2 Weeks of LARPing Horror with Sasquatch! (Archives)

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0:43 Welcome to big for Society. If you have Bigfoot activity to report from the same areas discussed in this episode, please reach out to me directly after this episode, and if you'd like to be on the podcast to discuss a personal Bigfoot encounter, please reach out to me directly at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. Do you wish there was more big for Society to listen to every week? Well there is now. If you become a supporting member over at Patreon, you get a special members only episode every single week on Wednesdays, and sometimes even more episodes head on over to Patreon dot com Ford Slash the Big for Society and now let's get on with the show. All right, Big Fort Society. We've got the privilege of talking to mister Randy Hutchings tonight. He is a field investigator based out of Tennessee. And how's it going today, Randy?

1:33 It's going good. How are you today? Doing good? Up here in central Iowa. It's starting to get cold up here though. We're getting down to the thirties and the twenties. Fingers crossed that it doesn't get too cold this winter, but we're still having a good time. How about you guys down there. It's getting really chilly this weekend. Actually, does it get really cold down in Tennessee. It depends because you get the foothills to the Appalachians and then you've got the actual appellation and so like parts of them, maybe it's as cold as parts of Michigan do. But down in the hot some of the hollows, some of the basin like around Nashville, not so bad really, but it's very mild by comparison.

2:13 Okay, Randy, you're a field investigator that a lot of people may not have heard of you before, because, as we had talked before the interview, you stay off to the side a litt bit. You're not really on the internet a lot. You're not out in the spotlight. But I was looking into was the wild Man Conference, and I noticed your name and I was like, man, that sounds that's a name I haven't heard before. And I think actually you had contacted me as well on Facebook Messenger. I was like, this is really interesting. I had talked to this guy and we had a little bit of a back and forth. Some things happened, but we finally got on. And how did the Wildman Conference go?

2:58 Randy really well for our first year, went smooth. The presenters and the guests seem to have had a really good time. All the attendance that we got to talk to, so they had a really good time. They really loved the lineup that we had, but a very eclectic lineup from one end of the bigfoot spectrum to the other, given a very very broad view overview on the subject. But it was awesome. I heard great things about it. I talked to a few people that actually went and they said it was a great time. And of course you had all the great guys and gast from down there. You had, I know, help and holler guys and Joe and Jesse, and I think Martin Grose is there. And you think Martin was there all those guys, and I don't want to leave anyone out, but it looks like they always have a good time. And yeah, you had some solid lineup. So I hope is that a thing that's going to happen again, you think, Randy.

3:54 We're actually planning the second one right now as we speak. Awesome, oh man, that is great. Happened in a interesting area that we're going to we'll get in into later in the show. Montgomery Montgomery Bell State Park. Correct, yep, we'll chat about that a little bit later. But I would love to start out by how is it that you got into all this this bigfoot action to begin with, Randy Beck? That have been like May twenty third, nineteen ninety seven, my cousin and myself were trekking up to an old abandoned rock quarry. It's about three or four miles outside of the town I live in, and it's about an hour's trick from where you park to actually get it to where this old abandoned rock Cory is and there's a box canyon there with a big lake, And we got up there to this box canyon and had stuck our feet in the water, just decided we're just going to chill out for a couple hours here on this lake, soak up the sun. It's late May, late spring. We weren't there more than five, maybe ten minutes the most, and something atop one of the bluffs off to our right starts vocalizing at us. And the only way I can describe the vocalization that was coming off this thing was as if you would put a hawl or monkey and combined it with a raging bull and a more

5:26 kind of sound. And so we both, my cousin and I both look at one another and honestly thinking someone's up there just messing with us. We start making the sounds back and thinking that maybe a hunter's come off the ridge there. He's trying to have a go at us for whatever reason. And it goes quiet. It goes quite about a minute. We figure whoever it was, they had their fun, and right about the time that we're about to discount all this, a boulder about a bit get run as my torso three hundred pounds at least comes flying off of that cliff side. And when I say flying, I don't mean as if like I've had people tell me or you shouldn't roll off the cliff.

