I grew up in Colorado and I'm a proud member of the Muscalero Apache tribe. I grew up hunting elk, deer, and bear in the mountains, but I've had the privilege of hunting all over the United States. I served eight years as an infantryman in the US Army, and I have three tours in the box. I've seen all sorts of things that would be hard to explain for anyone, but I'd like to focus this letter on the events
that happened right here in my home state. Growing up as a backcountry hunter and fishermen, I always strive to get off the beaten path. Our elk camp is a six mile walk, and we hunt even further than that. My father and grandfather had a lot of stories that we would talk about around the woodstove in our outfitter tent, and I would hang on to every word of the stories because I thought that's just what they were stories
until I got older. One story that sticks out was one about a cow elk my grandfather shot in a snowstorm. Grandpa hid her a little further back in the body than he would have liked, and she ran aways before they even picked up a blood trail, so they gave her some time to die. It was easy to track in the fresh powder, though. They followed the tracks four hundred yards through the scrub oaks into the back of a drainage, where they found the end print in the
shape of an elk, and the tracks stopped. What they saw there scared the hell out of my grandfather. There were big tracks with long strides that looked like something walking in bare feet, coming down the ridge and onto the shelf, and then they went back up the ridge. Whatever this thing was, it had taken the elk and carried it back up the ridge. And that's one of my grandfather's stories. But here's mine. I was hunting with my father five miles from where the last story took place.
My father was a retired recon marine scout sniper. He was a Vietnam vet as well as a veteran of desert storm and other conflicts. The third day of the hunt, we walked into a large draw. The dad went up into the black timber and then eventually broke out into a large boulder field on top. I went up the other side that overlooked a large meadow surrounded by aspen and I could see my father one hundred yards from the top of the ridge and a thousand yards from me.
As the crow flies, he was three hundred feet above my elevation. Later in the day, I was daydreaming, not really paying attention to my surroundings, when I heard a thump to my left, and then I heard the report of a rifle. Well. I instantly came out of the days that I was in and I started looking around frantically. I thought someone was shooting at me. And then there was another thump. This time I saw the round hit
the ground in the same spot. I looked through my rifle scope at my dad, who was still in the same spot, and he was pointing to my left. I looked over that way and I froze. Fifty yards away and up that endcline stood a sasquatch. Dad watched it come in on me. I never noticed it. It was covered in black and reddish hair, and it looked at me with a young and curious face with beautiful amber colored eyes. It was most certainly a female, standing seven feet tall. She was staring right at me, not in
a threatening way. Maybe she had never seen a person. We stared at one another for a while, and she would watch my movements, turning and cocking her head. She was mimicking me. I finally backed away down the draw and I met my father at the trail. We didn't talk about it much, but when I asked him why he didn't shoot her, he said he wasn't sure his seven mag had the power that it would take to put her down in her tracks, that he wanted to draw my attention to the creature while he had her
in his scope. If she had made an aggressive mood towards me, he had my back. But instead of shooting and seeing that she seemed none threatening, he just watched through the scope as we interacted. I grew up along the banks of the Wabash River, and even though I'm a female, I was a bit of a tomboy. I spent a lot of days by myself fishing and hunting in the woods across from my house that was about
a block from the river. I'd wander all through the woods and along the deer trails, looking and listening for critters or animals. Sometimes I'd just sit on the banks and watch the waterflow by watching the cranes on the sandbars et cetera. And one day I saw a pair of beaver there floating on their backs like they were so happy with not a care in the world. Do beavers do that? Do beavers float on their backs? I
guess they do. I've never seen one do it. I was very quiet so as not to scare them away, and they played there for ten minutes and then moved on. So to me, being in the woods or along the river, heck, even swimming in it almost daily was a common thing. I never did see or feel anything out of the way in all the years growing up down there, not
until several years later. It was somewhere around nineteen seventy six or thereabout, when I lived in the same house, our old homestead, and I had a family of my own that I saw them. At the time that this encounter happened, my husband and three kids were inside watching TV after we'd eat and supper. I cleaned up the kitchen and then told my husband that I'd be back in to watch TV with them all, but that I had to get the laundry in off the clothesline first
and fold it and put it away. That's how I did things back then, because even though we had a clothes dryer. I liked the fresh smell of clothes that had been hung on the clothesline. Back then, we used to burn our trash in an old fifty five gallon used barrel out back in the alley after supper, so as I started to go outside, I told the kids to get that chore done. As I was taking the clothes down from the clothesline, it was summertime and it
was warm outside. As usual, the two oldest kids didn't want to burn the trash, so they told the youngest one to do it. He was seven years old and I was close by, so I wasn't worried about him lighting the trash. This kid was smart too. He was a great kid and very reliable. Even so I still watched him closely. I forgot to mention that the park was on the next block to the south of my house, and it had toys for kids to play on, a boat dock, and a baseball diamond in which many teams played.
