started pedaling. The ride to the Caton

(22:33):
Place took about twenty minutes. I'd never been there before,
but everyone knew where they lived, a cluster of mobile
homes set back from the road, with a long gravel
driveway cutting.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Through tall grass.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
As I got closer, I saw that there were several
news vans parked along the road. Their satellite dishes pointed
at the sky reporters standing around with cameras and microphones.

Speaker 2 (22:56):
My stomach clenched. I'd known the.

Speaker 1 (22:58):
Catons had reported their sighting, but I hadn't realized it
had attracted this much attention. I almost turned around right then.
The last thing I wanted was to be interviewed by
some reporter, to have my face on television talking about monsters.
But I'd come this far and I needed answers. So
I peddled past the news vans, ignoring the curious looks

(23:19):
from the reporters, and turned up the Caton driveway. The
property was busy with activity. People were walking around, taking photographs,
examining the ground, pointing at things, and talking in serious tones.
I recognized the Caton brothers, Scott and Howe from church.
They were big men, tough looking, the kind who worked

(23:39):
with their hands and didn't take nonsense from anybody. They
were talking to a man with a notebook, probably another reporter,
and they looked tired, tired and scared. If I was
reading their expressions right, I got off my bike and
stood there, not sure what to do next. A woman
came out of one of the mobile homes, and I
recognized her as Evelyn Caton, one of the brother's wives.

(24:03):
She saw me standing there looking lost, and came over,
wiping her hands on her apron. She asked if she
could help me, and I suddenly felt foolish. What was
I going to say? I think I saw the same
monster you saw. I'm a twelve year old girl who
thinks Bigfoot is real. But something in her face, a
kind of weary understanding, made me brave. I told her

(24:25):
my name, told her I lived on Bayered Road, told
her that I'd heard about what they'd seen, and then,
before I could lose my nerve, I told her that
I thought i'd seen it too. She didn't laugh, she
didn't tell me I was being silly or imagining things.
She just studied me for a long moment, her eyes
searching my face, and then she nodded. She told me

(24:47):
to come inside out of the heat, and she'd give
me something to drink.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
She called over to her husband.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
That she'd be inside if he needed her, and then
she led me into the mobile home. Inside was cool
and dim, a relief after the blazing sun. She poured
me a glass of lemonade and sat down at the
kitchen table, gesturing for me to do the same. Then
she asked me to tell her exactly what I'd seen,
and I did all of it. The sounds, the creature

(25:16):
at the edge of the corn, the footprint in the garden,
the way it had looked up at my window with
an intelligence that shouldn't have existed in an animal. I
told her about Tommy's nightmares and Mama's fear, and Daddy
sleeping through it all because he worked nights and didn't
know what was happening in our backyard after dark. When
I finished, Evelyn was quiet for a long moment. Then

(25:37):
she told me that they'd been dealing with the same
thing for the past week. It had started with sounds
just like mine, howls and screams coming from the woods.
Then things had escalated. Their dogs had gone crazy, barking
and snarling at something they couldn't see. Their chicken coop
had been torn apart, but no chickens had been taken,
which was strange. And then a few nights ago, Scott

(26:01):
had seen it, the creature walking across their property in
the moonlight, just as bold as anything. He'd grabbed his
gun and fired a shot at it, but the thing
had just run off into the woods, moving faster than
anything that size should have been able to move. After that,
they'd called the sheriff. They'd figured it was their duty
to report it, to warn other people in the area

(26:23):
that there was something dangerous out there. But all they'd
gotten for their trouble was mockery and attention they didn't want.
The sheriff had been polite but skeptical, The newspapers had
treated it like a joke, and now they had reporters
camped out on their property, treating them like circus attractions.
Evelyn's voice was bitter as she told me this, And
I understood the Catens were good people, honest people, and

(26:47):
they were being made to look like fools because they'd
told the truth about something nobody wanted to believe. And
now I was sitting here with my own story, my
own encounters, and I was terrified of the same thing
happening to my family. I asked her if she knew
what the creature was, if she had any idea why
it was here. She shook her head and said they'd
been asking themselves the same questions. Some people had suggested

(27:11):
it was a bear, but the Catons knew bears, and
this wasn't a bear. It was something else, something that
science didn't have a name for sasquatch maybe, or bigfoot,
or just some unknown animal that had wandered into Ohio
from somewhere else.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
Whatever it was, it was real.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
And it was scaring people, and nobody seemed to know
what to do about it. She asked me if my
parents knew what I'd been seeing, and I admitted they didn't,
not really.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
I'd been too.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Scared to tell them, too worried they wouldn't believe me.
Evelyn nodded sympathetically and told me I should tell them anyway,
that they needed to know there was something dangerous on
our property. She said the creature hadn't hurt anyone yet,
but that didn't mean it wouldn't. It was unpredictable, and
unpredictable things were always dangerous. We talked for almost an hour,

