Back in October of two thousand and eight, I was twenty eight and I was in love. I had known her my entire life, but I didn't realize how I felt until after she moved away from Ontario, Canada, where we lived, to British Columbia. By the time I realized that she'd taken my heart with her, it was too late. Now, twelve years later, thanks to Facebook, we had reconnected and she was coming home for a visit. I felt like I'd waited a lifetime for that day to come. I'll
never forget how beautiful she looked when we met. Time passed two quickly, and days turned into weeks, and we spent as much time together as we could. Before we knew it, she would be leaving in a week, and I knew I couldn't let her go again, And to my surprise and great joy, she agreed to stay. Thanksgiving week of that year, we arrived I did in British Columbia to get her things and officially move her back home. We flew in after spending a few days with her friends.
We had a four day drive back home. Everything went well until the second day of our return trip. We got lost. How did I make this mistake, I wondered as I stared out over the landscape. We were almost out of the mountains by then, but it was getting late. I thought maybe if I drove a bit longer, we could make up some ground. It was a thought I would soon come to regret. Night was falling fast when I saw a sign that indicated the next town was
sixty kilometers away. Dear God, another sixty kilometers, but I'm already so tired, I thought. Being the stubborn type, I pushed on. I can do this, I told myself, like the little engine that could. No sooner had I formed that thought than the first rain drive began to fall. I glanced upwards and whispered, how much more are you going to put me through? Lord? Ask a stupid question. I tried to set aside my frustrations. The love of my life was sleeping comfortably in the next seat to me.
Even though we were lost at the moment, we had our whole lives ahead of us. I was a lucky man, and one day we would look back on this night and smile. Right. Five minutes later, the rain was coming down pretty steady, and we were no closer to finding our way back to where we should have been. One second, we were traveling along the lonely road while the wiper blades swished away the rain almost as fast as it blurred my view. And the next a pair of massive
antlers appeared in my path. It was a moose, and then another, and then another. They were being chased by something I could never have imagined. I slammed on the brakes, but there was no time to stop. It was out of my hands. The tires slid across the wet pavement and crashed into the animals. The world spun wildly as my car flipped over and over and over again, landing on all four wheels. I don't remember being ejected from the vehicle, but I awoke to find myself lying on
the ground, being pummeled by the driving rain. I had been knocked out at some point, and breathing hurt, but not breathing wasn't an option, and I gasped for air and winced at the pain with each breath, and then something growled. The memory of the last image before my foot buried the brake pedal came back to me, and it growled again, followed by a sort of wailing wah sound. The pain in shock of the accident was overwhelming, and as a former hockey player, I wasn't a stranger to
the feeling. No one plays high without breaking something at some point. But this pain felt like it was coming from every part of my body. And then I remembered my girlfriend. No, God, no, I cried. I couldn't pull myself up, so I had to inch around to the other side of the car, crawling on my belly. It was an eternity during which I pleaded with God to let her be okay. As I rounded the passenger side, I saw her body on the ground thirty feet away,
with something strange standing over her. At nine feet tall. The hair covered being looked like an ape man with shoulders as white as my car. Get away from her. I screamed at it, leave her alone, please. Through my yelling, I heard a strange waw wail again. Now I knew what was making it. The creature went down on all fours like a gorilla would do, and placed its hands on my girlfriend's belly and that whah again. Now I couldn't understand what this thing was doing to my girlfriend.
I just wanted it to get away from her. Leave her alone, I screamed. I grabbed a piece of broken fender in tent on throwing it at the beast, but my arm was broken and it wouldn't do what I wanted it to do. All I knew was that I needed to chase this thing away before it hurt my girlfriend any more than she already was. I wanted to hurt it. I wanted it to feel the pain I felt.
It stood up and released a long growl before taking one long hop and landing right next to me, with the ease of a child setting aside a discarded rag doll. It scooped me off the pavement, and it set me on the side of the road. It seemed to realize that I was hurt, because it didn't drop me. It placed me. Then it went back over to my girlfriend and carefully picked her up, cradled her in its arms like a newborn baby, and brought her over to set her beside me. I was trembling in pain and fear
as I looked into the face of my girlfriend. She wasn't awake. Her eyes were half closed in that terrible way that said there was no one behind them now, And I turned my gaze back to the creature. We locked eyes for a moment, and I saw compassion there. I burst into tears, crying out her name over and over, unable to bear the physical pain or to understand the mental anguish. I was angry at the world and frustrated with my inability to fix this, and all I could
do was cry all the while. The strange ape man stood over me and patiently waited, and finally it spoke, not in English or anything like a language I ever knew or heard. It wasn't yelling now. It knelt down and placed a hand on her leg and looked back over at me. Somehow, I think it knew that the love of my life was gone. Lights were coming from somewhere in the distance, and darkness fell over me. That was the last thing I remember until I woke up
in the hospital. Police were all around me, and my mother had flown in from Ontario along with my brother. They were in the room. My girlfriend's mother was there too. An officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said, sir, you were in a terrible accident. I want you to try to be calm now. I looked at my mother, hoping against hope, as I asked. The only question I needed to have an answer to is she did she make it mo The look on my mother's face told
me all I needed to know. I spent the next three year months recovering my leg required sixty two staples. My arm, wrist, and several ribs were broken. The official police report doesn't include the part about the Bigfoot. I left that out. It wasn't until five years ago that I shared this with anyone. At that time, I sat down with both my family and hers, and I told them everything I had to get it out of my system.
