Haunted Cosmos - The Paranormal Bigfoot (S7, E2)

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Time to take another look at the Bigfoot phenomenon! In this episode we tackle strangely spiritual Bigfoot encounters and learn about the historic precedence for such a beast.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes and monthly AMA's with our co-host, Ben Garrett, by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosThis episode is sponsored by: Jake Muller Adventures is an immersive, mysterious, and engaging audio drama. Use code "HAUNTED" to claim 10% off all digital downloads. https://www.jakemulleradventures.com/haunted Talk to Josh at Volenté Creative to get help you with your branding and marketing: https://volentecreative.com/ncpArmored Republic: Making Tools of Liberty for the defense of every free man’s God-given rights - Text JOIN to 88027 or visit: https://www.ar500armor.com/ Drain My Lawn is providing expert, high-quality drainage solutions that protect  properties and ensure lasting peace of mind to the people in Charlotte, NC: Visit drainmylawn.com/haunted for 5% off any serviceIndigo Sundries Soap Company - Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com and use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order. https://graytoadtallow.com/Join us at the New Christendom Press conference, The War for Normal, this June 11-14 in Ogden, Utah.https://thewarfornormal.com/Buy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Support the show

The Bigfoot myth has existed for much longer than just recent history. But why? Why does it have such staying power? And why has it endured for so long? Is it an increasingly powerful mass delusion? Or are at least some of the stories mostly real? And why would God place such a story into this world? Maybe it's a test.

Maybe it's a distraction. Maybe it's something a little bit more. In this episode, we'll explore stories of the world. the Woodwose, the Saabe, the Bigfoot. This episode is brought to you by Jake Muller Adventures, a thrilling Christian audio drama. What you're about to hear is a retelling of a firsthand account. The girl was only 16.

She lived with her father in a farmhouse outside Missoula, Montana. From her front porch during the day, she could look into the wilderness of the bitter root mountains. Surrounding the perimeter of the home, however, lay a quarter mile of flat plain. but this story takes place at night, a dark night. The moon hid behind heavy interspersed clouds, only the light of a few stars twinkled high above.

At the witching hour, the girl was half awoken from sleep by a clicking sound that repeated at odd intervals. She'd lived in that house her whole life and knew its noises. It wasn't the squeaking of her father walking down the stairs for a glass of water. Her room was on the lower floor. The windows were open, but it wasn't the knocking of the chain on the fence, for there was no wind. No, this sound was distinct. Half asleep and half reasoning through what it might be,

she was suddenly aware of something else. Through closed eyes, a dark red flashed in sync with the clicking. She opened her eyes and all doubt vanished. The porch light outside her room flickered on and off. The clicking was the sound of the light switch. This made her sit up in bed. Why would her father be out on the porch at such an hour? Better yet, why would he be flipping the switch on and off so rapidly? Or perhaps he was using the switch just inside the front door. Still, why use the switch that way at all? She turned these questions over in her mind and grew uneasy. None of it made sense.

Her unease sharpened into a subtle fear. What if someone was messing with them? What if they intended more? In a flash, that hint of fright became a wave of terror, for a new sound entered the scene. It started low, like a rumbling belly, then it grew. It modulated until within seconds,

she discerned roaring laughter. It was human in the sense that it was laughter, but beyond that it was bestial, groaning and crackling without equal in nature. It was loud enough to sting in her ear. The girl sprang from her bed in a panic, unsure what to do or where to hide. By then, the instinct of flight was overwhelming.

Something was horribly wrong. She started to cry and froze in indecision, standing motionless by the bed. Then she heard the squeak of the steps leading to the second floor. It was her father. She knew by the cadence of his descent that he was running. He confirmed the urgency by shouting a single word through her closed door, down. That was the word they rehearsed. He was armed, and that meant that she needed to hide in her room. And so she dropped to the floor and pulled herself under the bed. Outside her door, her father had stopped two-thirds of the way down the stairwell. What he saw there was nearly indescribable.

Looking down the barrel of his shotgun from just outside the front door stood the devil himself. A bulking thing with a twisted face of pure malice beneath two glowing eyes as red as coals. An arm the length and width of an adolescent maple tree stretched through the open window. Its bulk reached across the door. Gangling hairy fingers still touched the light switch, turning the house into a strobing horror film for an audience of one. The father, the defender of the place. He fired at the door and sprang down, clearing the entire landing in a single surge of adrenaline.

He met the guttural cries with animalistic screams of his own. He nearly tore the handle from the door as he flung it open. His girl would not be threatened so lightly. She heard him bounding across the porch, firing and screaming as he ran. It was the last strength of a desperate man ready to die for his daughter. But he didn't die. The creature, the devil he had seen, vanished into the night. satisfied, he entered back into the house and opened his daughter's bedroom door.

He pulled her, now shaking from beneath the bed. He led her into the living room, sat her in his chair, the one farthest from any exterior wall, wrapped her in a blanket and knelt down to hold her. In the hours that followed, the police came and went, but they were of little help. Despite the man's repeated pleas for an armed search of the woods near the home, the officers assured him that there was virtually nothing they could do. And so the ordeal ended. but the father and daughter were not yet finished with the night.

Still shaken but able to speak, the daughter flooded her father with questions, but he wasn't able to answer any of them. How could he? What he did tell her was that he'd been waiting for that night for some time. She looked puzzled. He asked if she remembered two years earlier, her 14th birthday, when he had abruptly taken her to stay at their mother's parents' house for three nights. She did remember, and he explained why. For you see, this was a little bit of her.

not the first devil he had encountered on his own property. It was a special day for our unnamed father of one. It was his daughter's birthday. Fourteen years together, most of them one-on-one, the girl's mother had left them when she was still very little. He was driving home for lunch to make the final preparations for her surprise party. Despite her mother's leaving, the man's in-laws had remained a welcome and pleasant part of his daughter's life. Thus, family from both sides were to come over while she was still at school so that she could walk into a house filled with all her favorite people

ready to celebrate her birthday. He couldn't wait. It was the first time he'd ever attempted anything like this and he knew that she would love it. His truck loped down the country backroad until he saw the chimney of his farmhouse rise over the next hill. Once he crested it, he looked down

and saw his house in full, as well as the neighbor's place about a quarter mile away. It was a view he knew as well as any other, but that day something wasn't quite right. A dark spot lay in his front. yard was unfamiliar. The man stared at it as he approached. Turning onto the gravel driveway, he saw that the black mass moved constantly, if only slightly. It writhed in a sandy section of

yard where his daughter had once played as a little girl. But only when he was 20 or so yards away did he begin to see what the thing truly was. A thick pelt of jet black fur completely covered the hunched yet undeniably massive body. The arm stretched long enough to look like spindles compared to the beast's trunk, but they were by no means thin. They were enormous and powerful, with sinews visible even through the fur. They stretched forward and pulled back again. The man watched this happen again and again. It dug almost frantically into the sand, forming a mound just in front of its crouched legs, which the man could see match the arms in both length and girth. The man registered all of this as he continued toward the

house. When he realized his peril, for whatever this thing was, it was not human, nor was it any animal he had yet seen. He checked beneath his seat, but his gun wasn't there. Ten yards away now. The monster looked up from its work and revealed a grotesque face, a chisel jaw open to expose sharp, yellow, partially rotting teeth. It screamed at the truck in a cry to man from unnaturally high-pitched, and its eyes glared with anger at both man and the machine. not knowing what else to do, he slammed on the gas and sped the final feet toward it while laying on the horn. The devilishnien sprang upright and sprinted toward the tree line, reaching it in an impossibly short amount of time. For all its size, the creature moved with an agility, dare one say a grace that struck the man as almost dreamlike.

It took him a while to leave his truck. He didn't know whether the thing might return while he investigated the yard. deciding that going alone would be foolish, he called his nearest neighbor, the one whose house he had seen from the hilltop. The neighbor struck him as a bit of an oddball. Though the man considered himself to be a god-fearing Christian, his neighbor practiced his faith with far more zeal. They had never shared a crossword, but neither were they really good friends. Still, the man told his neighbor a quick version of the events, making sure to mention that he didn't have his gun with him. In a surprisingly knowing tone, the neighbor assured him that he would be right over and armed.

