SO EP:688 Bigfoot In Ohio

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out here? Did you see what it was? It enough out here? Look, I'm new to one doowing now and I don't need anything. I don't want to go outside. Hello, hit the fuddy out here? What quin I'm out there? It's thought of a bench about sixty nine. I don't know easy, I'm out there.

start where I start with most people. What in the world got you interested in the subject of Bigfoot to begin with?

Space nineteen ninety nine. If it was in the seventies, we were watching it. My mom loved it. That was must watch TV back then. Whatever was on it was what you were watching. That's why somebody that was there traumatized by Heath Hall and The Lord's Welk Show because that was what you were watching on Saturdays. Man, it was terrible, but obviously six million dollars. Man the two part Bigfoot episodes the most popular episodes they ever had. That's why they had him back on the show so

many times. They had him on The Bonic Woman, A big Foot and Wild Boy. That was a Saturday morning show that a lot of people have never heard of, which was just bonkers. It was like a Tarzan kind of thing. Young Boy, it gets rescued by Bigfoot. So I was watching all that stuff growing up and in search of certainly as a huge part. Plus we got to see a legend of Boding Creek sasquatched the legend

of Bigfoot. Here in Ohio and especially where we're at in east central Ohio is what's called but Shockton is basically the last county on the left in the Appalachian Area. Like when you look at a map of Appalachia, Shockton is like right here on the left. So we're almost perfectly in between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, like one hundred miles if you draw like a right angle. We used to

get Channel forty three out of Cleveland. There was a guy named SuperHost on Saturday, and he would play these godzill movies, Three Stooges, and sometimes you'd see these Bigfoot, Legend of Boggie Creek, Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot, and then Big Chuck. Little John was also out of Cleveland on Friday nights and they would play those kind of movies too. So growing up, we got to see a

lot of stuff. And like I said, it was my CTV, so you had to watch it a little lot to see that stuff over and over again, but we did. So that got me into all the science fiction, Bigfoot and all that. I guess I shouldn't leave out the books either. We had books in the elementary school. I've got some of them that we sell on the table that you see about Bigfoot, Asian aliens, all the monsters, all that stuff. You get to check it out at the school library. And I'd wear those books out by myself.

We had a lot of stuff, what of good stuff.

into the woods to look for these things? Did you want to become a researcher and find out more about them or did you stumble into your experiences while you were doing other things.

three ponds, and that's what we went out there. We went up there for two reasons. We went out there to fish. Old Man McCoy he had a four to ten. He'd load all his shells up with rock salt, and he would shoot at you with the rock salt. He was a mean old man. The story was two of his boys died up there. One of them drowned in one of the ponds, and then the other one was killed in a really bad rain store and my lightning strike hit a tree and it fell on him. That

was the stories that we were told. So we would go up there and play cat and mouse with him, plus we'd go fishing. My first encounter, we were heading up that way. To get up there, you go through these line of houses that are up on this hill. We'd cut right through their yard, go up into the woods, get on the two track. It ran like in a almost like a half of you up to the top of the hill. You had to be careful because he'd

come down that way sometimes. He had an old beat up I think it was a green truck or red truck. So we're walking up the two track. It was me and my friend. My buddy's a little older than me. He was thirteen, I was nine. We're going up through there. We got our fish and stuff. Also, I have to point out this Caveat at the time, we were heavily influenced by Marvel Comics. We thought we were vigilanties, so

we occasionally had these. If you remember the character Iron Fist from the comic books, he had this mask that just had his eyes and it would wrap around your head like a bandana. So we had a couple of those. We didn't o man that day, but we thought we were vigilanti superheroes. We're walking up this two track, and the way I remember it, the way I always explained it was, it seemed to be the woods up to the right of me just exploded with noise. All these

trees start shaking. Now when I say trees, these are saplings. They weren't shaking giant oak trees or anything. I looked up to the right. The sun is back behind that, so all I can see is shadow ish. I see the con head down to these huge shoulders. That's all I remember as far as the encounter goes. We both just booked it back down the two track. But of course we get down so far and we decided to

