You can call me Luke from up in the hills of West Virginia. Please, leave my name, my town, and the railroad's name out of it. There are only so many little tourist lines that run along our stretch of river, and I don't want any of them catching flak because of what I'm about to tell you. This happened on one of those Christmas train rides several winters back. As we chucked it along, there was something out there keeping pace with our little train.
My wife, our nine-year-old son, our six-year-old daughter and myself, had booked the Christmas train as a treat with Christmas money sent from grandparents. Money had been tight that year, but we already had all the gifts for the kids covered. So we all thought maybe we would like the train ride instead of more presents. When we asked the kids, they voted to get the train tickets with the money from their grandparents.
Now this railroad runs an old diesel locomotive, and there's a handful of 1950s coach cars, and it runs along a deep river gorge. In December, they rebranded it as a polar express run. Now they put lights on the outside, they serve cocoa. There are volunteers dressed as elves, you know, they go all out. You take a ride from the little deep hoon town up to a spot they call the North Pole.
It's really just a train siding off in the woods with a bunch of small plywood buildings and some Christmas light set up. It looks like a tiny little elf town. Very cute. You can get out and walk around a bit, buy a few things, and then they take you back to town. We got the late run. It was leaving at 7.30pm, and it was supposed to get back a little after 10. It was the week before Christmas, and the first real cold snap of the year had come. In the daytime temperatures had been in the 20s.
By the time we boarded, it was down to about 15 degrees. There was a fresh dusting of snow covering the banks and the trees. It was that powdery kind of stuff that squeaks under your boots. We had four seats lined together. Me and my daughter on the river side of the train and my wife and son across the aisle on the hillside side of the train. The car was warm, cramped, and very loud in a happy way. Kids were chattering about Christmas and Santa.
Grownups were busy keeping them in line and listening to everything they had to say. Now, I'm a big guy. Bigger than those old train seats were built for. It was just a tad bit uncomfortable, but I knew I'd be fine, and it was just a few hours. And the kids were so pumped, it was all worth it. And once we got moving, and the cocoa came around, I was very relaxed. Volunteers in Elf hats walked up and down with trays of cocoa. Somebody read the polar express over the PA.
And the kids, they were following along like little weird groupies shouting out parts of the story from memory. On the way up to the North Pole, I wasn't thinking about anything. I was just enjoying the atmosphere of happy children, adults, and a nice Christmas ambiance. We wound along the river, sometimes up on a bench cut in the hillside, sometimes right down at the water level.
On our side I could see the river slipping along, patches of ice forming along the edges, and no heaped up on boulders as we passed. The train had a bunch of under-bodied lights. They're mounted so they don't blind you looking out, but they're bright enough to show off the deers, the trees, and the landscape as you pass. If you were the marketing type, you would call that winter magic.
On the other side my wife and son had a view of rock walls and pines, the beam from the headlights raking across the tree trunks as we curved. We passed through a darker stretch where there were no houses, no road, just river on one side, and dark woods on the other. I remember thinking this would be a lonely place to break down. We'd gone maybe 40 minutes when the announcer said we were getting close to the North Pole. The train began to slow, the kids perked up.
We rolled past a big bend in the river and then along a straightaway. Ahead you could see colored lights glowing through the trees. They'd really gone all out at the siding. They had a little post office, a toy shop, and they even had a little Santa's barn with real reindeer that you could pet. All of it was lit up with strings of Christmas lights and floodlights. The flood lights lit the whole clearing. And of course there were rows of little tiny elf shops where you could stop and buy things.
Little small Christmas gifts, souvenirs of the train ride, and they sold specialty hot coffees, cocos, and pastries, things that probably made them more money than the train ride itself. The train pulled alongside at a crawl and finally stopped. The front of the train was almost to the end of the cleared area. Our car was more toward the middle. We could see the main cluster of north pole buildings from our windows plus the edge of the woods beyond.
Over the PA came a voice that told the kids to be on the lookout for Santa. All the kids smushed up against the glass. They were all looking. Well, that's when I got my first look. Right behind the fake toy shop, the hill rises up again sharply. They'd cleared enough trees to make this display, but then there was a wall of dark trees and heavy woods. I was looking over at the toy shop, mostly because they had done a great job of painting it to look like an old company store.
In my peripheral vision though, up there on that hillside I saw something shift. At first I thought it was just a shadow like maybe someone had moved a flood light down below. But it didn't move like a shadow. It moved like something that had been crouched and was now straightening up. It was up above the town display, maybe twenty or thirty feet up behind the buildings, standing between two pines where the flood light spill still reached.
