Dogman On The Farm

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 a smell that hits you when you step into deep ozark.

wheel and my chest goes cold. And I'm twelve years old again, standing at the edge of a tree line that I know I should not walk into. My name's Kevin. I'm fifty three. I live in Kansas City. I coach my grandson's Little League team on Saturdays. Normal life, normal guy. But when I was twelve years old, something happened to my family on a piece of land in rural Missouri that none of us have ever been able to explain,

and I mean none of us. My dad went to his grave without ever saying what he thought it was. My mom still won't talk about it. My older sister brings it up sometimes, usually after a glass of wine at Thanksgiving, and you can see the color leave her face when she does. I found your show about a year and a half ago. I was on a job site, had my earbuds in, and one of the guys on my crew told me to check out backwoods Bigfoot stories.

I figured it'd be something to kill time on the drive home, but I sat in my truck in my own driveway for forty five minutes that first night, just listening, and then I came inside and stayed up until one in the morning going through episodes because these people were describing things I'd lived through, details that I'd never told anyone, because I didn't think anyone would understand the feeling of being watched, the sounds that don't match anything you've ever heard,

the way animals react before you even know something's wrong. I want to be clear about something before I get into this. I'm not a guy who jumps to concl illusions. My dad was career military before he got into farming, and he raised us to be observant, to think critically, and to not let our imaginations run away from us. I spent twenty two years working on engines and mechanical systems, and I approach problems the same way. What does the

evidence tell you, what makes sense, what doesn't. I've asked myself those questions about the summer of nineteen eighty five more times than I can count, and I still don't have a clean answer. But I know what I saw, I know what my family saw, and I know that whatever was on that property with us was not a bear, was not a feral dog, and was not a person. It was something else. We moved to the farm in early June of nineteen eighty five, I just finished sixth grade.

My dad had taken early retirement from the army and used his savings and a VA loan to buy one hundred and twelve acres in Dent County, Missouri, deep Ozarks. The property sat at the end of a gravel road about nine miles outside of a town that barely qualified as a town. One gas station, a post office, a feed store, and a church.

blew hard. There was a barn behind the house, bigger than the house itself, with a hay loft and old cattle stalls that hadn't been.

degrees the second you step into the shade. There were game trails threading through it, old logging roads that had grown over, and a creek that cut through the southeast corner of our property before winding deeper into the hills.

excited about the whole thing. I'd been a boy scout for two years. I liked being outside. I liked exploring in one hundred and twelve acres of woods and fields with a creek running through it. That sounded like the greatest summer of my life. For about three weeks it was. I spent the first part of that June exploring every inch of the property I could reach. My dad gave me two rules. Be home before dark, and don't cross

the creek. The creek was the boundary line between our land and the National Forest, and he didn't want me wandering off into timber that stretched for miles in every direction without any landmarks I'd recognize fair enough. I had plenty to work with on our side. I found an old root cellar dug into a hillside about two hundred yards behind the barn. The door had rotted off its hinges, but the interior was still solid, cool and dark, and smelling like wet earth. I found a natural spring bubbling

up through rocks near the northwest fence line. I found deer trails everywhere, and the tracks to go with them, raccoon, apossum, turkey, rabbit, the usual stuff you'd expect in that part of Missouri. I found a massive red oak near the creek that had to be three hundred years old, with the trunk so wide I couldn't get my arms even halfway around it. I was comfortable in those woods. That's what I want to emphasize. I wasn't a nervous kid. I wasn't jumping

at shadows. I spent hours out there every day, sometimes from right after breakfast until late afternoon, and I felt at home.

of those Jeremiah Johnson type stories. My dad loved. The birds were everywhere that first part of the summer, cardinals, blue jays, woodpeckers hammering on dead limbs, hawks circling up in the thermals above the ridge line. The woods were loud with life, and it felt like they'd accepted me, like I was just another animal moving through the territory and nothing out there paid me much mind. That changed

in the last week of June. I was walking the fence line on the east side of the property, heading south toward the creek. It was a Thursday, I'm fairly sure because my mom had gone into town for groceries, which she did every Thursday. The sun was out, probably mid eighties, Cicada's buzzing everything normal. I was just walking and looking at the ground I usually did, checking for tracks, looking for interesting rocks, regular kid stuff. And then I stopped.