Sure enough, not five minutes later, the man saw the dust cloud of the neighbor's truck rolling up behind him. He stepped out to greet and thank him. The neighbor, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and cradling a lever-action rifle in one arm, met him with a comforting smile and asked if everything was all right. The man assured him that he was and the two walked to where the monster had been digging in the yard. At first glance, it looked like nothing more than a shallow hole in the sand. Only when the neighbor stirred the pile beside it with his boot did they discover what truly frightened them, trinkets that could have only come from inside of both of their homes. Refrigerator magnets. A notebook with grocery lists scribbled inside. And worst of all,

a photograph of the man's little girl that had been pinned inside his truck. He had noticed it go missing weeks earlier, but never bothered to search for it. Seeing these pieces of his life in possession of that inexplicable horror terrified him. His mind raised with questions about how the beast had stolen them and how many times it might have been inside of his house. The neighbor nodded knowingly and explained that his family had seen the same or a similar beast on their own property many times. He told the man that he had once found such a demon, even sleeping in his barn, sprawled across the seat of an old rusted tractor. It had been wearing one of his wife's dresses. The fabric had stretched and torn under the creature's bulk,

but he recognized it immediately. There was no doubt. The neighbor said he had called the police about the incidents, but they brushed him off every time. At first, they even tried to gaslight him, claiming that he was imagining things. But when the calls continued, they admitted that they knew of the thing,

but they could do nothing. Shocked that his neighbor knew of the creature, the man asked why he'd never mentioned it before. The neighbor replied that he hadn't really wanted to trouble him or cause worry, after all, until now, he had wondered himself if he might be going mad. Now he knew better. They turned back to the sand and noticed something else protruding beneath the scattered knick-knacks.

The man brushed more sand away and both stepped back, speechless at what appeared. Twelve angel figurines. Some were ceramic, others plastic, some were small, others nearly as tall as a grown man's knee. All looked weathered as though they had been kept, though not carefully, outdoors. hidden in earth and among the trees. The sight felt surreal. The man saw fragments of his own life mixed with symbols of Christianity,

all defiled by the same hand. A rogue wave of existential dread washed over the man. In that pile, he saw a threat that transcended the normal, the very paradigm upon which he had built his life. Here was something unknown and alien, something that struck his foundations like a hammer, leaving behind a single but irreparable crack. The neighbor, disturbed by the angels but unsurprised, assured him these creatures were devils.

They always dwell where humans live. They seek to steal, kill, and destroy for destruction's own sake, and humanity's symbols of faith, whether angels or crosses, would always draw their malice. Together they cleaned the mess. The neighbor left acting far more casually than the man thought appropriate given what had happened. As for the man, he still had a party to throw. So he finished the preparations inside, flinging at every creek of the old house. Then he put on a smile and went to get his daughters.

They stopped for milkshakes and fries at a burger stand, where he slipped in a few new house rules about not going outside alone. The girl seemed confused, that they returned home to a house full of surprises. The party delighted his daughter and almost made her forget their earlier conversation. But in the middle of it, she glanced out a window and saw her father speaking with her grandfather. She wondered why her dad looked so angry and frantic. When the festivities ended, he loaded her into the truck and the two stayed at that same grandfather's house

for three nights before returning home. Now, with all of this revealed to her two years later and after her own experience with the beast's return, the girl was at a loss. She'd heard of Bigfoot before. Even some of her friends at school claimed to have seen one in the mountains as children. But it always seemed more humorous than anything else.

Bigfoot, to her, had been like a practical joke that nature had pulled on itself. Now, though, things were different. She realized that other things, things not so neat, somehow shared the world with her. That same existential dread tinged her heart with a blotch of despair that never really went away. To this day, she remembers that night with equal parts love for her father and fear for what he was forced to confront. The crypted known by many names, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the Yeti, the Skunkape, the Ruggaru, the Wittico, the Ohio grassman, Momo, the old man of the mountain, just to name a few, has stood at the forefront of the modern imagination for generations now. It's taken on qualities of a horror myth whose titular anti-hero serves as the preternatural double of mankind, one who seems always to have the upper hand and who uses that upper hand to feed off of our fear. and terror. Given this description, a profound question eventually arises. Why isn't Bigfoot more violent? Sure, stories exist in which Bigfoot commits horrible acts of physical violence against

its victims, but those accounts are rare. It's a strange thing. Either in the majority of cases, inspiring fear is the only goal, or our lack of explicitly violent stories reflects a case of survivorship bias. Maybe we hear less about violence because those victims will not, or more likely cannot talk. In any case, the Bigfoot problem remains unsolved. It seems there must be two options. Either on the one hand, the whole phenomenon is a multi-generational, international, and increasingly powerful mass delusion, the product of deceived true believers at best,

clout chasers and charlatans at worse, or on the other hand, at least some of the stories are mostly real. But again, if we accept the latter, only more than. questions arise. Why would such a being exist? Why would it behave the way it does? If real at all, is it purely natural? A crypted in the most technical sense of the word, a mere animal that's simply yet to be cataloged by the sciences of man, or is there some spiritual element to it? At risk of stepping into idle questions, we have no business asking at all, why would God place such a story into this world? Perhaps it's a test, perhaps a distraction, perhaps

something more. Perhaps real or not, Bigfoot can teach us something about the world we live in, who we are, and where we're going. So join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos as we search for answers in the strange mystery of the BigFly. Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of Haunted Cosmos, season seven, episode two, attempt number two actually at this episode. No, no, we just happen to change clothes completely for all the discussion portions of the episode. No, I mean, that's That would be chill of us to do if we ever did it. So when we first recorded this episode, we kept the scripted sections.

Stuff happened. But Brian and I were both sick. We were like deeply sick. It was the most worthless episode discussion-wise. And that's saying something. We're going to have to can't. We're going to have to redo this. It sucks.

No, dude, this is elite. Okay, anyway. That we've ever done. So we literally scrapped the whole thing. The lost episode. It's the lost episode. Can I say a certain percentage of Haunted Cosmos fans Would have loved it would have absolutely

It would have been their favorite And we might open up a Patreon tier Where you get the lost episode But it's gonna have to be like op-sex Can I have to be high $1,000 a month And you have to like send us your social security Yeah, just send us like a pick Like a sworn affidavit that you will not leak it

It's nothing bad. It was just like It was really undignified, we'll say I'll become even more undignified than this Which is again Leave my pride by my side. Saying something. I will dance. I will sing to be mad for my king.

Nothing is hindering this passion in my soul, man. But there is a possibility for one lucky listener who signs up for Patreon today to get an artifact. From that episode. From this lost episode. Brian, can you reveal the artifact? There is one Easter egg that explains why 90% of it had to be discarded. So this, first of all, in this poster. If you sign up for Patreon today, you could be entered for a chance to win this beautiful poster that you.

It used to be on the wall in my office, and that's why it's full of holes from thumbtacks. This is well-loved. But I signed it. Brian signed it. Martina and Evan Essence signed it. The whole team, okay? And there is an Easter egg. This is the Easter egg.

That I wrote. Some of you will get it if you're terminally online. Yes. And all we'll say is that that is a taste of what the lost episode actually keeps it off. You should really be able to derive from first principles at this point why we had to throw away the episode. But I want to reiterate that it was because of how awesome of how sick we were. It was actually like we were ahead of our time. And it was that good, but the people just aren't ready for how good it was.

No. No, we were both sick and it was. It was truly a waste of everybody's time. Yeah. But you know what's not a waste of everyone's time, Ben? Haunted Cosmos in general. Haunted Cosmos is not. I know some people in the year 1850 looked into it and said like nobody's allowed to talk about it.

But some of us, you know what? Some of us want to talk about Bigfoot. Some of the time, not all the time. No, not all the time. Don't be talking about Bigfoot all the time. I'm preaching about Bigfoot. No. No.

I'm not riding Bigfoot around my property. I will say you have mentioned Bigfoot in a sermon before. But it wasn't. It was an example of something not to emphasize a lot. Ah, okay, see? But you did what I'm saying. Technically. But like, this is the thing.