jump off the side of the two track. We decided we were going to run some fishing line across the trail because we're going to trip him if he comes after us. We're going to trip him, and we both got like little buck knives with us. Poor mister Bigfoot. We were plot is demies already. I don't remember if the creature made a noise at all. It's possible, but I don't recall that. Of course, this is quite a long time ago. I don't remember a smell. I don't

remember smelling anything. It smell is a pretty powerful reminder you usually things like that were stuck with. But all I remember is, like I said, we were bebopping up through there. All of a sudden we saw it took off run and I think it was about ten seconds maybe, if that long, I think it was right after we got done stretching the fishing line across the trail. We looked at each other, let's get the hell out of here and off the hill. We were booking, and we

ran all the way back down. People probably thought we were up something, because running through their yard, down over the hill, and then all the way down to Wilson Avenue, it's a little bit of a trip. So that's out the first encounter went. I got home and dropped my stuff. I went up to my buddy's house. He lived up the street, I told him about it, and he made fun of me. That was the first thing I think, but it's not real. And then of course he goes

on to tell everybody I saw one. I'm getting tortured, I'm getting made fun of it. Occasionally through school people would say, yeah, won't you ask truly he saw a big boot one time, because I would tell people every now and then about it. There's a couple more caveats too, but the one I want to talk about real quick before I go off on wherever I'll end up going.

And I've been together now for almost twelve years. Right after we got together, I don't know if we were married yet, but we'd been together for a little bit. The county fair came around and I saw my buddy that was there with me that day, and I didn't have any bigfoot shirt on or nothing. I wasn't doing this yet. Full disclosure. I've been in recovery now for fifteen years, and I've found that talking to people and

like minds, it's cathartic. It's good for your soul. If you have an encounter, if you have something that's happened to you, you need to talk about it. You need to get it out there in the open. So I saw him at the fair and I told Beth, I said, will you wait for me right here? I will go ask him something. And I walked over to him and I said, Hey, do you remember that? And this is all I said, Tom, do you remember that day up

on old man McCoy's hill. Now we were on that hill hundreds of times, so I didn't ask him that day when we saw the bigfoot? I said, do you remember that day we were up from old men McCoy's hill. He didn't skip a beat, he said, John, it was a big It blew me away because, like I said, he's a little older than I was, so he would have a better recollection. Plus he didn't destroy his ma brain cells. This I did in my twenties and thirties

with heavy duty partying. That was really cool to get some reassurance like that, because as we get older, our memories do change. I know this. It's part of my job is to understand psychology a little bit. It's short and sweet. That's what happened. It's one of those things that I never thought would ever happened. Never occurred to me it would. I just did the little show with a friend. I met him on Twitter. He doesn't podcast.

Billy Delicious is his name, call him Doc Strange. But we were talking about the movie The Mysterious Monsters, the one that Peter Graves did in nineteen seventy five. And in that movie there's a map and it shows the Bigfoot sightings, how many had been in each state. In the seventies, all you ever heard was California, Oregon, Washington, and even British Columbia. You never heard of Bigfoot until Boggy Creek. Really you never heard of anything ever east

of the Rockies. But there's a little map on there. It shows eight sidings in Ohio in seventy five. So when I saw that, I remember going, hey, that was some validation too. See there's been other sidings in Ohio. Like said, I was a young kid. I didn't have no idea how to do research or try to find if other people had been seeing things in Ohio or anything like that. You can just stumble across that stuff.

Like I said, that was some good validation. Now to add to this, I'm going to jump forward to nineteen eighty seven, so about eight years, eight years and about two miles as the crow flies out to one of the valleys that I said that when you go out east of Kashocktan, there's just hills and valleys, hills and valleys all the way out to a little town called

west If. Yet there's a place out there. We called it the Valley at Forever in high school because we used to go out there and we'd have huge bonfires and parties and there was a place to meet. It was a good location. It was out of town enough to where the cops would leave a salon for the most part until they found out about it. Of course they got to ruin everything anyways. So we were out there one day. It was just me, and it was about this time of the year because my one buddy

had not left for school yet. Just about everybody else had gone off to college. I was starting my senior year and there was four of us out there. We had two vehicles. So we're out there and we were having a couple of years and from the back of the valley, this valley is shaped basically like a bowl, and it's got trees rimmed around all the way around the top of it, so it's a bowl that goes up. It's all grass down here, and then it goes up and then there's a tree line all the way around it.

