November 14, 2025 • 44 mins
In this episode, Brian sits down with John from Ohio, a lifelong Bigfoot enthusiast whose fascination began in childhood and never faded. Inspired by 1970s classics like The Six Million Dollar Man and vintage sci-fi books, John recalls his very first encounter at just nine years old — an experience that would ignite a lifelong passion for uncovering the truth behind the Bigfoot mystery.
John shares how cultural legends, local folklore, and popular media shaped his curiosity and how his fascination evolved into genuine field research. He takes us back to a thrilling 1987 sighting, describing every detail of that unforgettable moment and how it deepened his conviction that something extraordinary roams the forests of Ohio.
Beyond the encounters, John opens up about his work with Crow Town Squatchers, the Bigfoot vendor and support group he co-runs with his wife, Beth. Together, they’ve built a welcoming community of researchers, experiencers, and fans who share evidence, stories, and the unshakable belief that discovery is just around the corner.
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John shares how cultural legends, local folklore, and popular media shaped his curiosity and how his fascination evolved into genuine field research. He takes us back to a thrilling 1987 sighting, describing every detail of that unforgettable moment and how it deepened his conviction that something extraordinary roams the forests of Ohio.
Beyond the encounters, John opens up about his work with Crow Town Squatchers, the Bigfoot vendor and support group he co-runs with his wife, Beth. Together, they’ve built a welcoming community of researchers, experiencers, and fans who share evidence, stories, and the unshakable belief that discovery is just around the corner.
Get Our FREE Newsletter
Get Brian's Books
Leave Us A Voicemail
Visit Our Website
Support Our Sponsors
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today, I want to tell you about a journey that
I've been on for most of my life. Ever since
I was a kid, I've heard tales of Bigfoot and
wild men while spending time with my friends and family.
As I grew older and read more about the paranormal,
my interest in encryptids and other things strange only deepened.
That's why I'm so excited to share with you what
I've personally become involved with the Untold Radio Network. The
(00:21):
Untold Radio Network is a live streaming podcast network that
airs a new show every day across all podcast platforms, YouTube,
and more. They have eight different shows on all sorts
of exciting topics such as bigfoot, cryptids, UFOs, aliens, and
much more. I even have my own show called Weird Encounters,
where I talk about all things strange. This is more
(00:42):
than just a podcast network. It's a community that allows
me to meet so many amazing people who share their
stories and experiences with strange. If you're interested in hearing
more of these stories and learning more about the paranormal encryptids,
make sure you check out the Untold Radio Network for
all kinds of exciting shows. It's free to subscribe. So
what are you waiting for visit www dot untold radionetwork
(01:05):
dot com today.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Now, what are your reporting? I got a screen going
on here. Something just kid with my dog, something to
kill your dog? My dog. We're flying through there, over
the tree. I don't know how it did it? Okay, Damn,
I'm really confused. All I saw was my dog coming
over the fence, and name was dead once you hit
the ground. I didn't see any cars. All I saw
was my dog coming over the fence. Sat, what are
(01:45):
you reporting? We got some wonder or something crawling around
out here? Did you see what it was? It enough
out here? Look, I'm new to one doowing now and
I don't need anything. I don't want to go outside. Hello,
(02:10):
hit the fuddy out here? What quin I'm out there?
It's thought of a bench about sixty nine. I don't
know easy, I'm out there.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, I'm walking right, heady, all right, folks with welcome
our guest to the show. It is John from Ohio.
Welcome to the show man.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Brian, I have been looking forward to this man. We
met three or four years ago. I was a first
time vendor up at the Gatlinburg conference. Next to you
guys in one of the vendor spots. We became fast friends,
had a great time that weekend, and I've seen you
guys out so many times. We'll certainly talk about some
of that stuff before we get out of here, but
(02:46):
you're here to share an experience. But I want to
start where I start with most people. What in the
world got you interested in the subject of Bigfoot to
begin with?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
There's a couple of pieces to that. Obviously. You can
see behind me. This is my Big flo slash atari
slash comic book slash Godzillas. This is the Man Cave,
but it's primarily Bigfoot. You can see the Steve Austin
Bigfoot right there behind me. I'm a gen X kid
(03:15):
born in nineteen seventy. I have so much love for
my mom. She left us a year and a half ago.
My mom loves science fiction, so I grew up watching
In Search of Star Trek reruns six million dollars Man
Space nineteen ninety nine. If it was in the seventies,
we were watching it. My mom loved it. That was
(03:38):
must watch TV back then. Whatever was on it was
what you were watching. That's why somebody that was there
traumatized by Heath Hall and The Lord's Welk Show because
that was what you were watching on Saturdays. Man, it
was terrible, but obviously six million dollars. Man the two
part Bigfoot episodes the most popular episodes they ever had.
(04:00):
That's why they had him back on the show so
many times. They had him on The Bonic Woman, A
big Foot and Wild Boy. That was a Saturday morning
show that a lot of people have never heard of,
which was just bonkers. It was like a Tarzan kind
of thing. Young Boy, it gets rescued by Bigfoot. So
I was watching all that stuff growing up and in
(04:21):
search of certainly as a huge part. Plus we got
to see a legend of Boding Creek sasquatched the legend
of Bigfoot. Here in Ohio and especially where we're at
in east central Ohio is what's called but Shockton is
basically the last county on the left in the Appalachian Area.
Like when you look at a map of Appalachia, Shockton
(04:43):
is like right here on the left. So we're almost
perfectly in between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, like one hundred miles
if you draw like a right angle. We used to
get Channel forty three out of Cleveland. There was a
guy named SuperHost on Saturday, and he would play these
godzill movies, Three Stooges, and sometimes you'd see these Bigfoot,
(05:03):
Legend of Boggie Creek, Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot, and
then Big Chuck. Little John was also out of Cleveland
on Friday nights and they would play those kind of
movies too. So growing up, we got to see a
lot of stuff. And like I said, it was my CTV,
so you had to watch it a little lot to
see that stuff over and over again, but we did.
(05:24):
So that got me into all the science fiction, Bigfoot
and all that. I guess I shouldn't leave out the
books either. We had books in the elementary school. I've
got some of them that we sell on the table
that you see about Bigfoot, Asian aliens, all the monsters,
all that stuff. You get to check it out at
the school library. And I'd wear those books out by myself.
(05:45):
We had a lot of stuff, what of good stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I too, am a gen xer and I grew up
with all of those amazing shows that you're talking about
and the books. NeSSI was my first love. The lockness Monster.
It was must have books. You get the little library
that would come in and you could go to the
books sale. I love that stuff. That's where I fell
in love with NeSSI and the other cryptids. That being said,
(06:09):
was it one of those things that drove you out
into the woods to look for these things? Did you
want to become a researcher and find out more about
them or did you stumble into your experiences while you
were doing other things.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
The first experience I had I stumbled into it again
growing up in the seventies was go outside and play
with a stick. You made your own fun. It's right
here on the east side of Kashaktan, which from where
we live right now. My encounter where it happens not
even a mile from my house up on this hillside
right here. All that land going out to the east
(06:44):
was called Old Man McCoy's Hill is what we called now. Yeah,
there's several rolling hills and valleys back in there. There's
three ponds, and that's what we went out there. We
went up there for two reasons. We went out there
to fish. Old Man McCoy he had a four to ten.
He'd load all his shells up with rock salt, and
he would shoot at you with the rock salt. He
(07:06):
was a mean old man. The story was two of
his boys died up there. One of them drowned in
one of the ponds, and then the other one was
killed in a really bad rain store and my lightning
strike hit a tree and it fell on him. That
was the stories that we were told. So we would
go up there and play cat and mouse with him,
plus we'd go fishing. My first encounter, we were heading
(07:28):
up that way. To get up there, you go through
these line of houses that are up on this hill.
We'd cut right through their yard, go up into the woods,
get on the two track. It ran like in a
almost like a half of you up to the top
of the hill. You had to be careful because he'd
come down that way sometimes. He had an old beat
up I think it was a green truck or red truck.
(07:50):
So we're walking up the two track. It was me
and my friend. My buddy's a little older than me.
He was thirteen, I was nine. We're going up through there.
We got our fish and stuff. Also, I have to
point out this Caveat at the time, we were heavily
influenced by Marvel Comics. We thought we were vigilanties, so
(08:14):
we occasionally had these. If you remember the character Iron
Fist from the comic books, he had this mask that
just had his eyes and it would wrap around your
head like a bandana. So we had a couple of those.
We didn't o man that day, but we thought we
were vigilanti superheroes. We're walking up this two track, and
(08:35):
the way I remember it, the way I always explained
it was, it seemed to be the woods up to
the right of me just exploded with noise. All these
trees start shaking. Now when I say trees, these are saplings.
