My first contact was Sasquatch was when I was twelve years old. I was playing in the deep woods one hundred yards from my back door. Back in those days, there weren't a lot of expensive toys to occupy my time, so I was playing army all by myself. I was in a location where there was an ovular ovular ovular. I can't pronounce that word. I was in a location where there was an ovular ovular ring of trees, and when they shed their needles, they made an ovular build
up around their bases. Inside this shape, there was also a pile of dried needles that made a nice cushy spot. Anybody new to this podcast, there are some words that I can't pronounce, so I just throw something out there and look for people in the common section to correct me, because I know you will. But the word is ov u la r ovuler. I think that's maybe that's what it is. Anyway, Sorry to get hung up on that.
Back to the story. I was playing soldier there and decided I needed to do a quick hid and cover, and I dove into this bed of needles like I had many times before, but this time I startled a large animal when I landed, something big and heavy took off and ran away. It felt like thunder in the ground, even on that bed of needles, and I felt every step it took vibrating through the earth. I had never heard about sasquatch, but at that moment, all I could think was that I had snuck up on some kind
of a giant and then it ran away. My second contact was during a hunting trip with my brother. At that time, I was thirty years old, and we were hunting in the hills of North Goldendale, Washington, near the Yakima Indian Reservation border. We had been hunting for about an hour when I broke into a large clearing where the sun had started to shine. There was a big stump, so I sat and leaned against it with my rifle
in my lap to watch the clearing. But the sun was so warm, and I was so tired from working the graveyard shift the night before that I soon fell asleep. I must have napped for an hour, and when I woke, my eyes focused across the clearing at the timberline, and there it was a bigfoot in a squatted position, and he was studying me as soon as it noticed that I was awake. It stood up, and it turned and it walked away. I was so stunned that I didn't
even get up to try to follow it. It was two minutes later when my brother called my name and asked if I had seen anything. I sure as hell did, I felt like saying, but instead I laughed and I said I hadn't. The third contact happened while I was hunting in the hills of the Columbia River. I was watching a ravine that was filled with scrub oak trees. It was bushy at the top but open in the ravine. I was sitting there and I heard a noise coming down the ravine, like an entire herd of deer was
headed my way. I got ready to pick a target, but no deer ever came. Instead, a stampede of gray squirrels raced through the treetops like Satan himself was on their heels. At one point, when the stampede passed by me, there was an intense stinky horse sweat body odor smell that filled the area. When the stampede passed me, so did the smell. Never saw anything, but I did feel like that I was not alone. My fourth contact happened when I took my grandson camping on the side of
mountain near in the White Pass. The first evening, I heard a sasquatch call. It was impressive how much air of this thing's lungs could load. His below lasted for twenty full seconds. I tried to emulate it, but I ran out of air after about eight seconds. My fifth contact happened when I took my wife camping in the White Pass. The first day we were there, we walked along the rocky beach of the river that we were
camping next to. The river. Rock was not easy to walk on, but was apparently great for making Okay, here's another word, Carns Cairns Cairns. Never heard that word before in my life. These are man made piles of flat stones. There were two at the time. I added a small rock at the top of one stack, and the next morning the stacks had all been leveled. I think Bigfoot walked through there and said, not today, hippie, y'all seeing those videos where people are not those down, I think
they're funny. The second night we were there, a sasquatch came into our camp while we were sleeping, ran a finger along the side of our tent, right against my wife's back, startled her awake, but she didn't tell me until we were home from the camping trip. And the sixth and final encounter who six in his life? Unbelievable. The sixth and final account encounter was when my wife and I were camped in the upper click atat Valley. This time I had taken gifts. I had taken silk flowers, marbles,
a large plastic toy soldier, and a box of apples. Unfortunately, I became ill the first night there and decided that we needed to sleep in my pickup truck. The apples were left in the bed of my pickup truck. My wife's little yapper Mutt was along with us, and I had the windows down a couple of inches for Fini. We heard nothing the entire night, and the dog never barked or growled once. But the next morning the entire
box was gone. The debris on the forest floor prevented me from seeing any tracks, but we were the only campers for miles. I think a sly bigfoot was laughing at us while he ate the apples throughout the night. Oh that's a good story. I don't know I guess I'm jealous of these people that have encounter after encounter after encounter. They see them all the time. I can't even see a footprint. I never see anything. What is it about me that keeps me from seeing a bigfoot?