It was too tall and too solid to be any of the volunteers. It rose up and kept rising up until I could see ahead and shoulders well above that toy shop roof lying. What I saw was a massive silhouette with a thick upper body and a short sloped neck. All of it wrapped in some kind of a dark covering that looked more like an animal's coat than any kind of cloth. The flood lights didn't wash it out. Instead they highlighted it.
Not caught along the edges of the arms and the shoulder line, giving clear definition to what I was seeing. It took one step forward, downslope, and then more of it came in to direct light. I want to be careful here. I did not see the face clearly that first time. The angle and the lighting was all wrong. But I saw enough to know I wasn't looking at someone in a costume. The shoulders were as wide as a door. The torso incredibly long.
The arms were hanging almost to mid-thigh with the elbow bent in a strange place. The legs were thick like telephone poles. When it moved it had that smooth heavy gate that you see on big draft horses. Nothing bounced. It was just heavy weight settling and lifting again, solid and smooth. It stood there a moment, looking down at the train in the village. Then it took another step, then another, moving behind the fake toy shop and out at the main light.
The whole time kids on the train were squealing and pointing at Santa who had just come out of the barn on the other side and was making his way over to the train. I looked around quickly and I saw that no one had been looking where I had been looking. I was gripping the underside of my seat so hard my fingers hurt. I told myself, "You're just seeing shadows of tree stumps that look like they're moving because someone's down there moving a light around."
Then I told myself, "I was probably looking at a volunteer walking the hill in a heavy coat. I did think those things, but even when I did I knew they weren't right." Then the train whistled blue. Santa boarded the first car down the line. The focus in the coach snapped back to the main act. My daughter climbed into my lap and said, "Daddy, do you see him?" She meant Santa. I said, "Yes, I see something."
Santa came down the train passing out candy canes and invited everyone to come visit his north pole. We all disembarked and walked to the little shops. The elves were stationed at the edges of town so no one wandered off. We spent maybe a half an hour at the little town, then we all were boarded up again. The whole time everyone else was enjoying the town. Me? I was looking behind the buildings for the shape I had seen.
One supported back on the train and a head count done to make sure no one was missing. I had to came back through the train handing out bells to all the children. My mind was still on the shape, so much so that all the bells ringing constantly didn't bother me at all. When the train started to move again, creeping forward along the siding before we reversed direction, I cramed my neck to try and see at that hill again. By then whatever I had seen was gone.
Just a flood lit little plywood village and a wall of trees behind it. I had almost convinced myself I had imagined it. Almost. On the way back they dimmed the inside carlight some. The kids were supposed to be settling down. There was now softer music playing. People were talking lower. Outside the world was mostly darkness sliding by. We backed down the siding. Some ease back out onto the main track and started the return run along the river. This time with the engine on the far end.
From our car it still felt the same. We were in the middle and the river was still on my side, the hillside on the other. That's when we got to that long river curve I mentioned earlier. The train slowed there because of the bend. It felt the tilt of the car on the rails. You heard the flange squeal just a little. Those under body lights painted the river bank in a moving strip. I was about to turn and tell my son to settle down. He'd been kicking his sister.
But that's when something flickered at the corner of my eye again. It was down low near the creek water. I turned my head and there it was out in the open moving with us. We were on a bit of an elevated grade with a shelf maybe six or eight feet down from the track level where the river bank flattened out before dropping to the water. On that shelf in the wash of lights there was a huge dark figure striding along in the same direction that we were traveling. There were no trees in the way.
No pylons, just open bank, snow, rock, that was it. I saw it from the side, full profile. The light above cast enough glow that I could see texture in the hair on its arms as it swung. The pelt on it looked thick. Probably a couple inches long, combed by the wind so it lay in rough streams down its arms and back. It wasn't patchy or mangy, but very dense. The head was slightly forward on the shoulders. The back of it was very rounded. The forehead slanted back I could see that much.
Then it dropped into a heavy brow. Below that I could just make out a broad nose that seemed to be pressed closer to the face than ours are. There were wide nostrils flaring a little as it breathed hard in the cold air. The mouth was in a straight line, no teeth showing. I can't give you any kind of eye color. The position of the lights and the angle were against me for that. But I know there were eyes sockets, a place for the eyes deep under that brow ridge.
And once, when it flicked its gaze up toward the train car, I think there was a brief flint, like light touching wet glass. The arms, well I keep coming back to those because they were so wrong for any human frame. They swung low and easy. The hands opened. Fingers slightly curled. The elbow bend in a strange place for a human. And there were hands that were so big they could have wrapped around my whole head. It strived match the train's plotting speed.