6:14 And it had momentum. It went flying, zooming off this cliff a good twenty twenty five feet and splashing down in the water right in front of us, which got our attention. And the first thing my cousin says to me is he looks over at me and his eyes are just huge, and he's you'd have to have thumbs to do that. And I'm like, yeah, I think he would. And we're sitting there perplexed as to what just occurred. Maybe a minute, two minutes goes by and the vocalization starts back up again. It's more and I have no idea what that means, what those vocalizations really mean, but the message that it felt like was you need to leave.

6:59 You're not welcome here. So that's all we did. We ended up leaving, okay, even though we tricked over over an hour to get up there. We left. And having grown up here in Tennessee and the sticks, I've been in a wildlife my whole life, I've heard everything in the woods. I know what animals sound like out in the woods. I've never heard this sound before. A lot of my relatives are hunters, so me and my cousin went to them initially and were just like, what in the world could this be? And most of them were discounting it. One of them said, oh, it was probably a cow that got loose. How did he throw a boulder? He said, I don't know how you did that, but giving us all these discounted bs explanations, And finally I went online and found a vocalization on the BFROL website, and I don't remember which vocalization it was, but it sounded similar to what we heard, and so I contacted the BFRO and they got a researcher to get in touch with me, and I told them everything that happened.

8:04 They explained that yet that's classical rock throwing behavior when they want you to leave an area. And it was through that I got initially invited to be a BFRO investigator for a little while. But it was while I was doing the thing for the BFRO for about four months, I met the Tennessee bigfoot lady, Mary Green. Have you ever heard of her, and yeah, Mary Green was working at the time for the GC Bureau, which is the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research organization, and it turned out that she only lived about forty five minutes up the road from me, so she invited me to come up there and visit her. Went up there and visit her, and she basically was what got me into the bigfoot thing really, and she was like, we need more people out there doing this. They know about these things, that are willing to go out there and be where they know they are.

9:00 And yeah, she got me into the gcbro back in nineteen ninety seven, followed nineteen ninety seven, and I've been doing it. I did it for them for years. I've done it on the side for groups like the Blue and Gray. I was part of the founding member of the Sasquat's Research Initiative back in the day. So I've done research field investigations for several groups here and there's along with just a whole bunch just for myself, especially just in. My Schall encounter happened Randy twenty three, Wow, that's awesome. When you went up to chat with Mary Green, any interesting things happen when you're up there.

9:45 Just the stories that she had should been there, done that by the time I even came along, should been there, done that. So hearing all that kind of and it was interesting. There was a lot of political stuff between all these groups, especially back in those days, and so the BFRO didn't like anybody talking to her and she didn't like it if you were a member of the BFRO. And so it was just a whole bunch of hull of balloo yep. Something I've always tried to stay out of is all the drama. But she knew her stuff, and she told me, she's like, go out in these areas, look for this, look for that. And she's like, if you find this and that, stay in those areas and then start looking for this and looking for that. And just like she said, we started going out of the areas.

10:34 One thing we started looking for with seep springs. She told us to look for seep springs. Seep springs are like where there's springs, it's just the water seeping up out of the ground. Oh sure, And she said those things are crucial, and the reason being they're there almost year round. Seep springs are so even during the worst parts of the year. Animals know that stuff's there, they'll come, they'll get water from it. They're going to be watching for the animals are coming there to get water from it. We use that mentality that she actually told us and found two of our active areas that we still have to this day. Wow. So seep spring is one of the big things that you look for. Are there any other big things that you're looking for when you're you're trying to narrow down maybe a new area, or if.

11:21 We're trying to narrow down a new area, it's trying to find if there's been any generational activity attributed to the area as people for years, has it been going back years? Has people have been seeing things? Have people been hearing things? One thing we especially down here in the South, it looked for haunted forests, like places where people say that the woods they are haunted. Why why are they haunted? And when you actually start talking to these people is why they're haunted. You'll hear these women, these dead women screaming in the woods, the ghosts of these women screaming, and it's oh, okay, yeah, that's what you're hearing, is it? So we're in it's brilliant, so that after that then you you got into the bigfoot game. Pretty wild, is what it sounds like. You were into all sorts of groups.

