Here's a story from Dale, or an email from Dale with the story in it. Here's what Dale writes. I watch your videos and I decided to share my own. It was the fall of nineteen seventy three. I lived in a small town called Floyd, Arkansas. There was a group of guys I hung around with and we hunted and fished and camped, and we rode dirt bikes together. And we did this the whole time we were growing up. We had a game that we played on our dirt bikes, an advanced
version of follow the Leader. And one day in the late summer, I was the leader. I went up into that area that was about as remote as any area around. As I topped the climb on White Rock Mountain, I discovered an old town. Were old ruins of several buildings, even the false front of an old saloon with one old swinging door still hanging on the rusty inges. The other guys caught up with me, and we were all
staring in disbelief. We couldn't believe what we had found. We found one old cabin that was well preserved and decided that it would be cool to fix it up use it for deer camp and we spent the next couple of weeks hauling building materials up the side of the steep slopes, and when deer season finally rolled around, all six of us had our gear loaded on our bikes
and headed up the mountain to our new camp. We arrived at the old cabin a few hours before dark, and we busied ourselves gathering firewood for the old fireplace. We spent the rest of the night playing poker and telling lies about our hunting skills. Around midnight, all the guys were asleep in their sleeping bags on the floor in front of the fireplace, except me and my buddy Big We were the oldest of the group, and we quietly talked about
where we would position the rest of the guys at daylight. Around one am, Big Steve told me that he was going to get some sleep. I told him I was right behind him. After I threw a couple of more pieces of wood on the fire, Steve had begun snoring. As I stared at the flames and enjoyed the feeling of being there with my best friends on this hunt. All of a sudden, all hell broke loose. It sounded
like the old cabin was going to fall down around us. It sounded like boulders were hitting the walls in the roof, and the whole cabin started shaking. Steve leaped up out of his bag and grabbed a shotgun off the wall pigs. I already had my Marlin lever action in my hand and my big spotlight in the other. Big Steve was scared, and he asked me what the hell was going on. We positioned ourselves in front of the door and we pulled the door open and turned on the big light. The whole cabin
was surrounded by a ring of huge red eyes. All of them looked like they were ten feet off the ground. I slammed the door shut and yelled at Steve to get everyone up and get their gear packed while I guarded the door. And after everyone was ready, one of the guys volunteered to strap the gear on the bikes and start all the bikes while the rest of us stood with our rifles and shotguns pointed at the red eyes that surrounded us.
I told them that this is what we're gonna do, and on my count, everyone but Big Steve and I are going to open fire with everything you have and then jump on your bikes and haul ass out of here, Steve and I'll cover you as long as we can. As the bikes roared down the dark path, Big Steve and I emptied our weapons into the dark and as soon as we ran out of Ammo, we jumped on our bikes and
we flew down the path after the rest of the guys. We never went back there, and we never told anyone what happened to us on that mountain that night. We didn't even know what to call him. The Boggy Creek Monster came out shortly after that. All we knew was that we had been run off the mountain by monsters. Who was going to believe a bunch of high school boys with a story like that? Very good story, Dale, I loved it. Thanks for sending it, man. I hope this is
true because whoo, what a memory and what an adventure. I appreciate the story, buddy. Thanks. Let's see, this man doesn't say whether to use his name, so I won't, But here's what he writes. This is pretty cool. Back in the nineteen seventies and eighties here in East Texas, bigfoot stories were just that. There were stories, and they always took place in the Pacific Northwest. There was no way we could expect to see one here or even look for signs of them. When we did see things
that we could explain, Bigfoot was the last thing on our mind. I've walked uncountable miles through the woods. My company owned over five thousand acres of land in the Natchez River bottom. It was always flooded in the winter, and it had to be cruised before the end of the year. We'd always wait as long as we could for the river to crawl back into its banks, but it never did. One day, our supervisor said that he would cruise it if someone would volunteer to go with him. That meant waiting in
water that would likely be chess deep. Like a fool, I said I would go. We mapped out our plan when we got there before heading out in the water that was already knee deep. We crossed sloughs that were necked deep at times, and by the time we got within a quarter a mile of our turnaround point, the water was only knee deep. Again. There were no trees in the huge flat except for some small tupelo gum trees and bottom whellows. We were looking for marketable sized trees to measure. At the