You know how trains feel when they're climbing or taking a sharp curve. Sort of a steady, tough plot. This thing walked like that. There was no wasted motion. Every step landed sure on the rocks and the frozen mud without a single stumble. For a moment my window and its path lined up perfectly. It felt like we were walking almost side by side, separated just by glass and maybe ten feet of air. My daughter was still half asleep on my shoulder. She didn't see it.
My son was now craning his neck to look for deer on the other side. My wife was digging in her bag for some tissues. I looked around. No one else in that car was looking out the window in that moment. I couldn't believe it. "Look," I hissed at my wife, louder than I had meant to. She lifted her head quickly and turned. But by then we'd passed a stand of leafless saplings that flickered between us and the river breaking up the view.
By the time we cleared those, the shelf had narrowed and the thing, the creature, the animal, whatever you want to call it, it was angling up slope toward the trees. My wife caught just a glimpse of motion. Later she would tell me, "It looked like a big guy to me in some kind of a parka cutting up the bank side." That was all she saw. "Me?" I saw more.
I watched it lingered forward, planted a foot up on a higher rock, and go up the incline and two powerful steps that would have taken me six or seven. It used one arm to lightly touch a tree trunk, I think, just for a little balance. The muscles and the thighs and the calves, bunched and released under that coat. You could see the power in every move. At the top of the bank, right before the wood swallowed it, it turned its upper body, and it looked back toward the train.
It didn't just turn the head. It was the whole torso that twisted, like a person looking over their shoulder when they hear a car behind them. In that motion I saw the breath that the back, the way the traps rose up toward the skull, giving it that no neck look. I saw one shoulder-blay roll under the hair. And for a moment I'd swear it.
It slowed its pace to stay in the light just a fraction longer, like it wanted to keep looking at the train, all at up outside and inside, with all sorts of colored lights. Maybe it was interested in us inside the train too. Then there was a cut in the bank, and a cluster of thicker trees blocked the view. When we came past that, the shelf was empty.
Just no one rock, and the faint impression of some disturbed ground that wouldn't have been picked up by my eyes at all, except for what I had just seen. I sat there breathing hard, my heart pounding against my ribs as I looked out into the night. Are you sure you're feeling okay, my wife asked? I nodded because I really couldn't answer right then. Now you might think that would all be enough, right? Well it wasn't.
Another ten minutes down the line, we went over an old steel trestle that crosses a smaller side creek. On the way up I'd hardly even noticed it. On the way back, every dark shape below us felt like some kind of threat to me. The train slowed to a crawl to cross that trestle. Looking down out of my window, I could see the creek waters, the ice forming at the edge. There were a few boulders and some brush poking up through the snow.
As we passed over the middle of the span, I looked down at the creek below glittering with the lights from the train above. Everything else was in deep shadows. As the train moved over the creek slowly, the underbody lights hit the opposite bank, and as we passed over to that side, I saw a darker shape there, crouched near the concrete supports that stretched out to the bank.
It was perfectly lit between the train lights above and the reflection of light from the creek waters, and there was a contrast of its dark body against the lighter concrete. I didn't get the same detail as I did before. That shelf-siding was the clearest. But in that instant my brain said, "That's the same thing. Same build, same way of moving." And you know what it is. That's a big foot. There was nothing else in the world I could think it could be.
I felt my stomach drop because I was certain it wasn't out there wandering the dark night randomly. It knew where to go. Where to stand to view the train? It knew all the quiet spots. This was its route. We were just crossing into it. The rest of the trip back to town is kind of a blur. I remember a lot of sleepy kids in the smell of cocoa everywhere. I pulled my kids closer to me away from the windows, which didn't go over well.
They wanted to keep looking for Santa's sleigh out there on the dark night. I suddenly wanted them as far from those panes of glass as possible. I caught myself listening. Again passed the engine and the clack of the wheels for anything that might be walking along the ballast outside the train or moving through the trees, as if I could have heard it outside. Once near the last curb before town I saw something really big crashing through the brush on the hillside.
But that could have been an imagination or maybe just a deer. But I saw branches moving, the snow falling off of them before they settled back into place and stopped moving. It didn't matter. My nerves were shot. Back at the deep hoe everyone poured off the train happy. Their cheeks bright from hot cocoa in the chill of the night air. My son buzzed on about the bells and Santa and how he was going to tell all his friends at school. My daughter Yond and clutched her little gift bag.
