All right, let me see if I remember how to do this. I've been busy so long, something been gone so long, But I'm back, and I hope people are still around to listen. Let's jump into Mark's story here. He's from southern California, and here's what he writes. You recently said that you didn't know if there were bigfoot in southern California. Well, I can assure you that there are, and they have been there for a
long time. In fact, one of the very first bigfoot encounters I heard online was around seventeen years ago, and it came from a former marine stationed at Camp Pendleton Marine Base. My ranch was nine miles up the canyon from the back of the base. Bigfoot stripped my fruit trees every spring. It scared my big dogs into their beds. They silenced the millions of frogs and Deluze Creek nightly and roam the canyons around Fallbrook Temkula Vista. I'm sorry if
I didn't pronounce that right. And I went to the border of Mexico lost mastros de la Fonterra. The monsters of the border are no joke to the Mexican people crossing the border illegally in southern California. A route they used to take through the back of De Luz had so many people disappear it isn't used anymore. Sheriffs, rangers and border patrol agents and ranchers all have stories to tell. If you're among the trusted to keep your mouth shut now, I
too have had encounters. Once scared me so bad that my bones turned to ice. At night, I would sit on my back patio with my two eighty pounds all business ranch dogs and smoke a cigar, have a beard, watch the stars. This was how I relaxed after running my business all day. The frogs in the creek would shut up around eleven PM. At the same time my dogs would slink into their beds in the garage. No amount of coaxing could get them to come back out, and I let them room
free. And some nights they would be out late and then come racing back into their beds without stopping to sit with me. One afternoon, my share friend came down my entry road and headed straight up to the barn without stopping. I was working up at the house, but he motioned for me to come on down to the barn, which was curious to me well. I met him there and he asked if I knew of any holes around, meaning graves and waiting for thieves and the avocado groves, which include hundreds of acres
in the area. Then he wanted to know if I'd seen a couple of suspicious guys around my property in an old pickup. He went on to explain that these guys were junkie thieves and they had disappeared a week earlier. Their goals that they were going to rip off my barn because they knew I had expensive equipment, and I guess the girls had cased my place with the guys. I told him that I hadn't seen anyone or anything, and then he went on his way. Two days later, I awakened at two am to
find my two dogs facing the barn and growling loudly. I dressed and walked down to the barn with my shotgun and my two fierce dogs. I decided it was better to go through the trees and stay off the road in case I was about to surprise the junkie thieves. But when I got to the barn, I reached in and flipped on the lights. As I leveled the gun and there was no one there. There was nothing but me and my two brave canine companions. And then I heard a noise from down behind the
barn in the equipment area. So I turned out the light and I acted like I was heading back to the house, but instead I headed around the barn the other way. Again, nobody was there. I crept along the eighty foot tap, a five foot in diameter eucalyptus trees that lined up most of the groves. Well, that was when I discovered that my fierce guard dogs were no longer at my side. Now I looked back to see them standing at the barn fifty feet away, staring at me like I had lost
my mind. Get down here, you cowards, I yelled at them, and as I yelled, I turned my back on the eucalyptus tree I had been walking around. The dogs took off like a shot and ran full boar all the way back to the house and into their beds, whining all the way. It was at that moment that I realized that someone or some thing was behind me. If it had been a person, I knew my dogs would have tore into them. It was their ranch and nobody ever entered without
my permission. And then I smelled it. It was a gagging smell that I've heard described on YouTube so many times, that was followed by a low moan. I dropped the gun barrel to face the ground. I let go of the trigger and I held it by the stock. And then, with every ounce of courage I possessed, I walked slowly away, straining my ears with each step to see if it was following me. Well, thankfully,
I heard nothing. I reached the barn, turned all the lights out, inside and out, and then I jumped on my four wheeler and I raced to the house. When I checked on my dogs, I found them still shaking and sweating. I got a beer and a cigar, and I sat in the garage floor with them until they calmed down. And in reflection, I was thankful to be alive. Why didn't I turn around. It's because
I was afraid it was a dog man. I already knew from the terrible experience a friend of mine had that you should never look at them, if at all possible. Well, a few days later they found the truck of the two thieves hidden in a defunct overgrown grove nine hundred feet from my barn. They searched for the thieves, but they were never found dead or alive.
To this day, I don't know if I was spared because I was at my ranch in the Bigfoot eight my fruit that year, or if it was because I had a shotgun and didn't level it on the Bigfoot, or maybe it was another reason. God only knows, but I am grateful now. In my life, I've known two Vietnam War veterans who were tunnel rights. They were the soldiers who searched the NVA tunnels and killed those they encountered. I met these two men forty years apart. Their stories were identical.