(28:01):
comparing notes, sharing details, trying to make sense of something
that defied all logic. I learned that the creature seemed
to be most active at night, that it avoided people
when it could, that it seemed drawn to properties with animals.
The catence had chickens and dogs, and we had Mama's
vegetable garden in the barn where we kept feed for
the deer that came around in winter. Maybe that was

(28:24):
the connection. Maybe it was looking for food. Before I left,
Evelyn made me promise to be careful. She said that
whatever this thing was, it was powerful and potentially dangerous,
and I shouldn't try to confront it or get close
to it. If I saw it again, I should stay inside,
lock the doors, and wait for it to leave. And

(28:45):
I should tell my parents, no matter how crazy it sounded,
because they needed to be prepared. I promised I would,
though I wasn't sure I meant it. The thought of
telling Daddy what I'd seen, of watching him try to
process the existence of something that shouldn't exist, was terrifying.
But Evelyn was right. My family needed to know they

(29:05):
needed to be prepared for what might be coming. I
thanked her for talking to me and for not treating
me like I was crazy.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
She walked me to the door.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
And watched as I got on my bike, and just
before I peddled away, she called out to me. She
said something that I've never forgotten, words that have echoed
in my mind for more.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Than forty years.

Speaker 1 (29:26):
She said that sometimes the world is stranger than we
want to believe, and sometimes the only thing we can
do is accept that strangeness and try to stay safe
until it passes. She said that monsters are real, not
the kind in fairy tales, but real, flesh and blood
things that walk in the darkness, and the sooner we
accept that, the better chance we have of surviving them.

(29:48):
I nodded, not trusting my voice to speak, and then
I peddled away from the Caton property as fast as
I could. Behind me, I heard the reporters shouting questions,
trying to figure out who I was and why I'd
been there, But I didn't stop. Stay tuned for more
backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
I just kept.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Peddling, pushing harder and harder, as if I could outrun
the truth of what was happening, as if I could
go fast enough to leave the monster behind. But you
can't outrun something that knows where you live. You can't
escape something that has chosen your home as part of
its territory. And as I rode back toward Bayered Road,
the sun beginning to sink toward the horizon, I knew

(30:31):
with absolute certainty that the creature would be back tonight,
and the night after that and the night after that,
until something changed, until something happened to make it leave
or to make it stay forever. I just hoped we
would all survive long enough to find out which. I
didn't tell my parents that night, or the next night

(30:52):
or the night after that. Each evening I would work
myself up to it, planning exactly what I would say,
how I would explain that something possible was living in
our cornfield. But then Daddy would come home tired from
the mill, or Mama would be stressed about money, or
Tommy would do something that required discipline, and the moment
would pass, the words would stick in my throat, and

(31:14):
I'd tell myself I'd do it tomorrow, tomorrow, for sure. Meanwhile,
the visits continued. The creature came to our property almost
every night, now, always after dark, always announcing itself with
that terrible scream that seemed to shake the foundations of
the house. I'd taken to sleeping in my clothes, ready
to run if I needed to, though I had no

(31:36):
idea where I would run to. Where do you go
when a monster knows where you live? Tommy's nightmares got worse.
He started wetting the bed. Something he hadn't done in years,
and Mama was beside herself trying to figure.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
Out what was wrong with him.

Speaker 1 (31:51):
She took him to the doctor, who said it was
probably just stress, maybe trouble at school or anxiety about
growing up. The doctor prescribed warm milk before bed and
suggested we be patient with him. Mama came home from
that appointment looking frustrated and worried, and I felt a
stab of guilt. I knew what was really wrong with Tommy.
He was being terrorized by the same thing that was

(32:14):
terrorizing me, and I hadn't said a word to help him.
The news about the Minerva Monster was everywhere now. It
was in the local papers, on the television news, even
in some of the national broadcasts. The Catons were being interviewed, constantly,
telling their story over and over, describing what they'd seen.

