It was late summer of two thousand and nine in a small Minnesota town north of the Twin Cities. I was staying in my buddy John's house on ten acres of forested land. We were just seventeen at the time. John's dad built a million dollar home on that plot of land, with more rooms and doors and windows than you could count. He even had a gun room. John's parents were out of town on vacation in Mexico, and his sister was at a friend's house for the week. So John came and picked me up in his maroon
Grandmarquee and we went to his house. Nothing was out of the ordinary, but I remember when I got out of the car, I smelled something rank in the air. I don't really know how to describe this smell, but it made me sick to my stomach. John said there was probably a dead animal somewhere, not to worry about it. Inside, threw a couple of steaks on the grill and enjoyed the view from his million dollar back patio, which faced
the vast wilderness and the ponds surrounded by trees. Now I could hear the frogs sounding out different calls, but otherwise there was no noise but the gentle breeze and the leaves, But there was that smell again. It was so bad that I had to go inside to find a handkerchief to put over my face so I could breathe. It didn't work very well, but I was thankful that it helped it a little. By the time we finished eating,
there was nothing left but bones on the plate. It was dark enough that you couldn't see an inch into the tree line at the edge of John's thick, beautiful golf course green lawn. We looked at the steak bones on our plate and decided the only rational thing to do was to see who could throw them further in the woods. So we chunked them as hard as we could, and we listened to the rustling of them falling through
the trees. We heard them hit the ground, but what we didn't expect were the noises that came after that. It sounded like a bear crashing through the trees. The bears are rare in Minnesota, but they are here, make no mistake. John and I decided to get out there and go for a drive so that whatever was crashing through the trees wouldn't be tempted to come and check us out. We brought the grill in, we hopped in the car, and we sped out of there as quickly
as we could. We drove around for about an hour, listening to loud music, and made the same trip over the same roads until it was pitch black outside. It was about the sixth time that we had made that loop when I started getting a funny feeling. It was a sense of anxiety that I'd never felt. Adrenaline immediately started coursing through my veins. I felt like I was being watched by something big. I stopped listening to the music and I was looking straight ahead. John was barely
paying attention other than he was going straight. I saw a huge figure walk across the road. I couldn't see its face, but I saw the shine of its eyes. That some bitch had to be ten or eleven feet tall, and its arms were unnaturally long to be a human in a suit or a bear. It was walking on two legs, but it walked more like an ape than a human, and its feet were massive and flat, and I could see the muscles rippling through its thick, red
gray fur. I felt fear like I had never felt before in my life, and every hair on my body stood straight up. It was like I had been struck by lightning. I remember trying to scream, and I couldn't breathe John never saw what crossed the road, even though he came a foot from hitting it with his car, But he noticed that something was wrong with me, and he slapped me across the chest, which made me catch my breath. What the hell's going on with you, he asked.
It was a bigfoot, I managed to get out. Yad knew me as the craziest, most fearless person he had ever met. He knew I never backed down from any challenge or any dare, anything that was stupid and could result in broken bones or death. But there I was, his fearless friend, scared straight and barely able to speak. My fight or flight response was always fight first, and asked questions later. But I won't lie though I was
all flight that night. He slammed on the brakes and spun the car around to go back to where I saw what scared me, and we drove a little until I could see footprints out the window, and John turned his car so the headlights pointed into the trees. In the light from the headlights. I saw the creature standing behind a tree, and it was holding on to a tall branch. If I didn't know what I was looking for, I would have never have seen it right away. I lost my breath and all my hair stood up again.
