Sasquatch Chronicles - SC EP:337 Childhood encounters with the creature
Episode Date: June 25, 2017Jimmy writes "I had an encounter with 2 different Sasquatches in on afternoon/night. I really love your show and it is great therapy for people whom have had encounters" I will also be welcoming Ed to... the show. Ed writes "My fascination with Big Foot began after my sighting in the summer of 1985 in Maine. I was 14 and it scared the **** out of me. Since then and up until about a year ago I used to have horrible nightmares several times a year about Big Foot. The nightmares stopped late last year when I finally admitted to myself, and to a few close family members, what I saw. Up until about a year ago I had never told anyone about my experience."
Transcript
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Black thing go from left to right, and I thought, I'm going to die out here and no one's ever going to know.
I couldn't believe what my eyeballs were showing me. I'll never forget how evil the eyes were.
It was horrible. I mean, I've never seen nothing that evil.
It ran towards me at a rate that I can't even explain, turned and stared at me,
and this look of, I just want to kill you.
I want to say it was human, but it wasn't.
He was yelling out, he'd he grab a gun, grab a gun.
I was like, for what? He said, just grab a gun.
And there's footprints all the way to the door of my house.
It had went inside my garage all the way to the door.
9-1-1. What are you reporting?
Get somebody out here.
What's going on now, sir?
That son of a bitch is about 6'9, I don't know.
Do you see him now, sir?
Yes, I'm looking right at him.
Uh-oh.
You're listening to see.
Sasquatch Chronicles. Check us out online at Sasquatch Chronicles.com.
If you've had an encounter, email me. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com.
Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show playing for you tonight.
Childhood Encounters. I got two witnesses coming up. Ed, who had an encounter when he was about 14 years old.
and he saw one of these creatures digging on the side of a bank.
Very, very fascinating encounter.
And then I'll also be speaking to Jimmy,
who had two encounters with these when he was a child.
And even it's smashing the back door.
You'll want to stay tuned for that.
If you've had an encounter and you'd like to be on the show,
shoot me an email.
My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com.
And if you get a chance to check out Sasquatch Chronicles.com,
You can get merchandise, additional shows.
There's a daily blog.
Please check it out if you get a chance.
How's everyone doing tonight?
Gosh, I can't believe this weekend's almost over with.
It's about a million degrees here in the Pacific Northwest.
Well, it might be a million and one.
It's hot, though.
It's real hot here.
And I hope wherever you're listening to the show, you're in a nice, cool place to get ready for some encounters tonight.
Let's jump into it.
I want to welcome Jimmy to the show.
So, Jimmy, thanks for coming on.
Absolutely, Wes.
Thanks for having me.
No, I appreciate it.
I know you're on vacation.
I appreciate you taking the time to come on.
And, you know, when you and I were talking the other night,
I was just blown away by the encounter,
the two encounters that you had.
If you were for the audience, maybe kind of start from the beginning.
Where did all this take place, Jimmy?
What state?
This South took place in North Carolina.
I was probably, I want to stay, maybe six, seven.
I couldn't have been any much older than that.
I'm 44 now.
Um, my, it's kind of relevant to the story just a little bit, but, um, my mom wasn't the greatest
mom.
We moved around a lot into several schools and the same amount of year, you know, several
schools and three, four schools in a year.
We just moved around a lot.
She was just in a nutshell.
She was just a horrible little abusive mother, a lot of abuse going on and growing up as a
kid.
So in a little bit later on the story kind of plays a, you know, a part and it's kind of relevant
to the whole encounter.
Yeah.
But it started out.
We had just moved from Illinois.
And my stepfather, he's a Native American Indian, and he was married to my mom at the time.
And we moved up to North Carolina, and they had a spot where they tore some trees down and put a trailer in.
When they put the trailer in, the day we showed up, we got out of the car.
Me and my brothers got out of Al Camino.
And my stepfather, buddy, he literally looked at us.
said back in the trees there's a hairy man stay out of the tree stay out of wood and you know
I never even hearing those two words in the same sentence here and man and we kind of
it was more of like we didn't know what to think of it and we kind of thought yeah whatever
and laughed and he had you know he kind of laughed back at it's like well I told you kind of thing
and we weren't really at this place that long I know that my like said mom wasn't the
us, they're the moms, and she would leave us for day, night, you know, all day, all night,
sometimes a little longer.
And they left one day.
And I wouldn't say it was in the evening time.
It was in the evening.
And we were, me and my brothers, we were just, once again, this story with the trailer,
the trailer, it didn't have any skirting on it.
It wasn't even anchored to the ground yet.
It had got put in, the plumbing and the electric had all been hooked up just the day before
we got there.
So it didn't even have poor.
in the back. It just had a make-way shift porch just to get into the front.
And so when we were out behind the back of the trailer play, and we heard this just got off a
screen, it sounded like a woman getting kind of ripped apart is what it sounded like.
It was just a big old bloody curly scream, and so it got our attention, and we started walking
back, and since this was kind of a newly construction area, they had to take down some trees
and whatnot. So the trees close to the trailer weren't really all that thick. And as we were walking, well, we couldn't have been 25, 50 feet away from our trailer. We weren't looking in the tree. We were just looking straight ahead. There was no reason to look in the tree. The found of the screen got our attention. And as we were walking in, we were walking in and there was a big crack. And all of a sudden, the crack was in the tree. And we looked up in the first branch that we've seen, there was, and
best way to describe it is literally it looked like probably about a six six and a half foot
chimp and it kind of reminded me of a chimp it wasn't super buff it was black hairy and when we
looked up as we looked up the way it was standing is that you can picture holding standing next to a
flagpole and grabbing it with your hand and then totally extending your arm from the flagpole so
you're straight out and then holding on to the flagpole and moving your feet all the way up
against the flagpole.
So you're actually kind of leaning out, but your feet are up against the flagpole and your arms
pulling it.
This is how the thing was.
And when it went to stand, the branch it was on, it broke.
And it was, I want to say, it was 12 to 15 feet up in the air.
That was the first branch on the tree.
When the thing fell west, it was all sand and whatnot.
So there really wasn't as much of a, you know, a thud or anything that you would,
you would think or that you would recognize, but what stood out the most of us is when it landed,
the legs barely even bent like it was, like for me it was like stepping off a curve, but this thing, you know,
fell out of a tree 15 feet and it was almost like it was used to that.
So it was mind-boggling to see that when it landed, it barely even bent its legs from the position
that it was in.
Me, jumping out of a tree, fairly fit guy, I'm pretty sure I'd break a leg,
or I'd at least fall all the way to the crown,
but the thing, it was almost like there was nothing there really
to cause any resistance to it.
When it landed, it just barely landed.
It's what it looked like.
It looked like it was just stepping off a curb on what we would do.
When it landed, and we noticed it had kind of like a,
oh, crap, look in its eyes.
It didn't change its face, expressed in except for its eyes.
His eyes got really wide.
And us being kids, my brothers, like I said,
I was six or seven and my other brother was two years older with me, so he was either
eight or nine, and my brother Bobby was two years older than him, so he was 10 or 11, you know,
somewhere around and there.
Well, we all took off an like about out of hell.
Run into the trailer.
The trailer's not that far away, like I said, maybe 15th.
That was the day that I realized if I wanted to survive in this family that I needed to run
faster than I did because my brother, Bobby, my oldest brother Bobby, got to the back porch,
And the back porch just made out of center blocks.
Like I said, it just Trailer just got put there.
The center blocks just so we could get up to it.
He ran up and he bailed on us, man.
He got up in the house, he shut the door and locked the door and just left us hanging.
And so me and my brother, Galen, we were right next to the porch was an old freezer chest.
But it had a top, like a plexiglass top.
And the plexiglass top was very weathered and worn.
So it wasn't see-through.
It hazed over really bad.
And the only thing we could think of was to jump in there.
And so we jumped in there and lid came down.
