Ep:148 It Wasn't A Man

many times over the years. I remember mentally trying to force what I'm looking at into something I knew, a horse or cow, something like that, and it's a back lit by the sun. I thought, this is not either one of those, and it's not a man. It's just large hair covered things standing there on two legs. And I'd never even heard a big foot.

no nonsense in the woods. And we were Native Americans, so we respect everything in the woods, and so we sort of knew how to behave accordingly from my brothers, and I did from a young age. And so when I was eleven, we had moved from the rural part down to the Beaumont put Arthur area on the coast, but we would go back and visit our grandparents quite often because they were still up there. And I'd had

family in that area since eighteen thirty six. Wow, Yeah, same year Davy Crockett passed through those same parts, my third great grandfather came into that area. So been in that area ever since. And while it was in November nineteen seventy one, I was eleven years old and we drove up from Beaumont for Arthur area, and we'd say at my grandparents' house and my dad would get us up really early every morning and we'd go deer hunting.

Obviously it's a jeer season for white tail. So like we did every time, we'd drive out to the same spot, which is just west of Gropton, Texas. Groton is the county seat of Trinity County, Texas, and to an area that's now known as Westville. Not maybe a few people live out there now, and it's obviously named Westville because it's west of Gropton, and it's an area people referred to as the Why. It's where there are two eighty seven splits and goes up toward Crockett, Texas and ninety

four goes down toward Trinity, Texas. And we'd go down the toward Trinity a bit and then pull off on this dirt road and drive till the dead ended. We'd get out there. It was dark as night because the sun had yet to come up, and my dad we'd get out of the car be as quiet as we could. My dad would have a flashlight which he points straight down to Rowland. He'd lead a younger brother of mine.

It was just about a year or four months younger to his spot where he would stay and wait for the sun to come up, and then he'd lead me to my spot, and then my dad would go off further west, and then he'd eventually turn north and then wait for the sun to come up, and he would

sort of move toward us through the woods. And so while he was sort of actively hunting, moving taking a few steps looking around, my brother and I were what they call still we'd still hunt where we're just sitting there waiting to see if you could drive anything toward us. It was one morning in particular, like I said, November, there's those crisp East Texas fall days where it was probably in upper forties fifty and the air it was just clear. It felt good, you could, you know, the

birds and squirreled all pretty happy. And so I'm sitting there on my stand. I'm sitting at the base of a small oak tree where I have a couple of lines of sight to the left and to the right. I'm sitting on my backside with my legs right in front of me stretched out. Now I'm left handed, so I have a four to ten single shotgun with a one round the slug in it, and so that's against my right shoulder and have the barrel resting down across

my legs. And so gets to that time of day where you can really start to see things, and you hear the woods come alive, you can hear the birds, you hear the small animals moving around, and I start to hear sounds too behind me and back to my right in the distance. And at this point, like I said, it's sort of gray, but the sun's really starting to come up. So back in that direction is towards the rising sun, and I'm thinking, what is this I'm hearing?

And I realize it's actually footballs and I could distinctly hear it because of the leaves underfoot. And We've gone out there to this place countless times and there's no one that hunts out there, and so I'm thinking, there must be someone out here that's hunting, and what the heck is he doing? Because about the most profane word I knew in my mind at that age was levenear was jackass, Because I hear this guy and I'm thinking,

what is this jackass doing? Is you know, I can hear crunch crunch, crunch, And my little amused thought didn't last long, because then it crossed my mind in a flash that this guy was walking toward me from about my four o'clock So I'm sitting, I'm facing north. This guy is coming from back toward the southeast, and I think anybody inexperience enough hunting to not try to be out in the woods me quiet, I'm not. That's not

someone I would be taught to trust. And the fact that he's walking toward me is becoming really unnerving, and I'm starting to say, I think, what should I do? What should I do? I'm gonna have to let this person know I'm here, And even if he's somehow moves his sort of trajectory a little bit, he's going to be walking somewhat in the direction my dad's coming from, and I'm fearful that he might see my dad. You know, some people, I've heard him joke they'll just shoot if

they hear a sound. So all this is racing, racing, racing to my mind, and I just about decided I'm going to sort of make a clear my throat that sort of thing. When the guy gets close enough, and I'm thinking, well, that make enough soundly shoot at me. All this is just racing, racing, racing. At that point, I waste enough time in fear of trying to decide what to do that this guy had come up right

behind me and suddenly just came to a stop. So he's about fifteen feet to back right, and I'm sitting, like I said, on the ground against this in anticipation of the way he was walking. I had my head turned as far as I could to the right, and I'm using my peripheral vision to look at so so I can see this guy. At that point, I had not made a sound, and I thought, well, he stopped,