It's really cool. It's kind of like an amphitheater.

comes this noise again. It's moving closer to us. We're over here at about three o'clock as far as the clock goes, so it makes another noise, but it's not coming out of the tree line. Whatever it is is standing in the tree line. We don't see anything moving, we don't hear anything moving, but this thing's moving closer to us. And as it's moving closer to us, we're

all grouping closer together. So then the next time, about ten minutes later, it lets off a really nice loud reverberating, and it's really getting close to up the hill from us. So now we're all grouped closer together. And I remember, I don't know if I said it or someone else said it, that bang screams from the top of this hill. We're getting the heck out of here. It wasn't a few minutes later, and it was right up the hill

from us. Like I said, never came out of that tree line, but it led out a roar, it rattled, it went right through you. You could feel it. We didn't even say a word. I just remember thinking we looked like cartoon characters into the vehicles, and then it's about it's probably two miles. You go up the hill and then down the hill into the high school parking lot.

And I don't know about when you were in high school, Brian, but when we were in high school, summer break we spelled our summer break in the high school parking lot. You spend all year trying to get out of there, and then as soon as summer rolls are out, where you want to hang out. Oh, let's say I got the pargo out of the high school. It's good centralized location it's a good meeting spot. But we zoomed back down there, we jump out of the vehicles. What then

was that we're just freaking out. And then it was that weekend. I remember the High State was playing because we were going to have a party at my buddy's house. This ended up being the first time I actually went squatching because four of our other friends, I think it was two weeks before our incident, were coming down the road that's off of that road that takes it in the valley. It's called Morgan Run Road. They were his

boltswade and driving. They had a road crossing and they said it was a juvenile smaller one rolled out into the road and stood up and ran off. They went past it and backed up. What I was told was that thing was standing there. When they backed up, they could see it right there on the side of the road, and it was doing this keeping its head down and his shoulders. It's primate like behavior, trying to hide kind

of like that. And my one friend that I still go squatching, what had told me he's you could see he called a hair. He didn't say it was for he said it was hair. He said, you could see like in between you can see the hair and you could see the skin, and it was just standing there. The guy that was driving came with us that Saturday. We went out back out to that valley and we

went around looking for footprints. Now, the funniest part about looking for footprints is when we were looking on the other side of the valleys, because I think I did want to go. They didn't really want to find anything, cause well was freaked out because like I said, we were over here looking. I remember it was raining. We were just will find some footprints or something, and we didn't find nothing. But we didn't go to that other side either. I can't remember if that was the reason.

It might have been because it was just not as walkable as the other side. And what was wild too, was it was nineteen eighty seven, so Don keating he was putting out his signs and stuff. You could find him on trees, you can find him on telephone pools out in the woods if you had a big foot counter. And I kicked myself in the butt every day for not doing that. Because I knew there was a guy in Newcomers Town we could call and talk to him

about this. We didn't do it. To this day. It's like one of those things you're like, should it go to the wood? I'm sure things would have been a whole lot different as far as what got me to come back around. When I hit my twenties, I was out in the woods all the time. But we never really were looking for big w You were always having parties and stuff. It's funny because I went squatching one time with dog Keating. We went out kind of road seven hearing Shock, and it was all our old party spots.

The coal company Peabody and the coal companies and the power plants and all that, because we had a power plant out here Shaking County. It's in a little town called Conesville, and so all these back roads we had all these really cool lakes and ponds, and these back roads were maintained by the coal companies because that's where all the coal trucks went through there all over the place. So we had plenty of party spots, swimming holes, fishing holes.

After the coal company basically closed down, they blocked a lot of these side access roads off and some of them became impassable or they were just really rough, you mean to four wheel drive vehicles, or they just bloked them off completely. You couldn't get back there much you walk. I got to go out squatching. What don Keating and Dave Wickham and a few others. Don It had asked me, you've ever been out here before? That's been five years of my life out here. I passed out over there.