And, you know, we were kind of expecting to be lunch after that.
We were terrified.
I was very terrified.
It was very traumatic for me.
I had lots of nightmares for years after this had happened.
To point back to when it had fell and we took off running one time as we were running, we glanced back.
And when we glanced back, it caught.
But it never ran.
It never picked up pace.
It just walked a tearious walk behind us.
So we just looked back once and me and my brother got into the freezer chest.
She shut the freezer chest.
It walked right up to the freezer chest.
We could see a silhouette right through the hazed over flexing glass.
And all it did, I mean, it could have tapped on the side.
It could have ripped it apart.
It could have pulled us out.
All it did was it kind of huffed out.
It's kind of like what a horse would do.
when they're breathing really hard, and they just go, it kind of huffed at us.
And at that point, I was ready to scream.
My brother Galen kind of got control over me.
And it just walked away.
We could hear it walk away, but it wasn't stomping.
We just heard it walk away.
And it was just too hot in that trailer that freezer chest.
We couldn't stay in there any longer.
So we came out, reluctantly came out, and my brother Bobby got us in.
and that was that was the first experience on that night on of of this encounter with this creature and it was like I said it was it's very traumatizing and I think um I think when I brought up um having an abusive mother um a lot of things in my childhood memories and stuff um just kind of suppressed um you know bad things get put away put in a dark spot kind of forget about or whatnot
I knew after that day that I needed to be a faster runner because my brother Bobby Smokis,
and he left us out there hanging.
So I became a lot faster.
I became a lot faster runner after that.
I bet.
And, you know, the other thing, too, is I just had a show on Friday, and the lady was
talking about her husband locked her out of the house.
He went running for the house.
And so I think there's sometimes a self-preservation streak when we're running from fear
to where, I'm sure if, you know,
know, my brothers would have done that.
There would have been a fist fight or something afterwards for doing that.
Yeah.
You know, I don't think it was intentional that your brother, or maybe you know, you obviously
know your brother had been and I do.
But I think it's self-preservation.
You start freaking out and you're not really thinking straight on what to do.
And so you lock the door behind you.
Yeah, I'm 100% with you.
I don't think there was any.
It went like, he was like, yep, it's your day to get eaten.
It was one of those, I mean, because like I said, grew up in a very abusive mother.
And I can't count them any number of times where my older brothers took the heat,
took the rap for something that may have gotten broken around the house because they knew
that the beating to come that I may not survive.
And they've taken it.
I understand.
I understand.
So I don't believe it was anything to really, you know, let us die.
It was just one of those things where he was secure in himself, just the only way he knew how.
Little as we know, you know, it wasn't it wasn't beeline.
And with all my heart, I know it could have had us if I wanted to without really much trouble.
It seemed more curious than anything at the most.
I wanted to ask you, before we get into the next night or the next time he saw the creature,
which is even more terrifying than this one.
Same night.
Yeah, the same night.
But when you saw the thing, did it look like a chimpanzee in the face?
Or did it have human-like, you know what I'm trying to say, not expression?
Yeah, what the kind of features and stuff.
Yeah.
From the, from the glance that we had, West, the closest thing I can tell you, man, it is literally what, because we've seen Planet of the Yates as a kid, you know, the original one before all these other ones came out.
And to me, that's what it looked like.
As a kid, it looked like one of the monkeys from Planet of the Yates in their face.
There wasn't much, there wasn't much hair around the eyes and the lips, but the lips did stick out.
They were bubbled out, if that makes any sense.
Kind of like a chump, the lips stick out.
I remember that it had darker hair, thicker hair, and like I said, we only saw it for maybe, gosh, if you put it all, to get maybe four or five seconds at the time we saw it up in the tree from the time it landed, from the time we took off and then turned back, just glanced back to see if we were being chased and then turned around even in a morphier.
Um, it may be five seconds total. Um, it couldn't have been any more than that. But, but I can, I can promise you that that was enough to, to give me nightmares and think about it for many years afterwards.
I bet. Yeah, and I think anyone rational would feel the same way.
You know, I mean, my God, seeing this thing and just being a bunch of kids out there, you know, and being terrified by this thing.
God, I can't even imagine. You know what's interesting is I listened to that, Jimmy, and I was thinking it must have been a juvenile or something because it doesn't sound like King Kong.
I mean, you mentioned this thing was, what, six and a half feet tall or something?
Maybe.
It looked, you know, my stepfather wasn't very big.
He wasn't a very big guy.
I'm actually, I'm 5'8, and I think he might have been 5.
Right now I'm 5'8, but, you know, child was younger.
I mean, he, my, my, I think my stepfather was like 5, 7.
And this thing, you know, like I said, it was never fully standing up straight,
but it might have looked six and a half feet, maybe at the most, at the very most, you know,
and that's me judging as a six or seven-year-old, you know, the height.
It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't ginormous like the second.
It wasn't, not even close.
It was, it was night and day.
Well, so tell us what happened.
So you, you guys obviously get out of the freezer at this point, and you go and you talk to, you guys are all talking.
Is there any sort of conversation as far as what the hell was that thing?
You know, I think, I think for the first, you know, few hours, we were just in fear.
I honestly, I don't remember much past, the main thing I remember after that,
I don't, I'm sure we did, you know, I'm sure we did.
I just, I just remember later that evening after it had been scared so much that we, you know,
we got out one of those old ghost guns that flashes a ghost silhouette up on the wall with a flashlight.
Basically a flashlight that has a ghost silhouette.
And I think we just, we all just stayed in our dark room just trying to scare each other after that.
I don't know if it was a rush as a kid being scared.
But then all of a sudden, because I was more freaked out than my bigger brothers, I think it became more of a game to them to scare me.
And so, you know, and the one thing, the one relevant thing I wanted to bring up was the Harryman, the phrase Harryman.
I had never heard it prior to that.
Never heard it prior to that.
Never even thought about the words Harry and man being the same sentence.
And then I never heard it after that.
And so I don't mean the name drop, but my son, I had told my son, my second, the youngest, he's nine.
I told him, you know, I was telling him about, you know, what had happened to us when I was a kid.
And so he became infatuated with finding Bigfoot.
And, you know, we watched and watched and watched all the episodes, all the seasons.
And then one episode, they were watching, they were doing a talking about.
Uwari National Forest, which is in North Carolina.
And they literally, moneymakers said, you know, the Native Americans around this part,
they call him the hairy man.
And when he said Harry man, unless the floodgates opened up, all these memories that were just long,
locked away, just flooded out.
And I was just blown away about how much I was able to remember, how it just like, it basically
unlocked the door. It was
it was nuts and
you know a lot of people aren't
fans of finding me bigfoot.
I was a fan of finding Bigfoot
and so it started getting redundant
but they did
you know they did kind of thrust the subject out there
and the mainstream a little bit
and you know we've got to give
props for that at least.
No absolutely. I agree with you 100%
it kind of brought it to
the public's attention and however you feel about
finding Bigfoot's kind of
you know it doesn't really matter but it's it's it is it brought it brought it to it brought the subject
to the public's eye and that's very important and and that's cool that's cool that they did it
and a lot of people bash finding bigfoot but you know like I said it's it's it's all we got on
TV so what happens that night that night you guys are in the bedroom and and walk us into that
evening because it gets even more scary yeah absolutely um we just had the trailer put in
in. My stepfather, like I said, my stepfather had the trailer put in, and if anybody's ever been in a single wide trailer, and you kind of know how the setup is, but if people that don't, I'll kind of lay it out for them. You can walk in the front door. In the front door, you walk right into the kitchen slash dining room slash living room. And if you go one way on one end of the, when you take a right, it's kind of like the master bedroom at one end of the trailer, which where my mom and my stepfather's state. If you take a left and walk into the living room,
and start working your way down the hall.
The first room on the left was my little sisters.
And then the next door was a small bathroom.
And then our bedroom was the door at the end of the trailers.