This baseball park was complete with a red block concession stand in which they had all kinds of goodies that they made and sold there, such as sodas and pizzas and hot dogs and such. Just all kinds of stuff. There were also two or three large metal barrels on the side of the concession stand for people to throw their trash and half eating food in. Let me say here that these barrels of trash and half eating goodies were facing my house to where I could see them
clearly from my backyard. I was taking my laundry down off the clothes lines, and I had stripped the bedding and had two lines full of sheets and light blankets and pillowcases too, that were all moving and blowing in the light wind. I was grabbing at the clothes trying to take the clothes pins off and get them back into the bag, when my youngest son, Shane, who was supposed to be burning the trash by the road, came running up to me and he started yanking on my shirt.
He was scared and his eyes were big, and when I looked at him, I said, what's the matter, and he whispered to me with his finger to his mouth, shush, mom, come here, come here with me. I want to show you something, but you have to be real quiet. He took my hand and he was shaking, and we walked back down the alley road where We had been going to light the trash when he stopped and whispered to me and pointed to the concession stand, saying, look at them, Mommy,
what are those things? Well? I looked, and I froze for a second, and I told him, in a hushed voice, run in the house, hurry up, and tell your daddy that there are two bigfoot out here. He did like I told him, and I watched him for a second, and then I looked back for the bigfoot. I remembered my mother telling me about my grandfather seeing one of these things years ago in a holler getting water from his spring he had in the side of the hill. But I never believed in them before, so when I
looked at these things, it was almost in disbelief. As soon as I looked at them the second time, after my son had left with the house, all sorts of things were running through my mind, thinking that this was not happening, that this was not real. And then I pinched myself and oh, yes, it was real. They were both huge, and they were covered in dark brown black hair, and the largest one was all bent over, digging in
the metal barrels of trash of that concession stand. And he was handing stuff out to the other one, who I think was a female because she was smaller, I could tell the big one was a male. And she says, lol, and not from the obvious method, but rather from looking at his face and the build of his body. Okay, I thought she was gonna say something else. He was way bigger than she was, and the muscles rippled, and his arms and upper body were huge. But here's the thing.
When I looked at them both. This all happened in a minute or so because he was so intent on digging through those trash cans that they did not see me until I opened up my mouth as I was looking them, and I uttered, oh shit, they're real. Oh my god. When I said that, he stood up and
locked eyes with me. I was looking him straight in the face, even though I was probably a half a block away, but my eyesight was sharp and very good, and I was in my twenties at the time, but I could see them both standing there now, And like I said, he looked right at me and we locked eyes, and my mind went wild, as I have stated, and a thousand thoughts were running through my head. Oh yeah, he's real. They're real. Oh, look at the size of those things. How can this be? They really are real?
And then as I was looking in his eyes, I thought to myself how much he looked like a human right in the face. He didn't have scary eyes like they say on TV, and he did not look like an ape either. To me, he looked so much of what I had heard of of the Neanderthal men. He had human eyes, a human nose, and yes, his nose was very large. His whole head and body was large.
But what I'm saying here is is that his nose did not look or resemble an ape or a monkey's now it looked like a human being's nose, although it was a pretty good sized honker. The only thing that was sort of out of place was his brow bone, and it was very large and pronounced. And when he looked at me, it was as though he had me in some sort of a mental trance to where I could not tear my eyes from his until he willed it.
I couldn't leave, and I couldn't look away, and I couldn't run to the house, which is what I desperately wanted to do because I was so scared. Yet he held my gaze for what seemed like a minute, and it seemed to me that he was picking or scanning my mind to see what he wanted to see. And then all at once he motioned to the smaller one, and then he pointed to the river where the woods were by the boat dock, and he gave out a whistle,
and she followed his direct command to her. She took off running, and I could see her from the corner of my eye. He still held my gaze, and she was out of sight in just a few steps, and her steps were huge too, by the way. As soon as she was out of sight, he let go of my gaze and he took off running in the same direction. One thing I did notice was the hair on his arms hung from the bottom side of his arms, and they were five or six inches long the hair was
and I thought that looked odd. And then I thought to myself, Oh my god, what if those things, as fast as they are, come up that river bank through the woods to my driveway where I'm standing. What if they came out of the woods and grabbed me. And I was so scared then that I ran quickly back into my yard. But I did have the senses to think about the laundry in which I had to have the sheets and betting for my kids back on them
before bedtime. And I must have been so rattled in my thinking because I should have run right into the house instead. I grabbed and yanked the rest of the sheets off the clothesline, and I grabbed my laundry basket, and I ran as fast as I could into the house, and I threw down the basket and I locked the door even through the dead bowl. I was so shaken, and I ran into the living room where my husband
and two oldest kids were still watching TV. The youngest one that had seen the Bigfoot too, was sitting there on the couch, crying his little eyes out because he said to me, Mommy, they wouldn't listen to me about the bigfoot and they told me to shut up. Well, I asked my husband why he had not come outside, and he told me that it was all just a bunch of bullshit because there was no such thing as a bigfoot. I told him what had happened, and then him and the other kids they just all laughed at
me and my youngest son. They tease Shane so bad. Over the next few months that he completely blocked it out of his memory, and he does not even remember it now. But I'm a diehard, and they could not make me forget what I had seen and not what I had felt during this encounter. I know what I saw, and I have never doubted it in all these forty six years. My mind as clear as the bell still. And this may go against many who say Bigfoot looks like a gorilla, but the two that I saw didn't.
