Sasquatch Chronicles - Show Notes with Shannon-Encounter Stories and Open Phone Lines

Episode Date: February 10, 2015

On this episode, I will have on with me, John and Adam.  John has his own encounters to share from Tennessee and the Carolina's. And Adam, much like myself has never seen one, but is very interested in the subject.  We will also be taking as many calls as we can get to...so please join us! 646-716-8791 You can also visit us at sasquatchchronicles.com

Welcome to Show Notes with Shannon Legerone. Give her a call at 646-716-8-7991. Good evening and welcome again to Show Notes. I wanted to just send a friendly reminder out to everyone that this and every show is live fire and unedited. Now, coming up on Sunday, we will be talking to a woman named Melissa in South Carolina. and it's a story much like the Browns, but it's much more aggressive. And I know that she has a lot of information to share

some strange things going on besides the Sasquatch. So it'll be a great show. So make sure you tune in for that. And some other big news is that at the beginning of March, we are going to go out as a team. The Sasquatch Chronicles team is going out together to an area that has a lot of confirmed activity. We will not be disclosing where we're going,

but once we get back, I'm sure we will fill everyone in on all of the details. So we'll definitely be talking about that more and more as we go along. Now, on Sasquatch Chronicles.com, Wes posted a video for our members, and he ended up going to the exact location of he and Woody's encounter. counter. You can hear in his voice how hard it is for him to be there and to recount those

events. He actually shows you exactly where they were parked, which tree the smaller Sasquatch was in, and right where King Kong, as he calls it, stood in the middle of the road. And he ends up going down to the Lewis River and showing you that location, and that's where he thinks they inadvertently disrupted them getting to. So I wanted to, you know, thank Wes for doing that. And I know that he, it took a lot for him to do that. So he got a lot of nice comments and I wanted to say thank you as well. And also another reminder, everybody, that our contact emails, if you'd like to get in touch with us for any reason,

especially if it's to come on the show and share your encounter or just to talk to us, It's Wes, Will, or Shannon. And then you end each one of those names with at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. And you can get a hold of us through that. So tonight I have on with me, my friends, John and Adam. They both help me with the Sasquatch Chronicles Facebook page. And John has had encounters, which he will be sharing. And Adam like me is fascinated by this subject.

but has not seen one. And actually, Adam has recently been accepted into the North American WoodApe Conservancy and has his own blog, searchthewoods.com. So I'm very happy to

count them amongst friends and to have them on tonight. So how are we doing, guys? Doing well, Shannon. Doing great, Shannon. Thank you so much for having us on here. Absolutely. Thank you very much for being on.

And for, of course, helping out with the page. It's grown in leaps and bounds. And I thank you guys for helping out with that. You're welcome. Sure, sure. Now, regional-wise, John, you're in South Carolina currently and Adam, you're in Tennessee. And I'm assuming I know why John got into, you know, the subject, which he will share more about with us. But Adam, I was wondering what got you into the subject of Sasquatch? I think it's kind of the normal story of

like little boy loves monsters and ghosts and anything that can can't quite be explained, I guess. And so my dad really instilled that in me. Like he loves anything paranormal lies or anything to do with Sasquatch

or anything like that. So he kind of instilled that in me and my dad is also a big outdoorsman as well. And so just kind of those two things together got me interested probably around eight or nine years old. And I've been fascinated with it ever since. And I guess lately over the past four or five years, I've really gotten into the subject of Sasquatch and kind of looking into things there. And your blog, how often will you be, you know, is that a new passion of yours then to add to that blog? It is, yeah.

So I started that literally maybe two or three weeks ago and kind of made a promise to myself that I wouldn't post anything unless I felt it was worthwhile. So it'll probably be every couple of weeks. But the blog really kind of tries to look at task question a very kind of black and white manner and just kind of analyze things for what they are and kind of just my take on things. So it's obviously just my opinion and my opinion alone. but it's just an outlet for me to talk about something that I'm really passionate about and really interested in. Awesome. And John, am I right in assuming that you got into Sasquatch because you had your initial encounter that you had? Or was there something prior to that?

I think back in the 70s, there was a lot of flak on the television about Bigfoot, but there was also an equal amount of stuff about UFOs and Loch Nuss Monsters and that kind of stuff. That was in the Leonard Nimoy era, but I really wasn't looking for one. And that's when I saw mine for the first time. So, yeah, I didn't have a lot of preconceived notions at that point, no. Well, I think then that's a great segue to go ahead and let you start off on your stories then, if you would. Yeah, I live up at North Carolina now. I used to live in South Carolina.

It's easy because we're only like an hour and a half from the border, so it's easy to get it mixed up. I grew up on a rural farm in York, and if you ever want to look it up, it's actually case number 977 on Bufro, and we gave it to them in 1996 a lot of years ago, but during the summer to fall when I was turning 12 to 13, we used to get the mailbox, go buy the mailbox and get all the stuff out of there, and then the evening paper would come by, so you'd always have to go back up the road and pick up the evening paper. And where we lived at on our farm, we lived a quarter mile off the main road, and you came down through some fences, and you came down through a couple of fields before you got

to the old house. It had been there since the Civil War. And when I got home one evening, it was about 5.30 to 6 o'clock. Now, the sun wasn't quite setting yet, but it was setting enough that it was in the west. We lived to the east of the place where I saw it for the first time, but if you followed the road straight down to the house. then what ends up happening is that when you leave the front of the house, you can look out and you can see the beginning of the woods up near the start of the road.

And you can see just off to the left, there's a blacksmith shop my grandfather has had for years. And he's since passed on, but in the day, that was a very dense part of the forest. And if you look at the beefrow report, they say grapes, but that's not technically what we have here in the south that's wild. It's called muskidons. And so when my mom looked at me and she said, I want you to go back up the road and go to write the paper for your dad, I didn't think much about it.

I got on my bike, which was a Murray Raycat number five. And I grabbed my dog, and he was a, what they call a bear dog, a plot him, and he went with me. And he always seemed to kind of travel on my left-hand side whenever I would bike up the road. On both sides of the road, as you leave the house, the house was enclosed by a fence because all around the house were cattle. And directly behind the house to what would have been in my southeast was the swamp, where it's just miles and miles of just kind of depressed areas

and also swampy, marshy land. And that ties into several creeks systems and a lot of marshy areas that in the ponds the cows drink out of. So I left out of the house and I'm going up the road through the two fences and heading up to the highway where the mailboxes are. And off in the left, as I'm coming up the road, I look and I see the sun setting over the ridge. And I didn't think much of it, but I remember my dog, I looked down and I saw my dog and my dog stopped right in the middle of the road. Now, this is a gravel road. And I'm not trying to be gross or anything like that, but back in those days, we had white gravel,

which was what we generally tend to pour on the roads to kind of keep the dust down, because it gets really dusty in a lot of areas of the south. And so when I looked down, I saw that my dog had already started to urinate, and I saw that I just remember looking down and seeing that, and I thought it was just really odd, so I stopped my bike. and I looked at him, and he was looking straight forward into the holler off to the left as the road found back around to the right and up the hill. And it didn't, I really didn't see it at first.

I didn't really pay attention to what it was. But if you're looking straight down the hollow, there's a, there's a trail that runs almost due west and hits back down towards the main dairy farm. And on the left side of that trail is, as I mentioned before, my grandpa, there's blacksmith shop. And on the right side of the trail was a lot of bramble and a lot of places where the black berries would grow in addition to the muskidon. So it was a heavy, heavy kind of berry area. And when I kept staring, it was kind of like, it kind of came into focus. At first, I didn't really see it. And then all of a sudden, I did start to see it. And

what helped out was the sun was just right off. into the west and kind of barely setting. What I remember seeing first was the right arm was actually, the right arm was actually framed a little bit in the light. And it looked like it had a little bit of a halo around the hair of the arm. And then the rest of it, he was pulling down, he or she, I don't know what it was. He was pulling down the muskidon binds to its face, and it was pulling the muskidons with its right hand.

it was putting it in its mouth. And I remember kind of coming to an awareness of what I was looking at. And when it finally figured out I was standing there, it turned its head directly towards me and looked at me. And I don't know if I was the first person to say this, but I think I was one of the initial Internet reports used the term mongloid face because that's literally what it looked like. And it just kind of, I would say it didn't have like brown eyes per se, but kind of like a dark amber.