I didn't decide to stop, My body just did it the way your hand jerks back from a hot stove before your brain even registers the heat. I stood there on the trail, and every muscle in my body locked up, and I felt something I'd never felt before in my life.

didn't see anything. The trees were thick, there lots of underbrush, honeysuckle, BlackBerry tangles growing between the trunks. I couldn't see more than maybe thirty or forty feet into the timber.

Then I heard something move. It was deeper in, maybe sixty or seventy feet from where I stood, A single footstep heavy, Not the light crunch of a deer picking its way through dry leaves. This was something with real weight behind it, something that pressed down hard enough to snap a stick that sounded like it was as thick as my thumb. Just one step, then nothing. I didn't wait for a second one. I turned around and walked back to the house as fast as I could without running.

I don't know why I didn't run. Something told me not to. Something told me that if I ran, whatever was in those woods would know I was afraid, and that felt dangerous. So I walked fast, my heart hammering in my chest, sweat running down the sides of my face, and that feeling of being watched boring into my back with every step. I got to the house and went inside and locked the door behind me. Beth was in the living room watching MTV on the Rabbit Ears. We

could barely get a signal on. She looked at me and asked if I was okay. I told her I was fine, just hot. She went back to her show. I didn't go back to the woods for three days. When I finally did go back out, I told myself I'd been ridiculous. I was a twelve year old kid who'd gotten spooked by a deer or a coyote, or maybe even a turkey moving through the brush. The Ozarks were full of wildlife. Of course, something had been in the woods. That's where animals live. I was being a

baby about it. I followed the same path along the east fence line, deliberately proving to myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. The sun was out again, the cicadas were screaming, and everything felt exactly the way it had before normal safe. I walked all the way down to the creek, sat on the bank for a while, threw some rocks in the water, and started to feel pretty stupid about the whole episode. I decided to head back along the creek instead of following the fence line.

The creek bank was mostly clear, easier walking than the brush along the fence, and there was a nice breeze coming.

I'd seen plenty of dog tracks, We'd had dogs my whole life. A big german shepherd will leave a track about four inches long, maybe four and a half. These prints were enormous. I didn't have a tape measure with me, but I put my hand down next to one for reference, and the track was wider than my spread fingers and almost twice as long. I was twelve, so my hands

weren't full grown. But still we're talking about prints that had to be at least seven inches long, maybe eight deeper than any dog track I'd ever seen.

went home and got my dad. He was under the truck changing the oil, and he wasn't thrilled about crawling out to go look at animal tracks in the creek, but I was persistent. I told him they were huge, bigger than anything I'd ever seen. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. And eventually he sighed and said, all right, show me. We walked down to the creek together. I found the spot easily because of the stick I'd left.

from one of the neighboring properties. He said, tracks in soft mud always look bigger than they are because the edges spread out as the mud settles.

July is a special kind of miserable. The humidity sits on you like a wet blanket, and the temperature doesn't drop below eighty even after the sun goes down. The nights were worse somehow. You'd think it would cool off after dark, but the air just hung there, thick and still pressing against the house like something with weight. I spent most of the hottest hours inside reading or playing with the atari we'd brought from Fort Campbell, and then I'd go out in the late afternoon when it started

to cool down a little. My dad had settled into a routine by then, up before dawn, coffee on the porch, then out to work on whatever project was next on his list. He was clearing brush along the south fence line, repairing the barn roof, fixing the WEHLL pump that kept losing pressure. He was happy, or at least he seemed to be. This was the life he'd wanted, the life he'd spent twenty years in the army dreaming about my mom.

