[Rodger sounds]
My name is Roger. The place where this happened was my grandparents' place in Washington, not far from the Caled's River. I don't want to say any more than that. It's been 46 years since this happened, but there are still folks who know the area, and they could probably guess it from some details, and I just assume as they didn't. But back then, I was 12 years old, all long skinny legs, and not much since. This would be Christmas of 1979.
Christmas Eve that year was the night that I rounded the far side of my grandparents' garage with a bag of trash, and found myself just mere feet from something standing over the metal garbage cans. Something. I didn't quite know what its name was. My grandparents' house sat just off a county road. There's cedars and Douglas Furs all around. Back then, there was a little hay field across the road, though I'm of the way of knowing that it has been built on since then.
But back then, the Caled's River was so close you could hear it on a quiet day. In 1979, there was not another neighbor within eyesight. My grandpa built the detached garage with cedar plank siding and a little car port stall that was off on the other side. He kept the garbage cans, the old galvanized kind, with metal lids and handles.
He kept those around back on gravel, so nobody would have to look at the uglies as he called them, and Grandma didn't have to smell them when she opened the windows at the house. Christmas Eve at that house was the only time I ever saw all of my cousins together in one place. The aunts brought and made casseroles of every kind known to man, and they would be put in little white-cording-weared dishes with a little blue-flower design on them. There were jello salads and glassed dishes.
A lot of cookies and candies and thudge, and my grandmother made rolls that were so incredible, they steamed when you opened them. And there was always a big salmon, at least one anyway, alongside the ham, because that was just the rule around there. You lived that close to water, fish is going to be part of your holiday meal, whether you want it to be or not.
Albums from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Elvis Presley stacked up and playing on Grandma's big console stereo, while that was the entire background soundtrack for the week when we were there. Grandma sure liked those rich male voices for her holiday music, but with all the laughter and everyone talking over everyone else, you would be hard-pressed at times to even hear the music in the house. So that's our old family Christmas boil down to one paragraph.
The only other things I could add to this that I remember, and now that I think about them, I realize they're so iconic and classic for the time, would be the nut dish that was set with a pair of nutcracker pliers and picks on the coffee table. And there was always at least one big bowl of oranges, tangy reens, grapefruit and lemons somewhere in the dining room or kitchen. Does anyone even do those two kinds of things anymore?
Well I still do, even though it's mostly just me and my grandkids, and they snicker and joke at my old old-fashioned stuff. Sorry, I've gotten off track. I'm an old man and I do love thinking about my old Christmas's. Please forgive me. Well let me get back to Christmas Eve that year.
We had eaten the impossibly large dinner that we always had, and all of us had had our seconds probably by 8 pm that night, as well as our dessert of which we kids always weedle about and got a smaller second portion of dessert, which was usually just one more cookie. But by 9.30, nobody cared about food or dessert anymore at all. We were stuffed. And then we were scraping and stacking plates and packing up leftovers to be put in the fridge and getting things ready for the big dinner tomorrow.
We'd be busy stepping around each other and bumping into each other and grandma's kitchen. It was a warm, happy, glowing and wondrous kind of chaos. That was when my grandpa tapped the trash can with a knuckle and said, "This needs to be taken out." He jerked his head towards the back door while he said it. Of course, nobody volunteered. He looked down the line and his eyes landed on me. Now for years, grandpa, my dad or one of my uncles was always the one to take the trash out.
But the year before, grandpa laid down a new law. He said that us teen and near teen boys were old enough to start carrying that torch. "Twelve's old enough," he said. "Take it around the garage," he said, "be sure to put the cement block back on the lid." I was twelve. And the only thing a twelve-year-old boy hates more than being left out of grown-up stuff is being told to do grown-up stuff. I might take out the trash. But I knew I had to do it.
So I walked over, got the trash bag, and grandpa's old dog, Rocky, an old farmnut with the confidence of at least three other dogs. It is Paul's up on the wood door and started whining like he was going to go with me. But when I held that door open for him, he would not budge. He suddenly backed away and looked at me hard, and he barked a couple short barks. Then he turned tail, went straight back into the living room. If I'd had more years on me, I would have paid that some mind.