so he must see me. And like I said, I'm looking back sort of in the direction of the sun, and I see someone standing there, but it's not a someone. And I remember I've gone through this in my head so many times over the year. I remember mentally trying to puce what I'm looking at into something I knew, no, a horse or cow, something like that. And it's back lit by the sun. I thought, this is not either

one of those, and it's not a man. It's large sort of chocolate coverard hair covered things standing there on two legs and I had never even heard a big but never I remember when I was in I was that was my first year in middle school. I was sixth grade at this time. When I was in elementary school, kids would joke about the goat man's going to get you. That was a term I heard a lot, and even hearing that, I think that's just a story people make up to keep young people from going out and parking

on country roads and necking and stuff like that. So you know, the goat man isn't anything real. It's just they believe. I so goat man. I was familiar with the term. But here is something I never heard of, and it's standing there about fifteen feet away. And the last lucid thought that I had was why is this guy breathing so hard? He wasn't walking because he's going. Then I'm thinking, and then it hit me, He's not breathing hard from exertion. He smalls me and he knows

I'm there. And like I said, I was looking to my back right pur pro vision, and I just had this horrible sinking feeling and the next thing I knew, I'm looking down at my lap. Oh twenty hindsight, I know, I painted the fact that I'm sitting down up against this tree. I'm still upright, so to speak. When I sort of got gathered my wits or revived from the faint, I slowly look up and turn again, and I think,

what is this thing going to do to me? And it's still breathing like that, and I'm thinking, my god, this thing's gonna kill me or whatever, and it's gonna be suddenly go. Just all I can describe is a sort of a disgusted grunt snort like ah. And it turned and walked away to my back left, sort of at the same pace, not heard off in that direction. And I sat there until I couldn't hear the footballs anymore.

But I was just so I know, I am sure I was in a state of shop because it just didn't register with anything right that, Like I said, any known quantity with me. I can say all the times my dad would come and go, when he'd drop, when he'd walk away in the morning, and then when he had slowly come back, he'd always whistle when he got close,

so I know he was getting close. And my dad's six feet tall, so relative to seeing him from a sitting position, there on that deerstand so many times I knew this thing was probably six two six thirty maybe, so it wasn't overly tall, but it was very bare well built, and with the sun back lighting it almost gave it a sort of a red halo tinge around it. The hair hair tips, that makes sense. Yeah, And I couldn't really see its face because, like I said, with

the sun behind it, it's in shadow. All I could see was this very well put together thing, and its head was sort of comb shape, you know, because I'm there looking up at it so I can really focus my with my purpul vision. I was more focused on the top part of its body. I didn't move my head around to see what its feet looked like or anything else. Sometimes, you know, when I go over and

over it, this is in my mind. I thought, if I were to leaned around to get a look good look at it, what would have what would it have done? I'll never know.

But in other words, from my position, I think I got it as good to look at it at at it as I could have without really leaning around the tree to try to look directly at it. Oh wow, No, I didn't. I didn't. Like I said, my dad was form a military marks and ship badges and stuff like that. Here's no nonsense in the woods. So I didn't dare say anything to him, even think I was out of my mind or whatever. And so it was just one

of those things I let fester in my brain. And the next year, in nineteen seventy two, we went to watch a movie called Legend of Boggy Creek, which I know pretty much everybody's heard of at this point. And when that movie started going on and I saw the lay of the land, the woods and the creeks and stuff like that, how much it looked like where we hunted. And then that thing, that's when I knew what I had seen. Boy, that movie scared the hell out of me.

It scared me so bad that I really didn't want to ever hunt again. I'm not afraid of the woods, but I just never wanted to be in that position again. But that movie sort of, in my young mind, explained a lot to me about what I've seen, and so that was sort of my introduction to those critters.

talk about encounters they had. The way they described the breathing when one walked up it was exactly not sort of, it was exactly the way this thing reacted to me, with the heavy breathing in the sort of snort like you know, I'm done with you? What are you doing here in my way?

within the Davy Crockett National Forest. That land's been in my family for years and years, and he used to pay the US government this very small token amount each year because of that acreage. But I've heard sounds from there. But the most vivid encounter I heard of when I was there one of my dad's well, I considered the guy he passed away just recently. He was one of

my dad's best friends. Tells his story of one of his buddies led hunts in the area deer hunts again, and he had deer stands set up north of Gropton, up the ninety four corridor that goes to Lufkin, Texas and between Broken Luck in the the Natures River, and there's this area called ironically Boggy Slough. And so this guy had some stands set up in the Boggy Slow area right where Trinity, sort of Trinity and Angelina County meets.