That's not over there. It was really cool to just to get out there. These were hot spots. I'm sure people asked me. We never really squatched, but I bet you could have been a fly on the wall. Theoretically, there was probably some things watching us out They were probably fascinated by our stupid behavior. That was really cool. And like I said, one of the reasons I got

back into squatching, Finding big Foot was on TV. I got sober in twenty ten, and I'd been going to meetings and things like that, and I remember we went to one of the High Bigfoot conferences in twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen. I think it was Bruce that came up to me and was asking me if I had a story. Beth was like, yeah, he's got a story. You didn't need to listen to a story he needs to tell you. I'm a timid about saying it, because every time I talked about it, people look at you

like you're growing another head out of your shoulder. Are you regular crazy or are you special crazy? No, this really happened. So that was, Like I said, one of the reasons I really liked going to the conferences was you could talk to somebody. It was very cathartic when you could talk to people similar stories that would listen to you, that wanted to hear your pinions or just listen to what you had to say and say, man, that's amazing. Now here listen to this story or that story.

And that's another reason that I wanted to get it out there. This is what I told Doug Waller. I talked to him.

of stories, you know how that goes. It's amazing how many people have encounters that are just afraid to talk about it. Sad at shows, if you're watching the crowd and you're watching a speaker, I can see people they're just bursting at the seams one to tell their story, but they're just afraid to open up about it. That's one of the things I want to get people to

talk about it because it's freeing for one thing. Plus, like I said, another reason that your story could help somebody else come out and talk about something, and it can link a chain of events that it would just blow your mind. I've had so many people in my office. I've got big Foot stuff up on the wall of my Bigfoot calendar. I've got a big Foot bobblehead on my desk, and they're like, you believe in Bigfoot? And I'm like, oh, absolutely, and they're like, let me tell

you what happened to me. I was taking the garbage out one time, and I've had at least three people taking the garbage out telling this story. It's fascinating to me just how many people really do have these stories, so some of the other things has happened a few of the watching incidents, which is cool because I was looking through my photos yesterday and I really forgotten about this. So there's a place and it's out Kye Road seven. Kyrod seven is just super duper. It's a huge amount

of area. So if you keep hearing me say Kyrod seven, there's all these ponds and lakes, all the strip mines. They build it when they stripped a lot of this and now it's grown back up. Literally, there's a high wall. We've stopped out there several times just to take pictures because it goes down this real long hill. It's right

behind playing field. But on the side of the wall where they stripped it out, it looks like the face of an Indian the way that the rock is carved, and part of it it's just saddened out because there's like a tree growing out his eyeball now and part of his nose fell off. I've got a couple of pictures and it used to look like an Indian hit. It was very cool looking. Like I said, I'm going through my old pictures and I had an old video out there. It was right before Christmas. I was out

there twenty eighteen. I was just out doing some wood knocks. It was eleven o'clock in the morning something like that, foggy, overcast and pretty warm for December actually, And on the video I totally forgot about this, which is wild. I parked down right by the face and then walk back up this way, and then there's like a hill. That hill is the top of the high wall. So if you walk up to the top of the hill and try to go any farther, you'd better get a parachute.

It's a straight drop. It's not like you can catch yourself falling down. You're done, so you gotta be very careful out there. But anyways, there's stuff up in the tree, and it seriously looked like a cat, like a big cat. I'd put stuff up in a tree, or it could have been a giant eagle nest or something like that,

but that's what I've originally caught my eye. So I'm looking at that, I'm out above it, and then there's a game trail you can see, and it even says in my video, I'm like, you can see deer poop all over the place. Here they're coming up this way and I'm looking at this. It's a little bit of dirt underneath these leaves, and I'm just looking down at it. I'm like, man, it looks really fresh. So I go down and I walked around because I didn't want to step on it. I walked around and I moved the

leaves out of the way. Even on the video, sometimes when you take those two dimensional pictures and videos and you show a footprint, you're just like, what am I looking at? I don't see anything, maybe a shape whatever. You can see very clearly. You can see the toe indentations. They're thick, and you can see the dirts rose up in between the toes. Like I said, that was twenty eighteen, so it was pretty cool just to find that again. I think it was that same year in the spring.