But at twelve, I just rolled my eyes and stepped out into the darkness. My cousin, Rhaeg, was there that Christmas. He was eighteen, and home from a seasonal road job up near Randall, and he was one that always had a grin on his face. Always looked up to him. "Anyway, when I took the trash bag," he said, "Don't feed this ass-quatch!" My grandpa shot Rhaeg a look that toned his grin down to a mere smirk. I walked out the door, hearing it, but thinking nothing of it.
Rhaeg was always a teaser, and he always had a grin on his face. The cold outside was sharp and biting. There was no snow, but it was frosty and brittle feeling outside. The light on the back corner of the garage made a perfect bowl of light over the gravel out there. But beyond that was inky blackness. The cedar windbreak, making a wall of dark separating the drive along the garage from the fields beyond, was dark and dark.
I followed the cement pavers off the stoop across the front of the garage and over to the far side of the garage. I was thinking of nothing and everything as I walked, Christmas morning, and whether or not I'd get that CB radio I wanted, and I hoped it was the right one. Those were my thoughts when I went around the garage corner and only took two steps more. All thoughts of Christmas morning and my fancy CB radio went right out of my head in a second.
I saw a long arm first, disappearing down into the garbage can. The other hand was on the far rim of the can, studying itself as a bent over. What I saw was unlike anything that I had ever seen, yet it was just like a human in a way, at least the vague shape of it was. The corner light did not illuminate the area entirely, but I had enough overcast from it that I saw the side presented to me, lit up softly in the yellow glow of light, while the other half faded away into the darkness.
Your mind and brain can pick up a lot of details without even trying, but together they all work to give you context and clues, even if you don't realize it. There's no exact reason that I can explain to you that I knew instantly that this was a real solid thing I was looking at, and not someone in a costume. When you see something like that, you know it's like looking at a human wearing a very good mask of a human face. You still know it isn't real.
It kept the far hand on the rim of the metal can, but turned it the way slightly to look at me, pulling its arm out of the can most of the way when it did so. The movement was slow and unhurried. I hadn't startled it I didn't think. Now the face was lit across the width of it, and I saw a dark area under the heavy brows, which I took to be eyes, though I couldn't see them.
The dome of the head sloped down and ended at those heavy brows that stuck out far from the face, putting much of it in shadow. It stared at me with an intensity that made me shiver, even though I couldn't see the eyes. I felt the stare nonetheless. It held that position for a few seconds. It was like it was saying to me, "Is there something you want, human?" And it was saying it in a challenging kind of nice way, if you know what I mean.
We were as best as I can say, six to eight feet apart, close enough for me to see the hair at the top of the shoulder and how it curved around and laid down in a nice pattern. Close enough for me to understand exactly what size the garbage cans were compared to it. They were tiny. Time stopped and spun a bit for me right then. Everything slowed, and I swear that I could hear the big-foot breathing in and out. It's chest size, making it very loud in the quiet night.
I felt like a small rabbit under a hungry wolf's stare. I knew I should run back to the house, but I was so afraid that if I moved, I would trigger something bad to happen. It straightened up a bit more, with both arms now free at the garbage can. If I was scared of how big it was before, I was now terrified. Its head was just below the gutter that ran along the garage roof above the cans there, which I later measured was just under eight feet.
It had turned more toward me, and I now got an eye full of its breath and width. Its body mass was tremendous. To this day I've seen almost no one on the earth that comes close to it in heft and mass of muscle, even proportionately for a human. Even at twelve years old. I knew I was in a bad pickle. I knew the bag I was carrying was full of a lot of food scraps, and I thought maybe if I dropped the bag, it would be more interested in the bag and less so in me.
