Conspiracy Garden: Portal Locations, Magic, & Synchronicity

I just I love everything about it.

on each other's podcast. We help each other out, you know, we give each other clues like, hey, what equipment are you using? What does this? You know, people, it's just great, like it's just really supportive and wonderful.

Later on I would have learned this is this is folklore, and I love folklore. But I was interested from that from that young age. And then once shows like In Search of came on and things like that, it just fired my imagination and and I really fell in love with the idea of Bigfoot. And it had a few experiences of my own as a kid, which I didn't really connect until I was like much later looking back, not Bigfoot experiences. I saw Ufo and and had some

other strange things happened around around that stuff. But funny enough, even though I saw Ufo, I didn't I was still a Bigfoot kid. I just all I wanted was I'd read big Foot books and watch big Foot shows on TV all that stuff. But then you know, got us to a certain age, and I found girls in punk rock, and I forgot about all that stuff and went off

and had adventures and music and et cetera. And then, you know, as an adult, started settling down again and started looking the stuff up and found that, you know, it didn't stop when I stopped, It kept going and there was a wonderful world full of this stuff. And I started exploring it again, and eventually, you know, I wrote my first book, which is about a local area here in York County, Pennsylvania called Toad Road, and I really dug in and that's when I found my love

for research. I just really, like, like, you know, started going to the Historical Society, started really spent a lot of time with newspaper archives and things like that, and just fell in love with like just digging up this information. And then from there I started going on podcasts and then I was like, hey, I want to do a podcast. So it all kind of but it roots back to my earliest memories. I mean, I just always loved this stuff.

live if you're interested in this stuff. There's you know, just you know, forty five minutes away is Gettysburg, which is a massive, you knows, ghost hunting place, and you know, obviously the history there I love too, but I mean it's infused with this this ghost hunting culture there. But you know, we have Michell Forrest. It's just a little bit beyond that, which is probably your top one or two places in Pennsylvania for bigfoot settings, and then all

kinds of other stuff locally. It's just it's a wonderful place, like I don't have to go too far to get to some really interesting stuff.

high strange area of the country. I'd say that West Virginia is dense four tea in land.

some people call them these batsquatches, they call them. Yeah, it was like, are these are they related? Are they the same thing? I don't know, I don't know, but yeah, I thought about that too, as far as the gargoyle thing.

are Bigfoot. It certainly sounds like what they're describing. The thing that really hit home for me is these people are describing behaviors right so not only they describe something big and hearing, but they're describing the behaviors that people today are describing. And these are very obscure articles I'm finding that take me a long time to dig out of these old newspapers. These witnesses today that are like, let's say I hear them on Sasquatch chronicles for instance.

They're not reading these old articles and going, oh, yeah, I'm going to talk about this this and the you know, they're talking about what they saw, and so are these people in these old newspaper articles, and they're describing some very specific things, things like recognizing the gun, like they seem to recognize a gun when they put out things like there they're problems or or anger or I don't know how to put it there. They don't like dogs, right,

so they're they're aggressive towards dogs, climbing on roofs. I mean, that's a very very weird thing. That's a very strange thing. And when I hear that, I'm like, okay, okay. And people today are reporting it too, you know, slapping the side of their house, tapping on windows, all these things,

and it's like, well, these it's the same behavior. These people are describing over the course of hundreds of years, you know, And I'm like I said, I'm sure these modern witnesses weren't finding these articles and then and then saying, oh, I'm going to make up a story based on these old articles. It's just, you know, it's not possible.

This subject is going back to some of those older articles when they were called often they were referred to as wild men.

nineteen ten, you start seeing them called gorillas. At that point they'll say, you know, there was a gorilla, A big gorilla was seen, you know, outside of town. So it's interesting how they changed. Once the monster movies come in in the twenties and thirties, well then they turn into monsters for a while. The newspaper reports are like, you know, monster scene, they pay big hairy monster scene, and then you know bigfoot sasquatch. All that takes over

starting in the fifty sixty seventies. So it's interesting the way the sort of naming goes. And when I mentioned gorilla is by the way, a lot of people say, well, they were escape circus animals. Gorillas were extremely expensive back then, about the equivalent of two million dollars today. Not everyone had it. Not every circus had one. Very few zoos had them. We knew exactly how many girulas they had in the United States at any one time back then. I believe the New York Zoo had one, and Barnum

had one. That might be it. There might have been one other one out there that I'm forgetting about. They're very difficult to take it. They didn't know how to take care of them back then, so they died pretty easily. So the idea that people say, oh, it's just an escape circus animal, when the people are talking about seeing gorillas, you know, now we knew where the gorillas were and they were accounted for, so it just a gorilla does not explain, you know, what these people are seeing. They

were just using that word. You know, first they saw big everything in the woods, they called it a gorilla.

a few nowhere near as many as people claim. But I can always check with her and just say, hey, was there a circus train crash in this state around this time, and she can look it up for me, and by far the answer has been no. You know, I can't think of one time where it's corresponded with one of these stories.

to that property, we stayed there. We had some incredible things happened to us, not all of which I'm ready to talk about, but some Bigfoot related things, some things related to anomal flights in the sky, and some other very very strange things that were very Mothman prophecies esque. And I don't mean we saw Mothman. I just mean the other kind of high strangeness that surrounded that phenomena. We are we're currently working on. This will be a

Strange familiar's life. We're going to tell the entire Witch Digger story live, the history of it, modern witness interviews, and then our experiences when we went to Indiana and did that. So that story has become incredibly important to Strange familiars and to me personally. That journey to Indiana changed my life in a major way.

this is a really interesting story. And then when I started the podcast, the first three episodes were based on my first book. So really the the first original content I made for the podcast was The Witch Diggers, and it was based on that story. So it's this, this family moves from Ohio to Indiana. They buy property in this area and there they're a Swiss family. They they're having a hard time there for various reasons, farming and

so forth. But they're they're living, they're doing okay. But one day one of the family members shows up at a neighbor and starts talking about witches. And it was so is a one brother named Nick, one brother named Sammy, and their sister named Susan. And Nick was kind of the caretaker of these two. The rest that they had a very large family, but their parents died, two brothers were killed in the Civil War, and a couple other their other brothers died I believe in Europe before they

ever got to America. So it's just Nick, Susan, and Sammy left. And Nick's actually younger than those two, but he comes back from the Civil Wars and starts taking care of them. So they moved to this farm in Indiana, and like I said, they start talking about witches, and the neighbors are like, what's going on there? And Sammy, the younger brother, he starts talking about he's afraid to be in the house alone, and he just wanders the

neighborhood all day long. They said he was a little he was probably, you know, mentally handcapped, handicapped in some way. They in the in the census records, they list him is not a nice word, but this is this is how we find this family. In the census records, they list him as an idiot, So we know it's it's that family. We can find them pretty easily by their names.