12:08 You were, you're helping out, you're investigating. Were there any other interesting things that you remember over the years maybe did you ever get any closer to any of the creatures. Or I did have I've had personal sightings my first siding. I've had four sightings thus far, all surprisingly, all of them within about one hundred and fifty acres of each other. Wow. I don't know how to explain that. I have theories, and I've had people tell me theories that a lot of it being that the family in that area are relaxed with me and things like that as to why they all happened in the same little area there. But my first starting happened in August twelfth to twenty eleven, and throughout the two thousands, I had a live event venue business that I ran using state park specifically group campsites in state parks that you can rent, and what we would do is we would basically if you've ever been to a renaissance festival or renfair, we basically did that on a smaller scale using group campsites, so we would have like vendors come in from out of state and they would all set up as merchants in these cabins, and we would have people that would come from all over the place, and then they would dress up the parts of nobles and nights and the L's and all this crazy stuff and spend the weekend basically just socializing and buying medieval kind of attire and stuff like that.

13:39 And we would have a jousting events stuff like that, Like I said, a miniature Renaissance festival. But the other two thousands, I rented a lot of these state parks for these events that we were having. And it was during one of these events that I had my first sighting and I was not my mind was the furthest away from Bigfoot. At the time, I was in the middle of running this event, and it was about one o'clock in the morning, and we had had a three hour field battle where people basically use these latex weapons and just wall up on each other, just go brave heart on one another and done this for three hours and everyone's walk going their own little ways now, and one of my staff members is I'm going to run down here to the river. There's a river about a quarter mile off site. Down and down the path and have some smoke and I'm gonna go to bed, and we got to get up and do this all day again tomorrow. This is like a this is a two week long event we're running. This is on day five of this event. And so I'm like, I walk down there with you. So we start to walk down there.

14:49 We'll be back with more Bigfoot Society after these words from our sponsors. And as we're passing the last cabin what's called C section of this site, we hear this snap crack off to the right hand side of us, and I think it's one of our one of our staff members coming to join us. And turn around and there is what I can only describe man as a seven foot hairy thing that is in the process of walking parallel to us. We both stop and that the guy I'm with, he's six foot five. He's a big dude. I'm six foot four.

15:31 I'm a big guy. We turn to look at this thing and it takes a couple of steps in this high grass on the side of the woods, stops, turns the hole top half of itself to look at us and stay just stares at us. And I don't know how to explain this other than if you've been a big guy all your life, there's this level of I don't know, intimidation that you have around other guy, other people, right, smaller guy, smaller people, And that was what this thing was projecting towards us. There was absolutely no fear from this thing's body language. The confidence it was insane. It was just like, we're not even threats. And it turned its half and just walked right into the woods. And it had ruddy red hair like you would see on a really a bucking heat, but ruddy red hair. But you could see the musculature under its hair. It was hair, it wasn't fir. You could make out muscle definition. Even though it was one o'clock at night. We were about thirty yards from it, there was enough light coming from the moon that you could still make out muscle definition under this thing. Yeah, it turned walked into the woods and we both started screaming, like just instinctually screaming like girls.

17:01 And I don't know how to explain it other than just just fear, just straight up. Our brains were scrambled, but we started screaming and running. We started running back towards the tavern area, and a bunch of people come running over to us because they heard us screaming, and we're asking us what was going on, and we're like, we don't We're not exactly sure. We didn't want to start throwing that on them, but yeah, that was the first time that we had we had a siding, I had a siding. Do you mind if I ask a few questions? And so that is an amazing encounter. The best thing I love about it is that you weren't out looking for Bigfoot. You're no, it sounds like you're doing some sort of like renaissance LARPing event. Is that right where.