I want to see a bigfoot. Everybody else sees them. Everybody that writes me sees them and encounters them, some people multiple times through their lives. Not me. I know I'm kind of acting like a baby, but I kind of feel a little pissed about it. Anyway, I'm glad y'all see bigfoot, but I'm not glad. I don't so how yak gat? Anyway, this was a very good story, well put together, and I appreciate the writers sending it
because it is very interesting. Thank you. This was an ongoing encounter that went on for a month or two. This event happened in nineteen ninety four in the Midwest. I worked nights doing custodial work, and my family lived out in the country. Wasn't all that remote, just a rural part of a small town. Each time I arrived home and got out of my car after work, I started noticing lights in the sky. They seemed lower and
brighter than the other stars and much closer. It was a bright white light, but I also saw blue and red flashes with pulsating lights. The light didn't move across the sky like an airplane, or I would have just assumed that it was that and I would have moved on. There were at least two, sometimes up to four of them, spaced out in different directions. The lights seemed to be observing somehow. When I saw them, it was like they moved in closer to me, zooming in on my location.
They would remain in the same spot for hours and then drift away slowly, but sometimes it was as if they shut the light off. Stars don't do that. We had an outdoor barn light on a pole in the backyard. When these lights in the sky appeared, the backyard light would get brighter, as if someone was slowly turning up the intensity. I noticed that if a car went down the road, the light would gradually dim back to normal, and then when the car was gone, the light would
gradually intensify again. The barn light would be so bright that it looked like early morning, right before the sun came up. When I went inside, every lamp or electronic device the stereo, the numbers on the digital alarm clock, and anything with the light got more intense, just like the barn light, and then would slowly go back to normal. The lights would all be in sinc and would all do it at the same time. I got an uneasy feeling while this went on. I felt like whatever was
causing this was waiting for me to come home. One night, I waited in my car and sunk down in my seat. I just waited and watched for the lights to intensify. Now this freaked me out, so I waited for the lights dim when the car went up the road, and then ran for the house and hid behind the recliner for a few hours. I did this for several nights. Of course, no one else in the house saw anything, and I started to think I was losing it. I was no longer curious as to what was causing this.
I just wanted it to go away. I would come home and walk in and turn off the lamp my family had left on for me, and I'd find my way through through the dark. I felt like something or someone was looking for me, and paranoia started to set in. During this time, I also had trouble sleeping. Several times I had sleep paralysis. I'd be in that state in between sleep and awaken. I couldn't move my body. The only thing I could move was my eyes. I didn't see a thing, but I felt this terrible dread and
uneasiness come over me. I couldn't speak at all, even my tongue was numb. Eventually I was able to force a word out. If I forced the name of Jesus out, it would stop. The light shows seemed to escalate over time. One night, while making my way to my bedroom in the dark, I walked past the door to my parents' room,
which was open. Out there window, I saw what looked like search lights, like the extremely bright white light you see on a police helicopter searching for someone on the It was shining the light back and forth across the driveway, then the yard, and then into their window. But I knew there was no helicopter. There was only a low rumble that went on all night, like the gentle rumble of an air conditioner kicking on, but deeper and so heavy you could feel the vibration of it. I hid
in my bed until I eventually fell asleep. That next morning, after my family had all left for work, I could still hear that low rumble. After a while, whatever it was finally left and the rumbling sound drifted above the clouds. I saw nothing outside, but I had the TV on the morning news, and while I was watching out the screen door, the TV turned off. Well that was it for me. I was totally freaked out, and I drove
to my boyfriend's apartment that weekend. While hanging out with him, I swore I still heard the low rumble above the clouds above apartment, as if it was following me. I was a basket case for a while. One morning, my mother got up and found me crouched behind the reclining chair hiding from the lights. Eventually I had to start ignoring the blinking lights in the sky or I was going to be committed. I have no doubt about that.