They weren't shaking giant oak trees or anything. I looked
up to the right. The sun is back behind that,
(08:55):
so all I can see is shadow ish. I see
the con head down to these huge shoulders. That's all
I remember as far as the encounter goes. We both
just booked it back down the two track. But of
course we get down so far and we decided to
jump off the side of the two track. We decided
(09:18):
we were going to run some fishing line across the
trail because we're going to trip him if he comes
after us. We're going to trip him, and we both
got like little buck knives with us. Poor mister Bigfoot.
We were plot is demies already. I don't remember if
the creature made a noise at all. It's possible, but
(09:38):
I don't recall that. Of course, this is quite a
long time ago. I don't remember a smell. I don't
remember smelling anything. It smell is a pretty powerful reminder
you usually things like that were stuck with. But all
I remember is, like I said, we were bebopping up
through there. All of a sudden we saw it took
off run and I think it was about ten seconds maybe,
(10:00):
if that long, I think it was right after we
got done stretching the fishing line across the trail. We
looked at each other, let's get the hell out of
here and off the hill. We were booking, and we
ran all the way back down. People probably thought we
were up something, because running through their yard, down over
the hill, and then all the way down to Wilson Avenue,
it's a little bit of a trip. So that's out
(10:22):
the first encounter went. I got home and dropped my stuff.
I went up to my buddy's house. He lived up
the street, I told him about it, and he made
fun of me. That was the first thing I think,
but it's not real. And then of course he goes
on to tell everybody I saw one. I'm getting tortured,
I'm getting made fun of it. Occasionally through school people
(10:44):
would say, yeah, won't you ask truly he saw a
big boot one time, because I would tell people every
now and then about it. There's a couple more caveats too,
but the one I want to talk about real quick
before I go off on wherever I'll end up going.
And I've been together now for almost twelve years. Right
after we got together, I don't know if we were
married yet, but we'd been together for a little bit.
(11:07):
The county fair came around and I saw my buddy
that was there with me that day, and I didn't
have any bigfoot shirt on or nothing. I wasn't doing
this yet. Full disclosure. I've been in recovery now for
fifteen years, and I've found that talking to people and
like minds, it's cathartic. It's good for your soul. If
you have an encounter, if you have something that's happened
(11:29):
to you, you need to talk about it. You need
to get it out there in the open. So I
saw him at the fair and I told Beth, I said,
will you wait for me right here? I will go
ask him something. And I walked over to him and
I said, Hey, do you remember that? And this is
all I said, Tom, do you remember that day up
on old man McCoy's hill. Now we were on that
hill hundreds of times, so I didn't ask him that
(11:52):
day when we saw the bigfoot? I said, do you
remember that day we were up from old men McCoy's hill.
He didn't skip a beat, he said, John, it was
a big It blew me away because, like I said,
he's a little older than I was, so he would
have a better recollection. Plus he didn't destroy his ma
brain cells. This I did in my twenties and thirties
with heavy duty partying. That was really cool to get
(12:15):
some reassurance like that, because as we get older, our
memories do change. I know this. It's part of my
job is to understand psychology a little bit. It's short
and sweet. That's what happened. It's one of those things
that I never thought would ever happened. Never occurred to
me it would. I just did the little show with
a friend. I met him on Twitter. He doesn't podcast.
(12:38):
Billy Delicious is his name, call him Doc Strange. But
we were talking about the movie The Mysterious Monsters, the
one that Peter Graves did in nineteen seventy five. And
in that movie there's a map and it shows the
Bigfoot sightings, how many had been in each state. In
the seventies, all you ever heard was California, Oregon, Washington,
(13:01):
and even British Columbia. You never heard of Bigfoot until
Boggy Creek. Really you never heard of anything ever east
of the Rockies. But there's a little map on there.
It shows eight sidings in Ohio in seventy five. So
when I saw that, I remember going, hey, that was
(13:21):
some validation too. See there's been other sidings in Ohio.
Like said, I was a young kid. I didn't have
no idea how to do research or try to find
if other people had been seeing things in Ohio or
anything like that. You can just stumble across that stuff.
Like I said, that was some good validation. Now to
(13:42):
add to this, I'm going to jump forward to nineteen
eighty seven, so about eight years, eight years and about
two miles as the crow flies out to one of
the valleys that I said that when you go out
east of Kashocktan, there's just hills and valleys, hills and
valleys all the way out to a little town called
west If. Yet there's a place out there. We called
(14:02):
it the Valley at Forever in high school because we
used to go out there and we'd have huge bonfires
and parties and there was a place to meet. It
was a good location. It was out of town enough
to where the cops would leave a salon for the
most part until they found out about it. Of course
they got to ruin everything anyways. So we were out
(14:24):
there one day. It was just me, and it was
about this time of the year because my one buddy
had not left for school yet. Just about everybody else
had gone off to college. I was starting my senior
year and there was four of us out there. We
had two vehicles. So we're out there and we were
having a couple of years and from the back of
the valley, this valley is shaped basically like a bowl,
(14:46):
and it's got trees rimmed around all the way around
the top of it, so it's a bowl that goes up.
It's all grass down here, and then it goes up
and then there's a tree line all the way around it.
It's really cool. It's kind of like an amphitheater.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
And stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll
be right back after these messages.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
So from the back of the valley we hear this
god awful catterwall and we were all just what is that.
My brother famously told me it was a sick cow.
We're shooking up by this, but we're still just jalling,
listening to some music. And next thing we know. So
if you think about a clock, so the back of
(15:30):
the valley's twelve o'clock. Next thing, about two o'clock, here
comes this noise again. It's moving closer to us. We're
over here at about three o'clock as far as the
clock goes, so it makes another noise, but it's not
coming out of the tree line. Whatever it is is
standing in the tree line. We don't see anything moving,
(15:52):
we don't hear anything moving, but this thing's moving closer
to us. And as it's moving closer to us, we're
all grouping closer together. So then the next time, about
ten minutes later, it lets off a really nice loud reverberating,
and it's really getting close to up the hill from us.
(16:12):
So now we're all grouped closer together. And I remember,
I don't know if I said it or someone else
said it, that bang screams from the top of this hill.
We're getting the heck out of here. It wasn't a
few minutes later, and it was right up the hill
from us. Like I said, never came out of that
tree line, but it led out a roar, it rattled,
it went right through you. You could feel it. We
(16:33):
didn't even say a word. I just remember thinking we
looked like cartoon characters into the vehicles, and then it's
about it's probably two miles. You go up the hill
and then down the hill into the high school parking lot.
And I don't know about when you were in high school, Brian,
but when we were in high school, summer break we
spelled our summer break in the high school parking lot.
(16:54):
You spend all year trying to get out of there,
and then as soon as summer rolls are out, where
you want to hang out. Oh, let's say I got
the pargo out of the high school. It's good centralized
location it's a good meeting spot. But we zoomed back
down there, we jump out of the vehicles. What then
was that we're just freaking out. And then it was
that weekend. I remember the High State was playing because
(17:17):
we were going to have a party at my buddy's house.
This ended up being the first time I actually went
squatching because four of our other friends, I think it
was two weeks before our incident, were coming down the
road that's off of that road that takes it in
the valley. It's called Morgan Run Road. They were his
(17:37):
boltswade and driving. They had a road crossing and they
said it was a juvenile smaller one rolled out into
the road and stood up and ran off. They went
past it and backed up. What I was told was
that thing was standing there. When they backed up, they
could see it right there on the side of the road,
(17:58):
and it was doing this keeping its head down and
his shoulders. It's primate like behavior, trying to hide kind
of like that. And my one friend that I still
go squatching, what had told me he's you could see
he called a hair. He didn't say it was for
he said it was hair. He said, you could see
like in between you can see the hair and you
(18:19):
could see the skin, and it was just standing there.
The guy that was driving came with us that Saturday.
We went out back out to that valley and we
went around looking for footprints. Now, the funniest part about
looking for footprints is when we were looking on the
other side of the valleys, because I think I did
want to go. They didn't really want to find anything,
(18:41):
cause well was freaked out because like I said, we
were over here looking. I remember it was raining. We
were just will find some footprints or something, and we
didn't find nothing. But we didn't go to that other
side either. I can't remember if that was the reason.
It might have been because it was just not as
walkable as the other side. And what was wild too,
was it was nineteen eighty seven, so Don keating he
(19:03):
was putting out his signs and stuff. You could find
him on trees, you can find him on telephone pools
out in the woods if you had a big foot counter.
And I kicked myself in the butt every day for
not doing that. Because I knew there was a guy
in Newcomers Town we could call and talk to him
about this. We didn't do it. To this day. It's
like one of those things you're like, should it go
(19:25):
to the wood? I'm sure things would have been a
whole lot different as far as what got me to
come back around. When I hit my twenties, I was
out in the woods all the time. But we never
really were looking for big w You were always having
parties and stuff. It's funny because I went squatching one
time with dog Keating. We went out kind of road
(19:46):
seven hearing Shock, and it was all our old party spots.