Keeping it hidden was making me sick now, worried that people would laugh at me, but bundling up inside was worse. I look back now, I can imagine that the bigfoot was chasing the moose and they just happened to cross the road at the same point we were. I don't harbor any hard feelings toward these creatures. He showed me empathy by placing my girlfriend beside me one last time. Now, this story doesn't have a happy ending, but I hope it will encourage others to share theirs. Keeping it inside
does no good. I've wanted to give up many times since that awful night. The images and memories are always with me, but I keep moving forward, trying to live my life as best I can. I think my girlfriend would have wanted it this way. I was playing a game of creek jumping with four of my friends when I was twelve years old. We lived in Independence, Kentucky, and creek jumping was a game we played often back then. It was really just follow the leader, but it involved
jumping over creek, so that's what we called it. We'd been out in the woods playing our game for over an hour when we heard something walking somewhere behind us, like it was following us. We'd gone pretty deep into the woods, but we figured it with some of the neighborhood kids who had followed us there well. Figuring that there was going to be an ambush, we picked up some sticks and began hitting them on the trees and yelling, if you want to play, come out and open you
big chickens. Everything went quiet, maybe a little too quiet, but we were kids, we wouldn't have noticed that. After a few minutes, we figured that we had chased them off, and we went back to our game of creek jumping. Minutes later, we were a little deeper into the woods when a massive roar rang out that vibrated in our chests. I grew up in the Kentucky woods, and this was
nothing like anything I'd ever heard. We froze in our tracks with two of my friends on one side of the creek and the rest of us on the other, and we looked up the hill on our side of the creek to see a nine foot tall nightmare standing between two trees at the top, shaking and growling at us. Fear shot through us as one of my buddy's gasped, what the hell is that? My other buddy on the other side was so scared that he pee his pants.
Come on, let's get out of here. One of the other friends yelled from across the creek, and the three of us on our side sprang into action, and we jumped across to the other side. As soon as our feet hit the ground, it let out another ear shattering roar, and then it snapped the tree off like they were twigs, and they threw the trees at us. We were panicked and terrified and ran as fast as we could with
this thing following behind us. Well. No one looked back, but we could hear it crashing through the trees like a bulldozer. We didn't stop running until we came to a country road, where we had to stop and catch our breath. By then we were all crying. Now I have to admit I thought I was going to die that day. We knew it wasn't far behind us, so we started walking up the road as fast as our exhausted lungs would allow, and our only hope, we thought, was if someone came along and gave us a ride.
All the way up that road, it paralleled us, but we didn't see it. It stayed inside the tree line, but we could hear it huffing and puffing and tearing up trees. We finally came to a gas station where one of my friends called us mother to come and pick us up. We told her what happened, but she didn't believe us. When I got home, I told my mother and father, but they didn't believe me either, and
after that we never spoke about it again. My friends still don't speak about it, except to admit that it gave them all nightmares. But we didn't play in the woods after that. It was another four years before I stepped foot inside that tree line. One thing I do know is that that thing wasn't human, and if it had wanted to kill us, it could have easily caught us and done just that. My siblings called me Buckshot.
I guess you can tell by that name that I've spent most of my life in the woods hunting everything from white tailed deer to turkey, to coyotes and hogs. Because of that, I've also spent many an early morning and night listening to the sounds of mother nature. Where I'm from, coyotes are pretty common and black bears aren't unheard of. We also have black panthers or black cougars here, but don't tell the authorities. They ain't figured it out yet.