I started going inside when I got home, not looking up, and straight to bed or doing sit ups until I was so exhausted and I had to go to sleep. To my relief, my then boyfriend and now husband saw the lights too. One time, he flipped one off from his car while he was driving, and in front of our eyes it literally shut off. We both saw that happen. Even today, I occasionally noticed the blinking lights every now and then, but I ignore them. I live in a
different state. Now, I decided it was not just me. They were watching and observing. They were waiting for someone to notice them. My husband is the only other person who has heard this entire story. I didn't dare share all of it with others, and we all know why. Oh wow, that's kind of scary. I'm assuming she shared the whole story with us. I've heard of stories like this. I've gotten stories like this where people are just tormented
by something and they never know what it was. My thought and always goes to well, like she said, I'm just repeating what she said. I'm not accusing her of this or diagnosing this problem that she was just paranoid. But this letter seems perfectly legible. It doesn't wander all over the place. Seems like a person who has their thoughts together and that who knows what they saw. It's scary. I'm glad to find out that this is eased up
quite a bit. A lot of people will say, you've probably been visited by whatever these things are, and you know, the longer time goes on, the more evidence. We just saw videos on the news of some kind of craft flying over the top of the ocean and the I can't even remember where it was, somewhere in the Middle East.
I think I believe the Americans shot a hellfire missile at it and hit it, and the missile just like either went through it and a couple of three little pieces broke off of this whatever this UFO was, but they didn't fall in the water. They just kept going with the craft. I know hundreds of people have seen this video, and I don't even know if you haven't seen it, what to tell you to search for. I just kind of flipped through these shorts a lot of
times and it popped up, and I thought, man, that's crazy. Anyway, here's what I'm getting at. This stuff is becoming more and more and more evidence, much more than Bigfoot. There's one hundred times more evidence for paranormal beings from another realm, another planet. There's one hundred times more evidence of that than there is for Bigfoot. And people aren't interested, at least on this channel as much as in these UFO stories. But it really intrigues me because it seems more real
because there's more evidence. And I know people say, hell, there's pictures and videos of Bigfoot all over the place. Ninety nine percent of are hoaxes, and they're obviously hoaxes. But this stuff, right hear, these lights and these crafts flying around and under the ocean, in the ocean, we got videos of all these things by military. The people in the federal government are coming out and saying it's real. It's everywhere. So what is all this stuff? Some people
say it's demonic. Can't Why would a demon you a UFO to try it? Just doesn't None of that make sense. I'm not saying I know what it is, but I'm saying there's a lot of stuff. If you just use critical thinking skills, you can rule out a lot of things that people think it is. This was an interesting story, and I'm glad to hear that she is doing better and not as tormented as she was. Thank you for sharing the whole story. I assume it's the whole story. Thank you for sharing it with us. Thank you to
the writer. In two thousand and two, I was freshly divorced. I had very little money, and the time I spent with my children was precious. I wound up doing a lot of things outdoors in order to tire them out and get them away from their computers. My kids had a limited time to spend in the hot weather of central Florida, so I used to take them for bike rides at the local park. One time, we were two miles into the park on our bikes when my daughter
started sobbing and yelling are we going now? Daddy? Can we go now? She kept it up until we turned around and headed back to the parking lot. My son and I were concerned and a bit overheated, but we still giggled at her with her theatrical shouts. I was a bit upset to end the ride so early, but looking back, who knows what was really going on or if she had seen something that scared her. In twenty fifteen, I was riding my bike alone in the same part,
enjoying being outdoors and having the place to myself. An hour into my ride, I had gotten about six miles in when the rain shower started. I was peddling through sugar sand and it was burning the heck out of my legs, so I decided to get off my bike and walk instead. I got to a place that I had passed on the way in. It was off the beaten path and had legs and swamps and a clear path along the power lines. I decided to leave my bike and look around the swamps and the wetland for
a bit. The rain was tapering off, but it was steady, and it made the whole area look like it was in the shadows. To my left or swamps, and on my right was a saturated open field that led to the lake, with a power line in between the two. I walked along the power line path and I heard the distinct sound of something plunking away at bicycle spokes. It's a metallic sound that I knew from my children's bikes and mine when I was a kid. The sound stopped about twenty five feet from me, right where I
had left my bike, and I stopped walking. There was no other sound but the rain. In Florida, if you're near the swamps, there always seems to be frogs and other critters making a fuss, but at that moment, there was nothing. I stood there for a moment listening, and I heard someone whisper was almost unintelligible. It sounded like a little girl's voice talking to someone. She was asking a question. Now I was confused. I was not in a place where a child should be, and even if
there were other people, I would have seen them. I waited another moment, and then I said hello again. I heard more whispers from this little girl's voice. This time I heard her clearly, and she asked, when are we going to leave? I was really confused. I couldn't see anything. The voice was coming from directly in front of me, but there was nothing there. It was just a little girl's distressed voice, pleading to go home. I'm always comfortable in the forest, but I was starting to get a
bit freaked out. And then the girl's voice screamed, are we going home now? Daddy? The end of her sentence built up to a high pitched scream that made my gut hurt. I was stunned and scared. My first instinct was to get the heck out of there, but for some reason, my mouth betrayed me, and again I said hello.
