Archive 157 Bigfoot

I think that's the term for a four wheel type vehicle that you can haul stuff with, although I think I would have preferred an actual mule because the mechanical one I rode was about as smooth as taking a spin and a washing machine, not that I've ever done that. I took some trash bag so that I could gather pine needles to use my chicken coop and garden. After an hour of bouncing up and down on that hard seat, I found a great spot to gather up some pine needles.

It was at the back of their property, where there are a lot of trees in a creek that zig zags back and forth across the property. It was a beautiful fall day. The only thing I was concerned about at this time was watching for snakes as I gathered the pine needles, and I love listening to the birds seeing as I went about my work. I had gathered a lot of pine needles and loaded them on the mule, and I was still wishing it was the four legged

kind of mule. I decided to walk for a little while before I bounced back to the house, thinking maybe I could somehow use one of the bags as a cushion. I'd been walking for about a half an hour and had come to a washed out area that made sandy high banks on each side. The banks were fifteen feet tall. There were several rocks exposed from the creek flooding, I guess, and some of the rocks were really pretty, so I amused myself by digging around and looking for neat rocks.

Now I had been doing this for a while when I noticed everything got real quiet. It was then that I heard a rustling coming from the top of one of the banks. I couldn't see anything from where I was, so I just froze, waiting to see what was going to happen. And then I smelled it. It was horrible smell. It was the worst thing I've ever smelled in my life. It was a combination of cat poop, smelly old mop water, and skunk that had been dead in the road for

a while. And then the rustling stopped. I was getting nervous now, thinking it was a wild hog, because I've heard they can be mean. I decided just to stay still and hope it would go away, not that my legs would have worked right then anyway. And then I heard the oddest sound. It sounded like someone clucking like a chicken. It was comical and amusing, and I wondered what in the world was going on. A million things

flashed through your mind. I began to think that I was going to be murdered by a mad clown that thinks he's a chicken. I leaned up against the bank and still hoping it would go away, and then a rifle shot rang out, and it sounded like a cannon, and it was followed by a big thud, and then I heard voices. There were men's voices talking. I was thinking that it was the hunters and they had shot the hog, and one of them said, damn, good shot. You got that, Sorry devil, Steve, You're one crazy son

of a gun. I can't believe that stupid chicken dance of your still works. And then one said to get the head. And I heard a chopping noise and a thud and a thunk and a thud, and something came rolling down the bank and it was the head. It was a huge, ugly, hairy but it wasn't a hog. All I could do was stand there frozen, thinking, there really are bigfoot creatures in these woods. No, it can't be. I must be having a stroke, I thought. I was jerked back to reality by someone saying, you go get it.

You're the one that dropped it. The next thing I know, here comes a man scrambling down the bank with a burlap sack. In kind of a Southern voice. He said, excuse me, ma'am. I didn't mean to startle you, dear, but I really do need to get that head that I dropped. He came over and he shook my hand, introducing himself as Steve Lily. He gave me his thanks and said they were sorry to have bothered me. He picked up the head and put it in the sack, and then he tipped his hat and he said, well

by now, and he climbed back up the bank. And that's how I met Bigfoot and the hero named Steve Lily that apparently saved me from a Bigfoot. It's been seventeen years since this incident took place. Until recently, we had not discussed what happened to the five of us while camping at Bailey Cove Campground. It always felt like a taboo subject to bring up. This past Mother's Day in twenty twenty one, we were able to get all of our adult kids to travel home to celebrate their mother.

We had a great visit with everyone, and one of the big topics of discussion was our upcoming camping trip into the Sierra Nevadas. Later that evening, we were all out on the patio talking about the upcoming camping trip when my youngest spoke up and said, hopefully we don't

have any unwelcome visitors this time. Everyone laughed, and then my oldest spoke out, Hey, Dad, what do you really think happened to us that time on Shasta Late Oh Man, I thought to myself, please let this be going in the direction that I I have wanted it to go. For the last seventeen years. What trip does Shasta Lak are you talking about? I ask Dad? Everyone said, are you talking about the Bailey Cove campground trip? Yes? That trip,

said everyone. I glanced at my son and daughter in laws and saw a bit of confusion in their faces. So I said, let's talk about it, but maybe we should start at the beginning, so folks here that weren't present at the time can better understand what happened. The next ninety minutes was great. I started off the conversation and we all took turns telling what we remembered happening. I think it was good therapy for all of us

to talk about it. September tenth, two thousand and four, would forever change our young family and the belief that only four legged creatures live in the wilderness. Our family had a summer routine of two camping trips each year. September approached in two thousand and four, we had not been able to go camping yet. It had been a busy summer. My wife mentioned that she wanted to plan a quick camping trip to Shasta Lake for the following weekend. Well.