So there was my three brothers and I, my two brothers and I shared one bedroom and my sister got a room to herself.
She was, she was the littlest.
So she was probably, she might have been three or four.
And so we're all in the bedroom.
My sister, I don't know where my sister was.
She wasn't with us.
I have no idea where she was.
But my brothers, we were all in our bedroom at the other end of the trailer.
And outside of our bedroom, when you walk out of our bedroom, when you're facing down the hall,
to the right is the bathroom.
The next door on the right is my sister's room.
But as soon as you walk out of our bedroom to the left is the back door of the trailer.
And that's the door that didn't have a porch.
My stepfather just had stacked up some center blocks to make a steps to get up and down.
so we could actually use it.
And so, you know, one got put in if one is ever going to get put in.
I remember the, I remember the, it was, it was kind of a brighter moon night because,
and my brothers had the ghost gone out.
And they were flashing the ghost silhouettes, you know, shining up on the wall.
And every time they'd turn it on, we'd all scream, you know, we were just boys being boys,
scaring each other and mostly them trying to scare me.
But, you know, I'm kind of still a little freaked out, I imagine.
and so they're shining it and shining it.
And I guess it gets to a point to where I'm just,
I'm too scared and I'm throwing too much of a fit.
And my brothers open up the curtains so that some of the moonlight in,
so it wouldn't be as scary.
You have the lights on and you have too much lighting.
You can't really see a silhouette from the flashlight
that's shining an object on the wall.
So they didn't want it to be too bright for me to ruin the fun,
but give me enough security that I had some light to see what was going on.
And when they opened up the curtain, their moonlight never came in.
It was like there was never even a moon out there.
And then my brother was shining the thing, and he went across the window.
And keep in mind, people that haven't been in a trailer, trailers, to get up in a trailer,
you've got to take three, four, five steps.
So it's probably three and a half feet up off the ground just to be floor level,
what we're standing on and what would be on outside.
So when he shined that ghost gun across the window there,
and it went right across the face, right across the eyes of a big foot.
There's nothing else that could have been.
There's zero anything else that could have been.
The shoulders were, the shoulder width of it was bigger than our window on the trailer.
So we never got to actually see how wide it was,
but I know that it was at least four foot wide.
its head was never fully exposed, so its head was still higher than our window.
Which explains why we couldn't see any moonlight.
The damn thing took up the whole window.
And when they shine the light across it, and it went across its eyes,
it did the same eye expression as the one that fell out of the tree.
Its eyes got really, really big, and it kind of moved its lip.
And when it hit its eyes, I was on.
on the left side of our bed.
And when I seen it, I jumped over our bed.
I don't think I touched our bed.
I landed on the other side.
But by the time I had landed on the other side was that thing was standing in the front of the window,
it went around the side of the trailer to our back door.
And I don't know if it had a cinder block in its hand or if it was, if there's just that quick,
but it grabbed one of those cinder blocks and it threw it through our back door.
So when it threw it through the back, the back door was locked.
but there was such a gaping bust in the door
that I could stick my whole entire leg out of the door
that's how much force that it used
when it threw that cinder block into the back door
and that was that we never made a sound
it never peeped
that you know there were we didn't hear anything
but we were terrified
and we were extra terrified
because now we had to look my mother in the face
and explained to her how it
This door is tore up, and we just knew the repercussions to come, but that were not going to be fun.
That's what happened.
It was, this one looked completely different than the one we've seen, but it may be because as they get into adulthood and get older, their facial structures may change.
I do, I don't have an answer for that.
But it looked like just a classic drawing of a, you know, a big brown.
Bigfoot, a big brown Sasquatch, you know, anyone, I think you've had sketches on.
It had, I do remember seeing white of the eyes.
I know some people say that it's all black.
I do remember seeing whites of the eyes.
I don't remember the color of its pupils.
I don't remember any eyeshine, which is troubling after hearing a lot of stories where people
see eyes shine, I shine.
We have a flashlight directly in its eyes.
And I don't remember any eyeshine.
I might not have been because I didn't stick around long enough to see, but I bailed.
But its hair was nowhere near as thick as the one that we see in tree.
It was a lot thinner as far as like if, I don't know, maybe you know how dogs have mange and their hair is not very thick.
You can see skin through their hair because some of their hair is falling out.
I remember seeing some of the hair and, I mean, not some of the hair, but some of their skin, it was huge.
There's nothing enough that could have been.
And that's what happened.
And then when my mother and stepdad got home, you know, we had to face the music and tell
him what happened.
And my mom wasn't buying it.
And she kind of went into a rage.
And then, but, you know, we brought it that, you know, but he said it was the Harryman.
It was the Harryman.
It was here, the Harry man.
And, you know, I kind of remember them getting into pretty much just about a knockdown
drag out in the kitchen.
and about, you know, what is going on.
And then my stepfather kept trying to tell us all that it was with our nephew or our cousin in a monkey suit.
You know, but none of that makes sense.
No best athlete in the world is not going to fall out of a tree 15 feet and land
and barely even bend their knees once they land from the position that they hit the ground.
Yeah, and you would have known even at that point if it was someone playing a brink on you when a monkey suit.
You know what I mean?
It's easier.
My nephew, I was just going to say, my nephew was only, or my cousin, he was only, it was
buddy's nephew, so I guess it would be my cousin.
If he was only maybe a year older than me, and like I said, I was six or seven, and there's
no, I'm 40 for you now.
I work out regularly in pretty good shape, and no damn cinder blocks are still heavy
to me.
There's no way a six, seven, eight-year-old is going to pick it up.
And if they do pick it up, they're not going to be able to throw it.
And if they do throw it, they're not going to have the force to do what the damage you
did to this door.
And so my thinking is, you know, this was all just a thing to calm everything down, to get the fear to go away.
This really wasn't what he said it was.
It was really his nephew and, you know, a monkey suit.
And, you know, none of it added up.
And then maybe if we were in my mom's bedroom on the other end where the actual hitch for the trailers, for trailers getting pulled, they have a hitch, you know, and it's on one end.
Maybe it was on that end, and there was a couple people trying to pull a prank with a giant costume, but we were on the opposite end where there's no hitch.
There's nothing there to get up on to make yourself look giant.
There was nothing there.
When this all happened, that night, I remember everybody franticry packing all our clothes, throwing them in garbage bags, throwing them back to the El Camino, and we left that night.
never came back.
And the explanation the whole time growing up was it was just my cousin in a monkey suit.
I know better.
Well, I know better.
If it was just a kid in a monkey suit, why pack up and leave?
And that's the other thing.
If it was our nephew, why not go beat his ass and straighten things out, not just tucktail and run?
If it was my nephew, you know, why not having come back?
over and apologize. I'm my cousin.
I believe it was all just to try to smooth things over to not terrify us anymore to keep
us calm down. But I think I was beyond that point. And when we moved back to Illinois
to another trailer court, this trailer court had a cornfield behind it. And there was just a
small tree line that was just all it was was just a divider of property. The tree line was maybe
three trees deep. But for months and months and months every night,
I would go out and stare out our back door staring at this tree line looking for something to come out of this tree line.
It was, you know, it's beyond baffling how much fear.
And even telling the stories today, you know, when I tell people, I'm physically not scared to tell it, but I'm my body's trembling now.
That makes any sense.
It makes complete sense.
Like literally, my legs, my arms, my body's trembling and just telling the story.
There's no rhyme or reason for it other than, you know, that was some real stuff that happened that day.
And I never heard a Bigfoot prior to that when we moved back to Illinois,
you got a trailer, and I started the school that I started, I came across the book in the library,
and this was, you know, 30 years ago or so.
And it was basically about legends of, you know, Bigfoot, Sasquatch.
and oh, the,
I'm lock this monster, you know, it was one of those kind of books.
And then man, when I got that thing, that thing was overdue like nine times.
I couldn't take it back to school because I was so sucked in by what had happened.