Unfortunately, so were their mental issues. They both carried a selection of knives and a forty five to do battle in the dark tunnels, so it's no wonder they were ordered to carry the guns loaded, but one shot would bring hordes of NV eight to them. Stealth was what kept them alive, so they actually didn't shoot the guns inside the tunnels. They weren't willing to take a chance. I'm telling you both of their names because they were brave men
and they deserve to be honored for their sacrifice. Bud was the brother of Renee, a girl I worked with in high school. When he came home from his third tour, I met him. He was a scary, being a truly dark presence. The week after I met him, Renee woke up to find him on top of her holding his ke bar to her throat. She had to yell at him several times before he got a grip on reality again. The next morning, he said his goodbyes and headed off to do
his fourth tour, and it would be his last. He never came home. May he be in God's house today. The other person's name was Phil. I met him four decades later when I put my fifth wheel on a campground by a river in the Arizona Desert for the summer. Phil was a hard man by this time, deeply troubled by his war experiences. People thought he was crazy, but he was my neighbor and I spent a lot of time sitting by the fire feeding him beers and cigars, so I had time
to study him. I soon learned that he used that persona as a mental fence, but we did become friends. He didn't have much, but he was a grateful guy. I took him boating and bar hopping at the waterfront bars. Phil found in me someone he felt he could share his life experience with. But little did he know I was a counselor for years. I was empathetic and I employed my craft without him realizing it. He was broken his bud and my heart broke for him. Well. One weekend, I
arrived early on Saturday morning. I knocked on Phil's door and expected him to be ready for breakfast and going for a boat ride. His car was there, but he didn't answer. Strangely, all the windows were covered in full and paper from the inside. And I went to my place and made breakfast in coffee, but still there was no Phil. It wasn't until five pm the day that he appeared. He was pale and nervous and looking around like someone was going to jump in. I asked him what was but he wouldn't
talk about it. That evening, I made a fire and I sat down, and Phil came out to the fire cautiously. He took a beer and sat for half an hour without saying a word, and finally, in tears, he said, I want to tell you what happened, but you'll think that I've lost my mind. Well, I laughed and said, hell, Phil, I already think you've lost your mind, and he punched my arm and he laughed too. Okay, he said, well, last night I
was watching TV about eleven thirty when something hit my motor home. It sounded like a slap. I looked out the window and I couldn't see anyone. And then a minute later there were three or four more loud bangs. This time when I looked out the window, there was this werewolf looking thing standing there looking at me. Phil took a deep breath and added and then three more appeared behind him, and they started circling my trailer and they were slapping
it. The biggest one stepped out and stared at him. He said it was telling him to come outside. He could feel it. He couldn't hear it, but he could feel it. He went and got his gun and laid on the floor for hours, thinking they would get in at any moment. I told him that we would look for the tracks in the morning, but his coach was sitting on gravel, so I knew where they wouldn't find any Mostly, I wanted to take his mind off of it. We went
through the motions the next morning, and I was right. We weren't going to find any tracks in the gravel. And Phil told me he had decided that it was a prank by Hollywood film students. He was guessing. So these guys drove six hours, put on costumes at nearly midnight, hung out for hours, and filmed our coach and went back to Hollywood. I asked, does that make sense. He looked at me with fear in his eyes, and he said, it's what I have to believe or I'll go crazy.
