Bigfoot Let Them Walk Away

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, and let's head off into the woods if you dare.

There's something I've learned, after nearly four decades of doing this, after all the interviews, the field research, the late nights, sitting in places most people wouldn't go in broad daylight, I've learned that the stories that stick with you, the ones that burrow in and won't let go, They aren't the dramatic ones. They aren't the stories where somebody saw something for half a second through the trees and went

home with a good campfire tale. No, the ones that keep me up at night are the quiet ones, the slow ones, the encounters where something took its time, where it watched, where it made a decision about whether or not to let you leave. That's what you're about to hear. I've been collecting accounts like these for a long time. People send them to me, They call, they write long emails at two in the morning because they can't sleep,

and they've never told anyone the full story. And I can always tell the difference between someone who's embellishing and someone who's still shaking people. In these accounts, they're still shaking, some of them decades later. What I've put together here are five encounters, five separate people, five different parts of this country, five different decades, and every single one of them shares something in common. Not the details. The details

are all different. What they share is the aftermath. Every one of these people changed the way they lived because of what happened to them. They stopped going to places they'd gone their whole lives. They gave up hobbies they'd built their identities around. They rearranged their entire relationship with the outdoors because something out there showed them in no uncertain terms that they were not at the top of the food chain. I'm not going to tell you what

to believe. That's never been what this show is about. What I am going to tell you is that these people believe it, and after you hear what they went through, I think you'll understand why.

specifically asked me not to use their last names. A couple of them took months to even agree to let me share their stories at all. These aren't people chasing cliques or trying to sell a book. These are people who went through something they can't explain, and they've been carrying it alone for a long time. Our first account comes from a man named Dale, out of sequem Washington.

Dale grew up hunting the Olympic Peninsula. He'd been in those mountains his entire life, and one morning in the fall of nineteen seventy eight, everything changed in about thirty seconds. Here's Dale, Brian. My daughter listens to your show and she's been after me about it for months. She says, I need to get it out of my system. I don't think that's possible, but I told her i'd try so here I am. My name's Dale. I'm seventy one now. I live in Sequem, Washington, and I've been here most

of my life. I grew up hunting these mountains. My father taught me. His father taught him. That's just what you did out here. I started tagging along when I was eight years old, and by the time I was sixteen, I was going out on my own. I knew those woods. I'm not saying that to sound tough. I'm saying it because I need you to understand that what happened to me in October of nineteen seventy eight wasn't the result of some greenhorn wandering into the timber and getting spooked

by a bear. I was twenty three. It was the second week of October ELK season, I'd gone out alone, which wasn't unusual for me. I preferred it actually. I was hunting a drainage off the Do's wallops, up above a creek bottom where I'd seen sign earlier that week. There'd been fresh row ubs on the alders and some good tracks in the mud along the water. I figured i'd get up into a good spot before light and wait.

I drove in before dawn, parked at a pull off i'd used a dozen times, grabbed my rifle, my pack, and a thermos, and started hiking in. It was cold, low forties, maybe fog sitting in the valley like it always does that time of year. You couldn't see more than forty or fifty yards in front of you, and even that was fuzzy.

the branches and nothing else. I sat there for maybe forty five minutes. The sky started getting gray, just barely. You know that moment where it's not really daylight yet, but you can start to make things out, Trees take shape, you can see the ground. That's where I was when I heard something moving below me.

a bear. We've got black bears all through that country, and they'll move through the bottoms early in the morning. I just sat there, watching the fog, waiting for whatever it was to come into view. And then the smell hit me. I've cleaned more elk and deer than I could ever count. I've been around dead animals in various states of decay. I've smelled bear dens. This wasn't any

of that. It was something else entirely. It was sharp, organic, almost chemical, like if you took the worst body odor you've ever encountered and mixed it with wet dog and rotten vegetation. It was so strong my eyes watered. I remember pulling my collar up over my nose. That's how bad it was. Whatever was down there had stopped moving. I couldn't hear it anymore, but the smell was getting stronger, which told me it hadn't left. It was close, and it was still. Then the fog shifted just enough and

I saw it. It was standing at the base of the slope, maybe sixty yards below me, partially behind a big hemlock. At first I thought I was looking at a man. My first, honest to God thought was that some other hunter had come in on the same drainage and was standing there in a dark coat. Because the shape was upright, two legs, two arms, shoulders, but the proportions were way off for a person. I could see

that even through the fog. The shoulders were too wide, way too wide, and the arms hung too far down, They hung almost to the knees. The whole body was thick in a way that a human body isn't. Not fat, not muscular in the way you'd think of a bodybuilder, just dense, packed, like every part of it was built heavier than it had any right to be. The way it stood was wrong too. A man standing still in the cold shifts his weight, he moves, he adjusts. This

thing was rooted, absolutely motionless from the waist down. The stillness of it was unnatural. It was the kind of stillness that takes effort, or that comes naturally to something that's used to standing still for a very long time, waiting watching. It was covered in hair, dark brown, almost black, and it was matted in places, clumped, wet looking. The hair on the shoulders was longer than on the arms. It didn't look like fur, not the way a bear's

coat looks, uniform and groomed. This was more like the hair on a neglected animal, uneven, patchy in some spots, thick in others. I couldn't see the face clearly, not at that distance, not in that fog, but I could see the head, and the head is what made my hand start shaking, because it wasn't round, it wasn't shaped.