And then when, you know, like I said, years go by and years go by and you get older,
other things come along.
And then, you know, when Finding Bigfoot had that episode,
And he said the words, honey, a hairy man, man, I just, I couldn't believe what wave had came over me of, oh, my God.
And then everything just came rushing back.
Everything came rushing back.
Oh, I can imagine.
I can imagine for any sane person it would come back.
And, you know, it's interesting the behavior of the Sasquatch to pick up something and throw it.
If you watch a lot of non-human primates, and I would imagine it's.
three kids screaming as you guys are shining the light on this thing, probably startled it,
probably took a retreating, grabbed one of those, those center blocks and threw it and hit the back
door. And I'm just assuming, I don't know that it necessarily was trying to break into the place.
I think it was probably more or less an accident, but I wasn't there to really say one way or another.
I wanted to ask you, you said there was differences between the one that you saw in the window that
night and the one that fell out of the tree. Was it just less chimp-like looking in the face?
Correct. Yeah, it was less chimp-like. It didn't seem like its lips were bubbling out as much.
It seemed that its mouth, its mouth just didn't stick out as much, if that makes me sense.
It were, as the lips are. It wasn't as round like the first one we'd seen. And so that's, you know,
it's one of those things where we were thinking, okay, it threw something through the door,
how to get around there so fast to do that, you know, and then we were talking and maybe that other one was out there already with a brick.
I can only speculate, but I literally dove over that bed, and by the time, when I landed on the floor, it's about the same time that brick hit the, that brick hit the back door.
You know, so that's just a second, the second to make it from standing in front of a window standing, I mean, he had to been he or she, I don't know if it was he or she, but.
but if they weren't standing straight up,
they were every bit of eight foot tall
if they weren't standing straight up.
I mean, if they were standing straight up,
if it wasn't standing straight up,
I couldn't tell you how tall it was.
But I know it was huge.
Yeah, and that's the interesting part is because I know the trailers
you're talking about.
And if that thing was, let's say,
four or five feet across taking up that back window,
you know, without a porch or without something to step up on,
I'd imagine the thing,
had to have been at least nine feet tall
to take up the whole window
because you're right, those windows are high up.
I mean, it's not like a, you know, normal house.
Yeah, we didn't get this forehead
and top of his head was not exposed
because that was above the window.
So we never, you know,
we didn't get to see a full-on head of it.
We saw from, gosh, it was,
I think all we saw was like
from above the nipples
to midway up his forehead.
And that all took up in the window.
That all blocked out the moonlight that night.
Do you think the creature made you harm that night?
Honestly, I don't think it did.
I think what attracted it to us is, you know,
there's two boys in a room screaming,
trying to scare each other.
And the trailers back in the day weren't made all that great.
You know, you hear somebody screaming through a trailer wall
from a, you know, trailer that's, you know,
40 years old, I think that might have just attracted it or, you know, it knew we were already there.
You know, I can't say that if, you know, the juvenile didn't go back and say, yeah, dad, there's
people that here aren't supposed to be here and dad went and checked it out.
You know, I don't know what the scenario is, but, you know, it could have, like I said,
we were in there and, you know, scaring each other from just seeing me cry, basically.
I imagine that's what they were doing it.
but we were all having fun, but I was still scared at the same time when we were playing with the ghost gun.
And then I just got more and more scared, more and more scared.
And finally I got to where I was just a winy little brat and they couldn't handle it and get me some,
tried to give me some moonlight to show me down.
And, you know, and that's where it all escalated.
And, you know, when I tried, I tried to talk to them about it.
And, you know, their response to it was Buddy's answer.
It was just our cousin in a suit.
You know, and so I just, I just have a feeling that it didn't affect them like it did me.
But there's no way.
I mean, the biggest person, under the giant couldn't sit there that tall and took up that much room.
And he's a big guy.
Yeah, and I think what happens is a lot of times I was just talking to Ed about this.
You know, I think what happens sometimes when people have encounters, it's easier to pass it off like it's something explainable.
Well, it must have been your cousin in a monkey suit.
And I think even if you don't deep down believe that,
it's kind of nice to hear that because then you don't really have to address the elephant in the room
that obviously wasn't your cousin in a monkey suit.
You know, and the whole them saying it was your cousin,
it just seems odd to me that your folks were like that because, you know, here's a back window.
You know, I grew up with brothers and we used to fight.
I've learned how to fight mainly from growing up with brothers.
And I would imagine a back door like that.
There'd be hell to pay if my folks showed up.
The three of us were home alone.
I actually have seven brothers, but the three of us that we grew up with.
And there was a broken back door.
There'd be a lot to explain.
And for them to say, well, it must have been this or that.
And then they pack up and they leave.
I mean, that kind of says it all right there in their reactions.
that they knew it wasn't.
You know, if some kid broke my back window,
whether it was my nephew or my cousin,
I'm going to go grab him by the ear,
drag him back and yell at him for a while
for breaking my back door.
And the fact that they didn't,
they just said, let's pack up and we're out of here.
Kind of says a lot.
And did you, have you ever talked to your mom since then?
Have you ever sat her down and said,
hey, listen, mom.
Let me tell you.
No.
No.
No. Just because that relationship has been,
No, I understand.
It was such a bad relationship that, you know, I tried involved in myself in my birth mother's life.
And it was more of a, hey, how are you?
Can you do this for me within the first five minutes?
You know, it was in a, hey, nice to see you, good to see you, I love you.
It was basically, we were, you know, we were objects to use and abuse at her will, and it was mostly abused.
And so, you know, after trying to just even get a verbal relationship after, you know, decades, I gave up.
And I've got kids to my own now, and they don't need somebody like that in their life.
And so, no, I haven't.
My stepfather has passed away.
Oh, gosh, I don't know, whatever year it was that Dale Earnhardt Sr.
died in NASCAR was the year he passed away because my mother was so distraught when he died.
Dale Earnhardt died that she couldn't talk to anybody because her husband was a Dale Earnhardt fan.
But so that dictated, you know, a whole year of her life.
But no, I haven't.
Yeah.
You know, I just, I remember we packed up.
I mean, and then that's the other thing.
She did really if this was just, you know, my stepfather wouldn't have the first lines out of his mouth where stay out of the woods because there's a hairy man back there.
That's not a setup for a prank for another nine-year-old, eight-year-old to.
do on another family of three, you know, three other, three other boys. It's, it's, you know,
and the way he said it was so nonchalant. Like, you know, we know they're back there, but we don't
go back there because we know they're back there kind of way. Yeah, no, I understand. I understand.
It's too bad. It's like that with your mother. You know, this encounter is an interesting
encounter because you guys, it carried on until that evening. And obviously there was more than one
in the area. And I would imagine that would change your outlook as far as going out in the woods
and just being out in the woods. I know when you moved to that new place, you were talking about,
you're constantly, you know, fixated on the pack of woods behind your house. But I'd imagine
that even sticks with you as an adult, you know, having something like this happen.
Yeah, it's, as a kid, it did. I've always liked the woods. I still like the woods.
I never even, as I got older, I never, like I said,
The memories were so suppressed and locked away because it was just kind of a horrible childhood that it was locked away with, you know, the fear of the woods and whatnot was locked away with the incident that happened.
So I was, you know, never really afraid of the woods, still not afraid of the woods.
I like the woods.
I'm much older now.
I don't really live in any woods, you know, but I sure would like to go back there.
I mean, you know, the subject, it does consume you when you've had an encounter.
You know, I don't know the classes of class A, Class B.
I've heard them, but I've not really paid much attention to what they mean and what they are.
But when you have an encounter where you're literally, it's on the other side of the wall,
they're both three to five feet away from you.
And the only thing blocking you is a freezer chest lid and a window and a wall of a trailer.
You know, it's kind of hard to put that in the words, but it doesn't, no,
there hasn't been any fear.