I told him that I understood that, but pointed out that they didn't hurt him, they only scared him. I asked around the camp to see if anyone else had seen or heard anything strange, and many of our fellow campers were up by their fires at that time, and none of them heard a thing. Plus, the gates are locked at ten PM. A week later, Phil pulled up stakes and he left. Another week after that, I woke up at two am to the sound of a loud bang on the
side of my coach. I sat up and grabbed my twelve gates just before another loud bang rocked my forty foot fifth wheeler. I could see a shadow through my curtain, and I realized that this thing had to be eight feet tall for me to see its head. I reached to open the curtain, but then I pulled it back when I remembered what Phil said about the wolf thing, trying to mentally get him to go outside. Instead, I yelled, I'm not Phil, and I racked my shotgun the universal sound forget lost
or get dead. Whoever or whatever was out there evidently got the message. It ran through the gravel to the fence, up the hill to the other side. The next morning, I found giant handprints in the dust on the side of my coach that were eleven feet up. There were scuffle marks in the dirt on the hill, and since then dog Man has been confirmed on that part of the river. I noticed later that people quit walking around the park after dark. I never told a soul, and I'm pretty sure Phil
didn't either. Now, look, they're real. I've seen donkey kills. While donkey kills in the desert, They're not the cute and fuzzy creature portrayed in some be movies. They're ugly and vicious looking. And that's the end of his email, And that sometimes I couldn't tell in this story whether he was dealing with bigfoot or dog man. But this guy knows what's going on. I think in the first story, when he was at his barn, it could be he first thought it was a dog man, but then reconsidered
and figured it was a bigfoot. But his buddy then that he knew from the Vietnam War. This guy Phil absolutely says he saw something. Why would he make that up? I don't know. I don't some of these stories. I'm not sure what to make of them, but I do know they are great stories. And this was a good story. This was a good story. Okay, here's a story from the Northeast. The writer doesn't say to use their name or not, so I won't. I grew up in
southern Maryland, surrounded by cornfields and forest. It's kind of place where a kid's fun is instigated by their mother kicking them out of the house until dark. We spent a lot of time in the woods. When we went out for a walk at night, the moon was our only light. Now, granted, we lived on the Chestpeake Bay, so we had a lot of light bouncing off the water. My family's beach house was only a few miles from the Point Lookout Lighthouse, which was once a military hospital turned poa camp.
During the War of eighteen twelve. One of those major television ghost hunting shows did an episode from there once. Now ours was an eerie play, so it was not uncommon for us to have a creepy feeling or to have strange things happen when we were in the back part of our property. Our lights were always flickering, even when a new bulb was just put in, and we'd see dark figures in the back near the creek. We always stayed close to the house, or we went out front to the beach and we
avoided the back where the creek was after dark. Now, I've always had experiences with the ghosts and demons and cryptids. There was a house of a buddy of mine where strange things would happen to me at night. I learned that his brother had drawn a pentagram on his bedroom floor with his own blood. Sometimes I would feel someone sit down on the bed beside me when no one was there, or between three and four am, I would feel the
sensation of someone's wiping their hand across me. While I slept under the covers. At another friend's house, we would often see dark figures. One was a tall man in black dress clothes wearing a top hat. Once, when I was in the basement, I saw a dark figure with a body like a spider and a face of a human but completely dark. I thought it was going to attack me, but then it suddenly withdrew back into the shadows.
When we would ride our bikes along the path by the marsh, we always had the feeling that someone was watching us, in the sensation that something was telling us to get out of there. But there was one time in particular that still has me a little biffle. I'm twenty four years old now and I live in Washington, d C. My parents divorced when I was younger, and my dad moved to San Antonio. I only got to travel out there to see them twice a year, so we would try to pack
everything into those short week long stays. When I was fifteen, we went to visit a friend of my step mom's who had a ranch about two hours from the border. It was near a town that was so tiny that they had a one room school house with a bus that was actually an old limousine. The ranch was located down a seldomly traveled road in a small valley that
wasn't much bigger than a ravine. The house was actually a double wide trailer with a shipping container on the side, and the water was a five hundred gallon tank that had to be brought in. The closest neighbor was a mile away, and we were there for three days. The first two days were not bad. Everything was quiet that first night. The second day, my father and I decided we'd hunt some boar and ride the ATVs around the place.
There were paths all over the woods there, and my stepmom's friend pointed us in the right direction and we had it out. My father was not a hunter. He was being loud, so I knew nothing was going to come our way. He couldn't help himself. He was an it guy with a pinstriped shirts and the business pants hiked up to his rib cage. It didn't matter though. We were having father son time, and that was all that I cared about. While Dad rambled on, I began to get an
aery feeling like I was being watched. I looked all down the trails, hoping to spot a deer or some other animal watching us, but I didn't see anything. At dark, we gave up and headed back to the house to eat, and after supper we built the fire outside. The adults were all talking, but I was staring at the fire and realizing that I didn't have anything in common with them. Sometimes I'd look up and the stars and mentally compare the sky to how it looked back home on the beach. Now.