I've been in tight spots. I've had close calls in the woods. I fell off a cliff face when I was nineteen and broke my collar bone, but nothing has ever produced the kind of fear I felt in that moment. It was primal. That's the only word for it. Something in my brain was screaming at me to be still, be invisible, don't let it know you're here. It turned its head, not toward me, off to the left, and when it turned I saw the profile of the face.

The jaw was massive, just enormous. It jutted forward, not like an ape exactly, but close. The brow was heavy and sloped, and the skin on the face, the parts that weren't covered in hair, was gray, not dark gray, not pale, just gray, like old concrete, like something that hadn't seen sun in its life. It stood there for maybe ten more seconds. I don't know. Time didn't work right. It could have been thirty seconds, or it could have

been five. Then it turned and walked into the fog and the brush, and it was gone, just like that. No hurry, no sound at all this time, it just walked away and disappeared. I didn't move for another twenty minutes. I'm not proud of that. I sat there with my rifle in my lap, and I shook. My legs were shaking, my hands were shaking. My jaw was clenched so tight that when I finally forced myself to relax, my teeth ached. When I finally stood up, I didn't go down the slope.

I didn't track it. I turned around and walked straight back to my truck. I didn't run, but I wanted to. Every cell in my body wanted to. I kept looking over my shoulder the whole way back. I'd take ten steps and stop and listen. Ten more steps, stop, listen. It took me twice as long to hike out as it did to hike in. I got to the truck and sat there with the engine running and my hands on the steering wheel. I couldn't stop looking at the

tree line. I kept expecting to see it again. Every shadow between the firs looked like shoulders, Every dark stump looked like something crouching. I sat there for at least ten minutes before I could bring myself to put the truck in gear. I drove home, and I didn't tell my wife what happened. I didn't tell my father, I didn't tell anyone. I put the rifle in the safe, and I told everyone I was done hunting. My dad thought I'd lost my mind. My buddies gave me grief

about it for years. I let them. I wasn't going to explain myself because I knew how it would sound. I knew exactly how it would sound. I didn't go back into those woods for twenty six years. Twenty six years, Brian, I'm not talking about that specific drainage. I mean any woods. I didn't hunt, I didn't hike, I didn't go on camping trips with my kids. My wife would want to do a weekend at a campground somewhere, and I'd find a reason not to go. She thought I just didn't

enjoy it anymore. I let her think that. The truth is, I was afraid, a twenty three year old man who'd spent his whole life in the mountains, and I was afraid to go back because I'd seen something standing in that fog that should not have been there, something that wasn't a bear, wasn't a man, wasn't anything I could make sense of then, and honestly I still can't. I finally went on a walk in the woods again when my granddaughter was four. She wanted to go on a

nature walk. She was tugging on my hand and I did it for her. But I'll tell you this, it wasn't peaceful, it wasn't fun. I spent the whole time watching the trees, listening. My granddaughter was pointing at birds and picking up rocks, and I was scanning the timber like I was on patrol. I'm seventy one years old, and I still don't like being in the woods after dark. I've had a good life, raised two kids, had a career,

built a house with my own hands. But there's this one thing sitting in the back of everything, this one morning in nineteen seventy eight that I've never been able to put down. I've tried, Lord knows, I've tried. I've told myself it was a bear on its hind legs. I've told myself the fog was playing tricks. But I know what I saw. I saw a face. I saw a gray skin and a jaw that could have crushed a fence post. I saw something that looked almost human

but wasn't. And the way it moved when it left, unhurried, casual, like it had somewhere to be, and I was beneath its Notice, that's the part that haunts me most. It wasn't afraid of me, not even a little bit. Whatever I saw that morning was real, it was solid, it was alive, and it was something that made me, a man who grew up in those mountains, feel like prey. I don't know what you do with that, but my daughter wanted me to tell somebody, so I'm telling you Dale.

Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Twenty six years. That's how long Dale stayed out of the woods. A man who grew up in those mountains, who learned to hunt before he could drive, and one encounter took all of it away from him. That's not somebody telling a story for fun. That's somebody describing a wound. Our next account takes us across the

country to the mountains of West Virginia. A woman named Karen was twenty four years old in nineteen ninety three, camped alone on a trail she'd hiked dozens of times. What happened to her that night and what she saw the next morning ended her relationship with the outdoors permanently. Here's Karen Brian. I'm writing this because my therapist told

me it might help. I know that probably sounds dramatic, but I've been dealing with this for over thirty years and I'm tired of it living only in my head. I found your show about six months ago and listen to most of your episodes in about two weeks. Some of them scared me so badly I had to turn

them off and come back the next day. But I kept coming back because these people were describing things I recognized, not the exact same thing, but the feeling, the way it sits in your chest afterward, the way you can't explain it to anyone without feeling like you're losing credibility. My name's Karen. I'm fifty seven. I live in Virginia now, but I grew up in Elkins, West Virginia, right on

the edge of the Monongahela National Forest. My family wasn't what you'd call out doorsy, but you didn't have to be. The forest was just there. You'd drive ten minutes in any direction and you were in it. I started hiking in college. I went to Davis and Elkins, so I was right there and it became my thing.

always felt safe on it. I hiked in on a Saturday morning and set up camp in a spot I liked, a flat area back in some hard woods, about thirty yards off the trail. I spent the afternoon reading and walking around, had a fire that night, ate dinner. Everything was completely normal. I woke up at around two in the morning, and I don't know why. I wasn't cold, I didn't have to use the bathroom. My eyes just opened and I was immediately wide awake, which is unusual

for me. I'm a heavy sleeper, always have been. But I was awake, like someone had flipped a switch. The first thing I noticed was the silence. And I know people say that all the time in the stories, so let me be specific. The creek I was camped near was still running. I could hear that, but there were no insects, no frogs, nothing in the underbrush, nothing in

the canopy. It was September and West Virginia, Bryant. The woods at night in September are loud, crickets, katie DIDs, tree frogs, all of it, that constant chorus that you stop hearing after a while because it's just background noise. It was gone, all of it. It was like someone had muted every living thing within a quarter mile. I lay there in my sleeping bag and I listened. My heart was beating hard, and I didn't know why yet. I just had this overwhelming feeling that something was wrong.