And I had mentioned to you before,
I'm a kind of a,
I'm a different breed when it comes to fear.
There's not too many,
it's going to sound stupid.
There's not too many things that scare me or that I fear.
I mean,
the main thing I fear,
I'm not sure it's all parents
and there's something happening to my wife,
my children.
You know,
that's my main fear.
Yeah.
I can't stand spiders.
That's stupid too.
That's creepy little bastards and there's no place for them.
I'm with you.
And,
and,
and,
I'm a different kind of person that takes a lot.
And I had mentioned, you know, if I was to go out to an expedition and with people and they're wanting to videotape, you know,
fast-clotch, and they're just out of the woodline and they're acting like they're challenging you.
I'm that guy that goes, okay, let's do this.
You know, I'm the guy that says, yeah, take some shirt off and does some challenging stuff back just to get the shot, just to get the video, just to get the evidence.
And but again, you know, when we, when we had mentioned and talked about the fear and whatnot, you know, I'm still sitting here.
I'm not, I don't scare easy, but I'm not scared telling the story, but I'm trembling right now.
I'm that guy that's pretty much fearless, but I'm trembling telling you the story.
I understand.
So I'm not sure, you know, when there's all the talk of infrasound and, you know, projecting feelings on people, I don't get this way.
you know, telling other scary encounters or I've had a few car accidents that I should have been dead.
I don't get that way telling those, you know.
Those are legit things that everybody in the world can believe and do believe because I have some pictures.
And I don't get that way.
But when I talk about this, you know, literally it's my body's trembling.
And there's no rhyme or reason for it.
And I remember you were talking, I think his name was Rick or Rich.
And he said that, you know, I don't, I can't.
I feel like I'm a.
I am offending them by trying to go out.
You know, if he felt like there was emotions projected on him.
And that was just like, what, three shows ago?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's kind of how it feels.
There's no, there's no fear, no trembling, watching Finding Bigfoot.
There's no fear in trembling watching Mountain Monsters.
There's no fear in big, in trembling of watching all these Bigfoot movies.
that I've seen and went out and purchased, you know, small-pound monsters, videos, and whatnot.
There's none of that fears there.
But, man, when I start talking about my encounter, you know, there's not the fear,
but the body reaction of what my body is different than what my mind does.
Yeah.
And like I've said before, you know, when you recount an encounter, you know, that's why I love talking to witnesses
because it does take you back in the moment.
you do relive that moment.
And that's why there's such tremble and that's why there's such fear is, A, it's so unknown.
You know, what is this thing?
And then B, I think that we go back into that moment.
We go back, you know, in your situation, you go back to being that kid who saw this thing fall out of the tree,
who remembers what it's like to be terrified in that room as this thing standing in the window
and then smashes the back door.
you go back in those moments and it's kind of, it's very fascinating to me because anything that's traumatic that's happened and you go back and you start talking about it, you relive it. You're back in that moment. Like it just happened yesterday. And you're right, there's something different about these. I've been in car accidents. I've been in motorcycle accidents, stuff that, you know, I mean, I could tell you some horror stories, but you don't quite go back into that.
moment of almost dying in a car accident. And I think it's just because these things are so unknown.
It's so odd. It's so weird. And then when you have something like that happened, we tend to
kind of compress it inside and it lives inside of us. And it comes out in other ways, whether it's
nightmares or whether it's drinking or whether it eventually comes out. It's our inner demons.
And going back in that moment of time where that shouldn't have happened. That thing falling out of the tree
doesn't exist. It shouldn't have happened. And then coming up to that, the trailer, that shouldn't
have happened because they don't exist, right? Well, they do exist and you do run into them.
And so it kind of freaks this out. But, you know, I'm really glad that you came on the show,
Jimmy. I enjoyed reading the email. I enjoyed hearing the encounter story. And you hear a lot of the
behaviors that we always talk about on the show. Those are the best ways to learn about the
behaviors from these things is from eyewitnesses. So,
I can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing it, man.
I know you're on vacation too.
Thank you for taking the time.
Yeah, no.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
I came across your podcast while I was looking at other podcasts and they were just, you know,
not to put anybody else down.
I don't know here to do that, but they weren't even close to yours west.
I heard one episode and then I started binge listening to, too.
all your episodes and then started to irritate me because I couldn't get access to the ones that I wasn't a member of.
So I became a member so I could get access to those.
It really is an addictive show and more importantly for people that's had encounters, you know,
whether it's a sighting counter, whether it's your think one's there, you hear one.
Your show, man, is therapy.
It really is therapy that you can't get anywhere else.
I wanted to thank you for that.
I know you get that a lot, but it really is because the subject, if you have an encounter, it can consume you.
It hasn't consumed me to where it's all I think about.
It does consume my free time of when I can multitask.
I'm listening to your iPod and, you know, your podcast.
I appreciate that.
I'm going to be going July 8th.
I live in Georgia now.
And in July 8th, North Georgia, there's a Bigfoot Museum called Expedition Bigfoot.
It's owned by a guy named Dave.
And it's fantastic.
It's a 4,000 square foot facility, and he's ever expanding all the time.
He's got artifacts from the Yeti expedition.
He's got hundreds of casts, hand cast, butt cast, fee cast, you know.
He's got all the movies and books, all kinds of information.
In July 8, they're going to have a town hall.
and he's invited me to be a speaker there for, you know,
telling my encounter.
And that's in up in North Georgia.
Gosh, I can't think, I can't remember for it's Cherry Log or if it's Blue Ridge.
I think it's Cherry Logging.
I meant to cherry log.
But, yeah, Expedition Bigfoot's a fantastic, fantastic place.
And it just opened about a year ago, just over a year ago.
And that's where I'm going to go with.
But I wanted to, you know, I wanted to leave you with, I appreciate what you do.
I couldn't have got the kind of therapy.
Basically, it's therapy.
You might say it's not, but it is for people with encounters.
And these other podcasts, they weren't, they weren't fulfilling.
They offered nothing but more of an irritant, irritant than anything.
You're legit, and I appreciate you for that.
Thanks, brother.
I appreciate the kind of words.
That's really nice of you.
You bet.
Next up on the show, I want to welcome,
Ed to the show. Ed, thanks so much for coming on, man.
Oh, is that my pleasure.
And I know you had an encounter when you were younger.
If you would for the audience, could you kind of start from the beginning?
Tell us what you're out doing and just kind of walk us into what you saw.
Where did this happen too, Ed?
What state?
It was in New England.
I'll just say sort of New England area in the middle of the woods.
Nowhere in New England.
I got you.
I got you.
Well, if you would, for the audience, maybe walk up.
Cassinda, what happened?
Sure. I was probably around 14.
It was the summer of 1985.
And we had this very hot stretch of weather.
And football season was coming up and I wanted to get into shape.
So I was doing some jogging.
And I was usually going in the evenings as the sun was starting to kind of go down.
It cooled off because it was just too hot to do anything during the day.
and down the end of my street there was this dirt road kind of thing that paralleled some train tracks
that would north up into basically all the way to Canada there was nothing but woods
and this dirt road was really not used by vehicles it was more bikes and joggers three wheelers
would have been not uncommon to see on the trail.
So running along this trail through this wooded area,
and probably about three quarters of a mile into the trail,
it kind of rises up and passes through this marshy bog area.
And the area kind of looks like some lowlands that flooded,
and it never actually really drained.
So there are some trees sticking up out of the water,
some fallen trees,
sort of a real boggy, marshy area.
And as you approach that area, you kind of come around this bend.
So I was coming around the bend and the trail.
And off to my right, there's nothing but woods for probably ever.
And then on my left, there's a low-lying area with the marsh, a hill going up.
And then beyond that is an area where there's some houses and schools and a little bit more of a populated area,
which is probably from that point, maybe a half a mile or so away from where I was.
It's fairly close.
So I come around this bend and the trail, and I became aware of some movement off to my left.
