I had my first bigfoot counter back in February of nineteen ninety eight in Golden Dale, Washington. It happened on a trip with my father and my uncle. A little bit about my family, and you need to understand, is that they don't camp like everyone else. None of them own a tent or a trailer. We prefer throwing a mattress in the bed of a truck or sleeping up front along the bench seats of an F two fifty pickup truck. I'm the youngest and I usually got the back seat. On this day,
there was enough daylight to make two walks through the woods. My uncle dropped me and my father off at a place that we call the lake beds. The plan was for my uncle to pick us up at the road down below the Rock Bluff, which is twenty minutes away on foot, and I told my father I'd be walking west down the slopes while he took off to the east. I noticed the birds and the light breeze blowing through the trees.
There was a deer trail, and I was looking at fresh tracks, and at one point I glanced behind me because I thought I heard my father, but there was no one there. So I kept walking down toward the same road where my uncle had picked me up on previous hikes. I heard a deer close by. I figured it was a deer, judging by the light weight sound of its hoofs hitting the ground. I didn't understand what had spooked it. The wind was at my back, and then I realized the birds
and the chipmunks weren't flying around or singing or making any noise. My uncle told me that if it ever got quiet to the point of seeming odd, just head straight down the road and don't get distracted by anything. So I focused, and I walked toward the edge of the bluff, where I could look down and see my uncle in the distance, sitting on a tailgate,
nervously swinging his legs. He seemed agitated. Hurry up, my uncle yelled, there's something out here besides us. Yeah, I yelled back the rocky slope, causing my voice to echo, it's dead, silent, like you said. I had no clue what was actually happening. I carefully made my way down the hill, and as I closed the distance between my uncle and I waiting in the truck, he suddenly commanded me to run well, I reached the passenger door and I opened it, and I flung myself across the
seat, and my uncle hit the locks. Look behind you, up on that bluff, he said. I looked out that window, and I scanned the hillside, and I spotted the largest manlike being I'd ever seen in my life. Its sheer size was jaw dropping. There was an animal carcass of some kinds slung over its shoulder. We need to get to your dad, my uncle said. He threw the truck into gear, and he sped away. I noticed the way my uncle had phrased it as get to your dad,
as if somehow this thing might have already trapped my father. It was walking down from the top of the bluff and was almost to the road, and in less than a minute it must have closed a hundred yards, and it stood there looking at us, before continuing down the slope. A few minutes later, to our relief, we saw my dad standing just ahead of us. My uncle slowed the truck down to a crawl, and my Dad took a flying leap into the truck bed. Go go go, he said,
as my uncle mastic accelerator to the floor. Did you guys see that thing, yelled my father through the back window, as the rush of air blew off his prize baseball cap. There was no going back for it, though. We pulled into the driveway of my uncle's place, and that night, all of us there in the truck bed, staring up at the stars and munching on snacks and sharing a six pack. I think I'm going to invest in a camper, said my father to no one in particular. It
was my uncle who started laughing first. All right, all right, welcome to another podcast. It's been a few days, and I'm glad to be back reading these stories because I love doing this. Got four stories in this podcast, and I hope you guys enjoy it. I just wanted to say thanks for clicking on the video. Now let's jump into these stories. Let's do this all right, here we go. My wife and I have been
hunting together for twenty years. It's tradition for us to leave our house in Shelby County around one am on Sunday morning and dry three hours to her family's property in Fayette County, Alabama, and then take a nap in the truck until right before daylight, and then we walk out to our stands. That's how we've always done it. Like I said, it's a tradition. On January twenty seven, twenty nineteen, it was different. When we pulled up to the gate at four am, it was noticeably silent. In the pre
dawn hours of winter. It's always quiet as part of the joy of honting. The gentle piece of nature surrounds you and it seeps into your bones and sort of fills your soul with something I can't quite explain. It's a knowledge or a wisdom that you're walking the path of generations beyond memory. During that time, you might hear the earliest bird chirp as it catches that proverbial worm.
A late hunting owl might hoot it's good night to the world. A rabbit might shuffle under the protection of a briar patch, or a squirrel might getter along a tree branch. That's to say that it's quiet, but it is silent. That morning, it was silent. We pulled through the gate and cracked the windows and turned off the truck. Within a few seconds, the whole cab was filled with an odor that could have peeled the paint off
an outhouse. It was a kind of smell that made you ask yourself if you wanted to breathe it through your nostrils and endure the smell, or open your mouth and wrist tasting it. Oh, man, that's a good line. That is a good line, good writing. My wife wrinkled up her nose and looked at me in uttered disgust before asking, did you do that? Oh my god, no, I exclaimed, horrified at the possibility that my body, or any human body for that manner, could create a smell
that nauseating. After a short discussion on the possible origins of the odor, we decided to head on out to our stands. Were looking forward to having a good day, and the land that we were hunting was full of wildlife, and we each usually harvested two deer there every year, so we were both a bit surprised to learn that neither one of us had seen a thing.