And then and then when Samy is listed as as such, but he starts talking about what he called monkeys with human heads that climb through the window and scared him so bad that he did he didn't even want to talk about it. And they're also talking about seeing witches

and so forth. The family seems to go crazy together, all three of them, and they start digging this ditch h and at anytime they come upon something like a frog or a worm, anything alive, they kill it and they say it was a witch, and they drive a stick in the ground. So they're obviously like they're kind of losing it. And the question is did this paranormal activity kind of drive them to that that make them, you know, put them in this paranoid state, or is there something

else going on. Eventually the people come and they take them to the Olms house. But then later people coming through this area start seeing this Harry wildman and he's carrying an axe, so it's this weird thing and they think, oh, it must be Nick because he escapes from the asylum at some point, and they said it must be him, it must be Nick. He come back to the neighborhood. But what they're describing doesn't look it's not a man. They're describing a big hairy thing that runs on all fours,

but it's carrying an axe. It's a really really interesting thing. I love the article and I always wanted to do something more with it. And last summer I was talking to my friend John, who would he would end up going to Indiana with me. I said, John, I want to do something more with the witch Diggers, and I don't know what it is. I said, maybe we should just go to Indiana and drive around and see if

we could find this place. I didn't. I didn't know, like, you know, the chances of that would be slim, but I thought maybe we could try. And about a week later, I got an email with the subject witch Diggers and I opened it up and it said I live on that property and I'm still having activity today. Please contact me. I was like, this is a week after I said this to John. So I sent an email right away, and I don't hear anything back for two weeks, Like

what is happening? Like why won't this person contact me? They seemed like so eager to talk to me, So I went in in our discord for Strength Familiars. We have this intention and prayer channel and usually people use it for like, hey, my mom's sick, can you pray for you know, you know, my my neighbor's not feeling well, things like that. And I went in there and I said, look, this is this isn't important as far it like nobody's health was involved or anything like that. But here's what

I'd like. I said, I'd like these people to contact me. Number one. Number two, I'd like them to tell me their story. Number three, I'd like them to come on Strange Familiars and tell their story. And number four, the big ass is, I'd like them to give me access to this property. Two weeks, within two weeks of me putting that on discord, I get another email from a different email address that says which diggers as a subject line says, hey, we live across from this property and

we're still having activity today. So this is yet another person. They gave their phone number. I called them right away. They told me the stories they came on Strange Familiars. I said, hey, can we come out there? They said, You're welcome to come out here. I got everything I asked for. Like to the letter everything I asked for, which blew me away. Right, So we made plans to go out there. I think this was in the fall. We made plans to go out in the spring. We

went out in March. And now they were these witnesses. There's about five families live back in this hollow. This is in southern Indiana, near this property, all of them. I think maybe we know about three of these families. Talk to us, and we're going back and we'll be able to talk to another one. I think in the fall they all had activity. They all had stories, multiple stories, and the one that really blew me away and the reason the witness contacted me. They didn't know anything about

this witch Diggers article. They had a cemetery on their property, and they sent away to the local historical society for information on that, and they sent them information on that cemetery. But they said, oh, this is in your area too, and they sent them part of the witch diggers article, not the full article, just like a little part of it. They type in witch diggers on the internet. They get

interested in upcomes strange familiars. They listened to strange familiars and the witness said she listened to it, and then when her husband got home from work, she made him sit down and said, now, listen to this podcast the whole thing. Listen to it. And this is why they had had bigfoot activity. But they did not know anything about this Witch Digger's article. They were seeing she had seen bigfoot. They had some workers come to work on

some power lines nearby. They had seen bigfoot. They were terrified by what they saw, and their neighbors were experiencing weird stuff. But the thing that got them they had an eighty year old neighbor and they originally thought he was seen now when he said this. He called his son one night and he said, come out here. I need your help. It's like late at night. I think he left a message. He didn't explain what he needed. And they go out to his house, which again is

right across from this property. All the lights are on, all the doors are open. He's nowhere to be found, and they're looking around for him, and they finally they call his cell phone. They could hear it ringing in the distance. They go and they find him under a piece of farm equipment hiding and they asked him what happened, and he said monkeys with human heads climbed through my windows.

Same thing that the kid without any knowledge of this article from the eighteen hundreds, same thing, and that's what gave them chills and made them contact us. And when she told me that, obviously I got chills too and I have to go. I have to go. So we went out there. Like I said, we've had We did not see any creatures, but we had bigfoot like activity. I don't want to say too much because, like I said, this is going to be we're going to do strange

familiars live. We're going to tour the country and we're going to tell the full story of all this. But we saw anomalos lights in the sky more than once. And next time we go out, I believe. So the house where that the elderly man lived, he he has since passed away, and that house sits empty. The family doesn't doesn't want to do anything with it. They said, next time we go out, we can stay in that house.

So I will. I will get to stay in the house where the quote unquote monkeys with human heads climbed through the window. So I'm quite excited about that. Since we've been there, there's been three toed tracks found in along a pond, and the main witnesses that we talked to they rent a cabin to other people, and these people at this cabins had not talked to them about bigfoot, but finally when they had this footprint appeared in this pond,

they opened up about it. And they said, since I think for two years, they said, every night they've been getting activity. They so they get their house slapped. Things you know, comes through the woods. They can hear holan on the ridge, et cetera, et cetera. So there's more for us to explore. And uh yeah, we'll be going out there again in the fall. I'm super excited. But it's just been this amazing thing, Like I said, life changing, has just been fantastic for us.

toes and a lot of flesh and white. People say, well, that's inbreeding. Well, if you look up how inbreeding works, that you tend to get more toes, not fewer with inbreeding. So it's they're just weird. They're just weird tracks.

a lot more in recent years. But I've realized that the synchro mysticism is almost like its own type of this. I don't know, like it's its own a tentacle of this phenomenon or it's its own entity altogether. But somehow it's all all intertwined. And it's like, you know, it's just like you with this Witch Diggers episode. I mean, it's interwoven in your podcast journey, yeah, and now and now it's I don't know, it's interwoven with with the big Bigfoot and everything else.

like very depressed and almost sick. It's very strange like like this, but the whole thing is just it's just brought us closer together. It's just been amazing in a very spiritual way. Like John again, I've known John forever and I've seen this change in John, this incredible change in John where he's just in this new sort of like it like activated this spiritual side of him that's just been incredible to see. And it, like, like I said, it changed this. I think the paranormal can do this.