Not vague, not gradual. It was instant and absolute, like my body knew something my brain hadn't.

had all the time in the world. And the smell came with it, thick, sour like body odor and rotting leaves and something else underneath, something animal that I couldn't place. It came through the tent fabric. It was inside with me. I was breathing it. I stopped breathing myself. I put my hand over my mouth because I was terrified it could hear me. I lay there, completely rigid, staring up at the inside of the tent, and I listened to that breathing for what felt like forever. My whole body

was locked up, every muscle tight. I could feel my pulse in my throat, my wrists, behind my eyes. Then something touched the tent, not bumped.

next to a wood stove. It was alive. It was right there, inches from my face. With nothing but a thin sheet of nylon between us. Then the hand moved. It slid downward along the wall slowly. I could hear the fabric whispering under the pressure, like something feeling the shape of what it had found, not trying to get in, not tearing at it.

a cricket here, a frog there. The woods came back to life, and I took that as a sign that whatever had been out there was gone. I waited until gray light, and then I got out of the tent. I won't pretend I wasn't shaking, because I was. My hands were trembling so badly I could barely work the zipper. I stepped outside and looked around, and everything looked normal, trees, leaves, morning fog, nothing out of place except the ground. About

five feet from my tent. There were impressions in the leaf litter, two of them, side by side, where something had been standing, and they were enormous. Not prints exactly, not in the way you'd see in mud, but compressions, like something incredibly heavy had stood in that one spot for a long time and packed the leaves and dirt down under its weight. I packed up faster than I've ever packed in my life. I stuffed everything into my bag,

without organizing it, without folding anything. I was on the trail within ten minutes. I made it about a quarter mile.

I felt observed, not watched, observed, the way a person looks at something they're studying. It wasn't aggressive, it wasn't curious, the way a dog is curious. It was something else, something deliberate, something that made me feel very, very small, and very exposed. Then it turned, It turned away from me and walked uphill into the timber, and it moved with a fluidity that didn't match its size. Nothing that

big should move that smoothly. It was like watching a shadow slide between the trees, three or four strides, and it was out of sight, and the only proof it had been there was the faint sound of brush snapping higher on the ridge. I ran, I'm not going to dress it up. I ran the rest of the way back to my car. I fell twice, cut my knee open on a rock the second time. I didn't stop. I threw my pack in the trunk and drove home, doing seventy on roads that were meant for forty five.

When I got home, I sat in the shower for over an hour. I scrubbed my arms and hands like I was trying to wash something off me that wouldn't come off.

answer for most of my life has been nobody. I haven't camped, since I haven't hiked alone, since I live in Northern Virginia, now near the suburbs, and even here, when I drive past a tree line at dusk, my hands tightened on the steering wheel and something in my chest constricts.

but I do know that it happened. It was real. It's the most real thing that's ever happened to me, and I've spent thirty years wishing it wasn't. Thank you for giving people a place to say these things, Karen, I want you to think about that for a second before we move on to the next email. The hand on the tent, the heat coming through the nylon, and then seeing it the next morning, standing in the trees, watching her with a look she describes as observation, not aggression,

not curiosity. Observation. That word keeps coming back to me. Karen didn't describe something that was startled by a hiker. She described something that seemed to be studying one. Our third account comes from southeast Ohio. A man named Brent and his buddy Cody were riding four wheelers on the OHV Trails in the Wayne National Forest in the fall of two thousand nine nineteen. They heard something in the

timber that didn't belong. They kept riding, and when they came back the way they'd come the trail wasn't the same trail anymore. Here's Brent. My name's Brent, and I live outside Athens, Ohio. I'm thirty nine. I run heavy equipment for a road construction outfit out of Lancaster, and I've been riding the trails down here in the Wayne since I was old enough to operate a machine. My dad put me on a three wheeler when I was eleven,

and I've never been off one since. I tell you that, so you understand the woods aren't a foreign place to me. I'm not a city guy who got turned around. I know these hollers and these ridges. I know what's supposed to be in them, and I know what isn't. My wife told me to write you. She listens to your show on her commute. She says I'm different on the days I think about it, and she's right I am. So I figured i'd put it down once and be done with it. October twenty nineteen, Cody and I had

taken a Saturday to ride. We'd done the Monday Creek system probably forty times between us, but we wanted to put a long day in before the weather turned. The leaves were already mostly off the ridges. The understory was open. You could see two hundred yards into the timber in places where you couldn't see twenty in July. That's important. I want you to picture that the woods were stripped down. There wasn't much hiding anything. We left the trailhead a

little after nine in the morning. Cody was on his Polaris. I was on a Honda Foreman that I've owned for twelve years. We'd packed lunches and water, and we figured we'd be out till four or five o'clock. No reason to hurry, just a long, easy day in the woods. The first part of the morning was uneventful. We rode the lower loops, stopped at the overlook above the creek, ate a granola bar. Each joked around normal Saturday. The only thing I noticed, and didn't think anything of at

the time, was that we weren't seeing deer. The wain is thick with them. You can't ride a full more morning without bumping at least four or five out of the brush. We hadn't seen one, hadn't seen a turkey either, hadn't even heard a squirrel cutting on a hickory, And that time of year. You should be hearing them constantly. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back

after these messages. Around eleven thirty, we worked our way up to a section of trail I'll call the Spur because I don't want to put the actual name out there. It's a narrow two track that runs along the spine of a ridge for about three miles before it dead ends at an old logging clearing.

