I am sixty one, and I believe my first bigfoot encounter happened only recently. I'm an avid wildlife photographer. It's a passion of mine and came about after a nasty breakup with a girlfriend a decade ago. Taking pictures motivated me and helped me cope with my issues at the time. I stalked the forest with my camera lens, and when I'm in the woods, my perceptive hunting techniques become sharpened. I slow my walking speed, which helps to control my
breathing, and I hide within the shrubs. And when hiking down a trail, I use its edge instead of its center. I hunt for tracks and listen to the silence around me. I've loved exploring the wood since I was eleven years old. Many a time I was miles from my house, but my home was the wilderness. I would never tell my parents where I was, even though I would be gone for hours. They knew me and just accepted it. Those were more innocent times. There were numerous occasions in the
woods that I heard suspicious sounds and smelled putrid odors. I once found a fifteen inch human track in the midsummer within the sugar sand in one hundred degree heat. That sand is blistering hot at those temperatures, and I could only wonder what bubble would be miles in the woods, barefooted, walking on fire sand. At the time, I lived in a small town named Lake Helen, the population of thirteen hundred, and it surrounded by thick woods and swamps.
There were stories around Lake Helen concerning a creature who the locals had given the nickname the Moleman. It allegedly was ripping the heads off of cattle and leaving the bodies, and it had been seen on several dirt roads darting between the orange pros, and it was described as a very tall creature with red glowing eyes. I was going to kill the mole Man, and I warned my mother that if I ever saw that monster, I would stab it with
my Indian headed, dear antlered handle hunting knife. Unbeknownst to me, my mother and my uncle had concocted an elaborate prank on me. My uncle snuck into my bedroom walk in closet. He was wearing a dark coat and a cheap dime store monster mask, and with a flashlight under his coat. He was patiently waiting for me to add an extra element to the joke. He had unscrewed the lights in my bedroom ceiling under the pretext of retrieving a new
radio she claimed she had stashed inside my closet. My mother sent me upstairs to my bedroom and I fumbled with the light switch and nothing happened. I felt around in the dark for the knob to my closet door, and when it flew open, and my uncle let out an unearthly scream. He had a flashlight shining across his masked face. Need lunch for me, but I slammed the door on him and ran from the room and flew down the stairwell, bouncing off the wall at the bottom, where I then staggered down two
more steps and fell to the floor, totally freaked out. My uncle came down the stairs and tore off his mask, and then he revealed himself. I guess it was funny, judging how everyone in the room nearly wet themselves from laughing so hard. Needless to say, I was humiliated, and I left the house for a few hours, not caring if the real moman was lying in wait for me. A few weeks later, I was asked to go camping with my brother Rick, his girlfriend, and another couple. I
was told of a campsite they chose, and I loved that area. There was a doctor that lived nearby on one hundred acres of prime land. The place was surrounded by dense woods with a ten acre swamp. He owned a very large and very mean Rhodesian ridgeback dog that was known to run loose on the property, and I was assured that the doctor kept the massive dog inside at night while I tended to our camp fire. The two couples took off on a nighttime height. The fire was intense and the light from it made
me feel somewhat safe from any advancing wildlife. My uncle's moleman prank was still fresh on my mind. The area was within a few miles of the supposed cattle mutilations, but I was skeptical that any such thing had happened. What
kind of animal could pull the head off a cow's body. After an hour, I thought I heard the others coming back, and I saw a tall, shadowy figure off in the dark on the other side of the fire, and I thought it was my brother Rick, and I called out to him A few times he turned and walked toward the swamp and disappeared into the darkness. I heard his footstep descend into the water. When the others finally returned,
Rick swore that whatever I saw it was not him. Not long after, reward posters appeared around Lake Helen. The doctor's beloved Rhodesian ridgeback had gone missing, and the dog was never seen again. As we inch closer to adulthood, my friends and I would joke about the possibility of the Moleman. Like most legends, celebrated by one generation and ignored by the next, the stories eventually die out, and in the end it's only the historians that remember.