I love a good Bigfoot story. Who doesn't? Put me in prison. Put me in a maximum security prison, okay? Lock me up. throw away the keys. Solitary. Okay.

I don't care who knows it. Is that what you're going to say is not a wasted time? I don't know. I don't even remember. Oh, you know what? It's not a wasted time? What?

Checking out the current fundraiser that I'm running to help me finish my next full length album of original music. It is also not about Bigfoot. But one of the songs does feature one of the Fay. Ooh. I know which one it is. Do you?

Do you know because you haven't heard it yet? You haven't heard it. Unless you read my live concert last year, New Christian Press Conference. If you join the fundraiser, you could, you might hear it early. I actually have no idea. I'm going to instruct Evan essence right now. If it is done in time to put a five second snippet of the album to play right now. Okay, ready? Go like this. All right, that's five seconds. If nothing but silence happened there, the album was not finished enough for that to have happened. And that was a total waste of time. And hopefully you didn't click off the episode thinking that there was some kind of error. Anyway, we're back.

Listen, my music is made not by robots. It is certified human made. The AI demons aren't making my music. Real musicians playing real instruments are making it. It kind of sounds like a cope. It costs a lot. I'm kidding. Wow.

I'm singing it. We're doing stuff. I hope it's good. I think you'll like it maybe. If you don't keep it to yourself, honestly. I can say it is really good. I heard a lot of the songs at the concert that you did last year. I've heard a couple snippets here and there in the office.

It's very, very good. Thank you. Well worth the support. I'm excited to hear the rest of it, fully produced. I appreciate it. Because man, that producer, he really knows a few tricks. Oh, dude, my guy, Brandon is amazing. He is both handsome and talented.

Indeed. Much like you. Perfect segue. Much like you, the person who wrote the cold open that we just enjoyed. Yeah. Which we should now discuss because, man, there is a lot in this story that is really fascinating. A lot of the thematic connections between some of the supernatural phenomena that we discuss on this show frequently,

and the religious spiritual overtones where these are not just like, you'll find when you get not even that deep into all of these different genre of stories. Yeah. Aliens to Bigfoot. That they are not just like materialistic phenomena. Yeah. But that right under the surface,

there are spiritual elements. Yeah. Spiritual messaging, spiritual elements. And that's what I want to discuss that with you today, Ben. Yeah, I mean, you see that with, so the thing with Bigfoot, that always comes up is that overwhelming sense of dread. We don't ignore that.

It's like that dread window that we always talk about with John Keel and the Mothman episode where you take a step and all of a sudden you're in this cloud of overwhelming fear. There's certainly that with Bigfoot, which already seems to imply something that's beyond the mere physical. But with this story especially,

you see religious iconography buried in the ground around like the personal trinkets and belongings of this family. and all of that comes on the heels of hearing from the guy's neighbor who's very religious about how like, oh, of course these things are devils. And we've seen a whole family at our house

and one of them was cross-dressing, unless maybe it was a lady bigfoot. Ah, well, Patty was. Probably not. They're probably cross-dressing because demons cross-dress. That's what they do. So true, King. So you've said something, Ben.

I'm just going to interrupt you. So rudely. You said something before that I want you to unmasked. To use a youth pastor word, I'm going to unpack it a little bit for us, okay? We need to unpack it. I hate unpack it after a trip. That's the worst. So I get it out right when I'm through the door, I unpack.

I'll say it right here right now. Unloading the dishwasher is 10 times worse than loading the dishwasher. I could not agree with you more. All right, go ahead. So you've talked about the UFO and UAP and alien phenomenon being a modern mythology and that big, and then I've heard you even say, the Bigfoot thing is another form of a modern, myth or mythology. So what do you mean by that? Yeah. Especially, you know, even like how you've talked

about the UAP phenomenon as a mythology of hope. Yeah. Let me unpack that. Unpack that for us. So it starts with my, like my working paradigm of what myth actually is. Yeah. Which is an admixture of historical events wherein the gods, quote unquote, are involved with the affairs of men. Do somebody quote that and make an Instagram post, Ben Garrett, looking thoughtful, saying that, because that was smart. That was some smart stuff. Dude, that was off the dome. He used the word ad mixture.

Go ahead. I really like you. Keep going. No, keep going. I was proud of that. What a guy. So since that's the case, that is the paradigm of myth that I operate under constantly. And one time I was reading through a compilation of Carl Jung's essays on mythology.

And one thing that he mentioned that I thought was interesting was that the modern UFO phenomenon, and he's writing this long ago, is a modern myth. And that actually fits nicely into my paradigm of myth, which is fundamentally different from Colly Young's, by the way, where you have in the UFO occurrences historical things.

I think that they're really happening, that these things are actually occurring. Yeah, some of them, not all. And they're instances of people witnessing what I believe to be spiritual beings. I could see the argument being made that some UFOs or UAPs are angelic. Sure enough, okay, but I'm talking really about like abduction stories

and the really terrifying UFO stories that you hear. I think that that's people coming into contact with demonic entities or we can say, quote unquote, gods. The difference, though, is that in the cases where people come into close contact with these beings, but it's not always or only terrifying, they're receiving some evangelistic message. We've talked about this at length on high. cosmos. And that message is one of like a false hope. It's the not even world, but cosmic

religion of peace. It's the ascension. It's becoming being instead of becoming. It's, you know, all these things. It's man going up to the next plane of his spiritual evolution. And the aliens are giving these people this message and they're really convinced of it. And then they go and proselytize other human beings with the same message. That is why I call the UFO phenomenon a modern myth of transcendent but false hope. Yes. I think that there's a parallel with the Bigfoot phenomenon, but it's like an inverse of that. It's still false, but it's almost like Bigfoot is a manifestation of, that really happens

at times, but it's like a spiritual manifestation of our moral bankruptcy, especially in the West, as we apostatized from Christianity. the more that I read about Bigfoot stories, the more it seems like there's this allegorical connection where Bigfoot is almost like the ghost of our guilt that's haunting us. Wow. We're like, we've become so decrepit

and so morally bankrupt and so confused and unwise that there's this now demonic entity that's meddling in our affairs. There's that myth aspect of it. And it's telling us some transcendent thing, but it's about our transcendent like damnation. It's like we're losing everything that we once had and we're haunted by this guilt and shame,

but we want to hide away from it. We want to pretend like it's not even there. We want to explain it away with materialistic things, things that don't matter. I think that it's a tenuous connection, but I do think it's a potential one. And the more that I hear stories about the ones that we read about in the cold open,

the more I think that that actually could be like a meta possibility of like, Yeah. What is the big demonic narrative that's being played out here? Well, what if it's the demons showing us in a sense like our own ugliness and it terrifies us? But because we're already apostate, that terror doesn't lead us to godly sorrow and repentance. It leads us to worldly sorrow, which is just more and more despair. It's a flaunting of what is happening to man in his sinful estate, which is that he becomes like unto a beast. Yeah. Great use of like unto. You're welcome. I would like to repent. I would like to. I would like to say that. Yeah, we become like a beast. So, you know, Paul talks about this and Titus with the Cretans.

And he basically quotes a poet of their own that said that all the Cretans were liars and they were basically evil beasts. And then he says, this testimony is true. Yeah. This generalization about the culture. Not every individual Cretan was like this, but generally speaking, their culture was like this. The scriptures routinely talk about sinful man as if he has descended from his place as the crown of creation. like Psalm 8, that God has put everything under man's feet. And yet in his sinfulness, he imitates the beasts instead of imitating God.

And so he's just ruled by his desires and brute desires. You see this in myth all over the place. Yeah. This theme of the bestial half man. Yeah. So I could see a demonic trope emphasizing this or playing along with it and recasting that before our eyes in a bestial half part wild man type of creature. Yeah.

that is meant to like sort of mock us. We've also talked in the past about, demons can be doing more than one thing at a time about the way in which certain corners of the materialist world view Bigfoot as sort of a missing link, Australopithecus or, you know, between the ape and the man in our evolution,

like a bygone, vestigial leftover, you know, dying line of human evolution. Yeah. And so there's that as well, you know, like reinforcing this narrative that man is a beast come from beasts. He's not made in the image of God. He's just the result of chance.