They looked just like what they call a hairy man, and their hair was not around their eyes and nose, because his nose looked like w. C. Fields. We moved to the country even further out away from the river back in nineteen ninety eight. But we have a little creek in the woods behind our house now, and I have seen tracks back there, lots of deer back there, plenty of water, and my son Shane, has seen barefoot
tracks back by the creek. I cast one of those footprints once with plaster of Paris, and the next morning I was going back to get it and take it up from the sand, and my grandson had already beaten me to it, even though I gave him orders the night before to leave it alone, that I would get it the next morning when I was good and set up. He got up early and went to get it anyway, because he was almost twenty years old and that he
didn't have to listen to me any longer. So there he came with it in a plastic bag and he handed it to me, and it was all broken up in pieces. I had to throw it in the trash. I felt like throwing him in the trash, but you know how that goes, lol, she says, and then she winds up and says, thank you so much, Cam for taking your time to read this, and if you'd like to have and if you'd like, you have my permission
to tell this story if it meets your specifications. I was introduced to the world of the paranormal when I was five years old. I didn't understand it other than I knew deep inside my gut that it was wrong and terrifying. In two thousand and four, I had my fifth daughter at the age of forty and so technically all her sisters were really old enough that they could pass as her mother. And when she was eight months old, Laura had her first epileptic seizure. They're not what folks
think of when you say the word epilepsy. Laura will make a choking sound and her eyes will roll back, and she goes limp, becoming pale while her lips turned blue. That we panic the first time we experienced one of her seizures is a gross understatement. In twenty thirteen, we moved from California to Arkansas for a more peaceful life. We found a large, two story house built in the eighteen hundreds that used to belong to the town doctor.
It was large and ramble, with pocket doors in the parlor and a wraparound porch, and it was situated in a beautiful, quaint old neighborhood. We knew it had recently become empty because this town is small and gossip is huge, and we had heard about a murder that had taken place in the home some eight months earlier. It was a sad story of an adopted son killing his mother, and as usual, illegal drugs were involved. Before we could move in, we needed to do a major cleanup. On
the inside. It smelled of death and cat urine, among other things. We had to bring in a machine that removes all the odors out of the oxygen, but the process was so toxic and no one could enter the home immediately after the application. Well, I was a lover of history and antiques, and I didn't want to replace anything, so the floors were only sanded and re stained and fresh painted, and we loved it for a little while. My mother in law and my handicapped nephew lived with us,
and they used both of the downstairs bedrooms. My mother in law would accuse me of being in her room, while my nephew would ask about the name of the cat the cat coming to his door at night. Though we didn't own a cat and I had no interest in violating my mother in law's privacy by sneaking into her bedroom, we considered the source. After a while, the arrangement started to grate on our nerves. My marriage became terribly strained. The household seemed to exist under a cloud
of paranoia. I thought my mother in law and husband were conspiring against me behind my back, and after a few months of this, I was ready to take my daughter and leave the state. But unbeknownst to me, my mother in law got it in her head that my husband and I were doing the same to her and if that wasn't bad enough, my husband developed the drinking problem that began to escalate. One evening, while he was asleep and I was reading in bed, there was a terrible,
loud crash in my daughter's room. We instantly thought that she was in the middle of a huge grandma seizure. I took one giant leap and two steps to throw open Laura's door, with my husband trailing behind me, and Laura was standing at her closet door across the room with a look of sheer terror on her face. And next to her bed was her wicker dressing table, the lamp swinging over the edge with a cord still plugged
in behind the dresser. There was a stream of body powder leading from the dresser to the closet, and furniture had been cast about the room. We had a family meeting the next night, where all the rage and emotional venom that had been building for months finally exploded. We were realizing that before we had taken up residence in this house, we had all gotten along fine. Was there
a curse on this place? Once all the adults in the room had aired their grievances, my husband excused himself to check on our nephew, and a minute later I heard him cry out, and by the time we reached my nephew's room, I was horrified to see my husband trying to hold upright a loaded down seven foot bookcase that was threatening to fall on top of my nephew in his wheelchair. I quickly wheeled my nephew from the room, and once clear, my husband let the massive bookcase go
crashing to the floor. Well, this was the last straw the house was trying to kill us, if not literally by breaking bones, psychologically by turning all of us against each other. We got my mother in law and nephew out within a week, but finances kept my husband and I tethered to the place for another two months. Light switch is going off and on in apparitions of toddlers appearing in the hallways and around the doorframes. It's a long list of crazy things. Every image seemed guaranteed to
play out our worst spheares. We slept a lot at my mother in laws for those last few weeks. When you tell a prospective home buyer that a place is haunted, they usually back away. Tell them there was a murder in the house, and they will delete your number from their cell phone. We were lucky enough to sell the place to a gentleman who didn't believe in ghosts and
had no fear of older crime scenes. From time to time I check on the real estate listings, and I'm not surprised to see that our former home was on the market every few months. Thankfully, the house and all its secrets are no longer our concern.