Archive 173 Texas Bigfoot

in New York's Adirondack State Park. Just for scale, I'll tell you that the Adirondack State Park is a bit larger than the entire state of New Jersey, where I was living then. I was hiking alone for a few days, letting my pioneer spirit have its way. I was on my first day. I was in good physical shape and the miles melted under me. The hike was fantastic, and the trail was in very good repair. I felt as though I was bounding along. Nature was all around me,

and thankfully the black flies had not yet appeared. As long as I kept moving, the sweat I produced evaporated nicely with the occasional forest to breeze. So far, I had met no one, My pack didn't feel too heavy, and I was really enjoying myself. I had arrived on the trail around one PM after the drive up from New Jersey, and I walked the afternoon until near dusk,

and then I set up camp. I didn't build a fire, so I was able to watch and see the forest around me without the glare of the fire's bright wall holding back the night. No need for a tent fly. The weather was perfect, the stars were everywhere. So far, what a trip to evade some persistent mosquitoes, I went into the tent and zipped the mess shut. I settled on top of a sleeping bag, and I took out my map and pen like for a once over of

tomorrow's trek. Reading the contour lines, I saw that there were some interesting looking spaces along the way, a little over three miles off the trail. I really don't know the reason I chose to go there. It just looked interesting, that's all. Looking back, I like to feel that I was drawn there for some reason. I don't know. I loved orienteering and I just needed somewhere to go. Perhaps subconsciously,

I hoped I would find something later. After I cooked my supper on a white gas stove inside the vestibule of the tent, I removed my compass from its leather case, and I began to develop bearings away from the trail for the next day's height. When I'm alone, I like to do things to break up the monotony, and for tomorrow this would be it. I settled back into a happy sleep and awaited the dawn, anticipating the map adventure to come. I awoke alert and rested, and I felt

as though I had been sleeping on a cloud. It was more of a recollection of a night than a feeling. If you can imagine that, it's something you strive to get again. Usually there's a noisy dawn chorus of birds to start the day, but all I heard that morning were crows. I ate a fast breakfast of coffee, cold hard bulled egg, washed up, packed up, and I was eager to get on the bushwhack, as we called it back then, when one leaves the trail and goes off

into the woods, fading into the tree line. I hiked on down to a stream which showed up on the map as crossing the trail, and I filled up my gray water bottle for boiling later. I had enough water for the trip off trail and back. I turned right, walked a few steps, turned around, and took a back bearing on the trail, using it as my baseline for the return. I had everything well mapped out on paper, but there's nothing like being really sure of things when

you're alone. So I ducked my head and left the trail, taking a bearing on a large oak, and I started walking towards it. That's what you do when you're hiking off trail. You go via object bearing, object bearing, object bearing until you can see further. Then it's still the same, only the objects such as a tree, a large rock, or some other feature on the landscape stands out. The

course wasn't exactly a straight line. I had planned it that way to add a little more of a challenge to it, so I had to pace off a few out of view objects until I was back in line and back on course to the terminus of my bushwhack. I was playing soldier and I was really enjoying myself. After I left the trail, I started hearing the birds again, also scurrying squirrels, who hated the stranger that was in

their world. Now, when you're off trail, you can tell a whole lot better what kind of woods you're in. The briars and berry bushes get culled from the trail during routine trail maintenance. Sometimes that sort of gives the trail a generic park kind of look. I don't like that, but the walking is easier. I guess we humans liked to make parks, but parks in the woods seem out of place. The trees were fairly dense, and vines were about, and the leaf litter was pretty noisy. As I walked.

There were humid areas in some of the darker, more sheltered gullies, but as long as I moved along, it wasn't too much of a discomfort. I stopped often to admire and investigate the flora and the fauna along the way. There were flowers, there were vultures up high, birds, bugs and rodents, and they all worth a look. By now, I was about an hour and a half into the trip and was a bit tired from all the stooping I had been doing with the now heavy pack. I'm six foot six, and in some places I had a

lot of bending to do. I needed to drink and took off my pack to sit down. I was a little more winded than I thought I was, and wasn't really paying attention too much. I just wanted a little rest in a drink of cool water. I flopped down on a high rock and excelled in relief. I raised my water bottle to drink, and as the cool, clean water went down my parched throat, I saw a dark shape up in the air, just a little off to