Sometimes it could change people for the worst, I know, but in this case, I think it just brought the three of us very close together and it feels quite amazing, and it feels like like we're supposed to be doing this like this, this is like something that we're meant to be doing. I think. I don't mean to speak for him, but I think the other two guys feel

the same. So yeah, I mean that's part of it too, Like this idea of like this, I guess, like kind of going on this quest, right, the three of us go on this quest and we end up, you know, kind of closer at the end of it. We all

end up I think change. And I don't mean like, you know, I'm going to leave my wife or anything like that, like not that kind of change, but just your perspective on the phenomena is changed, I think, and certainly likewise, maybe your perspective on life, you know, because this is I believe this is about this is a human experience thing and we've been experiencing it forever that's why we have folklore that talks about very similar things going back in time. So this is part of of

what happens when we're here. You know. Maybe I don't know if it's why we're here, but it's it's certainly something that happens and has been happening to people over time. So it just feels that like like this is my journey, you know, And a few times in my life I felt like, yeah, this is where I'm supposed to be, and this is one of them. For sure.

a very ghost like fashion. It descended below the tree line, and when it went out of sight, beams of light shot up into the sky, like several beams of light like. And then we were walking towards where we saw it go behind the tree line. It popped up on the other side, just a little bit above the trees again, just enough to let us know, like, yep, you saw me. That was it. I was here. And it drops down again and again with the beams of light. Once it

drops down. One of the witnesses when we described this, his eyes got real big because they were telling us their stories. And then like, oh, you know what we saw the other night, because we saw that the first night, not the first night we arrived. We got there late, we went right to sleep, but the first night we were like out in the field when we were there, that's when we saw this fireball, and we said, you know, he tells his stories. And then we said, well, you

know what we saw the other night. And his eyes get big. I could tell, and he said, he said, you know, I haven't thought about this. He said, I saw the exact same thing in the exact same place in nineteen eighty eight.

It wasn't the sun, It wasn't fireworks, it wasn't swamp gas. You know, it was a fireball. That's the only thing. But one of the things that it's I want to say it bothers me, but not in the way it's like scary or upsetting, but it's just kind of like I can't figure it out, is did we happen to walk into that field and one in a two milli chance or whatever it would be in time to see that fireball? Yeah? Or did it appear for us for

some reason? And it's so why, you know, And that's that's the thing that kind of haunts me about it. And again not in a bad way, but it's just this question I have, like, like, why did we see that?

I'm sorry, let me back up. Before I started this podcast, I was talking about it with a close friend of mine in North Carolina and we we were on the phone and we were, you know, we were talking shop about getting this thing together, and he had a a weird moment in the middle of a conversation where he goes, hold on and he says, I just saw these I think seven lights appear in a row and then disappear, and then an explosion happened at a neighbor's house. He goes,

he goes, I gotta go. I'll call you right back. So as I'm waiting to get back on the phone with him. I was in my living room and I stepped outside. And I stepped outside. I hadn't been out there for I haven't. I hadn't been out there for a minute yet. And I looked up and I saw an orb fly an arc right right in my field of vision, and it was, I don't know, two hundred

yards away, maybe very close. And it came from within the atmosphere, and it went up and it arcd and it went over a tree line across the street, and it went down behind a tree line close to where there's another neighborhood street over there. And here's the thing. It blinked at me three times as if to say, like you said, just making sure you saw this, just making sure you see me. And it was so intentional.

And of course I'm getting back on the phone with my friend at this point, and I'm like, you're not going to believe this. So he has a UFO siding in North Carolina. Moments later, I have a UFO siding for lack of a better word, in Tennessee. We're talking about doing this podcast about the supernatural, and it's like, at what point, at what point is any of that coincidence.

And that's what I meant, Grandpa, what do you mean he goes a fireball like it was literally like a ball of fire that moved over the horizon.

to have seen still a more singular sight. It was nothing more or less than a phosphorescent fire or will of the wisp which emerging from the banks of the Flint River during the recent overflow, in the shape of a ball of fire across and above the tree tops. This ghastly fireball made its appearance just as the corpse of an unknown man was seen drifting down the swollen current of the river, his face, calm after the agony

of death, upturned to the pitiless sky. So the dead guy is a you know, we certainly didn't see a dead guy. This was by a large creek. Some people call it a river where was But when they describe it as this ghastly fireball, that's what I mean. The first thing Tyler said is like he said, that thing's a ghost, you know, by which he meant I believe it had been the nature of a you know, it did move in a very ghostly way. You know, it kind of did this fish hook motion down and blow

the chin. But it moved very ghostly like that. So when they say this ghastly fireball in that article, first of all, there we go. You know, they're talking about a fireball in the sky in Indiana around the same time as the witch Digger. Is very interesting to me. But the way they describe it though, I was like, wow that, you know, I don't know that they saw the same thing, but it certainly sounds very similar to what we saw.

we're there, like a for erunners. Great little little four wheel drive yet an old four runner is fantastic and just to you know, hit the trails if we wanted, and just drive us around night and day again, night and day. Just the nicest people I've ever met in my life. The last thing I want to do is bring down a paranormal circus around their heads, you know, and have a bunch of people running on their property and stuff.

So when I say, whenever I hear you say, you know we're going to do it like this, well you're still getting the story out there, and the story can still be great even if it's just being told. Yeah.

inch long dark hair covering his body. When he spotted the miners, he pounded his chest before turning and bounding off into the woods with the speed of a deer. The party tracked him with guns. The party tracked him with guns, drawn to a cave deep in the mountains, where they found bones of many animals scattered about, including that he had been living oh indicating that he had been living there for a while. And I just I

like that one because it's from North Carolina. I'm from North Carolina, you know, Yeah, you've probably heard that one.

I immediately when you said that was eighteen.

it's been pretty consistent. Every time I find one of these, you know, quote unquote haunted areas or areas that are associated with Bigfoot, there seems to be cave mine or an instance of people doing like some kind of major digging into the ground. Look at the witch diggers. They were digging in the ground, digging in the ground. Not only were the caves there, but they were digging.

same states. It's these states that have all like Kentucky and Tennessee and Indiana, the states that have the caves in the west Virginia, Ohio and then you know the lower part of Pa where all these giants are are found, all the well they were found, all the bones in the burial mounds, the Ohio River Valley. And you know, I'm trying to find different terminology, but what keeps coming to mind is like Middle Earth, Lord of the Rings.

But it's like this area of the country was just and still is like abundantly humanoid.

a faith healing practice in Pennsylvania, the shorthand Powell. The German name is Brokrye, and it's it's simply a Christian folk magic tradition, mostly faith healing kind of stuff, but part of it is to undo hexes, right, so if someone felt they were cursed or hext and always with the idea that the people can undo, can unmake hexes, can also make hexes. So there's a lot of superstition around these Powwow doctors as they were called. This one fellow,

these people believed he put a curse on them. They murdered him. It's a long story. He was completely innocent. I feel awful for him, but in any case, the area became known as hex hollowed. In that area, I have found a series of intersecting walls, so out this park and the local sort of wisdom is, oh, there's just farm walls, Well, they don't correspond to any farms that were ever on the map down there, you know, going through the old historical maps, and they're not built.