I thought it was great idea because I had the next Saturday through Monday off from work. We just needed to decide what campground we wanted to use. My wife suggested Bailey Cove Campground because it was only a twenty minute drive. Now I was able to get the reservations with no problems. We arrived at Bailey Cove Campground and checked in with the park ranger, who told us not many folks were there and we could choose our own campsite.

We got the trailer backed onto the pad. Not long after we were cooking hot dogs over the campfire, and then we got the kids ready for bed and tucked in. Afterward, I joined my wife out by the fire pit. We stayed up for another couple of hours, enjoyed the evening. Once the flames had died down, I doused the coals with water, and by eleven thirty PM we were all asleep. At some point in the middle of the night, a loud cracking sound woke me. A large branch was snapped

off a nearby a tree. It was loud and I could hardly believe I was the only person awake. I thought about shaking my wife away, but it was quiet outside. Now, maybe I had imagined that loud noise. I lay there on my back with my eyes wide open and listening, and all I could hear was my heart beating. And then I thought that was no sound at all. I must have dreamed it. It was freakishly quiet though there were no crickets, no breeze, no traffic sounds. It was

almost suffocating. That's the only way I can describe it. And then I heard the sound of footsteps on pine needles and twigs. Whatever it was, it was toward us. My imagination was starting to mess with me too many CSI Las Vegas episodes with a crazed killer on the loose. I guess it was most likely a deer. I thought maybe a bear or a raccoon. So I closed my eyes and I think I fell back to sleep. But

what happened next is when things got real. My eyes opened with a loud, crunching sound of something walking on the crushed rock that surrounded the asphalt pad, and I sat straight up. I noticed that my wife and son were now moving and confused. One of the kids asked about the sounds. It's probably a bear, I said. Whatever was outside started walking slowly back and forth in the crushed rock, I could tell it was heavy. My wife's

white knuckle grasp on my arm was intense. She finally spoke up and said, it sounds like person walking, not a bear. That's exactly what I thought, but I played it off again as a bear, and through the mesh screen we couldn't see anything moving. Now. Finally, I said, whoever's outside, you need to leave now. I'm armed and we're about to call the police. That only woke up our two daughters and the youngest one immediately since the

tension of the situation, and she started crying. I told my wife to call nine to one one, and she asked me if I was really armed, and I told her to know that I had left the handgun locked up in the truck. Whatever was out there ignored my demands anyway, and the pacing increased. There was no cell service where we were. I couldn't believe how close we were to civilization with no cell service. You know, twenty

years later, nothing's really changed. It was two thirty am at this point and all five of us were in the die in Nette area. I double checked to make sure the flimsy camper door was locked, and I grabbed the flashlight I called out again, and the pacing back and forth stopped. One of the kids said, Dad, you should go outside and check to see if it's still there. Well,

I didn't know what to say. I had to figure out a reply that made me sound like the protector of the family, but gave me any excuse for not going outside. I was about to speak when something or someone tried to open the door. Everyone freaked out, and the screaming inside the camper was deafening. I have never felt such fear in my life. I felt certain we were all going to die a horrible death. I really did feel powerless. Whatever was outside was now grunting and

breathing heavy. Feeling like my next move was going to save us, I started zipping up all the windows actually, like that would protect us. Next, a loud slap from the side of the camper happened. It was near the back and on the same side as the door. One of the kids yelled at Dad, do something. I didn't know what to do. There's not a worse feeling as a father when you can't protect your loved ones. The next thing this monster did was a slap dead center

on the roof of the camper. And then it scraped its fingers across the top, like fingernails across the chalkboard. Screams for help came from all of us inside the camper. My ears were ringing from the extreme decibel levels coming from everyone's cries. And then I heard footsteps in the crush rock again. I tried to get everyone to quiet down so I could listen. It was relatively quiet except for the heavy breathing and sniffing from inside the camper.

