When You See One Everything Changes

coming from any type of animal. There were a few times I remember hearing large limbs snapping or sounds of trees falling over, but I didn't pay much attention to that. In many years of hunting this property, it was strange to me that I never killed many deer, especially since I was hunting on the edge of an apple orchard. The apple orchard sat directly on top of the Missouri River bluffs, and there were over one hundred acres of

apple trees and hundreds of acres of woods. There was an unlimited food supply, a great water source from the river, high elevated hills, and deep thick woods. You could literally get lost in if you weren't familiar with the surrounding area.

The next doorland owner, Jesse, who owned the cattle farm, directly across from the orchard asked me if I had seen any of his baby calves, because there were several of them missing, and at the time I thought a big cat, maybe a mountain lion or something related had killed them and dragged them into the steep embankments of the bluffs. I never thought much about it until now. What happened changed my life forever. It has riddled me with so much fear that my eyes won't stop tearing

up as I write this story. I have seen more violent killings working as a Kansas City police officer than many will see in a lifetime. Many times I have caught myself tearing up at the sadness I've experienced on this job. But never in my life have I ever experienced tears caused by extreme fear again. The year was two thousand and two, and it still haunts me to this day. It was a hot summer night with clear skies, and the orchard was in the midst of its apple season.

I left my girlfriend's house late at night and got into my vehicle and headed back home to Lexington. I drove slowly down a gravel road and approached an s curve the left side of the road was all apple trees and the right side was cattle. As I began to round the first part of the S curve, I saw a large black creature down on all fours facing the farm. At first, I thought it was a black bear, even though black bears are uncommon in this area. I slowed down, and as I got closer, my headlights lit

up the creature fifteen yards away. Its hair reflected off my headlights and had a sort of a shimmering sparkling of fact. It stared at me with two large, piercing green eyes, and then turned and scurried off the gravel road toward the orchard. As I went into the S curve, I looked out my driver's side window, and I'll never forget what I saw till the day I die. It forever haunts my mind. While looking out my window, the creature stood upright on two legs, just ten feet from

my vehicle. I was shocked. It was a giant, ape like creature that towered above my vehicle. He was eight feet tall and must have weighed eight hundred pounds of solid muscle. He had black, gray matted hair, long arms that went to his knees and a face completely covered with thick, straight hair. I slowly drove by and he stared right at me, unmoving, like he didn't know I could see him or didn't care. The entire encounter only lasted ten seconds, but it was the longest ten seconds

of my life. It scared me so bad that once I drove past the creature, I downshifted my truck into second gear and almost killed the clutch. Thank god that didn't happen, because I would have probably had a heart attack. When I got back home to Lexington, I told my parents and my brother what had happened, and to this day they believed me. Six months ago, I reached out to Jesse, the owner of the cattle farm. I hadn't spoken to him in eighteen years, but I asked him

about the missing baby calves again. He told me that his family had spent a week searching the property for any signs of them being attacked by big cats, but he never found evidence of them being killed or dragged away. They just disappeared and no bones were ever found. Everyone at the police department has heard my story, and two of my coworkers have had encounters with this same creature.

One of them had a daytime encounter in the winter of nineteen ninety four while he was bird hunting near Concordia. My cousin has had three encounters on a conservation ground called Baltimore Ben, which is only four miles east of my sighting on the bluffs. In one of his encounters, he had to fire a shot at the creature because it was stalking him while he was squirrel hunting. Thanks for letting me share my story. I hope whoever is listing from the Missouri area will come forward with their

own stories. There have to be many more people who have had these encounters with the elusive creature, and I look forward to hearing about their experiences. I lived one mile from the school that I attended. I never had much fear of the woods, even after my first encounter with a bigfoot, and I knew my way through them from the house to the school. There were old logging roads through there, so they weren't hard to travel through. Well.

One day, it was late in the fall and I didn't have to babysit my brother that day since he was at the doctor, so I took a long route home from school through the woods. I wasn't very far when I noticed something walking beside me one hundred yards away. At first I thought it was a bear, and my heart began to race, But then I realized it was walking on two legs and had slinked behind a tree. It was as big and black as the midnight sky, and it was a bigfoot, and it was much bigger

than the first one I had seen. He was more powerful looking than the first one, and his hair was much shorter, kind of like a gorilla. He could not hide from me, though, and he didn't like that I noticed him, and he paced a few feet toward me, and I quickly realized he wasn't as friendly as the first one that I had encountered. The way he was moving, you'd have thought he was pissed off at me. My adrenaline was pumping at that point, and I bolted out

of there. To my horror, he followed right after me. And I was a fast runner, and I was even on the track team. I was good, but he had no problem keeping up with my pace, and he could have easily overtaken me. So I sped up as fast as I could go, but this beast just kept right with me. At that point, I was terrified. I threw my books and I ran as fast as I could, not wasting the precious energy to look back at him.

When my heart was thundering in my throat and I was depleted of oxygen, I couldn't run anymore, and I looked back and he was gone. Well. I didn't trust this, though, so I ran on until I got home. I remember my shaking fingers, rustling with my keys trying to get in the door. And when I got in, I slammed the door and I locked it, but I couldn't calm down because I knew he could still enter, just like the first one had done. I stayed freaked out all day,

and I never went back through the woods again. I got in a lot of trouble for ditching those school books, and I had to pay for them, but I didn't care going back after them. Ever, that beast let me know that this was his territory, and in my mind, he could keep it. I'm a retired school teacher living in South Mississippi. About twenty years ago, I attended a teaching Writing to Children workshop taught by a lady from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She was a professor at the USM at University of

Southern Mississippi. All University of Southern Mississippi is where Brett Fahr played college football. By the way, but I digress, pardon me, She recounted this story to participants of the workshop. This happened in the mid nineteen seventies. She was sixteen years old. Her dad owned a country gas station and grocery store just north of Hattiesburg and lux near the river.