And they filled, and I don't say, I don't think it filled up all the eye sockets, but pretty much had some, a little bit of white on either side. But at that point, it let go of the, I remember how I snapped too because I could, I just couldn't, I just couldn't keep from not staring at it. and at this point I'd already stop myself because, I mean, me and my dog were both just getting our tracks, staring at this thing. And we're approximately 15 yards from the tree line, and it's approximately another five yards in off of the road. And so it finally, as it's let that bond snap and go back up into the tree, it kind of stared, and then it made some type of grooming. or some type of those like facial movement. And it came sort of towards us.

And at that point, I pissed in my pants. And my dog was already starting to make its rounds back towards the house. It wasn't going to waste any more time than the initial contact that we'd already had. And I ended up turning my bike around somehow. I don't know how I did it. It was on autopilot. And I pebbled as fast as I could. back in those days, the bikes only had one gear.

That was it. And as much of that gear as I could, I got out of it. And I got back down to the house, and I hit the ground running pretty much. And when I got back in, as I was coming back up to the house, mom was asking me, she was coming out the front porch. We had a classical southern front porch, but not with a lot of pillars or anything like that, just a big front porch. And so she's stepping off the front porch and she's looking.

She was like, who's that? and what's wrong? Pretty much was all she said. And I could just remember glancing over my shoulder long enough to see it step over the fence and back into the tree line. Because they had come full space up towards where me and the dog were at, and then it literally just stepped right over the fence into the field and just back into the tree line.

It was literally like a U-turn. And when I went into my room, we had these heavy oak bookshel. And I could just remember, there wasn't much going through my mind other than I was just scared to death, and I started pulling books left and right off the shelf. You know, my mom's thinking I've lost my mind,

and I'm putting the bookshelves up against the windows, and I'm putting the books back into the bookshelts. And I really didn't, for the most, for as much as I can remember, I think I must have stayed in that room for three days and didn't come out. And up until the time I got in the Army, I mean, even at 17, and it's four years later, if I was going to go see my uncle or go down to the barn, I would either take my dirt bike

and ride as fast as possible, or I would walk through the open fields so I could see on either side of where I was at if I could see this thing coming. And my mom is mostly all American Indian. Cherokee, Eastern Bay in Cherokee. And so she always had little tricks for like getting me to do stuff. And my nightmares were just really, really bad for, I would say about three years.

I really had a hard time sleeping. And it was really difficult my uncles would get me in the woods at night, but I'd start that hyperventilate during hunts and stuff like that. And they eventually just had to start taking me back home. more often than they wanted to. And so my mom decided that there was an old trick that they had where they would put like a knife under your head at night

and they'd tell you that basically if you start to see one of these things in your dream that you pulled a knife out and you kill it. And that was, you know, it's not necessarily a PC or new age solution to how you do it. But that's exactly what happened. And so eventually that was how I got my Bigfoot nightmares to stop. A lot of people, when they first see them, they're not prepared to see them from what I read. It's just like what I went through. It's like a form of a post-traumatic Sasquatch disorder.

Yeah. Everybody seems to go through that. But, yeah, that was the very first time I saw it. I didn't see another one until I was in my 20s. But that's one initially got me started. I became very interested in the subject after that, even though you're scared to death. for some reason there's a fascination to it. Yeah, and I don't mean to laugh at the PTSD acronym.

Because I just, I already know you and we've, you know, we've text and talked about that before your PTSD acronym. It's not the same thing as in the military. So, yeah, so that was already a tough first encounter. It's really striking to hear you went in your room and you moved your bookshelves, you know, up against the windows. So that's very striking to hear. Yeah, to this day, I still use heavy velvet curtains. And that's just, it's just something you don't want to see. What's up?

Yeah, if I can ask a question, just curious, how close were you? I may have totally missed that. But it sounds like you got some really good detail. It was fairly close, I guess, right? Yeah, the biggest drawback to the detail was if you're standing on the road, the road hits up until it forks off to the right, the road hits literally due west. And I would have seen more of this thing if it hadn't been for the fact that the sun was almost setting behind it.

Because it was, like I said, around 6 o'clock. And I was probably about 15 yards from the tree line when I stopped, and it was at least five yards in. So, you know, 30 feet maybe. That's still really close. Yeah, I mean, it's closer. I mean, yeah, it's not, I don't want to do it again. I'll tell you that much.

On the no list. It's like we always tell Shannon, no, you don't want to see one. Yeah, and I'm stubborn. I'm like, yes, I do. You know, and piggybacking off Adam's question, how tall would you guess that it was? I don't, it wasn't like what Wes and Will see out there. It was, I think it would have been about a little bit taller than about, basketball player because there was a lot of guys that my mom also taught basketball.

So I was a fairly good judge of height. And I'd say that it would have to be about, maybe about half an inch, not half an inch, half a foot to a foot taller than a standard high school basketball player. So maybe seven at most eight feet, but seven as best as I can remember. And you said your family actually got you out hunting again. How soon after this did you go out hunting? They're Southerners, as soon as they possibly could torture them. Adam knows this.

This is how southern people work. They will throw you right back on top of the horse. If you flip the tractor, they'll put you right back on the tractor. And that's exactly what happened. Oh, yeah. It'll brush you stuff off and get back on. Yeah, within two weeks, they had me out on tune hunting at night. They're like PTSD, my ass.

You're going out hunting, right? Well, I found out later that there was a reason that they did that. when I was 21 years old, I had just got back from college, and I was also about ready to go off to do some Army stuff for that. I went to military college. And I just got back from college, and I was about ready to get ready to go back out for drill. So I'm at the house, and I go up to go see my uncle before I head off,

and he's got four other farmers around him. Now, mind you, my father picked on me for years and said he didn't believe in this thing. But my dad also jumped into Mount St. Helens many, many years ago back. When Mount St. Helens happened, they pulled all state fire and forest rangers and everybody from anywhere across the United States. And it was only until, it was only right before, probably about a couple years before he died that he told me that he believed my story, but he never told me why. and my uncle was the one that kind of filled me in

that something had been happening down there for a while but he would meet up with some of the guys they would go down to the stockyard and then they would either they would meet before they went down to the stockyard or they'd meet after they got back from the stockyard but there were four farmers that were up there and were on the back to his truck

and they were just chatting and carrying on And, of course, Adam knows this, in Southern society, once you have a great traumatic event happens, that's part of your nickname at that point. You're a big foot boy or a raccoon boy or something. They're going to call you a name. And so I'm coming out of the house to go talk to him, and he's with the guys that's my uncle's house because I visit my aunt here. And I'm coming out to talk to him, and he's sitting there talking to him. And he said to him, here comes John. And one of the guys kind of laughed, and he said, he said, well, I think Bigfoot boy can hear this.