grown back into thick brush. It's the kind of place where you can hear for a long way because you're up high and the wind moves through it pretty good. Cody was the one who heard it first. He was sitting on his machine eating a sandwich and he held up his hand. I was about to ask what was up when I heard it too. It came from the timber on the north side of the clearing, up the slope, maybe three four hundred yards, a long, drawn out call.

I want to be careful describing it, because I've spent a lot of time over the last six years trying to put words to it, and none of them are right. The closest I can get is to say it was a whoop, not a coyote, not an owl, not anything I'd ever heard in those woods before. It started low, climbed in pitch, held for maybe three seconds, and then dropped off. The volume was crazy loud. It carried through the trees in a way that could have only come out of something that had a chest the size of

a barrel. Cody and I just looked at each other. Neither one of us said a word for about ten seconds. Then he said the hell was that? I told him I didn't know. We sat there, we listened. After maybe a minute, there was a second one, same direction, but closer. It had moved, and this one was answered faintly from the south side of the clearing behind us, a different voice, lower in pitch, shorter like a response. I'm going to be straight with you. The hair on my arms went up.

I had this sudden, very physical feeling that we were standing in the middle of something, that something on the ridge was talking, and something across the saddle was answering, and we were sitting in the gap between the two of them. Cody must have felt the same thing, because he stood up and put his sandwich back in the bag without finishing it.

of his machine. There was a tree across the trail, not a small one, a red oak, probably twelve fourteen inches at the base, laying directly across the two track at a point where the trail was hemmed in on both sides by thick brush. There was no way around it on a machine, you'd have to either move it or turn around. Cody looked back at me and he said, that wasn't here. I said, no, it wasn't. We sat there on our machines for a few seconds, idling, just

staring at it. I think we were both trying to come up with an explanation that made sense. A tree falls. Trees fall in the woods all the time. Maybe a gust of wind. Maybe it was rotted at the base and we hadn't noticed it on the way out. I shut my machine off and got off. Cody did the same. We walked up to the tree. The first thing I noticed was that the leaves were still green, or what passed for green that late in October. They were the dried red brown of.

stopped exactly where the tree was laying. I stood up and I said, Cody, look at this. He came around to where I was standing. He looked at the base, He looked at the drag marks. He didn't say anything. He just turned his head slowly and looked at the brush on the uphill.

behind the trunk of a big white oak. Most of it was hidden by the trunk, but I could see the shape of one shoulder and the side of a head. The shoulder was at a height that didn't make sense to me. I tried to estimate it later, and I keep coming back to seven and a half feet maybe more. The white oak it was standing behind was a mature tree three feet through at chest height, and the shoulder I was looking at was clearly above the point where the first major branch came off that oak.

seen it. I could feel that there's a difference between watching something that doesn't know you're there and watching something that knows you're watching it back, the shoulder shifted, the head turned, It stepped out from behind the oak. It came out, slow, deliberate, one step, then another. It cleared the trunk and stood in full view, and there was no longer any question about what we were looking at.

It was a body shaped roughly like a man. The chest was deep, the shoulders were so wide they didn't look proportional. The arms hung past the hips and ended in hands that were dark and heavy looking. The legs were thick, the thighs especially, They were the thighs of an animal built for climbing, for moving up these ridges in ways no person could. The face is what I want to describe, but I'm not sure I can do it justice. I only had a few seconds to look

at it. The skin was a deep gray brown, the color of wet creak.

know how else to say that. There was rage and there was warning, and there was nothing about it that was confused about what it wanted. It wanted us gone. Cody and I didn't talk about what to do. We didn't have to. We were on our machines and we had them started before the sound had finished echoing off the opposite ridge. The tree was still across the trail.

We didn't move it. There was no time. Cody yanked his Polaris into reverse and backed up about twenty feet, then cut the wheel hard and shoved it down into the brush off the lower side of the trail. I followed him. We bush whacked our machines down the slope through saplings and briar for probably one hundred and fifty yards before we caught a deer trail running parallel to the spur.

the trailhead. When we got back to my truck, Cody got off his machine and walked into the gravel parking lot and bent over with his hands on his knees. He stayed like that for a minute. I sat on my Honda and stared at the tree line behind the trailhead, and I couldn't bring myself to dismount. I sat on that machine for probably five minutes before I could make my legs work to get off it. We loaded the four wheelers onto the trailer in silence. Cody helped me

strap them down. Neither of us said a word. When we were done, he got in the passenger seat of my truck and shut the door, and I got in the driver's seat and I started the engine and we left about ten minutes down the road. Cody said that thing was real. I said yeah. He said, what do we do? I said, I don't know. I don't know what we do. We didn't tell anybody, not at first. I didn't tell my wife for almost a week. When

I finally did, I told her the short version. I said, we saw something in the woods on the spur, and it's scared us. Pretty bad, and I'd rather not get into specifics. She didn't push. That's one of the things I love about her. She knows when to wait. I told her the long version. A few months later, on a winter night when I couldn't sleep, I sat on the edge of the bed and I told her the whole thing. She didn't say a word the whole time. When I was done, she just put her hand on

my back and held it there. Cody and I have talked about it maybe four times in six years, always when nobody else is around. We've never been able to come up with anything new to say about it. It happened, it was real. We saw what we saw. There's nothing else to add. I still ride. I won't ride the Spur, I won't ride alone. I won't ride after about two in the afternoon in the fall. Those are the rules I live by now, and I don't bend them. Cody

won't ride the Waine at all anymore. He goes up to Michigan with his brother in law a couple times a year and rides up there. He says he can't be in those Ohio hollers anymore. He says they feel different to him now. I understand what he means, even though I haven't been able to leave them the way he has. The thing I think about most isn't the scream, even though the scream was the worst part in the moment.