Because Beth had knee surgery, she had spent the whole winter in a wheelchair. We were concerned that she wasn't going to be walking or walking right again. When it came to spring, she got up out of that chair and the doctor was like, you just need to run with it, go get out and walk. So Beth was like, We're gonna go walk. We're going to sol Fork and we're gonna go for a walk. So we go out to Morgan's trail. We get through the pine trees, turn

the left to go up that little sandy hill. I think she had to stop tire shoe and she's, hey, come here and look at this. And Beth is ambivalent. She's a good sport and she's interested, but only because of me. But she's come here and look at this. I go over and look. This is actually a good example of when I was talking about that two dimensional because I have a picture of this foot, and it

doesn't do it justice. This foot was gigantic, right in the middle of Morgan's trail, and it looked like it stepped off of that little I couldn't find anything over here, though, but it looked like it stepped off that little rise where the pine trees are plot down right in the middle of that sandy gravel mix. It's right in the middle of that going up that hill. And then went the other way over to the There's a lot of hardwoods over on that side of the trail, so let

the little rise in them right there. But it was huge, like I have size fifteen books and I could put it inside of that and you could still see the whole footprint around the outside of my boom. So that was in that spring. Come around to spring of this year and I'm on Morgan's trail again, almost in the exact same spot. Off to the right, there's another huge footprint over there. I took pictures of that and sent

it to John Hickinbottom. He's a park ranger, but he's like the head of the Eco Center at the soul Fork and I'm like, John, I don't have any casting stuff with me because I just went to lunch in Cambridge and I came out there just to walk after lunch to take a hike. I wasn't squatching. I was just out there walking around and I'm like, stright there, dude, it's a huge. This one could have been a person,

but it was still a size eighteen foot. It's possible to sit human being walked around on barefoot in the march. But that was funny because I came back out two months later and that print was still there. It was deteriorated a lot, but it was still there. Because I was with Gwyn Purcell. She was in town camping at the Privet and Kid Ground and We went up all the way to the top medte Her and a couple other people. But I'm like, there's that foot print. It's

still there. Of course, we still didn't have any casting stuff, but I found a three toed print up there the same time. I don't know what that was. That was weird. I sent it to Joe and Ron with while I'm weird, I'm going to have to really start taking some casting Mixcury well. And the reason I bring that up is

that's just taking a walk on Morgan's trail. That's not even going out in the middle of the night, going way out in the sticks and doing tree knocks, or just going out there and sitting and waiting for him to count. Because I know a lot of people told me that's the way to go with that.

we had two teams. We're talking back and forth. But even when you're not even entrenched doing it, it's amazing what goes on in the woods. I don't want to get made. But when I talk to people and they're just like, this stuff's not real, John, And I'm like,

you've never even gone out in the woods. You have no idea that if I take you twenty feet off the highway, like the State Route eighty three, if I took you because I've tried this experiment, if I take you twenty feet off the highway where you can't see that road, and I spun you around in the circle, you'd have no idea where you're at. You would be

completely lost in those woods. You have no idea what you're talking about when you say there's four hundred million game cares, so to to gut you any you don't know what's talking. You just don't. Yeah, there's always I'd like to get out. I'd love to get out more. Maybe when the conference season is over, I might be able to get out there, but like right now, we have a fully packed October. It's been pretty amazing.

that people don't expect it to. And I tell you, I have cast some really good prints here on the property. I've cast prints on my neighbor's property about a mile away. One of the best prints that I have ever come across that I happened to have my phone with me and I took a couple of photos of I showed it to Cliff Berrickman. We were at dinner one night out in Idaho, and I showed it to Cliff and he's, dude, that's a Sasquatch print.