I don't know how long I sat there before an eerie feeling of being watched started coming over me again. I started scanning the woodline. Then just beyond the fire, looking back at me was a pair of eyes, and it felt like our eyes connected. Something was telling me not to make any sudden moves, not to move at all. Mentally, I was running through the possibilities of what I was looking at. Was it someone who had crossed the border to rob us? There was a lot of that going on at
that time. It wasn't a headlamp. It would have produced a lot more light as close as it was. But while I watched, I was blindly searching for my flashlight and phone without moving too much, and finally had to accept that I had left both in the house. But sometime had gone by, so I felt safe enough to get up and grab the flashlight. Unfortunately, when I came back out, those eyes were gone. I sat back down and thought about what I had looked at. The color was sort of
orangeish red. If it had been headlamps, it would have been two people who were up in a tree because it was eight feet off the ground, and they almost would have had to have their heads right next to each other. Eventually, the fire died down and we all went inside. We got ready for bed and played a few hands of Texas, Hold Them and Blackjack before turning in. I had asked my dad to sleep in the other bed in my room the night before and to keep a gun with him. There
had been a lot of break INDs down there by border jumpers. An older couple was even held hostage and killed, and I was terrified that someone would try to break my windows and kill me. At three am, my stepmom came to the door and started yelling for my dad to wake up. Someone was making a lot of noise outside her window. He got up and loaded his gun and went to check the windows and doors. I assume he didn't see anything, because he went back to bed, and I didn't hear anything
else from him the rest of the night. Of course, I couldn't sleep now, and I lay there staring out the window, certain that something was going to happen, And finally I began to feel drowsy. But just before my eyes closed, I heard what sounded like the boards creaking on the front porch that was to the right of my window. The footsteps moved across the porch, and the silhouette of an extraordinarily large human being covered the shades. When I got to the window, it stopped and turned, and I saw
those reddish orange eyes again. I couldn't make out any detail because the blinds were opaque to obliterate its features, but those eyes were clearly visible. It did a motion as if it was trying to look in on either side of the blinds, and then it moved on. I was wide awake now it would be quite some time before I would manage to fall asleep. When we all got up the next morning, everyone went outside to look around. There were crushed pots and the grill was open with grates lying on the ground.
It looked like someone had dug through it and had stepped on the pots in the process. The adults all blamed border jumpers for the mess, but I kept wondering why they hadn't taken the pots and pans that were out there, or why hadn't they tried to steal the four wheeler. We hadn't locked the shed, and there was a lot of other things in there as well, none of it was touched. And why would they take the time to bend up and break and crush the pots when they could have taken them to use
or sell. Later that day, when we saw the Border patrol drop by, the adults pointed and nodded knowingly. I wasn't so easily convinced. I still think that it was a bigfoot that stepped up on the porch that night, and I think it was a bigfoot watching us by the fire earlier that night, And it was a bigfoot that watched my father and me in the woods that day, Now that I think about it, that would have been
the veritable paradise for one. With all the boars and deer and farm pond up the road, not to mention all the trees for covered, a bigfoot could live a pretty lavish lifestyle right there. Well, that's a good story. You never you saw eyes, but you never really saw the creature. I think you said you saw a silhouet. That's kind of interesting. Austin, Texas, down in close to the border, you know, there's a lot of people coming across the border. Now. I don't know if they're
coming across there, but wonder if Bigfoot's given them any trouble. This was a good story. I really appreciate the writer and thank you for sending it. All Right, that wasn't a long podcast. It's my first podcast that I've recorded since Thanksgiving, and I've been so busy. You guys have heard this story over and over. But I'm done with my work and I'm going
to be semi full time podcasting for the next few months. So you can expect the upload schedule to pick up steam, the podcast to get longer. Hear more Steve Lily on the Steve Lily channels. I'm writing one of those. I'm actually about to finish one. Get it recorded, get it up soon. I've got audio books. I'm working one that I want to get out. For the very few people who've waited for me to get back into
this, I'm here. I'm back into it full time. Not full time, but pretty much full time, and this podcast would be longer, but through the last six months, I have spent so much time in this office working on other projects that are part of my regular business that I haven't spent much time with my wife. So I'm going to cut this podcast short.
It's about noon on Friday. I'm going to go in there and see if she wants to go to dinner and maybe to a matinee this afternoon, and her and I just spend the rest of the day and evening together, and then this weekend, I'll be recording podcasts all weekend, so I hope to
get several podcasts up over the next week or so. And I've also got a lot of fun things planned, different formats, different ways to present stories that have been crossing and running through my mind as working on this other stuff that I think should be fun. They're going to take a little time, but I got to figure out how to do them quicker. But it should be add a little spice to everything for me, so I'm excited about that. Anyway, I've got some good stuff coming. And for those of you
who stuck around the audience who's stuck around, I really appreciate you. All Right, that's enough talking. I'll see you guys on the next video. Thanks.