I was still clutching the garbage bag, but I just couldn't make my fist open to drop the bag, no matter how many times my brain supposedly sent the signal to do it. My hand was not cooperating. Once it's straightened up, it kept staring at me hard, and now more light hit its face, and I can't say that I saw the eyes enough to really describe them, but I did see dark eyes that glinted under the light.
Every impression I had of the stare was giving me the eyes, the posture, and all of the intent that was rolling off of that big foot. It was just a notch under being malevolent, or at the very least, angry. Maybe it just didn't like humans, or maybe it had a bad experience with one. Either way, I'm afraid I'd pay the price. There came a point, and I don't know when or how long after the staring thing started, but at one point the intensity of the stare went down just a notch.
It released some tension from its stance, let out a great huff of air, turned and took one long step away from the can, another step, and it cleared the corner of the garage. Then it walked along the blackberry hedge that was at the back of the garage, and then it was gone in the darkness. I stood there with my heart hammering, and the bag of trash still hanging from my fist as I watched it go. Now, just before it was covered in darkness, it had turned to look back at me.
I'm sure it was making sure that I wasn't going to give it any trouble, as if I could. Then it was gone into the night. At the time my legs were rubbery, but I didn't realize it until I took a step. I remember thinking, "I can't go back in there with this bag of trash." So I quickly stepped forward, just enough to lean out and drop it into the can that the big-foot had been rooting around in.
I picked up the lid from the ground, put that back on quickly, then picked up the cement block on, put it on top. Now that block might keep raccoons out, but I knew it wouldn't help with the big-foot. I don't have a clear memory of running back into the house, but I remember stepping inside the warm, glowing kitchen, and growing on two of my ants were sitting there at the breakfast nook, talking and smoking with their cigarettes.
It was Elvis's turn on the turntable right then, and he was singing about the wonderful world of Christmas. And from beyond in the dining room, there was a board game in progress with a lot of smack talk going down between my cousins and uncles. And somewhere in the family room it sounded like Godzilla was tearing around. That turned out just to be some of my other uncles, rough-housing with the smaller kids. I stood there in a days.
I had just had this incredible, and to me, terrifying moment just outside. And yet here inside, it was warm and going along as if nothing in the world existed outside the house. Except I had just seen that something did indeed exist out there. I wanted to yell out to get someone's attention to tell them, but I didn't have to. I don't know where my grandpa had been when I walked in to the kitchen, but he suddenly came up to me. He looked at me and before he could say anything, I blurted it out.
There's a man out there in the garbage. No, not a man. I mean, I don't know. Grandpa looked at me for less than half a second. He said, "Slow down." You want to say that again? My aunts and my grandmother had gone silent over at the breakfast-nook table. They were listening to us. They had caught a whiff that something was going down. Grandpa looked at me for maybe two seconds longer than he really needed to, and I started getting scared. I thought he was going to blow it all off.
I still hadn't repeated it as he asked. Instead he said to me, "All right then. Let's go have a look, shall we?" He then turned and pulled the flashlight out of a kitchen drawer, took his jacket off the peg by the door, and he motioned for me to follow him. About that time Uncle Bill walked in and said, "Hey, where are you guys going?" Grandpa said. Me and Raj are going out to look for someone that was hanging around the garbage cans.
Uncle Bill said he didn't like the sound of that at all, and he was going with us. I saw the look that Grandpa gave him. It was the look I'd been seeing a lot more. Now that Grandpa was getting ticked off that his sons and sons and laws were coddling him and trying to keep him from doing things. You see, Grandpa had a mild heart attack the year before, but he was a mean old, bull-headed man sometimes, and he didn't like anyone trying to do things for him or keep him from doing things.
Instead all Grandpa said was, "Shoot yourself." But did he wait for Uncle Bill to get his jacket? Nope. We just walked on out. Uncle Bill came with us with no jacket on. He had to have been cold. Rocky, who'd barked at raccoons since he was a pup, stood there at the edge of the back stoop and refused to put so much as a single toenail down on those pavers. We got to the garage and Grandpa swung the light around and then said, "Well, whatever it was, it's gone now."
