I'm a full blooded Cherokee Indian, and my father and my grandfather always told me never to run from trouble.
That's why when my father saw.
A bigfoot through his night scope and he told me to stay out of the woods, I sat myself down by the fire and I waited for it to come to camp and introduce itself. Now here's my story. In nineteen eighty six, I went hunting with my father in Nevada to a place called White House Reservoir. We drove our camper trailer there on a n ice day when the weather was pleasant not too cold. We always cooked out in the area where we were going to hunt. We built a healthy log fire and enjoyed the area.
Everything was going fine until about two thirty in the morning when the dog started going crazy. I went outside and poked around the remains of our fire to see if maybe an animal had come into our camp, and I couldn't see anything but a smell of something awful. I mean, it's tank and this dog, who would normally jump outside at any chance, wouldn't come close to the door. The only way to get him outside at that point
was to push his butt out the door. But then he just ran underneath the trailer and he came up through the floorboards. That's when I knew something was wrong. I could hear something moving around close to our camp, but in the darkness surrounding the campfire, I couldn't see anything. I called to my father inside the trailer, and I asked him to get his night scope out see if he could see anything. He looked through the scope, looked around the camp from the door of the trailer. Then
he looked me right in the eyes. Don't go a step further, he whispered, what's up? I ask him, Just trust me, don't go any further. Don't go in the woods. Do you hear me? Yes, sir, I said, always listened to my father, so I did as he said, but I didn't go inside. I put another log on the fire and I sat down, and I stayed up till around four in the morning, looking around and listening to the strained silence of the night, waiting for whatever the
creature was to make an appearance. It never did show itself to me, but I remember at one point, all the sounds of nature started up at once, like they had all been hiding and holding their breath until the monster in the woods went away. When daylight crept over our camp, I went inside and got some sleep. A couple of hours later, I went back outside and saw tracks, and I measured nineteen inches long and twelve inches wide
all around the trailer. I told my father, but he didn't want to talk about it, so I pressed him on until he told me what he saw in the scope. He finally gave in and told me he saw something big moving out there in the darkness, through the forest and trying to hide between trees, but he said that
I didn't need to worry myself over it. Well, I saw the footprints with my own eyes, and I smelled that famous horrible smell you hear about, and I heard the seriousness in my proud father's voice when he warned me not to go any further. And I saw that dog act like it was scared for its life. I'm positive it was a bigfoot out there, which, in my humble opinion, is something we should have been worried about. I used to be a mountaineering guy, and I hiked
a lot in Arkansas, where I'm from. I remember hearing heavy footed people walk around my campsite at night, but I always assumed they were nearby campers getting up to use the bathroom. After several unusual experiences, though, I started to become more convinced about the bigfoot subject. I was hiking around mina ark Saw in bear country with a friend. We were going along when we both noticed that the trail had become eerily silent. It was so silent that my ears started to rain. Well.
I thought it was cool, but as we went to bed that night, I was kept awake by the sound of something massive walking in the forest around us. Naturally, I was alarmed, thinking it might be a bear. We both sat up and turned on our headlamps and looked around, ready to see a bear in the light, but there was nothing there. Neither of us saw anything but a forest. I will never forget it. It was too loud of a sound and too close to our camp for us not to see what it was. None of it made sense.
A couple of years ago, while I was hunting on a friend's property, I was outside getting the fire going late at night when I heard a loud and long woop. It was such an unnatural sound to hear coming out of the dark that it startled me. My flashlight on and looked around for whatever person was playing a trick on me, but I saw nothing. Just as I started to relax, I heard a loud growl come from the
same spot in the dark. Well, my courage left me at that moment, and I quickly retreated to the cabin. My friend and I came out together a little while later, but we didn't hear another sound. Later that weekend, my friend said that there had been another strange call coming from the woods. It sounded like something huge had pounced on an animal and killed it. Now, that's not such a strange thing to hear out in the while, but
my friend swore there was something unnatural about it. Another time, I was driving down the Interstate and I was about to pass over a country lane in the middle of nowhere, and as I approached, I saw two men walking down the center of the lane. They were black as night from head to toe, and they were huge. Together they would have taken up half the road if they were standing shouldered shoulder, which put them at at least three
feet wide each. Unlike most people, I was not looking for bigfoot signs, and I didn't believe anything like this existed at the time. But that said, I do not doubt that a bigfoot could have encountered me during those years. I just know I would not have been observant enough to see it. In nineteen eighty I was a twelve year old kid growing wild in the mountains of Montana. Our home was thirty miles outside of Missoula, nestled smack
in the middle of the woods. My best friend Ron lived two miles east, and his place was practically my second home. I'd often get off the bus at his house or rush back home, grab my gear, and head straight to his house. Our kind of normal meant being latchkey kids in the wilderness. We'd pack sandwiches and grab
a fishing pole. We'd take a twenty two rifle or it's sixteen gage shotgun, and we'd head out fall Afternoons were for hunting ducks and grouse, and we had our fair share of close encounters, like that time a mama bear charged us. It's not something we mentioned to our parents. Winter meant trapping season. Our path to riches for two twelve year olds, that is, we were all over the west fork of Petty Creek and beyond, snaring coyotes, foxes, raccoons, skunks, weasels,