And I got really, it piqued my interest because it was my uncle that was talking, not somebody else. And he had always played this off. But we've been in the South for at least 400 years. We had an older family that was with us that worked with us for a long time. They've been with our family for at least two to three hundred years. And the guy that was in that family was a guy named a Fred, and he was the most honest and dependable person I'd ever known. And apparently him and my uncle were out looking at cattle,

and they had calves that had gone missing. And at first they thought it was based upon the fact that we had wildhawks. And at that time, we were just starting to get coyotes. But not a lot of them. But we just started to. So it was kind of like the mythical coyote. might be out there. And the story, as I understand it, was they pulled the truck through the fence off the road,

and then they get out of the truck, and they walk down to the back end of the fence line, where the forest starts, and they hop the fence, and they head down the hill to where the creek's at. They've got a 22 rifle with him, and Fred's got the rifle in his arms. My uncle's just opening up fences and getting them through and briars and brambles. So they start the head down toward the creek because common logic is that if a cow gets out, they're going to head to water some way. And so they're going to also get a head downhill because cows are heavy. And so they're down there at the creek looking for the cow,

and they're looking, and they're looking, and there's a bend in the creek. As best as I can remember this story, this isn't my story, so I'm telling some else's story. but there's a bend in the creek, and where we have creeks around there in South Carolina, they have red clay. Deep back in this red clay, well, I should say before this, there were some signs that they saw. There were cattle bones and things like that. But also, when you kill cattle near a creek or you eat cattle near a creek, if you're a dog or something like that, then there's a sickly yellow foam that grows up on top of the water,

and it kind of catches itself as the creek flows down. So you can tell where a lot of stuff is it either been chewing on something because of the fat and the sinew and all that kind of stuff, it just kind of creates this like, it's like it's weird form of soapy foam that develops when you have a large,

any type of large body of a cow that either decays or is killed or is eaten near a creek. That's just the way it looks. and so they saw that, and they ran the corner, and there, inside of this depression within the hill, there's something, and this was the first time I ever heard this. This wasn't like when I was 21,

there wasn't a lot of this swam back and forth garbage that everybody always talked about. But in the inside of this red clay embankment, something had dug in enough that it could, it could literally hop in and hide there. And, you know, on second thought, thinking about it, it's perfect because the wood, the name of the road that they were off, it's called Wood's Road. But the Wood's Road would go off perpendicular to the main road.

And so thinking about it, that would have been a good area for whatever it was to stick its head into or hide out in because nothing would have seen it in that particular thing. But if they came around the corner and there's a funny part of this story, They start seeing this thing swaying back and forth. And he told me that it smelled bad, but they said it smelled bad just because of all the decay and stuff that was around there and things that had been, that it drugged down in that area. And Will also, you never shared the story with me, but Will mentioned that there were a lot of reports from South Carolina

where these things were killing cows. But you'd have to ask Will more about who you heard from. So I'm looking in the side of this creek I'm not he's looking I'm sorry my uncle's looking at the side of this creek thing and he's sitting there trying to figure out what this thing is and it starts yelling at him

and then Fred who was right beside of him my uncle turns and asks him said Fred him in my gun and Fred's Fred wasn't even there and my uncle said Fred and you turn around and looked over his right shoulder again

and Fred was literally running out of the out of the woods. He said, Mr. Johnson would like to stop, but my legs didn't let me. And they asked, all the farmers just kind of stopped me, said, well, you know, I won't mention my uncle's name. He still alive. And he said, what did you do?

And he said, I got out of there, too. I wasn't going to stay. And I remember he never looked me directly in the eye. It just kind of like side-glanced at me. And it's just to let me know that even though they had picked on me, at least for those five to four years that I'd seen that thing, that there was more to what was going on than what they were leading to. Right.

So I always found, like I said, when I told that story to Will, he mentioned, I mean, over an email, he mentioned that there were cases in South Carolina where that had happened, so I didn't think they were half crazy. He was pulling my leg. Right. Right. Jeez. you look back, your friend's just gone

see ya if you don't waste any time yeah I guess you can't blame them in a way huh no it was funny was he was the main one with the gun but all the farmers just carried 22s I'm not exactly sure that would have even put it in it in it so now John I know this next one is tougher for you to tell

but it's your 2010 encounter yeah Yeah, we had one in 98, but I won't mention that because that actually happened with some other people. And I want to put that one down on paper because when you start to see these things, and when you start to become somebody that's seen them more than once in your lifetime, you begin to question a lot of things about your sanity. So the one in the situation in 98, I was actually with a grand total of seven people, so six including me. And I managed to run into somebody here in town that lived near.

And I asked him many moons ago at a music festival, if we had seen this thing like I'd remember, he had gone to prison for what people go to prison for up here in the mountains, alternative horticultural. and so he told me he said he said yeah he said we saw that he said but nobody wants to talk about it so i'll skip over 98 one yeah that's that's completely you whatever you yeah whatever you want to share yeah i understand the permission side of that one so yeah the 2010 situation is a little bit different um i uh took care of a guy who's uh whose uh family had started a famous race out in Hawaii. I won't go into it, but it's a race everybody knows about.

And it was his brother. He ended up becoming my mentor and my close friend. And he was married into an Appalachian family up here, and they, even though he wasn't from Western North Carolina in his current life, his family had originally lived here many years ago. So he kind of felt drawn back to the area. But we spent a lot of years camping, and he shared with me some knowledge and things like that about engineering and making stuff. And he had a tool and dye shop, so we would get in there and make all kinds of funky stuff with grinding wheels and whatnot and welding and what have you.

A long, long time, that's pretty much how life progressed. But as things happened, he got really sick and he died. and part of his will was that he wanted to have a traditional Appalachian weight, but he was also a Buddhist, which means he wanted to have not just a traditional Appalachian weight, but there was some additional things that he wanted to do with his body. So my mom's family, like I said, they're Eastern Bay in Cherokee. My godmother's an Nita Indian from up in New York State, and my godfather, you would call him Anne and Uncle,

is what you would call him in American. Indian culture. Like, this is my aunt here, my uncle. And so she's Anita, and he's Lakota and Cherokee. So he's part of the tribe here in Luce Way as well. And they told me, after handling the body for about four days, like I would literally, I would move the body from one part of the house into the basement and back and forth is required by the wake and the viewing.

And his son's, his actual birth sons, they couldn't do this because that was the body of their father and they couldn't handle it. And so when I say couldn't handle, I mean literally like an emotional sense, not a physical sense. But we would take it and I would sit with the body at night, which is what you do in a lot of the Appalachian and Mountain Society. And as you can imagine, sitting with the body in the basement at night is not necessarily mentally strengthening. It can take a lot out of you. And so after the funeral was done with, and we made the urn boxes for his ashes,

my family just basically turned and looked at me, and they said, well, you need to go and cleanse in the woods. And so the traditional Cherokee way of doing it from what I've been told and from what they they expressed me was you spend seven days out in woods and you're you're you fast and then you cleanse and then and then you come out and the the the way that I ended up doing it was that since I handled the body for that long I said well I'll just I'll just Cherokee do things in sevens so I just told everybody I'll just I'll just take 49 days out and I'll go and spend it out in the woods in the Appalachians.

And that's where my, I'll call him my godfather, but assume my uncle, if there are other American Indian people listening. But my godfather looked at me and he says, now if you do that, he said, there's some things you're going to need to do. And we sat down and we talked about it. And he told me, he said, basically, he said, you want to move camp every four days so you don't impact the land. He said, you want to go to an area where you're not going to be able to see people,

because part of the cleansing tradition is that you avoid all contact with all people for the time period that you're cleansing. And so I was going to do it for seven days straight, and after that I was just going to, you know, spend the rest of my time in the woods just to be sure, you know, that I was, you know, ready to head back in and deal with society because it took a lot out of me, not just as death, but sitting with the body. and we picked the area that we picked was Snowbird, which a lot of people don't know much about Cherokee culture or society. There's, you know, what you know about in the film, and then there's, like, Western North Carolina reality, and Western North Carolina reality is that almost all Cherokee people

grew up on the Qualil boundary or Bryson City, at least in the eastern band side. And then there's, like, the old Catua Mound, which is this field that has a big pump in it, that is the old sacred site for the old sacred fires. And then past that up into the hills in Robbinsville is Snowbird, which is where almost, how do I say it, that's where the oldest traditional community is. And I don't know how to explain it any other way than that. That's where the hardcore Cherokee live.

I mean, other than Oklahoma and the Eastern Band Cherokee, and I think a couple people down in Mexico, but the really old-school traditionalists live in Snowbird. And so we pick Snowbird. and I said, well, I'm going to go stay up on Snowbird Creek. And we looked at a map and we picked a place. Me and my uncle did, and we sit there and he says, okay, well, you're going to go here. And once you go here, then what you're going to need to do is just keep moving around in this area for four days.

And if you look at the place on the map, it doesn't look like it's that ridiculous hard. But as Adam can tell you, and when you're in the Appalachians, what looks like it's five feet ends up turning into being a cliff, you know. and everything becomes a lot more hard to transverse than what you realize. But before I headed back out, my uncle knew about what I'd seen when I was a kid growing up, and he also knew about what I'd ran into in 98. And he pulled me aside, he said, I want to talk to you about this because this concerns me. He said, you have a propensity to see these. I don't think propensity was a word he used, but I'm using it.