spot that we were to turn north. We turned around and were surveying our surroundings when something roared at us. Now I've heard lions at the zoo, but nothing living that I knew of had a roar that loud. It was like a train horn if you were standing right next to it. Whatever this was, it lasted a good three or four seconds before tapering off for another two seconds more. I was standing behind my supervisor, so I got a good view of the hair on the back of his neck, and it was
standing straight up. You could have gone all day without doing that, he said, in a quiet voice that made me think he might be struggling to keep his composure, and then he added, if that wasn't you, I'd suggest you get your knife out and get it open. We didn't waste any time getting out of there. Surrounded by hundreds of yards of knee deep water. You'd have thought that we'd have seen something, but we never did. We didn't hear anything else either. We worked our way through half a mile
of water without stopping. We were working our way west to get back to the road. Halfway there, a six foot long white oak that was six inches in diameter hit the ground between us. At the time, we were in too much of a hurry to give it any real fault. And it wasn't until years later when I heard stories of bigfoot throwing logs and limbs and rocks at people that I looked back and I remembered the one detail that stood out for me. That tree was broke off at both ends. We never
finished cruising that section. Management found a way for us to fill our quota elsewhere. I don't know what was out there screaming at us or throwing trees at us, but I have my ideas. You'll have to decide for yourself. We had a thirty five hundred acre company hunting club in that same river bottom. To the west of that place, My wife and my twelve year old son were in deer stands on a pipeline once when my son saw something
huge standing on the edge of the pipeline. He pointed it out to his mom and they watched it as it crouched low to the ground and crossed the pipeline. It was on the other side and it stood upright again, and then it walked into the woods. Then I had a friend whose wife had a stand over the hill from where my wife and son had their encounter. A few weeks before that, she claimed she saw a bear. It was
the last time that she came out there hunting. I also know of an older man who had a stand in that same area, and he saw something once that he never talked about whatever it was, though it ended his deer hunting. He would come out to camp with us, but he would never leave the campsite. In the nineteen ninety s, at the same hunting club, I would set trotlines in the slews and backwaters during the winter months. The bottoms, of course, were flooded and the water was cold enough to
use soap as bait. It was February and the temperature was dropping into the twenties at night, and if I caught a mud cat, i'd throw it in the live well on my boat and use it to bait my lines. I generally left the boat sitting in the water, but something started rating it for the mud cats. I was sure it was raccoons, so I figured i'd keep them out by placing a couple of bricks on the lid at night, but that didn't work. Each day, I'd find the bricks in the
bottom of the boat, and the live bait would be gone. Raccoons are crafty devils, but I still doubt that they were the culprits. I figured the best way to keep them out was to bring a cinder block down and put it on the lid. That day, I caught some more mud cats and I placed them in the live well and I set the cinder block on top. Problem solved, I thought, But the next day the cinder block was sitting in the middle of the road. I was baffled by what could
have done that, so I began to investigate. And that was when I found muddy, human looking tracks in my boat. I didn't look at them and say to myself, man, maybe these are bigfoot tracks. They looked like very large human tracks, and I figured maybe they belonged to someone living off the land. That made perfect sense to me until I ran my boat across that flooded flat and I saw the tracks coming out of the water over
the next ridge and back into the water. Now that got my attention, and I stopped running the trot lines and I started going around the ridges and following the tracks. I followed them until whoever or whatever this was, swam the river and went up the bank on the opposite side. Man. I thought that must be one crazy man to be swimming in this cold water. I had to reconcile it some way. I didn't want to ruin my fishing. In twenty and eighteen, I went to a bigfoot seminar that featured some
famous keynote speakers. Bobo and Cliff from Finding Bigfoot might have been two of them. There was another speaker there who interested me more. He talked about having similar encounters at his fish camp on the Sabine River. I ask him point blank what the footprints look like, and to my surprise, he described
them as being very human like, but much bigger. Now I may never have seen a bigfoot, but the things I have seen and heard in East Texas has convinced me that they exist and that they live in Southeast Texas. Sometimes it isn't what we see in the woods that matters. I've hunted all my life. I'll probably keep right on hunting until I'm too old and crippled to get myself out there. To be honest, I have never seen anything that I couldn't explain. I can't say the same for the things I've heard.