my right. Gradually, as I began to get rested and gather my humidified wits about me again, I could see that I was just on the edge of, and a little above, what could be described as a clearing in the loosest of terms. Actually, it looked like someone had tried to build a fort or something, but they just couldn't get it right. There were tree trunks which looked like they were deliberately placed, but not in the right

way to make them into something definite. Wait a minute, I was looking off to the left now and was really a bit amazed at the same time and disturbed by what I saw. There was a tree about a foot and a half or so across which had its bark scraped off. I think it was an oak, but it could have been something else. I was looking at

the scraped part. It was lighter than the rest of the tree, which went from about four feet off the ground to about a foot path where I could reach, making it ten or eleven feet up, no problem, except there were claw marks on it, four claws together at nearly right angles to the trunk all the way up. I was astounded when I saw that. My hackles immediately went up, as I thought it may have been a grizzly or a large brown bear. I started looking around

in real earnest. It had gotten very very quiet. Those claw marks were at least I would say, a minimum of a quarter inch wide, sometimes a little more into the wood. The tree was green, it was not rotted in the least. I couldn't make those marks easily with a saw and an axe if I had to. What was I looking at? What made those marks? I never found out. Today I would have taken pictures with my cell phone, but back then we didn't have cell phones. I've never seen anything like that again, and I had

never seen it before that. At that point, I needed to look at this thing closer. I had successfully gotten my jaw back into place from looking at the tree trunk when it fell open again, this time by virtue of what I saw up in the crutch of a tree. There again, ten or eleven feet up in the air was a very big heavy tree stump dirt, and all that thing weighed three hundred pounds if it weighed an ounce. I had done some logging as a teenager, and I knew my wood weights. They could kill you if you

misjudged them. You can rely on it that I got the stumps weight right. It was a biggin. I look for more stumps in the air, but there were none. By now you can imagine how all was feeling, not quite flight or fight yet, but approaching something close to it. None of the large, close to one foot or more diameter logs which were stuck up in trees or crisscross standing on the ground had been sawn. They had been

broken off and placed there. I couldn't find the sockets that they belonged in either back when I was logging. If we were to have done such a thing, it would have taken a log skiter and many feet of cable and chain to get the logs up there. I took my time. I walked about the area and I looked for signs. I really had no idea what to look for, and I poked and I searched. Then I sniffed the air, and I did all the chemo sabby stuff and came up just as clueless as when I started.

I kept telling myself that there has to be something, but I never found it. The crime scene was clean, the bodies were there, but there was no sign of a weapon. It looked like the perpetrator got away. Remember this was nineteen seventy five and there was no internet. There were no cell phones, no way to snap a picture. I had no idea what I was observing. I just knew it was darned odd. So I sat down on that rock and surmised and contemplated, and I guessed and

formulated and worried at what I was seeing. At that time. In those years, everything was supposed to have a logical, scientific, exit explanation, so I sat down to make one. And my theory was that it was a micro tornado. Yeah, that was the ticket. But wait, there was too much mass thrown about in too little of an area, with too little damage to the surrounding trees, so it couldn't be that. After sitting there and pondering and wondering for most of the afternoon, I had to return to the

trail and I needed to get going. I burned my brain for days after trying to come up with something to explain it, but I couldn't. Everyone I explained it to couldn't grasp the scale of the scene, so no new offerings or explanations arose. Today, I would almost immediately say it was definitely a bigfoot. Time is a funny thing. I hope your audience can understand the land of Oz

I found myself in so suddenly on that day. Even back then, it was obvious that something big had happened there, and whatever did it could just as easily do it again. And no, I definitely do not have an explanation for the scratches either. Over the years, I have noticed that possibly the only thing that could have made the marks

like that was a giant tree sloth. But why, I'd like to apologize and say that I cannot give this story a more cogent ending like seeing a bigfoot, But I like to think that maybe he or she was there somewhere watching and laughing at me the whole time. My name is Joe, and I live in East Texas. We have a small farm where we keep cattle, goats, and a few horses and other small animals. And we grow of vegetables for our family and ourselves, and a couple of big fields of millet or corn to help

feed our stock. I'm not a big farmer or rancher. I just love this life. I grew up this way on a larger farm my grandfather runs to this day. I bought a few acres from him when I was in my twenties and just carried on with what I grew up doing. All that said, I don't make a living off this like my family does. I travel and I work pipelines. I'm a welder. Sometimes I'm gone for a month or more, traveling to wherever the money is

at the time. My wife is able to take care of things at home with my two sons and my father's help. I have one neighbor about a mile down the road. I tried to get to know the guy, but he is one of these homesteadter types, you know, the people who never worked the land or animals in their life. They buy ten acres in the country and set up a house, and they try to go back to the early nineteen hundreds or eighteen hundreds by working the land with a hoe, yes, I know the type.