The coal company Peabody and the coal companies and the
power plants and all that, because we had a power
plant out here Shaking County. It's in a little town
called Conesville, and so all these back roads we had
all these really cool lakes and ponds, and these back
(20:10):
roads were maintained by the coal companies because that's where
all the coal trucks went through there all over the place.
So we had plenty of party spots, swimming holes, fishing holes.
After the coal company basically closed down, they blocked a
lot of these side access roads off and some of
(20:30):
them became impassable or they were just really rough, you
mean to four wheel drive vehicles, or they just bloked
them off completely. You couldn't get back there much you walk.
I got to go out squatching. What don Keating and
Dave Wickham and a few others. Don It had asked me,
you've ever been out here before? That's been five years
of my life out here. I passed out over there.
(20:52):
That's not over there. It was really cool to just
to get out there. These were hot spots. I'm sure
people asked me. We never really squatched, but I bet
you could have been a fly on the wall. Theoretically,
there was probably some things watching us out They were
probably fascinated by our stupid behavior. That was really cool.
And like I said, one of the reasons I got
(21:12):
back into squatching, Finding big Foot was on TV. I
got sober in twenty ten, and I'd been going to
meetings and things like that, and I remember we went
to one of the High Bigfoot conferences in twenty fifteen
or twenty sixteen. I think it was Bruce that came
up to me and was asking me if I had
(21:33):
a story. Beth was like, yeah, he's got a story.
You didn't need to listen to a story he needs
to tell you. I'm a timid about saying it, because
every time I talked about it, people look at you
like you're growing another head out of your shoulder. Are
you regular crazy or are you special crazy? No, this
really happened. So that was, Like I said, one of
(21:53):
the reasons I really liked going to the conferences was
you could talk to somebody. It was very cathartic when
you could talk to people similar stories that would listen
to you, that wanted to hear your pinions or just
listen to what you had to say and say, man,
that's amazing. Now here listen to this story or that story.
And that's another reason that I wanted to get it
(22:14):
out there. This is what I told Doug Waller. I
talked to him.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Doug.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
He's a author here in Ohio. He collects people's stories.
He's written six books, and he put my story in
his sixth book. I told him one of the reasons
I wanted to get it out there was I'm hoping
somebody reads that and goes, man, somebody around here or
close by was like, this is what happened to me
(22:39):
in nineteen seventy nine, and it was right there by
your story. It happened in the same spot or it
happened really close to that. Because you've heard a lot
of stories, you know how that goes. It's amazing how
many people have encounters that are just afraid to talk
about it. Sad at shows, if you're watching the crowd
and you're watching a speaker, I can see people they're
(23:00):
just bursting at the seams one to tell their story,
but they're just afraid to open up about it. That's
one of the things I want to get people to
talk about it because it's freeing for one thing. Plus,
like I said, another reason that your story could help
somebody else come out and talk about something, and it
can link a chain of events that it would just
(23:21):
blow your mind. I've had so many people in my office.
I've got big Foot stuff up on the wall of
my Bigfoot calendar. I've got a big Foot bobblehead on
my desk, and they're like, you believe in Bigfoot? And
I'm like, oh, absolutely, and they're like, let me tell
you what happened to me. I was taking the garbage
out one time, and I've had at least three people
(23:42):
taking the garbage out telling this story. It's fascinating to
me just how many people really do have these stories,
so some of the other things has happened a few
of the watching incidents, which is cool because I was
looking through my photos yesterday and I really forgotten about this.
So there's a place and it's out Kye Road seven.
(24:04):
Kyrod seven is just super duper. It's a huge amount
of area. So if you keep hearing me say Kyrod seven,
there's all these ponds and lakes, all the strip mines.
They build it when they stripped a lot of this
and now it's grown back up. Literally, there's a high wall.
We've stopped out there several times just to take pictures
(24:26):
because it goes down this real long hill. It's right
behind playing field. But on the side of the wall
where they stripped it out, it looks like the face
of an Indian the way that the rock is carved,
and part of it it's just saddened out because there's
like a tree growing out his eyeball now and part
of his nose fell off. I've got a couple of
(24:46):
pictures and it used to look like an Indian hit.
It was very cool looking. Like I said, I'm going
through my old pictures and I had an old video
out there. It was right before Christmas. I was out
there twenty eighteen. I was just out doing some wood knocks.
It was eleven o'clock in the morning something like that, foggy,
overcast and pretty warm for December actually, And on the
(25:10):
video I totally forgot about this, which is wild. I
parked down right by the face and then walk back
up this way, and then there's like a hill. That
hill is the top of the high wall. So if
you walk up to the top of the hill and
try to go any farther, you'd better get a parachute.
It's a straight drop. It's not like you can catch
(25:32):
yourself falling down. You're done, so you gotta be very
careful out there. But anyways, there's stuff up in the tree,
and it seriously looked like a cat, like a big cat.
I'd put stuff up in a tree, or it could
have been a giant eagle nest or something like that,
but that's what I've originally caught my eye. So I'm
looking at that, I'm out above it, and then there's
(25:52):
a game trail you can see, and it even says
in my video, I'm like, you can see deer poop
all over the place. Here they're coming up this way
and I'm looking at this. It's a little bit of
dirt underneath these leaves, and I'm just looking down at it.
I'm like, man, it looks really fresh. So I go
down and I walked around because I didn't want to
step on it. I walked around and I moved the
(26:14):
leaves out of the way. Even on the video, sometimes
when you take those two dimensional pictures and videos and
you show a footprint, you're just like, what am I
looking at? I don't see anything, maybe a shape whatever.
You can see very clearly. You can see the toe indentations.
They're thick, and you can see the dirts rose up
(26:35):
in between the toes. Like I said, that was twenty eighteen,
so it was pretty cool just to find that again.
I think it was that same year in the spring.
Because Beth had knee surgery, she had spent the whole
winter in a wheelchair. We were concerned that she wasn't
going to be walking or walking right again. When it
(26:58):
came to spring, she got up out of that chair
and the doctor was like, you just need to run
with it, go get out and walk. So Beth was like,
We're gonna go walk. We're going to sol Fork and
we're gonna go for a walk. So we go out
to Morgan's trail. We get through the pine trees, turn
the left to go up that little sandy hill. I
think she had to stop tire shoe and she's, hey,
(27:21):
come here and look at this. And Beth is ambivalent.
She's a good sport and she's interested, but only because
of me. But she's come here and look at this.
I go over and look. This is actually a good
example of when I was talking about that two dimensional
because I have a picture of this foot, and it
doesn't do it justice. This foot was gigantic, right in
(27:42):
the middle of Morgan's trail, and it looked like it
stepped off of that little I couldn't find anything over here, though,
but it looked like it stepped off that little rise
where the pine trees are plot down right in the
middle of that sandy gravel mix. It's right in the
middle of that going up that hill. And then went
the other way over to the There's a lot of
(28:03):
hardwoods over on that side of the trail, so let
the little rise in them right there. But it was huge,
like I have size fifteen books and I could put
it inside of that and you could still see the
whole footprint around the outside of my boom. So that
was in that spring. Come around to spring of this
(28:25):
year and I'm on Morgan's trail again, almost in the
exact same spot. Off to the right, there's another huge
footprint over there. I took pictures of that and sent
it to John Hickinbottom. He's a park ranger, but he's
like the head of the Eco Center at the soul
Fork and I'm like, John, I don't have any casting
stuff with me because I just went to lunch in
(28:46):
Cambridge and I came out there just to walk after
lunch to take a hike. I wasn't squatching. I was
just out there walking around and I'm like, stright there, dude,
it's a huge. This one could have been a person,
but it was still a size eighteen foot. It's possible
to sit human being walked around on barefoot in the march.
(29:08):
But that was funny because I came back out two
months later and that print was still there. It was
deteriorated a lot, but it was still there. Because I
was with Gwyn Purcell. She was in town camping at
the Privet and Kid Ground and We went up all
the way to the top medte Her and a couple
other people. But I'm like, there's that foot print. It's
still there. Of course, we still didn't have any casting stuff,
(29:31):
but I found a three toed print up there the
same time. I don't know what that was. That was weird.
I sent it to Joe and Ron with while I'm weird,
I'm going to have to really start taking some casting
Mixcury well. And the reason I bring that up is
that's just taking a walk on Morgan's trail. That's not
even going out in the middle of the night, going
(29:51):
way out in the sticks and doing tree knocks, or
just going out there and sitting and waiting for him
to count. Because I know a lot of people told
me that's the way to go with that.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll
be right back after these messages.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
I went out one time, we went out the woodberry
and we heard this squealing noise. This is how I
describe it, the noise that squirrels make when they get
really mad. Imagine a squirrel it's about eighty pounds making
that noise up a tree about two hundred feet we
(30:32):
couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Me and Dave.