The thing I think about is the tree. Somebody, something picked up a fourteen inch oak and carried it across a trail to put it where we'd have to stop.

for any of this. But I can't argue with my own and I can't argue.

In the fall of nineteen seventy two. Cal was a trapper in northern Wisconsin. He went to check his line one cold morning and found something waiting for him. Cal told this story exactly twice in his life, and Caitlin is the last person alive who heard it from his own mouth. Here's Caitlyn. I want to be upfront that this didn't happen to me. This happened to my grandfather

Cal in nineteen seventy two in northern Wisconsin. He told this story exactly twice, once to my grandmother the night had happened, and once to me when I was nineteen and helping him split firewood the summer before he had his first stroke. He passed in two thousand and four. I should tell you about that summer afternoon because the way he told it matters. It was July two thousand. We were splitting cordwood out behind his shed, working through a pile of red oak rounds he'd had delivered. He'd

been quiet most of the afternoon. My grandfather wasn't a chatty man under any circumstances, but that day he was quieter than usual. I was wedging a knot apart when he set his maul down and said, Katie, you remember the trap line up off the Bois Brulee. I want to tell you something about that. I sat down on a round and listened. He told it slow, no drama, just the facts.

He grew up in northern Wisconsin, and he never lived more than thirty miles from where he was born. He wasn't a big man, five eight maybe one hundred and seventy pounds, but he was wiry the way old farmers are wiry, hands like leather, four arms, ropy with veins. He could work a peevy for ten hours and not complain about his back the way younger men did. And he wasn't superstitious. He didn't go to church. He didn't

believe in ghosts. He thought UFO stories were nonsense. If you'd asked him in nineteen seventy one whether there were any animals in the Wisconsin woods that science hadn't named yet, he'd have looked at you like you were simple. In October of sex seventy two, he was running a long trap line through some state forest land north of the

Boisbrule River, mostly Fisher and Martin. That year he had about thirty sets distributed across maybe twelve miles of country, and he checked them on snow shoes once the snow got deep. But in late October he was still using just his boots and a small pack. The morning this happened, he'd left his cabin around four thirty. The plan was to walk the southern half of the line that day and the northern half the next. It was still full

dark when he started. He had a kerosene lantern and his rifle and the leather sack he carried his sets in. He was about a mile in when the sky started to gray, and that's when he came up on the first set. I want to describe what he told me here because it's the part that bothered him most. The set was a fissure set. He built it on a

dead fall, maybe forty yards off a narrow creek. The way you build it, you wedge the trap into a notch in the log and you set bait above it, so the fissure has to come up from load to investigate. It's a careful kind of trap. It takes a while to build. Right when he walked up to it, the trap was gone, not sprung, not bent, not torn off. The chain just gone. The chain was still attached to

the dead fall. The wire stake holding the chain was still in the ground, but where the trap should have been at the end of that chain, there was nothing. The chain was lying limp in the leaves. He told me he stood there with his lantern up, just looking. A bear can ruin a set, but a bear breaks things. They tear at the wood, they twist the chain, they leave fur, and they leave tracks. There was none of that. The dead fall was untouched. The bait was still there,

dried and unchewed. The chain had been disconnected from the trap cleanly. He walked the area. He couldn't find the trap anywhere on the ground. So he stood there in the gray light, and he looked up, and about thirty feet away, on a low branch of a hemlock, the trap was hanging, just hanging there, suspended on a branch, maybe ten feet off the ground. He told me he had no explanation for it, none. He said it was the kind of thing that if he told anyone, they'd

have called him a liar. So he didn't tell anyone. He took the trap down with a long stick, packed it back into his sack, and kept walking the line. The next set, two miles up the line, was a Martin cubby. A cubby is a small wooden box you build to enclose the trap so birds don't get caught in it. He'd built that particular cubby about three weeks before. When he walked up to it, the cubby was still there, but it had been turned around. He stopped and looked

at it for a long time. The cubby was a foot and a half square made of cedar boards nailed to the side of a maple about waist high. He'd nailed it himself, and someone or something had pried it off the tree, turned it one hundred and eighty degrees and renailed it. The trap was still set, the bait was still in place, but the opening of the cubby was now facing the tree, which meant nothing could ever

get into it. The cubby had been disabled in a way that took thought, in a way that took fingers, in a way that took tools or hands strong enough to be tools. He told me his stomach went cold. He told me he stood there for probably ten minutes, just trying to talk himself into a rational explanation. Maybe a person had done it, Maybe somebody from a nearby camp had a problem with trappers and was harassing him. Except there were no camps nearby. He was on state

forest land and country that almost nobody used. He hadn't seen another human footprint in those woods.

shallow water at the edge of the spring. When he walked up, the trap was sprung but empty.