They buy a few chickens and goats, and then they tell you how hard they were and how much they know about everything agricultural. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for folks going back to the land and living that way. But a lot of these homesteaders are real goofball know it alls, and they annoy me. There are probably a few good ones. I have asked him to be available to help my wife with things she might need if she gets in a buying I mean we are neighbors.

He says he will, But when she called him once to help her catch one of our horses that had gotten out, he refused because he said he was down in his back. That is all it took from my wife to nix that idea. But he sure has no problems asking me to use one of my tractors to do a job the very next weekend. Then he does a YouTube video showing everyone how hard his life was getting that hundred by hundred foot field ready to plant. I watched the video, and his back seemed fine to me.

It may sound like I'm going off on a tangent here with these homesteaders, but I'll get back to him in a minute. Here's the thing. We have wild pigs in our county. We have a lot of them. On winter nights, my sons and I like to scope out a field with our night vision scopes and shoot them. We try to kill as many as we can. First, it's a lot of fun. Second, they are a very destructive animal around here and all over Texas. Really, last, who wouldn't like shooting feral pigs at night with an

effing night vision scope? Last January, around New Year's I had taken off a few weeks to spend with my family over the holidays. My two teenage boys were getting rowdy and wanting to go to some party one of their buddies was throwing a few miles away. I didn't like the idea. They had gone to several parties in the past, but for some reason, my wife and I both didn't feel good about this one and told them I was going to shoot up a field that night

and they were welcome to come along. Look, these boys are seventeen year old twins by the way, and they lived to hunt, and they canceled their party plans right there. I knew they would, and my wife smiled at me when she saw their response. Boy, do I know how to work those teenagers. We got to one of my grandfather's fields around ten pm and set up under an irrigation system. The field has a slightly downhill slope with a line of sight all the way to the woods

that line the bottom land about three hundred yards away. Oh, and we had piled up corn in that field for bait. That always guarantees a good shoot. We threw out some square haybells for rifle rest, and we set up. There had been pigs there when we drove in, and it took an hour or so for them to all come back. After the distraction we caused driving in and setting up, the first half dozen trotted back to the corn pile. It was not long before there were a third thirty

or forty pigs chowing down on the bait. I let my boys start shooting, and they knocked down four or maybe six pigs. We could clearly see our targets with these scopes. Most of the pigs left and we waited. We knew they would be back soon and we would start the process all over again. The boys were drinking cokes in the interim, and I was sipping on coffee from a thermous and we were all eating some of my wife's world famous pecan pie. It was a good night.

I loved doing these things with my boys, and life was really good that night. One of the boys leaned back over the bail and scope the field. I just happened to look over at him, and he lowered his rifle to the bail and looked into the field intently. Are they back for more? I asked him. He didn't answer. I just watched him move his head back into position to look through his scope. Everything got really quiet. We figured it was shooting time again, and we headed back

to the bells. Then my son raised his head again in the darkness, and he said, Dad, there's something in that field, but it's not a pig. I looked through my scope and illuminated in white was a large figure close to the ground. These scopes do not show images that are not there. There was something crawling on the ground in the mud, towards the pigs we had killed thirty minutes before. Everything about it was strange, but mostly the way it moved. It acted like it was sneaking

up on the dead pigs. It was hard to make out exactly what this thing was, and none of us even thought about taking a shot at it, just our luck it would be some sort of endangered predator and we would go to jail for killing it. But it was the way it moved it was hard to explain. The only way I can convey it to you is to refer back to some horror movies I've seen, were these ghosts and people move in a real jerky type

stop motion. It would creep slowly on all fours and then speed up, then slow down, and it looked like it would turn its head and body back towards the tree line, as if it was looking at something behind it. Well, needless to say, the pigs that were there all scattered. It soon made it to the dead pigs, which were also illuminated in our scopes. They were still warm on this cold night. It reached out and grabbed a pig

and started back to the woods. We just watched it, and then it stopped fifty or sixty yards from the tree line. It stood straight up and through the pig by the leg. The whole distance back to the trees. We could see the pig lofted in the air, flipping end over end, and I could actually hear it break through the limbs and hit the ground. Then this thing stood up and was standing on two legs like a man.