I took a step forward and betrayed my feet. This time, whatever was with me in the woods shot away from me at a speed that was supernatural, like it had been attached to a cable and was being pulled away, shooting across the wet, boggy Florida wetlands. I stood there with my head reeling, thinking I was about to throw up. I stayed where I was for ten minutes, collecting my
thoughts about what I had just experienced. I had seen nothing but the voice and the scream and the metallic sound of the bicycle spokes were stuck in my head. I eventually gathered myself and headed to the parking lot without any other incident. Oh man, that's kind of spooky. I don't know. This may sound weird, but it's kind of intriguing to me. I don't think there was anything there that he felt was after him, but he was. I don't know. What do you guys think? What was
he hearing? A lot of people say ghosts or demonic I tend to go that route. I don't. I'm a Bible believer, and I believe, you know, we're either here or we're with the Lord and the only thing left on earth or living humans and demons. And I don't know. I could be wrong about all that. I don't make real y'all know, I never talk about spiritual stuff or political stuff too much. Never political stuff. Good Lord, man, what a world we live in with this political junk,
but this supernatural stuff, spiritual stuff. Sometimes it perplexes me. And I was talking to my wife the other day about it was nothing about this, but what I've learned in my life is that usually with big problems or big incidents, there's always the one thing. People try to complicate it and spread it out and make it about a bunch of things. It's usually the one thing. But here's what I'm getting at. I think the one things the one thing is in these type situations is that
it's probably a demonic presence somewhere that you've encountered. It's just my opinion. I'm not making a categorical statement or a singular statement. That's just what I think it is. And it kind of goes along with my one thing theory. There's always that one thing. Anyway, I thought i'd share my thoughts with you on that. I'm not sure why I did, but I just kind of popped in my head, so I thought i'd say it. So there you go.
Thank you to the writer for sending the story. It was really good, really good, kind of spooky, but very intriguing. Thank you. I grew up in the wild and wonderful state of West by God, Virginia. Now I live in Kentucky, just across the Big Sandy River. I don't know if I believe in cryptids, aliens, or anything ghost related, but I am one hundred percent sure that I believe in shadow people because I encountered one when I was eight years old. This happened in a small town in West
Virginia named Fort Gay and Wayne County. We lived in an old, two bedroom, one bath house rented to my family by a man named Frank. He owned dozens of rental homes and hundreds of acres of property in our little town. According to several neighbors and other town residents. In the nineteen fifties, Frank used our house to meet with some other men in town to drink, gamble, and do things that were publicly frowned upon back in those
days in a small religious town. One night, back in the nineteen sixties, Frank and his friends were drinking and playing poker. Someone accused another of cheating at cards. Tempers flared, somebody pulled a gun and blew a man's brains out right there in that very house. My big sister and I had to share the second bedroom, which wasn't a problem since we were just little kids at the time. My aunt and uncle hadn't seen our new place yet and they were coming to spend the weekend with us
in the new house. My mom set up our room for them, and that meant one of us had to sleep on the couch and the other got to sleep with Mom and dad. I don't know if you remember sleeping with your parents at this age, but I absolutely dreaded it. Always got stuck between them and got pinned down by the covers. Plus I had to listen to my dad's snoring and sleep talking. I had been lying in bed with them for about an hour or so. My parents were already fast asleep, and the house was
dead quiet. I was burning up under those covers as usual, and I was wishing like crazy. I had used the bathroom before I went to bed, because my eyeballs were floating. I dreaded going because I knew I had to crawl over one of my parents and take the chance of waking my dad, who was definitely not someone you wanted to disturb out of a deep sleep. I decided my best option was to dig out from under the covers
and crawl over my mother. What happened after that was a pure nightmare, fuel especially for an eight year old kid. I began the task of trying to get over my mother without making too much noise and avoiding waking my dad at all costs. I had my right leg flung over my mom, looking for the floor with my toes, and holding onto the bedpost with my left arm, when all of a sudden, the worst most hair raising feeling came over me and went up and down my spine.