There are exceptions. My friend Pam was an avid equestrian in the late nineteen seventies, and Pam loved to go riding bareback on the trails around Lake Helen. When she shared her story with me, she seemed ill at ease. She was on her horse in some deeper woods on the far out skoe of Lake Helen. She described something on the trail resembling a massive manlike creature
with a huge head and very tall with big hands. It had a rank odor, something she believes made her horse skittish minutes before she spotted the monster in the clearing and Pam dug the heels of her cowboy boots into the rib cage of her horse and they took off in the opposite direction. Now I'm a bit of a cynic. I didn't believe her, or at least I didn't believe that whatever she had seen was something as camera shy as a cryptid. I began to wonder if my uncle had a second career standing out in
the woods in a homemade bigfoot suit, scaring the innocent. In twenty thirteen, I ventured into the Everglades to do some primitive camping for a month. It was the first day of May and I wanted to fast and read my Bible and to hopefully photograph an endangered Florida panther. After set up my tent, I left to go on a ride with my mountain bike. Two miles into it, I noticed what appeared to be a deer in the center of
the road. Well, I was excited to see some wildlife, and I used my binoculars to get a better view, and to my surprise, the deer was actually the Florida panther. These panthers are rare. There are maybe one hundred and eighty or so left in the state. It sensed my presence and it vacated the road, slipping into the pal meadows to my left.
I rode a few hundred feet down the road in the direction I believed the cat to be traveling, and I stopped and laid down my bike in the grass, and I stood behind a power pole on the right side of the road. I could hear the squirrels chattering at the panther as it approached. Judging by the sounds it was turning in my direction. Well, it came into view between another clump of pal meadows, and I shot off at least one hundred photos in one rapid fire motion. Now I returned to camp extremely
pleased. A week into my stay, I had seen bears, snakes, a bobcat, two panthers, and a huge thirteen foot alligator walking on the road in front of me. Whatever came into my campsite this particular night, it gave me ample reason to leave. I was getting ready for bed after reading my Bible. I had just turned the led lantern off at nine thirty pm and laid my head on the pillow. There were only two roads in and out, but the land was mainly made up of large alligators, swamps,
and cypress trees. I was alone out there, or so I thought. I was suddenly jarred away by the thud of a crashing tree to my left of my tent, and I realized a second later that something had exited the pial meadows at the swamp's edge to the right of me. Was it a bear? Had it climbed in to the withered tree limb and both had fallen together. I laid there with my bible on my chest and a small twenty two handgun ready to fire. The sounds outside of my tent came all
at once, human like whistles, some soft and some loud. They changed in tone from high to low. There were guttural grunts followed by growling. It was like the demented choir from Hell. I asked God to protect me and stayed huddled inside that tent until daybreak. When everything grew quiet, I un zipped the tent flap and took a quick peek outside. Whatever had terrorized me half of the night was apparently gone. The tree that had fallen by
my tent was a healthy pine with no trace of rot or disease. There were tracks all over the camp, and as I stared down at the ground, I thought back to the giant footprints and the sugar sand that I had uncovered when I was eleven and a fearless explorer. Maybe all the stories and legends were beginning to have an effect on me as I neared retirement. There's
no fool like an old fool, they say. I can't bring myself to admit the existence of such creatures like the mole man out there in the wilderness until I literally capture one with my camera or see one in person. Unfortunately, since that night, I haven't touched the camera or gone camping, so it's likely to be some time before either happens. I became interested in bigfoot, yetti, latness, and all things cryptied in the mid nineteen seventies shows
like Boggy Creek and In Search of Come to Mind. I grew up in central Indiana, in a small town about an hour from Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Dayton. I was what my family called an east side river rat. We ran the swampy area in the Whitewater River and played in the woods all the time. Okay, when we weren't playing baseball or football, riding bikes are in the old barn property. In grade school, I recall going to the library at the school and then later to the county library to find books
on Bigfoot and other cryptids. So I really believed in these creatures at a young age. In the late seventies, my grandparents moved down to Florida and we would go down there a lot when I was a young boy. I can recall playing outside and feeling like I was being watched. Numerous times we walked down toward the old sawmill and I would just get the creeps and could not get the nerve up to explore that area. It had been shut down for a long time and was overgrown. Just a few hundred yards down the
road, the swamps in the forest began. It was super thick and dark. We never really went in at all. I say this because in Indiana I ran the woods and the river all the time, so the outdoors never bothered me. I'm just not sure if it was the creepy feeling fear of the gators or rattlers that kept us out, but we never went too far in those woods. During the spring of nineteen eighty or eighty one, a local newspaper had some stories of the Bigfoot swamp eight near my grandpa's house.