Had planted a garden near the house, tomatoes and peppers and squash, and it was doing well in all that heat. Beth had made a tentative friend in town, a girl named Jenny whose parents ran the gas station, and she'd ride her bike the nine miles into town to visit her, which meant she was gone most afternoons and slightly less miserable about the whole situation. It should have felt perfect

in a lot of ways. It did, but underneath all that normalcy, something was wrong, and I could feel it, even if I couldn't name it yet.

in mid July, maybe the fifteenth or sixteenth. I was lying in bed with my window open because we didn't have air conditioning and my room upstairs trapped heat like an oven. It was late, probably eleven or so. My parents were asleep, Beth was asleep. The house was quiet, except for the usual creaking and settling that old houses do. From somewhere out in the woods south of the house, toward the creek, I heard something call out. It's hard to describe. I've spent forty years trying to put this

sound into words, and I've never gotten it right. The closest I can come is that it was like a howl, but not a howl. It started low, almost guttural, like a growl, that built in volume and then climbed in pitch until it became something between a scream and a whale. There was a roughness to it, a kind of ragged, torn quality, like whatever was making the sound was pushing

it through vocal cords that weren't built for it. It lasted maybe four or five seconds, echoed off the hills and then cut off abruptly, no fade out, just there and then gone. I lay in my bed, completely still, staring at the ceiling. My heart was going so fast I could feel it in my temples. I waited for it to come again. Five minutes, ten nothing. Eventually I got up and closed my window, even though it meant I'd swept through my sheets the rest of the night.

The next morning, at breakfast, I asked my mom if she'd heard anything unusual during the night.

every week. Coyotes yip and bark and howl, and even when a whole pack gets going at once, you can tell what they are. This was a single voice, one animal, and the sound it made was unlike anything I'd heard before or have heard since. Over the next two weeks, I heard it three more times, always at night, always from the same general direction, south and east, toward the

deep timber along the creek. The second time I heard it, I was already awake, reading by flashlight under my covers, and I was able to get to the window and listen more carefully. It was the same call, that low building growl that escalated into something high and terrible and then stopped cold. But this time, about fifteen seconds after it ended, I heard a second call, fainter, farther away, coming from somewhere to the west, on the other side of the property.

been choking the pasture fence row. I liked the goats. They had personality. One of them, a brown and white nanny my sister had named Patches, would come right up to you and push your head against your hand looking for scratches. Another one, a gray billy that my dad called Hank, was an escape artist who spent half his

time testing the fence for weak spots. They were funny, goofy animals, and taking care of them gave me something to do that kept me closer to the house and farther from the woods, which at that point I was grateful for. The first one went missing on August third, I remember the date because it was my mom's birthday. I went out to feed the goats that morning and counted five instead of six. One of the younger nannies, a solid brown one we hadn't named yet, was gone.

The ping gate was closed and latched. The hog wire was intact on three sides, but on the backside, the side closest to the tree line, a section of wire had been pulled away from the bottom of the fence post and bent upward, leaving a gap maybe two feet wide and eighteen inches high. I called my dad out. He looked at the fence, looked at the gap, and said the goat must have pushed under and run off. But I could see his face while he examined that wire,

and he wasn't as sure as he sounded. Hogwire is stiff. Bending it like that takes real force more than a sixty pound goat is going to exert pushing against it from ground level. The wire wasn't just bent either. It was twisted slightly, the way it would be if something had grabbed it and pulled upward. There were tufts of brown hair caught in the sharp ends of the wire, and some of it was stained with what looked like

dried blood. Not a lot, but enough. My dad fixed the fence, added an extra strand of electric wire along the bottom, and told me the goat would probably turn up in a day or two.

Then he went into the house and came back out with his deer rifle, a Remington thirty ought to six, and walked the tree line for about one hundred yards in each direction. He didn't find anything, or at least he didn't tell me he did. When he came back, he told me and Beth that we weren't to go near the woods until further notice. He said there was probably a big cat in the area, maybe a bobcat that had gotten bold, and he didn't want us taking

any chances. I wanted to tell him it wasn't a bobcat. Bobcats don't bend hog wire. Bobcats don't leave dog shaped tracks the size of a man's hand. Bobcats don't make sounds that carry across a valley and stop your heart in your chest. But I also saw the look on my dad's face, and I realized something that scared me almost as much as the sounds in the night. My

dad was unsettled. My dad, who had done two tours in Vietnam and didn't flinch at much of anything, was standing at the edge of that tree line with his rifle in his hands, and he was unsettled. I kept my mouth shut and stayed close to the house. The next ten days were tense. My dad started sleeping with his rifle leaned against the wall next to his bed.