Every hair on my neck and body stood on end. I could feel a presence behind me at the bedroom doorway, and I could feel something was there and that its eyes were on me. My mind started racing and my heart started pounding, and I was completely frozen in that awkward position. I didn't want to, but I knew I had to look at the dark doorway. I turned my head, praying that it would be just my sister. I couldn't have been more wrong. I can only describe it as
a shadow person. It had the basic form and size of a human, but it was featureless. It had no discernible face. When I say it was black, I mean it was darker than the darkest corners of the room. It was highlighted by the hallway light that my mom had left on for anyone who might get up in the middle of the night, which made it seem even darker. It was a shadow, but deeper and darker than a shadow,
like black silk or a black hole. Many people who suffer from a CONDUCTIONH call sleep paralysis often report seeing a shadowy man they called the hat man. This thing did seem to be wearing a hat, but I was completely awake, and this was not a case of sleep paralysis. This thing didn't move or speak a word. It was just standing there, peeking around the doorway at me. To say that I almost had a heart attack would be
a severe understatement. I didn't know what to do. Should I scream and wake my parents in hopes they would see what I'm seeing? No? Instead, I slowly slipped back over my mother, and I slid under the covers and I pulled them completely over my head. I didn't dare peek out or try to look at this thing again. I just knew if I pull those covers down, that thing would be closer right at the foot of the bed,
or worse, face to face with me. At this point, I completely forgot about needing to go to the bathroom, and honestly, I don't know how, oh I didn't wet myself After I saw what I saw. I was stuck there under the covers, afraid to move, afraid to look again, heart pounding in fear. I don't know when, but at some point I must have finally fallen asleep, probably out of exhaustion. When I woke up, that experience and the fear of it were still fresh on my mind. Now.
I could hear my parents, sister, my aunt in the kitchen getting breakfast ready, and I was glad I was still alive to wake up at all. I jumped out of bed and ran with all I had to the safety of my family in the kitchen, and I told my parents everything. Of course, they chalked it up to a bad dream by a kid with a wild imagination. We lived in that house for four years, and everyone in my family would eventually go on to have weird experiences,
which are stories for another day. Something about that old, creepy house just never did feel right to me. I believe something evil was living there. I'm an adult man, I'm a husband and a father now. But I will swear to my grave that this was real and was not a dream or my imagination. I've never had anything like that happen to me since, and I pray that it never does again. I wouldn't wish something like that on anyone, not even on my worst enemy. Oh what
a great story. Man. I didn't read this. I zip a lot of these up and I send these to Rebecca and Rebecca Lee Wesson, who, by the way, is a great author and has books out on Amazon. Look up for Rebecca Lee Wesson. She's editing all these stories that you hear. But what I was going to say is, I don't know if this guy wrote this this well or or if Rebecca put her magic on it. But man, it was just so fun to read and so well put together. I don't know. It's probably not going to
go down in historical literature by any stretch. But sometimes the stories are great, but the way they're written is, oh, man, it just sets them off. He doesn't say whether to give his name or not, but he lives in Kentucky, born in West Virginia. I got this story a while back. I hope he hears this because man, what a great story. Thank you so much for sending this. If anybody else has stories about the paranormal or whatever, I have a lot of them to do right now. I've just got
a big backlog. But if you send me a really good one, I'm liable to pull it up and just do it right away. So I really appreciate you all sending these stories. They're so fun to read, and anyway, I appreciate it. Thanks to the writer Ghost of Tula by Shane Brown. I remember being a little kid and Mama walking around videoing anything and everything she could. She would use that camera all day. She said that she never had anything that neat before. I think she believed
that she would have each moment forever. When she hit the record button. That camera was huge and it hurt your shoulder to hold it propped up for a minute. I guess it didn't bother her. She gleamed with it. She was getting something new and recording her babies. Recently, I watched a video of us at my grandmother's house having lunch one day. Leanne and Billy Ray were fighting while Mama was in the background frying chicken and bacon biscuits.