Uncle Bill made a big show of checking the hedges like he expected to flesh out some neighbor kid. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open. I was very nervous out there, and I can't say otherwise. Inside my announcement turned into a family conversation with all the usual parts, worrying about bears coming into close jokes about Santa checking our leftovers, and the little cousins fussing around about it, thinking there might be a bear out there, acting baby scared.
Somebody put on the chipmunks record to try to distract us all and to drown us out. After a while it faded from the focus in the house, and the focus turned to what Santa was going to be bringing everyone in just a few short hours. At eleven o'clock on the news, the local weatherman showed Santa's sleigh was very close to our location, which had all the little ones scrambling and screaming to go to bed.
Very wrong when the little ones were sprinkled all across the beds and floors and all of the bedrooms. I was at the other end of the house, standing in an open area at the end of the hallway. The window there looked out at the garage. I didn't hear Ray walk behind me, and I jumped half a mile when he said, "Hey, very quietly." I said, "Hey, back." And I went back to looking out at the garage. A few seconds he said, "You did good, not running." I turned and stared at him. My mouth opened.
"Most folks would run," he said. I still hadn't said anything. What could I say? Ray looked at me dead in the eyes, and then he said, "I believe you." I waited for the grand to come, but it didn't. He said it, and he meant it. One Ray proceeds to quietly tell me his own story. Two summers ago he'd come to stay for a few weeks while his mom was in the hospital for surgery. One night he snuck out back around the garage to have a cigarette.
While he was standing there by the can, something tall and scary walked out from the head drove, and it acted like it was going to walk to where he was standing, but it stopped when it saw him. He knew the second that he saw it. It was not a person. He wasn't sure what it was, but he didn't like the look of it, and he said he looked like the feeling was mutual. Then he said to me, "I told Grandpa.
All he said was, 'Keep a semit block on the lids, and stay out of the back after dark.' That was the end of it." After that Ray and I talked for a long time that night about what it was might be, what it meant to do out there and all kinds of things. Sometime after midnight we heard some cursing downstairs and went to investigate. We caught the uncles bringing in gifts, you know, the one Santa left in the driveway they said, because he was in such a hurry.
They looked guilty at first, but we all knew the score, and we let them know it. After that we helped them bring things in. And for the very first time in my life I stayed up till almost dawn on Christmas morning helping putting things together. Lila, my seven-year-old cousin, was about to have her little mind blown with a brand-new Barbie Dreamhouse. I remember it was a big triangle thing with yellow floors and a red roof. She got the Barbie Corvette too.
We had fun putting stickers on all the things and setting the furniture up. That's a really good memory for me. And you don't have to include that if you don't want to. It was just something I remembered. I fell asleep on the couch somewhere around 5 a.m. and I was back up with the wild joys of Christmas all around me at about 6 a.m. And for the next hour or so we all unwrapped what Santa had brought us. And yes, I got my CB radio.
I didn't have a card to put it in, but I could still use it from home. That's one of my favorite gifts ever, mostly because I asked for something and for once. I got exactly what I had been dreaming of. Christmas morning was coffee, sweet rolls and two types of breakfasts, casseroles, and all the little kids being loud and wild with all kinds of Christmas morning joy playing with new toys. I slipped outside after the presents, but before I ate. I wanted to see whatever I could see by daylight.
The cans were still upright. The cement block was tossed over to the ground just a few feet from the cans. The lid was often tossed to the side as well, but a different area. The garbage bag that I had tossed in the night before had been pulled out and set on the ground. Inside I saw the bag below. It was torn open with a few tiny pieces of silvery salmon skin glinting in the sun, but the rest of the salmon was gone.
I put the trash back in the can, replaced the lid, and was in the process of putting the cement block back on top when Ray came out. "Hey, I didn't mean for you to be the one sent out here last night," he said. "What do you mean?" I asked. He looked all guilty and then he said, "I came out here and I put some salmon skins in the can after dinner." Grandpa usually has me carry it down to the compost, but everybody was busy in the kitchen.