I felt like it was radiating anger straight at me. John asked if I saw it, but all I could do was point, So we rolled down his window and stuck his head out, and he called out to it, but the creature didn't move. And then he opened up his door and got out and whooped into the forest, and right then a loud, angry growled like I had never heard before in my life, came right back at
him from the woods. John saw the creature as it raised its hand in the air and threw a large rock at the car, busting the headlight on his side. He jumped back in the car and popped it in reverse and kicked up rocks and gravel in the road as he peeled out of there. We got back to his house, pulled the car in the garage, and assessed the damage. Then we started hearing banging on the house and screams coming from outside, just like we heard on the road well. We looked at each other and headed
to the gun room in the basement. John retrieved us both a gun and a rifle, and the banging got louder and more intense, and the screams were becoming deafening. We headed upstairs to the ground floor and went out the front door with our weapons pointed. John went left and I went right. We were going to meet up in the back of the house, and if we saw
this creature, we agreed we would shoot it. We ran around the entire house and right into each other without either of us seeing anything, but we could still hear this thing screaming and banging around. We went inside through the back door and closed and locked it, and then went upstairs to their bonus room, which had a view of the front and left side and the rear of the property. There was a point at every window in that room that you could open it up, step out
on the roof, and walk anywhere you wanted. And as soon as we got in the room, we realized the creature was screaming and banging around on the roof. John opened up one of the windows, pointing his gun and fired three shots into the air. That's when my fight response kicked in and I climbed out the window with the rifle in my hand, and I turned to the left and started onto the roof, and I saw the creature standing there, staring at me. I froze in fear.
At that moment, it seemed like Tom stood still, and I was sure that I was going to die. This thing's fists were clenched and his arms looked like clubs, and he was growling and showing me his long, gangly teeth. Behind me, John climbed out the window too, and he saw me standing there, frozen and pointing the rifle at the creature. And when John ran toward me, the creature started to charge. I pulled the trigger as fast as
I could, and I fell backward. John grabbed me and hoisted me back to my feet and started firing at the creature while it was still charging us. He landed a shot in the creature's left leg, right shoulder, and forearm, and it let out a howl of pain, and I pulled my trigger again, this time hitting him twice in the chest. But it just kept coming at us. Even after we had shot it. The creature jumped right over us and off the roof and it landed on the
earth like it was nothing. We heard him running back into the forest, screaming and growling as it went, crashing through the forest away from the house. Back inside the bonus room, we sat at opposite windows, holding our guns in hand and talking until we both passed out sitting up.
We woke up the next morning, both of us startled and looking out the windows to see if there was anything out there that shouldn't have been but it all seemed clear, so we went out of the windows to look around on the roof to see if we could find blood. We did find a little, and John took pictures of them to prove to his dad that we weren't just messing around. Since then, I have lost contact with John and his family, and I no longer have
access to those photos on the camera. But after we took pictures, we washed all the blood off the roof and the grass leading up to the tree line, and then we followed the path that the creature had made. We found its massive footprints and took photographs of them. We followed it all the way down to the water that's where it disappeared. I stayed there another three nights,
with John at the house with absolutely no activity. We called his father and his mother and explained what had happened, and if it weren't for the pictures of the footprints and the blood, they would have never believed us. We never really spoke of it again, and this is the first time I'm telling of it since I'm twenty nine years old, and I still dream of that night and I wake up shivering. I hope you enjoyed the story. Not gonna lie. Reliving that moment isn't exactly a pleasant experience,
but I'd like my story to be out there. My name is Bernard. I'm a sixty five year old retired all field worker from South Mississippi. I've lived my entire life in a small town about an hour south of Jackson, Mississippi, called Bogacheetah. Bogacheetah is Chuck Tall for Big Creek. Many Native American tribes settled here in the late eighteen hundreds, and many property owners discover burial mounds on their properties here.
My family farmed all the land we owned, and as children, we would spend the summer searching for arrowheads after the fields were plowed. We probably found hundreds of them altogether, and we still occasionally find them today. Once I graduated high school, I set out to make a living in the Gulf of Mexico all Patch. Looking back, I wish I had continued to farm and kept up with my
family's dairy farm business. The hard, manual labor of drilling rigs took a toll on my body, but it allowed me to provide for my family and lived, for the most part, an upper middle class life. Years ago, when my son was seventeen years old, I called home to check on him, as I did daily, and while I was away at work, my mother and my sister looked after him. On this day, he asked if he and a friend could take a bigfoot researcher onto my property.