There was no blood. The deer was intact, no wounds, he could see, no torn flesh, just dead and placed there like someone had said up to watch the trap. He told me he just stood there. He said, his ears started ringing, and he had this feeling all over his skin, like he was being looked at from every direction at once. He said, he couldn't move for what felt like a long time, and then he heard a knock.

It came from the Tamarack swamp north of it, a solid wood on wood sound, like someone striking a tree trunk with a piece of hardwood, slow, deliberate. One knock, then a pause of maybe ten seconds. Then another knock from a different direction east of him this time, then ten seconds, then another from due south behind him. Three knocks,

three positions. He told me he understood the moment he heard the third one, that he was inside something, inside a circle, inside a perimeter that had been drawn around him by things he couldn't see. He didn't run, He told me that specifically. I didn't run because I did didn't want them to know I was scared. He turned and he started walking back the way he'd come, slow, steady,

lantern up rifle in his other hand. He told me that he made it about one hundred yards back down the trail, and that's when he saw one, just one, standing on a low rise above the trail, in the gray dawn, between two big white pines. He said it was tall. He gave me a number. He said a head and a half taller than him, which would put it close to seven and a half feet. But unlike what people usually describe, this one was not bulky. It was lean. He kept using that word, lean, like a

man who'd been starved. Long armed, long legged. The body was covered in coarse hair that was mostly gray, with darker patches around the shoulders and the head. The hair was short on the chest and longer on the limbs, almost like fringe.

in the lantern light, just pale. It was looking down at him. It wasn't moving, it wasn't breathing fast, It wasn't doing anything except standing there between those two pines and watching him, with its hands at its sides and its mouth slightly open. He said, the worst part was that it didn't seem dangerous. It seemed tired. It seemed annoyed, the way some accounts describe. But underneath the annoyance there was something else, something that looked, to my grandfather almost

like sadness. He said, he had the strangest, most unwelcome thought. He thought, this thing has problems of its own, and whatever those problems are, I'm one more On top of the pile. He kept walking, he didn't stop. He kept his eyes on it as long as he could, and then the trail bent and the pines were behind him and he was out of its sight. He pulled five more traps off the line that day. He didn't even

take the time to coil the chains. He just yanked the steaks and threw them in his sack and kept moving. He left twenty traps in the woods. He never went back for them. He never trapped that drainage again, not in seventy three, not in seventy four, not ever. He told my grandmother that night. He sat at her kitchen table and told her exactly what I'm telling you, And he said one thing to her that he repeated to

me twenty eight years later. He said, Lilah, there's something living in those tamaracks that I do not understand, and I'm never going to walk into that swamp again.

different country. He never explained to his customers why he stopped getting Fisher and Martin out of the Bois Brutal drainage. He just changed his territory and that was that. I asked him that afternoon in two thousand why he was telling me. He looked at me for a long time. He had these pale blue eyes and they were filmed over with cataracts. At the end, he said, Katie, I'm not going to be around forever, and I want one person in this family to know what happened up there,

so you know I'm not crazy. So when you read about something like this in a book or hear about it on the radio, you don't dismiss it. You think about your grandfather standing on that trail in the dawn light, and you remember he went back to splitting wood. We didn't talk about it again. He died four years later, peacefully in his sleep. My grandmother passed a few years later. I wanted to send this to you because I think cal would have appreciated what you're doing. He wasn't a

man who needed his story believed by everybody. He just needed it told once somewhere by somebody before all of us who knew him are gone too. Thank you for listening, Caitlin the deer on the moss, the trap hanging in the hemlock, the cubby pried off and renailed backwards. Those details have a kind of intelligence behind them. It's hard

to file under the heading of unknown ape. They suggest something I'm not sure I have the vocabulary for a behavior that's neither animal nor human, but is also not random. Cal stood in those woods at dawn and was shown in a sequence that something in there had the patience and the dexterity to alter his sets in ways that required reasoning. And then it let him see one of its own, lean, gray, tired looking standing between two pines. And then it let him walk out. Our fifth and

final account comes from northern California. A woman named Marisol was thirty three years old in twenty fifteen, working as a freelance photographer specializing in remote landscape and astrophotography. She was on a solo overnight trip into the Trinity Alps wilderness when she set up her camp at a small alpine lake and saw something across the water that she's

been carrying ever since. The way she describes the encounter, particularly what she saw through her zoom lens, is one of the more haunting accounts I've received in some time. Here's Marisol. I'm going to send this and probably regret it. I've started writing this four times in the last three years and deleted it four times forty three Now. The encounter I want to tell you about happened when I was thirty three. I don't talk about it in person

because I can't talk about it in person. The one time I tried, I got about two sentences in before my throat closed up and I had to leave the room. So an email is the only way it's ever going to get out of my head and into the world.

solo backcountry experience. By then, I knew how to pick a camp site. I knew how to handle bears. I'd been charged by a cow l once and stayed calm enough to back out without losing any of my gear. I was capable. I want that on the record because what I'm about to describe is going to make me sound like I panicked. And the reason it matters that I panicked is because I'm not someone who panics in

the woods. In late August of twenty fifteen, I went into the Trinity Alps Wilderness in northern California for an overnight. There's a small lake there I'd been to twice before. It sits at maybe seven thousand feet in a granite cirque, and from the right angle you can shoot the Milky Way, arching directly over the ridge to the south.

maybe two hundred yards across at the widest point. The east shore is talus, and the south end has a narrow grassy meadow that runs up into a notch. The water is glacier clear. You can see rocks twenty feet down. I set my tent up, I filtered water, I got dinner started, just a freeze dried meal and a jet boil. The whole time I was working, I had a feeling. I didn't feel watched exactly.

to dip my hat in the water. It was hot, I was sweating from the hike. I knelt down at the shore and pushed my hat under, and as I was lifting it back out, I caught a smell. I've read accounts of this, and I know the standard description wet garbage, rotten meat, locker room stink. That's not what I smelled. What I smelled was a wet animal, heavy,

like a barn that hasn't been mucked out. Underneath the wet animal smelled, there was something sweeter, almost fruity, like the smell that comes off a bear that's been eating berries for a month. It wasn't bad exactly, It was just intensely organic, intensely alive. I've smelled bears before. This was not a bear. The bass note was different, heavier, more musk in it.