Now there are the confused matters. There are a couple firmly like Western walls that are that are down there, But these intersecting walls throughout the park are not built like like Westerns built walls. They're built like these early Americans, you know, these pre Native American civilizations built walls. The intersect they have offering niches in them, which is where they would have put corn or something. And these niches line up with the sun on solstices and equinoxes. So

I believe, yes, I have found something. Now the State Museum of Pennsylvania has is not yet convinced, but I cannot see what else it would be. There are there are serpent walls, you know, they wind, These walls wind and they end in what look like big snakeheads, m h all kinds of these earthworks. And if you know I grew up on a farm, you don't. You don't build a wall just to build a freaking wall, you know. And these low walls aren't keeping livestock in or out right. Yeah,

they could be property markers. But come on, that's a lot of calories. That's a lot of calories. You know what we did when we come upon rock, We taking me throw them out of the field. We're gonna build a wall with them, right, you know why waste the calories, Get moving, get back to farming. I'm just not convinced these these are anything. But these this pre like I said, this pre Native American society. And I'm sorry, I keep I keep blanking on the name that they called it.

But yeah, these build our culture. Perhaps, I'm sorry.

a wall it's an old farm wall. But it's just when you, like I said, when they start intersecting, they go north and south like on the compass perfectly. You know, the intersections are places which seem to correspond with with different things. So my goal is at some point to get maybe get this recognized as a as a you know, place of history, and it is a it's a county park, but you can't rely on the county. They will sell

off parkland. If it becomes like a National Place of you know, historical marker or something like that, then it can be preserved. So that's that's my hope one day to convince somebody else of what I'm seeing here.

it's older. But I keep seeing this, and you know, I was just recently looking at the so I think that some of these are old cities, remnants of old cities from a race who was here before the Native Americans and and eventually probably coexisting with them. And that's why I think that wall in Louisville is where it's at,

because it's on the Ohio River. I think they were using that they were traveling that river U and then But I just found a similar thing in Chicago where because you said altars and it and it came to mind, there was an old stone there called the Wabazi Stone. It's in a private collection today, giant I think it's granite standing stone, has a face carved in it, and at the very top of it is one of these altars carved into it. I think you said niche altar or something.

were on their way to the to the Mississippi. And they're going through one of these rivers in Chicago and they stop and they do their offering for well well being, for you know, safe passage. And I also have an old, an old map I've been studying. It's the tear Australis map and it's got it's from fifteen seventy something and right above Chicago it's got or right where Chicago is today, it's got on that map listed Chilago. So you know,

it's just it's it just got me thinking. I'm like, well, I think maybe when the ancient people were minding that copper and they were they were doing their altars, you know, in the area that Chicago is today, it must have been a port city possibly called Chilaga.

these are everyone's secrets. These belong to the people. So I think he did a good thing by writing it down. And this is this book was fairly ubiquitous throughout the Pennsylvania Dutch region. Most people who have family here for a long time, they have a copy that maybe that was their grandmother's or something. I collect copies of that. I have copies going back to the I think eighteen sixties, maybe earlier than that I found.

old copies they were these were user copies. So you get in pencil, often on pages extra charms that people have collected from people in their neighborhood, or names of other what we call palaut doctors or brawlkers they will have written down. And so these books are incredibly valuable.

Like a researcher like me, yeah, they're expensive, but when I find them, I you know, if they're not crazy, I will get them because because of that, those extra bits that are in there are just just wonderful, wonderful stuff, you know.

It's kind of a light type. Here, let me try the skin, curing hysteroetics or hysteria, I'm assuming, protecting oneself against slander, attaching a dog to a person, making a wand for searching for iron or water, so divining there, preventing malicious persons from doing injury, curing the pole, evil and horses, mending broken glass, making cattle or turn home, destroying rats and mice, making a candlewick that is never consumed, charming guns and other arms, and much more.

Appalachia as well. Appalachia it's changed. When I was learning BESI in West Virginia, I had some banjo teacher from West Virginia tell me, if I hear you say Appalachia, I'm kicking you out this class. Now everyone says, no, no, it's Appalachia. So yeah, trying to stick with it. But that's why I say Appalachia because someone from the region told me I better not say it any other way, and that got in mine.

He's like, oh, this is very similar to some of the same traditions in Ireland, you know.

Like I paused after I read this. When I first got this book, it's this little part on here that says, whoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible, and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the Holy corpse of Jesus Christ. Nor drowned in any water, nor burning any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him. So help me, And that's such an Appalachan thing to say, so help me. You know that's I just that whole pencil. I'm glad

this came up. You know this, the whole Pennsylvania Dutch thing has always fascinated with me. My mom being from Pennsylvania, she always told me stories of being around the Pennsylvania Dutch and all they did it this way, or they would do this, and and you know, I just I've always found that very fascinating. I just saw a thing that Peter Santanello put out. He went to I believe he wasn't actually in Pennsylvania, and he was just going around doing what he does. He just talks to the

locals and films it. And he was in a community where you had not Amish. Who am I thinking of Mennonite? Yeah, thank you. And so he goes into a Mennonite farm and talks to the lady there. She's the mom basically, and she has all her kids out there in the fields.

They're all doing tasks and such. But the younger kids come up and they don't speak English, and this is you know, twenty twenty four in Pennsylvania, and she explains to him that they learn English at a certain age before that they speak Pennsylvania Dutch.

To some of these festivals, not always around Christmas, but often around Christmas, you will find this Corompus is an example. I'm sure people are familiar with, like the crompus thing. That's one of these European wild men I'm talking about in Pennsylvania. Way we had until Santa Claus took it over, we had a surviving wild man tradition in the United States in the form of bell snickel. Hairy thing came

from the mountains. Howld knocked on your windows knocked It sounds like Bigfoot, right, that's that's the legend of the bell snickel and it came at Christmas time. So we have this surviving. You know, people would dress in these crazy outfits, you know, and and do what they call bell snickling. They would go from house to house and hang on the windows, and you know, good kids got candy, big kids got switches, all all that stuff. But here

we have this it's and it survived. And I think part of it is because of the language, because of the Pennsylvania Dutch language, which is not German. It's closer to Luxembourgian than straight Germans. It has a lot in common with German. But I have German friends who, like, I've tried to get them to translate Pennsylvania Dutch stuff for me, and they're like, nah, different not can't do it. Different language, you know, it doesn't exactly. It's not one to one kind of thing there. So it's a it's

a unique language. It's a unique form of German. And because of that, I think I think that helped the culture survive, you know, in a way, help these these aspects of it survived. It's very very interesting, very interesting culture.

it very quiet. And there were two things in that community that I guess you would call in the supernatural realm that people knew about, or you could say, believed in, and that was the fairies and Bigfoot.

the woods. That's all, you know. I can't say I don't know what they are, but just my gut says they're very weird. I know, they're very weird things you can't explain. They don't act like any other animal on the planet, and they seem, you know, a lot closer to these other things we talk about than they do to a gorilla.

had the same theory about Bigfoot. He believes that Bigfoot is is like a basically a big hairy face spirit essentially, And he was talking about the Book of Enoch, because in the Book of Enoch there's this story that these there was like an ancient battle, like a cosmic battle, and the celestial spirits fell to Earth, and wherever they landed they became a humanoid fixture of that tobography, your geography,

that landscape. So you know, you have mermaids for water and fairies for air, and for woods, you have wood boogers. I guess there sasquatch, right.