And again this is like heavily forested area, and the fact that the river ran through there gave all these swampy marshy areas. And so according to the story of my dad's, a friend told it had been related to him from his buddy. So it's beyond second third hand. But this guy is very reliable. He was honest. You tell long story, but he was honest about it. He said a friend had put this guy out on a deer stand one morning about the same time that bears

my encounter. It was November, but this was in twenty sixteen. Is when this happens. And guys out there on the stand and he's sitting and sitting sitting in the morning grows long and it's light, and he knows he's going to be picked up barely soon, and so he's sort of giving up on the white tail for that morning.

And suddenly a sounder of wild hogs comes out of the woods, and so he's looking at all these pigs and he's thinking, what, I'm not going to get a deer today, I'm shoot the biggest pig here, And so he picks the biggest one out and shoots it. Pig over in the middle of the pig falls over this large bpedal animal walks out of the woods, grabs the pig that he had shot, picks it up like it weighs nothing, and slams it into a tree and then walks off back into the woods with the pig. No way,

Oh that's the only this guy told him. So the guy like, I said that, put the guy in the stand. He comes out to the stand, and he figures the guy would hear him coming up, you know, and get up and walk out of the deer stand because one of those little enclosed stand sort of little rectangular type things. Yeah, if Berndy deer hunters would be telling where you have, you know, you can sort of look all around you.

And so he doesn't see the guy. He starts to get worried and he goes to the stand, opens the oysters. The guy is lying curled up in the fetal position on the floor. There's his deer stand, and the guy just kept saying, it's going to kill me, it's going to kill me, it's going to kill me. And he's trying to get something on this guy. What happened, what happened?

And he said that the guy explains to what happened, So he said he the he walked out to a place where the guy explaining, he said, there's blood on the ground and then blood up in the tree where the guy said that the animals snacked the pig against the tree. So coming from my dad's friend, I have to believe that's true, because, like I said, he was a no nonsense guy.

any choice, so they went back to the house. Next morning, they get up and she goes with them to try and find this deer, and they found the blood trail and they're following the blood trail, and then the blood trail disappears. It just stops and she could see where it looked like something walked off through the brush. So she kind of followed that trail. It wasn't like a game trail or anything, though, she said, but it was

just broken brush and things like that. And she thought, well, maybe something happened for whatever reason, you know, I'm not seeing the blood trail. Maybe the deer walked off this way. So she follows it, and eventually she finds the deer and it's just kind of like laying in this little clearing out in the woods, and all of the ground around it in about a ten foot radius looked like it had been cleared out, like the leaves and all the ground clutter had been pushed back away from the

deer and cleared out away from the deer. And the deer's like laying in the middle of this circle, and its body is just twisted up like an old washcloth. I mean, something has taken it and broken its neck and just twisted the whole body around. And there weren't any you know, signs of scavenging or anything like that. Weirdest thing. She showed me pictures of it. Don't know that a bigfoot did it, but don't really have any

explanation for it. Never heard of anything like that usually, you know, if coyotes do it, they'll tear it up pretty good and kind of scattered around all over the place. But the whole deer was there, just twisted up.

in that area. And it's about an acre or more and it's got a lot of vegetation, completely surrounded by trees. And this is only about two hundred yards from the National Forest part of the pasture I was mentioning. So my dad had bought some calves and one of them got sort of sickly, So you know, we put them in the patch because it's it's adjacent to the barn, and so it's got plenty of vegetation there to eat and it can come up to the barn where I had water in the troughs for it. So one morning

I go out there. This was only I guess two thousand and eight, so a couple of years after that happened with the hunter. I go out there, and I didn't I figured the cap would be up near the barn, because I'd give it some feet in the morning, and it wasn't up there. I start walking through the patch and the vegetation pretty high, so I'm looking looking then like you describe icee, a depressed area in the grass, and then I see the cap. It was ripped in two.

Its back moan was the only thing that connected the front end to the back end. And anyone who's ever fished, if you know you've got a fish, you spice them straight down the belly and remove all the insides. That's the way the inside of this cap looked. There was it was just ripped into. There was a front half of it, the back half of it, and it's intros all that. It was just gone cleaned out, and there was this huge depressed area all around it. Like you described.

It didn't have a bite mark on it.

place in New Mexico, you found some interesting things. Has anything happened in the timeline between Texas and New Mexico or is this more recent stuff really the stuff that's been standing out to you?