My wife had a small shopping bag with some of her purchases. She bought a commemorative little ornament of the train ride and a few tiny stocking things for the kids. They didn't know she got them. My wife looked over at me, over their heads and said, "You're white as a sheet. Are you sure you're feeling okay?" "I'll tell you in the car," I whispered. In the parking lot, under the harsh lights, I gave her the full version, the North Pole hillside, the river shelf, the trestle silhouette.
She listened without interrupting. Her eyes getting wider. Then they narrowed in that way she gets when she's trying hard to decide if something's true or not. When I finished, she looked back toward the tracks where the coaches were still unloading people for the night. "Well," she said, "whatever it was, it's out there in the cold. We are not. We are going home." She wasn't being glib. That's how my wife deals with things that she doesn't understand.
Me, I went home and I spent the next three nights waking up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, seeing that dark form walking alongside the train in my head on repeat. Now, the next day, I did what more than a few people do after they see something like that. I really tried to explain it away. I thought, "Maybe it was just a big guy and some dark coveralls doing track maintenance and my mind somehow filled in all the rest."
So I called up the railroad office under the pretense of asking about ticket exchanges on sale and how soon for next year. After a bit of small talk, I asked, "If they'd had any workers out near Myleposts so and so, that night that we rode." The lady said, "No. Their maintenance crews were wrapped up for the evening before the Christmas train started, you know, liability and all of that." I drove up the highway that roughly parallels the river. I found the curve I thought was the right one.
I pulled off at a little tiny overlook. From up the road, the shelf didn't look like much at all. Just a strip of rock and some dirt and snow. There was nothing on it but some coyote tracks. The trestle looked smaller in daylight, too. But I could stand there on that shoulder and I could map out where the train would have been, where the underbody lights would fall, and how that shelf would be the only place anything could walk without busting through brush.
It all lined up nice and clean, too clean for my comfort. I didn't go scrambling down there to get looking for prints. The snow had been drifting and melting since our ride, and honestly I didn't want to see one of my kids' new favorite Christmas memories turn into some kind of a crime scene in my memory. I told exactly two people besides my wife, my older brother, and a co-worker who hunts that area. My brother said, "Well, you've heard these stories on YouTube long enough?
I guess you got your own now, don't you?" He wasn't mocking me, just being his normal blunt self. My co-worker got real quiet and then said, "You mean down along that curve?" My uncle won't fish there after dark. He says something large and too legged used to throw rocks at him, and one time it came out and charged him. He took off, and it took his cooler of fish. He says he won't ever go back there. None of that made me feel any better.
And then about a week after I told my brother, he came back to me and asked if I thought that it was on the lookout for loose children. "Lose children?" I asked. He said, "Yeah," he said. He was checking around online and someone said, "They like to take children because they're easier, and they taste better." I had never hit my brother as an adult, but I came very close to it that day, just a reflexive action.
That thought about eating children hit like a bolt of lightning, and it scared me to death. It scares me to this day. Though, far as I know, no one's ever gone missing through there. So I want to believe it was interested in the train and all the lights. I've had more than a few years to chew on it, and here's what I think. You can decide for yourself what you want. Whatever I saw, it wasn't some trick of light, so don't try to tell me that. It wasn't a branch or a guy in a really bad suit.
This was big. It was flesh and blood, and it was moving with purpose along a river bank, and it knew it well. It used the terrain the way we built the train line to use the terrain. It used the flat spots. It used the cut benches and the bridge abutments. Passing the North Pole Elf Village, it stood up on that hill, and it watched the train fool of laughing children and adults. On the way back, it walked that river shelf in plain view in the wash of those lights, keeping pace with the train.
At the trestle it got in under the cover when the train rolled overhead. But I saw it. It knew just how and where to get the best view of us in the train. It wasn't hiding exactly, but it wasn't showing itself in the open for all the world to see, either. I am still stunned that I was the only person that I know of. That saw it that night. But my wife said everyone else in the train was focused inside the train.
The kids, the story, Santa, very few were looking outside very much, especially on the way back. I realized my wife was right. So if you're out there and about this Christmas, or if you take one of those little Christmas train rides that go along alonely and dark river at night, you should remember, it might not be just Santa and the elves out there watching the train. It could be something older, something out there walking its winter route, and you are just crossing its path.
You've been listening to the Buckeye Bigfoot podcast. Find more stories, hundreds more, over on our YouTube channel. Just look for Buckeye dickfoot. [ Silence ]