That's all in the daytime we were swatching. That day,
we were actually doing some research. We had walkie talkies,
we had two teams. We're talking back and forth. But
even when you're not even entrenched doing it, it's amazing
what goes on in the woods. I don't want to
(30:53):
get made. But when I talk to people and they're
just like, this stuff's not real, John, And I'm like,
you've never even gone out in the woods. You have
no idea that if I take you twenty feet off
the highway, like the State Route eighty three, if I
took you because I've tried this experiment, if I take
you twenty feet off the highway where you can't see
that road, and I spun you around in the circle,
(31:15):
you'd have no idea where you're at. You would be
completely lost in those woods. You have no idea what
you're talking about when you say there's four hundred million
game cares, so to to gut you any you don't
know what's talking. You just don't. Yeah, there's always I'd
like to get out. I'd love to get out more.
Maybe when the conference season is over, I might be
(31:39):
able to get out there, but like right now, we
have a fully packed October. It's been pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
So I tell you, I used to think when I
started getting into this early on, that you had to
be twenty five miles deep in the woods to have
an experience with these things. Absolutely not, just like you
said people taking out the tracks. I've interviewed people from
right here in my hometown of Lenore. Earlier this year,
a lady had an encounter with one of these things
(32:08):
behind a homeless shelter, going through a trash can. So
it can happen on trails, it can happen in places
that people don't expect it to. And I tell you,
I have cast some really good prints here on the property.
I've cast prints on my neighbor's property about a mile away.
One of the best prints that I have ever come
across that I happened to have my phone with me
(32:30):
and I took a couple of photos of I showed
it to Cliff Berrickman. We were at dinner one night
out in Idaho, and I showed it to Cliff and he's, dude,
that's a Sasquatch print.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Did you cast it? Of course not.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
I wasn't doing anything bigfoot. I didn't have casting material.
It was raining for the next three days, so it
was a wash. But now I don't go anywhere typically,
I don't go anywhere without at least having some kind
of casting material with me, because you never know when
you're going to run up on something like that. I
want to go back to the earlier siding because it
(33:04):
was resonating with me. Obviously, you had a physical visual experience.
When I was twelve, I had an encounter with one
of these things, and I didn't get to see it,
but my mom was right there in the house when
I came back to quote unquote safety and your mom
was into this stuff. She was watching that stuff on television.
When you had your experience at age nine, did you
(33:25):
talk to your mom about it? Did you tell her
what you had seen?
Speaker 3 (33:28):
I did not. I didn't want to tell any of
the adults. I already knew what their response would be.
Let's just put it that way. I think that's one
of the things my siblings and they never heard this
story until I was older because I never told I
didn't want to tell them. I was afraid of what
I would hear from them. That's my best answer. I
(33:50):
did not want them to doubt me. That would have
been too hard for me to take.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
I definitely get that, And for me, it was a
fear of not being allowed to go back in the woods.
If I told my mom what I'd experienced, should have
said your asses and going back in the woods. And
I've lived in the woods, so I can totally.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Relate to that.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yeah, you have been all over the place. You've talked
to anybody and everybody that's in the Bigfoot world, the
Bigfoot community. You've had tons of conversations with everybody. How
do you look at the difference? You obviously are aware
of the camps that are out there, the flesh and
blood versus the WU or high strangeness camps. Where are
(34:32):
you in your research and looking into these things. Are
you open minded to some of the weirder stranger things
that people say they experience when it comes to Bigfoot
or are you more in the flesh and blood camp.
I'm certainly not asking you to plan a flag by
any stretch of the imagination, no flag planting tonight, But
where are you on your research? Are you open to
(34:53):
that stuff or you more in the flesh and blood.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
I'm totally open to listening to everybody's point of view
on this because there has to be a flesh and
blood contingent to it. These things are leaving footprints. When
you listen to Cliff, the Cliff's all about it's an animal.
It's out there. People have found hair, It leaves footprints,
it leaves marks where it goes. We suspect it's building
(35:19):
some shelters or those the nests that they found. Guys
out in Washington found the Olympic project. Shane Corson came
here and did his presentation on that and talked about
those things are woven together, something with opposable thumbs. That's amazing.
That's some serious physical evidence. Granted you can't link one
(35:41):
thing to the other. We didn't catch them making it.
Shane even said that, but something did it. If somebody
was hoaxing that man, they need to get a life.
Good God. I sat out the woods and one together
took me fifteen years, but I owned those big butters.
Good lord, man.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
I'd definitely say all hoaxes need to get a life
and stop hoaxing. That's one of my biggest pet peeves
in all of Bigfoot. That's why I go after the
hoaxers on the other show. We don't talk about it
over here.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
So back to your original questions, There is a physical thing,
I am just of a mind. One of my favorite lines,
and it's been used in many science fiction films, or
is the most recent one that I can think of,
the first Thord movie. Your people call it magic, My
people call it science. We don't understand everything yet, and
(36:33):
I'm not saying this is exactly what it is, but
is it possible that they are occupying the same space
as ours but they're not here all the time, I
don't know, but they're here at some point in time. Obviously,
I'm right there. I don't want to say I'm on
the fence about it, because it just seems like they
(36:53):
do things that we just can't figure out. So it's
not the one thing that they are doing, some stuff
that we don't understand. And how they do that, I've
heard more than one. I've heard people talked about them cloaked.
I've seen pictures where people are like, do you see it?
And I don't know if you've ever seen those ones
where it looks like a klingon bird of prey, but
(37:14):
you can see it. It's there. What and the heck
is that? I talked to another dear friend of mine.
He told me he saw one out of the moonlight
and it was shimmering. He said, it was like you
can almost see through it. When the moon hit is hair,
it was like you could almost see through it. So
that fits right in with the other stuff. So if
(37:35):
that's the case, then maybe could be it. But they're
doing some things that they don't act like regular animals.
They're leaving traces, but they're not cutting huge schwats through
pieces of forest, whereas well, obviously a seven foot tall
creature walks through there. They're doing some things that are
to me, at least in my understanding, and maybe I'm
just not as informed as I should be. So I'm
(37:59):
right there, all right.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Before we get out of here, we mentioned it earlier,
tell everybody about Crowtown Squatchers, what it is and where
they can find you, guys.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
So Crowtown Squatchers is me and my wife Death and
a whole bunch of supporting casts that don't get talked
about enough. Our dear friend Amy who does our art,
all of our friends that support us. We've got lots
of people that come out. I don't want to call
them repeat customers. They're like family. Now they come and
see us at shows. They're always buying emerged from us,
(38:33):
and we love to see them and we love to
see everybody out on the road. So we got started.
It was at a Creature weekend at the High Bigfoot conference.
We were talking to one of the girls. She was
selling stuff from the Monster Mart down in the Blacky Creek.
I was like, do you work at the Monster March?
She goes, now, I'm just up here. They asked me
to come up and do this and I'm like, okay,
(38:54):
guys should do this and we were like no, She's yeah,
just get you some stuff, grab a booth. You want
to come to the shows. If you pay to be
a vendor, you just get your table and then you
can walk around and talk to everybody. In my defense,
Beth is the one who talked me into doing this.
That is the truth where she said. So we started.
(39:19):
Like the next year, I got old Mark the words.
We did the High big Foot Commerce. We had five
T shirts, some magnets, some necklaces that we made out
of clay. Beth made them out of Clay. I painted
them and we hung them on a string and we
went there and we sold some stuff. We had a
lot of fun. We'd got to meet Cliff and Bobo
and Bob kat Goldwaite was there that year. Then we
(39:41):
got to meet all these people and take picture and
it was a blast. We got to talk to people.
Like I said, I got to talk to people about
my encounter. It was really cool. And so we got
hooked and we started doing all those shows. We go around,
we get to talk to people, we get to hear
their stories. We'll do other shows like some flea markets
(40:01):
or things like that every now and then, especially during wintertime,
like we'll use a little Christmas show or something, and
we're usually the only Bigfoot people there and people will
come up and they want to talk about Bigfoot. They
want to share their stories with me. The hush tones,
Hey can I tell you about my encounter? They don't
want anybody around, Like they wait till people are you know,
(40:22):
they're looking at our all. They wait till people are
gone and they'll tell you. So it's really cool to
get to meet people like that and hear their stories.
So we get to like said, we travel all over
the Midwest. We just have a lot of fun with it.
We get to see all kinds of meat stuff and
go all over the place and meet great people. We
get to meet people like Brian and give him a
(40:44):
few pointers and help the guy along and look out,
now he's got to show it and he's going all
over the world squatching are little boys growing up.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
You guys definitely helped me in my first experience as
a vendor up at the conference and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I
can't thank you guys enough for that. It really did
help a lot, just having that camaraderie and knowing that
there were some really awesome people in Bigfoot because I
had no freaking clue what I was doing, and you
guys were my introduction to that. So I sincerely thank
(41:18):
you guys for that, because y'all are the kindest people
in the world. You your mother was there, Beth, and
I have enjoyed seeing you guys every single time I
get to see you out on the road. John, I
can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing your experiences. Man,
have had a blast talking to you.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
It's always a pleasure, and you hit the nail on
the head. The people that we get to interact with
the vendors, the speakers, the people doing the podcast. It's
like a big family. We all look out for each other,
we all stay in touch with one another. It's so
fun just to see everybody. And it's sad because cryptid
CON's coming up next month, and really that's the last
(41:57):
farewell of the season, is crypti Con it And then
you don't see everybody until next year when frog Man
It starts to conference season off. Now, so that's cool.