When we met back at camp that night, while we were discussing our lack of luck and enjoying a hot meal of my wife's homemade stew by the camp fire, that same putrid smell washed over us again and hung around for about ten minutes before it finally dissipated, and once it was gone, we got our taste buds back into order, and we finished our stew and climbed into the camper shelf for a good night sleep. The next morning, my wife went straight to her stand, but I decided to wander the property to
see if I could figure out where that horrendous smell was coming from. The first thing I noticed was that small trees were down across every walking trail I went down. After by an hour of wandering through those paths and stepping over trees, I happened to look up at a limb that was hanging seven feet or so off the ground, and I saw a long clump of black horse hair dangling from it. I believe in bigfoot. I think is real, so it didn't take much for me to put two and two together and realize
the situation we were in. I texted my wife to meet me back at the truck right away, and when she got there, I showed her the hair and I told her what I thought. She's not a believer. She laughed and poked fun at me, but I wasn't having that. But in the end I won. We left that morning and we didn't go back there for six months. Since then, I have sent that hair to Auburn University to get it tested. Meanwhile, I leave offerings of fruit and vegetables when
we arrived to hunt, and again before we leave the property. We haven't had anything than usual happen to us since that night. Now I'm hoping the offerings will let whatever it is out there know that we mean it no harm. On July first, two eleven, my life changed forever. I've been an avid deer hunter my whole life. I've seen and heard strange things in the woods before. When I was twelve, I came face to face with a black panther. My only regret was that I didn't have a clear shot
at it. The first time I ever heard of fox mark. It scared the hell out of me, and it was years before I knew what made that awful sound. But like all the other strange things I've seen and heard before that fateful day, it could be explained. But this day changed me. At the time, I was in a loveless marriage. The only piece I found was in the time I spent alone in the wood. During April of that year, an E five tornado destroyed the town of Smithville, Mississippi,
along with almost all of my friends and neighbors. I volunteered to help with the cleanup. While I was there, I ran into a girl i'd known in high school. She was in an abusive marriage and we had a common ground, so we began to meet and talk and about July first. We had bonded over our mutual bad marriages. That day, I was driving home from the bank in Tupelo, where I had taken out the money to
make my house payment, when I got a call from her. She told me that she and her husband had gotten into another bad fight and that she wanted to talk. It was a holiday weekend and I had plans to go hang deer stands, but she begged me to go with her, so I said, okay, I'll be there. Where I hunt is two miles deep into the land that is owned by a timber company. It's a long,
slow drive down the logging road to it to my spot. I parked my truck at an old logging camp and we sat there with the air conditioner running, and we talked for a while. It was a hot day in July and Tremont, Mississippi. We were parked in side of an old fire tower. It's all hills and hollers, inhabited by rattlesnakes and ticks. And I could tell that she really didn't want to follow me through that mess, so
I suggested that we sit on the tailgate and talk some more. I reached in my cooler and I got us both a beer, and I turned on the radio, and well, one thing led to another, and pretty soon we were tangled up in each other's arms in the bed of my truck. A little later we were lying there, back to back. She was talking and I was listening, or maybe I was just staring. There wasn't much to see the was there thick the leaves and underbrush made seeing past the perimeter
of the clearing impossible. And then it up down. It was seven feet tall, and it didn't look anything like the sasquatch you see on TV. It wasn't built like an NFL lineman. It was more like a basketball player. And it was tall, and it was muscular, and it was covered in long, black, shiny hair, with a white patch on its stomach that I'll never forget. I couldn't tell you what its teeth were like because it had its mouth closed but its eyes and face looked very human. It
stood there staring at me as if it were in deep thought. All I could do was stare back, and I was thinking we needed a plan to get out of there. About that time, the girl I was with poked me in the back with her elbow and she said, are you listening to me? She must have turned around then, because then she let out a blood curdling scream that told me that she'd seen what I was seeing. We have to go, I said, and we climbed out of the back of
the truck and into the cab as fast as we could. I don't think I've ever taken that old logging road that fast before. I kept checking the rear view mirror to make sure it wasn't following us out on the public road. We stopped, and we were both crying by then. I guess it was an emotional letdown after being so scared. She noticed that she'd left her shoes behind, and I was thinking about the summit dare stand that I'd left