17:46 That's exactly what we ling exactly? Yes? No way, you saw Bigfoot during a two week LARPing event, Yes, sir, I did. Was it themed a certain way? Just high fantasy? That's amazing sys high fantasy LARPing. And then like Bigfoot is like, what is going on with all these people in the woods with these amazing weapons, and he's probably freaking out. This is awesome. Oh man. That's honestly one of the things I think that I've actually come to think is that may be why they were in the area, is because we were entertainment. Oh? Absolutely, did you get a good did you get a look at the bigfoot's face at all?

18:27 During I did not get a good look at the face at the face. I don't know why I'm not because, like I said, I could you could make out musculature underneath the hair in the moonlight, but I didn't. I don't know if it was the distance or just the darkness of the face or what it was. But when it turned to look like you could feel the heaviness of that things looking at us. Oh, it was a feeling I haven't I haven't had before. Would you say it was it was a male individual? It struck me is that? Yes? And one thing about it too was it was very I've told people, excuse me, I've told people. It reminded me more. It had a lot of muscle on it, But it reminded me as if you take an NBA player and then you wrapped that muscle on top of an NBA player, Like it was more lean than it was just brick house.

19:24 Yeah, so lean, but very muscular, as like a got it. Okay, that's really interesting. Remind me so how far away again from you guys were off a little bit away from like the tavern and things like that. Yeah, we were at the very last cabin before you get on the trail to go to that little river area. Okay, wow, Oh that's awesome. And from where it was walking too, Like, I've thought about this a lot, because I've let I've had my kids like that slept in that cabin, the last cabin on the other side, and from the direction he was walking, I am convinced he was walking from behind that cabin where he was peeking in that cabin. The thing I don't get to this day is that he doesn't that he could have easily just turned taken a step into the woods because that cabin is so close to the woodline, and yet he decided to walk parallel and let us hear him. I don't understand that at all.

20:24 The next day, were you able to go and double check for tracks or any evidence here? Okay, we did. Some of my staff members. We had a staff meeting and we talked about what had happened. We're like, look, you don't have to believe us, but it was me and here's my staff member that was with it with us. Klindo's his name, and basically because Klindo actually teared up when he was talking about it. The big one of the guys was a big skeptic, was like, I believe you guys saw something because he's I've never seen that big man cry before. But the next morning some of the staff members ran out there to that to where we saw it. We told them more we saw it, and we got we walked out there and as we were walking out there, one of them was wide as a ghost because hey, there was a big, like seventeen and a half inch print just perfect in the grass. And he was just like, and you're sure you guys didn't put this out here. We're like, no, man, we didn't. Wow.

21:23 And so you're trying to run a LARPing event and you've got all this evidence going on, so you're like, I can't really like probably just stop everything and start casting this tract because I've got to keep stuff going on. Oh man, Again, I wasn't. I would. This was the last even though I didn't failed investigating since the nineties, this was the last thing on my mind. I was there to do a job and to direct this event, make sure everything went off without a hitch. So I'm going to play a devil's advocate for a second. Did you run through the thinking of maybe it's one of the people here for the LARPing event that had some kind of like costom or something. Did that come through your mind for a few seconds?

22:13 Or I've had people ask me that, they're like, are you sure it wasn't somebody in a costume? But like it was. You could see it. You could just see it was a real thing. Gotcha man, that's wild? Oh man? And that happened in Tennessee. Yes, okay, Van Buren County, Tennessee. Okay, gotcha man. That's why did you do research to see if any other sightings have also happened in that area? Beforehand? Et cetera. We had spoke to the game warden guy, the wildlife management officer that's over the place, and he was actually telling he had actually shared like, oh yeah, we've had a couple of people come in over the years and tell us to tell us this bigfoot story, that bigfoot story, and they're like whether or not it's real or not, But we started sharing stuff with them.

23:07 Did that when that happened? We shared that with them when other things happened, because again, like I said, all the other siddings I've had have happened in about one hundred and fifty acres of that area. Oh this is man, so here's the same. So people are always I'm gonna get flag for this, but I don't care. People are always like Pacific Northwest. But dude, from doing five years of interviews Tennessee, the crazy stuff I've ever heard is coming out of Tennessee. Dude, in Kentucky like it is wild, especially Tennessee East Tennessee. Oh my goodness, even for a good time. Yeah. Yeah, some of these woods up here are are virgin timber.