(32:34):
Some people believed them, most people didn't, but everyone was
talking about it. Minerva had become famous overnight, and not
in a good way. People were making jokes about bigfoot
tourism and suggesting the Catons were making it all up
for attention. But I knew they weren't making it up.
I knew because I was living the same nightmare, experiencing

(32:55):
the same terror, seeing the same creature in the darkness,
and unlike the cave Eaton's, I was suffering alone, unable
to share my burden with anyone. It was August twenty
third when everything came to a head. I remember the
date because it was the night of the County Fair,
and Tommy had been looking.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Forward to it for weeks.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Daddy had promised to take the night off work so
we could all go together, something that almost never happened.
It was supposed to be a special family outing, a
chance to eat cotton candy and ride the ferris wheel
and forget about our worries for.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
A few hours.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
We left the house around six, piling into Daddy's truck,
Tommy bouncing with excitement in the back seat beside me.
The fair was held at the County Fairgrounds, about fifteen
miles away, and the drive was pleasant, corn and soybeans
stretching out on both sides of the road, the sun
beginning to paint the sky orange and pink. For those
few minutes, I almost felt normal, almost forgot about the

(33:53):
creature and the fear and the terrible secret I was keeping.
The fair was crowded and loud and wonderfully distract We
ate hot dogs and funnel cake, played games where you
threw rings at bottles or shot water guns at targets,
watched the demolition derby in the arena. Tommy went on
every ride. He was tall enough for dragging Mama with

(34:14):
him while Daddy and I watched and laughed. It was perfect,
It was exactly what we needed. But as the sky
darkened and the fair lights came on, I started to
feel uneasy. We were fifteen miles from home, fifteen miles
from the house where the doors were unlocked and the
windows were open, and everything was vulnerable. What if the
creature came tonight. What if it decided to do more

(34:36):
than just stand in the backyard and howl. What if
it tried to get inside. I tried to push the
thoughts away, tried to focus on having fun, but the
fear was like a weight in my chest, getting heavier
with every passing minute. Finally, around nine o'clock, I told
Daddy I wasn't feeling well. I said, I thought I
might be getting a headache. Could we please go home?

(34:59):
He looked dis appointed, but agreed, and we started the
long drive back to Minerva. The house was dark when
we arrived, exactly as we'd left it. Nothing seemed disturbed,
no broken windows, no damaged doors. I felt silly for
having worried, for having cut our evening short. Maybe the
creature wouldn't come tonight, maybe we'd finally have one peaceful night.

(35:22):
We were wrong. We'd been home for maybe thirty minutes,
just long enough for Mama to put Tommy to bed
and for me to change into my nightgown when the
screaming started. But this time it was different. This time
it wasn't just one voice. It was two, maybe three,
multiple creatures calling to each other from the woods behind
the house, their voices overlapping and echoing until it sounded

(35:45):
like the whole forest was alive with monsters. I ran
to my window and looked out, and what I saw
made my legs go weak. There were three of them,
three massive figures standing at the edge of the corn,
their bodies clearly visible in the moonlight. Two adults and
what might have been a younger one, smaller than the
others but still enormous by human standards. They stood together

(36:09):
like a family, and as I watched, one of them
reached out and touched another a gesture that was so
human and so gentle that it brought tears to my eyes.
Below me, I heard Daddy shout. Then I heard his
footsteps pounding up the stairs, heard him burst into my
room without knocking. He grabbed me and pulled me away
from the window, his face pale and his hand shaking.

(36:32):
He told me to get away from there, to go
to Tommy's room and stay with him. Don't look outside, don't
go near any windows. His voice was raw with fear,
and that scared me more than anything else. Daddy was
never afraid. Daddy was the man who fixed everything, who
made us feel safe. Seeing him like this, seeing the

(36:52):
terror in his eyes, made me realize just how serious
this was. I did what he told me and ran
to Tommy's room. My little brother was sitting up in bed, crying,
asking what was happening? Why were the monsters screaming? I
climbed into bed with him and held him, trying to
be brave, even though.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
I was just as scared as he was.

Speaker 1 (37:12):
Through the open window, we could hear the creatures calling
to each other, their voices rising and falling, and beneath
that we could hear Mama and Daddy downstairs, their voices
urgent and frightened as they checked locks and closed curtains.
The screaming went on for about fifteen or twenty minutes,
then gradually it faded. The creatures were moving away, back

(37:34):
into the woods, their voices growing fainter, until they disappeared entirely.
In the silence that followed, I could hear my own
heart beat fast and hard in my chest. I could
hear Tommy's ragged breathing. I could hear Mama crying softly downstairs.
When Daddy finally came to check on us, his face
was gray. He sat on the edge of Tommy's bed

(37:56):
and put his hand on my shoulder, and then he
said the words I'd been waiting to hear for almost
two weeks. He said, we needed to talk about what
we'd all just seen. He said there was something living
in the woods behind the house, something that shouldn't exist
but clearly did, and we needed to figure out what
to do about it. I felt a wave of relief
wash over me. Finally, finally I could tell someone what

(38:19):
I'd been seeing, what I'd been experiencing. Finally I wasn't
alone with this terrible knowledge. But the relief was mixed
with dread, because now that the secret was out, now
that we all knew there were monsters in our woods,
we had to face the question of what came next.
How do you protect your family from something that's bigger
and stronger than you, something that moves in the darkness