And the chance turning of genetic folds. Yeah. With selective pressure and nature. We're just a part of nature. We're in no way spiritual. So there's lots of different themes that you could see being emphasized played up in some of these accounts.

I'll also say, too, there's, you've talked recently off offline, about the tendency of modern Westerners towards like suicidal altruism or like suicidal empathy where we constantly are drawn to the fringes of things in order to try to like fix stuff there. But in doing so, we're even willing to sacrifice our station.

But it accomplishes nothing. All it does is give away the blessing that we had. And it even like gives it to a waste, so to speak. And I think one of the big ways that you see this in the modern West is with an environmentalistic bent, I didn't say that well. And environmentalism is suicidal, where humanity becomes its own in-groups out-group,

where humanity is seen as a villain to the rest of the world, a cancer on the planet. And so in order to repent for our cancerous presence on the planet, we actually submit ourselves to nature instead of ruling over it. And when you do that, maybe the demons are playing into that a little bit, and Bigfoot is showing us the consequence. Like, we're submitting ourselves to this wild thing.

And instead of taking charge of it and subduing it, and now that wild thing is going to take what it wants, which is our own souls. You know, like that I think, yeah, like, yeah, I'm digging a little bit. So anyway. But, but. But, uh,

reached his arm through the window trying to get you. Well, it just, it reminds me of, and if you, if you've ever read listener Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, um, One of the big symbols in Frankenstein is that the monster is a manifestation of Victor Frankenstein's own hubris. Like, Victor Frankenstein is actually a very likable character.

But one thing that he has is hubris to believe that he can create life ex-Neilo. Right. And then the monster is produced and that monster continually comes back to haunt Victor Frankenstein. And it's like the punishment of his pride. And I see like kind of a parallel in some of these Bigfoot stories. where we, speaking generally, in the West, have just become so prideful, but also so self-loathing.

Like, we just hate ourselves. We absolutely hate ourselves and everything that God has done for us. And we produce a monster in a world of chaos where, like, we stop, again, we stop taking dominion. We stop trying to subjugate the world to the glory of God and we submit ourselves to it. We shouldn't then be surprised

if the demons play into that and try to lead us further down that line, while also showing us our existential fear. Yeah. So what do you think about the angels? The buried angels. Oh, yeah. The defiled.

Azog, the defiler. Deep cut. Actually not. It's not that. Relative. For movie watchers? My sons recently watched the Hobbit movies. And I decided that if you don't like the Hobbit movies, you're just like not a fun person.

Like I get they're not faithful. I get all the, I get it. They're terrible. They're fun movies. Like if you think, wow, the Hobbit book is at all related to this. It's not. It's a different project. If you just view them as like Jason Bourne, but with elves.

That's Jason Bourne. And then it's kind of fun. Orlando Bloom, by the way, you can tell he's wearing so much makeup. Poor guy looks way older. Anyway. Not my guy Orlando. Azog the Defiler. No, I think that the buried angels is one of the things that drives me to these

speculations is, you know, they're not conclusions, it's just thoughts, but to see like that religious, very overtly religious and Christian iconography being given back to the earth, given back to the wilds, stolen by the wild man, there's just, there's a lot there. You know, I think that you can run with that to a lot of places, but all of them lead back to this is more than just a material phenomenon. This is spiritual defilement. of even a Christian heritage. Yeah, and it comes along with all the other elements of this, the feeling of dread, the smell of hell,

like all of these different experiences that are through lines through all of these encounters is that there is a spiritual element to all of them. Or at least a good percentage of them. Even like the whole thing with the Bigfoot attacked the home that was the single father with the daughter and the father was a good father from all accounts. and the daughter loved her dad.

And he wants to interrupt that. He. Bigfoot wants to interrupt that thing. Wants to drive a wedge between those two in some way. Like get a life. Leave people alone. Leave them alone. Like touch grass, Bigfoot. Touch grass, Bigfoot. Mind your own business, man.

Also a pound sand. Also, mugged. He just got probably framed mogged by that dad. He got framed mocked. Wasn't that dad? He shows up. That's why you ran away. We can't, we can't go back down.

We can't descend back in the abyss of the first attempt. I think what you mean is us and the pinnacle that was the first attempt. Before this episode gets hit by a bazooka, could you go ahead and maybe lead us into this next discussion or this next story? Yeah, absolutely. But before I do, we are going to take an ad break and we're going to hear a little bit about our friends over at NutraCel, who are the headline sponsors of this episode. So stay tuned. Listen to NutriCell. Amazing products.

They make you feel better. They make you healthier. I use them, methylene blue, other things. They make your pee blue. Yeah, they do. Also, get this, if you skip these ads, Bigfoot will kill you. I didn't want to say it.

That's not a threat. I didn't want to say it. That's just an observation. We're just observing the world around us. We're taking notes, okay? Yeah. So anyway, listen to the ads. And then we will roll right into the story.

Yes, thank you. Ben, have you heard? heard of the Jake Muller Adventures? Ooh, what's that? A Christian audio drama. Zombies, vampires, global conspiracies, and faith at the center. I was up all night on the edge of my seat. Is it fully immersive, sound effects, and cast and everything?

Yes, full cast, cinematic sound. It's like you can hear the danger coming. Ooh, so kind of similar to Hanna Cosmos, but know your mom jokes and more drama? No mom jokes yet. But yeah, tons of drama. So it's kind of like your mom then? Not quite. Check it out at jakemulleradventures.com slash haunted for 10% off.

Brian, let me paint you a scenario. You wake up in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. The swamp ape has flooded your yard overnight. What do you do? Ben, I wouldn't even know where to begin in answering this question. Okay, well, let me answer it for you. You call the good old boys at Drain My Lawn and they'll rush right over. These drainage experts are the swamp ape's greatest foible.

They can remove his habitat in no time. Plus, their sister company, Fence My Lawn, can follow up the drainage with a fence that is scientifically proven to keep swamp apes out, and it also looks really good. Wow. If you live in the Charlotte, North Carolina area, go to drainmylawn.com slash haunted, and you'll get 5% off any service. Does your outdated website give your visitors sleep paralysis? What? Is that a thing? Are you haunted by that logo your uncle's pet werewolf made? Brian, what are you talking about?

If you're ready to level up your brand and website, you need to talk to Josh at Valenti Creative. What's up, guys? Josh, my guy. What the heck? How did you just appear? Head to valentecreative.com slash NCP to talk with Josh about your brand and website. Oh, oh, this is an ad that we're doing right now? Wait, wait, how did he teleport into this room?

Ben, I wish I could tell you, but this is an ad. You have to go to valentec creative.com slash NCP and reach out today. Gilgamesh so tall, magnificent and terrible, who opened passes in the mountains, dug wells on the slopes of the uplands, and crossed the ocean, the wide sea to the sunrise, who scoured the world, ever searching for life and reached through sheer force, Utnan Apishti, the distant, who restored the cult centers destroyed by the deluge and set in place for the people the rights of the cosmos. With these words, the first epic myth of Western civilization begins. The hero of the tale the demigod Gilgamesh is introduced. A giant of towering proportions formed by fallen gods, he began his reign in Babylon in terror. Mere mortals feared their king, and he had his way with them.

He walked here and there along the walls of his city, challenging every man to combat with weapons, and no man dared refuse him for then death was certain. Thus he killed many of Uruk's future strength. Women fared no better, for Gilgamesh took whichever maiden he pleased. The complaint of the people rose up to the pantheon of false gods ruling over them. Powerful, preeminent, expert and mighty Gilgamesh lets no girl go free to her bridegroom. To their complaint, the goddess Ishtar paid heed.