I know I haven't seen or heard everything, but I've always been pretty comfortable with my knowledge of Mother Nature. That's why I was so shook up by what I heard one night a few weeks back. I was sitting in my barn taking a rest before heading to the house, when out of the blue, I heard an extremely loud roar or I guess you might say it was a yell. Well, whichever it was, it was something I've never heard before. I've heard everything that might have come close to it,
but this wasn't any of them. I'm sure of that. There's something else. I'm sure of. Whatever made that noise was huge. The sound repeated itself three more times. With each successive yell, my heart beat a little faster, until it felt like it was beating out of my chest. I retreated to the house as quickly as I could, since then I carry whenever I step outside, especially late at night, So naturally I told my dad and sister and nephew about it, and just as naturally, they laughed
and picked fun at me for it. After a week of being mocked by them, we were all sitting out in the yard one night, enjoying the evening air. It was getting to be around eleven forty pm, and I was half listing for another yell and half hoping I didn't hear one. Just as my dad opened his mouth to say something, that loud, bellowing howl came from the woodline along the backfield of my property. In the daylight, we could have seen where it came from, but at
night it was too dark. As that sound echoed across the barnyard, everyone went still. My dad frozen midward, and his eyes bulged from his face. We all sat looking at each other as that same sound came from the bowels of the woods a few more times over the next several minutes, and no one spoke a word, probably because no one needed to. That effectively ended our night. The next night, we regrouped in the barnyard, with everyone
anxious to talk about what happened the night before. As my dad and siblings discussed the loudness and the possible source of the sounds, my nephew and I searched the Internet on our smartphones, looking for animal sounds that might explain what we'd heard. We searched for several hours, but we came up empty. Nothing came close to what we'd heard. Then we stumbled across the site that had bigfoot sounds.
They were remarkably close to what we'd heard. After hearing those recordings, we all looked at each other and came to the same collective conclusion that thing roaring in my woods had to be a bigfoot. A few days after that, my nephew and I were walking in a field on my property when he came across an unusual track in the soil. He called me over to look at it. What I saw led me to conclude that it was
definitely a bigfoot. The print was very human in appearance, except that it was six or seven inches wide at the top and four to five inches wide at the heel. I could see the toes and the curve of the arch and the foot. My heart was racing as fast as it was that first night. I've always believed in the possibility of their existence, but I never thought I
would actually see a print or hear one yell. A few nights passed and I was standing out on my front porch to catch a bit of fresh air before turning in for the night, and from the woods across the road from my house, I heard that roar again. Having heard it several times now, I wasn't so quick to retreat. It was a little different this time, more like a squeal of pain with a hint of a roar in it. Fear gripped me, but I was determined to stand my ground. My wife heard it and came
outside to see what it was. This was the first time she'd heard it, and I could see fear and worry in her eyes as she stood there and shot. Two nights later, my son and I were out checking my grapes at eight pm, and I was studying how many grapes were producing when I heard that familiar sound in the distance. I marveled at the power it had, even from so far away. With white eyes, my son looked at me and he said, is that what you've been hearing? And I nodded my answer as he turned
to run for the house. Come inside, he called over his shoulder, and I followed on his heels. A couple of more days went by with no unusual sounds from the woods. I had just gotten comfortable with the idea that we wouldn't hear any more of those yells when as my wife and I were lying in bed that night, somewhere between awake and dream land, and a loud bellow came through our bedroom window and rattled our walls. We both immediately sat up right in bed and looked around,
neither one knowing what to say. All we could do was stare at each other when another loud roar shook the window glass. After that, all was silent for the rest of the night. It was just enough to keep either one of us from getting a good night's sleep, and we spent the rest of the night, sitting up waiting and listening. By now I was contemplating looking for more evidence despite my internal struggle between fear and curiosity, I decided to take a walk along my property line
at the edge of the woods. This time I found two different sets of prints. One was fifteen inches long and the other was ten inches. Both were very wide, and I realized then that I was going to have to accept that whatever this was, it had chosen to make my property its home. Judging by the size of the Prince and the strength of its roar, there wasn't going to be much I could do about it. I told my siblings about the Prince the first chance I got.
They all ran over to look at them, but I could tell that they were struggling with the same internal battle between curiosity and fear that had me tied at knots. I've lived on this property for the last six years. Before that, I left five miles from here. Now I've lived in this general area my entire thirty one years. Never have I heard anything like this. I'm sure my siblings could all say the same. That night, after I showed my siblings the Prince, we all decided to wait
up to see if we might hear it again. The neighbor, who was living three houses down, was having a shin dick that night, and around nine pm the creature in the woods let loose with a long, bellowing yell, and the neighbor heard it. How do I know that he heard it? Not two seconds later all of his friends started leaving in a hasty manner. The fire went from lighting up his yard to darkness, and I laughed a bit, but I understood their fear. So far, it's the last time I've heard that yell.