I don't remember if it was the Leaf river of the Bowie Bowie Boie Bowie River, but she and a friend were hauling a load of trash and her dad's old standard shift pickup to a place near the river. They were unloading sacks of trash when they both heard something walking up the river. They listened as the splashing got closer, and then they noticed a nasty, putrid odor.

And what they saw next terrified them. A huge, she said, between eight and nine feet tall, hairy, white creature came walking with purpose from the banks of the creek up a slight hill toward them. They jumped into the truck to leave, and the truck's ball tires were spinning in the sandy soil allowing the creature to almost reach the tailgate as her friend was screaming, go, go go, it's

gonna get us. The old truck had no back window, and the odor from the creature was actually making them nauseated. The truck's wheels finally gained enough traction to spin out as she made it back to her dad's station. They ran inside, panicked and breathlessly telling what they I had seen. There were several local customers in the store that heard the girls share the story, and they commented that there had been several sightings of this creature. It had come

to be called the White Gorilla. They also said that there had been a number of reports of missing dogs in the area. She actually wrote a short story recounting the event, which she entitled the White Gorilla. Oh, I'd love to read that story. Oh, I'd love to read that story. And there's a PostScript here. I must say that this is one of the best workshops I ever

had the opportunity to attend. One of the most difficult problems children face when staring at a blank page after being instructed to write a story is what to write about. I can't tell you how many times I've heard I don't have anything to write about. Our instructor first had us think of an experience that left a lasting impression. She gave us construction paper in Elmer's glue and then had us tear page and illustrate the experience or memory.

It was after we constructed our illustrations that we began to write our stories. It totally changed the way that I taught. I learned how important it was to model for students writings a process. She taught us how to teach the process. So I enjoy listening to Dixie Crypti it. Thank you for providing folks and opportunity to share their experiences. Yours truly, Robin, and you may use my name, Robin.

Thanks so much for that email. That White Gorilla story is so good, and again I would love to hear her short story the White Gorilla. Oh, I bet it's awesome and it's so cool that you. I don't know if you still teach anymore. This was twenty twenty two years ago, and I agree. Sometimes I have a lot of ideas for stories in my head. I'll sit here and look at the screen and just ready, quiet, ready to go, And now I cannot. It may take me an hour just to do the first sentence. But usually

once you get started, the ideas just start going. They just start flowing. If there's anybody out there who has that problem like me and a lot of other people, just start writing, just start putting words on the paper, and sometimes it just comes to you. I don't know what it is about getting in that zone. If you can get in the zone that the words just come. Don't worry about the grammar, don't worry about the punctuation, don't worry about any of that stuff. Just start putting

it on paper. You can go back and correct it. The most important thing is to get the idea, or if you're writing one of these stories, get the memories down on paper so they're in print. Look, people say videos are forever, they're not. These audio recordings are not forever. But if you put it in print, print it out on a piece of paper and start somewhere, that is more likely to be forever than some of these videos. All we need is one EMP pulse attack and all

this stuff is wiped out. It's all gone, and that the chances of that happening in this culture are pretty good. So everything you've ever seen on video. H you know, it can disappear, but stuff printed on paper, written on paper, printed on paper has a better chance of surviving. So write your thoughts down, write them out. You can go back and edit them and make them good. Writing's not easy. She's right, it's it's a daunting task, especially to someone

who doesn't do it. Anyway, that's my encouragement to people to write. I think you will enjoy it. I think sometimes you can look back on it and say, oh, I'm so glad I wrote that. But anyway, that's Those are my ideas on writing. And thanks for listening to me, And thanks to Robin for sending this email so good. Didn't even have to send it to my editor because she's a writer, and it was written just perfectly. I

had no trouble reading it, so thanks for that, Robin. Okay, this is a short little pot I wanted to get something out on Sunday. I usually upload something on Sunday. I am just hammered with work right now. I've been working all weekend. I'm going to be busy for the next month or two with strict, tight deadlines, lots of changes, lots of extra work, blah blah, blah. It's just the

nature of my business. But so some of these podcasts that I put out may be short, shorter like this because I can just knock them out real quick in the morning, but I appreciate you listening to it. I'll keep them cranking them out. And I'm also uploading these archive podcasts. You see a thumbnail that says archive. These are podcasts that I'm going back four or five six years and re editing and redoing the sound, taking all of my useless commentary out of it. It is only stories.

There's no talking. There may be one or two where I left the talking in it because I think it was I think it was appropriate to do that. But on the podcast, if you look on Spotify or Apple, I've got over one hundred. I think there's like one hundred and twenty up, but I'm just slowly bringing those over to YouTube. I think I'm up to twenty or twenty four. Some of them are shows so short that I'm putting them together and combining like three or four archives in one. But if you see those pop up

on your YouTube screen, click on it. If you like these stories. These are older stories that the newer listeners probably haven't heard. You can click on them and you will be amazed at some of the stories I've gotten through the years. I think you'll be very much entertained and enjoy what you hear. So okay, thanks for listening and we'll see you guys on the next podcast. Appreciate you