We got some book ends now, we got frogg Man
in the spring, and we got Cryptown in the phone.
It's a little bit of a sweet farewell there, and
then you get to see everybody in the spring.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
They say, you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay.
I don't want to be.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
We're all ouppen.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
This job everything for joy, for me, joy staying right.
You can't it run away.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Sissie, still stay inside step stills, the bass start plays
(44:12):
and psssts and things and
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Usedst instance
Today, I want to tell you about a journey that
I've been on for most of my life. Ever since
I was a kid, I've heard tales of Bigfoot and
wild men while spending time with my friends and family.
As I grew older and read more about the paranormal,
my interest in encryptids and other things strange only deepened.
That's why I'm so excited to share with you what
I've personally become involved with the Untold Radio Network. The
(00:21):
Untold Radio Network is a live streaming podcast network that
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where I talk about all things strange. This is more
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than just a podcast network. It's a community that allows
me to meet so many amazing people who share their
stories and experiences with strange. If you're interested in hearing
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make sure you check out the Untold Radio Network for
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what are you waiting for visit www dot untold radionetwork
(01:05):
dot com today.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Now, what are your reporting? I got a screen going
on here. Something just kid with my dog, something to
kill your dog? My dog. We're flying through there, over
the tree. I don't know how it did it? Okay, Damn,
I'm really confused. All I saw was my dog coming
over the fence, and name was dead once you hit
the ground. I didn't see any cars. All I saw
was my dog coming over the fence. Sat, what are
(01:45):
you reporting? We got some wonder or something crawling around
out here? Did you see what it was? It enough
out here? Look, I'm new to one doowing now and
I don't need anything. I don't want to go outside. Hello,
(02:10):
hit the fuddy out here? What quin I'm out there?
It's thought of a bench about sixty nine. I don't
know easy, I'm out there.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah, I'm walking right, heady, all right, folks with welcome
our guest to the show. It is John from Ohio.
Welcome to the show man.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Brian, I have been looking forward to this man. We
met three or four years ago. I was a first
time vendor up at the Gatlinburg conference. Next to you
guys in one of the vendor spots. We became fast friends,
had a great time that weekend, and I've seen you
guys out so many times. We'll certainly talk about some
of that stuff before we get out of here, but
(02:46):
you're here to share an experience. But I want to
start where I start with most people. What in the
world got you interested in the subject of Bigfoot to
begin with?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
There's a couple of pieces to that. Obviously. You can
see behind me. This is my Big flo slash atari
slash comic book slash Godzillas. This is the Man Cave,
but it's primarily Bigfoot. You can see the Steve Austin
Bigfoot right there behind me. I'm a gen X kid
(03:15):
born in nineteen seventy. I have so much love for
my mom. She left us a year and a half ago.
My mom loves science fiction, so I grew up watching
In Search of Star Trek reruns six million dollars Man
Space nineteen ninety nine. If it was in the seventies,
we were watching it. My mom loved it. That was
(03:38):
must watch TV back then. Whatever was on it was
what you were watching. That's why somebody that was there
traumatized by Heath Hall and The Lord's Welk Show because
that was what you were watching on Saturdays. Man, it
was terrible, but obviously six million dollars. Man the two
part Bigfoot episodes the most popular episodes they ever had.
(04:00):
That's why they had him back on the show so
many times. They had him on The Bonic Woman, A
big Foot and Wild Boy. That was a Saturday morning
show that a lot of people have never heard of,
which was just bonkers. It was like a Tarzan kind
of thing. Young Boy, it gets rescued by Bigfoot. So
I was watching all that stuff growing up and in
(04:21):
search of certainly as a huge part. Plus we got
to see a legend of Boding Creek sasquatched the legend
of Bigfoot. Here in Ohio and especially where we're at
in east central Ohio is what's called but Shockton is
basically the last county on the left in the Appalachian Area.
Like when you look at a map of Appalachia, Shockton
(04:43):
is like right here on the left. So we're almost
perfectly in between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, like one hundred miles
if you draw like a right angle. We used to
get Channel forty three out of Cleveland. There was a
guy named SuperHost on Saturday, and he would play these
godzill movies, Three Stooges, and sometimes you'd see these Bigfoot,
(05:03):
Legend of Boggie Creek, Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot, and
then Big Chuck. Little John was also out of Cleveland
on Friday nights and they would play those kind of
movies too. So growing up, we got to see a
lot of stuff. And like I said, it was my CTV,
so you had to watch it a little lot to
see that stuff over and over again, but we did.
(05:24):
So that got me into all the science fiction, Bigfoot
and all that. I guess I shouldn't leave out the
books either. We had books in the elementary school. I've
got some of them that we sell on the table
that you see about Bigfoot, Asian aliens, all the monsters,
all that stuff. You get to check it out at
the school library. And I'd wear those books out by myself.
(05:45):
We had a lot of stuff, what of good stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
I too, am a gen xer and I grew up
with all of those amazing shows that you're talking about
and the books. NeSSI was my first love. The lockness Monster.
It was must have books. You get the little library
that would come in and you could go to the
books sale. I love that stuff. That's where I fell
in love with NeSSI and the other cryptids. That being said,
(06:09):
was it one of those things that drove you out
into the woods to look for these things? Did you
want to become a researcher and find out more about
them or did you stumble into your experiences while you
were doing other things.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
The first experience I had I stumbled into it again
growing up in the seventies was go outside and play
with a stick. You made your own fun. It's right
here on the east side of Kashaktan, which from where
we live right now. My encounter where it happens not
even a mile from my house up on this hillside
right here. All that land going out to the east
(06:44):
was called Old Man McCoy's Hill is what we called now. Yeah,
there's several rolling hills and valleys back in there. There's
three ponds, and that's what we went out there. We
went up there for two reasons. We went out there
to fish. Old Man McCoy he had a four to ten.
He'd load all his shells up with rock salt, and
he would shoot at you with the rock salt. He
(07:06):
was a mean old man. The story was two of
his boys died up there. One of them drowned in
one of the ponds, and then the other one was
killed in a really bad rain store and my lightning
strike hit a tree and it fell on him. That
was the stories that we were told. So we would
go up there and play cat and mouse with him,
plus we'd go fishing. My first encounter, we were heading
(07:28):
up that way. To get up there, you go through
these line of houses that are up on this hill.
We'd cut right through their yard, go up into the woods,
get on the two track. It ran like in a
almost like a half of you up to the top
of the hill. You had to be careful because he'd
come down that way sometimes. He had an old beat
up I think it was a green truck or red truck.
(07:50):
So we're walking up the two track. It was me
and my friend. My buddy's a little older than me.
He was thirteen, I was nine. We're going up through there.
We got our fish and stuff. Also, I have to
point out this Caveat at the time, we were heavily
influenced by Marvel Comics. We thought we were vigilanties, so
(08:14):
we occasionally had these. If you remember the character Iron
Fist from the comic books, he had this mask that
just had his eyes and it would wrap around your
head like a bandana. So we had a couple of those.
We didn't o man that day, but we thought we
were vigilanti superheroes. We're walking up this two track, and
(08:35):
the way I remember it, the way I always explained
it was, it seemed to be the woods up to
the right of me just exploded with noise. All these
trees start shaking. Now when I say trees, these are saplings.
They weren't shaking giant oak trees or anything. I looked
up to the right. The sun is back behind that,
(08:55):
so all I can see is shadow ish. I see
the con head down to these huge shoulders. That's all
I remember as far as the encounter goes. We both
just booked it back down the two track. But of
course we get down so far and we decided to
jump off the side of the two track. We decided
(09:18):
we were going to run some fishing line across the
trail because we're going to trip him if he comes
after us. We're going to trip him, and we both
got like little buck knives with us. Poor mister Bigfoot.
We were plot is demies already. I don't remember if
the creature made a noise at all. It's possible, but
(09:38):
I don't recall that. Of course, this is quite a
long time ago. I don't remember a smell. I don't
remember smelling anything. It smell is a pretty powerful reminder
you usually things like that were stuck with. But all
I remember is, like I said, we were bebopping up
through there. All of a sudden we saw it took
off run and I think it was about ten seconds maybe,
(10:00):
if that long, I think it was right after we
got done stretching the fishing line across the trail. We
looked at each other, let's get the hell out of
here and off the hill. We were booking, and we
ran all the way back down. People probably thought we
were up something, because running through their yard, down over
the hill, and then all the way down to Wilson Avenue,
it's a little bit of a trip. So that's out
(10:22):
the first encounter went. I got home and dropped my stuff.