another just wonderful life changing trip. You know, I've been very lucky to have some of these, but I was impressed by them because literally everybody I talked to except one person, had a big Foot story. There was no question to them whether real or not real, because it was there, you know, they it was real. But I asked everyone, what do you think it is? And everyone that I talked to said, oh, it's some kind of

spirit and some kind of spirit. And they also have little people there, you know, in the same area they're same Bigfoot. In fact, literally in the exact same area some of these stories I collected, they saw what they call the wee we load, the little people, and then big they saw. You know, another person saw Bigfoot the exact same place is the exactly raped by this creek. So yeah, they're they're firm would convinced to the reality of it. There's no question to them. Yeah, no, it's

it's here. But is it is it a They never said, by the way, they never said gorilla, and they never said ape man, nothing like that. They all said man, hairy man or big hairy man. That's how they described him. And I asked, finally, I asked, one of them was telling their stories when the Lakota was telling me the stories, and I said, you know, I noticed nobody here says compared it to a gorilla or an ape or anything like that. And she said, oh no, no, no, it's

a man. It's a man, big hairy man. So I found that interesting too. There was no no gorilla talk, no, nothing like that. But yeah, they're all But I would say, even after they said oh, it's a big harry man, I said, well, do you think it's like you know, like, no, no, it's a spirit. It's the spirit of a man, you know. That's what they say. So it's incredibly interesting, Like it's just completely there. There's no question to them that does exist, does it not exist? No, it's here, it's here.

in terror. Other reports indicated that these giant, hairy entities have been seen in this area on several occasions and for centuries, and putedly are able to slip into our realm from another dimension. Wow wow yep. Rumors indicated that there was a gateway or portal into another dimension in the area where large dolmens were located at the bottom of the Golo Selvilla Goli. So we're back to like

ancient sites here now. Decades later. Decades later on, there were reports of mysterious disappearances of residents in the nearby villages of Dayakovo and Sabdovniki between eighteen twenty five and nineteen seventeen. But the legend has been around since the fifteen hundreds.

There's these legends all over the world. It seems like wherever we live, weeping humans next to us, there's always the wild man in the wilderness, whatever that wilderness is, if it's the forest, if it's the mountains, even the desert sometimes, as I said, but there's always a wild man. Even in places that have large primates, like Africa, they still have a wild man tradition.

the late sixties and into the seventies. And this is a man who threw himself at the phenomenon. He became a bloodhound on the trail of just all things weird, and he got close, I think, to catching up to this great unknown spectacle of this whole thing. But on his journey, what I found was that this was a guy who was hitting these pockets of frustration, because when you can't conclusively catch what you seek, you are at best adapting a theory. And I think that he is

constantly stuck in this state of here's my theory. I've got to tweak it again. But it's the dot dot dot, the eternal dot dot dot. And I call it the Kill conundrum. And you know, I recently included in the title of an episode just for people who are paying attention. I'm just kind of nerdy about it, but honestly, I do. I think he was frustrated because he thought that he

couldn't find real conclusive proof. But I'd argue that he proved that there is a whatever we want to call it, I'll just call it for the sake of this conversation, like an ancient cosmic intelligence. He almost proved that there is one by the amount of time that he sacrificed by search. His physical and mental dedication to the study itself was a form of proof. And you know, also, if you really want to go deep alchemically, agregorically, if you want to take into account maybe a form of

esoteric manifestation. If this phenomenon did not exist before Keel, perhaps it existed after Keel because of Keel.

samples inevitably comes back inconclusive. They'll test it once and they'll get something like unknown primate. They'll send it to a different lab and they'll come back. Now that's a bear, you know, complete or just inconclusive. It's contaminated, it's inconclusive. We can't use it. A lot of times it gets just go lost. They get lost in the maulth these hair samples, they're just gone. They're gone. Oh it's the government. What the hell, it's not. Government can't fix the roads.

They don't care about Bigfoot here. It's something about the phenomenon. There are people who have claimed to kill Bigfoot, several people, multiple cases of it now the time, not ninety nine percent of the time, not ninety nine point nine, one hundred percent of the time. These bodies go missing. We have no Bigfoot body. So are they lying? I don't know. But there's no bodies. There's no bodies. Those giant skeletons

you're talking about, Oh they were taken away to the Smithsonian. Okay, maybe, but if they're gone, no matter who takes them, whether it's a black helicopter or some government agency or in the terms of these big Foot sometimes we'll say the other Bigfoot coming out of the woods and reclaim the body. If we can't access them. They're gone. It doesn't matter. They're gone. The original Patterson Gimwin film from the sixties that shows what may or may not be a big

foot walking across the thing there. My opinion has changed on this over the years. I used to be very convinced it did show an actual creature. Now and we'll see. I think time will reveal. But in any case, the original film, despite some people who claim to have it, has, is not when no one can put their hands on the original film, and it's an incredibly valuable piece of evidence. We could tell a lot if we had the original

film just going. You know, this happens again and again with this evidence, with this stuff, and I think it becomes very much like and I do paranormal conferences, and so many of them are about like, this is how we should collect evidence, and this is how we should present our evidence, and these attempts to write these scholarly papers on the phenomena and so forth. It becomes like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's all theory, and it's you're presenting theories to other

people who are interested in the paranormal people into the science. Now, as I say this. There have been some very interesting PSI experiments that were repeatable in the lab. These are vastly in the minority. I'm talking about your average ghost tun or, your average bigfoot person, obsessed with evidence, obsessed with collecting evidence, obsessed with convincing people who aren't interested in this stuff that it's real. I think it's a real problem because I think you begin to miss the

nature of the phenomena is experiential. It is not. It's not for me to prove to you. If you've experienced it and I tell you my stories, will go, oh, you'll probably believe me. Right, I can tell you my stories. You know that's great, But to believe you must experience. And the biggest believers of the people who've experienced something maybe they just all in orb but they're opened a little bit more to some weirder stuff. So the nature of this, I truly believe it that this stage in

my life, the nature of this is experiential. You can relate it to other people, you can tell it to other people, but you're never going to prove it to him. You're never going to prove it to mainstream science. It's almost fruitless to even try just go out there and experience it and talk to other people who are interested in it, you know what I mean. That's kind of where I am at this point. I'm not interested in proving to anybody who's a skeptic or anything. I can't whatever,

I can't tell you what it is. I think that's.

up and Mothman showed up in West Virginia. It's very close and so it's like I had to ask a question like how much of that was how much of that phenomenon now is perpetuated by the fact that there is a madman out on the roads who's hunting down humanoids in real life? You know, how much of them coming through To go back to that one account them coming through a dimension is how much of that is intertwined with the fact that there's a guy out there looking for it?

explain them. I'm good with that. Let's let's go. So we hiked into this area during the day and we just waited until it got dark, and not only did we see them, but we saw them in a way that we never saw them before. I don't know it's because normally we would sit outside of the woods and look in. We were sitting in the woods where we saw it normally saw the lights, and they came right up to us, almost like curious and playful, like these

these orbs and lights just coming at us. And at one point John dropped to his knees and he was trying to catch one. He was trying to grab one out of the air. He's laughing because he's like, I don't know what these are. I said, I told you, I told you. And he's he's reaching up and trying to grab one. And I was about six or eight feet to his left, and I was looking at what I assume was the same light, and I said, John,

what do you see? For some reason, I asked him and he said, oh, it was about the size of a ping pong ball and was going I didn't see that. I saw just a little single looks like a little led light, That's all I saw. It looked like he was trying to reach up for a little led light.