Dad was leaned back in a chair, watching everyone. Mama threw the camera on him and asked him about the ghost story from a call he got the night before while he was on duty at the fire station. A dad was wearing a navy blue Firebuster shirt, and he leaned his head down and his eyes got big. He twisted the sides of his ear with a finger and a thumb as he chuckled. Then he shivered. He told the story of what he saw that night on a call. I don't believe him as surely as I study every
word that he said. I didn't believe in ghosts at nine years old. Now Webster says that ghosts are the soul of a dead person, thought of his living in an unseen world or his appearing to the living people. Webster can't describe what I know, but he is close. Maybe Webster is telling me I know a soul that still lives that it's appearing to me. I think I know his feelings too. From spending time at Tula, I'm
starting to know instead of only wondering. At forty three, I don't know if I truly believe in ghosts yet or not. I've never seen one. I have never considered for one second that my eyes witnessed a ghostly motion. But I feel things. I wonder if ghosts can make you feel things. If they can, then I believe in them. That's something that happens to me often, especially at Tula or somewhere my father frequented. I am sitting on the docks of Tula right now, and it's almost haunting. Not
a scary haunting, but a gut wrenching one. Crickets are calling, and the bullfrogs are loud. They echo off the trees and through my body. There's a white cloud of fogs sitting on this pond as its glow dances from the moonlight. The moon's cast is wrapped in a fog, which shows the pond's general shape. The moon's light runs about six or seven feet to the bank and up the trees into their tops as it shines up the back end of the sky. The white fog just sits in a gloom.
It doesn't move, and neither do I. There's a presence here, present makes me want to write stories. Maybe this is the presence that makes me want to be like my dad. I'm not for sure yet, but I like both of those thoughts. I know I'll never be the writer that he was. I'm okay with that, But if I can be a writer with a connection to him, that it's all worth the sacrifice. There's a presence over me and under me. I feel it in both of my sides too.
It's the truck I got to pick out from my dad one day when he said he wanted to pick up with air conditioning, a CD player and powered windows, as he sent me in mom to Tupelo to buy it. It's the presence that I feel when I'm asleep at the old tool of store he owned that's been renovated into an apartment. It's the store he wrote about in Joe, where the protagonist would pick up his workers. But the feeling down on the pond at Tula is more powerful than any I've ever felt. It's a feeling where I
start to believe in ghosts. I don't see it, but I believe it. All Right, here's the story I got. I'm gonna call this fiction because it just feels like it's fiction, but I guess it could be true. The writer did not say if it's true, and I'm calling it fiction, and the writer gets upset with me, just don't. It just just feels fictiony the way it's written and the story in itself. However, it's a really good story,
so let's duteous. Nineteen months ago, I awoke from a coma, unable to move, speak, or even see what was happening around me. I had a vague awareness of who I was. I had a family, a job, a portfolio, and a name. I knew something terrible had happened to me, but I couldn't remember what it was. I remember remembered the frantic and helpless sensation of trying to escape and then being thrown through the air. I remembered a great crippling fear,
but the details were beyond me. I searched the darkness in my head, but it was useless, like looking through foggy glass. I knew the facts of my life and what had happened to me were on the other side, but I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them yet. I could hear the voices in the distance, and the footsteps approaching and fading away, and I could hear the slow beep of a heart monitor as it started to pick up speed. The footsteps approached me again, and they
ran away, summoning a doctor and a team. He's away, Get the team here, a woman said in an excited voice. There were multiple footsteps in the room now, each set hurried and shuffling around the bed. The team was talking about me in hush voices, though I didn't understand the medical terms they used. One of them was instructed to notify my family, Jonathan, I remembered my name was Jonathan. That felt like a wind. It was a minuscule maybe,
but a win. Nonetheless, the sudden burst of energy after what felt like an endless idle rest put a strain on me, and I fell back to sleep. And when I woke, I heard hush voices again. This time I recognized one of them. It was my wife. Her name was Madison. That's another win, I told myself. She was reading from the Book of Proverbs. I fell in love with her all over again. It was the voice I needed to hear. My eyes opened in the room erupted in excitement. I could make out colors and the details
of my surroundings. I was unable to move my head, but able to turn my line of sight. I could see a woman to my right, and I studied her features and her long gray hair and her familiar smile. It was my Madison. She was older. Now now I was confused. A young man and two younger women stood beside her, one of them holding a baby. They were my children, but they had grown one at a time. They came to the bedside and hugged me. They told
me they loved me, and they missed me. I realized then that I must have been in a coma for some time and kept alive by machines. But for how long. I had no clue. My family had grown up without me, and the realization was overwhelming, and I had a thousand questions. This routine went on for days, deep sleep for hours, and awake for a few minutes. Day in and day out, the medical team would tug on my leg and bend it, shine a flashlight in my eyes, and stick needles in
my right foot and fingers. There was a brace around my neck and back, preventing me from moving, and at one point the doctors told me that my left leg had been so severely damaged they had had to remove it to save my life. Well. I was devastated. The realization about my leg sparked something in me, like an approaching siren. I had a memory, not in images, but in sound. It was a roar, and it terrified and