I went up to my buddy's house. He lived up
the street, I told him about it, and he made
fun of me. That was the first thing I think,
but it's not real. And then of course he goes
on to tell everybody I saw one. I'm getting tortured,
I'm getting made fun of it. Occasionally through school people
(10:44):
would say, yeah, won't you ask truly he saw a
big boot one time, because I would tell people every
now and then about it. There's a couple more caveats too,
but the one I want to talk about real quick
before I go off on wherever I'll end up going.
And I've been together now for almost twelve years. Right
after we got together, I don't know if we were
married yet, but we'd been together for a little bit.
(11:07):
The county fair came around and I saw my buddy
that was there with me that day, and I didn't
have any bigfoot shirt on or nothing. I wasn't doing
this yet. Full disclosure. I've been in recovery now for
fifteen years, and I've found that talking to people and
like minds, it's cathartic. It's good for your soul. If
you have an encounter, if you have something that's happened
(11:29):
to you, you need to talk about it. You need
to get it out there in the open. So I
saw him at the fair and I told Beth, I said,
will you wait for me right here? I will go
ask him something. And I walked over to him and
I said, Hey, do you remember that? And this is
all I said, Tom, do you remember that day up
on old man McCoy's hill. Now we were on that
hill hundreds of times, so I didn't ask him that
(11:52):
day when we saw the bigfoot? I said, do you
remember that day we were up from old men McCoy's hill.
He didn't skip a beat, he said, John, it was
a big It blew me away because, like I said,
he's a little older than I was, so he would
have a better recollection. Plus he didn't destroy his ma
brain cells. This I did in my twenties and thirties
with heavy duty partying. That was really cool to get
(12:15):
some reassurance like that, because as we get older, our
memories do change. I know this. It's part of my
job is to understand psychology a little bit. It's short
and sweet. That's what happened. It's one of those things
that I never thought would ever happened. Never occurred to
me it would. I just did the little show with
a friend. I met him on Twitter. He doesn't podcast.
(12:38):
Billy Delicious is his name, call him Doc Strange. But
we were talking about the movie The Mysterious Monsters, the
one that Peter Graves did in nineteen seventy five. And
in that movie there's a map and it shows the
Bigfoot sightings, how many had been in each state. In
the seventies, all you ever heard was California, Oregon, Washington,
(13:01):
and even British Columbia. You never heard of Bigfoot until
Boggy Creek. Really you never heard of anything ever east
of the Rockies. But there's a little map on there.
It shows eight sidings in Ohio in seventy five. So
when I saw that, I remember going, hey, that was
(13:21):
some validation too. See there's been other sidings in Ohio.
Like said, I was a young kid. I didn't have
no idea how to do research or try to find
if other people had been seeing things in Ohio or
anything like that. You can just stumble across that stuff.
Like I said, that was some good validation. Now to
(13:42):
add to this, I'm going to jump forward to nineteen
eighty seven, so about eight years, eight years and about
two miles as the crow flies out to one of
the valleys that I said that when you go out
east of Kashocktan, there's just hills and valleys, hills and
valleys all the way out to a little town called
west If. Yet there's a place out there. We called
(14:02):
it the Valley at Forever in high school because we
used to go out there and we'd have huge bonfires
and parties and there was a place to meet. It
was a good location. It was out of town enough
to where the cops would leave a salon for the
most part until they found out about it. Of course
they got to ruin everything anyways. So we were out
(14:24):
there one day. It was just me, and it was
about this time of the year because my one buddy
had not left for school yet. Just about everybody else
had gone off to college. I was starting my senior
year and there was four of us out there. We
had two vehicles. So we're out there and we were
having a couple of years and from the back of
the valley, this valley is shaped basically like a bowl,
(14:46):
and it's got trees rimmed around all the way around
the top of it, so it's a bowl that goes up.
It's all grass down here, and then it goes up
and then there's a tree line all the way around it.
It's really cool. It's kind of like an amphitheater.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
And stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll
be right back after these messages.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
So from the back of the valley we hear this
god awful catterwall and we were all just what is that.
My brother famously told me it was a sick cow.
We're shooking up by this, but we're still just jalling,
listening to some music. And next thing we know. So
if you think about a clock, so the back of
(15:30):
the valley's twelve o'clock. Next thing, about two o'clock, here
comes this noise again. It's moving closer to us. We're
over here at about three o'clock as far as the
clock goes, so it makes another noise, but it's not
coming out of the tree line. Whatever it is is
standing in the tree line. We don't see anything moving,
(15:52):
we don't hear anything moving, but this thing's moving closer
to us. And as it's moving closer to us, we're
all grouping closer together. So then the next time, about
ten minutes later, it lets off a really nice loud reverberating,
and it's really getting close to up the hill from us.
(16:12):
So now we're all grouped closer together. And I remember,
I don't know if I said it or someone else
said it, that bang screams from the top of this hill.
We're getting the heck out of here. It wasn't a
few minutes later, and it was right up the hill
from us. Like I said, never came out of that
tree line, but it led out a roar, it rattled,
it went right through you. You could feel it. We
(16:33):
didn't even say a word. I just remember thinking we
looked like cartoon characters into the vehicles, and then it's
about it's probably two miles. You go up the hill
and then down the hill into the high school parking lot.
And I don't know about when you were in high school, Brian,
but when we were in high school, summer break we
spelled our summer break in the high school parking lot.
(16:54):
You spend all year trying to get out of there,
and then as soon as summer rolls are out, where
you want to hang out. Oh, let's say I got
the pargo out of the high school. It's good centralized
location it's a good meeting spot. But we zoomed back
down there, we jump out of the vehicles. What then
was that we're just freaking out. And then it was
that weekend. I remember the High State was playing because
(17:17):
we were going to have a party at my buddy's house.
This ended up being the first time I actually went
squatching because four of our other friends, I think it
was two weeks before our incident, were coming down the
road that's off of that road that takes it in
the valley. It's called Morgan Run Road. They were his
(17:37):
boltswade and driving. They had a road crossing and they
said it was a juvenile smaller one rolled out into
the road and stood up and ran off. They went
past it and backed up. What I was told was
that thing was standing there. When they backed up, they
could see it right there on the side of the road,
(17:58):
and it was doing this keeping its head down and
his shoulders. It's primate like behavior, trying to hide kind
of like that. And my one friend that I still
go squatching, what had told me he's you could see
he called a hair. He didn't say it was for
he said it was hair. He said, you could see
like in between you can see the hair and you
(18:19):
could see the skin, and it was just standing there.
The guy that was driving came with us that Saturday.
We went out back out to that valley and we
went around looking for footprints. Now, the funniest part about
looking for footprints is when we were looking on the
other side of the valleys, because I think I did
want to go. They didn't really want to find anything,
(18:41):
cause well was freaked out because like I said, we
were over here looking. I remember it was raining. We
were just will find some footprints or something, and we
didn't find nothing. But we didn't go to that other
side either. I can't remember if that was the reason.
It might have been because it was just not as
walkable as the other side. And what was wild too,
was it was nineteen eighty seven, so Don keating he
(19:03):
was putting out his signs and stuff. You could find
him on trees, you can find him on telephone pools
out in the woods if you had a big foot counter.
And I kicked myself in the butt every day for
not doing that. Because I knew there was a guy
in Newcomers Town we could call and talk to him
about this. We didn't do it. To this day. It's
like one of those things you're like, should it go
(19:25):
to the wood? I'm sure things would have been a
whole lot different as far as what got me to
come back around. When I hit my twenties, I was
out in the woods all the time. But we never
really were looking for big w You were always having
parties and stuff. It's funny because I went squatching one
time with dog Keating. We went out kind of road
(19:46):
seven hearing Shock, and it was all our old party spots.
The coal company Peabody and the coal companies and the
power plants and all that, because we had a power
plant out here Shaking County. It's in a little town
called Conesville, and so all these back roads we had
all these really cool lakes and ponds, and these back
(20:10):
roads were maintained by the coal companies because that's where
all the coal trucks went through there all over the place.
So we had plenty of party spots, swimming holes, fishing holes.
After the coal company basically closed down, they blocked a
lot of these side access roads off and some of
(20:30):
them became impassable or they were just really rough, you
mean to four wheel drive vehicles, or they just bloked
them off completely. You couldn't get back there much you walk.
I got to go out squatching. What don Keating and
Dave Wickham and a few others. Don It had asked me,
you've ever been out here before? That's been five years
of my life out here. I passed out over there.
(20:52):
That's not over there. It was really cool to just
to get out there. These were hot spots. I'm sure
people asked me. We never really squatched, but I bet
you could have been a fly on the wall. Theoretically,
there was probably some things watching us out They were
probably fascinated by our stupid behavior. That was really cool.