If you've spent any time in alpine country, you know what a moving rock sounds like. Talis settles all the time, especially with temperature changes. But this wasn't a set of rock. This was a rock being displaced. A heavy, wet thunk, followed by a smaller clatter as something else shifted into the gap. Then a silence, then another displacement twenty feet to the right of the first one, then another. Whatever was moving over there was working its way along the

talus toward the south end of the lake. I went back to my pack and got my camera out. I had my long zoom on it from earlier in the day, a seventy to two hundred. It's not a wild life lens by any stretch, but it gets you closer than your eyes do. I crouched behind the boulder and brought the camera up and looked across the lake. The first thing I saw was that the smell had a source. There was a depression of bent grass near the south end of the lake, right at the shoreline where something

had been lying down. The grass was still moving back into shape. Whatever had been there had stood up and walked off recently. The depression was maybe seven feet long and three or four feet wide. Long body, a heavy body, something that had been resting on its side. I tracked the camera north along the talus where the rocks had been moving, and I saw it. It was at the edge of the talus, just where the rocks meet the

strip of grass that runs along the lake shore. It had come down out of the rocks and was kneeling at the water, not standing, kneeling on both knees with its back to me. The first thing that registered was the size. Even kneeling, it was tall. The shoulders were as wide as I am tall. The torso was massive, V shaped, narrowing slightly at the hips. The arms were

longer than a human's Proportionally. When it reached toward the water, the hand traveled further than it should have for a body that size.

fingers curled up to hold the water in. It drank from its own hand, not like a dog or a cat or a deer, not lapping, cupping the way a person would drink from a stream if they didn't have a cup. It did this three times. There was no rush, no watchfulness. It was relaxed. It was hydrating after a hot afternoon, the same as I had been twenty minutes earlier on the other side of the lake. Then it lifted its head and turned. It turned its head, only not its body, and it looked across the lake, and

it saw me. The lens was on it. I was looking through the eyepiece, and in that moment I was looking at a face that filled most of my frame at two hundred millimeters across two hundred yards of water. The face was dark, not the same dark as the body hair, but darker, almost black around the eyes and mouth, with the hair receding slightly from the brow ridge so I could see the skin clearly. The brow ridge was heavy pronounced. It cast a shadow over the eyes from above.

The cheeks were flat and broad. The nose was wide and short, very pushed in, the nostrils opening forward instead of downward. The mouth was a thin line. The jaw was square and heavy, but unlike a lot of the accounts I've read, this one had a chin, a small one, but a chin a definite point at the bottom of the jaw. The eyes were brown, like a person's eyes. They didn't reflect anything, they didn't glow. They were small, set deep, but they were intelligent. I want to be

very clear about what I mean by that. I'm not saying they were thoughtful or conscious or whatever else people say when they want to elevate an animal. I'm saying that when they locked onto mine, through two hundred yards of distance and a camera lens, they saw me. They registered a person, not a shape, not a moving thing, a person, And in the time it took me to draw a breath, they had assessed me, decided what I was, and decided what to do about me. It just looked

at me for about ten seconds. It didn't stand, it didn't snarl, it didn't run. It just held my eyes through the lens. And while it was looking at me, the muscles around its mouth shifted. The corners of the mouth moved very slightly downward. The brow furrowed. It was a frown, a subtle one, the same frown a person makes when they realized the line they'd been waiting in just got longer because somebody cut in front of them, an expression of mild, weary displeasure. Then it stood up.

I've seen a lot of animals stand up over the years. Black bears, elk, moose, mountain goats, None of them stand up like this thing did. It went from a kneeling position to fully upright in one motion. There was no rocking, no leverage, no use of the hands for support. It just stood like its legs had hydraulics in them. The transition was so smooth that for a second my brain couldn't process it as movement. It was just shorter, and then it was tall. Standing it was massive. I'm guessing

eight feet maybe a touch more. The shoulders had to be four feet wide. The arms hung past the knees. The hands were the size of dinner plates, with thick, blunt fingers. There was no neck to speak of. The head sat directly on the shoulders. It looked at me for a few more seconds while standing. The frown stayed. Then it turned very slowly and walked into the talus. The walk is the the other thing I have to describe.