(38:40):
and knows where you live. We went downstairs together, all
four of us, and sat in the living room with
every light in the house blazing. Daddy had his hunting
rifle across his lap, though I doubted even that would
do much good against creatures that size. And then, for
the first time, I told my family everything. I told
them about the first night i'd heard the screaming, about

(39:03):
seeing the creature in the backyard, about the footprint in
the garden. I told them about going to see the cadence,
about learning that we weren't the only ones being visited
by these things. I told them how scared i'd been,
how I'd wanted to tell them but didn't know how.
When I finished, Mama was crying openly. She said she'd
heard the sounds too, had seen shadows moving in the corn,

(39:27):
but she'd convinced herself she was imagining things. She'd wanted
so badly for everything to be normal, for our quiet
life to continue, unchanged that she'd refuse to acknowledge what
was happening, and now with three of them standing in
our backyard, there was no denying it any more. Tommy
admitted he'd seen them too, multiple times, always at night,

(39:49):
always watching the house. He described them exactly as I had,
enormous and hairy and walking upright like people. He said
he'd tried to tell Mama, but she'd said he was
having nightmares, so he'd stopped trying. He just suffered in silence,
getting more and more afraid, until it was affecting every
part of his life. Daddy was the one who finally

(40:10):
said what we were all thinking. He said, we had
two choices. We could stay here and deal with these creatures,
whatever they were, or.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
We could leave.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
We could pack up and move somewhere else, somewhere these
things didn't go, start over, in a place where the
woods were empty and the nights were quiet, and we
didn't have to be afraid. But even as he said it,
I could see in his face that he didn't want
to leave. This was his family's house, his family's land,
His parents had raised him. Here and his grandparents before that.

(40:42):
The idea of abandoning it because of some unknown creatures,
of letting fear drive him away from his home, went
against everything he believed in. So we made a different decision.
We decided to stay. We decided to fortify the house,
keep the doors and windows locked, stay inside after dark.
We decided to document everything, keep a record of when

(41:04):
the creatures came and what they did in case we
ever needed proof. And we decided not to tell anyone else,
not to call the sheriff or the newspapers or anyone.
We'd seen what had happened to the catens, how they'd
been turned into a spectacle, and we didn't want that
for ourselves. We would handle this privately as a family
and hope that eventually the creatures would move on to

(41:26):
somewhere else. It was a decision that would haunt us
in different ways for the rest of our lives, but
sitting there in our brightly lit living room at midnight,
exhausted and terrified and trying to be brave, it felt
like the only choice we could make. We didn't sleep
that night, none of us did. We just sat together
in the living room, watching the windows listening for sounds

(41:48):
that didn't come, and when the sun finally rose, painting
the sky pink and gold and beautiful. We felt like
we'd survived something important. We'd made it through the night.
We'd face the mind monsters and lived. But deep down,
we all knew this was far from over. The creatures
were still out there, and they would be back. After

(42:10):
that night, everything changed, not in any obvious way that
outsiders would notice, but in all the small, private ways
that transform a family's daily life. We developed routines designed
around fear rituals meant to keep us safe from things
that shouldn't exist. Every door had to be locked by sundown.

(42:30):
Every window had to be checked twice. No one went
outside after dark, no matter what. If we heard the screaming,
we were to gather in the living room, safety in numbers,
and wait for it to pass. Daddy moved his work
schedule to first shift, taking a pay cut to do it,
because he couldn't stand being away from us at night anymore.
He told his supervisor at the mill that he had

(42:52):
family issues, and maybe that was true, just not in
the way his supervisor probably thought. Mama stopped hanging laundry
outside even during the day because the clothesline was too
close to the corn. Tommy stopped playing by the creek,
stopped building forts in the woods, stopped doing all the
things that made childhood and the country worth living. And

(43:13):
me I became a watcher. I spent my evenings at
my bedroom window, notebook and pen in hand, recording everything
I saw. What time the creatures arrived, how many there were,
what direction they came from.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
What they did while they were here.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
I documented it all with the methodical precision of a scientist,
as if understanding their patterns might give us some power
over them. What I learned was both fascinating and terrifying.
The creatures, I'd come to think of them as a
family group came almost every night. Usually it was just
one or two of them, but sometimes all three appeared together.

