The Thing Outside My Tent

turn my head to see it. The strangest thing of all was that I was overcome with peace and calm, and despite the urge to turn my head and look, I couldn't do it. I could hear heavy footsteps, but there was no bad smell, just the sense that I was not alone, that I was eighth, and whatever it was didn't mean to harm me. I continued to walk through the cemetery. I felt this thing get close enough that I could have reached out and touched it, but

I felt no urge to do that. I felt as if my body was on autopilot and I had no real control over what I was doing. As I neared the exit of the cemetery. Whatever this thing was seemed to back off and was completely gone by the time I got to the gate, and then, and only then was I able to turn around and look behind me. I wish I could say I saw it run behind a tree or something like that, but I didn't see anything. Well.

I got to my karate class just a few minutes later, only to find that I was nearly half an hour late. The walk that only took me ten minutes had taken twice that I couldn't make sense of the lost time. I kept walking through the cemetery often for the rest of my youth years in that town, and only one other time did I feel anything a sensation of being watched as I walked home one evening. To this day, I don't know what happened that night. I know something

was there. I could feel it, I could hear it walking behind me, But I cannot explain the missing time or why I couldn't make myself look behind me at what was following. I just hope that whatever it was continues to watch after those who walk through that place. I hope that those who walk through there are respectful

enough not to earn its Anger. I live in northwest Arkansas near Beaver Lake, and I have been an avid hunter since I was eight years old, and I've experienced everything my area has to offer for over four decades. In my passion for the outdoors, I've encountered nearly every creature native to this region, but this one has gotten me scratching my head. In twenty seventeen, I was hunting behind my house for deer in a small wooded lot that runs down to the lake a few miles away.

The area I live in has houses mixed with fields and small patches of woods just one hundred yards outside the city limits. There are deer in the area, but it's by no means isolated, certainly not enough for a bigfoot encounter, or so I thought. I stayed in my tree stand until it was too dark to shoot. I finally gave up and headed back to my house. Just four hundred yards away between me and my house was

a deep valley. Now, I approached the slight rise before the valley and something was on the other side, and it started making a sound I'd never heard before. It started in a low half growl and ended in a high pitched screen that lasted nearly ten seconds. It repeated this cost several times, as if to let me know it was there and it was not happy. I'd walked up on it a frozen place, trying to see what was making the sound, but I couldn't lay eyes on it.

After a minute of this thing screaming at me, it broke and ran to my left down the valley. I could hear its heavy footsteps, rocks being kicked and disturbed, and large branches snapping and breaking as it ran off. To this day, I still don't have an explanation for what it was. We don't have wild hogs in this area, and I know it wasn't a bear. It was far too heavy to be a fox, and its call was completely different. I'm not saying this was a bigfoot, but

I'm left with little elks to consider. I just know that, even with my forty plus years of hunting, that experience leaves me stump. Keep up the good work. I love the channel sign, Dennis. I've been rigging in installing twenty four thousand pound, five million dollar radiation therapy machines for twelve years now. One night I had just finished installing an upgrade on a machine in Montgomery, Alabama, and I was planning to drive all the way home north of

Atlanta late that night. But as luck would have it, when I finished the installation, the owner of our company call me directly saying he needed my partner in me to head straight to pick a Une, Mississippi. So there we were driving the six hours to Mississippi with my partner asleep in the seat next to me. Around three am, my GPS re routed us off of Highway ten onto

a parallel route through the Pascagoula National Forest. Things felt strange as soon as I got onto this tiny road, with swamps all around us in nurald old trees casting eerie shadows, my eyes darting all around, taking in all the creepiness. About halfway through the forest, I came to a complete stop and I looked to my right. There in a cove was a round dark craft hovering at the top of the tree line, buzzing like a giant electric box, and it was emitting a glowing green light

down to the ground. Well. I was in shock. I finally spoke up, my eyes glued to this thing, poking my partner until he woke up. He looked at me, frowning and confused. I pointed out the window and I said, tell me what that is. He frowned again, looked out his window, and he gasped at the thing. He finally turned away from it and yelled to me to get us out of there. Well. I snapped out of my trance and drove away, relieved that he had seen it

too and that I wasn't going insane. I don't know what we encountered, but it was definitely a flying object that I could not identify. I grew up in a town on the south coast of Maine, in a little place called Bath, known for the Navy shipyard. My family and I lived in a small house in the woods, and come sunrise, we kids did the chores and we were kicked out of the house until sundown. As I got older, my parents let me pack out and go on two or three day camping trips on my own.