The warrior's daughter, the young man's bride, she heard each of their cries. Thus, Ishtar persuaded the rest of the gods and goddesses. Collectively, they called upon Aruru, the great goddess and maker of mankind. They called upon her to fashion a match for Gilgamesh. The wicked hybrid demigod would only be broken into civility by a wild man, fashioned by the gods alone, one who could offer him a real fight. Thus, in fighting the humanoid manifestation of the wild outside the walls of Uruk, Gilgamesh would conquer the wilderness within himself.

and become a benevolent ruler. Enkidu was made by Aruru of Clay, fashioned in the badlands of the world. Enkidu, the offspring of silence. His body covered in a thick mat of hair like the animals he ran beside, and he lived with those animals, for they were all he knew. For many days, this was his way of life. Eventually, though, a young trapper caught sight of this wild man while on the hunt for game outside the city.

He was perplexed, of course, at first. He marveled at the incredible strength, the inhuman size mixed with the unmistakably human frame. At once the young man understood that this was the doing of the gods for some purpose that he did not understand. Thus, the first account of the wild man was written by poets thousands of years ago. To them, such creatures were far from purely natural. Rather, they were the offspring of demonic thought. Bread for the purpose of persuading man to govern himself more rightly. but this is far from the only mention of a creature one might mistake for our modern Bigfoot in antiquity.

Even when separated by entire worlds, human men wrote of similar things. Starting in the late 1300s, the Wycliffe Bible translations from the Latin Vulgate rendered the word translated as hyena or hairy one in the ESV version of Isaiah 1321 into the old English term Woodwos, meaning Wildman. The fact betrays a legend in the medieval folkloric tradition about a race of something, not quite man and not quite animal, that appears in some of the most highly regarded stories that defined that age. In Sir Gowan and the Green Knight, one reads about the hero, Gowan, warring with dragons

and wild men, or the woodwows, who dwelt within the craggy hills of rural Britain. In Carlisle Cathedral, a mezzar record depicts a woodwose fawning over a beautiful nymph. The wild man is partially hidden by the wild man. trees. Something in the picture makes it certain that the nymph knows the creature is there and that he longs for her. She stares directly out of the carving with a confident expression as if she knows the power she already holds over the lingering manifestation of the uncivilized. In Holy Trinity Church, in Coventry, another carving shows a giant man covered in hair sitting on a throne with a tamed lion curled at his feet. The image preserves a memory of an even deeper past,

when myth and history were not so neatly separate. Perhaps it is all mere story. But other accounts from those times genuinely make one wonder whether the ubiquity of the woodwose was not indicative of something grounded in reality. Around the year 1160, the English historian Ralph of Cogashaw documented a woodwose being captured by local villagers.

The story goes that some children living in Arford began telling their parents about glimpses of something in the woods that they couldn't name. They said it, walked and ran like a man but was large and somehow disproportionate. They also reported that the beast was covered in thick hair. Some of the people believed the children and went out to search for the thing. Ralph states that this group found the creature living deep in the marshes

and that its features matched exactly what the children described. It was humanoid enough for them to know that it was not an animal. And though the thing did not or could not speak, a look in the eye betrayed some level of apparent intelligence or self-awareness. The villagers watched stealthily, learning the habits of the creature until they could predict its movements well enough to attempt a trap. They succeeded in this, and they brought the woodwost back to Arford Castle. There, the nobles of the land, intrigued by the novelty, attempted to civilize the woodwows, but all of their efforts failed. The thing refused all cooked food, whether meat or vegetable, and despite thousands of man-hours of effort, it never showed any growth in comprehending human speech.

One morning, the Castle Groundskeeper was walking toward the stables when he heard a grunting sound from near the garden wall. He glanced over, but the morning fog was so dense that he struggled to make anything out. He shifted his head and moved around a little bit and focused his gaze until finally, ever so faintly, he saw the form of a man with locks of matted hair, pulling himself up and over the stone wall. It was the escaped woodwows, and he was never seen again. The Chronicle offered no commentary on these events. events. He merely recorded the story as a fact relevant to the broader community of his day. And this type of account was, again, not uncommon in those times. It seems the woodwos of yesteryear

has merely changed names in modern day, retreating alongside the ever-vanishing wildernesses of Britain. The Ojibwe people were descendants of a clan from Babel, who, upon expulsion from the land of Shinar, walked and sailed for a long time, before eventually arriving in the rich but perilous wilderness around what we now call the Great Lakes. Much like the seven sages traditions of the ancient Mesopotamians or ancient Hindus or Mesoamericans or Greeks, the Ojibwe received their education in ethics and virtue from their own seven wise grandfathers, powerful Ojibwe spirits, who took pity on the difficulty of mankind after the flood. In order to help men learn these immaterial skills of the world, the grandfathers enlisted the help of a prophesied child.

A child would be taught by the gods and would lead by example for the rest of the people, being himself a perfect embodiment of wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth. Thus, the grandfathers carried the child away from his mother's womb and took him on a tour of the cosmos until he reached the significant age of seven. At that point, they returned him to the earth and as already stated, they taught him into his manhood. At the onset of that manhood, they released him back to the Ojibwe, whereupon he became their pagan prophet, priest, and king. The people received the gifts and established their tribe in harmony with the earth and her bounty. As the man taught his people, the need to attach the virtues to visible and tangible examples

became clear. His early men struggled to reason in the abstract, so to help them he carefully chose one animal from the earth to represent each of the seven gifts. For wisdom, there was the beaver, who changed the courses of rivers with prudence and skill. For love, there was the eagle, an image of majesty and jealousy that love produces. For respect, there was the buffalo, honored among the creatures. For bravery, there was the bear, who doesn't hesitate to defend the one she loves. For humility, he chose the wolf, an animal mighty on his own, but who nonetheless knows that he's doomed apart from the pack. For truth, there was the turtle who's slow

and therefore models a sober restraint in the world. All of these made perfect sense to the man and to his pupils, but one final gift remained to be personified, the virtue of honesty. With great deliberation, the man took counsel within himself. He needed the symbol to be concrete, obvious to everyone, even to the children, and he needed to follow the theme of known creatures

that he used for all the other gifts. After many days of thought, guided by the insight he received from the grandfathers, he finally understood. Thus, honesty was symbolized by the Saabe, the image of meekness or honesty with oneself. The Saabe is what it is, and everyone grasped the teacher's meaning at once. But what is the Saabe? Well, it was the wild thing. The man-like beast of hair and crude intelligence whom everyone in the tribe frequently saw gathering and hunting and packs in the wilderness beyond the woods by the lakes.

To the primordial Ojibway, Bigfoot was as obviously real as the beaver, the wolf, the eagle, and the bear. Well, welcome back from that wonderful story. Ben, I just want to ask a question to lead us in. Because there's so much there. We talked about Enkidu. We talked about my Chippewa heritage. Gichichimukukukwai. We, which means big, big black woman and Ojibway, just heads up. But the woodwows, my question is just, is the woodwows like a British bigfoot? I think so. Is it just like, hey, I'm a bigfoot in it, beans, all right. Well, at least our bigfoot aren't giving people existential dread.

Well, at least our bigfuts, they can't even read. They're stealing jobs. Well, at least the woodwows doesn't impede Sir Gowan and the Gowin'n and the Gowin. Green Knight. Yeah, so like, what do you think about the woodwells? Well, I think that Bigfoot are Forest Fay,

Wood Fay, if you will, demonic fey. And so, yeah, it makes sense that you'd have like regional manifestations of the same kind of motif. Why not? And I think the Woodwows is just the British version, especially like the old Christendom British version.

Yeah, he's got bad teeth. It's way, he's way more low-key. Yeah. You know? He's like, riding around town in a row. If I see the opposite, it's over.

You know, he's not, he's not like ratchet. Have you seen the one, okay, this would be the last thing and then we'll actually talk about real things. Have you seen... Like the wood worse. Exactly. Have you seen the Instagram reels where the guy's like, point of view, you're a British waitress in and in like 1643.

And it's a guy, his face is all distorted by it. And he's like, you know what, love, just a light one today. if you could just bring me a raw trout and the teeth of a donkey. Have you seen? They're so good. Have you seen the one that was like different countries

arguing about best beer food combo? And America's like a Coors banquet with a cheeseburger. And then the Italian says some Italian beer with pizza. And they're all like, oh, that's a good one in German say. And then the British guy's like, what about a nice warm?

brew with a side of beans. British, that's literally what they're like, though. Hey, I live there for three years. British people. Yeah. Need to get some better opinions about everything. I lived in England for three years and it was, I mean, constantly in fear for my life. Yeah.