(43:51):
They seemed most interested in the corn, often walking through
it or standing at its edges, and I wondered if
they were eating it or just using it for They
never approached the house during these visits, never tried to
get inside, but they always seemed aware of us. Sometimes
I'd see one of them pause and turn its head
toward the house, as if listening to the sounds of

(44:13):
our lives inside, and I'd feel a chill run down
my spine. The smaller one, the one I thought might
be a juvenile, was the most active. It would sometimes
run through the corn or climb part way up the
oak tree in our backyard, moving with an agility that
seemed impossible for something so large. The adults were more sedate,

(44:33):
more watchful, but the young one had energy to burn.
I found myself thinking of it almost fondly, which was crazy.
This was a creature that terrified me, that had turned
my life upside down, and yet there was something almost
endearing about watching it play. While the adults kept watch,
The cat and sidings continued too, though the media attention

(44:55):
was starting to die down. The reporters had gotten their
stories and moved on to others. Since stay tuned for
more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
We'll be back.

Speaker 1 (45:04):
After these messages. Leaving the Catons to deal with their
monster problem alone, I rode my bike over there a
few times, always making sure no reporters were around, and
compared notes with Evelyn. She was keeping a journal too,
documenting the same things I was. Together, we tried to
make sense of it all. One thing became clear pretty quickly.

(45:28):
The creatures weren't just random animals passing.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
Through the area.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
They were established here, settled in somehow, They had territory
they moved through regularly, and both our property and the
Caton property fell within that territory. Evelyn wondered if they'd
always been here, living deep in the woods where people
rarely went, and something had driven them closer to human habitation.
Maybe development had encroached on their space, maybe food was scarce.

(45:55):
Maybe they were just curious about us, the way we
were terrified of them, the reason they showed no signs
of leaving. August became September, and September brought the start
of school. I'd been dreading it, worried about having to
leave the house during the day, about being away from
my family when they might need me. But in a
strange way, school became a refuge. For those six hours

(46:18):
every day, I could pretend to be normal. I could
sit in class and learn about the Revolutionary War or
how to diagram sentences, and for a little while I
could forget about the monsters in my backyard. Of course,
everyone at school was talking about the Minerva monster. It
was the biggest thing that had ever happened in our
small town, and people had opinions. Some kids believed it

(46:41):
was real, others thought the catons were lying or crazy.
There were jokes about it, drawings of crude eight men
with silly captions, rumors about other sidings and other parts
of the county. I kept my mouth shut through all
of it, never admitting that I'd seen anything, never acknowledging
that I knew more about this than on almost anyone
else in town. Jennifer, my best friend, noticed I was

(47:04):
acting strange. She asked me several times if something was wrong,
if I was okay, and I always gave her vague
answers about being tired or stressed about school starting. I
hated lying to her, hated keeping this huge secret from
someone I'd known since kindergarten. But what choice did I have.
If I told her the truth. She'd either think I

(47:24):
was crazy, or she'd want to come to my house
and see the creatures for herself, and I couldn't deal
with either one. The strain of keeping the secret was
wearing on all of us. Daddy became quiet and withdrawn,
spending his evenings cleaning his rifle over and over, even
though it didn't need cleaning. Mama jumped at every unexpected
sound and started having trouble sleeping, dark circles appearing under

(47:47):
her eyes. Tommy regressed in ways that worried me, becoming
clingy and babyish, afraid to be alone in any room,
and me, I felt like I was aging years in
the span of months, losing my childhood to fear and
vigilance and the terrible knowledge that the world was stranger
and more dangerous than I'd ever imagined. October arrived with

(48:10):
cool nights and changing leaves, and with it came a
shift in the creature's behavior. They started coming earlier in
the evening, before full dark, bold enough to appear while
twilight still lingered. They stayed longer, too, sometimes for an
hour or more, moving through the corn and the yard
with what almost seemed like confidence. And one night something

(48:32):
happened that changed everything. I was at my usual post
by the window, watching two of the creatures, the adults,
as they stood near the garden. They were communicating with
each other, I was sure of it, making low, grunting
sounds that carried across the yard. Then one of them
did something I'd never seen before. It bent down and
picked up one of the tomatoes that had fallen from

(48:53):
the damaged plants we never properly fixed. It, held the
tomato up to its face, examining it, then bit into it.
The other one watched, then did the same thing, picking
up vegetables from the garden and eating them. They weren't
just passing through. They weren't just curious. They were feeding
themselves from our garden. They'd been doing it all along, probably,

(49:16):
but this was the first time I'd actually witnessed it.
And as I watched them eat, watched them share food
with each other in a way that was eerily human,
I felt something shift inside me. These creatures were real, breathing,
living things. They needed food like we did, They had
families like we did. They might even have feelings and
thoughts and desires that weren't so different from our own.

