My grandmother was a god fearing woman. She was in her late eighties when she told me this story, and she swore on the Bible that it was true. My grandmother and grandfather were newlyweds. They had spent the first few months living with her parents until they could find a home to rent. My grandfather was the pastor of
a small country church down Sycamore Avenue. He didn't make much money preaching, and many of his congregation members couldn't give money to the church, so they brought chickens and corn on the cob and eggs to the preacher. We limited income, finding a home was challenging. One Sunday, a church member came up to my grandfather after church and told him that his aunt had a house that she was trying to rent. Wanted to know if he wanted
to rent it. The house was a two story white home with a big picture window in the living room. The kitchen was on the main floor, the two bedrooms were upstairs. The house was nice and it was cheap, only ten dollars a month. Well why is it so cheap, my grandmother asked the owner of the home. Well, I can't lie to a preacher, but the house is haunted. He said. Well, my grandparents were shocked and shook their heads because they didn't believe in ghosts. The only ghost
that we believe in is the Holy ghost, said my grandfather. Okay, said the owner, But I warned you. He said this with a nervous laugh. My grandparents moved in all day and finally got settled. Nothing happened the first night, but that was the last peaceful night's sleep they would have in that house. The next night began normal. Grandpa and Grandma went up to the bedroom and went to sleep. At two am, they heard people talking down in the kitchen,
several people in fact. They heard the cabinets being opened and dishes being set on the table, and chairs were heard moving across the floor. My grandfather got a shotgun and quietly walked down to the stairs. He turned on the light and there was nothing, nothing out of place. The kitchen was perfectly clean and in order, just like Grandma left it. Grandpa searched the house and he still found nothing. And then he remembered the owner's words, it's haunted.
A cold chill came over him. He quickly prayed the Lord's prayer and checked both the front and back doors to see that they were locked. He then went up to bed and only to have the same thing happen. The voices started and the dishes started to be moved about the kitchen. Grandpa finally went to the kitchen and turned the light on. Everything stopped. He put his Bible open to Psalm Nighty and went on the table, and he went to sleep with his head resting on the book.
The next morning, my grandmother told him she wanted to leave. She didn't want to live in a haunted house. Grandpa told her they would pack up and leave, and they did just that. It took most of the day, but with the help of family members, they had everything out of the house in one day. My grandparents shut the curtains on the massive front picture window in the living room and quietly looked left and right, and again they felt a cold chill come into the room. They quickly
walked out the front door and locked it. As they slowly pulled out of the driveway, my grandmother yelled stop. My grandfather stopped, and they looked at the house and the curtains they had closed upon leaving were slowly opening. My grandparents looked at each other and said it's haunted. They left, and the house sat empty for many years after that. It may sound strange that a skeptic like me would write to you about an exp xperience that
could have been a sisquatch. Regarding my skepticism, I can't help but feel that a complete lack of concrete, irrefutable physical evidence is suspicious. Now, don't get me wrong, I would be thrilled to learn that we shared this earth with another mysterious primate. But again I have serious doubts.
I spent my childhood enchanted by stories of the unknown, and I cut my teeth on Sunday afternoon reruns of In Search of And I had seen the Patterson Gimlin film dozens of time by my fifth birthday, Having learned to read at an early age, I was even aware of the Baumanns story at that age. I bear in mind that I grew up in the seventies when the Bigfoot phenomenon was hitting its stride. Bigfoot was everywhere. I
even saw him fight the six million dollar Man. I suppose years spent in the woods with no experiences of my own allowed my grown up common sense to overtake my sense of wonder, and I hadn't thought about this subject for years until I found your channel a few days ago. After watching several episodes of your podcast, my wife and I began to talk about weird experiences from our past. It was during this talk that memory came flooding back, and I related a story to my wife
that astonished her. We've been together more than fifteen years and this was the first time she had ever heard anything about it from me or my family. I almost think that somehow this memory was being blocked from my conscious mind to some degree. So enough about me, let's get on with my story. I was born and raised in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. If that sounds familiar, you may know it from the John Prime classic about a small town named Paradise that was turned upside down by strip mining.
I lived most of my childhood a few miles down the Green River from Paradise, on the edge of a small town called Martwick. It was also displaced by strip mining. I lived in a rural, heavily wooded area that was adjacent to hundreds of acres of desolate and uninhabited minelands. It was like paradise to a young kid like me, I spent countless days trekking across this rural wonderland. We got to the back porch and Mom and Dad were
sitting there waiting for us. We walked up the backsteps and showed off the projects that we had worked on during the week, and we sat down to join them. After a few minutes, Dad stated that he was going to slop the hogs that we were raising at the edge of the woods behind the house. We didn't have a huge piece of property and we didn't necessarily need it for meat, but Dad liked to expose the kids to different ways of life that he remembered from his youth.