I thought I heard a couple of small branches break and few faint footsteps heading up the steep hill. Maybe it was leaving. Everything was silent for five minutes, and I told my wife what I wanted to do next. My plan was to run to the pickup and drive off as quickly as possible with the trailer in tow, and get to the ranger station and then go from there. No, I had not unhooked the trailer from the truck. She liked the plan, and we explained to the kids what

we were about to do. Trying to quietly open the camper door wasn't going as planned. Usually the thing just swung open at the slightest turn of the handle, but it didn't this time, so I turned the knob fully down to the open position and gave the door a pop with my right shoulder. The door popped open and flew out of my grip, smashing into the side of

the camper. I rolled out onto the asphalt, and I sprinted like an Olympic hurdler, jumping over the fire pit and a chain or two as I headed around the front of the truck. Just as I got to the truck door, a blood curdling scream blew up the night. It was so deafening and long that it made my insides churn. It scared me so bad that I dropped the keys. I finally found them, and I fumbled to get the correct key and get it into the walk. I was doing all of this in the dark. Then

the next scream came. You could not tell where this monster was. It sounded like it was coming from every direction. The truck started and I threw it into drive and floored the gas and I went forward a foot or two, and then the tires began to spin. That's when I remembered the wheels on the trailer were choked. I put the truck in reverse and backed up a little, and then put it back into drive and said, hold on, guys,

and I pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The truck shuddered and the trailer launched into the air like a kid jumping a BMX bike. And in the glow of the tail lights, I could see that the trailer was still behind the truck. And I kept the hammer down as best as I could on the narrow road. And when we got near the ranger station, I pulled to the side and then ran back to get my family. The door on the camper flew open, almost hitting me

in the face. You've never seen a wife and three young kids sprint so quickly, and they dove into the cabin. I yelled to my wife to get behind the wheel and lock the doors while I unhooked the trailer, and in thirty seconds I was back at the truck and I met my oldest daughter's crying face at the window as she unlocked the door. Let's get the hell out of here, I said. As I slammed the door shut. My wife fish tailed up the road for two hundred feet.

We climbed the winding road faster than any vehicle should be allowed. The crying now was because we had escaped whatever it was that had terrified us. What should have been a twenty three minute drive home took much less time. Our youngest daughter, who was and still is the family's back seat driver from hell, chimed up and said, Dad, it's okay that she's going fast. We just want to get home. We made it home in ready and pulled

into our driveway just minutes after four am. Everyone rushed into the house, and I locked up the truck and headed for the front door. Once in the house, everyone had their pillows and blankets from their beds on the living room floor. Everyone laid there with their eyes wide open. I asked if anyone wanted to talk about what we had just experienced. Nobody said a word. That was fine with me. I didn't want to talk about it anyway. Everyone eventually dozed off. It was the phone that woke

the next morning at eight o'clock. It was the park ranger. She seemed concerned. Our camper trailer was left in the middle of the park road and our campsite was in total disarray. I apologized, and I told her that I'd be there soon to clean everything up. As I backed up the truck, to the tent trailer. I saw the ranger was there waiting, and I told her I'd have our mess cleaned up within twenty minutes and be gone. She didn't seem too concerned about the mess, but more

concerned about why we left so quick. She mentioned that the other family in the campground had packed up too and left before she arrived at seven thirty am. She said that they were supposed to have stayed another five days and she hadn't been able to contact them by phone. I told her that we had had a couple of bears the night before, and they were not the normal friendly type we usually see while camping here. I pretty much kept it at that, and our camp site well,

isn't really that bad. One of the older lounge chairs was completely bent, and one of the large air mattresses that I had blown up before dinner had been ripped in half. I was five minutes from being finished with loading up when the ranger's truck pulled up alongside mine. She commented on how quickly I had loaded up. I felt like she was trying to get me to talk about what happened. I continued throwing stuff in the back of the truck, and I started to cover it up

with a tart. I was just about to say goodbye when she asked me where the iron grate insert for the campfire pit was. Well, I didn't know where it was. It was there last night, I said, when we had our campfire. Well, it's missing. Now. If you can't find it, we're going to have to bill you for a replacement. She said, go ahead and bail me. I said, because I'm not looking for it. And I jumped in the

truck and I left. The ranger called the house the next afternoon to let me know that the firepit grate had been found. It was two hundred feet away from our camp site. She made a big deal on how strange it was for that to have happened, and she asked me what really happened, And I told her those bears were just a couple of real pranksters, I guess, and I said goodbye and I hung up. After I hung up, I wondered about the things that had happened

that could not be explained. The heaviness of the bipedal steps, the slap on the middle of the roof that was eight feet tall, and the turning of the doorknob on the trailer, ignoring the threat of being shot, the sustained guttural, ear piercing screams and the howls, and the feeling of immense dread and shock I had. Why did that other family leave five days early? Did they have a visit