confused me. It was real. It was too real, like it approached, and it faded back into the darkness of my mind. I hoped it would stay there. That was wishful thinking. I would soon find out. My improvement was marked by tiny daily successes, and in time I gathered enough air in my lungs to push out the words thank you to Madison. Within a minute, the room was filled with medical personnel checking my statistics, and soon my hands and right leg regained feeling and to move them,
and I finally could speak fluently again. Communication with my wife was what I wanted the most. I learned I had been comatose for five years and four months. Brain trauma was the cause, and I was lucky to be alive at all. Five years had gone by. I had been gone all that time. My son Nathan was now seventeen and in his junior year of high school. He was playing football and he was quite good at it. My daughter Susie was a mother and in college, while
my youngest daughter, Brittany was twelve years old. I had missed so much, and I hadn't seen my son playball, I didn't walk my daughter down the aisle, and I had missed my grandchild's birth. I missed BRIT's first days of school. By then I remembered who I was. I was a Harvard graduate with a PhD in business, a chief financial officer for a fortune five hundred company. We had a home in Upstate, New York, a penthouse apartment in New York City, and a vacation home in the Keys.
My wife broke the news to me that my life as I remembered it was over. I had lost my job. My family was forced to sell our house up state and the wood in the Keys. They kept the penthouse in the city and sub leased it to a guy who took over my position at work. They had moved to North Carolina and had been living off our life savings. At one point, two gentlemen came to see me, one from the Forestry Department and the other from the police department.
They asked me questions for hours about what happened and what I remembered. I couldn't recall anything from the incident. They showed me pictures of a campsite that had been ravaged, a tenth that was torn to pieces, and a backpack with a metal frame bent completely in half. They presented photographs taken by the hikers who found me. The picture showed me in a blood soaked sweatshirt and my head
looking like it had been hit with a sledgehammer. There were other pictures of me from when I arrived at the hospital, my chest and my shoulder full of strange scratches and scars. I had four deep lacerations on my chest, spaced two inches apart, and one deep laceration on the back of my shoulder below my neck. A photograph of my left leg had multiple lacerations, as if something massive had grabbed onto it and sunk its claws through the
skin and muscle. I looked at the pictures objectively, having no recollection of any of this, nor any explanation for how it happened. After over a year of therapy, both mental and physical, I was sent home. It wasn't my home though. It was a small place and a quiet subdivision with no sidewalks, But there was a porch where I could sit and read and look at pictures of my family and see what I had missed over the last five years while I tried to get my mind
in better shape. We attended most of my son's football games during his senior year, and I got to see him take his girlfriend a homecoming. My life was coming back together. My walking improved with the prosthetic leg I had been fitted with, and I was working on my dance moves for Brittany's father daughter dance at school. When Thanksgiving rolled around, my brother in law, Jeremy, came to visit us. He burst into tears and apologies when he saw me. I had to sit down. Seeing his face
brought back a float of memories. I should have been there, I should have stayed, he said, over and over again. You had to go home, I said, suddenly remembering he and I had planned a week long vacation to hike a section of the Appalachian Trail, with the goal of completing the entire trail within the next several years. We left my car at the end where we would finish our trek and took his car to the trailhead where
we would begin. We arrived late the first evening, just a half hour before dark, and decided to put some miles on the boots before we called it a night. We hiked several hours before setting up camp and turning in, and we slept like two tired puppies before the sun's light and singing birds woke us up. The next morning. We planned to hike sixteen to twenty miles that day and had one hell of a pace going. The beauty was breathtaking, and the birds were singing, and the deer
were plentiful and unbothered by our presence. As evening approached, the sounds of nature began to die down, and the satisfaction we had from our hard work that day slowly gave way to an unsettling awareness that we were not alone. Something was stalking us in the woods. We called out that we were armed, though we didn't have anything other
than pocket knives and hatchets. We decided that it must have been a couple of locals with a shine operation or a marijuana grove nearby, and we were being chaperoned. We stopped for the night and pitched our tent, wondering if our chaperones had gone home or if they had stayed nearby to patrol through the night. As we settled in, small pebbles began to hit our tent, and we did our best to ignore it and we tried to sleep. The next morning, Jeremy got a call that his mother
had been rushed to the hospital. I told him to head on back and that I would continue onto my car so he wouldn't have to backtrack and waste time. He tore down the trail like a cat with its tail on fire, and I packed up and headed out in the other direction. The better part of the day was uneventful, with no sign of our chaperones from the night before, but later that evening they came back. I remembered walking to the last possible minute before pitching my
tent and climbing into sleep. After that, there was nothing. My next memory was waking up in the hospital. Over the next several months, I spent countless hours browsing the TV and the Internet for anything that sparked my interest, as I had more time than anything else. I stumbled upon a Bigfoot documentary and found it to be very interesting until they played a recording of the creature's roar.