He put a padlock on the goat pen gate, which was absurd because the gate wasn't the problem, but I think he needed to feel like he was doing something. He drove over to Elden Kreeger's place one afternoon and asked him if he'd lost any livestock recently. My mom told me later that Kreeger had said no, but that he'd mentioned finding a dead whitetail buck on his property that had been partially eaten and dragged into a brush pile.

He'd assumed it was a mountain lion. Kreeger said he'd been carrying a gun with him when he went out to.

I'd look out there and see nothing but trees and shadows, but the feeling was undeniable. The vocalizations continued too. My dad heard one of them for the first time on a night in mid August. I know he did because I was awake when it happened, and I heard his bedroom door open, heard his footsteps in the hall, heard the back door creak as he went out onto the porch.

I went to my window and looked down and saw him standing in the yard and his boxers and undershirt, his rifle in his hands, looking south toward the tree line. The sound had already faded. He stood out there for maybe five minutes, perfectly still, just listening. Then he came back inside and locked the door. At breakfast the next morning, he was quiet. My mom asked him what was wrong, and he said nothing, just tired. But he looked at me across the table and held my eyes for a second,

longer than normal, and I could see it. He'd heard it, and he knew it wasn't a coyote. The third goat disappeared on a Sunday night in the third week of August. We heard this one happen, or rather we heard the aftermath. The goat started screaming around two in the morning. If you've never heard a goat scream in terror, count yourself lucky. It's one of the most god awful sounds in the world. High pitched, raw, desperate. They sounded like they were being murdered,

every single one of them, all at once. My dad was out of bed and down the stairs with his rifle before I even got my feet on the floor. My mom was right behind him, telling him to wait to call the sheriff, to not go out there alone.

a way that I'd never seen on him before. He sat down at the kitchen table and put his rifle across his knees and told my mom that another goat was gone. The fence was torn open again. Worse this time, a section about four feet wide ripped away from the posts and folded backward, like someone had peeled open a tin can. The remaining three goats were huddled in the

corner of their shelter, shaking. One of them had a gash on its flank, not deep, but long, like something with claws had swiped at it and missed a solid grip. There was blood on the ground near the fence, more than the previous times, and there were tracks. My mom asked what kind of tracks. My dad looked at me again, that same look. Then he said they were big canine, but big, too big to be any dog he'd ever seen. I didn't say a word. I didn't say I told

you so. I didn't remind him about the tracks I'd found at the creek in June. I just sat on the stairs and listened to my parents talking low voices at the kitchen table, and I felt a cold six satisfaction that I'd been right, mixed with a much larger, much heavier terror about what being right actually meant. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The next morning, my dad moved the remaining goats into the barn. Something changed in the house after

that night. It's hard to explain the atmosphere, but it was like a pressure, like the air before a thunderstorm, that thick electric heaviness that makes it hard to take a full breath. Everyone felt it. Beth stopped complaining about being bored and started finding reasons to stay inside. My mom, who'd been making an effort to be cheerful about the

move all summer, went quiet. She cooked, she cleaned, she did laundry, but she didn't hum while she worked anymore, and she started keeping the curtains closed on the south facing windows, the ones that looked out toward the woods. My dad threw himself into fortifying things. He put up floodlights on the barn on the back of the house, the big Haligen kind that lit up the yard like

a car dealership. He strung more electric fence. He started driving the perimeter of the property every evening before dark, slow loops in the truck with the window down, looking and listening. He never told us what he was looking for. He didn't have to. I spent most of my time on the front porch, which faced the gravel road in the open fields to the north, away from the woods, away from whatever was back there. I read books, I drew pictures.

By mid August, they were closer, a quarter mile maybe less, and they weren't just coming from one direction anymore. I'd hear a call from the south, and then a few minutes later a response from the east. Then silence, then movement in the brush behind the barn, too heavy and too deliberate to be a raccoon or a possum. I started sleeping with my window closed every night, heat or

no heat. I'd lie there in that sweltering upstairs room, drenched in sweat, with the covers pulled up to my chin like a little kid, and I'd listen to things move in the darkness outside my window. One night near the end of August, I heard footsteps on the porch roof. My bedroom was on the second floor, and the porch roof ran directly below my window. You could access it from outside if you climbed one of the porch posts, or from inside if you went through the hall window.