Okay, so, yeah, I think the wood was just like British version of Bigfoot. He's like British Bigfoot. And he can't learn to, like he can't read. No, he can't teach him. Yeah, just like the rest of. Okay. The British people literally built like the greatest empire in history And like we're all descended from them

Some never sets dude And like we're they're great and amazing Yeah, we're just we're dunking on them No man hey we we we we mess with you because you're my friend That's right. Yeah Yeah, love you British people Yeah exactly And then there's the OG boy thing

Well hang on the scribe though Like the village scribe told us this about the woodwork Yeah yeah so that so it happened well yeah It's well documented can you imagine being the village scribe Like, that's your thing. The village scribe... You just keep track of what's been happening. The village scribe, he's talking to the prince or the king or whatever.

And he's like, so then what happened that next week? Yeah. The king's like, oh, that was the woodwost. We caught the woodwows. Like hundreds of villagers helped come together to capture a woodroes. We all saw him. Kept him at the castle for months. Try to educate it.

Try to educate him. Couldn't do it. He ended up just running away. He finally leaves. And the scribes like... Yeah, of course, checks out. What next? Yeah.

And then he's like, and then the droll bridge had to be replaced. I just love. Because the timbers was roll. And man, the high middle ages, those guys, they knew how to just roll with stuff. They did because they'd be like, you know, talking about doctrine stuff. Theologians are writing. And then like, yeah, and then there's the hobgoblins. Like here's what, here's what they've been up to.

And then anyway, like penal substitutionary atonement. Yeah. But there's even carvings of wood, wood woes sigh. Woodwoses? Yeah, woodwosin. Woodwozen. Woodwozen. Yeah. on churches.

Yeah. You know, and I can't remember which ones they are, like Carlisle Cathedral, I believe on the front door has a carving of a woodwose being like tempted by a nymph. Wow. Like a river nymph. And the nymph is just staring right out of the frame at the onlooker. And then the woodwose is like trying to get her attention from it. It's just, yeah.

That was just the water they were swimming in. They were like, this is our world. It's real. Yeah. It was enchanted. Did that image, so you've got the nymph tempting the woodwows. is that representative of like your higher nature trying to convince your lower nature

not to make your mom jokes in the middle of every Hanukas episode? I got a little turn around by the question. But probably. Because that's autobiographical. Probably. Well, no, it is interesting how this kind of goes back to the Gilgamesh Enkidu thing

as one of the founding pillars of Western civilization in a civil sense, the epic of Gilgamesh with the whole, Gilgamesh Enkadoo episode was, I think, attempting to give a fallen, of course, like just post-Babel take on how man reconciles

all the different appetites inside himself. And so Plato talks about this, how outside of man, you have our shell, our outer shell, it's the body, it looks like a man. But inside, there's three different appetites. There's the human appetite for wisdom, true wisdom. There's the kind of middle road

of strength and spiritedness courage in the lion. And then there's the Silla, the multi-headed monster. And that's our base affections and emotions that we are bound just by being created to tame. We have to cut the bad heads off so that the more human heads can flourish. And if you invert that order and you put SILA at the top, then you're going to get total chaos. Societal chaos. You'll turn into a democracy and then a tyrant is what it says.

It almost sounds like the id, the ego and the super ego. Yeah. Yeah. It's all in Plato. It's all there in Plato. It's all there in Aristotle and Aquinas as well. They basically said the same thing. But it's interesting how the Babylonians were giving that similar commentary on the Gilgamesh thing. But they, you see, were actually saying that there's a way in which the man and the beast or the Silla can coexist. Yeah. Interesting. And the way that that happens, just little ears, maybe plug them. The way that that happens is interquins. course is through an expression of sexuality. So they were tying sensuality to humanity and reasonableness in such a way that we then shouldn't be surprised when their false worship and when so many other forms of false worship after them were focused around perverse sexual action. A deviant sexual practice. Yeah, because the demons have been telling us from the beginning,

the thing that makes you most human is sexual expression. Man is always seeking in his fallen is to understand himself, but he does so imperfectly because he's not willing to take the medicine he needs, which is death to die with Christ and become a fundamentally new creation, which is a perfection of nature. It's not like a denial of our original created purpose or denial of our humanity. It's not fundamentally to become something other than a man. Right. But it is to die to the flesh, to this aspect of the bestial nature of man that we're always trying to explain like, why do I do these things? Why is man evil? Why does he bring chaos and destruction, but also he's capable of civilization and rational thought.

And beauty. And beauty. Even in his fallenness, he still echoes and he is still a man. Yeah. Right. So we're always trying to understand ourselves. But apart from the guiding light of Christ and the revelation of the God man who shows us the perfect man, he does more than that, of course, but he does show us the perfect man.

Man is always attempting to semi-deify or baptize some aspect of his fallen nature. Yeah. instead of crucifying it and seeking the true restoration of man. Paul even talks in Ephesians too. It's all in Bigfoot stories, really, like everything I just said. I know, seriously. It's all in the woodwows. Obviously.

Paul even talks in Ephesians too. He uses the language of us already being dead. Like we're born dead and trespasses by nature like the rest of mankind is what he says. And so there's a sense in which like we're trying to still be human beings. And we are still human beings, but we're fallen. But we're dead at it. Like we have no sense of how to do it the right way. And so when we're resurrected with Christ and the Spirit,

it's not grace turning a human into something that he's not or something that he was never meant to be, but it's restoring that humanity. Yeah. It's grace restoring and then perfecting nature. Yeah. Not, even not like, transcending what man was never created to be. Because man is a good thing that was corrupted.

And so it's not that the nature of man, man is bad, badness. No, man's corrupted self. It's corruption of sin touched every part of what it means to be human. And so we are totally depraved. That's what the words mean. It's not that we always do the most evil possible thing, but it's that every part of our humanity is touched by sin,

infected by it, corrupted by it. But man is a good thing that can be redeemed into a glorified and glorious thing that bears the image of God and represents his character on earth. is why too our hope as Christians isn't that we would live forever as souls, disembodied souls. Our hope is a resurrected body that is finally glorified, perfected

by grace, and then able to enjoy all of the goodness that God has for us in glory as embodied souls, as fully human beings. Could a glorified man wrestle a Bigfoot and win? I think for sure, dude. Like, what do you think? Like, nine rounds,

boxing. I don't think Bigfoot make it one. Glorified man versus, dude, it's over. When I'm glorified, I'm able to fly, right? A glorified man sees a big foot. It's on site. It's on site. He pulls out his like heaven gun.

Yeah, dude. He just blad. It's like no wonder off or something from from Nazi zombies. It's like this amazing weapon. It's amazing. Infinite ammunition. How we can go from that to that. And I think everybody knows what I just said, what I mean.

100% by that. The one thing that I would like to touch on before we go into the close. Okay. This is an idea that I had kind of off of that first discussion that we talked about. And that is this topic of or this idea of Bigfoot being like a thought form. Dang. An egregor or a Tulpa. So I say, hang on.

What if Bigfoot's like a thought form? You know like a tulpa. Yes, indeed. And then your friend looks at you and goes like, dude, bro, yes. What's a tulpa? I'll just say I don't think that. That is true. Okay.

But I'm interested in hearing. Well, yes. So a Tulpa or an Agrigor, they're basically the same thing. One's eastern, one's western. But both are thought forms that manifest in reality if enough collective thought or emotion is ascribed to that idea. Yeah. So like we actually, there's a lot of accounts from the east of this, of these mystic religions wanting to curse people. And so they create together a Tulpa.

Yeah. That's this, actually, Talmudic Jews talk about this with golems. Yeah, exactly. Like they form this clay thing and then they give it enough thought and it eventually comes alive. They put their will into it. Yeah, and it wreaks havoc. I don't think that that is the case with Bigfoot, partly because it has to be intentional. And the other reason is I just don't like that idea.