The Orlando news station also had a TV report. If I recall, I mentioned to my grandpa that I thought it was true and wondered if the creature could use the old mill and the swamp areas for a home. The whole family had stayed up and I had gone to bed about eleven PM. I stayed in a room at the front of the house by myself. I can't recall if I was awake or trying to sleep, or was awakened, but I could hear a noise outside of my window. I'm guessing it was around
twelve or twelve thirty or in that time frame. I could tell something was walking around in the front yard. I thought it was my dad or my grandpa. I could hear different sounds from growling, guttural noises, and snorting. I knew my family did not sound like that, but I didn't look. I wished I could have mustered the courage to look, but I was terrified. The noises only lasted about five or ten minutes. I can remember
hearing dragging sounds, and like something touching the house. It was pacing back and forth. The sounds got louder, and then they got softer. I remember the primal fear to this day. I was so scared to look out the window, even though I wanted to. I remember just staying in bed, awake and scared. I went outside as soon as I woke up in the morning and found something interesting. There were two large footprints in the sandpile.
It almost looked like they were made by something jumping into our sandpile. The piles were a couple of feet tall and wide. I showed the tracks to my family and they all played it off as a fluke or a neighborhood kid goofing around. I can't think of too many kids with feet that big. They all had the five toes and were just plain big bear footprints. I measured them with the tape and they were seventeen inches long and eight to
ten inches across. My foot today is a ten and a half long and four and a half inches wide, and my foot could have fit in these footprints twice. I can say I did not imagine these noises, nor the actual footprints, but I cannot say, one hundred percent sure that it wasn't a hoax or a family member kidding with me. No one ever claimed they did it. I even asked my dad a few years back. He is seventy seven now, and to this day he claims to have no knowledge of
how the tracks got there. I even asked my grandfather when I was in college, and he says he doesn't know either. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in New Jersey. I had no experience with the real outdoors. Growing up, all my activities took place inside the city limit. I never considered the unseen world as anything more than fantasy. I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories. I think most things can be explained by science or sound reasoning.
Sometimes two plus two really does equal four. After graduating from high school, I became a little less sheltered, maybe even a bit more open minded. Now I met my wife, who had a love for these topics I either dismissed or had little interest in. She shared a few stories with me that happened while she was growing up, like the abandoned garage where the neighbors kids claimed a pair of bright red, glowing eyes would stare at them from
the window. The old two story house where she lived with her family had a basement that had been dug out after the place had been constructed around the year nineteen hundred. It had a dirt floor and the foundation was starting to sag. There was a section that had an inlet crawl space. When she aimed a flashlighting into it, she could see nothing but cobwebs. One day, her mother sent her to the basement to retrieve some canned goods sitting on
a metal shelf. Her arms were loaded down with baked beans. When she looked up and saw a pair of red, glowing eyes looking at her from within the crawl space. She let out a scream, dropped the canned goods, and fled to the safety of the first floor. Her father's response was to hang a few more lights from the basement rafters. My wife and I were visiting her mother one evening, shortly after we were married. The two of them left to visit a relative on the other side of town, leaving
me alone to watch the television. Well, maybe it was a mix of hearing my wife's scary stories and the power of suggestion, but I thought I heard something rumbling around in the basement. There was a loud crash, and I immediately thought about the metal shelf of canned goods, so I opened the
door leading to the basement and reached for the light switch. The lone bulb hanging over the steps flickered and went out, and I peered down the stairwell into the darkness, and I saw two red glowing eyes staring back at me. And I slammed the door and ran to my car, and I fled to a nearby fast food joint. My in laws were not bothered in the least by my story. They righted the topple shelving unit, restacked the cans, and changed the bulb over the stairs. Critters was all they said.
Since then, I've had what you call a heightened awareness of my surroundings. I readily admit that there are things in life that can't be explained, though I always believe that two plus two equals four mm hmm.