as well? I'm sure they heard the insanely loud screams maybe most of all, How does a fifty pound, one inch thick iron grate travel two hundred feet up a hill? I don't think a bear would do that. Well, that's my story, and it feels good to write this down and share our story with people who won't judge us as freaks. This event really happened, And even though I've injected a little humor here and there, it was absolutely

nothing funny when this happened. Maybe the humor I used is a self protection mechanism that helped me pin this on paper. He says, I'm a truck driver and I've driven all over and I've seen a lot, but there's one piece of road from Coos, Texas, over to Conrod, Texas that I'll never drive again, not after what I saw that night. I was driving the highway when something

hit the road with a boom. There was a full moon, so I could see it was there, but it wasn't until I got a ways down the road that my headlights hit the body of a two hundred pound pig with its back quarter chewed off. I was just beginning to register what I was looking at when something jumped up out of the ditch and crossed both lanes in one step. I was pulling a flat bed with a load of lumber, and I'd just come around the corner, so I was only going five miles per hour. The

ditch there was about six feet deep. When it stood up on two legs, I nearly lost control of my bowels. Even standing down in the ditch, there was at least four or five feet of upper body clearly above the roadway. It was covered in long, shaggy red hair with arms that reached down to its knees. It meandered along like it didn't even care I was there, swinging its arms and walking with a weird gait. I will never forget. The only words I can find to describe it are

werewolf on steroids. Not long after that, I moved to Buena Buena, Buna, Buna, Texas. My next door. Neighbor's dad had passed away and left him his truck. I was parked behind the trailer I was living in, and we were using it for part storage. One night, I heard a bunch of rattling out there, and I assumed it was my neighbor digging some parts out until I smelled an odor coming through my window air conditioner that was like a rotten skunk sweat running through a backup sewer.

I know this guy was probably scared, but oh man, the the way you guys described these smells are just awesome. They're just awesome. Uh. He said. It burned his eyes, and it burned his nose. It even burned my throat. It was out there for three or four minutes. The smell was so bad and so strong that I couldn't even take a breath. Worse yet, I was afraid to move and attract the attention of whatever was out there. Because the windows in those little house trailers aren't more

than a sixteenth of an inch thick. It wouldn't have taken much to peel that window open like a sardine can, and I wasn't about to be a sardine. The next morning, I went out and walked around the trailer to see if I could find anything that might tell me what had been there the night I keep thinking about this. Ooh, I'm sorry, y'all. I'm just gonna leave this in because

I gotta move on. Okay, where was I? The next morning, I went out and walked around the trailer to see if I could find anything that might tell me what had been out there the night before. Under the kitchen window, I found a footprint. I've never seen one like it before. It had three toes with long claw indentions in the dirt. The size of it sent a shiver down my spine. I took a picture of it, but I don't know

where it's at. It could be on a computer I have that's broken right now, or maybe a on an old cell phone. Either way, it's probably lost forever. My trailer was just off of ninety six, heading out of town, and there were just a few houses and then nothing but forest. My two neighbors, the guy down the road, and I all owned dogs. I had three, and my neighbors each had dogs, and the guy down the road

had two pit bulls. Three weeks after I found the footprint, every one of those dogs, except my little rat terrier was found dead. Not too long after that, I had gone over to visit my friend and his wife. They lived about fifty yards over from my trailer, off the main road. I got there at eight o'clock, so it was already dark when I stepped through their French doors into the deck for a cigarette. I was scanning the tree line about twenty feet away when I saw a

pair of red eyes staring back at me. They had to be nine feet off the ground. I stared at it for what felt like in a turity, but was probably only a few seconds, and then I turned around and went back inside right away. My friend asked me why I came back in so quickly. I didn't know what to say, so I told him I forgot my lighter. We went back out together with a couple of beers, but the eyes were gone by then. I can't help but wonder why I have these encounters. The first time

I saw one was north of Roanokee, Virginia. After that, I didn't go outside at night for a long time. After the incidents in Buena or Buna, a medicine man and a healer told me that I had great powers and that's why I see them. They're drawn to me for healing. The worst part is the dark forces and the demons, but that story is for another time. Oh to the writer, what a great story. You really do seem to attract these things. I mean, I counted one

to three encounters in your lifetime. And you know there's people like me who never see anything. So I'm a little jealous in a way. And you might say, well, think about what you wish for, But I really do wish I could see one. I do. I'm not lying. I really wish I could see one. But thank you for writing this. We had to edit it a little bit, but it wound up being just a fantastic story to share it and I really appreciate the man taking the time to write it down and send it to me. Thank you, sir,