(49:39):
It should have made them less frightening, this realization that
they were just animals trying to survive, But somehow it
made them more frightening instead, because if they were intelligent
enough to plan and remember and return, that meant they
were unpredictable. That meant we couldn't count on them behaving
like normal animals. Following instinct and nothing more. Intelligence meant

(50:02):
danger in ways that simple animal behavior never could. I
called Daddy up to my room to watch, keeping my
voice low so as not to startle them. He came
and stood beside me at the window, and together we
watched the creatures eat from our garden. His hand found
my shoulder and gripped it tight, and I knew he
was thinking the same thing I was. This changed things,

(50:24):
This made them harder to dismiss as just some weird
natural phenomenon. This made them real in a way they
hadn't been before. After they left that night, after we
checked all the locks and gathered in the living room
like we always did, Daddy said something that surprised me.
He said, maybe it was time to call someone, not
the sheriff for the newspapers, but someone who might actually

(50:47):
be able to help, someone who studied these kinds of things.
He'd been asking around discreetly at the mill, he said,
and one of the guys there had given him a name,
a researcher from a university somewhere, someone who investigated reports
of unexplained animals. Maybe this person could tell us what
these creatures were and how to coexist with them.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
Safely.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
Mama was skeptical. She pointed out that bringing in an
outsider meant losing control of the situation. It meant admitting
that we couldn't handle this ourselves. But Daddy argued that
we were already not handling it. We were living in fear,
prisoners in our own home, and something had to change.
Either we got help or we accepted that this was

(51:29):
our life now, that we would always be afraid. In
the end, we decided to wait. We'd see how things
went for a few more weeks, and if the situation
didn't improve, we'd make the call. It felt like a
reasonable compromise, even though part of me wondered what improvement
would even look like. The creatures were here, they weren't leaving.

(51:51):
What exactly were we waiting for? The answer came on
October fifteenth, on a cold night, when frost was starting
to appear in the mornings, and winter did it seemed
so far away. That was the night the Young One
came to my window. I'd gone to bed early that night,
exhausted from a long day at school and an argument
with Jennifer about why I couldn't come to her Halloween party.

(52:13):
I couldn't tell her the real reason that I was
too afraid to leave my house after dark, so I'd
made up some excuse about having family obligations. She'd been hurt,
I could tell, and the friendship we'd had since childhood
was starting to fray under the weight of my secrets.
Sleep came quickly pulled under by sheer exhaustion, and I
dreamed of normal things, school and homework and riding my

(52:36):
bike down roads that went on forever. But something pulled
me out of the dream, some sound or instinct, and
I opened my eyes to darkness and the familiar shapes
of my bedroom. That's when I heard it, breathing, heavy
and rhythmic, coming from right outside my window. My window
was on the second floor. There shouldn't have been anything

(52:57):
capable of breathing outside my second floor window. But as
I lay there, frozen, afraid to move or even breathe myself,
I heard it again, definitely breathing, definitely close, and then
worse than anything I could have imagined, I heard something else, tapping, gentle,
deliberate tapping on the glass. Every instinct I had screamed

(53:21):
at me to close my eyes, pull the covers over
my head, pretend I was still asleep. If I didn't look,
maybe it would go away, maybe it would think no
one was home. But another part of me, the part
that had been documenting these creatures for months, the part
that had learned to face fear even when every cell
in my body wanted to run, That part made me

(53:42):
turn my head toward the window. The young one was there.
Its face was maybe three feet from the glass, visible
in the moonlight that filtered through my curtains. It was
looking directly at me, with eyes that caught the light
and reflected it back, making them seem to glow. The
face was both ape like and humanlike at the same time,

(54:03):
covered in dark hair, but structured in a way that
no ape's face was structured. There was intelligence in those eyes, curiosity,
and maybe, impossibly, something that looked almost like gentleness. We
stared at each other for what might have been seconds
or might have been hours. I couldn't tell. Time seemed
to stretch and compress in strange ways. The creature made

(54:26):
no threatening moves. It just looked at me, its breath
fogging the glass, its massive hand resting against the window frame.
The hand was enormous, easily twice the size of my
father's with thick fingers and nails that looked almost like claws.
It could have broken through the glass easily, could have
reached in and grabbed me before I could even scream.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
But it didn't.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
It just watched, and then it did something that haunts
me to this day. It raised its other hand and
placed it against the glass, palm flat, fingers spread. It
was as the same gesture a child might make, reaching
out to touch something fascinating, and without thinking, without considering
how insane it was, I found myself getting out of bed,

(55:11):
found myself walking slowly toward the window, found myself raising
my own hand and placing it against the glass, matching
my palm to the creature's palm. Even through the glass,
I could feel the warmth radiating from its hand, could
see the lines increases in its palm that were disturbingly
human like, could see where one of its nails was broken,

(55:32):
as if it had injured itself on something. We stood
like that, girl and creature, separated by a quarter inch
of glass and millions of years of evolution, And in
that moment, I wasn't afraid. In that moment, I felt
something else, entirely understanding, maybe or recognition, a sense that,
despite all our differences, we were both just living things

(55:56):
trying to survive in a world that was often cruel
and all confusing. The moment broke when I heard Mama's
footsteps in the hallway. She was checking on us, something
she did most nights now, making sure we were safe
and asleep. The creature must have hurt her too, because
its head turned sharply toward the door.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
Then it looked back.