Apparently his buddy had seen a creature across the road and enter an area of my property the week prior. His friend reported the sighting to the BFRO and a man wanted to take a look around. Well, I laughed, and I told him that he could go and do whatever they needed to do. I had spent the majority of my life in those woods and never saw a
sign of a strange creature being there. The old men in my town would tell tales of skunk apes that lived in the Bogacheetah River swamps, and a few years earlier, a preacher's daughter said the creature jumped from a tree and slapped her carror late one night. I didn't know if any of these stories were a fact, but I later found out for myself that it was all too real. The years passed, and fast forward to twenty twenty three. I have a ten year old grandson who has become
the center of my universe. I wanted to spend all the time I could with him and a couple of COVID mandates. Later, I decided to retire and enjoy my golden years. My son and grandson loved to deer hunt. Knowing this, I spent months preparing deer plots and getting them set up to have good places to hunt for the upcoming season. A few weeks before opening day, I started to notice that hogs were destroying one of our
plots near the river swamp. I went to my local feed store and bought a hay ring, a net wire, a spring loaded swing gate. I took these items in my welding machine and fabricated an indestructible hog trap to try and lessen the population of these pests. We kill and eat these hogs all the time. Now I knew I had takers for any that I would catch, because
properly cook, they're fine eating. I placed the trap beside the food plot and attached the trigger wire for the spring gate to a bucket of corn inside, and once those pigs moved that bucket, the gates would close and they would be trapped. My years in the oil field afforded me some of the finer redneck things in life. A four wheel drive pickup and a side by side, and an arsenal of guns from pistols to semi automatic ar style rifles, with many Wi Fi game cameras. I
had one camera that had seen better days. It would take and send me pictures just fine during the day, but had lost its ability to flash and take pictures at night. So it was the perfect candidate to watch my hog trap. It would send me pictures the next morning to let me know if the trap had been sprung and if I had any hogs to go and remove. I set the trap up on Friday afternoon, and by early evening I got a picture showing me I had
four hogs in the trap. The next morning, my son and I pulled up to the trap just as the sun peeked out, but we were greeted with an empty trap. The gate was closed and there was no damage or holes dug under it. This trap was anchored to the ground using six t posts, each with four fence tie wires fastening the trap, and all of them were intact. We found hair on the top end of the net wire, which was at my eye level and I'm six foot two.
Some of the hair was dark, it was almost black like the hogs I had seen in the photos, but some of the hair was long and light brown. After handling it, the smell on my hand was enough to make a maggot gag. It smelled like a crab house a tune of boat Oh Man, that's a classic. We reset the trap and headed back home, and just like clockwork, when it was early evening, I received another photo telling
me there were more hogs in the trap. But the next day I awoke to the photo from my game cam of a hawk sitting on top of my empty sprung hog trap. I was baffled, how were these hogs getting out? Again? We reset the trap and around four pm we arrived and found the empty trap with more hair stuck to the wire. This time, we took more time to investigate, and we noticed the grass was beaten down in a path leading from the woods. Well this got me thinking was someone coming in and taking these hogs.