The other thing we've talked about before with the Tulpa-Egregore thought form thing is. is... Egregore. That's a season one throwback right there. Is that back when we only did Italian accents, I think you all know

what I'm getting at. But now, what is a... Egregore. Ninja torpa. Oh, that torpa is very skinny and short and running very fast.

He's bad at driving. Shout out to all my Asian listeners. Love you guys. The ones that are still here are so real for that. They are. So here's what I was getting it. We discussed this in the past,

that the demonic and satanic being a deception is constantly, it always stays the same in a sense. It's purposes the same. It's to steal, kill, and destroy. But it brings, it's clever, it's cunning, it will adapt, it will be an angel of light when needed, it will be a thing of darkness when needed, it deceives. And so one thing that Satan loves to do is to latch onto,

to nurse into flame some idea of man, and then latch onto it, and show man what he wants to see. To show man, yeah, this is this, this wrong idea you had about the world and everything in it and yourself. Totally true. It's true.

And let me demonstrate for you, but it's all sock puppets all the way down. You know what I mean? Like it's fake. Sog puppets all the way down. Sock puppets all the way down, man. So like Bigfoot is a satanic sock puppet. I love that.

Put that on a t-shirt. You can see like one of the, so Anthony Esselen has this really fascinating lecture series on the roots of Western civilization. And he has building blocks where he talks about the fall of man and how before the fall, man's dwelling place was in this beautiful garden. And he was cultivating nature. And it was wild, but it was tamed wilderness. And so it was a full expression of like God's creative glory with man's agency involved. After the fall, you have Babel going up. And that shows that now man is so afraid of that wilderness that he's supposed to go in tame,

that he would rather ignore it all together, come together in collectivism, and form a city. And so the next building block of Western civilization is the city. And then you have the nation and it goes on and on and on. But I do think it's that like dichotomy between the city and the wilderness is an interesting one, where if you buy into that idea at all, you can see how the demonic deception might play out, where if man is so afraid of the wilderness that he's going to content himself with the city walls, admiring the city walls,

and just staying there, and he's never going to go and subdue anything else. Just that one patch of earth. Then, anytime he does go outside of those walls, if he were to encounter some like embodiment of the wild, whether it's an Incadu or a woodwose or a Bigfoot or whatever it may be, that thing is going to terrify him and drive him back to the city

so that he would, again, be more confirmed in his fear and not bother to subjugate and subdue. And so it's this cyclical thing of our fallenness and our sin. It turned the wilderness that God created that we were fit to rule and subdue into this haunt of jackals and demons and all this stuff. And then when we realized how terrifying that was, we came together in this Tower of Babel type mindset, it gets judged, but we still have that city mindset after that.

And so cities are popping up all over. the ancient world. And any time they go out, they go back into the haunt of jackals and that drives them back to the city and then you never actually take dominion. So we need to be...

So Bigfoot, basically... We need to be getting the Bigfoot's. We need to be... We need to round them up. We need to re-educate them. We need to not apostatize as a people. I would have...

And in doing so, we need to go and preach the gospel to all creation. That seems more important than what I said. Well, but that would include that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If we caught a bunch of them, like we'd evangelize. 100%. And then they'd be like, but we're demons and we'd be like dead.

On site. On site. Yeah. Guys, what I think that's probably the logical conclusion. Yeah, I think so. To this discussion. And now we're going to go in to a closing story, a hot close, if you will, that introduces a piece of evidence that I was actually unaware of until writing this episode.

That I think gives a lot more credibility to the reality of. of Bigfoot encounters. It doesn't touch as much on the spiritual implications of it. But it's just to show you guys that even when you get just basic snap and shoot pictures of Bigfoot, there's a lot of drama, fear, wickedness that are still involved. And so we want to leave you with that story until next time. Do you want a six-pack? No, I don't mean abs and I don't mean beer.

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overexposure present comes as no real surprise. The provenance is about as ironclad as one might hope for given the circumstances. There is little doubt that this photo was taken when and where it claims to have been taken. The proof comes from an inscription penned on the photo's rear side. It reads year 1894. Yallicorn River, around Lilliot, BC, Forestry Hudson's Bay Co. They took the picture, and the guy that was in the picture went and stole them back from the forestry records, Hudson Bay Co. I believe the last name was Holiday.

Don't know the first name. Never took all the pictures, only one, and took pictures of the rest. Glassplate photography. The top half of the scene shows rugged winter wilderness, rolling hills beneath a whitewashed sky and a sparse evergreen forest buried in deep snow. As the eye traces downward, the trees break off. On the left side of the lower third, snow shoes from the time period are stuck into the ground,

their bottoms facing the viewer. These were presumably placed there as a size reference for what lies on the right side of the lower third of the frame, a creature of some kind. That it is lying down and dead cannot be mistaken. Even in a still photograph, one can sense a lack of vitality to the creature. The body is half prone and half on its side. Both arms stretch forward from the torso into the snow. The wrists appear bound with a length of cord and hair covers the thing completely,

except for a thinner patch where one might expect a face to be. Patches of snow still cling to the matted fur. The feet fall out of the frame. Assuming the body aligns with the snow shoes and minimal parallax is involved, the creature's estimated length is around 60 inches or 5 feet. For years, this picture remained hidden. But since its resurfacing in 1982, cryptozoologists and average enthusiasts alike

have believed that what's pictured here is an adolescent Bigfoot, five to seven years old by most guesses of indeterminate sex. Of course, we can't answer exactly what the image shows, but there are other questions about the photograph that can be addressed. The story goes like this. In the frontier lands of North America's northern reaches, two hunters came upon a strange thing while stalking elk. The creature, a young man of the wild, was busying itself beside a river.

Despite the frigid temperatures and pelting snow, the river had not frozen entirely, providing precious sound cover that allowed the hunters to approach extremely close. The gunshot rang out through the trees, scattering whatever game the hunters had pursued, but honestly they didn't care. The strange entity's body lay motionless on the rocky beach,

shot through the center mass, and now utterly bereft of life. Believing the beast carried a high-value pelt, unlike anything they'd ever heard of, the hunters chose to cross the icy water immediately rather than search for an easier crossing elsewhere. Up close, the monster made them shiver. A face resembling a human's,

bipedal but hunched, uncloathed, and covered head to toe in fur as thick as a buffaloes, save for the face. After an exhausting struggle, dragging the corpse from the beach, hauling it up river to a narrower crossing, carrying it back across, and then dragging it once more to their makeshift game sled, the hunters reached the settlement of Lillowet just after nightfall. The cold bit hard. Wind announced itself in waves of powdery snow, spinning into little twisters along with streets. Apart from oil lamps glowing on a few porches, darkness ruled the town. They stopped the sled in front of a fur trading post, just as a particularly vicious gust tore through the town. The wind forced the men to turn their faces downward.

When they looked back up, a man stood in the doorway of the post. In those days, and in that region, fur trading meant one thing, the Hudson's Bay Company. The building belonged to the company, and the man who greeted them was one of its buyers. For the hunters, the timing couldn't have been better. They sold the corpse to the company man with little hesitation, distracted by the handsome sum offered, and then made for the warmth of the bar further into town. The story continues that upon close examination of his purchase, the Hudson's Bay representative commissioned a local photographer to document the creature.

How many photographs were taken remains unknown, but both the story itself and the inscription on the back of the recovered image corroborate that there were multiple. If our interpretation of the note is correct, one of those photographs, even included the man who later stole the image bearing the inscription. The man identified only by the last name, Holiday. At any rate, this picture was safeguarded, perhaps passed down through generations, until its eventual release to Bigfoot researchers in the 1970s.