And it's an area of the woods where, you know, I spent a lot of time on this trail as a kid.
And there were, you know, deer, you would see deer, bear were not uncommon.
And everybody knew what to do if you ran into a bear.
so it wasn't a fearful thing, but it was something to always keep an eye out for.
And so I came around the corner and I got aware of some movement off to my left, and I stopped
because my first thought was, you know, it's a bear.
And I kind of stepped out.
There was a tree blocking my view of what was moving around in the water.
So I took kind of a quiet step out further into the trail to get a look around the tree.
and in the water was something, and my first thought was, that's not a bear.
And the thing that clicked in my head about that was the size of this.
It was just enormous.
And the next thought that clicked in my head, because of the size, was, oh, it's a moose.
And I think the color was sort of like a darker Irish setter type of color,
sort of that reddish brown.
And then I realized, and the way that it was moving, and the shagginess of it, that it wasn't a moose.
And what I saw was in the water back to me.
I was looking at the back of this animal, was bent over and digging into the bank of the marsh.
and the arms were in front of it and kind of coming out around both sides as it's digging with both hands in the mud,
and the dirt was kind of flinging out behind it.
And as the arms came backwards, I could see that underneath the arm down along kind of the torso was this kind of shaggy hair hanging off of it that was, again,
I use the Irish Seder example,
it was very much like the underbelly of an Irish setter.
It would sort of hung down like that.
And I could see hands.
It was just huge.
And my next thought was, you know, that's not a moose.
And I turned around and I buggered out of there so fast.
I ran at full tilt all the way down the end of this trail,
maybe about three-quarter of a mile to where the road was.
And as I'm running away, I'm terrified thinking,
oh, this thing's coming after me.
And, you know, this thought in my head of my God, that was a big foot.
And I'm running down the trail, and I get to the end of the trail.
And I ran so hard, I actually threw up.
I started to vomit when I got to the end of the trail.
And then it wasn't very much further from the end of the trail to my house.
So I ran to my house and ran inside,
ran up to my bedroom, shut the door, and immediately started watching out my window,
which overlooked the direction I had just run from.
I was waiting for this thing to be coming up the street after me.
And the whole encounter probably took, oh, I don't know, maybe 10 seconds or so.
I mean, just enough time for me to understand there was movement to my left,
to step out, think, oh, that's not a bear, it's a moose,
then to realize the behavior that I was seeing and the kind of general,
look at it and think that's not a moose and to see the hands and the arms coming backwards and
there's just and I just turned and bolt it out of there I don't blame me I would have too
what was the creature doing was it digging it looked like it was digging and it was back to me
bent over so I couldn't I can't give you an estimate of the height and I don't know how deep that
water actually was I never went down in there but I could see
see a back of legs kind of a buttocks and a bent over torso. I don't know the height,
but I'll tell you the width of this thing from side to side. It was just, it was huge.
I mean, to the point where I said it's in my mind quickly, oh, it's way too big to be a bear.
It has to be a moose because of the size. I mean, that's where my head went immediately
because of the size. And it looked like it was digging because I saw the arm.
disappear in front of it and kind of swing back maybe two or three times in the amount of time I watched it,
flinging mud and dirt behind it, like it was burrowing into the ground.
And that's all I saw, and I just left.
At any point, did the creature notice you?
No, not at all.
And that I'm aware of, he may have heard, he or she, whatever it was, may have heard me as I tore out of there.
but certainly didn't realize I had come around the corner.
And it's a heavily wooded area, and the bend is quite sharp,
so it might not have heard me kind of coming up the trail,
and maybe making noise in the water itself didn't really hear me coming.
And the distance, I don't know if I said, it was probably about 20 yards.
It's fairly close.
Oh, really close.
I turned that corner.
Yeah.
And did you tell anyone about this head after you're in?
counter, did you ever go back and say anything to anyone?
No, absolutely not.
Until very recently.
And as I was telling you, we talked before, when I came home, my mother was in the kitchen,
and I tore Ray Byer.
I never told my mother, my father, my siblings.
I never told anybody about it ever.
And I don't know why.
It's a type of thing I've, with the relationship I had with my parents,
It wouldn't have been an issue.
They would have been completely supportive and believed me, and it wasn't anything like that.
I just, I don't know why I never told anybody.
And it wasn't until very recently in the last year or so that I felt kind of compelled to start talking about it.
Yeah, it's kind of one of those things.
And, you know, you're not telling your parents, that's not, as you and I were saying the other night.
That's not as uncommon as people think.
A lot of times people don't tell anyone for many years.
I've talked to people who have had encounters, and 30 years ago, never told a soul,
and now they're starting to talk about it.
So it affects people in different ways.
Did it change your mind?
I mean, did you ever go back?
Did it change your mind as far as going out in the woods, and did you ever go back to that spot?
Yeah, that's a good question.
You know, I went back the next day, and I went back on my bike, because I felt like I could
go faster on my bike if I needed to get out of there, because I just, I couldn't process it
inside my head.
I grew up in the woods and there I've seen every living creature out there that I thought
existed.
And to have something be so outside of anything I'd ever experienced before was a hard thing
to get my head around.
So I went down the next day.
And so the way I kind of plated around in my head was that, oh, you know, it was
just a bear.
And what I really saw was, you know, one of the fallen tree trunks and that made it look bigger
than it was, and I probably just imagined the whole thing. So I went back down the next day on my bike
to see this sort of what it looked like. And could I have mistaken it for one of the tree trunks
or something like this? And so when I went to look at the area, there were no trees in the
general area where I actually saw this thing other than the tree that blocked my view and I stepped out
from behind. And, you know, it hit me that what I saw was real and what I had seen.
or observed was, in my mind, accurate.
And what I had seen was something extraordinary in terms of what's normal for that area.
And I started to panic.
And I hyperventilated.
And I jumped on my bike.
And I just got out of there.
And I have never been back down to that spot since.
And that's, you know, from 1985.
Never been back down there.
That is very common for us as humans.
I did it myself.
You have that reaction of,
God, was I dreaming?
Did I dream that?
Did that really happen?
And I think everyone who's actually seen one of these things goes through that at some point.
You question yourself, God, did I really see that?
Am I losing my sanity?
Yeah.
There was a lot of that.
Yeah.
And I think that's very common, you know, with a lot of people I talk to.
You know, that seems to be the number one thing people will say after an encounter is I didn't really believe it.
I had to go back or I had to convince myself.
You know, a lot of times people will say, well, it was just a bear.
It was just a bear.
It was just a bear.
And then the more and more they try and sell themselves on it, they know that that's just simply not true.
No, I think that's exactly what I did, you know, for many years.
And I, you know, my background is Bigfoot to this point in my, up to 1985 in my life was,
really, you know, the $6 million
man episode and the
in search of
with Leonard Nimoy. I mean, that was it.
That's all I really knew. I'd seen
the, you know, the odd
clip above Bigfoot, but it wasn't
something that was
something I was interested in.
You know, I wasn't, you know, obsessed with Bigfoot
like I kind of am now.
You know, so I, that's what I did.
I walked away from it, the experience
and just think, yeah, okay, it was a bear.
It was a bear. And I spent, you know, my life up until recently saying, ah, you know, it was just a bear.
Because it's this cognitive dissonance of the unsettledness of what you saw being so far beyond what you can explain or understand.
It's a tough thing to deal with. And I certainly spent a great deal of time trying to convince myself that I've seen a bear.
Yeah, and you hear that a lot with people. You know, and I'm really glad you came on the show.
people in the East Coast, especially the Northeast, I've found, it's really hard to get them to come on the show and talk about it.
You know, the main thing I hear a lot from people in the Northeast is I thought this was a Pacific Northwest problem.
I didn't realize that we had them here.
But I've noticed a lot of people, especially in the Northeast, I don't mean to generalize you guys, but are pretty closed off to the subject.
And if they've seen one, it's like pulling teeth to get them to talk about it.