So I'm pretty sure we were observing the same thing and seeing something different, which is you know, it leads me to wonder, like, does this stuff Is it like a video game and it's skinning this phenomena right in different ways?

in gender terror, no question about that. But some of these things that like it almost doesn't realize how creepy it is or how weird it seems to us, Like it doesn't quite speak our life language. You know what I mean, it's just trying to get our attention. Had an instance where I was in the woods and I had heard some wood knox and I really didn't want to go back in the direction of the wood knox, so I knew the trail looped around the other way. I was by myself, and it was an area I

hadn't been in. We really don't have time. One day, I'll tell the whole story of this, this whole area. It's it's very involved story. But I hadn't been there for a while because i'd been attacked by a rabid raccoon, which I believe was related to a whole bunch of other synchronicities and and something I did wrong. I think I was sort of being smacked on my butt by the phenomena for screwing up a little bit. In any case, I hadn't been there much since this rabid raccoon attack.

I put the recon. I won the fight good, but.

I stopped it. I had. I had to put myself between the raccoon and my son who was with me, and I was like, you know we it was during the day. Shouldn't have been out during the day. I told my son run. I tried to run. I looked in this thing. I was like, I'm not outrunning this thing. So I just thought this is gonna suck, because like raccoons could tear you up. I said, I got I got one shot. If I hit this thing with my walking stick before it gets to me, that's my one

shot and divine intervention. I don't know. I got it. I broke its neck with my walking stick one shot, but I knew I couldn't let it get to my son. That's the only thing, Like, I have to stop this thing. It's between me and my son. Anyway, hadn't been at this park much since that raccoon attack because of all this weirdness. It was the synchronouses around. It literally floored me.

There were so many and so much that it like I was like stunned, and I was like, I just I don't know if I want to go back there. And I didn't go back there for a long time, but one of my I think it was like the second time I went back to the solo hike there, I hear these wood knocks. I don't want to go towards the wood knox. I go the other direction and literally turn the corner and there's a dead cat like right in the middle of the trail, perfectly laid out,

no sign of predation. It wasn't a coyote kill. It looked like it just killed over in the middle of the trail, perfectly parallel, like perfectly in the trail, as if it was walking the trail and just just keeled over. Now, I initially took this as something very sinister because of what had happened with the raccoon, and there are some other there's relations to other dead things that work into

the story. Again, it's a very very long story, but I was like, oh, and it really took me back, and I was like really like, oh, but I talked to my friend brother Richard the Friar again from Ireland, and he said, well, maybe not. He said, maybe it was just trying to get your attention and it doesn't really understand that that's really creepy to us. You know,

that's a really creepy thing to us. Maybe it was just in a way saying welcome back, here's some weirdness for you, and it didn't mean it in a sinister way. So I think that maybe sometimes that can be the case. Sometimes I don't know, the sometimes it can seem very very sinister. I'll say that, yeah.

gonna plug my laptop in when when I've moved. When I was ten, we moved into a house that.

were serious about it. And of course the previous owners had left the house empty, and I went upstairs to try and pick myself a bedroom before my brother could. I just like kids do, I just opened up the hallway closet upstairs, and of course this whole house is empty except for the Luigi board. What that was left in this house?

And we moved back to the mountains, back to Appalasia. And when I got there, I'm a teenager, now I'm older. I'm talking to some of the kids outside the church, my first, you know, week there, and one of the girls says, have you seen them yet? And I say, you know, I say who? She goes the people in the woods?

remember her face and everything. And she was so serious and she was scared, and she's we're having this conversation and we're out in this church parking lot in the middle of nowhere, and the parking lot surrounded by woods, and so the whole time she's telling me this, she's looking over my shoulder at the woodline as if she's expecting something to come out as we're talking about it.

And come to find out, it took a while. It took a while for me to put together the pieces, but she was talking about sasquatch and she was one hundred percent serious about it. And her friend in I went to youth group with all these kids. Her friend was a girl who I dated for a while, and this is like, this was, you know, a sixteen year old, seventeen year old girl who did not She wasn't in the squatching, she didn't care about Bigfoot. He's not involved

in the culture of it or anything. She's not watching Bigfoot documentaries for fun. She but she saw one and she was scared to death. She lived down a lit, long, windy road out in the middle of the country, gravel road. We used to joke that it was the longest driveway in the region because it seemed like it was like a mile long. And she one walked out in front of her her car, and the way I understand it made eye contact with her, and she was afraid to

tell me. She eventually told me, She's like, I'm, I'm She was almost apologizing for telling me the story, but she's like, I can't help it because it really happened. I've have to tell you. And she was scared, and I said well, what was it? And she said it was a man, but not a man, and of course big and hairy. And we would go out and we would do you know, teenager stuff, and we'd get back sometimes after dark, and she'd have to psych herself up to get out of the car after dark, just to

go straight into the front door. This was a very real thing to.

one say that I'm saying that. But when you look at the phenomenon and you compare it to marry and apparitions, for instance, these visions of Mary all over the world, people say brighter than the sun, Bigfoot, they say, blacker than black. These these holy visions, not just Mary, but some angels, other things that people experience often are accompanied by a wonderful smell. The odor of sanctity just smelled so good. Smell good. Bigfoot smells like rotten meat and scat.

You know, it smells horrible, awful smell. People are left tired often with these these heavenly visions, but very happy, very very fulfilled, very you know, like calm Bigfoot. People are left scared, terrified, haunted by it for the rest of their life, these these holy visions. They'll leaves like flower petals behind. Sometimes they'll get the people get showers of flower petals. What is bigfootly behind? Big piles of poop, you know, nasty stuff. So I call it the oppositeness

of the phenomenon. So it does. It does speak to something kind of like the opposite, you know, the opposite of this heavenly stuff. Now again I'm not saying it's a demon, but it does make me go, well, that's weird. You know, there's maybe maybe there's something a little bit negative about that phenomenon, or maybe just aspects of it. You know. I've had people tell me, well, some are bad, some are good. I don't know, but certainly the people that are left with these effects, it makes me wonder.