Speaker 1 (56:16):
At me one more time, its eyes meeting mine, and
I could have sworn I saw something like sadness in them.
And then it was gone, dropping out of sight so
quickly I might have imagined the whole thing. I heard
a soft thud as it hit the ground, then the
sound of it moving away through the yard, surprisingly quiet
for something so large. I scrambled back to bed and

(56:38):
pulled the covers up just as Mama opened the door.
She poked her head in, checking that I was there
and seemingly asleep, then closed the door softly. I lay
there in the darkness, my heart pounding, my mind racing,
trying to process what had just happened. The creature had
come to my window, it had looked at me, had
reached out to me, had made contact in a way

(57:01):
that felt deliberate and meaningful. Why what did it want?
Was it simply curious.

Speaker 2 (57:07):
About the people who lived in this house?

Speaker 1 (57:10):
Was it trying to communicate something? Or was I reading
far too much into the actions of an animal that
didn't think or feel the way I did. I got
up and went back to the window, pulling aside the
curtain and looking down into the backyard. The young one
was there, standing near the corn with the two adults.
They seemed to be communicating, the adults making low sounds,

(57:32):
while the young one gestured with its hands in ways
that looked almost like sign language. Then all three of
them turned and looked up at my window, and I
felt a chill run down my spine. They knew I
was watching, They'd always known. After a moment, they turned
and walked away, disappearing into the corn, and I was
left alone with my thoughts and fears and the memory

(57:54):
of a massive hand pressed against glass, reaching out across
an impossible divide. Didn't tell anyone what had happened, not Daddy,
not Mama, not even Tommy. I wrote it down in
my journal, documenting it like I documented everything else. But
I kept it to myself. I don't know why exactly.
Maybe I was afraid they'd think I was getting too

(58:15):
close to the creatures, that they'd forbid me from watching
at the window anymore. Or maybe, and this was harder
to admit, I wanted to keep this moment for myself,
wanted to protect it from other people's fear and skepticism
and the need to turn everything into a problem to
be solved. Whatever the reason, it remained my secret, And

(58:36):
in the nights that followed, I found myself watching for
the young one, specifically hoping it would come back to
the window. It didn't, though none of them came close
to the house anymore. They kept to the corn and
the edges of the property, and I wondered if the
adults had forbidden it from approaching, if they'd realized the
danger of getting too close to the humans who lived here,

(58:57):
if they decided to keep their distance for everyone in safety.
The weather turned colder. November arrived, with gray skies and
early darkness, and with it came a change in the visits.
The creatures came less frequently, now, sometimes skipping several nights
in a row. When they did come, they seemed rushed,
spending only a few minutes before moving on. I wondered

(59:20):
if they were getting ready to leave the area, to
migrate to somewhere warmer, or somewhere with more food. The
thoughts should have made me happy, should have brought relief. Instead,
I felt something that might have been sadness. These creatures
had been part of my life for months now. I'd
spent countless hours watching them, studying them, trying to understand them.

(59:42):
The thought of them leaving felt like losing something important,
even though I couldn't explain why. Evelyn Caton reported the
same pattern. The visits to their property had decreased dramatically.
The creatures were moving on, she said, though nobody knew
where they were going. The media had long since lawt
lost interest in the Minerva Monster, moving on to other stories,

(01:00:03):
other sensations. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
We'll be back.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
After these messages, a few dedicated researchers had come through,
interviewed the Catons, examined the property, but nothing concrete had
come from it, no photographs, no physical evidence, just more
stories added to the thousands of other Bigfoot stories that
people chose to believe or disbelieve based on their own preconceptions.

(01:00:30):
By Thanksgiving, the visits had stopped almost entirely. We'd see signs,
sometimes tracks in the frost, or cornstalks bent in ways
that suggested something large had passed through, but we never
saw the creatures themselves anymore. It was as if they'd
never been there at all, as if the whole thing
had been some shared delusion.

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
But I knew better.