I'd actually climbed out onto it myself a couple of times during the day, just messing around. I knew what it sounds like when someone walked on it. The old tin roofing would flex and pop under your weight, a very specific kind of metallic groaning. That's exactly what I heard. Three steps, slow, deliberate, moving from the edge of the porch roof toward my window, the tin flexing and popping under something heavy. Then it stopped right outside my window.

I was lying on my side facing the window, and the curtain was thin enough that I could see the general shape of the window frame against the slightly lighter darkness outside. I couldn't see anything standing there, but I could feel it. That same feeling I'd had in the woods back in June amplified by a thousand. Every nerve in my body was firing. I was shaking so hard the bed frame was vibrating against the wall. I tried

to call for my dad. My throat wouldn't work. I opened my mouth and nothing came out but a dry, strangled whisper that wouldn't have carried past the foot of my bed. Then I heard breathing, heavy, slow, rhythmic breathing right on the other side of the glass, deep and ragged and close, close enough that if the window had been open, I would have felt it on my face. I don't know how long it lasted. It felt like hours.

It was probably three or four minutes. Then the tin popped again, two steps moving away from the window, and I heard something drop off the edge of the porch roof and land in the yard below. Not a small drop, either, The impact was heavy enough that I felt a faint vibration through the house frame. I didn't sleep for the rest of the night. I lay there, rigid, staring at the window until the sky started to lighten and I could hear birds singing. Then I got up and went

to the window and looked at the porch roof. There were scratches in the tent long parallel scratches, four of them spaced about an inch apart, running in the direction of my window. They hadn't been there before. I told my dad that morning, all of it everything I'd been holding back, the feeling of being watched since June, the tracks at the creek, the vocalizations, the way the sounds had been getting closer, and what had happened on the

porch roof during the night. He listened without interrupting. When I finished, he went outside and looked at the porch roof. He stood on a step ladder and examined the scratches. He walked the perimeter of the house, looking at the ground. Then he came inside and sat down at the kitchen table and was quiet for a while. My mom asked what was going on. My dad told her what I'd said. Beth was there too, and her face went from bored

indifference to wide eyed fear in about three seconds. My mom started asking questions what kind of animal could climb.

activity in Dent County. He suggested setting up a trail camera, which my dad didn't have, or putting out a live trap, which wouldn't do any good for something big enough to tear through hog wire. The agent said he'd make a note of the report and check in if anything else came up.

the weapon across his lap. He told us he was just being careful. He told us there was nothing to worry about, But he sat in that hallway all night, and I could see the outline of the rifle barrel against the wall every time I opened my eyes. He did the same thing the next night and the night after that. My mom would bring him coffee around midnight, and I'd hear them whispering in the hallway, their voices too low for me to make out the words, but

the tone unmistakable. They were scared, both of them, and they were trying to figure out what to do without terrifying their children any more than we already were. The truth is, Beth and I were already past terrified. We'd gone through fear and come out the other side into something that felt more like resignation. We couldn't leave, not immediately. My dad had sunk everything we had into the property and the move. There was no apartment waiting for us back in Kentucky, no backup plan.

dreading this part of the story. I've been writing toward it like you'd walk toward the edge of a cliff, knowing you have to look down eventually, but putting it off as long as possible, because describing what we saw that night means committing it to something permanent. It means taking the thing that lives in the back of my mind, the thing I've spent forty years trying to rationalize away, and putting it into words that other people will read.

It was September first, the last day of summer technically, though school in our area didn't start until the ninth. The weather had broken a little. A cold front had come through over the weekend, and the temperature had dropped into the seventies during the day, low sixties at night. It felt like relief after months of suffocating heat. We'd been on edge for days, all of us. But nothing

had happened since the porch roof incident. No sounds, no missing goats, though they were locked in the barn now behind heavy doors that my dad had reinforced with two by sixes bolted across the frames. No tracks, no signs, no feelings of being watched. It was like something had pulled back, retreated to whatever part of the timber it called home, and left us alone. I was starting to hope it was over. Maybe whatever it was had moved on.