There are always going to be dead trees that fall over, And then there are the smaller critters that make noises outside of their own chatter. Squirrels drop nuts, and raccoons and rabbits scurry around and make scratching sounds. Even deer can make a lot of noises. I know that every hunter knows that, and anyone who knows anything about the woods knows what silence means. Usually that means a predator is nearby. It could be any kind of predator,
depending on where you are. In my neck of the woods, it means bears. So I can explain most of the sounds I hear when I'm sitting twenty five feet up a tree in my deer stand. The first time I began to think there might be something out there in the woods that I didn't know about was years ago, during a shotgun season. It was one of those frosty late fall mornings when every step I took walking out to my stand was accompanied by the crunch of frozen grass and sticks and acorn shells and leaves.
It was take a step and wait all the way in. Stalking in is generally the best policy but when there's frost on the ground, it always sounds twice as loud, no matter how nimble footage you try to be. I got up in my stand just as the sun was breaking over the horizon, and I took a long, deep breath of cool air. There's nothing quite like being alone in the woods. At least I thought I was alone.
I was looking out over a meadow, waiting for that trophy book that I knew was going to step out and give me a perfect shot, when I happened to notice this tree in the woods on the other side that looked like it was rocking back and forth. It was a tall tree, and I couldn't swear to it, but judging by its height, I'm guessing it must have had at least a little girth to it. But that thing was rocking back and forth like it was nothing more than a sapling. And then
I heard it crack. And there's a sound that a dead tree makes when it snaps. It's different from a healthy, live tree. This wasn't that sound. The tree I watched sway back and forth, then topple over like it was nothing was green and alive. I had a lot of questions running through my mind at that moment. I've since come up with a lot of answers. Time does things to our memories. You forget things, you remember
things wrong. Sometimes you add things that weren't there. And the farther you move from that moment, the more likely your memory is to be unreliable. And this was a good thirty years ago. So I can't say, or I won't say, what pushed that tree. Over All I know is it left me with a lot of questions. A year later, I was sitting in that same stand when I heard a loud grunt from somewhere below me that
I also couldn't explain. It wasn't a deer snorting or any other animal that I knew For one thing, it sounded larger than anything I'd ever heard before. I wriggled around in my stand and tried to see as far around the tree as possible from both sides. I was limited on how far I could see, but I still managed to look quite a ways around. There was nothing out of the ordinary that I could see. But it was at that
moment that I recognized a dead silence that comes with a predator's presence. Not even the bugs were chirping that was followed by footsteps through the leaf matter that littered the forest floor. I could tell it was on two feet, so I immediately thought that maybe another hunter was coming through. That didn't make sense because I was on my uncle's property and I knew darn good and well that I was the only person who had permission to be there, and if it
was another hunter, he was trespassing. So I called out, hey, you down there, you got permission to be out here. I didn't get an answer, and the footsteps stopped. Hey, I yelled again. Still, I didn't get a reply. I said as quiet and as still as I could for several long minutes, waiting for someone to acknowledge me, and hoping it was my uncle. After what must have been five minutes or more, I heard the footsteps again. They were moving away from me now,
and I figured whoever it was they must have thought they'd been caught. They decided to move out and avoid a confrontation. I settled back into watching the meadow and had almost forgotten about that person when three distinct knocks that I recognized as being wood on wood echoed through the woods from somewhere behind me. What the hell, I mumble to myself as I swiveled around and tried to get a look in the direction of those knocks. What kind of game was this
guy playing with me? Anyway? But before I could even finish the thought, another distinct set of knocks came from the other side of the meadow, and I spun my head around so fast it almost made me dizzy, and for a minute I expected to look over at a tree line across the way and see a horde of marauders pouring out. Another round of knocks from my side of the meadow had me spinning around again, and then another, and
then another, and this went on for a good half hour. I don't know if it was because I couldn't identify who or what was doing it, or if it was something else altogether. I only know that I began to feel sick right about then. Things quieted down a bit, and I stayed up in the stand for a while to get a grip on myself before climbing down and packing up and heading out. I didn't finish hunting that day, and I never hunted that spot again. Years later, I was squirrel hunting
on another fall day. It was earlier in the year, and it was a lot warmer. Squirrel hunting hadn't been on my agenda that morning when I got up, but I managed to get done with all my honey dews a little early, and it was such a pretty day I couldn't help myself. The sun was already beginning to set in the west when I began to feel like someone was watching me. I stopped at my tracks, and I felt the skin on the back of my neck crawl and prickle, and my heart
began to beat a little faster from the increased adrenaline flow. I looked around me, scanning closely to see if maybe a deer had snuck up on me and was checking me out, or maybe a coyote or some other critter. Late afternoon shadows cut deep into the foliage, forming a million pockets for curious eyes to look out from, and I couldn't see anything unusual, so after a minute, I started walking again. This time I heard footsteps that didn't
belong to me. They were so nearly perfectly timed to my own steps that at first I thought it was an echo. But there was always one more step that I hadn't taken. When I stopped, I listened carefully. I was able to pinpoint the sound as coming from somewhere to my left, and I stopped and I scanned the forest. The night was moving in and the shadows were getting darker, and the undergrowth was too dense to make out anything. I decided that it would be a good idea not to take my time.