23:48 They've never been logged. People's there may have been some people that come through them two hundred years ago when the pioneers were coming through here, but nobody goes through them nowadays. Lot of the hunters don't even go through these areas anymore. So that was okay. So did anything anything else happen during that two week span or everyone's just really got foot? We found out, actually, but we found out years later that because again that was in twenty eleven. We found out years later after people started finding out about what had happened at the event, there was people that are like, let me tell you what happened when I did this? Oh no, there was an incense where there was a couple, a married couple that came out of their cabin. One of them was walking to the bathroom one of the bathhouses and said that a tree this is where she put it. This tree starts dancing just like this, starts shaking like this, and I'm like, so, what did you do?

24:44 And she goes I turned around and walked right back into my cabin and I'm like, why didn't you say something to somebody? She's like, what am I supposed to say to somebody that I'll go, I'm going to the bathroom and a tree starts dancing. She's I didn't see what was making it do that. But another girl got on. I think it was day eleven. We were up there. She stopped going to c section because something growled at her when she went near a bath house. Granted we don't know what it was the growled at her, but something growled at her and it scared her so badly she refused to go back to that section anymore. And then a filmmaking buddy of mine. Josh Manning, he was actually getting up back then and going to the Art Institute of Nashville for his college stuff every morning, and he mentioned that he's I thought it was maybe you guys signaling that people were awake. But he said, I would get up out of my cabin and as I'm going to the bathroom every morning at about five point thirty in the morning, back behind ace what's called a section of the campsite, he said, you would hear two knocks.

25:56 Oh. And he said that I thought it was you guys signaling to each other that all that I'm awake, And I'm like, no, man, we were already in bed. We were asleep by that point. So we had wood knocks, we had stuff being shaken at people, all this stuff that we had no idea all that stuff was going on at the same time. Oh. And then we found out later on too, from a player that there was a player that said he came out of one of the cabins one time and he said that there was a giant man. The way he put it was up under the awning of one of the cabins, and he said he could just see him in silhouette. But he said, this guy was huge, and he said that I just stood there thinking it was one of us, so that we're going to attack him or something. And he said, this thing's just frozen. It doesn't move. And he said finally I ended up walking off and I'm like okay, and he said it never moved, he just stood there, so he was gone. So there's all this potential other stuff that's happened around the same campsite.

26:57 This is my new favorite bigfoot Like this is literally my new favorite one, Randy, because it's like you have all these people that are not bigfoot people but like experiencing difference. It is so cool, man, I love it. Wow. Have you ever gone back and researched that area again? Oh yes, yeah, yeah, heavily. That's actually where our main research area now, oh yeah, and that's where I've had my my other three sottings was in that same area, not the same that the campsite, but down a trail farther into the woods, but in that area of the area. Oh man, so I was twenty eleven. Was it stuff like off the bat or a few years later that you experienced other things in that area?

27:42 Or yeah? Well okay, so I didn't go looking for anything right off the bat. I told myself that I had rented this place so many times and run so many events out of this place that this had to be like a fluke. This had to be like it just was coming, it was on its way through or something. There's no way it lived here. But after I talked to it, like I said, I talked to the game warden guy, and he started talking about, oh yeah, this they told us about this, and some kids said that Bigfoot destroyed their fort and all this crazy stuff. We actually were going to do an event, and we decided there was this one trail that we'd never used before that's just over the little river area that we were going down through that night, and so we were going to go up this trail. And as I was going down this trail, I just goofully started knocking on trees.

28:37 And we walk almost a mile down this trail, and I'm knocking on trees like every quarter mile or so, and finally I go I knock, and about forty fifty yards this seems like in the woodline. There's a response, and me and the guy I'm with both kind of freeze and go to turn and as we're turning on the opposite side of us from the where we heard the wood knocks, there was what I can only describe is what sounded like an exasperated sound, like the sound of like that. I have no idea what that sound came out of, but it sounded like a big a really big guy just and I've wondered ever since if maybe it was I don't know, it was like, oh God, you gave us away or something like that. I don't know, But so we left. We got spooked by the wooden knocks.