I pondered on this the rest of the night. If someone was taking them, then how were they doing it. There was no blood inside the trap or around it, and the hogs aren't exactly cooperative, so picking even a small one up and handing it over to another person outside the trap would be damn near impossible. I decided to go back the next day and set the trap and then get into my box Dowd with my thermal scope equipped AR ten and see what I could see. A few hours later, two large hogs entered my trap
and the gate shut. Now I had the bait and I was going to wait and see if anything took it. Night came and I scanned the woodline with my thermal. Around ten PM, I heard what sounded like whistles coming from the woods where the grass trail had led. I pulled up my thermal again and I saw heat signals moving through the trees, and after a couple of minutes, I saw what sort of resembled a human emerged from
the tree line and walked toward the trap. When he got there, he had his hands at waste level, with his palms straight out. I tried to figure out why he was standing like that when I realized he was so tall that his hands were resting on the net wire of the trout. The large hogs immediately went to the opposite side of the troup, but I could see that the top of their backs were just above this
thing's knee. It wasn't but a few seconds later that I heard another series of whistles, and two more large figures emerged from the woods and walked to the trap. Once they arrived, the first creature gingerly climbed over into the trap and grabbed one of the hogs, and within seconds its loud squealing stopped and it was handed over to one of the creatures on the outside of the trap. The second hog was silenced and handed over, and the creature climbed back out and walked with the others back
into the woods. Well I couldn't believe my eyes. I stayed up watching until the batteries of my thermal died and then I lay down on the floor of my box stand and I tried to sleep, but there was
no way I was climbing down until after daylight. About an hour after daybreak, I climbed down and walked to my truck, and I called my son and I told him what I had seen, and he wanted to go back that night to see for himself, and that's what we did, and the exact same thing happened again, only this time three hogs were trapped, and instead of two additional figures emerging from the woods, there were three. My son watched in silence through my thermal binoculars while I
watched through my scope. After what we had witnessed, we both agreed that we weren't climbing down until daybreak. And when we climbed down that morning, we walked out to the trap. Those things have to be nearly ten feet tall, Dad, my son said. Just as he said it, we heard something near the woods. A second later, a boar hog with its nose to the ground, ran out. I quickly shouldered my rifle and took it down, and my son and I walked over to it. It was over two
hundred pounds. We had about a half a mile to walk to the truck, so we decided to leave it beside a tree stump at the base of our box stand and then come back with the side by side to haul it out. We got back home, loaded up the side by side, and came straight back to remove the boar. But when we got there, it was gone. There were no drag marks, no pack of cod hees tearing into it. It was just gone. That's when my son noticed a pile of twenty or so pecans sitting
on top of a tree stump, each of them perfectly shelled. Wow, they left us some pecans, Dad, my son said. I asked him what he meant. He explained that last year season he had been sitting in that stand eating pecans and throwing the shells out the window onto the ground. So the bigfoot must have assumed that would be a good trade pecans for pigs. My son collected the gifted pecans from their smell. He didn't eat them, but he
took them with us. Nonetheless, we didn't set the trap again, and a few days later I brought a trailer and removed it. In preparation for deer season in Mississippi, Youth deer season opens a few days earlier than rifle season for all ages. Opening morning, I took my grandson and just after daylight, a six point buck and a doe walked out. And my grandson is a crack shot with a rifle, and before I could blink, he shot the buck and then the dough with a Savage Youth Model
two forty three. We climbed down to assess his first kills of the season, and when I told him we had two to skin, he told me, no, pau Paul, just one. Let's take the buck and leave the dough for them, you know, the big feats. Well, how could I argue with that. We loaded the buck, pulled the dough over near our stand, and left, and we got home and skinned his trophy. And later that day we loaded up the corn to take to a nearby feeder.
My grandson asked if we could ride to see if they had taken his gift, and when we got there, we saw that they had not only that, but on the stump laid a beautiful fox squirrel tail and a large Indian spearhead. It's not like an arrowhead, it's bigger and something. We searched and searched for as children, but we never found them. My grandson was rightfully excited, and quite frankly, I was too, And when I got him home, he told his father about it. Those things won't forget anything.
My son said, what do you mean, I asked him, This isn't the first time my son has been down there near the swamp. Don't you remember me taking him squirrel hunting down there last year? They were watching him harvest squirrels, and I bet they've been around so long that they remember you searching all that area for arrowheads. My son's words re played in my head the rest of that day. How long have these things been watching us? How many of them are there? Since that day? We
have continued to hunt and gift. I recently put the hog trap back down there, and I reset it a couple of times a week for them. I hope those hogs are feeding their group, maybe they're young ones. Also hope that our friendship with them and kindness carry on. Maybe when I'm gone, they will keep a watchful eye over my son and grandson and other generations to come. Thank you for reading my letter. Sign Bernard