And I knew they wouldn't know, and it's a lot easier just to tuck them in the can. Unfortunately, that stuff draws those things in like flies to honey. He looked right at me, more guilty than ever on his face, and then he said, "I'm sorry. I really wasn't trying to bait anything for you, and I really didn't think Grandpa would send you out here." I didn't know what to say. I looked at him, I nodded, and with as much gravity and truth as he said it to me the night before I said, "I believe you."
And that was the end of it. At least as far as that day was concerned. We walked back inside to the sights and sounds of one of the grand old Christmas's of our youth. Only we didn't know. That's what it was at the time. Do we ever? And as always happens, the calendar pages turn, and the years roll by and before we know it, there's a yawning gap between now and back then. We don't even know how it happened. Then came the inevitable loss of people.
First Grandpa, then some of our uncles and aunt, and then Grandma. After Grandma, the house sat empty for close to a year as we all worked out the details and began the long task of separating and selling things. Justice things were winding down for the estate. My sister called and asked for some help to do a final push, clean out, and put the final touches on the house to put it on the market. I agreed. I dreaded it. That's true.
But I knew it was just another step in life that I would have to take, and I wasn't going to leave my sister to do it alone. I drove up that weekend, and those of us that remained between aunts, uncles, and cousins spent a rainy weekend going through and keeping what we could, and letting go of what we couldn't. I was standing on the top of the wooden step stool in the garage, trying to snag a jar of screws.
When I found an old cigar box, shoved behind a rafter where Grandpa stored the Christmas lights inside it, under a church bulletin from a year that I barely remember, was a raised pocket notebook. His name was in pencil on the inside cover, and it was dated for 1977. That was the summer he mentioned, where he came and stayed. Part of the summer would grim on Grandpa.
In it were several pages that had multiple entries that wouldn't have meant anything to anyone other than me, entries like June 12th, tall shaped by the hedge, I watched it, then it left. July 7th walked out between the cans in the field. It seemed to be in no hurry. July 15th. It was back again, back at the garbage cans. It went for the fish. It was entries like that, multiples and pages up them.
On one page, there was a quick pencil sketch of the garage corner, and a blocky shape where the cans were. And there was a simple, tall outline by the hedge with a simple note. It turned shoulders to look at me. I still have that little notebook. I'm afraid though that Ray's life didn't go so well for him, and he got mixed up with some things that helped him become homeless. I'm sure some of you can read between the lines.
I have tried to find Ray, but when people like that want to stay hidden on the streets, they can really stay hidden. There was also a newspaper clipping folded in there, the kind of little community piece that they run when there's nothing else that happened that week. The title was "Prowler Reports Near Creek, Sheriff Urges Vigilance."
Then there was a small snippet about garbage cans being raided all up and down the river area, and it recommended that people secure the can-lids with heavy objects like cement blocks. The date from that little snippet was also from the same time as the "Prowler Reports." No mention of anything other than bears or raccoons as possible culprits, and the sheriff just telling people, "Use bricks and cement blocks on their lids." I had to smile at that part.
I could hear my grandpa saying it in my ear. Then the garage was good and empty, and the floor swept. I walked outside, and I stood at the same corner where the cans used to be. I stood right where I had stood on that Christmas Eve so long ago. I looked out at the hedge line like I could peer backwards into time. Of course, there was nothing there. Just for a few heartbeats, though, I could still see that large Sasquatch with my mind's eye, just as I saw it on Christmas Eve, 1979.
Well, that's my story, Nancy. You call me Roger from the Cowlids, if you would, please. And if Ray is out there listening somewhere by some strange chance, he'll know who he is. There will be no question. Mary Christmas to him. You know, Ray was the only one who believed me, and if he's listening, he knows how to find me, and I sure wish he would. That's my Christmas wish this year. Anyway, thank you. Mary Squatchness to all, Roger. You've been listening to The Buckeye Bigfoot podcast.
Find more stories, hundreds more, over on our YouTube channel. Just look for Buckeye Bigfoot. [ Silence ]