There's this old government fencing and my dog suddenly alerted on something and I looked up and I actually saw one. I'd say I three to five seconds. It was on the others in the heavily wooded area, part of the National Force, and it went left to right. It was like watching an NFL lineman do the swim move where they use their arms. It's good, that's what it did. And I thought it was what am I seeing? And I jump deer there countless times, and this wasn't a

deer jump. It was a large It was about the same color as the one I saw when I was a kid. Like I said, it was only three to five seconds. What amazed me is how thick that brush was and how fast it got through it and how little sound it made. Basically all I saw was from about waste up and it was gone.

So I go up to that property. It's only a few miles north of Groton, and it's heavily wooded. If you didn't see any and every kind of animal in this place. And so I'm in it with my dogs, my dogs from that time, and there's one area that's sort of a clearing that's sort of pear shape, and there's a deer stand down at the what would be the bottom of the pear that looks out over this clearing and there's a really really thick stand of bamboo all along the left side of it. So I go

around the base of it. I'm going up and I had the bamboo to my left, and I had a red heeler and he was always out free lancing, just running around, running around, and he'd make contact with me every a few minutes. Blue heeler and she was pretty insecure and she always stayed near mean. And I'm walking the bamboos to my left, and there's a really deep creek that flows into Piny Creek, which then goes into

the Natures River. There's a really deep creek on the other side of that war I was walking and I knew my dog had the red heeler had gone over there, and next thing you know, he's in front of me, and I almost trip Ograhim. And I always try to be as quiet as I possibly can when I'm out there, because I want to see what some animals we're going to see him, you know, I get to kick out of that. My dog's like seeing deer and pigs and

other stuff. And he had my dog can look on absolute terror on his face, and so I quietly say said to him, I said, what's wrong, Red, what's up? What's up? And he just looked at me, and so I finally I get him out of the way and I start walking again, and he runs in front of me again, and I had to stop short. And the

minute I did, I hear football football crunch. It's like something across that creek on the other side of the bamboo walked and it had to stop short too, and I could hear this dead ball sort of slowly cracking as it put his foot down, and I thought, okay, did I just hear what I thought? I And for a second time, I tried to start walking, and my dog they just wouldn't let me move, And so i'd walked a few steps and the same thing happened, but that time I just heard step step, real heavy steps.

I thought, oh man, there's something obviously something over there that's got my dog's petrified. So I just stand there a few minutes and listen and listen and listen, and try to get my dogs through lives. And I finally get them out of my way, and I think, Okay, I'm gonna try to make it to the end of this stand of bamboo. And I'm going to be able to look across that creek and see what's over there

if I can see through the brush. So I start walking again, and again my dogs just getting front when I had to stop and I heard step step, and it stopped, and I thought, the hell with this. I'm not anything that's got him that scared. I'm not going to see it. But it sounded like something. It's walking on two legs and it's big, and so I just said to heck with it and went and sort of tried to look for that cow somewhere else. But my dogs are just petrified that they would not leave my sigh.

After that, Becau said all that, and less than a week after that, I was at my dad's house and he said, did did you hear anybody in town say that someone saw said they saw a bigfoot on Walter Dial Road? And that's name for my great grandfather, and that's exactly where that property is. Walter Dial Road crosses well stops at ninety four that goes up to Luckin and then Lloyd James Road is where that property is.

And I said, no, I hadn't heard that. And I said, but that sound encounter I tried to tell him about that. He said, oh, it's probably just a big hog his answer for ever everything. I thought, no, because I've been on that property a lot of times and my dogs had actually killed a couple of hogs out there that

they sadly caught, but that's just what dogs do. And so I thought, between what that hunter saw, what I saw down, you know, doing the swim move through the National Force and the place I was just talking about, that's literally maybe three miles total from there where we heard that thing walking on the other side of the creek. All that happened really within the span of a few months. So interesting coincidences.

it out. But I heard that on multiple occasions where the coyotes would start going, then I hear that, oh, and I thank god, crazy stuff.

of Christ. And they look that way as the sun is setting, and the north of Tao said about eight thousand feet and I'm taking my dogs out and we go up into the mountains and we discover what looks like old piping that was once used to care maybe snow melt down from the mountains. And we have this high desert, very dry, that's to the west of where I am. And so it just started following an old road up there that looks like it was once used maintenance.