on the ground by where we'd parked. No parashoes or even a drestand was worth driving back into that spot, as far as I was concerned, so I told her, no, we're not going back for your shoes. We drove all the way back to Fulton, where we stopped to get a coke before I realized I had also lost my wallet. It must have fallen out of my pocket and it still had my house payment money in it. It
was two thousand dollars. We had to go back Navis. I had my Taurus Judge Revolver with me, and I loaded it with forty five long code m O. The ground was tore up where we had left so quick. I looked around for my deer stand in my wallet, and she was searching for her shoes. Now. I couldn't find my wallet anywhere, and when I picked up the deer stand and tossed it into the back of my truck,
it landed with a big bang. For whatever reason, I glanced up then and I saw one of her shoes stuck in the crook of a tree ten feet off the ground, and I started tossing rocks and sticks at it to try to knock it out. It was unnatural how quiet the woods were. I noticed that about the time I managed to unwedge the shoe, the loudest, most menacing growl I've ever heard in my life came from the holler below us. I looked over and I saw a forty foot tall pine tree
swaying back and forth as if it were being pushed. It was time to leave again. Now I'm no good at guessing wade, but I'd say that thing must have weighed at least three hundred to five hundred pounds, and apart from that white square patch on its stomach, it was as dark black as a mink. I said its face looked human, but it was an ugly human. I couldn't believe how well groomed its hair was. It didn't have an odor, and it approached us in total silence. If I hadn't seen
it, I would have never believed in Bigfoot. I didn't until that day. That e F five that hit smith Fille was a little south of where we were that day. It cut a mile wide path that probably dislocated a lot of animals. I guess that Bigfoot was one of them, and these days I never go into the woods without my shotgun. Fortunately that day, I found my wallet in the floorboard of my truck when we got back to town. But we never did find her other ship. Something happened to me
that has always haunted me. I've never told anyone except my father and my best friend. Neither one of them believed me. During the nineteen seventies and eighties, my dad was a land developer in East Texas around Toledo ben and sam Rayburn Reservoir. He would buy lakeside lots of land and get a surveyor to break it down, and then he'd put in roads and eat sell the
lots. He developed several campgrounds and neighborhoods that way, and I grew up in a small town in deep East Texas around the Sabine and Angelina National Forest above the Big Thicket. Every now and then Dad would go see the surveyor to discuss the business, and sometimes he would take me with him. I thought I would enjoy the ride. And the surveyor had a son that I could play with. His name was Tommy James, and we called him TJ.
For short. He was nine and I was eleven. He didn't go to my school, but he was fun to play with because he was a simple kind of country kid, and we would shoot bb guns and we'd whittle sticks and get dirty playing in the dirt. Pile with his talk of trucks. It was while we were playing in a dirt pile one day when TJ slowly looked up at me and he said, there's a Chebacca man that lives down that trail right there. He pointed to a thin trail in the back
left corner of his backyard. You want to go see it, he asked. Chewbacca lives back there? I asked, yep, he's a Chewbacca man. TJ assured me. I remember laughing and saying, okay, let's go see Chebacca man. We started down the little path with me convinced that we were playing make believe, and I was surprised how far TJ was taking. It seemed like we walked for a long time before we came to a huge dead fall across the trail. It looked like a tree had fallen down and
taken a lot of trees with it. There were empty cracker jack boxes with Little Debbie snackcake rappers strown on the ground in front of it, and I guess this is where TJ came to eat as snacks. TJ looked around and he said, well this is it. I'll call him. He let out a long howl. I was still convinced that this was just a game that we were playing, so I didn't expect to see anything. I figured this
was his imagination and overdrive. But when he let out another long howl, I began to hear the sound of walking and cracking that was coming in our direction. TJ, what is that, I asked, as the fog of make believe was beginning to clear. Well, it's the Chewbacca man, he told me. I took a step back as TJ faced the dead fall and him began to speak in a coaxing tone. Come, come on, come
on. He was beckoning it like a little puppy. The walking sound stopped on the other side of the tree, and I could hear loud breathing like a horse. A horse, Yes, I thought he's calling a horse. I took a huge breath and I released it in a deep sigh of relief. T J began to almost sing the word Chewbacca and a gentle voice. He was calling it again. A few limbs shifted and moved in the dead fall, and then I heard it utter, a single, deep but faint
word. Oh. All of my former relief slipped away in this place was a hard nod of fear and anxiety. That the thought of whatever was on the other side of those trees that was big enough to have a voice that deep. I could almost feel its mass as it stood there, breathing the air into its lungs. That must have been massive. Come on, TJ sweetly beckoned again. Tommy, I whispered, let's get out of here.