By then, the Hudson's Bay Company had modernized and showed little concern for an old stolen photograph. Ultimately, nobody knows who the hunters were, nobody knows for certain what the picture portrays, nobody knows exactly why the photograph or photographs were taken, nobody knows who Holiday was, and at this point nobody likely ever will know. What is known is the strange story and the unsettling curiosity of the image itself. By all accounts, the notes on the back dates from shortly after 1894. It's cryptic and clearly written in haste. Some have taken this as evidence

of a cover-up by the Hudson's Bay Company. Perhaps they knew Sasquatch existed within the ecosystems of British Columbia. Perhaps they didn't want the public to know. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But perhaps not. If secrecy was the goal, why take multiple photographs? Why hire an ordinary photographer? Why failed to guard the images more closely in the first place? If this was a corporate cover-up, the operational security seems strangely laxed for a company with such immense resources. As for the photograph itself, its subject does remain in dispute. It does not appear to be a man. it doesn't resemble any known animal. The discernible physiology alone seems to rule that out. Either it depicts a true cryptid, a juvenile Bigfoot, or a man in a fur suit, playing dead beside a pair of

snow shoes. But if it's the latter, then why? The Bigfoot myth will endure. Of that, there can be little doubt. If it's merely a chase after the wind, it shows no sign of stopping. Clues will continue to be found where none exist. Confirmation bias dies hard. If it's a chase after something real, then we may never hear the truth at all. If even a fraction of our speculation about Bigfoot is accurate, should we really expect full disclosure within our lifetime? And yet, hints of truth still surfaced from time to time. This 1894 photograph, the Patterson Gimlin film, thermal footage from Expedition Bigfoot, all of these, if not hoaxes, suggest that something real may be present. Alongside these hints stand volumes of alleged eyewitness testimony,

much of which adds a terrifying preternatural dimension to the purely physical evidence. We've said it before. People lie, but people do not only lie. So maybe it is nothing. Maybe it's something far less remarkable than many hope. Or maybe the Bigfoot myth is far more real than any of us would like. We can't say. Remote parts of eastern Tennessee were still wild in the early 1900s. It was a section of the country that was rugged and difficult to reach. To boot, the people there had lived there for generations, all descended from Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. As such, they took to change very slowly. All of this meant that the forests around Walden's Ridge was like one big time capsule. Very few roads, no electricity, and virtually no cities had yet

taken hold in the area. Walden's Ridge was a dense and dark holler. Of course, the trees were thick there, but it was not only the forest that kept it from being developed by the farming families. The ground was sandy and laced with tough clay. Granite boulders grew up from the bedrock and made sections of the hauler feel like a labyrinthine canyon somewhere much further west than Tennessee. Two families owned massive farms on either side of the hauler, the Smiths and the Browns. These two families were friendly with one another and thus a trail was carved through Walden's Ridge that allowed the families to host one another somewhat regular.

for card games and meals. One night, the Brown Boys were at the Smith's home. The friends fellowshiped on homemade wine for so long that night that the Browns didn't remount their horses until after 1 a.m. Remember, the trail was rough and neither family owned cars yet. The trio of men and horses started down the trail and eventually reached a rocky section that wound tightly and had short crags on either side, a natural choke point. Suddenly, just after a bird call echoed from the rocks above them, the three horses went berserk. Kicking and bucking in a confined space forced the two eldest brothers to spur their steeds into full gallop. They ran about a quarter mile until the horses had finally calmed at the crest of a hill.

The third brother, however, didn't fare as well. At the onset of his horse's mania, he was kicked straight off and onto the ground. His oil lantern tumbled into a rare patch of sand in the trail. Provinentially, it neither broke nor went out, and he was glad for this. Even though he had been bucked off his horse, his horse kept panicking. It didn't try to run, but it could not or would not calm down either. For a few seconds that felt very long, the young man lay on the ground watching his horse bounce about with wild eyes shimmering on the mix of lamplight and moonlight. After those seconds passed, he finally saw what had spooked the horses,

the silhouette of a man against the moon. Massive red eyes stared back at his. The man was covered in what was clear. clearly hair, and his size rivaled the trees. It was a monster unlike anything the Brown brother had ever conceived of before. After another whistle, as if from a bird, the shape bounded down the rocks toward him. It entered the lamplight with a terrible grimace, slashing with dreadful claws at the horse. One slash caught the animal's throat, and warm blood immediately began gushing out. Brown, without thinking, unholstered his revolver and emptied all of his shells into his

attacker. His target stood no more than 10 feet away, and he later swore that the lion's share of the shots had struck the beast. Despite this, the monster let out nothing more than a grunt before leaping and climbing back up the rocks at incredible speed. As the youngest sat there glancing around wildly while trying and failing to reload his gun, the elder brothers returned and saw the grisly scene for themselves. The sight of the mangled horse, an utterly terrified brother, shocked them. And of course, they asked what it happened. The brother shouted about a monster, about not missing, about getting out of there, and then leapt onto the rear of the eldest Browns brother's horse without invitation. The brothers waited for nothing more. They left the horse and

all its gear behind and rode home as fast as they could. The next morning they returned to the hauler to recover the saddle and whatever else remained. When they came upon the spot where it had happened, they found the place swept, totally clean. No horse. No blood, no prince, no saddle, nothing. Thus the legend of Whistling Jack was born. Decades later, an army veteran stood atop a sandstone cliff some miles away from that dark collar, though still within the wilderness of Walden's Ridge.

It was night, and the moon shone with the bright silver, raining cold light down onto the valley beneath him. There he could describe the lights of houses and shops winding down for the day, had lights betrayed cars heading for home. The man, tired but content after an afternoon of hunting, sipped bourbon and soaked in the piece of his home woods. He knew them well. Into this tranquility came a bird call.

The man knew his birds, and he knew this one was a bobwhite, a quail. The sound came from the trees at the base of his cliff. Normally, this would have meant nothing, and at first he didn't register why the sound unsettled him immediately. After a few seconds, he heard an answering Bob White a few hundred yards away, but at his elevation. His unease sharpened into a palpable fear, and he finally understood why.

Bob Whites were not nocturnal birds. To hear one so late at night was rare. To hear too was unnatural. The man hurried to his feet, shouldered his backpack, and cradled his shotgun. Something was wrong, and he could feel it. He worked his way stealthily through the woods and down the slope until he reached the base of the cliff,

heading for home. The Bob White calls continued from different, size, all sides around him. It soon became impossible to deny that the calls were actually following him and drawing closer to him with each sound. Not wanting to give away his position too easily, but also not wanting to be caught off guard, he pulled out his flashlight and some tape and secured the light to the magazine tube of his gun, just in case. More minutes of careful movement passed. More Bob White calls, calls that were not Bob White calls, closed in on his position. Then he heard the footsteps. Heavy thuds in the leaves, spaced at intervals he could not

match. Something was close now. Something that stepped slowly but moved fast, which meant it was big. He'd grown up hearing the stories of whistling Jack, and now they flooded back into his mind. He cursed himself for never taking them seriously. A pattern emerged. The man took furtive steps through the shadowed woods a few yards at a time. Every time he stopped, he heard one or two heavy footfalls steadily closing in behind him before they two stopped. They were mirroring his movements. Pure instinct took over. He made for a slot canyon he knew lay not far away. Once there he wedged himself into it and chimneed to the top. More Bobwhite calls. Both were very close now. He heard them approached the slot's entrance just as he crested the rock and scrambled up the scree into an old pine

forest above. He poured with sweat and shivered in the cold night air. Everything blurred into frenzy. Everything felt curious and wrong, it was hard to think. When he finished scrambling, he sprinted deeper into the pines, dropped to a knee beside a thick trunk, flipped on the light, and aimed his gun back the way that he had come. He could already hear two pairs of heavy steps entering the first few rows of trees. He pointed the light where he heard the sounds, believe the monster stood, but he still couldn't see anything. Finally, with his patience exhausted, he fired two 12-gauge buckshot blasts toward where he judged the creatures to be. After the second shot, a horrible shriek tore through the forest.

It was somehow both deep and shrill, layered with the highest and lowest pitches all at once. Into the beam of his light rose a massive figure, hairy and powerful. It opened its mouth and screamed again. Massive fangs glistened and eyes reflected red like burning coals. The screams sounded angry rather than pained, but the shots did their work anyway. When the man recovered from the ringing in his ears and the shriek faded, he heard the footfalls, now loud and careless, retreating into the woods. He sprinted to his car, drove home, and never returned to those woods again. Want more hunted cosmos?

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