I felt my knees bend to my chest and I lay sideways on the couch, holding myself like a terrified child, and then I remembered everything. I had just climbed into my sleeping bag when rocks were pelted into the side of the tent again. I was growing frustrated at the thought of losing another night of sleep to the locals and their pranks. They poked the side of the tent, even touching my arm or time or two, and they prodded me through the side of the tent. I could
see a figure standing in the moonlight. By then, I was fed up. I wanted to teach those clowns a lesson, so I grabbed my hatchet. When one of them prodded me again, I swung it with all my might. I struck his hand with the backside of the hatchet. I realized that whatever had been pestering me was not human. It roared like a freight train, and it grabbed the tent and it ripped it out from over the top
of me. I jumped to my feet, ready to bolt down the trail, but something grabbed me by the shoulder and leg and lifted me above its head. And then, with the force of a car crash, I was thrown against a tree on the other side of the trail, and everything went black. I have no idea what attacked me or why. I have my suspicions, but I have
no evidence. Part of me wished I didn't remember what happened along for the time when the details were beyond me, when I was in the dark, and when the facts of my life and what had happened to me were on the other side of the foggy glass. But now I could see clearly something terrible had happened to me. Lying there on the couch in the safety of our new home, I felt the frantic and helpless sensation of
trying to escape. I relived the fear, the great crippling fear, and I knew that my nineteen month old recovery was only just the beginning. How about we wind this podcast down with a dog story. I asked for them a couple of months ago, and I've got six or eight
that people have sent. I've done one, I've got a few to do, and I'm going to just drop them in periodically in a podcast, and then after this story, I'm going to put two archives at the end of this to give the video a little more length and for people who haven't heard these stories to enjoy. So let's get into this dog story. I really like this one.
I'm a cat lover, but I've enjoyed the company of more dogs than cats in my life, some of the best friendships anyone can ever enjoy, or with the pups and kitties that'll allow us to come near. My first love was a hound dog named Joe. He was dark brown with black markings. My mom called him Hines fifty seven. That meant he was a mutt. In all these years, I've never forgotten Joe, and I've often used his name to answer the old question, which was your favorite pet?
I love that dog, and I can remember hugging his neck, But he used to infuriate me because he wouldn't allow me to go down the driveway to the street. If I started toward the street, he stood sideways in front of me, and if I tried to move around him, he just moved with me. Eventually I'd get mad at him or crying. This brought my mother and grandmother out
to see why I was upset. Either way, I ended up getting my butt busted for going on the street when I wasn't supposed to, and I was made to stay on the back porch for the rest of the day. I never stayed mad at Joe for long. After all, he was just looking after me. He died when I was five years old, just before I started school. I was devastated. His passing taught me what death was and the permanence of it. His leaving may have left a hole in my heart, but my heart was bigger and
warmer for having known him. I've been listening to you for quite a few months now, and I want to thank you for your stories. I love your even toned voice and your comforting comments about your readers and the authors of the stories you read. Thank you for sharing my little story and memory of my first true love, Joe the hind fifty seven of the Hound, Well, you're welcome. Thank you for that nice paragraph there at the end of your at the end of your story. But that's
a great dog story. You know. Dog stories are just good. Uh, they don't have to be long. Obviously, this was a short, little story, but I felt it. I felt she's thought about what this dog did for her life all the way back before she would turn five years old. She remembers that dog was keeping her, trying to keep her out of that street. And they're smart that way. They're put in our lives for a reason. Just another great
dog story. And I want to tell the writer. She doesn't leave her name, but hopefully she'll hear this and this is this is a great story, so thank you.