Speaker 1 (01:00:52):
I had my journals, page after page of observations and
drawings and notes. I had my memories, clear and undeniable,
and I had the knowledge that the world was bigger
and stranger than most people wanted to accept. That there
were things living in the woods and fields that science
didn't acknowledge, Creatures that moved through the darkness and sometimes

(01:01:14):
reached out to make contact with the humans whose world
they shared. Christmas came and went. The new year arrived,
nineteen seventy nine, brought snow and ice, and the slow
returned to something approaching normal life. We still locked our
doors at night, still checked the windows, but the edge
of fear had dulled. The house felt like ours again,

(01:01:35):
instead of a fortress under siege. Tommy's nightmares faded and
he started playing outside again, though never alone, and never
after dark. Mama's smile came back, real and genuine instead
of forced. Daddy went back to third shift, needing the
extra money. Now that things were calm and me, I
kept watching, kept waiting, kept wondering if the creatures would

(01:01:59):
ever return.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Or if that chapter of our lives was truly over.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Spring came, and with it the planting of new corn,
and I watched the field grow tall again, remembering the
nights I'd stood at my window and seen massive shapes
moving through those stalks. Summer arrived, hot and humid, and
sometimes I'd waken the night and go to the window,
looking for something that was no longer there. The catens

(01:02:24):
eventually moved away. The attention and the memories had been
too much, Evelyn told me when I went to say goodbye.
They were starting over somewhere else, somewhere without monsters or
reporters or the weight of impossible experiences. I understood, even
though part of me was sad to see them go.
They'd been my allies in this the only other people

(01:02:44):
who truly understood what we'd lived through. Years past, I
graduated high school, went to college, started a life of
my own. But I never forgot that summer, never stopped
thinking about the creatures that had visited our property night
after night and changed everything in those few short months.
And I never told anyone, not really, not the whole truth,

(01:03:08):
because how do you explain something like that to people
who weren't there. How do you make them understand that
monsters are real, but they're not evil, that they're just
living things trying to survive, same as us. I'm sixty
years old now and I still live in Ohio, though
not in Minerva. The farmhouse on Bayered Road was sold
after my parents passed, bought by a family that probably

(01:03:31):
has no idea about the property's history. Sometimes I drive
past it, looking at the cornfield and the woods beyond,
and I wonder if the creatures are still there, if
they still walk through those fields at night, looking for
food and shelter and whatever else drives them to live
so close to human spaces. Tommy doesn't like to talk
about that summer. When I've tried to bring it up

(01:03:52):
over the years, he changes the subject or claims he
doesn't remember much. I think he remembers more than he admits,
but the memory are too frightening, so he's chosen to
lock them away. That's his choice, and I respect it.
We all deal with trauma differently. As for me, I've
spent the last forty years reading everything I can find

(01:04:12):
about Sasquatch and Bigfoot and unexplained creatures. I followed the research,
the reports, the theories, and I've come to believe that
these creatures are real, that they exist in the forests
and remote places of North America, living parallel lives to ours,
mostly avoiding us, but occasionally making contact in ways that

(01:04:33):
defy easy explanation. I think about that night with the
young one at my window more often than I probably should.
I think about the intelligence in its eyes, the gentleness
of its touch against the glass, the way it seemed
to reach out across the gulf that separated our species.
I wonder what it was thinking, what it wanted, what

(01:04:54):
it might have been trying to communicate. I wonder if
it remembers me the way I remember it. I wonder
if somewhere out there it's grown into an adult now,
maybe with young ones of its own, telling them stories
about the time it looked through a window and saw
a human girl looking back. People ask me sometimes if
I believe in Bigfoot, it's become a sort of cultural joke,

(01:05:15):
this idea of a giant ape man walking around the wilderness.
And I always smile and give a non committal answer,
because how do you explain to someone who hasn't experienced it,
How do you convey the absolute certainty that comes from
seeing something with your own eyes, from living through something
that transformed you. You can't, so I don't try. I

(01:05:37):
keep my journals locked away, keep my memories to myself,
and live with the knowledge that the world is far
stranger and more wonderful and more terrifying than most people
will ever know. And sometimes late at night, I'll stand
at my window and look out at whatever trees or
fields are visible from wherever I'm living, and I'll remember
a summer when I was twelve years old, and monsters

(01:05:59):
were real. One of them reached out to touch my
hand through a pane of glass. They came to us
that summer, those creatures. They came out of the woods
and into our lives, and they changed everything. And then
they left, disappearing as mysteriously as they'd arrived, leaving behind
only memories and questions and the unshakable conviction that we

(01:06:20):
are not alone in this world, That there are things
in the darkness that we don't understand, that science can't explain,
that most people will never believe in. But I know
I was there, I saw them, and nothing will ever
make me doubt what I experienced during those long, terrible,
wonderful months when the Minerva Monster was real and the

(01:06:41):
world was stranger than anyone imagined.

Speaker 3 (01:07:00):
Sh to Pat the

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
P