Maybe the floodlights and the activity around the property had scared it off.

Not their normal barking, the kind they did when a raccoon came around or a car turned down the gravel road. This was different, frantic, hysterical, high pitched, yelping barks punctuated with long, keening wines, the sound of dogs that are terrified. My dad put down his book and stood up. He went to the window that faced the backyard and looked out. From where I was sitting, I could see his reflection in the glass, and I watched his brush and change.

It went from alert to confused to something I'd never seen on his face before, something close to disbelief. He said one word, He said, Helen, my mom's name. My mom got up and went to the window. She looked out. She didn't say anything for about five seconds. Then she grabbed my dad's arm and said, oh my god. I was on my feet by then, so was Beth. We both went to the window and looked out into the

floodlit yard. It was standing at the edge of the tree line about eighty yards from the house, right where the mode grass ended and the brush began, standing upright on two legs. I need to slow down here because this is important and I want to get it exactly right. The floodlights were bright, bright enough that we could see the barn clearly, see the goat pan, see the fence posts and the wire, and the individual blades of grass

in the yard. The thing at the tree line was at the far edge of that light, partially lit and partially in shadow, but we could see enough. It was tall. I don't mean six feet tall, I mean tall. My dad estimated it later at somewhere between seven and eight feet based on the tree. It was standing near a ceaar that he'd trimmed the lower branches off of the week before, and knew the height of it stood upright the way a person stands with its shoulders back and

its head up. But everything about its proportions was wrong. The legs were too long relative to the torso, and they were bent at the knee in a way that human legs don't bend. A reverse angle digitigrade like a dog standing on its hind legs. The arms hung down past its waist, long and thick, and the hands, if you can call them hands, looked enormous, even from eighty yards away. But the head, that's what made my mom grab my dad's arm. That's what made my sister start

to cry without making a sound. The head was not human. It was along gate with a distinct muzzle, a snout, pointed ears that stood erect on top of the skull. It looked like a dog's head, a wolf's head sitting on top of a body that was built like a man, but proportioned like nothing I'd ever seen in any book or nature show or nightmare. The thing's body was covered in dark hair or fur.

We stood there, the four of us, pressed against the glass, looking at something that should not exist. The dogs had stopped barking. They'd gone completely silent, which was somehow worse than the frantic noise they'd been making before. The thing stood there for probably thirty seconds, maybe forty five. Its head moved slightly, tilting to one side, the way a dog does when it's listening to something.

rifle in the dark. My dad chambered around. The sound of the bolt closing was the loudest thing I'd ever heard. He didn't go outside. Instead, he went to the back door, unlocked it, pushed open the screen, and fired a single round into the air. The shot cracked across the yard like thunder, echoing off the barn in the hills beyond. The thing reacted instantly. It dropped, not fell, dropped. It went from standing upright to a crouched position on all fours in a motion so fast and so fluid that

it barely registered. One second it was standing there like a man, seven or eight feet of dark mass against the tree line, and the next it was down low to the ground. Its posture completely changed, its silhouette, suddenly more animal than anything else.

each stride, deliberate but blindingly quick. The body low and streamlined, eating up ground like the earth was on a conveyor belt, rolling backward underneath it.

My dad stood in the doorway for a long time, the rifle at his shoulder, scanning the tree line.

My dad sat in a chair facing the back door. My mom sat on the couch with her arm around Beth. I sat on the floor with my back against the couch, staring at nothing, running through what i'd just seen over and over and over in my mind, trying to make it into something I could understand. We stayed like that until the sun came up. We left the farm eleven

days later. My dad found a rental in Salem, a small house on a regular street with neighbors on both sides, and street lights and traffic and all the things I'd never thought i'd be grateful for He told people he decided farming wasn't for him, that the property needed more work than he'd anticipated, that my mom missed being closer to town. Nobody questioned it, nobody had any reason to. He sold the property the following spring to a timber company that wanted the land for the trees. I don't

know if anyone ever lived in that house again. I drove past the turnoff about fifteen years ago on a trip through the area for work, and I slowed down at the gravel road and thought about driving back in, just to see, just to know if the house was still standing, if the barn was still there, if the woods still felt the way they'd felt in nineteen eighty five. I sat at that turnoff for probably two minutes, engine idling, hand on the steering wheel. I didn't turn in. I

drove on, and I haven't been back since. Some part of me is ashamed of that. Some part of me thinks a braver man would have gone back, would have walked those trails again, would have stood at that tree line in the daylight and faced the thing that had run him off forty years ago.