29:37 We left, which we kept coming back, kept wood knocking. They kept wood knocking back at us. I've got a whole bunch of wood knocking videos on my YouTube. We'll be back with more Bigfoot Society after these words from our sponsors. But the second siding I had was on December the tenth of twenty fifteen, and me and another guy named Trevor had trekked back and there was a really large tree that had fallen over and he's like, hey, do you see that? And this is at a pretty good distance though, mind you, and I'm like, what are you talking about? So he like comes over and literally gets my face like right there, and there was something behind this big tree and you could see what looked like the head and a hump, and its arm was draped over the tree. And we watched as this thing's arm just does this and goes over the tree and he just disappears. And it was about probably fifty yards by the way we saw this, and that was about enough that we wanted that day, so we got out of the woods. The third siding I had was on June the eighth of twenty sixteen, and that that's the one that changed everything. That's one I think we talked about a little bit before when we were back and forth.

31:07 That one was I had trecked way back up into this area. I had something approached me earlier that day at a close range and spooked me to begin with. And as I'm trekking through some mountain Laurel, really thick mountain Laurel, I'm having to push it aside, take a step, push it aside, take a step. And as I'm doing that, I pushed some aside and about maybe twenty feet from me, there was a big root ball that is at this angle over here, and immediately I see this hole that's in the bottom like quarter of this root ball. And it's June. This is on June the eighth, So June's when coyoties have pups. And so I knew that, and they love to make dens and stuff like that. And I just because I say it's a hole, because you know how like a hole has depth when you look at it, the darkness. That's what this thing looks like.

32:09 And as I'm staring at this hole like figuring and I'm about to get tore up by coyotes, it moves and it's not a hole at all, and it's like this when it moves. The only way I can describe the thing that it did was if you've ever had a kid, like put a kid in time out on a couch, how like a kid will push themselves up against the couch like they don't want to be there and do this. That's what this thing was doing. And I don't know to this day why I couldn't see it for what it was. I don't know if it was like I've had. Ron Moorhead actually told me at the conference just a couple of weeks ago, he's maybe you did know what you were looking at and your brain was just like, n uh. I don't know what it was, but I did. When it moved into that position, it gave itself away and I could see what it was, and it was a child, and it was a black haired, dark skinned child. It was not an ape. It did not look like a gibbon or a chimpanzee. It looked like a kid. And the fact that it was looking like it was trying to hide and afraid just elicited something in me. I've got four kids of my own, and so I tear through this mountain Laurel. After this, after I realized what I'm looking at, drive all the

33:39 way home. It's a forty minute drive to my house from where this area is. I get home, I basically have convinced myself on the drive home that I'm not going to tell anybody that I even had deciding, because who's going to believe I saw a little feral kid. And as soon as I walk in the door, my wife is, honey, what's wrong? And I'm like, what do you mean, what's wrong? And she's I can tell something's wrong. You look tense. She could just tell automatically, and so I took her into the side room and we sat down and I started telling her and I just broke down and started crying. And I don't know. I'm not a I'm not a crime top, but it was that's changed me. My wife like literally told said to me.

34:25 She said, honey, what did you think was going to happen if you kept doing this? And I'm like, I thought that I might see something peek out from behind a tree at me something like that. I didn't think I was going to see what's tantamount to a scared kid, but that's what I saw. So after that, I didn't go up there for about eight days after that because it had spooped me so badly and it messed with me too, man, Like I there was a part of me that was literally like I need to call someone, like I need to someone needs to know that there is a there's a hairy kid out in the wood. That sounds crazy, but that's how much it affected me.