and muskrats. Bobcats were our golden ticket, though, when we raked in enough cash to buy motorcycles, school clothes, and even squirrel away some for college. In the winter of nineteen eighty, we thought we had encountered a sasquatch. We didn't have TV, and we knew zilch about bigfoot. We were laying a trap line on Fish Creek when we heard a chuffing noise, kind of like gibbering sounds. Naturally,
we crashed through the willows to investigate. On the creek bank, we saw something swaying behind the tamarack, pine and raspberry bushes. It was too tall for a black bear, we thought, and without warning, Ron fired his shotgun into the air. This thing bolted and we stood there and adrenaline was pumping. I thought it was a cinnamon colored black bear, but Ron, ever, the comedian, insisted it was an orangutan. In Montana, sure Ron, spring brought early bear season, and we decided to hunt
at our softswatch sighting spot. We set off at three am and reached Fish Creek by four and set up our stands, and by noon I was in my stand bottled up like a human burrito. It was a round dusk. When a rock came flying at me and smacked my chest, I figured it was Ron. Who else could it have been. My mind wandered to the strange pile of rocks I had seen on the other side side of the bank
earlier that day. Someone had built it there intentionally. And right then another rock whizzed by, followed by a muffled laughter. I laughed to myself, and I thought, this is war. Ron must have built the rock pile so he could move and through without me being able to pin him down. And I climbed down from the tree stand and I yelled at him, and I promptly got hit by more rocks. Well, this made me mad. He wasn't even giving me proper time to arm myself. So I grabbed some rocks and
I retaliated. My first rock zipped through the brush and had hit something, And then came the roar. It would have blown my hair back if I'd have been any closer. I was scared, but I stood my ground, And as I continued to pelt rocks at the unforeseen foe, a bigfoot family emerged from the bushes. There was a big one who would have towered over even my tallest uncle. And he was flying by two juveniles, and all three
of them were throwing rocks at me. I threw the last of my rocks, and I stood there staring at them with my heart pounding in terror. And just then a gunshot rang out, and the bigfoots fled, and there was Ron standing a few yards away. Man, I couldn't figure out all that noise. He said, what were those things? I think there were bigfoots. I stammered, those were definitely bigfoots. Ron agreed. We packed up as fast as we could and we headed home, but the eerie feeling of being
watched lingered. With our adrenaline still high from the encounter, we couldn't stop talking about it, and over the next few days we couldn't shake the incident from our minds. Every time we were out in the woods, we found ourselves glancing over our shoulders, half expecting to see those towering figures emerging from the trees. One afternoon, while we were fishing at Petty Creek, Ron brought it up again. We should go back, he said, not to hunt, but
to see if we can find any evidence. Are you nuts, I said, we barely made it out last time. I was protesting, though part of me was just as curious. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and we planned another trip. This time, we armed ourselves with more than just rocks. We had our cameras, hoping to capture proof of our encounter. We set off early one Saturday morning, retracing our steps to the spot where it all happened. As we approached the area, an eerie silence fell over
the forest. Even the birds seemed to have taken the day off. We moved forward carefully, I scanning the surrounding for any signs of movement, when Ron stopped and pointed at some large, fresh humanoid prints leading into the denser part of the woods. With followed the tracks, with our hearts pounding. Every crack of a twig or rustle of leaves made us jump. After a while, the tracks led us to a small stream, and there on the other
side of the stream were the bigfoots. We crouched behind some bushes and tried to hide, but it was no use. One of the juveniles saw us and yelped, alerting the others. The big one turned and faced us with his eyes narrowed, and I felt my heart nearly burst out of my chest. Ron we gotta go now, I whispered. The big One took a step toward us, and we bolted back through the woods with the sound of pounding footsteps behind us.
We didn't tear look back. After what felt like an eternity, we burst out into the road and scrambled onto our dirt bikes and kicked up the earth as we gunned the throttles. Weeks later, we received a mysterious letter from an anonymous observer containing sketches of the Bigfoot family and the keep the secret. They mean you no harm. Well, that wouldn't be hard. No one would believe us anyway. Over the years, Ron and I would often revisit that day,
especially during our summer camping trips. We'd sit by the fire and recount every detail, and our friends hanging on to our every word. They'd laugh and they'd call us crazy, but we didn't think it was funny because we knew the truth. We had seen something extraordinary, something that changed our lives forever. Ron and I were like chain link until we had high school, and then we sort of grew apart. The last time I talked to him, he
had just retired from a long Army career. I had gone into the Marine Corps and then later went into law enforcement. I eventually returned to the spot where it all began, hoping to find some sort of evidence of the Squatch family, hoping they were still around, some sort of evidence to take me back to that time Ron
and I had our lives forever changed. I never found anything, but on my way out of the woods that day, the familiar feeling of fear made its way up my spine, and I found myself looking over my shoulder just the same. Thank you for listening to this podcast a little shorter than others. Some people say they like the shorter ones, some people say they like the longer ones. So I
never know how long to make them. These shorter ones, probably for the next two to three weeks, will fit in good with my work schedule because I can knock short podcasts out in the morning and get back to work. So it's going to work good, and we get these great stories. I love them. These are encounters from real people telling real stories that really happened to them or they claimed they did. And I hope you guys are enjoying them as much as I am. That said, we'll see guys on the next one.