He stopped walking the fence line.

and nodding at each other and leaving it there. My dad never brought it up, not once in the twenty three years between that night and the night he died of a heart attack in two thousand and eight. The closest he ever came was one evening about a year before he passed, sitting on my back deck in Kansas City, when he looked at me out of nowhere and said, I should have believed you about those tracks.

look like a massive dog's pawprint. Feral dog doesn't work, not even close. A dog on its hind legs is awkward, temporary, unstable. What I saw was standing upright with the comfort and ease of a creature that was built to do it, and no dog, no matter how large, could cover the kind of ground this thing covered on all fours in the span of three or four strides a person in a costume. I've heard this theory applied to other sightings, and it's insulting. A person in a costume does not

leave claw marks on a tin roof. A person in a costume does not drag a sixty pound goat through a torn section of hogwire and into the woods. A person in a costume does not have eyes that reflect light the way an animal's eyes do. It's not something you can fake with a rubber mask. So what does that leave I didn't know what to call it for most of my life. I didn't have a name for it. When I was a teenager, I read some books about were wolf legends and thought maybe that was the closest fit.

But the whole supernatural transformation thing didn't feel right. This wasn't something that used to be a person. This was an animal, a predator, a living, breathing creature that occupied a territory, hunted prey, made vocalizations to communicate with others of its kind, and had a physical form that was consistent and real and left tangible evidence of its existence.

When I found your show, Brian and started hearing other people describe encounters with something they called a dog man, I felt like someone had turned a light on in a room I'd been sitting in for forty years. The descriptions matched. The elongated canine head, the upright stance, the digital grade legs, the disproportionately long arms, the speed on all fours, the vocalizations, the predatory behavior toward livestock, the way it watched and studied before it acted. I don't

know what a dog man is. I don't know if it's an undiscovered species, a relic predator that somehow survived in pockets of deep wilderness, or something that defies biological classification altogether. What I know is that my family and I lived with one, maybe two of them, for an entire summer, and it was the most frightening experience of any of our lives. I'm not looking for val I'm not looking for anyone to tell me they believe me.

I know what I saw, my mom knows what she saw, my sister knows what she saw, and somewhere in whatever quiet place my dad occupies. Now he knows too. I just wanted to finally tell someone the whole story, from the beginning to the end, without leaving anything out, and without softening it to make it easier to hear. I've been caring this for forty years, Brian, forty years of knowing that something impossible was real and not having anyone to tell.

So there it is, the summer of nineteen eighty five, the Culture Farm, Dent County, Missouri. Whatever was in those woods, it's still out there somewhere. I believe that the Ozarks are vast and deep and full of places where people don't go, miles and miles of unbroken timber, where things can live and move and hunt without ever being seen by human eyes. And every once in a while, when the conditions are right, when someone moves into the wrong piece of life land or walks the wrong trail at

the wrong time, those things make themselves known. I hope this story finds its way to someone who's had an experience like mine, someone who's been carrying the weight of something they can explain, turning it over in their mind at two in the morning, wondering if they imagined it wondering if they're the only person in the world who's

ever seen something like that. If you're out there and you've seen what I've seen, I want you to know you're not crazy, you're not imagining things, and you're not alone. There are more of us than you think, keeping quiet, carrying this weight, waiting for someone to give us permission to say it out loud. This is me saying it out loud forty years later, but I'm saying it. Thanks for reading this, Brian, Thanks for doing what you do with your show. It matters more than you probably realize.

You've given people like me a place to put something that doesn't fit anywhere else in our lives, and that's worth more than I can tell you.