35:08 Like I lost sleep over this. So when I finally ended up going back back up there, it changed my entire approach. Like I was going up there with this kind of I'm looking for a big bipedal epe and I'm not sure what it is that we're looking for now. To be honest, it's still to this day, I'm still trying to figure out what you're looking for. It sounds like, yeah, yeah, I imagine you see something like that and you can easily. You hear these stories about how people have what they think the creatures in their sights and they're like, I couldn't pull the trigger because it was just too real.

35:53 There was a human like quality to what I was seeing and I couldn't do it. And after hearing story like that, is I totally get it? That's wild. Yeah, and you're saying all this within the same one hundred and fifty roughly. Wow area, Yes, WHOA And I've again i'd why. And I had a researcher friend of mine, really well known when I'm not going to name drop him, but basically he told me that he's they know you, and I'm like, what do you mean, And he's you've been running those events there for years, for years. They've seen you there.

36:35 They see that everyone listens to you because you're the one directing events. They see that you're the one that everyone's coming to. You're the one everyone's talking to at some point at these events, and that they and they know me, And he was alluding to like they were introducing themselves almost or letting me know. That's that that that's really messed with me with the juvenile too. Is it like a I got approached earlier that day, like by something, They got really close. I've got video of that where you can actually hear it walking through the woods towards me. But I've questioned, like, why did that thing even let me see it like that? It could have scurried around the edge of that root ball. I would have never known it was there. And He's they wanted you to see it, like they almost like they wanted you to know they had a family up there.

37:29 And that's the way it's changed. It definitely has changed me that regard, Like when I go up there, it's now I'm dealing with a family. I respect it like that. Now. I can't tell you what they are, but I can tell you they're they're they're enough like us that it's Franklin. It's disturbing. But man, that just hearing that, Yeah, it affects you. Randy, Wow, I can't imagine going through what you went through. Yeah, as you said, you've got kids. I have a kid as well, and I think, yeah, that would really make me approach the whole subject a totally different way, totally different way. Ye oh man, And you're are still going to that area even to this day.

38:22 Oh yeah, yeah, we still go up there. We do. We leave them fruit sometimes we've had we What's interesting with the game warden in that area, there's an area where they when one of the trails near this area, they've actually shut down the park has They don't even they don't even let anybody go down the park the trail anymore. And I asked them all, why did you just abandon the trail and they're like, we just got tired of going out there having to chainsaw all the logs up from the trees that were falling on the trail. And that trail is one of the trails we used to get back to our area, and they've just given up on it because they they said that they basically chainsaw the logs up. Very next day some about howker would be like it there's more trees down and they go out there and the trees will be ten foot from where the other trees were.

39:16 Wow, They're like, yeah, we don't want any more humans going near our area. So we're just gonna put trees all over the place, over the trails. That's crazy, man. Yeah, that game war and has seen some man talking to you. Yeah, they know more than they let on to you. Oh totally so much. Wow is man? That is Wold, Tennessee. Is just this story after story man, of this stuff going on in that state. For sure. It's interesting what your wife said too. I've heard that come up a few times, which is it's like, what do you think what's gonna.

39:59 I didn't think the that's what was going to happen. I didn't. Yeah, that's yeah. Do you have any Maybe you can't answer this, but have you considered any type of like long term field recorder putting one out there, Yeah, to see if you can capture audio over and. Oh yeah we've done that before. Oh yeah, we've got We caught audio of something approaching the thing forty five minutes after we stick it out there. Oh wow, man, that's that is wild. Thank you, Thank you for sharing all that, man. I'm that's going to take me a while to process all of that. I also wanted to chat with you a bit about I was reading through your messages and you had mentioned were Wolf Springs, and I've heard other people mention this too, and so it's primarily a big foot podcast, but other stuff is starting. I'm starting to branch into other things, like some dog man things and et cetera. And this is going to be fun because I was looking into Werewolf Springs a little bit and I was like, Montgomery Bell State Park, why does that sound familiar? And we finally get to connect two of my favorite things, cryptids and a certain nineteen eighties movie that is near and dear to my heart from my childhood. And maybe you get what I'm talking about, but I'll tell you in a bit. But can you share a little bit about