Mom or I took to this chore, but probably due to my wearing my Sunday best clothes in it being so dark, Dad decided that he was going to do the task this evening. He grabbed up a five gallon bucket and he headed toward the woods. And the woodline started thirty yards from the back porch and fell into a steep ravine. The pigpen was about twenty feet into the woods, situated right where the hill began to descend, and as the edge of the woods was grown up
into a thicket. One had to go several yards left to the edge of our property to enter the woods where the undergrowth was thinner, and then we went back to the right to get to the pigpen. We watched Dad walk down the backyard and disappear into the woods, and it wasn't long before we heard petunias starting to oink and even squeal a little. My sister and I had named the hog and we were playing with it, much to Dad's disapproval. Like most animals, it wasn't unusual
for her to get excited at feeding time. However, the intensity of it seemed unusual to us back on the porch. The squealing stopped shortly, and we imagined that she must be in hog heaven ears deep in putrid leftovers. A moment later, we could hear the most got awful thrashing of something or something coming right through the thicket, not far from the pigpen, and to our utter disbelief, the figure of my father came bursting from the thicket at
a dead sprint, heading back to the porch well. All three of us on the porch were watching this in slack jawed shock. My father is not a particularly excitable man, nor was he ever one to adopt an overly macho persona. He was just a plain, ordinary man from ordinary country stock who just seemed to have that John Wayne, a man's got to do what he's got to do sort of attitude. My dad had been a star athlete high school, and I don't think I had ever seen him run before.
He'd worked all day and at his own pace if something needed to be done, but he wasn't into exercise. Well now here, he was running so fast that he was tripping over his own feet coming up the backyard, and as he drew near the porch, we could see his face. It was as white as a sheet, and we were freaking out. Mom started calling out to him, asking him what was going on, but he never answered. He never slowed down, and he jumped up onto the edge of the porch, and he continued into the house
as fast as he could go. This happened so quickly that we didn't have time to react, and by the time we had started to stand up and go see what was wrong, he emerged on the back porch with a twelve gate shotgun in his hand, and by this point all four of us were terrified. Mom was pleading with him in hush tones to explain what was wrong. He just kneeling there against the porch post, shot gun across his knee, in visibly shaking and staring at the woods.
Eventually she just stopped asking, and we sat there with him in silence. What else could we do? Something had happened in the woods, and he was so obviously shaken, and looking back, I don't know if he was able to form the words well. This behavior went on for several minutes until it started getting so dark that it would have been hard for us to see anything if it had emerged from the woods, and he finally seemed to ease up a tiny bit, and he started relating
what had happened. He had entered the woods and cut back to the right to reach the pin. He wasn't paying that much attention to anything, and as he entered the area of the pen where the woods were thicker and the thicket grew up all around, he realized it was darker than he thought. He couldn't see much at all. At first. He had noticed the pig agitation, but he didn't think much of it. He was dumping out the slop when it occurred to him that the pig wasn't
coming to the trough. It was scrunched up against the wall of the pin where he was standing. His eyes were starting to adjust to the darkness when he looked up from the trough and he saw it, and standing opposite him across the pin was a large, upright figure. It was covered in dark hair. His first thought was,
it's a bear. It was common in the area for people to report seeing things that had been rendered extinct to the area for years, such as panthers and bears, and the light and things like that were generally laughed at and seldom backed by any evidence. He didn't have any better explanation. That was the first thing he thought. He stood there, frozen by fear briefly when he realized that this thing was reaching into the pin for the pig, with its arms extended toward it. At that point he
turned and ran for it. We spent a very uncomfortable night at our house, and I don't think any of us slept much that night. It was weeks before I could go back into the woods to play, and I promised the hog was slopped in the daylight. From that point forward, we were going through hard financial times, and Dad was drinking a lot more than I ever had
seen him drink before. He was drinking that night, but I didn't think to excess, and by the time he reached the porch there was no trace of intoxication left in him, and he didn't drink again for the rest of that night. Oddly, I don't remember Dad or Mom ever speaking of it again. I don't know if I would call it shame. He just didn't seem comfortable with the level of vulnerability he had shown in front of us.
I was terrified, and I don't know what was worse, a creature in the woods out back or seeing my dad scared. The other night, as I sat with my wife, I tried to reason it out. I would love to be able to explain it away, but I can't. My wife suggested that maybe he might have staged the whole thing for me. Well, I was eating up with all things bigfoot at the time, and I was walking toward the woods with a camera seven days a week. I
can't accept that either. Though first, he did seem to delight in feeding whatever curiosity was fueling my young brain at any given time. I have a hard time believing he would go to such extremes for that reason, though, And second, if he had talked to mom and my sister beforehand, I don't think all three of them could have pulled it off that seamlessly. My sister is a notoriously poor liar. The most important, I know what real fear looks like. Almost get chills now thinking about it.
I had never, nor have I since, seen my father in that state. In closing, I just want to say how much I've enjoyed watching your channel on YouTube these last few days. I thought this story would fit perfectly. It does fits perfectly, honestly, if it doesn't get used, I feel better having aired these feelings after all these years.
And also I love your chickens. There's some sort of strange zen I achieve watching the chickens walk around pecking for feed in the yard, and sometimes I just drift off to sleep while I'm watching