But he said, you know, the tendency to see these things. And he said, you're going to be by yourself. And that's when you really don't want to see them. And they don't have the mythical kind of, as we always sat in our community, flute player attitude towards Sasquatch or Bigfoot. Their way of looking at it is that, yeah, they treat it like a different person, but it's been well-hashed over that they know that they can get you too. And so what he ended up telling me was something I'd never heard before,

and I'd mentioned this to David Polacki's investigators when they talked to me about this. The thing that he told me was that they liked two things, and he said they like to suck on true copper coins, which was like a pre-1982 copper penny. And I asked him why he said he said he just didn't explain it. You know, he just said that they would put. a penny in their mouth and they would suck on it. And he said that the other thing that they liked

was that they liked hard candy. And he told me, he said, now you don't put out a lot. You said, what you do is you put out just a couple pennies and a couple of and a couple of jolly ranchers or something like that. And if you leave those out at night,

he said, they'll leave you alone. And I wasn't really thinking about them as much as I was thinking about the death of the guy just buried and whatnot. But that was like a side note, and I remember going through and picking out a bunch of pre-1982 pennies, and then carrying that out in the woods. I must have spent, I got out there and we crossed over into the creek system, and I got on to the side of the mountain where nobody was at, passed where all the trout fisherman go.

And my friend goes across the creek with me, and we have to stretch a line, and we just go over. and I end up not at the area I thought I was and the area that I went to, I think I'm going to leave off of this interview. I'll tell you guys later if you guys want to know, but when I went into this area, I've never considered that I would even see them. It wasn't something that it had been so long since that had happened

that, you know, it just wasn't in my mind because there was a whole list of other things I was going to have to do throughout the day. and like I had to learn Cherokee as an alphabet and there's 80-something characters in the alphabet and there's five different ways of saying so many different vowels and whatnot and so

the and then my aunt or my godmother had like this entire thing of herbs that I was supposed to study while I was out there so there was a lot of stuff to keep me occupied that it wasn't going to be necessarily worried about it so I had my dog with me I thought that was kind of safe

you know a dog's not a person so they don't necessarily count and I just had myself and I had two, three, 57 revolvers. And that was right after the 2010, so that was right after the whole thing where you could start carrying into the national forest. And plus it was on Indian Lane anyway. We carry. We don't really care.

And then, so I'm up in this area and I'm camping. So I finished up my first seven days. and then right after the first seven days happened, this was in May of 2010. I don't know if you guys remember when Nashville, Tennessee, flooded the entire downtown area. Do you remember that, Adam? Yeah, I do for sure, yeah.

Yeah, Adam remembers this. The entire downtown had flooded. That was the time period that I had gone into the woods. So it rained for 38 days straight of the 49 that I was out there. And I would have to use that two, in the Appalachians, we use the two rainfly system, the one over your tent, and then one over your tent again. Make sure you're not going to get three.

And then maybe three because one under your tent. But the, so it was just kind of like, after that seven days, I remember my dog started barking at night. And when you're in the middle of a pitch hollow, on either side, if the sun's blocked or the moon's blocked, it's pitch black. You're not going to be able to see out of that. I mean, it gets so dark back there that, I mean,

you can't see your hand in front of you after the sun goes down. And so I'm listening to my dog, bark and bark and bark, and I got to check off. Just making sure I won't run out of power. But my dog started barking, and I got out of my tent to look around, and there wasn't anything out there. Now, I know a lot of people see some,

weird stuff that they can't explain, but I still looked at this as a possible sign of something was going on, but I really wasn't thinking about it. But I saw a foxfire for the first time, and for an Appalachian person, seeing Foxfire is like, that's like, that's like the ultimate thing you can see because it's just so tied in the folklore. And I look out there and I see it just floating through the mountain laurel. And I was just standing because I'd never experienced it. And I knew what it was, but I was just taken back by the fact that it actually existed.

And so I thought for a little bit that that was the main thing that the dog was barking at. She got excited and thought something really serious was out there. And so I went back and I went to sleep. The next night, the dog started barking again. And I got up and it was pitch black again. And as soon as I stepped out of the tent, I started to hear something just crash right off through the bottom of the Creek Tribunary system, where everything met up. I was camping it, like I said, down to the bottom. And all of a sudden, this big thing just crashed.

And I thought, man, that's a black bear. And I didn't really worry about it. And I went back and went right. And the next night I got up, I moved my camp out of the bottoms up on top of it. of a ridge because it was after the four days. And when I was on top of the ridge and I pitched camp again, I was there for that first night and it rained yet again. Hey, John, I hate to interrupt you.

What was Foxfire that you were bringing up? What exactly did you mean by that? What is that? It's a luminescent, or it's either a luminescent, or it's either a luminescent ball, according to some people. What I saw was many of them, and it literally looked like... So like fireflies? Not quite.

It looks, they don't blink. And it float on the wind. It's really hard to describe. It's like if you took insect eggs and you made them glow in the dark, and you set them on the wind and they were just lighter than the gravity and the air could push up against them

and gravity could bring them down and if you just scattered them and they kind of flowed into the wind instead of going straight to the ground that's what Foxfire kind of looks like. It looks like balls of light. It's really, it's beautiful but it's not so otherworldly

that you're going to freak out and fall over. It's a phenomenon but I'm not exactly sure what causes it. Just some kind of a weather phenomenon or something like that? We don't know. We absolutely don't know. The conditions where I was at was right for it, because we, like to say, Brown Mountain is not very within probably about 50.

Yeah, Brown Mountain Lights. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I'm sorry, John, to interrupt you continue. Yeah, no, you're fine. Sure shut. But that night back up on the, like I said, I was camped up on the ridge, and this was two nights after the Fox Star or stuff.

And I got up the second, as it was, I got up the night after it rained after I got out to the ridge, I was just tooling around the campfire, and I was just messing with the lines on the tent to make sure they're stretched out because that's what you do. It rains, and you repull out your tarp because that's, you know, the only thing you're really worried about staying dry. And so I'm sitting there just looking around, and there's not much going on except, you know, it's the woods and you're chilling out and you're not really thinking about anything. And then I look up through the bramble of Mount Laurel. I don't know if you've ever – I know you live in Ohio, so I know you've got the Alleghenies and stuff near you and whatnot, but the Mountain Laurel kind of just is so. thick that you really can't see through it.

Adam can tell you. It's just like, it gets really naughty in places. You can't even pass through this stuff most of the time. I'm looking up on the ridge and I'm looking through the Laurel and all of a sudden, I stop because I'm looking at something that looks like, just, it looks like black. I'm like, I don't know how to describe it because it looked like black, it's just like just pitch black hair. and I'm sitting there thinking, okay, well, that's a black bear.

And then I noticed that the hair wasn't quite, I mean, when you see black bear, I hike the Appalachian Trail, so I'm fairly, you get to know black bear pretty quick. And so I'm sitting here looking at the thing, and then it does something that really unures me. This black mask starts to sway back and forth, just enough. But enough to let me know, I'm not looking at a bear. Because a bear would have, you know, by the time I'm sitting there yelling and snapping and messing around, Black Bear generally won't stay around. My first thought was, okay, well, it's spring, maybe he's hungry, maybe I look tasty.

You know, I was trying to rationalize everything that they had been going on. Now, mind you, each night before I would go to bed, I was doing this ritual of setting out the Jolly Ranchers and in the Gialer-Renches and the pennies. So that had been going on, but I had been collecting them every night and putting them back in my pocket and helping myself to a couple of Jolly Ranchers

while I was at it. So I wasn't, you know, I wasn't really thinking about it until that moment. And then I looked, I looked back and it was still there. And it stopped swaying. It was just staying right there in the tree line. And I noticed my dog, who normally barks at everything under the sun, if she can see it, is not barking anymore.