It really does because again, I've seen bears in the woods. I don't want to mess with a bear, you know, I'd rather not see them in the woods. It's neat to see. I've seen a moose in the woods. They could be very way more dangerous than bear. It was cool to see. I'd rather not see one again. But it's not gonna keep me out of the woods, you know. And these are, like I said, these are guys who loved hunting. Who they could tell they'd be like, oh, man,

I loved hunting. You know, every year I was out there, you know, every day I could hunt in my entire life. And like never going back in the woods again. I give up hunting. Can't do it. You know, there's something about it that's not a bear. You know, It's not like I've seen a bear in the woods. It's something different.

may not ever see that bird. Doesn't mean if we wasn't there when I saw it, It's right, it means you didn't see it, you know.

like to show themselves to. And another weird thing about that one was it was his parents knew about the Bigfoot, and they they called them wild man or wild man, and he's here, he is on coast to coast and he's using the term the terminology bigfoot because it was almost like it was generational there. Yeah.

I don't know. Locally, they were there's one place and I know that this is a different creature in Wisconsin or something, the hodag. But locally there was a place that they were calling it a hodag here in Pennsylvania, and that it wasn't this creature of Wisconsin. They were talking about a big hairy man like thing. So I think these names they probably pre date Bigfoot, a lot of them. But you know, until later on, people didn't realize we

were talking about the same thing. You know, they've been on bigfoots. In California, we have the ho Dag, we have the Wooly Booker, you know what I mean like that, So it could be a little bit of that that's going on too.

bells for you. Man, he's uh. In one instance he said his name was Bear, which is super interesting given the amount of you know, associations between bears and Bigfoot. You know, people most often say it's the most mistaken animal for Bigfoot, or a vice versa. He's appeared behind people. There's a cop that tells a story of being he run into these guys. This cop was documenting a lot of these Bigfoot reports locally, and these guys came and

basically told him to stop it. He gets called out on a big foot call se these people's house, and he draws his gun on a creature, and he hears a voice behind him says, I wouldn't I wouldn't do that, and he turns around. It's that guy, that big guy in the big biker looking guy in the flannel shirt. He's just what, just appearing there. Like, it's very strange, and they do seem to be the bigfoot world's men

in black. I collected lots and lots of accounts of them. Yeah, they're they're odd, and they've been appearing at least since like nineteen eighty or so. So you know, these same two guys. One guy's like nice dressed in a nice suit and more business like. The other guy's like real gruff and rough and like I said, like sometimes they say he's like a biker. Sometimes they say he's wearing a flannel shirt. It's supposed to be a great big

guy too, like real big, intimidating guy. Yeah, that's that's interesting stuff.

the true answer is I don't know. And I had to accept that about a short time after I started looking into this, you know, I went in charged into Bigfoot, and I was like, you know, once I got back into it as an adult, I was like, maybe I could figure this out, you know, and very short time into it, I kind of realized like, nah, it's I'm not figuring this out. I don't think anybody in my

lifetime is figuring this out. And I had to sit down and sort of talk to myself because I went through like a month of almost depression about it and I and eventually I sort of had this talk with myself like well, are you are you still interested in it?

do whatever you want with him. How cool is that?

I do believe that the Sierra sounds are something. Now they were seeing Bigfoot and they were hearing the sounds. I don't know that they ever saw the creatures make the sounds.

The reason I say this is when they talk about these class B encounters with bigfoot. In other words, this is the using the BFROS terminology. These are things that are Bigfoot like things where the creature isn't seen people smell bad smells, they get stones thrown at them, They hear guttural vocals like the Sierras sounds sometimes things like that, and they say, because they're in the woods, they say,

oh is a bigfoot. Look at poltergeist encounters. Though, you get stones son at you inside of houses, they are warm. Now the bigfoot people say, oh, it's warm because the bigfoot was holding in their hands. Inside houses. People get stones thrown at them with poultrygeist accounts, and they pick them up. They're warm, They get bad smells, they get these all the same things, including a guttural unknown language.

I don't know that it's ever been recorded, but it's been reported with poultergeist accounts again and again at Skinwalker Ranch, the original I believe it was the original. The second owners, not the original owners, but the ones that were there when they wrote the book about it said they heard as language coming from the air, which they said sounded like Russian being spoken backwards. Now that could describe the Sierra sounds, you know. It's so you have these things that.

So that's why I say, like, did big Foot make the sounds or is it something else? Is it something about the phenomena. I don't know, but it's it's certainly something they recorded, and I do believe I don't. I don't believe very highly in video evidence, and that that doesn't mean I don't think it can be captured on video. I just think the phenomena, for whatever reason, doesn't like video. But audio is fine. We're for some reason, we're allowed

to record audio. I've gotten some very interesting audio myself, including unknown vocals. They don't really sound like with Serra sounds. They sound like the only way I could phrase it, and I don't mean to be offensive, but it's sounds like someone death who's trying to speak but very loudly, calling very loudly through the woods, free in the morning.

You know I recorded that. So you get these things, but it's it's it's almost a one to one match for Poltergez though, which is super interesting, super interesting.

never do that. You know, it takes a lot to get me to sit straight up out of a sleep. In fact, I just I think that's the only time that's ever happened to me. And I was overcome by fear, and I thought, I mean, I'm like, is this really happening? And I'm like, yeah, I'm not dreaming anymore. I'm not asleep anymore. Just loud, strange, demonic with these parts that trail off into what seems to be the language. And you know, at the time, I didn't know what it was.

I went and I talked to my neighbor about it. I asked him about it. He said, well, first of all, I don't think he told me what he really thought. He was an older gentleman, and the older people in that community wouldn't. They weren't inclined to talk about this. The kids would talk about it. The older people. You'd rarely hear that they knew about this, but they wouldn't talk about it. So he told me. My neighbor told me, the only thing I know that that would be or

could be, is a pack of wild dogs. And you know what I heard didn't sound knine at all.

the other als around. It's pretty interesting. The one thing that that did wake me up when I did wake up the wood knocks. One night I was camping at a there's a ghost town here in Pennsylvania called Pandemonium. And for those ghost towns on the East coast are not These aren't your western ghost towns. It's you know, very wet in the forest here, and that there's no wood. The wood goes away, so we're talking about you know,

rock foundations basically. But we're camping within this this town called Pandemonium, which had some ghost stories associated with it. We went there for ghosts. We did not go there

for Bigfoot. But I was woken up about, you know, three twenty in the morning by these wooden knocks and I could hear them, and I had enough in my mind to hit record on my recorder, so I recorded them, and you could see in the stereophile you could see it's a knock in this side, and it sounds very crisp, almost like a baseball bat like clack clack, and then it's answered and you can see it in the other channel.

It's answered by this heavy thud, you know. So I'm imagining like, you know, maybe a branch with like some spark still on it or something, you know, like a bigger log like a thud thud and clack clack, and they're going back and forth. I was terrified. I had to pee, and I'm sitting there in my tent, going I have to go out there, and this is happening sounds like maybe forty fifty yards from my tent, you know, right in the woods behind me, and I'm just I'm thinking, like,

my buddy's with me, he's in his tent. I can hear him snoring. And there's enough of these accounts where you can't wake people up. There's a lot of them where you can't wake someone up and you have to go through it alone. And I'm thinking like, well, I don't want this. I don't want to have to deal with this alone. I definitely have, you know, I gotta get up and pee, I gotta face this. And I'm listening. It was probably only a minute or so, and finally

I hear him say do you hear that? And I said, oh, yeah, I've been hearing that, and we you know, at that point, we got up and I felt a lot better, you know, having someone else around. The rest of the night, we heard stuff walking around, saw some red eyes looking at us. A pretty intense night. But yeah, I got woken up by knocks that night. Pretty very intense, very intense time.