It stood fully erect and through the pig like it was a softball, with a long, arcing side arm motion. I don't know how tall it was, but it was big. I moved my rifle a few inches to the right, and I could see several more of these things inside the thick woods, rushing towards the pig that had just landed in the mud. They were all standing straight up, they weren't crawling like this one. There were maybe four or five of them, And the boys saw all of

this too, and never said a word. This thing then turned back on all fours. It began making its way back to the dead pig still laying in the field, moving at a greater rate of speed than before, in that freaky, jerking sort of way. It looked like it was a crab. Actually, what the hell is that thing? Dad, one of the boys to ask, I don't know, just be quiet. Let's see what this thing does. We watched as the thing went through the whole process of reving pigs one at a time and returning to throw it

into the woods for its buddies. I could see one last pig in the field, and the creature was moving towards it. One of the boys must have moved because a coke can fell off the bail and landed on an AMMO box laying on the ground, making a clanking sound. I looked over at my son and he was looking down at the ground. No big deal, I thought, No way this thing heard that as far away as we were. When I leaned over to get my eye back in the scope, I saw the creature standing beside the last pig.

But he was standing upright, and he was looking straight at us. None of us said a word, but we all knew we had been made. It dropped to all fours and started moving at a very fast rate of speed right at us. It was running on four limbs like a gorilla does, sometimes skipping one arm or the other, like it was run on three legs instead of four. Boys. Get in the truck and get it started, I said. I never took my eye out of that scope. The

boys didn't need encouragement. I could hear them moving quickly to the truck a few yards behind us. Then I heard the truck start, and I began a backwards creep while keeping my eye in the scope. I didn't want to lose sight of this thing. I was going to have to take a shot to stop it. It was moving too fast for me to make it to the truck in time. I lowered the mill dot to a few feet in front of the charging animal and squeezed off three rounds, kicking up mud into the oncoming beast.

It stopped its charged about thirty yards in front of the bales. By this time I was even with the lowered tailgate, and I rolled over into the bed of the truck and slammed my hand on the sidewalls. My son punched the gas pedal, and off we shot down the gravel road. I finally got myself upright in the bed of the moving truck and tried to look through the darkness and my scope, but there was no way to get a good field of view. As my son tore down the gravel road, the back window opened and

one of the boys asked if I was okay. I yelled for them to stop the truck, and we came to a slow stop. I looked back into the field at what I thought was a safe distance, and acquired the beast again. As it walked slowly back to the woods, it picked up the last dead pig by its rear leg and continued to walk in a confident manner all the way back to the woods, where, illuminated and white again were four more of the same shapes now standing in the open field. They all had a pig in

their grip. I heard a loud moan over the sound of the truck engine rumbling in that cold air. I saw the one who did it. He tilted his head back and he stuck his chest out, and then howled like a wolf, but with a much deeper tone. And they all walked back into the woods and disappeared. We got the heck out of there and went home to a warm and safe house. Two weeks later, I was

driving past my homesteader neighbor's house. He and his wife, who, by the way, never spoke to my wife or I. She was religious or something and thought it was sinful to talk to people not in her religion were loading their truck with furniture. I stopped and asked what was going on with a weird, ghostly look on his face. The man told me that they were going back to their other house in Dallas, something about a family member

needed care, and they probably wouldn't be back. He offered to sell his place to me right there on the spot, which surprised me. Of course, I declined I didn't need that old swampy land they had bought. Not too long after that, I ran into the sheriff and he asked me about those people, where the heck they were, etc. I told him that they had moved. He laughed and told me about a call his office had gotten from them the night that we saw the creatures in the field.

Apparently they had been terrorized that night by a pack of monsters. He made a big joke out of the thing, and I laughed with him, all the while knowing that the story was true. I went on my way and felt a little bad about my homestead er friend who were run off their land by a pack of bigfoots. But honestly, I don't think I'm gonna miss them too much. So yes, we have bigfoot in our area. I had heard about them a few times, but had never run into them until that night. We just don't talk about

it in general conversation with anyone. I mean, really, who would believe us?