And I just kind of was like, something's not right. And I started to get that feeling you get whenever you know that they're there. And I stopped and put everything I could into my bag. and I started to move my camp immediately, pulling parts back, you know, cutting lines on trees. You know, I moved my dog first. I got her way back at where I was going to camp the next night, and I was going to go ahead and get out of here two days early,

and I was like, because I can't leave. I'm already on this. I've already committed to 49 days, and walking out, is that I'm going to tell you, if you back out of the southern traditional anything, everybody's going to make fun of you into the day you die and call you a cow. So there's no way you're going home. You're going to stay out there.

You're going to stay. And so I said, okay, well, I'll go, I'll get the hell out of here, and I'll go somewhere else. Because I'm not going anywhere anyway. I'm eight miles from the main road and even past that point, that main road to gravel road, it's another additional five miles into the nearest town. So I'm already way back there. I'm at the place where they caught Eric, not called Eric Rudolph, but where Eric Rudolph ran off to from the FBI for the first time.

That's how remote it was. And so I go way back as far as I can, drop the dog off, I come back. I grab as much as more of my stuff as I can. It's not there now, but I'm not trusting that. You know, I've got both. I'm packing dual pistolas at this point, where I've got my rig set up so that I've got both of them on me instead of just one. And they call it, you know, Code Red or whatever it is.

but the I bring all that back up to this place where me and my dog are going to stay and I started I should have took this as a sign other than the fact I just saw something in the trees going back and forth in the laurel

and I thought okay well whatever this thing is if it's come up on me these last few nights over this past course of this week there's a chance to come back again. And so I got camp set up in this other place. The other place was maybe possibly a little bit worse than where I was before, but I wasn't really tactically thinking about it at time. It just, it was back in a ravine. It was rock on both sides, and I could at least put my tent

near the creek and keep an eye on what was going on around me instead of the other place where I was, you know, knee-deep in Laurel. and so I set up camp and I go and I cut a holly, a holly kind of grows straight in certain areas. It doesn't always grow crooked. And I cut me a holly stick and also put my fishker fishing trident on the end of it and I strap that down because it's so thick in there in certain areas that you can't sometimes get your shots off real quick. So I'm thinking if it is a bearer, then I can hold it back a little hair if I need to. And at this point I'm in a panic mode, so I'm not really thinking properly anyway.

But I managed to get the tent set up, and I get the dog situated, and nightfall comes. And I remember staying out there waiting for whatever it was that I saw to show back up. And I got my dog already. I put my dog in the tent. I normally don't put the dogs in the tent, but I did that night. I put her in there, and I just had, you know, stab. And I got out there, and I had one pistol on my backside at this point. I got my spear in my one hand, and I got my 357 and my other hand.

And I custom load rounds, so I had 180 grain 357 rounds. And that's a pretty nice size 357 round. Even then I didn't feel like it was enough. I don't think anything would have been enough. But as the night kind of started to fall, you got to remember, as I said, it's rained in the Appalachians the entire time. So the loam and the forest litter cover, you can't hear anything. So if somebody could walk right up on you, and you wouldn't even know it,

unless they really snap the branch or something. And so I'm already aware that I can't hear whatever's coming, so I'm nervous and I'm scared. And at that point, all you can do is just wait and sweat and wait and sweat. And then, of course, as the sun goes down, you can't sweat anymore, you start to get cold. And at that time, I decided, okay, well, this is stupid. I'm sitting there waiting to get eaten or die.

So I'm just going to go stay in my tent. And I open up my tent and I get in there. And before I was starting to go to bed, I remember, oh, well, I need to put out the pennies and the child ranchers. And, of course, that was not something I really wanted to do, but I got back out. And there was a place where a tree had fallen and had fallen flat. perpendicular as it was horizontal to the ground. And in the center of it was where it started to erode at least a year or so ago.

And there was a little bit of a hollow in the log. So I put my pennies and my jolly ranchers in the center of that little hollow. And granted, it's not going anywhere. This was literally like a flat surface in sticking it. Even if the hurricane had come up, they probably wouldn't come out of there.

And so I did that. and I go in a lane in my tent. And all around me, there was a rain for a while, and you could hear it just softly hitting the tarp up above. And I'm laying there with my head facing down towards the downhill on the creek because that was just the way the situation was. And my feet are facing towards up towards the mountains, and way further back into the ravine.

The dog, I noticed, had rustled around, but then got really, really quiet. And I couldn't hear anything right at first. And then as I was laying there, I heard almost within 20 to 25 feet away, maybe, a little further, but still close enough that startled me. I heard these two rocks start clacking together. And about that time, I about piss my pants yet again.

Because at that point, everything from childhood, everything that already experienced comes back in one moment where you're just kind of like bracing to get killed. You're sitting there thinking, well, that thing comes through this tent, then I'm going to go out shooting both pistols as fast as I can and put as much damage on that guy as possible before I go out. And hopefully give my dog enough time to get out of there. And that's literally the state of miles.

I've already wrote goodbyes, you know, in a page in my journal. I was ready. And to make sure people didn't think I'd lost my mind, I even wrote in my journal that it's a bear just coming to get me. You know, so that way my mom wouldn't, you know what I'm saying? Right. Crazy guy.

And so that's rationally what you would do, and kind of protect your family. And so I'm sitting there just hearing it clacking rocks directly behind my head, and then all of a sudden, up the ridge as it's clacking, I hear and this isn't the echo because it was a different pentameter.

I hear a different set of clax up off almost to a 45 degree angle up on the ridge. And it's clacking it's clacking there too. I'm like oh shh, you know, there's two up, you know? Well to add insult to injury,

the story wasn't over for the number of them that were around. I was sitting there going like, okay, well, I can aim one pistol this way, I can name the other one back over my head. If they start approaching the team, I can just shoot two rounds off at the same time, and maybe they'll scare them off. And then in the same breath, I heard another one on the trail

at the other 45-degree angle from my head start, there's plaque rocks up on the ridge on the other side of the ravine. and then I started to realize what had happened. I was literally pinned. There was no way I could. If I had crossed the creek and I had even attempted to go up that space to get out of there that night, then the one that was on top of that ridge that was there would have got me.

If I had gone and ran further back into the mountains like I did before when I first saw it, then the one up on top of the ridge on that side on that trail would have got me. And if I tried to get out by the creek and down by the trail, the one that was directly behind my head. would have got me. And so I did something that you normally don't do. I caught both pistols and I literally put them across my chest and I mean I I'm the type of person that leaves all the rounds in the chamber. I don't leave one out like some people do or two out like other people do for quote unquote tactical reasons. I actually keep all the all around in the chamber.

And so I've got both of my pistols cocked across my chest, and I'm ready for them to either come in and get me or go out and get me. And so what ends up happening is that at some point they quit clacking the rocks because that was just really unnerving. That was the most unnerving part of the whole thing. And once they stopped clacking rocks, they said, well, okay, well, this is it. They're going to get me. And then I didn't hear anything.

and then finally I just kept listening, listening. And then once the adrenaline wore off and the panic left, I just collapsed and I went right to sleep. And when I woke up in the next morning, my pistols were by my head with my hands, and by the grace of God didn't pull the trigger or anything like that. And then I woke myself up and I got out of the tent, got my dog out of the tent, and I looked around,

and there wasn't anything to be seen. And I just remember thinking like, damn, I'm alive. You know, whatever it was didn't eat me. And then that's when I thought about it. You know, I thought for a second, well, you know, why didn't they get me? And I started to pack the tent up and get out of there

because I'm not going to stay. Even though I scheduled to stay another three days in that spot, I'm not going to stay. I'm going to get further back up to the side of the ridge closer towards the main. trail and I wasn't going to leave the woods yet because I was going to finish the mission because that's what you do. That's what meant it.

And so I'm sitting there going like, well, I'm not going to leave and I'm going to get close enough to the trail. Something happens. I can go out on that trail and find somebody. Just something really crappy happens. And so my plan is to get out of this deep part of the ravine and do that. I'm not going back down the trail, which I ran into the first one. I'm not going up the trail when I would have ran into the other one.

those clacking rocks on that side of the trail. You know, so I'm sitting there thinking, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up this sheer face of this rock and mud and mountain laurel and get up on top of that ridge, and I'm going to walk down and I'm going to get the hell out of here. And it's the exact one I'm going to do. And I pull out my carabiners and I pull out my rope and I start to get ready to get out of there. And then on second thought, I remember the thinking, I remember I said, well, I wonder what happened, you know, with the jogger ranchers and the, because that was kind of the thing. I always put in my pocket before I'd leave.