And like I said, one of the reasons I got
(21:12):
back into squatching, Finding big Foot was on TV. I
got sober in twenty ten, and I'd been going to
meetings and things like that, and I remember we went
to one of the High Bigfoot conferences in twenty fifteen
or twenty sixteen. I think it was Bruce that came
up to me and was asking me if I had
(21:33):
a story. Beth was like, yeah, he's got a story.
You didn't need to listen to a story he needs
to tell you. I'm a timid about saying it, because
every time I talked about it, people look at you
like you're growing another head out of your shoulder. Are
you regular crazy or are you special crazy? No, this
really happened. So that was, Like I said, one of
(21:53):
the reasons I really liked going to the conferences was
you could talk to somebody. It was very cathartic when
you could talk to people similar stories that would listen
to you, that wanted to hear your pinions or just
listen to what you had to say and say, man,
that's amazing. Now here listen to this story or that story.
And that's another reason that I wanted to get it
(22:14):
out there. This is what I told Doug Waller. I
talked to him.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Doug.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
He's a author here in Ohio. He collects people's stories.
He's written six books, and he put my story in
his sixth book. I told him one of the reasons
I wanted to get it out there was I'm hoping
somebody reads that and goes, man, somebody around here or
close by was like, this is what happened to me
(22:39):
in nineteen seventy nine, and it was right there by
your story. It happened in the same spot or it
happened really close to that. Because you've heard a lot
of stories, you know how that goes. It's amazing how
many people have encounters that are just afraid to talk
about it. Sad at shows, if you're watching the crowd
and you're watching a speaker, I can see people they're
(23:00):
just bursting at the seams one to tell their story,
but they're just afraid to open up about it. That's
one of the things I want to get people to
talk about it because it's freeing for one thing. Plus,
like I said, another reason that your story could help
somebody else come out and talk about something, and it
can link a chain of events that it would just
(23:21):
blow your mind. I've had so many people in my office.
I've got big Foot stuff up on the wall of
my Bigfoot calendar. I've got a big Foot bobblehead on
my desk, and they're like, you believe in Bigfoot? And
I'm like, oh, absolutely, and they're like, let me tell
you what happened to me. I was taking the garbage
out one time, and I've had at least three people
(23:42):
taking the garbage out telling this story. It's fascinating to
me just how many people really do have these stories,
so some of the other things has happened a few
of the watching incidents, which is cool because I was
looking through my photos yesterday and I really forgotten about this.
So there's a place and it's out Kye Road seven.
(24:04):
Kyrod seven is just super duper. It's a huge amount
of area. So if you keep hearing me say Kyrod seven,
there's all these ponds and lakes, all the strip mines.
They build it when they stripped a lot of this
and now it's grown back up. Literally, there's a high wall.
We've stopped out there several times just to take pictures
(24:26):
because it goes down this real long hill. It's right
behind playing field. But on the side of the wall
where they stripped it out, it looks like the face
of an Indian the way that the rock is carved,
and part of it it's just saddened out because there's
like a tree growing out his eyeball now and part
of his nose fell off. I've got a couple of
(24:46):
pictures and it used to look like an Indian hit.
It was very cool looking. Like I said, I'm going
through my old pictures and I had an old video
out there. It was right before Christmas. I was out
there twenty eighteen. I was just out doing some wood knocks.
It was eleven o'clock in the morning something like that, foggy,
overcast and pretty warm for December actually, And on the
(25:10):
video I totally forgot about this, which is wild. I
parked down right by the face and then walk back
up this way, and then there's like a hill. That
hill is the top of the high wall. So if
you walk up to the top of the hill and
try to go any farther, you'd better get a parachute.
It's a straight drop. It's not like you can catch
(25:32):
yourself falling down. You're done, so you gotta be very
careful out there. But anyways, there's stuff up in the tree,
and it seriously looked like a cat, like a big cat.
I'd put stuff up in a tree, or it could
have been a giant eagle nest or something like that,
but that's what I've originally caught my eye. So I'm
looking at that, I'm out above it, and then there's
(25:52):
a game trail you can see, and it even says
in my video, I'm like, you can see deer poop
all over the place. Here they're coming up this way
and I'm looking at this. It's a little bit of
dirt underneath these leaves, and I'm just looking down at it.
I'm like, man, it looks really fresh. So I go
down and I walked around because I didn't want to
step on it. I walked around and I moved the
(26:14):
leaves out of the way. Even on the video, sometimes
when you take those two dimensional pictures and videos and
you show a footprint, you're just like, what am I
looking at? I don't see anything, maybe a shape whatever.
You can see very clearly. You can see the toe indentations.
They're thick, and you can see the dirts rose up
(26:35):
in between the toes. Like I said, that was twenty eighteen,
so it was pretty cool just to find that again.
I think it was that same year in the spring.
Because Beth had knee surgery, she had spent the whole
winter in a wheelchair. We were concerned that she wasn't
going to be walking or walking right again. When it
(26:58):
came to spring, she got up out of that chair
and the doctor was like, you just need to run
with it, go get out and walk. So Beth was like,
We're gonna go walk. We're going to sol Fork and
we're gonna go for a walk. So we go out
to Morgan's trail. We get through the pine trees, turn
the left to go up that little sandy hill. I
think she had to stop tire shoe and she's, hey,
(27:21):
come here and look at this. And Beth is ambivalent.
She's a good sport and she's interested, but only because
of me. But she's come here and look at this.
I go over and look. This is actually a good
example of when I was talking about that two dimensional
because I have a picture of this foot, and it
doesn't do it justice. This foot was gigantic, right in
(27:42):
the middle of Morgan's trail, and it looked like it
stepped off of that little I couldn't find anything over here, though,
but it looked like it stepped off that little rise
where the pine trees are plot down right in the
middle of that sandy gravel mix. It's right in the
middle of that going up that hill. And then went
the other way over to the There's a lot of
(28:03):
hardwoods over on that side of the trail, so let
the little rise in them right there. But it was huge,
like I have size fifteen books and I could put
it inside of that and you could still see the
whole footprint around the outside of my boom. So that
was in that spring. Come around to spring of this
(28:25):
year and I'm on Morgan's trail again, almost in the
exact same spot. Off to the right, there's another huge
footprint over there. I took pictures of that and sent
it to John Hickinbottom. He's a park ranger, but he's
like the head of the Eco Center at the soul
Fork and I'm like, John, I don't have any casting
stuff with me because I just went to lunch in
(28:46):
Cambridge and I came out there just to walk after
lunch to take a hike. I wasn't squatching. I was
just out there walking around and I'm like, stright there, dude,
it's a huge. This one could have been a person,
but it was still a size eighteen foot. It's possible
to sit human being walked around on barefoot in the march.
(29:08):
But that was funny because I came back out two
months later and that print was still there. It was
deteriorated a lot, but it was still there. Because I
was with Gwyn Purcell. She was in town camping at
the Privet and Kid Ground and We went up all
the way to the top medte Her and a couple
other people. But I'm like, there's that foot print. It's
still there. Of course, we still didn't have any casting stuff,
(29:31):
but I found a three toed print up there the
same time. I don't know what that was. That was weird.
I sent it to Joe and Ron with while I'm weird,
I'm going to have to really start taking some casting
Mixcury well. And the reason I bring that up is
that's just taking a walk on Morgan's trail. That's not
even going out in the middle of the night, going
(29:51):
way out in the sticks and doing tree knocks, or
just going out there and sitting and waiting for him
to count. Because I know a lot of people told
me that's the way to go with that.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see. We'll
be right back after these messages.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
I went out one time, we went out the woodberry
and we heard this squealing noise. This is how I
describe it, the noise that squirrels make when they get
really mad. Imagine a squirrel it's about eighty pounds making
that noise up a tree about two hundred feet we
(30:32):
couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Me and Dave.
That's all in the daytime we were swatching. That day,
we were actually doing some research. We had walkie talkies,
we had two teams. We're talking back and forth. But
even when you're not even entrenched doing it, it's amazing
what goes on in the woods. I don't want to
(30:53):
get made. But when I talk to people and they're
just like, this stuff's not real, John, And I'm like,
you've never even gone out in the woods. You have
no idea that if I take you twenty feet off
the highway, like the State Route eighty three, if I
took you because I've tried this experiment, if I take
you twenty feet off the highway where you can't see
that road, and I spun you around in the circle,
(31:15):
you'd have no idea where you're at. You would be
completely lost in those woods. You have no idea what
you're talking about when you say there's four hundred million
game cares, so to to gut you any you don't
know what's talking. You just don't. Yeah, there's always I'd
like to get out. I'd love to get out more.