It was bipedal, but the gate was unusual. The legs were slightly bent at the knees the entire time, Even midstride, the hips swung in a way that human hips don't. There was a kind of gliding quality to the motion, but underneath the gliding there was incredible weight. I could hear the talis shifting under each step, big deep wet thunks, the same sound I'd heard earlier when I first noticed the rocks moving. Each step was deliberate placed. It wasn't running,

it wasn't even hurrying. It was moving the way a person moves when they're done with an interaction, and walking away from it. It went up into the talus, it picked its way through the rocks. I watched it through the lens until it crested the talis field and went over a small ridge into the next basin. The whole departure took maybe ninety seconds. I watched all of it, and then it was gone. I lowered the camera. My

hands were shaking, my ears were ringing. The smell was still in the air, but it was already getting fainter as the breeze pulled it east. I was alone at the lake again. I didn't sleep. I packed up my camp. I left my freeze dried dinner sitting in the jet boil untouched. I broke down my tent and shoved it into my pack without rolling it. I got my headlamp and at six point twenty in the evening, with the sun about to go behind the western ridge, I started

hiking out. I hiked the six miles back to the trailhead in the dark. I tripped at least four times on the Talis section. I scraped both palms on the granite. I didn't stop. I made it back to my car around ten thirty at night, and I sat in the driver's seat with the doors locked and the engine running, and I cried for about half an hour. Then I drove the four hours home to Ashland, and I got home at four in the morning, and I got into bed with my clothes on, and lay there until the

sun came up. I never reviewed the photographs I had been shooting all afternoon up to the lake. There were probably forty the exposures on the card, none of which I'd seen yet. I never put the card in my computer. I sat on it for two months, and then I formatted the card without ever looking at the images. I know that sounds insane. I know that anyone who's into bigfoot research would tell me I just destroyed evidence. But

I want to tell you why I did it. I knew that if I looked at those photographs and there was nothing on the card from across the lake. I would start to doubt myself. I would start to wonder if I'd hallucinated it, and I would torment myself for the rest of my life trying to figure out what really happened. And I knew that if I looked at the card and there was something on it, my life was going to change in ways I didn't want it to change. I would have to do something with the image.

I would have to share it, or hide it or destroy it. I would have to make decisions about something I wasn't ready to make decisions about. And I knew, sitting in my apartment looking at that little SD card that whichever it was, I didn't want to know, so I formatted it. I haven't done astraphotography since. I haven't done remote backcountry photography of any kind. Since I sold the long zoom lens. I sold the tent i'd been using that night. I switched to studio work and product

photography and food photography. I shoot in cities now I shoot indoors. The view from my apartment window is of a parking lot and a fence, and I prefer it that way. People in my professional life ask me sometimes why I stopped doing wilderness work. It was my whole brand for years. I tell them I burned out. I tell them I got tired of the travel.

want on it. The detail I keep coming back to is the chin, that little point at the bottom of the jaw. Almost none of the descriptions I've read mentioned a chin. They all talk about heavy jaws, and almost no chin. This one had a chin. I saw it, and I remember thinking in the moment, that's a person's feature. That's a feature you see in human faces. And then I thought, no, that's a feature you see in some human faces, some not all. Whatever I was looking at

it was different from what other people have seen. It was its own thing. It was an individual, and somehow that thought, that understanding that I was looking at an individual rather than a category, was the most disorienting part of the whole encounter. I thought I was alone at that lake. I wasn't. I'd been peripheral to whatever it had been doing, and it had been peripheral to me.

And we had each been working through our late afternoon when the wind shifted and we had to acknowledge each other for ninety seconds, and then it walked away, and then I walked away, and we have both gone on with the rest of our lives in our own corners of the same continent. And only I have ever told anyone I'm telling you now, so somebody else knows Marisol the chin. I want to start there because I think Marisol put her finger on something the wider research community

has not adequately reckoned with variation. The accounts I've collected over almost forty years describe a range of physical features that aren't uniform. Some are reddish, some are gray, some are nearly black. Some have heavy jaws and almost no chin. Some have what witnesses describe as more human like features. We talk about the species in singular, like we're talking

about one animal, But these accounts describe individuals. Faces that are different from one another, bodies that are different from one another, behaviors that are different from one another. If these things are real, and I believe they are, then we're not looking at a single template repeated. We're looking at a population with variation, with family resemblance with individuals.

That's a big claim. I'm not making it lightly, but you can't ignore five people, five different places across this country. None of them know each other, none of them were looking for this, none of them wanted it, and every single one of them describes something that if you line the accounts up side by side, share certain qualities that

are hard to explain away. The size, the build, the way it moved, the intelligence behind the eyes, the smell, and that feeling, the one they all describe in their own way of being in the presence of something that understood exactly what they were and made a choice about what to do with that information. That's the part that gets me, the choice. These weren't accounts of something charging

out of the brush and attacking. These were encounters where something looked at a human being, considered them, and either walked away or stood there long enough to make its presence known. That speaks to something. I don't know exactly what it speaks to, but it's not the behavior of

a mindless animal. It's the behavior of something that's aware, something that has boundaries, something that on these particular nights and mornings, decided to let these particular people walk away with a story they'd carry for the rest of their lives. These are the accounts that sit with me, the ones where the aftermath tells you everything you need to know about the encounter itself. You don't have to believe what these people saw, You don't have to accept any of it.

But what you can't do, what I don't think any honest person can do, is listen to the way these five people describe the way their lives changed and walk away thinking they're making it up. There's a cost to these experiences a real, measurable cost, and you can hear it in every word. If you've had an experience like these, if you've been carrying something and you've never had a place to put it down, I want you to know that this is that place. You can reach me through

the website or at my email Brian. That's an at Paranormalworldproductions dot com, first names only if you want as much or as little detail as you're comfortable sharing. And I promise you whatever you send me, it won't be met with laughter, it won't be met with skepticism. It'll be met with the respect it deserves. Because I know what it costs to tell these stories. I've been in this field long enough to know. Until next time, stay

safe out there. And if you're in the woods and something in your body tells you to pay attention, pay attention. These five people will tell you why don't do