And I went over there and I looked at the jolly ranchers and the copper pennies. All the copper pennies and all the jolly ranchers were gone. There wasn't even a wrapper that had been left. There was nothing at all that had been left in that little hole. and I was sitting and going like because it takes hands and to do all that you know from everything that they were doing

to getting that stuff out to to the chipmunk or anything like that they're going to you know you're going to be able to tell that they were around and they're not going to take all the pennies either because last time I checked chipmunks aren't into pennies and I'm like looking at that and I'm going like well I'll be darned I guess it was

it was them. And at that point, my resolve was quick in that I wasn't going to stay there. And I remember, I couldn't find my, I don't know if Adam does any mountain climbing or anything like that, but I remember I couldn't find my gloves. And I was, I created a hitch and I was pulling up my gear. I had two backpacks with me and one army duffel bag full of dog food. And I began to pull everything up from the base of the creek up to the top of this ridge up the cliff. And I remember getting, I remember just being in such an adrenaline

rush to get out there. I didn't realize that I had forgotten to put my gloves on and that I had eaten all the skin off of the inside of both my palms on the rope. That's how, that's how focused and scared I was about just getting out. out of there. And because my hands started to bleed, and finally that night, we actually spent, because they got so worn out, pulling all that stuff out of there and up onto the side of this mountain, actually spent the first night on that cliff face just as we got out of that bottom. And I figured I was probably a little bit safer up there because I could, you would have been very difficult to get to me. And then the next day, I, of course, got out of there.

the trip continued and it just, as all good trips, you know, it kind of crescendoed that was the worst part of it, you know. And then after I got out of there, it was, it just, you know, ended as good trips should. But it was before, that was well before I believe I'd ever heard about the missing 411 things and whatnot. And that didn't help me out after I heard about it either. I bet. Because, I mean, it was obvious that they could very easily got me that night.

You know, not that I'll fight there, you know, but at the same time, there were three of them. Yeah, you were ready, tombstone style for them, so I don't blame you a bit. That's terrifying. Adam, did you have any questions for John on that encounter? Yeah, I guess not so much a question, but just a statement. I think it's a testament to that, to John's encounter. the amount of detail that he can remember. I think that that is some of the most incredible pieces of any encounter.

When people remember so vividly, like, I mean, I don't know about you, Shannon, but I'm, like, sitting here staring at a wall, and I kind of, like, came back. You get a picture all of it, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's so, it's so easy with someone like John who can put that picture together and remembers every detail so clearly. Yeah. You know, just that realizing that you, it's not one thing that's off kind of in the woods,

clacking rocks, but it's another and then another. And kind of that realization that, you know, if they wanted to do something, then there's not too much, no matter how much ammo you're packing there, no matter what kind of firepower you have. There's probably not going to be a whole lot you can do other than put up the best flight you can. And I think that's crazy. The amount of detail there was just unbelievable. That was really awesome and terrifying, but awesome at this same time. Yeah, John, I was wondering about the rock clacks.

Was it in twos or threes? Was there a pattern to it? There was a pattern because when it first started out, it sounded like it was in sets of threes interdispersed with twos. It was almost like they, it was kind of like this. I'm here, other dude, I'm here, other dude, I'm here. And then, like, there was some type of, like, in between all that, there was some type of, like, it could have been almost like, I'm a ham radio operator.

So it kind of sounded like almost like a weird version of Morris Code. But the way that they ended it was the scariest part was they all started clacking at the same time. And that, right before they stopped. And that was the, that was, you know, like I said, when I thought they were going to stop and get that, that's what, let me know that that was most likely what was going to happen. How long did that? I couldn't really determine. I'm sorry.

Go ahead, Adam. Oh, no, I was just going to say, at what point did you kind of, you know, maybe accept the idea of what was there not being a bear or not being something a little more mundane or usual? You know, at what point did you kind of flash back to that childhood kind of experience and say, hey, this, does this happen? it again or was it just kind of something that after the fact you were like, you know,

that could potentially have been what it was, just curious to kind of when knowing thoughts started being, you know, triggered towards that early childhood experience? Knowing that what had seen the afternoon before and realizing that the fur on the black bear didn't look the same as what this was. But let me put this in context. I saw just enough that there was enough doubt. See what I'm saying? I saw just enough that there was,

I knew something was standing there, but I could still fit in my mind that that could have been a black bear. I mean, I still had that little bit of sanity to hold on to. Right. But at the same time, the movements of it

and it's not retreating and it not leaving me. That's what concern me more, that that's when I started to kind of logically start working out that what I was dealing with was a little bit different. Now, what I saw when I was a child, I won't go into the 1998 one too much except to say that it was black and silver. But what I saw as a child was amber. It was your classical wild blackburn, kind of like amber.

but I guess just thinking it was black and it could have been a black bear that helped me kind of get moved to the other camp. Sure. But it was when it started clacking rocks behind my head that I realized what I was dealing with. Because there's that famous, one of those famous interviews they always say it,

and it kind of haunting because it came to me years later when I saw it. I forget which interview it was when there are other people out there and know which one of it is. The guy says, it takes hands to clack that stuff together. And I don't know if those Mike Willie or one of those guys, but when

I heard it clacking the rocks, and I was in the deepest, one of the deeper parts of the Appalachians, if you know where Eric Rudolph ran off to, you know that's like, as the FBI can painfully tell you, that's a place you just don't want to be. And it's just

hard to traverse. And I just remember realizing that there's nobody back here. There's no possible way anybody's back here. And I'm by myself. And for anybody to show up in the middle of an Appalachian rainstorm in the middle of the night in order to, and some guys on a herring ridge up on the left side of the, and a herring ridge on the right and some guy directly behind me, it's not possible. I mean, I'm sure it's possible. I mean, to go through the amount of trouble, that's not likely. That's when the realization hit me out. Yeah.

John, as far as the clacking also, I'm just, I'm fascinated by that behavior, and we've heard it many of times. So how long at the climax of this encounter, were they, how long did the clacking go on all around you before it finally stopped? I would have to say it was about anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute. That's a long time. I've been going back and forth. No wonder you were so stressed out. My goodness. That's terrible.

I think I was part of the psychological. I think that's part of their psychological, you know, in retrospect. And I was in the infantry and I knew I had been triangulated. And that's what scared me really bad because a lot of other people they would have, you know, gracefully going to go, no, they're going to get me. But I already knew at that point not only were they going to get me, they were going to do it with style, you know. And tactically and brilliantly execute getting me.

And I think what they do, at least this from what I can, I really don't know what they do, but I'm just guessing. But at this point, I think that they kind of do that in order to make sure, you know, you can't go anywhere. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. There's no, there's no way that you're going to leave. And I need that pretty painfully myself.

But like I said, I think I did the best thing. I didn't move. You know, I just stood my ground and, you know, was prepared to start shooting. You know, that's what it came to. Yeah. I just wonder if there was one more or two more people with you. How different would it have been? Would they have even done that?

You know, were they just trying to mess with you or intimidate you because you're by yourself? It's the what-ifs, you know? Well, we're looking, you have to look at it. from the standpoint of those cases and see what I did wrong. First part of being wrong was I was by myself. The second part of being wrong was had a dog with me, which apparently that's not always the best thing. And were you wearing bright colors, right?

There's like the check ones. Yeah, no, by the grace of God, I do not wear bright colors in the woods. And the only positive benefit to this that I had was, before I went into the woods, I remember saying, like, well, if I'm going to spend 49 days out there, and this was when I got my pistols, I mean, it was the first time, because I had, I got there the whole tofu, Asheville yoga thing, and it sold off all my guns at one point, which was stupid. But, so right before I went on this trip, I ordered those pistols, and that was, uh, well, I didn't make my, why didn't, why I didn't, like, I got the, why I wasn't, like, totally back and reloading at that point,

I did make sure to get the most heavy bear round that I could get, which was 180 grains. They make a 200 grain, 367 round, but that was the round that I took out there was the old school Winchester, hollow point 180 grains. It's really hard to find nowadays. Very nice. And so it was kind of like the only saving grace I had was I was armed.