This was in the summer, and you could see a wake of something just walking around, something big through the ferns. I just walked around our campsite, you know. So we had this very harrowing night buying like daylight us here and we're breaking down camp and I have to go right. And I had my pack hanging on a tree and I reached around without looking. I didn't look around the backside of the tree. I just reached around and untied

the para cord that my pack was hanging. And I bring the para cord around and on that para cord and I was thankfully my buddy was standing right next to me, so he got to see it. As I brought it around, we locked eyes like what was a rusty spring? A bedspring that had been twisted into the para cord. Now again, gotta be something with hands to do that. It was still attached to the para cord when I brought around with and like I said, we locked eyes like, what the heck? Go around the backside

of that tree. Could see another wake through the ferns leading right to that tree, and a rusty old bedspring was there. It must it who him whatever, must have walked right over that bed spring, picked up a pull of spring up from it and twisted it into that pair of cord. I think it was that's just my gut. I don't know. I think it was like saying, yeah, I was here, I was this close, within feet of my tent, and my friend sleeps in a lean to tent standing behind that tree. You could watch him sleep.

You could watch him sleep maybe ten feet away from that tree he was. I was right beside that tree. I think it was just like, yeah, I got this close and you did nothing about it. It's like Countain Coup in a way. It was stunning, stunning. Yeah, And if it was a person, hey, brave man, because if we'd have woken up and found you in our campsite, you'd have had you we were armed, and you would have had a hard time. I'll tell you that. Don't go into people's campsites atnight, don't. I don't do it.

You know you're asking for trouble if you do.

no safe way to cross there anyway. Yeah, and his girlfriend, he was actually showing me some other like bigfoot sign that he found in the woods there. His girlfriend was sitting by the creek and said, came back up. I said, all I heard these low grunts and then I looked across and you just this this tree just whipping back if it was a big sycamore tree because it was white against it, really see it, because it's white against the other trees and just whipping back and for a

huge tree, Like what's doing that? Like yeah, yeah, yeah, who knows.

when it approached their haywagon. The following day, a man was cutting weeds on his farm about five miles from the previous incident when he heard a fierce roar and turned to see a monster with three horns and a tail charging in his direction. He raised his scythe to defend himself, only to have the implement ripped from his hands. At that point, the man wisely decided to turn both cheeks to the monster and escaped as fast as he

could run. And then there's one more. A day later, a woman was feeding poultry on a farm midway between the two earlier incidents, when she heard a commotion and turned to see the creature in the act of snatching a goose in each of its hands. She bravely ran towards the thing, waving her apron. The woman managed to recover one of her geese when the creature threw it at her, knocking to her to the ground in the process, and the interloper then escaped with the remaining bird in hand.

And that's from America's Nightmare Monsters.

I think they just went, oh, it's Langster County because it's Amish. But it's actually in a place called Happy Valley. It's in the middle of the state. But you have a fantastic account. All the other details are spot on.

people bring their folkslore with them. You're talking about fairies and Appalachias because there's a heavy Scots Irish population there. They brought that folklore with them. So I thought these, well Welsh have a fairy tradition too, and I would love to talk to them. But the Welsh they don't talk about this stuff like the Amish, they don't talk about it. So that I went to the Historical Society there and they're like, you'll never get them to talk.

And I happened to mention this to someone in the UK and they said, oh, yeah, the Welsh they just don't talk about this stuff. So it's it's just not done. So yeah, I'm sure the Amish have a lot more stories and I wish they would talk about it, but they just don't. They don't. It's not what they do.

zero light pollution there. It's incredible. Do you see darkness there like you rarely see anywhere?

it's just wonderful. They're just saving block after block, hundreds of acres at a time and just making it green space for people, and it's just it's fantastic, incredible.

first book that's like, it's not really paranormal focused. It's the story of these hermits in their lives, which are super interesting, and it's based on my photo collection I started collecting photos of these guys from the eighteen hundreds to early nineteen hundreds. After my wife bought me one basically said Dell, you're like, this is like a wild man. It's like it's the hermit. He's like a wild man.

You'll like this. And I looked up the guy and his story blew me away, and so I became interested, and I started collecting pictures of other hermits. So when I started writing a book, it is like, well, how am I going to narrow it down? There's way too many hermits, way more than you'd ever think. Well, just based on my photo collection. So almost every hermit, there's one or two in the book you don't get to see photos of, but almost every hermit you get to

see the photo. You get to see what they look like. I did tons of illustrations for it. It's, my opinion, the best illustrated book I've ever done, and over three hundred pages of hermit stories and illustrations and photos, and I think it's a really interesting topic. We've done some hermit stories on strange familiars and people seem to like them, so you know there'll be a whole book.

but basically I looked up the island. I found this the name of this island, and like, there's a little community there. But it turns out the island is famous for this tomb that's there today of this hermit, and he was he went to the island to get away from, you know, society basically. But he was a healer mm hmm, so he ended up being these people like a big help to all his neighbors in that you you know, in in terms of healing and other things. So I

got sucked right into it. And those those hermit stories are so rich.

Her name is Jenny Johannica. She was called the hermit of Happy Valley. I believe Happy Valley, hermit of Happy I'm getting Happy Valley because the almis is confirmed, but anyway, Happy Hollow. She's the hermit of Happy hollow, and I looked her up, you know, as I'm doing, and you know,

she's sort of famous in her area. I forget what part of the country she was from, somewhere I'm in the Indiana maybe maybe I could be wrong, but somewhere in the Midwest, and there's a I think, a little sign of her, you know, where she lived at this park, you know, like you know a little story about her. And I realized I may have the only photo of

her anywhere. I found this photo. It's a Siano type photo, someone probably printed at home, and on the back written is her name and the name of her dog, because they're dog's in the picture, and there's no I can't find any other photos of her anywhere, and it sort of hit me the responsibility, like I might have the only photo of this person that's around these days. Anyway. I'm sure there were others before, but I might have

the only existing photo of her. And I take that very seriously, you know, like I feel like, you know, there's the idea of second death right you die once and then you die again. Once everybody forgets who you were. And I feel like, almost in a way, like responsible for their stories and their care, and I've become very fond of these people writing these stories. And like I said, the seriousness of that when I realized, like I might have the only existing photo of this woman, that's kind

of important. Like, I hope someone else cares, you know what I mean. I'll leave it to maybe there'll be a library or something that will care enough to want to preserve this collection, because I would be happy for that. I would certainly give it to an institution like that, because I think there's something here to preserve these stories of these people that could have been forgotten. And in

a way, they were forgotten in their time. A lot of them people didn't care, you know, they went off to the woods and they they were either superstitious about them or they people barely knew them, or they made up stories about them.