Maybe when the conference season is over, I might be
(31:39):
able to get out there, but like right now, we
have a fully packed October. It's been pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
So I tell you, I used to think when I
started getting into this early on, that you had to
be twenty five miles deep in the woods to have
an experience with these things. Absolutely not, just like you
said people taking out the tracks. I've interviewed people from
right here in my hometown of Lenore. Earlier this year,
a lady had an encounter with one of these things
(32:08):
behind a homeless shelter, going through a trash can. So
it can happen on trails, it can happen in places
that people don't expect it to. And I tell you,
I have cast some really good prints here on the property.
I've cast prints on my neighbor's property about a mile away.
One of the best prints that I have ever come
across that I happened to have my phone with me
(32:30):
and I took a couple of photos of I showed
it to Cliff Berrickman. We were at dinner one night
out in Idaho, and I showed it to Cliff and he's, dude,
that's a Sasquatch print.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
Did you cast it? Of course not.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
I wasn't doing anything bigfoot. I didn't have casting material.
It was raining for the next three days, so it
was a wash. But now I don't go anywhere typically,
I don't go anywhere without at least having some kind
of casting material with me, because you never know when
you're going to run up on something like that. I
want to go back to the earlier siding because it
(33:04):
was resonating with me. Obviously, you had a physical visual experience.
When I was twelve, I had an encounter with one
of these things, and I didn't get to see it,
but my mom was right there in the house when
I came back to quote unquote safety and your mom
was into this stuff. She was watching that stuff on television.
When you had your experience at age nine, did you
(33:25):
talk to your mom about it? Did you tell her
what you had seen?
Speaker 3 (33:28):
I did not. I didn't want to tell any of
the adults. I already knew what their response would be.
Let's just put it that way. I think that's one
of the things my siblings and they never heard this
story until I was older because I never told I
didn't want to tell them. I was afraid of what
I would hear from them. That's my best answer. I
(33:50):
did not want them to doubt me. That would have
been too hard for me to take.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
I definitely get that, And for me, it was a
fear of not being allowed to go back in the woods.
If I told my mom what I'd experienced, should have
said your asses and going back in the woods. And
I've lived in the woods, so I can totally.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Relate to that.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Yeah, you have been all over the place. You've talked
to anybody and everybody that's in the Bigfoot world, the
Bigfoot community. You've had tons of conversations with everybody. How
do you look at the difference? You obviously are aware
of the camps that are out there, the flesh and
blood versus the WU or high strangeness camps. Where are
(34:32):
you in your research and looking into these things. Are
you open minded to some of the weirder stranger things
that people say they experience when it comes to Bigfoot
or are you more in the flesh and blood camp.
I'm certainly not asking you to plan a flag by
any stretch of the imagination, no flag planting tonight, But
where are you on your research? Are you open to
(34:53):
that stuff or you more in the flesh and blood.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
I'm totally open to listening to everybody's point of view
on this because there has to be a flesh and
blood contingent to it. These things are leaving footprints. When
you listen to Cliff, the Cliff's all about it's an animal.
It's out there. People have found hair, It leaves footprints,
it leaves marks where it goes. We suspect it's building
(35:19):
some shelters or those the nests that they found. Guys
out in Washington found the Olympic project. Shane Corson came
here and did his presentation on that and talked about
those things are woven together, something with opposable thumbs. That's amazing.
That's some serious physical evidence. Granted you can't link one
(35:41):
thing to the other. We didn't catch them making it.
Shane even said that, but something did it. If somebody
was hoaxing that man, they need to get a life.
Good God. I sat out the woods and one together
took me fifteen years, but I owned those big butters.
Good lord, man.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
I'd definitely say all hoaxes need to get a life
and stop hoaxing. That's one of my biggest pet peeves
in all of Bigfoot. That's why I go after the
hoaxers on the other show. We don't talk about it
over here.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
So back to your original questions, There is a physical thing,
I am just of a mind. One of my favorite lines,
and it's been used in many science fiction films, or
is the most recent one that I can think of,
the first Thord movie. Your people call it magic, My
people call it science. We don't understand everything yet, and
(36:33):
I'm not saying this is exactly what it is, but
is it possible that they are occupying the same space
as ours but they're not here all the time, I
don't know, but they're here at some point in time. Obviously,
I'm right there. I don't want to say I'm on
the fence about it, because it just seems like they
(36:53):
do things that we just can't figure out. So it's
not the one thing that they are doing, some stuff
that we don't understand. And how they do that, I've
heard more than one. I've heard people talked about them cloaked.
I've seen pictures where people are like, do you see it?
And I don't know if you've ever seen those ones
where it looks like a klingon bird of prey, but
(37:14):
you can see it. It's there. What and the heck
is that? I talked to another dear friend of mine.
He told me he saw one out of the moonlight
and it was shimmering. He said, it was like you
can almost see through it. When the moon hit is hair,
it was like you could almost see through it. So
that fits right in with the other stuff. So if
(37:35):
that's the case, then maybe could be it. But they're
doing some things that they don't act like regular animals.
They're leaving traces, but they're not cutting huge schwats through
pieces of forest, whereas well, obviously a seven foot tall
creature walks through there. They're doing some things that are
to me, at least in my understanding, and maybe I'm
just not as informed as I should be. So I'm
(37:59):
right there, all right.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Before we get out of here, we mentioned it earlier,
tell everybody about Crowtown Squatchers, what it is and where
they can find you, guys.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
So Crowtown Squatchers is me and my wife Death and
a whole bunch of supporting casts that don't get talked
about enough. Our dear friend Amy who does our art,
all of our friends that support us. We've got lots
of people that come out. I don't want to call
them repeat customers. They're like family. Now they come and
see us at shows. They're always buying emerged from us,
(38:33):
and we love to see them and we love to
see everybody out on the road. So we got started.
It was at a Creature weekend at the High Bigfoot conference.
We were talking to one of the girls. She was
selling stuff from the Monster Mart down in the Blacky Creek.
I was like, do you work at the Monster March?
She goes, now, I'm just up here. They asked me
to come up and do this and I'm like, okay,
(38:54):
guys should do this and we were like no, She's yeah,
just get you some stuff, grab a booth. You want
to come to the shows. If you pay to be
a vendor, you just get your table and then you
can walk around and talk to everybody. In my defense,
Beth is the one who talked me into doing this.
That is the truth where she said. So we started.
(39:19):
Like the next year, I got old Mark the words.
We did the High big Foot Commerce. We had five
T shirts, some magnets, some necklaces that we made out
of clay. Beth made them out of Clay. I painted
them and we hung them on a string and we
went there and we sold some stuff. We had a
lot of fun. We'd got to meet Cliff and Bobo
and Bob kat Goldwaite was there that year. Then we
(39:41):
got to meet all these people and take picture and
it was a blast. We got to talk to people.
Like I said, I got to talk to people about
my encounter. It was really cool. And so we got
hooked and we started doing all those shows. We go around,
we get to talk to people, we get to hear
their stories. We'll do other shows like some flea markets
(40:01):
or things like that every now and then, especially during wintertime,
like we'll use a little Christmas show or something, and
we're usually the only Bigfoot people there and people will
come up and they want to talk about Bigfoot. They
want to share their stories with me. The hush tones,
Hey can I tell you about my encounter? They don't
want anybody around, Like they wait till people are you know,
(40:22):
they're looking at our all. They wait till people are
gone and they'll tell you. So it's really cool to
get to meet people like that and hear their stories.
So we get to like said, we travel all over
the Midwest. We just have a lot of fun with it.
We get to see all kinds of meat stuff and
go all over the place and meet great people. We
get to meet people like Brian and give him a
(40:44):
few pointers and help the guy along and look out,
now he's got to show it and he's going all
over the world squatching are little boys growing up.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
You guys definitely helped me in my first experience as
a vendor up at the conference and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I
can't thank you guys enough for that. It really did
help a lot, just having that camaraderie and knowing that
there were some really awesome people in Bigfoot because I
had no freaking clue what I was doing, and you
guys were my introduction to that. So I sincerely thank
(41:18):
you guys for that, because y'all are the kindest people
in the world. You your mother was there, Beth, and
I have enjoyed seeing you guys every single time I
get to see you out on the road. John, I
can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing your experiences. Man,
have had a blast talking to you.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
It's always a pleasure, and you hit the nail on
the head. The people that we get to interact with
the vendors, the speakers, the people doing the podcast. It's
like a big family. We all look out for each other,
we all stay in touch with one another. It's so
fun just to see everybody. And it's sad because cryptid
CON's coming up next month, and really that's the last
(41:57):
farewell of the season, is crypti Con it And then
you don't see everybody until next year when frog Man
It starts to conference season off. Now, so that's cool.
We got some book ends now, we got frogg Man
in the spring, and we got Cryptown in the phone.
It's a little bit of a sweet farewell there, and
then you get to see everybody in the spring.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
They say, you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay.
I don't want to be.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
We're all ouppen.
Speaker 1 (42:56):
This job everything for joy, for me, joy staying right.
You can't it run away.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Sissie, still stay inside step stills, the bass start plays
(44:12):
and psssts and things and
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Usedst instance
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