And I don't know if they could smell that like gun oil, or they could smell gunpowder. could, you know, I mean, it was in the middle of rain, but then again, out in their house. Maybe they heard me, pulling the, pulling the, uh, pulling the, uh, pulling the, uh, hammer's back. But it was my godfather that basically told me what happened. And his beliefs, or what he believes happened, I should say, but, uh, came back to the house. Um, I ended up, uh, after they pulled me out of the woods, my best friend came and picked me up. He and I spent three days out there. And we talked about it.

And I said, I saw him again. And he said, well, they didn't get you. You obviously here, and we laughed about it. And we were, he hadn't got a chance. Of course, he'd been staying at my house for the time period because this was the guy whose father had just died. So he was staying up my house trying to unwind up in the mountains and get his head back on because he's just lost his dad. And so he and I are sitting around in campfire just talking and chatting

and stuff like that. And so, well, you know, your godfather wants you to come back over to the house up at his place. And so I ended up getting back in the town, and I drop off my gear off, and I spend that night at home alone for the first time, not home alone, but home in my own bed. So, you know, it's an awesome feeling after you've been out in the woods for that long, and you get back home and you finally sleep on an actual bed.

And so I get up that next day, and I go over to his house, and he and I are just talking. and he finally just said, so tell me about your trip and what happened. So I said, well, I moved my hampside every four days, like I said, I did my fast, I did my clearance, da-da-da-da-da. And then he just said, what else happened? And then I told him, and he said, well, he said,

they took the candy and they took the copper instead of taking years. And they recognized that. And it's a little bit, Adam, I read your blog today. I realize there's a lot of rational stuff that goes into the way you process thoughts. I really appreciate that. Sure. And you kind of have to get into a semi-terarchy Appalachian mystical logic thinking stuff sometimes because if you don't understand where a lot of people are coming from.

And so when he said that to me, I kind of understood that he was more than like. correctly correct. They had taken that as kind of like a substitute sacrifice other than picking my ass. Pardon my only who's picking my butt off and would, in doing whatever they want to with bones, you know. And me being the next, a missing video on Cam Am or something like that. But he, when he said that, it made perfect sense. I mean, I knew, kind of near in the back of my head when I saw it, that that might have been the case, but him saying that really, really brought it home to me that, that for some reason these old Johnson's like copper, and I don't know why. And that's just kind of the way things work.

And they like candy, obviously, because we like candy. But they like sweet stuff, I know that much. And maybe that's what they did instead. You know, they took that and instead of taking meat. Who knows? So that's not to, the thinking wasn't to keep them away with the copper and the jelly ranchers, it was to appease them, basically. That's what he told me. Okay.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, he said they like to suck on the copper and they like the hard candy. Yeah, that's, it's a terrifying encounter. I'm thinking of the rock clacks. And not that it really, I mean, I guess it could tie in somehow. We don't really know, right? But when Wes and Mimi and I were playing the baby cry out at the Browns, and the whoops started, they started it, it was the same thing.

It started in twos, and then it went to threes. It was very rhythmic, and there was just like a method behind the madness, if you will. So not that we know anything about what they're thinking or doing, but that's what it made me think of is your twos and your twos and. into threes and it stayed like that. I'm just thinking of you in the tent. Do you wish at any point that you would have, and I think I know your answer, but are you regretting not popping your head out

or getting out of the tent and saying, get the hell out of here or anything? Well, if you've ever used an Appalachian Rainflow system, the biggest discouragement is that as soon as you come out of the tent, you're not going to be able to stand up. anyway because the rainfly literally is over the vestibule of even the first part of the tent. And then after you come out of there, there's another rainfly up above. So I was already at the disadvantage of coming out anyway.

Not only would I have not seen them, I would have been already having to stoop down as soon as I came out. So tactically, I wasn't going to move because I would have been more exposed and that would have been vulnerable or weak. I agree. It was a good move. I'm not, I'm not questioning your judgment at all. I think I would have, you know, done the same, except give me the diaper kind of a deal. I mean, plus if you, if you poked your head out, they're just going to cloak away anyway and disappear. Right, exactly. Look for them anyway. So that's good move there. Good job, they got. Rainbows and unicorns, right through the forest. That's right. It's nothing but happiness out there in the forest, guys.

Yeah, John and his flute. I know he was laying on it, you know. I just love the vision of you with your, you know, your massive guns laying there. I'm like, at least you had, you know, the weapons. Like you said, maybe they could smell the bullets. You make your own bullets. Maybe they knew, you know, they're like, well, we're going to mess with them, but we probably shouldn't go too close.

Yeah, they, they, you know, back then, for those particular ones, I purchased them, but I was getting back into reloading at that time. But at the same time, I've also heard it said that they can, gunpowder residue stays on even factory bullets, they know from forensics. So they could have very easily smelled them that way, or they could have smelled, I was using ATF fluid as well, which is something else they could have smelled because ATF fluid works really well for guns in a pinch. so they could have smelled that

three in one oil or anything like that because you really have to keep your guns really well oiled when you're in the mountains up here because that I can tell you it's nothing but humidity humidity humidity humidity yeah it literally is rainforest here so I mean it's raining today the last time I checked

you know and it and it will all throughout but yeah no no way I wasn't I wasn't right to just go out there and say hey y'all do Is this a percussion band? Do you want some assistance? Right. Honestly, though, I mean, not to poke fun at all. I just, that's a terrifying encounter.

And I know that you've been, you know, kind of saying, hey, when I'm ready, I'll come on and talk about it. And I just want to say thank you so much for doing that. And before I move on, Adam, do you have any more questions for John pertaining to that story? No, I think I'm good. I think it's so awesome to hear a story again in such detail. I think it's just fantastic and incredibly scary. So thanks for that image as it's like 930 to 9.9 now and I'll be going to that here.

That's wonderful. Wow. You're welcome. If I was anywhere around you guys, or not you, John, but Adam, it would be nice just to tap on some things just around you, you know, while you're trying to sleep, I think. Yeah, it would be super awesome. Thank you. It'd be great. Just because we're friends, you know.

Yeah. Now, moving along, I know that we were talking about regional encounter stories. You know, Johns and the Carolinas. Adam, you're in Tennessee. Adam, did you want to go ahead and share the one that you found interesting? Yeah, for sure. So it's kind of weird because the encounter I found is actually it's maybe 70 miles west of me here. So I'm in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area.

so South Eastern Tennessee. And so there's a, there was a siding encounter case, whatever you want to call it, that I stumbled on. And it is called the Flintville Monster. And I found this one super interesting just because I think most of us probably have listened to, well, I know you have Shannon, and I'm sure everyone has Sasquot and Seth Breedlove and all those guys doing the whole Minerva monster thing. And the thing that I found most fascinating about that, I guess, is the fact. that it wasn't a single encounter, but kind of an ongoing, you know, in Minerva, it was just a single family. But here, the Flintville case is similar. So I found the newspaper article,

actually from the Augusta, Augusta, Georgia Chronicle. And I will, let me read that for you you really quick. I think it's pretty interesting. It says, there's a big foot attacking cars and trying to snatch little children in the Tennessee foothills. Exactly what the Flintville monster is or where it came from remains a mystery, but more than two decades of sightings and terrifying encounters have left many people convinced that the creature is not only real but dangerous as well. More than two decades of sightings and terrifying encounters with a massive hairy monster have left the folk to Flintville, Tennessee, about 70 miles west of Chattanooga,

convinced that the creature is not only real but dangerous. And then it goes into some quotes from some local townspeople. So that thing's so big it can easily hurt somebody. Said a local farmer, who knows how many head of our livestock has gone missing because of it. So far, no one has been hurt by the Flintville monster, which often leaves behind 16-inch footprint and a foul skunk-like odor. But there are those who claim to have had close calls. One man said a seven-foot-tall hearing monster chased him through the woods, howling and screeching at him like an eight. A woman says she hid on the floorboard when a similar creature attacked her car.