I love being in nature every chance I got. If I wasn't in school or the house, you could bet the farm that I was out there in the woods. One morning, I sweet taught my mother into letting me go on a four day camping trip. She agreed so long as I took my hunting dog, Sparky with me. Sparky and I made it two and a half miles away from the house when I decided to camp alongside a creek that i'd been following. I set up my

tent and I started gathering food for the night. In Maine, there's food everywhere if you know how to look for it. Berries and small game, that sort of thing. I found a large patch of blackberries, shot two plump gray squirrels, and caught some fish in a nearby lake. I brought my bounty back to camp. My backpack was full of fish and my pockets were full of berries. One squirrel in one hand and the other clenched in Sparky's jaw, and we ate like kings of the forest that night.

The next day we did the same thing, hunting, forge in and exploring. At one point Sparky got awful interested in something. I followed him, knowing it would lead to more fat squirrels or some other critter that we could have for dinner. We came across some tracks that I could not identify. Maybe it was a large fox or a coyote, I thought, but it ended up in a strange den in the side of a hill, and there

were small game bones lying around the outside. I got close enough to look at the opening and immediately got a bad feeling. I couldn't say what it was, but something wasn't right about that place. At night, I woke to the sound of shuffling outside the tent. Sparky was on his feet, his ears were perked up, and his tail was down, and he was sniffing back and forth across the bottom of the tent door. I couldn't hear anything, no crickets or frogs, not even the occasional hoot of

an owl. Now I wasn't afraid of what it might be, even if it was a black bear or a moose. Always stayed cool in nature, knowing that keeping a level head was the best way to keep us safe. I put my hand on my dog to calm him down, and I held my breath and I listened for a while. Whatever was shuffling around out there had a strange, scratchy kind of breathing. I ran through a mental checklist that didn't leave any berries out, and Sparky had finished all

of his dog food. I brought his bowl into the tent along with my backpack, which I had my other supplies. And then it hit me. I left the fishbones out by the fire. There's a big rookie mistake. And I cursed myself, and I guessed it was a black bear sniffing around out there, and I wondered how big It was. Still Sparky and I remained calm. Most of the time, black bears will just take off running when they see people, but they are known to attack and mall in some cases.

I sat there a minute, weighing my options, and in the end, I quietly unzipped the window flap and I peeked out with one eye. The moonlight was good enough that I could see everything around my camp, including what was sniffing around. And what I saw shocked me so badly that I couldn't even gasp. I had never been afraid of any kind of wildlife, no matter how big, but that all changed that night. Right then and there. Fear took hold of me and I couldn't breathe. The

Sparky was frozen too. I was looking at a bonafide Oh, I don't know how to say this, lunk SEUs and the Indian devil. I was looking at a bonafide lunk Seuss and the Indian devil. It was a cross between a cougar, a bear, and a coyote. In New England folklore, old loggers told stories about them. My grandparents even used to talk about them around the campfire. According to legend, they were extremely fast and stealthy. They were about four feet long with wider brown fur, and they had a

nasty scent, and they had sharp claws. Because they were so fast, it was nearly impossible to kill them. They weren't afraid of humans, and at night they would creep into camps to steal food and sabotag anything they pleased. It was down on all fours with its face pressed into the fish, and it stink like death and musk. My jaw was on the ground. I didn't know what to do. And then my dog started whining and making noise, and that startled it. Its head snapped toward the tent,

and in an instant it was gone. I couldn't even tell in which direction it had gone. It was just a blur of movement, and then there was nothing. I still couldn't move. I just sat there listening. There still wasn't a single sound just my heart pounding and Sparky's quick breathing. Somehow I knew this wasn't over. Sparky slowly cocked his head and perked his ears up, tracking something neither of us could see, and as quietly as I could, I dug my filet knife from my bag and held

my breath. And then suddenly it charged the tent, heavy footfalls, shaking the ground. Sparky exploded, barking and snarling like I'd never seen him do before. Our tent was blasted off, and Sparky emptied his blidder all over me as this thing trampled over us and it kept running, leaving me with a bloody lip. For the rest of that night, I held my trembling dog close to my chest. Both of us were wide awake and terrified. It's sun up. We were out of there, Sparky in the lead, both

of our tails tucked. I did a lot less solo camping after that, and I always stayed closer to home. Thanks for reading my story. I've been a fan for a long time, and I finally worked up the courage to share it with you. Keep doing what you're doing, and thank you for all that you do. Thank you sir,

thank you for joining me on this podcast. I'm working on a Steve Lilly's story right now, so some of these may be a little shorter, but I'm going to keep cranking them out about every three or four days. Thank you again for listening, and we'll see you guys on the next one MM