I didn't want to run and trigger any kind of predator instinct, but I didn't want to lose any of the quickly fading daylight either, and I cursed my for not grabbing a flashlight or a headlamp before I left the house. The steps continued, with me speeding up as I sped up, slowing down as I slowed down. Now, I looked at my watch, and I calculated that I had maybe fifteen minutes of daylight left if I hurried, and I'd be at the edge of the pasture leading to the house in ten
minutes. I just needed to keep calm and keep walking. When I started seeing bits and pieces of the field between the woods and my house, I began to feel easier. I even slowed my pace. I figured if whatever was following me had not attacked me yet, it wasn't going to and I stepped into what was left of that daylight with a huge sigh of relief, and I glanced one time over my shoulder, ten feet from the tree line, and at that moment I was hit by a loud scream that radiated through
me like a shock wave. Logic and reason left me as I broke into a dead run across that field. I don't even remember stopping to open the gate to the fence that surrounded the house. Maybe I jumped over it, I don't know. I took the steps up into the porch too at a time and slammed so hard into the front door that I thought I cracked the glass in the windowpane. I had shut the door, and I was leaning hard against it, trying to catch my breath when I looked down at my
dog. And maybe it was my imagination, and maybe I was projecting my own emotions on that dog. I'll never know for sure, but when he looked up at me, I was certain that he was as scared as I was. Looking back, it may have been a panther, the biggest damn panther that ever walked on two feet. But it might have been, or it could have been some other animal that naturally lives in those woods. I never saw anything to indicate one way or the other. There's a reason God
gave us five senses. If we had to rely solely on our eyesight, we might already be extinct as a species. I've hunted a million times on that land since that day, and I've never had another issue. I've heard tree knocks and tree falls, and occasional footsteps that sound by pedal and an occasional loud huff. And when I do, I quietly leave the woods and let whatever is out there do whatever it does. I don't need to see it. I don't think I want to, all right, I think that's
gonna wind this podcast up. Thank you for listening. A little bit of announcement. After this podcast releases, I am going to be gone for about a week, and here's what I'm doing. I've got to go get some work done on my truck tomorrow, which is Tuesday. I don't know when I'm going to post this, but it's Tuesday. I'm actually going out of
town to get it done. I'll be back Wednesday. At that point, I'm shutting my phone off, I'm getting off the internet, and i'm going to finish the next two chapters of Steve Lilly, and then I'm going to record finish recording Blood Eagle, so you guys will shut the hell up and quit asking me where is Steve. I'm joking. I'm just joking with y'all. I feel so so lucky that y'all like those stories and you like Da Roberts books. Da is such a good writer, So I'm going to work
on that. So you're I can only do one thing at a time, so you're gonna have to do without a podcast for about a week before I get one or two or all those things done. In the week, I'm kind of taking a hiatus from the podcast and doing these emails that people send in. So in the next couple of weeks, I can't project a day because I don't know how long it's going to take me to get all that done. There's a lot of work. Recording audio books takes a lot of
time. I mean, they're hard to read because you're talking NonStop for like an hour or two hours at a time, and then if the chapter is forty five minutes or an hour, it takes about three hours to edit that chapter to get it right, get the sound right, get all my screw ups out of it. So they take a long time. I get about three or four chapters done a day on a good day. I think that Blood Ego book may have twenty eight chapters. So you do the math.
But that's what I'm doing. I want to let you know I may take a break and just throw up a single story here and there, because I love doing these email stories. They're the best. They're just the best, and I love it when people send these in. And I've made a promise to you and I'm going to try to get to all of them. And that's what I'm doing. So I thought i'd make that announcement. That's only two and a half minutes to do that. Usually it would take me like
eight. All Right, thank y'all for watching, and we'll see you soon on the Dixiecrypted podcast. I appreciate you. See you on the next one.