And this particular, fast watch or whatever it is, appears to really like to beat people's cars up, which is great. On at least one occasion, a child was nearly kidnapped by a thing with long hairy arm. So all of it started in 1976. It says when a woman told police that a giant hairy monster broke her automobile antenna and then jumped onto the roof of her car and began bouncing up and down. When the woman's story made news, other citizens stepped forth and described similar encounter.

It says several attacks were. reported in the early 1980s, including one by a plumber who said his truck's windshield was smashed by the monster and another by a housewife who said that a black hairy creature chased her inside her house and beat on the door, which is terrifying also. Let's see. Again, in 1989, a church pastor complained that something had destroyed the windshield and antenna on his car, and that same week a group of teens reported a large manlike eight sloping across a field at the edge of town. But with this, probably the scariest story in all of this.

As a mother who related her story is on April 26, 1976. This lady's four-year-old son was out playing in his yard, and his mom heard him scream from in the house. She ran outside, and immediately she smelled like a really nasty odor, and she described it as a smell of a skunk

or dead rat. Then she said she saw a huge ape-like figure bounding across the yard, toward her house, which is just frightening. Seven or eight feet tall, was covered in hair, said it reached out towards the little boy and came with a few inches of him. She was kind of racing at the creature at the same time the creature was racing at her son

and snatched the sun up and ran inside. She kind of, once she collected herself, she looked back outside and kind of saw the creature going back out into the wood. So she immediately called the police. Police came and investigated and they couldn't really find anything, but they investigated it all night. And during the night, though, they heard several howls and screamed. and their general direction of something that they didn't recognize.

They also had rocks thrown at them, which I thought was really interesting as well. A lot of things in this particular encounter are very stereotypical or prototypical fast-watch encounters, screams and the smell and rocks being thrown and things like that. So anyway, these encounters in Flintville happened. I think the last encounter, I believe it says, was in 19... let's see, 1993, maybe. So it was a long time that people were seeing this particular creature, and I actually am going to Flintville, I think, here in about two weeks.

So I'm really excited just to go see. It's like here in southeast and Tennessee, we don't have a lot of Bigfoot sightings, are credible Bigfoot sightings, I should say. There are a lot of people kind of in the mountains that drink things that are illegal now and probably proclaims to see such creatures, and it's not necessarily then. And I'm sure John has experience with those individuals as well.

But they're not a whole lot of credible sightings around here that I would think probably most people would consider credible. But that was close enough, but I think it would be fun to go check out. So I'm going to head out that way here in a couple of weeks. But that was the closest one to home here. Adam, you know what it reminds me of is, and Lyle Blackburn has written a book on this, is the lizard man, the Bishopville Lizard Man, which I think is... And identified, you know, Bigfoot coming out of the swamp and he's all wet and slimy.

So they call him the lizard man. Well, the lizard man really disliked vehicles too. And he would tear up cars and brought that to mind. So that was a cool story that you brought up. Yeah, you know, I think it was, it's funny. I've lived here almost my entire life in different parts of Tennessee. And it never heard that. But apparently it was on a TV show a while back and things like that.

So I thought it was cool. And just the fact that it was not a single encounter, I think it's really interesting to know that that was kind of a habitual type thing that was happening over a period of time. And everyone from a policeman to pastors of churches to kids and just kind of lay people all saw it, I thought that was super interested. Much like the Minerva monster because they also had a, I think it was a sheriff involved in that story. Right. And he was one of the key figures in that. So very cool. John, how about you?

Well, I was going to say Adam's story that he recounted. I had not heard of it until I was looking at a book called Mountain Mysteries by Over Mountain Press. And the guy covered that story. And that was the first time that I had heard that particular Bigfoot encounter. And I did not remember it until Adam brought it up this week when we were talking. And I was like, ah, that's a perfect one. that is an absolutely perfect one. Now, I was going to bring up one that we had that was close to here,

and it's just, it's a classic one. If you go up online and you can look it up, it's called the story of Bojum and Annie, and you literally pronounce that Bojum, it kind of reads like Boosium, but B-O-O-J-U-M, and it was about a Bigfoot-like creature that appeared near the Eagles Nest Hotel up here in the M.

mountains and just right outside of Waynesville. And the guests would actually start to see the creature from time to time. But it had a strange habit. What it would do is it would go through the mountains and it would collect rubies. Adam, you know about this, right? You can find the rubies and stuff in the streams

and stuff like that. Right. And so apparently it would hoard rubies and emeralds and it would bring them back to its cave and it would hide them into mountains. And the story is actually about this Bigfoot-style creature falling in love with a particular woman.

And from what I understand that the way that the storytellers tell it, the creatures would sit at the side of this creek near Eagle's Nest Mountain, and when the women would go and they would bathe from this particular hotel or stop in the woods, they would look up and they would see this hairy-like creature watching. And one particular girl ended up, as American women normally do, ended up falling in love with this thing and going out and living in the mountains with this critter. And eventually, from the way that the story winds down, she, she, they have, apparently

they have children, but at that point, the, the critter starts, the, the creature starts to get more greedy, and the only wants to spend more times hunting emeralds and gyms and may end up breaking up or something like that, and that faded mountain romance in, as that's pretty much what happens. The greed takes over. It's terrible. That's how I lost my Bigfoot lover. Yeah. They always choose those darn mountain gyms first. That's so wrong.

Yeah, I thought that would be a good one to bring up. Yeah, it's a good name. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really cool story. Yeah, well, it makes you wonder about the caves. You know, that's always conjecture when you talk about Bigfoot, especially in the wintertime, where do they go? You know, how?

Do they go into ground? Do they go into caves? And I like hearing those old stories because it kind of, it makes you think about those theories that you might have again. Yeah, I think the other tie-ins, like, not necessarily just 401, but the other stories we've heard from the West Coast with the Shoney Indians. I forget what the name of the tribe is, the south there in the west, but especially heading out there to the summer to Seattle. So I want to spend some, they would sweep into the sites and they would collect the women and the children and eat the children, apparently, whatever with the women. And so I found it kind of odd to find an Appalachian story that a hairy creature watching women as they behave. I thought that was like, wow.

Well, it completely does. And it's very valid to the, I mean, to the old Native American stories we hear because that's a lot. of times all they talked about was, you know, they do what they do with the women and they steal and eat the children that was their MO to a lot of tribes. Exactly. Just kind of like eat the kid. I'm kind of staring into the chat room at the same time, which is a very interesting to do. It is, isn't it?

Yeah. Everybody in chat. Yeah, it's very distracting sometimes. I didn't log in the chat until them later. Yeah, sometimes it distracts a little too much, but we appreciate everybody being in there, that's for sure. Well, I am so thankful that you guys came on with me tonight. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, for sure.

Thank you so much again for having us on. Absolutely. And, John, thank you for sharing your encounters. I know that it's something I wasn't ever bugging you about, but I just said, hey, when you're ready, you know, of course you can, I would love to have you chat with me about it. and I surely appreciate you doing that. You're welcome. I took a couple months. I'm glad we got a chance to do it.

So you're welcome. Absolutely. Thank you. And thank you guys for all your work online too. All right. Well, I'm sure I will talk to you guys soon. Thanks again. Bye-bye.

Well, guys, I just, before I sign off, I do have another announcement to make besides the team going out on a little outing together. And it's something we've been discussing doing, for a while, and that is adding another member to the team. And more specifically, it will involve show notes, at least right off the bat. So starting next week, I will have a more permanent co-host. Some of you already know him from his Bigfoot Ground Zero podcast, my friend, David Hallett. So I am very much looking forward to that, and we have some great content in the works. And as always,

Thank you all for your support on Sasquatch Chronicles.com. And I hope you all have a fantastic week. Being across the country faster than the coronavirus and wagering week is your antidote. I'm Tom Barton and I'm a veteran sports analyst and respected sports handicapper who helped build ESPN's brand. I've been recognized and awarded by Pro Football Weekly and Gaming Today magazine as the honest handicapper. Let the other guys give you the same old boring sports talk with the same tired storylines. We'll give it to you straight here every Friday on Wagering Week. Don't gamble with other podcasts.

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