At that second, the thing released a loud sound, and it shook the world around me, and it shot through me, and it rattled in my chest, and it left me stunned in my tracks. My eyes widened in fear, and my own lungs ceased to function. T J was still calling the thing. I felt hot and sick, and beads of sweat broke out all over my body, while my heart was jumping up into my throat. If I could have made my legs work, I would have run away.
In my mind, this wasn't happening, This couldn't be happening. But t J wasn't afraid. Limbs and the dead fall began to move and snap again, and I thought the thing was coming over it or through it, and big grunts of breath mingled with the sounds of limbs slamming and cracking. I was still frozen and could only stand there and listen to the thing raising hell a few feet away. TJ turned to me and he said, he doesn't like you. As he spoke, I saw arms coming up over the dead
fall. I didn't want to see more. Tommy, run, I screamed, Now, wait, it's okay, he was calling to me. I had already taken off, and I left TJ standing in the path with that thing with the long arms and the deep growling voice and the loud scream was chasing me. I could hear it coming up the path behind me. It was exhaling great puffs of air with intense force. I barely felt the limbs slapping my face as I raced up the narrow path. I had to get
to my dad behind me. That thing seemed to have left the trail all together. All around me, branches were snapping and trees were cracking. And then it was in the woods next to me, and from the sound of the brush I could tell it was running a wide circle, and I guessed it was about twenty five feet out. Glimpses of its enormous black body with long arms swinging flashed through the leaves. It was so big and unbelievably fast.
It was pulling ahead of me, but the trail was endless, and panic stricken tears began to blur my vision when I realized it was gonna cut me off, and ahead of me, I could see into TJ's backyard. Daddy, I screamed, Daddy. And then as I broke through the underbrush into the yard, that thing came to a sudden, violent stop, and
everything went silent. The thrashing of the limbs stopped, and the sounds of its breathing stopped, and the sounds of those impossibly footfalls stopped too, And had chased me all the way back up the trail, and it almost caught me. I ran into the office building where my dad and the surveyor were talking, and TJ came running up behind me. Well, I was out of breath and I was crying and whimpering. As I began to tell my dad about the big thing that was chasing me, TJ stood behind me and
he never said anything. Well, our neighbor has a ghosts to get out all the time, the surveyor offered, I'll bet one of those nannies got out and got after you. Well, Dad could see that I was really scared, and he laughed and he patted me on the head and he told me to go wait in the truck. Well, I ran to the truck and I got in and I locked all the doors. I watched TJ walked slowly over to the truck, and I waited until he was standing beside it
before I had the nerve to roll down the window. I told you there was a Chewbacca man. He said it. I saw it. I said, what was that thing? He's the buggey Man. He's a Chewbacca man, was TJ's only answer. Dad came out to the truck and I rolled up my window as he got in, and we were pulling away, and I looked back to see TJ walking towards the back of the house. He turned around and gave me one last look before disappearing around the corner. Are
you okay? Dad asked, you got chased by a goat? Huh, No, Dad, it was not a goat, I answered, and I told him the whole story on the way home, but I could tell that he didn't believe me. He thought maybe a cow or a bullet chased me out of the woods. Well months later, Dad asked me if I wanted to go to the surveyor's house with him again, and I gave him a solid no. Okay, I just thought i'd ask, he said, holding up his hands in surrender. He knew how I felt about that place.
I never went back there again. Many nights, I've laid in my bed and I thought about what happened to me that day. I thought about TJ and all those wrappers around the trees. I figured he must have been going down there and feeding that thing. I guess he had kind of made a friend of it. I've also thought about what would have happened if I hadn't run. Some time after that incident, I overheard my dad telling my mom that the surveyor had taken his family and moved out of the state. Neighbored
down the road. Said that they had moved back to where his wife was from. Was Alabama or Mississippi, He couldn't remember which. It's funny. Dad said that he didn't tell me he was leaving. He just up and left, and I got him a lot of business. He didn't even call to say goodbye. My father was disappointed. My father died several years ago without us ever talking about the incident again. But I think I know what made them move without warning. TJ called it that Chewbacca man. Thank you
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