When I was twelve, I had an encounter with one of these things, and I didn't get to see it, but my mom was right there in the house when I came back to quote unquote safety and your mom was into this stuff. She was watching that stuff on television. When you had your experience at age nine, did you talk to your mom about it? Did you tell her what you had seen?

you in your research and looking into these things. Are you open minded to some of the weirder stranger things that people say they experience when it comes to Bigfoot or are you more in the flesh and blood camp. I'm certainly not asking you to plan a flag by any stretch of the imagination, no flag planting tonight, But where are you on your research? Are you open to that stuff or you more in the flesh and blood.

out in Washington found the Olympic project. Shane Corson came here and did his presentation on that and talked about those things are woven together, something with opposable thumbs. That's amazing. That's some serious physical evidence. Granted you can't link one thing to the other. We didn't catch them making it. Shane even said that, but something did it. If somebody was hoaxing that man, they need to get a life.

Good God. I sat out the woods and one together took me fifteen years, but I owned those big butters. Good lord, man.

don't know, but they're here at some point in time. Obviously, I'm right there. I don't want to say I'm on the fence about it, because it just seems like they do things that we just can't figure out. So it's not the one thing that they are doing, some stuff that we don't understand. And how they do that, I've heard more than one. I've heard people talked about them cloaked. I've seen pictures where people are like, do you see it?

And I don't know if you've ever seen those ones where it looks like a klingon bird of prey, but you can see it. It's there. What and the heck is that? I talked to another dear friend of mine. He told me he saw one out of the moonlight and it was shimmering. He said, it was like you can almost see through it. When the moon hit is hair, it was like you could almost see through it. So that fits right in with the other stuff. So if

that's the case, then maybe could be it. But they're doing some things that they don't act like regular animals. They're leaving traces, but they're not cutting huge schwats through pieces of forest, whereas well, obviously a seven foot tall creature walks through there. They're doing some things that are to me, at least in my understanding, and maybe I'm just not as informed as I should be. So I'm right there, all right.

It was at a Creature weekend at the High Bigfoot conference. We were talking to one of the girls. She was selling stuff from the Monster Mart down in the Blacky Creek. I was like, do you work at the Monster March? She goes, now, I'm just up here. They asked me to come up and do this and I'm like, okay, guys should do this and we were like no, She's yeah, just get you some stuff, grab a booth. You want to come to the shows. If you pay to be a vendor, you just get your table and then you

can walk around and talk to everybody. In my defense, Beth is the one who talked me into doing this. That is the truth where she said. So we started. Like the next year, I got old Mark the words. We did the High big Foot Commerce. We had five T shirts, some magnets, some necklaces that we made out of clay. Beth made them out of Clay. I painted them and we hung them on a string and we went there and we sold some stuff. We had a lot of fun. We'd got to meet Cliff and Bobo

and Bob kat Goldwaite was there that year. Then we got to meet all these people and take picture and it was a blast. We got to talk to people. Like I said, I got to talk to people about my encounter. It was really cool. And so we got hooked and we started doing all those shows. We go around, we get to talk to people, we get to hear

their stories. We'll do other shows like some flea markets or things like that every now and then, especially during wintertime, like we'll use a little Christmas show or something, and we're usually the only Bigfoot people there and people will come up and they want to talk about Bigfoot. They want to share their stories with me. The hush tones, Hey can I tell you about my encounter? They don't want anybody around, Like they wait till people are you know,

they're looking at our all. They wait till people are gone and they'll tell you. So it's really cool to get to meet people like that and hear their stories. So we get to like said, we travel all over the Midwest. We just have a lot of fun with it. We get to see all kinds of meat stuff and

go all over the place and meet great people. We get to meet people like Brian and give him a few pointers and help the guy along and look out, now he's got to show it and he's going all over the world squatching are little boys growing up.

in the world. You your mother was there, Beth, and I have enjoyed seeing you guys every single time I get to see you out on the road. John, I can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing your experiences. Man, have had a blast talking to you.

It starts to conference season off. Now, so that's cool. We got some book ends now, we got frogg Man in the spring, and we got Cryptown in the phone. It's a little bit of a sweet farewell there, and then you get to see everybody in the spring.