And as you and I were talking, you know, you get like Vermont, you get in some of those areas.
And I get a ton of reports from those areas, but you rarely ever hear them on the show.
Because people from those areas, you know, up in the Northeast, they just don't want to talk about it.
Do you find that over there on the East Coast?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And when I started to kind of accept what I saw, I told some very close friends of mine,
one of the individuals I talked to about it, or two of the individuals I talked to,
talk to you about it, still live in that area and frequent the woods, you know, that's what they do.
And so I said, do you guys know of any other stories? Is anybody else, you know, you guys spend
your life in the woods. Do you hear anything about this? Because one of the things I wanted is,
you know, that my experience, from what I know, looking at, you know, the BFRO website,
looking at sightings in my general area, there really aren't any. And so I felt like I was an N of
one and it was a very kind of lonely thing if i knew one or two other people who had seen something
in the general area um you know would have been comforting and they they both kind of asked around
so that they come the the old timers that they work with and everyone kind of scoffed and and one of
my friends said to me you know even if one of these old guys had seen a saskatch out here
nobody would talk about it nobody would say a word about it and and and
And I think that there's probably a couple reasons for that.
You know, you can generalize some things about New Englanders and that they're a very closed
a group of people.
And one of the things about us is that I always said that New Englanders are a lot like
cats.
And, you know, you can't just go rushing up to a cat and expect it to be your buddy.
You've got to let the cat come to you.
And they kind of will circle you and the circles will get closer and then eventually the
cat will end up on your lap.
I think the Winslanders are like that.
It's a closed sort of knit society.
It's a small town mentality everywhere you go here.
And there's some great things about that.
It's a very positive thing in a lot of ways, too.
Very neighborly, friendly area.
But it takes, you know, there's that wall of privacy here, too, that's unique.
I think I've lived in different parts of the country.
And I think it's something very unique to New England.
Yeah, I think so, too.
I didn't mean to state that the people are bad.
I just mean regarding this subject, they're pretty quiet about it.
They're pretty, very quiet about it.
Very hush, hush about it.
You know, it's something you don't talk about.
I've talked to so many hunters in the Northeast and who have great encounters.
I mean, some of the best encounters you've never heard on the show.
And they don't want to come on the show because it's not supposed to happen there.
If Bigfoot does exist, it's supposed to live in Washington, Oregon, or California.
You know, other than that, it's not supposed to be in the northeast.
And that seems to be the mentality of it.
And it's, but you hear great encounters.
You know, it reminds me a lot of the people in the South.
They're kind of the same way.
They'll have, they have great encounters and they have good information on these things.
But some of those backwoods people, man, it's like pulling teeth to get them to talk about what they've seen.
And I just, as the subject opens up and more and more people come forward and talk about their encounters, like what you're doing, Ed.
I hope more people do that because I think witness encounters, despite what some people will say,
I think are some of the best examples of trying to get information on what this thing is that's out there running around.
And you get it from people who've had encounters.
And it will tell you what they've seen and what they saw the creature doing and what the creature was eating.
And you just learn so much from eyewitness testimony.
until we have one in a cage that we can write down its behavior,
this is all we got at this point.
And I think it's pretty good to get from my witness testimony information on these things.
Oh, absolutely.
You know, and the thing that I think there are a number of things that made me reach out to you.
I've listened into the show for a really long time.
And, you know, the knowledge of behavior and trying to get an answer to what these
things actually are.
And I would have had no way to know about this sort of digging behavior that I witnessed.
And it wasn't until I was watching Finding Bigfoot, and they were interviewing a witness,
which I think, you know, one of the best parts of the show are the witness accounts.
Oh, yeah, I agree.
And this guy was talking about seeing one of these creatures digging in the edge of
a pond or a river, I forget which.
And the idea being that they dig down into the mud for frogs as a source of protein.
And when I saw that on TV, it was like getting hit in the face of the basketball.
And there was absolutely no denying at that point for me what I had seen.
And, you know, that type of behavior, the bent over digging in the banks of the swampy area,
you know, it was such an unusual thing to see.
never seen an animal do that. And that always sort of was one of the things in my head that
I couldn't rationalize. Why would it be, why on earth would it be digging in the side of this
swampy area in the mud and what's it doing? What's the point of that? And it was that,
that corroboration of what I had seen and a rationale behind it, looking for protein that was,
that really, that really struck me to own up to what I had seen. Yeah, and I've, I've talked to
witnesses before that have seen them digging. As you and I were talking the other day, I had a
witness on one time. She thought it was a bear cub because she saw it from behind and she said it was
digging. And as she slowly approached it, it actually turned around and looked at her and she said
that's not a bear. And asked her what she thought it was doing. She goes, I don't know if it was eating
worms or if it was trying to like get little grubs or whatever, but it was digging in the dirt and
seemed to be every once while putting something up towards its mouth. But she saw it from behind.
And so you hear that behavior.
Like I said, you hear that behavior from a lot of witnesses where you catch them in the act of doing something.
It's like I had the lady from Manitoba on, and she was talking about, you know, it walked out to the lake and was standing out there pooping in the lake.
And so it's kind of interesting to hear certain behaviors from these things.
And you really get that from my witnesses.
But I really appreciate you coming on, Ed.
I really appreciate you taking the time to share the encounter.
I know it's tough to come out and talk about it,
but I really do appreciate you coming on and take it.
It is, but you know what, Wes,
and we've something we touched on the other night, too,
is that one of the things that I didn't realize was happening with me
was I don't remember when they started,
but I know that it was since 1985,
and while I was still a teenager,
I started having horrible, horrible nightmares about Bigfoot multiple times a year.
I mean, sometimes it was, you know, once a month.
And it was paralyzing night terrors.
And I never, I didn't put two and two together.
I never knew why these were happening.
I remember, you know, years ago telling my wife about them and speaking,
I don't know why I have all these horrible, I mean, terrifying dreams about Bigfoot.
I mean, what is this about?
and once I started talking about it and telling a couple of friends and my family, some people in my family about it, the nightmare stopped.
And I haven't had one in, you know, over a year since I started talking about this.
And so that acceptance of finally, you know, coming to grips myself with what I saw is a very important thing that happened.
And certainly listening to your show has been a big part of that.
You know, like I was telling you other night,
listening to the show is sort of like a support group.
You know, we are all kind of there for each other with these stories
that we can't take any place out.
I was telling you, I'm a scientist, I'm a physician,
and, you know, if I were to start telling, you know, people about,
and, you know, what I saw, it could, you know, do some professional damage
to my career.
And that was something I think in the podcast last week,
that inspired me to reach out to you as well.
It's the lack of credible scientists
who have seen these things
that are willing to come out and say,
hey, I saw something, I don't know what it is,
we should go find out.
And it's a shame that with the scientists
that our job is the truth
and to not be able to tell the truth
is a very uncomfortable situation.
Yeah, no, it is.
And I'm assuming you're referring to the Dr. Benar-Noggle
episodes that I did.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was such a great interview.
Yeah, and he, you know, Dr. Benernoggle actually hit on a lot of points, you know, as far as why science doesn't really look at the subject.
Everyone, you know, and he hit it right on the head when he said, you know, everyone thinks scientists are open-minded and they're searching for answers and searching for truth.
And, you know, I don't want to beat scientists up too much.
But that's not really true.
You kind of fall into line to the agenda that's already been presented.
and if you think outside of the box, then you're looked at as kind of, you know, they raise the eyebrow.
You're like, what do you, what are you doing?
Exactly.
Let's go with what we know here.
And that's a shame because that's not really what you think of science.
That's not really what you think of.
You would think that they would be open-minded.
They'd be looking outside of the box for answers.
And as you and I talked, you know, there's a lot of different professors that actually listen to the show.