And now it looks like there's a game trail thorough bear you know, see bear tracks and deer tracks and coyote tracks and droppings and stuff like that. And I have a young dogs now, and the youngest one is a husky and he's pretty fired up and always running ahead. So, like I said, one of the first time Blue went out and we're up in the mountains, there's this is in the Carson National Course, and there was no one around. And back to this day, I've never seen a single

person up there. And we go out there up there almost every day, and this area and the young dog kept running ahead, and we're at the bottom of this arroyo, following the remnants of these roads. I finally got frustrated with him. I had the other dog on the leash because he weighs ninety pounds and if the husky goes, the other dog will go and they might wind up in Colorado chasing something. So I called the dog puppy.

So I actually sort of growl us a fucking slow down you now again, I'm always trying to be quiet, and I sort of growled at at him. And two are left and above us up the creek, were following up this arroyo. Something. It was a combination of a scream and a howl that was so ungodly loud I thought it knocked me off my feet. It was that loud. And my first thought was everybody in Taos County had

to have earned that. And I can't see it, but it's I know it's up there, and the husky starts running back at me, and the dog I have on the leash starts running up at it, wanting to get whatever for it is. And I had one of those the plastic handle leashes that's retractable, and I had to fight fight to get up to my dog, and this thing kept screaming at us this whole time. And I finally got to my dog and I literally had to

pin him to the ground. I had to get on him so because I was worried he was going to break the end of that leaf out and go after it, and is this thing screaming at us? It finally started going up and up and up and up, and it went up into the mountain and until the sound effectively baited, it stopped, but it just screamed for and I was sitting there thinking, God, I had my phone, I had a little recorder hang on it, but I was so

busy fighting my dog that came from going after it. That, Uh, that was about as bizarre as anything I've had happened in a while, because it it was just so loud and I tried to describe it to someone. I said, it's be like the cross of a coyote on steroids and a siren. That's how it sounded.

and the camera was just gone. And so I thought either the bears took it off or someone happened up here and stole it, and I know it was gone. I looked up and down that arroyo, and I went there multiple times since, and even when I was going to write up basically the information I shared with you to say the camera was so and so high on

the tree. I stood right in front of the tree that I hadn't mounted on to use my mind's eye so I could say Okay, this is about five and a half feet right here, and so I'm standing right in front of the tree and for me to show up there again in late December, two months after it was gone, and my dogs are going up to this point where I had it, and I go up there and the camera was right there at the basically the strap that held it on the tree is gone, but it was there.

And you go put it back where you found it. You know. I'm just going through what I think are logical reasons for it being gone that long, and I couldn't think come up with any because I thought if someone told me to do that, you know, most kids, if they had they just go and pick somewhere or whatever and say, yeah, I did it, But it was exactly on the tree, on the same side of the tree and everything. It was just lying there, right at

the base of the tree. And I'd been up there a number of times, and it wasn't at the base of that tree.

And so all I could think was maybe I hadn't turned it on all the way because it was It's one of these that's got one click to the left to review the pictures on there, and then another turn it on fully. But I always sit there and wait and look. It's just one of those things that I make myself do to until I see a little countdown time starting before I close it walk away. So that the fact that it was gone that long and the fact that there were no pictures on it, it just devise logic in my mind.

are obviously facing toward the tree. So it's stopped picking up any more images after whatever that was that's standing there with its body right in the camera. You know, that's another one that's weird that you know, and I could see a bear or one fellow thinks that's a

mountain lion that's got its space in it. You know, you could see a bear with its paws up, or a mountain line with its pause up somehow raking it the camera just enough to hit that flip on the side that the little hinge were caused it to open. But yeah, something opened.

I get my camera. We start walking down the royal and it's so steep to get up out of there. I had to wait until I go down probably about fifty sixty yards of this sort of semi game trail that goes up and I'm climbing up the trail my huskies ahead. I have the other dog in the leash. I'm holding the camera, but I'm about ten yards from the top. I hear from the mountaintop above us, I hear whack one hard hit, so like someone hit a tree with a baseball. And at that point I was

so out of my mind thinking where's this thing? Ben that I turned around and I held the camera, gave a sort of a goofy nod and way to whatever sound it was that I heard up there, and I got the hell out of there. That was just a weird coincidence.

it worked fine. And I thought that just it makes no sense to me, Like I said, my only logical explanations that someone took it and maybe you know, and then they messed with it and did stuff and then deleted their stuff or whatever, maybe didn't take any pictures all, and then they felt remorse and put it back, but

there were no no new pictures on it, so bizarre. Well, you got that other one I sent either, Really it was taken an instant before the initial that image, so whatever, that's the same animal because it's literally the same, like I said, within microseconds. I guess that's when that one was snapped. So I don't know if that might provide any insights in this madness, but it's weird stuff.

had some warmer days recently, the bears in theory are hibernating. Oh, they won't be messing with it.