And one in particular, that's a primatologist.
excuse me, and he, you know, he's, he's like, hey, the more I listen to these encounters,
he's like, it almost seems, almost seems more ridiculous in thinking everyone's delusional and everyone's
lying. That's almost more outrageous to think that out of all these people than they're actually
seeing something. The fact that they're probably seeing something makes more sense than everyone's
just delusional. And I really wish more scientists would look at it, you know, look at it.
at that point, you know, not saying you'd have to believe in Bigfoot, but, you know,
just take a look at it, you know, and there's nothing wrong with discussing it,
looking at it, and I just wish Moore would do that.
Yeah, and you're right, and it is, it is a science problem.
And if you, if you look at it in one end of the spectrum, is like, what's, what's the big
deal?
We're talking about identifying a species of North American Great ape.
why is this so hard for people to get their heads around?
And then you have the, you know, we talk about the tonight, the other end of the spectrum
where you almost go into the paranormal with Sasquatch and some of the more unusual
descriptions of behavior or other aspects of the mystical almost big foot.
And I think that's the problem that scientists have is having to deal with that end of the spectrum,
because it's, you know, the paranormal necessarily,
it isn't necessarily something you can measure.
It isn't something you can put in a lab and control
and try to study it and understand it.
And I think, you know, when you start mixing paranormal features
to the existence of something,
then it becomes a much less attractive thing for scientists
because as soon as you start going down that road,
then you're nuts.
and that's unfortunate.
And I get that.
I completely get that.
And I can understand that from a science point of view,
why they wouldn't want to touch that,
because how do you measure,
it's like chasing a ghost.
You know, how do you measure that?
You can't measure that.
But there is enough physical evidence
to show that something is out there.
You can put all the paranormal stuff in the back of your head,
and just look at what we would call normal.
I mean, the footprints, the audio,
and some of this other stuff,
and the witness, you know, eyewitness testimony and, you know, take a look at it, you know,
and I agree, you know, sometimes on the paranormal stuff, it's kind of like, well, I don't know.
But after a while, when you start hearing stuff over and over and over and over again from
different credible people, you're not really sure what to make of it.
But, you know, I really, and I can appreciate why scientists wouldn't want to get involved
in that.
It's like why scientists aren't involved in, you know, ghost hunting.
I would imagine it wouldn't be that hard to prove to someone.
Demons are real if you really wanted to show them.
But the problem is you can't measure it.
You can't put it in a lab.
You can't write down this.
You can't write down that.
It's more of just an experience.
And I don't know why I'm going off on that tangent.
But it just gets...
Yeah, it just gets frustrating after a while for them not to look into this.
You know, there's enough people that have come forward.
There's enough cops.
There's enough credit.
people have come forward that have had encounters.
And what's interesting is everyone kind of says the same thing.
You're not, one, one person really isn't that far off from the next.
And you're talking about completely different geographical areas of the United States, for example.
And you got a huge range of people that are seeing this thing.
And it's not, you know, it's not as cool as everyone thinks to have a big foot encounter.
I think most people who've had encounters probably wish.
they would have never had an encounter.
So it's not the cool thing to do to come forward and say,
hey, I've had an encounter.
It takes a lot of balls to come forward and say,
hey, I saw this thing.
I don't know what it was, you know.
Yeah, you're right.
And I think you hit on another really important point.
It were a lot of people wish they had never seen this thing.
And, you know, if you'd asked me a year or so ago,
you know, I wish I'd never seen this thing.
I wish I'd never had gone jogging that night.
I wish I'd never, never seen this.
And, but now it's different.
Now that I feel okay about what I saw and able to talk about it a little bit,
I think, I wish I'd stay there a little longer, you know.
You know, I'll never see one again.
I'd love to see one again because I really want to know what these things are.
And, you know, that's the scientific curiosity that now, you know,
the idea of, well, I have to understand what I've seen scientifically because of how I operate.
I wish I could see it again and go back in time and stand there and see what would happen if it
noticed me. See if I, you know, go down the next day and I should look for tracks. I didn't
do that because I didn't even think about looking for tracks. It never even crossed my mind.
And then by the time it hit me what I had seen, I just wanted to get out of there. I started to panic.
And I, you know, is the thing still here? Is it going to lunge?
out of the woods and I just get out of there. But, you know, today I probably would respond a little
bit differently, particularly now that I've been able to process it in a way that I think is,
is healthy. Well, and it's, it's, that is the question, isn't it? What is this thing? You know,
I talk about shooting this thing all the time and people get so upset. I mean, you wouldn't
believe some of the crazy emails I get, uh, messages I get, um, with people who are so irate over
that. I'm not saying shoot it for my benefit. I'm saying shoot it for the public's benefit,
for science's benefit, for this creature's benefit. It's not so much that it needs to be
proven in my eyes because I've seen it. I know they exist. It's I want to prove it for, I want
to the general public to know it's out there. But that is the question. What is this thing?
For me, it's not so much trying to prove it. It's what is this thing? And I wish I had the
answer to that.
Well, I think that
you're right. You know,
I don't hunt. I never, I've never
hunted
seriously because I,
when we, why I grew up,
deer would come right up to your house.
And if you wanted to hunt, you could sit in your back porch.
And they would eat out of the garden.
They would, you know, they were always there.
And they're just, such beautiful animals.
And I just, I never hunted. I never wanted to shoot
anything, tell anything.
It was never,
Because of that close proximity to the animals, I always felt, you know, some sort of, you know, fondness for them.
They were just so beautiful.
And I never wanted to kill anything.
And I understand why people hunt.
And I think it's important part of culture.
And friends would hunt, I never would criticize it in any way.
But killing a big foot, you know, not for sport is, you know, is how we species type.
And, you know, you go to animal collections all of our.
around the country in different natural history museums, and they are the species type identifier
everywhere, from birds to small mammals, and that's how you identify species. And if you can
identify the species, you can better understand it, see where it falls in line with
evolutionary scale of primates. And then if you need to protect the species, you know, your
your argument for having a body is is not unreasonable for science and it isn't you know a sport of
killing bigfoot it isn't to take a a corpse around and it to like a circus at a peep show
it's about trying to protect the species and understand what it is and i you know i think that
you know you never condone the killing of anything or any one but when you're when you're trying to
identify species. You have to
be able to
study it. I don't think that's unreasonable.
Yeah, I don't think it's
unreasonable either. A lot of these big
footers, they cry about
that, you know, as far as people talking
about killing one, but it has to be
done. It's just the way it is. You want to
talk science in one hand,
but then you think it's wrong to collect
the specimens in the other hand,
and it doesn't make sense.
Your arguments are way off. Either
it is or it isn't. If you're
for science and your force science looking into this, then you have to be for collecting a specimen.
Otherwise, what are we doing here? Why are we bothered looking into this?
Whether, you know, we want to prove it. That's the reason why we look into it.
And hopefully more and more people will come forward with their encounters and
take the time to come forward with their encounters like you have, Ed, and share it because
we get so much information off of that. Until we have a specimen, a collect specimen, you know,
until we collect a specimen, all we can go off of right now is the evidence we have with
footprints and audio and stuff people are collecting and witness sight testimony is a piece of
that. So I really appreciate you coming on, man. I really enjoy talking with you.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I appreciate the podcast. Like I said,
it's been a great resource for me to kind of process what I went through. And I think that's true
of a lot of people who listen and never reach out to you.
And it's certainly true with the people who do reach out to you.
I hope you get more people from New England willing to talk about it now.
I think I'd love to know what's really going on up here in this part of the world.
Because, you know, the Appalachian Trail coming right through here.
I mean, there's a super highway of forest.
And I'd love to know.
No, I'd like you too.
Thank you so much, Ed, again, for coming on.
I really appreciate it, ma'am.
You're very welcome.
Thank you for the time.
Again, I really appreciate all your work, Wes.
And that's it for tonight, everyone.
Remember, if you've had an encounter,
shoot me an email.
My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com.
If you get a chance, please visit Sasquatch Chronicles.com.
Until next time, everyone.
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