41:29 what's going on with Werewolf Springs. I saw that your conference. You were thinking about maybe taking people out there to check it out. But it sounds like it's got quite the history of some interesting things happening. Oh yeah it does. Yeah. We were actually going to take some people out and the park put up a gate. They didn't want a bunch of bigfoot free coos going out there and messing with the spring. It was pretty hilarious. Hill Bit Holler was going to go out there and do it, do a whole thing we got denied. But the story of the Werewell Spring goes back to the eighteen sixties, and the whole premise of the story is that there's two kind of two stories. There's one where it's two brothers. There's another where it's a man in one of his workers for his farm. But either way, they were going to two brothers. One for instance, they went to the cemetery hall what's called Hall Cemetery, and there's a spring about a quarter mile from Hall Cemetery called Hall's Spring. They walked up to Hall Spring to get something to drink before going back to the town, which at the time the whole area was called Bluff's I'm sorry, was called Burns Station. It's not just Burns, Tennessee.

42:43 But they went to go with some water, and as they were getting water, according to the story, one of them noticed basically this large hairy man monster thing on the other side of the spring staring at them in the woods. And they both went running and one of the brothers got caught, captured and killed and the other brother didn't. And in that story, that brother made it back to Burns Station told the people what had happened, and there was actually documented stuff in a newspaper from back in those days where they took a posse out there to haul Spring and they even staked a goat up out there at Hall Spring trying to capture whatever this thing was, and that story has turned into basically that's what. That's the seed of the Werewolf of Montgomery Bells and Werewolf Springs. That's how it gets its name.

43:33 And that whole area up there's got Whitehall is the little town next to Burns and Whitehall has the Whitehall Screamer, the Whitehall Howler, Hall Whistler. That whole area has like names for a lot of the cryptids in that area. Oh wow, So there's a lot going on. Is that the white Hall stuff? Is that like a dog man or a bigfoot type deal, or it could be a mixture, or it. Could be both, honestly, but most of them. I think that the community down there's embraced the dog man thing the last couple of years. So that's really where, especially with were Wolf Springs, the park is really embracing that.

44:14 So I think that more and more over the years, as you you'll come and see that that that whole anything in the Whitehall area Montgomery Bell will be dog Man werewolf related. Okay, guys, so where people can actually they can go to this park and they have like dog man stuff or. They've got it. They have a When we were having the call, they actually put on and we didn't even know they had it. They on the screens there in the park a lobby, they were playing the legend of Werewolf Springs. We'll be back with more Bigfoot Society after these words from our sponsors. And it's like a it was a little movie that apparently the park made back like in the nineties. Oh yeah, So they were playing it for us and along with the con there, it's pretty nat that's awesome.

45:06 Okay, So here's I'll let you know. This is my fun fact about Montgomery Bell. So there's a store. There's a movie that I love from the nineteen eighties called Ernest Goes to Camp. Yeah, Ernest Goes to Campus filmed in Montgomery Bell State Park. Because I've watched YouTube videos about so the cabins are all up that are in the movie, and like you can go supposedly to that park and you can see all the cabins out in the film. And I'm an Ernest fan outside of big I like Ernest stuff. So eventually, like I was, it was already my bucket list, Like I'm going to go to the state park and see where Ernest Goes to Camp was filmed. And then I find out like it's a total cryptid hotspot. I'm like, this is amazing. This is the best news I've ever heard.

45:50 Yep, I've actually run Evince out of that campsite. Really, it's a pretty beautiful. It's a beautiful camp side. It's beautiful. Yeah. Are they Ernest? Are they earned events? No, they weren't Arnest events. That's too bad. I hear they have an Earnest Day every year. Oh yeah, they celebrate Ernest goes to Camp and they watched the film and like Ernest goes to Camp things, And my listenership is slowly being like and I don't like Ernest goes the camp. Guys, I love the camp. So you're gonna have to deal with it. But so you're super into two big for and you're focusing on this one area. Are there other areas of the state that you've also been involved with your research or you're focusing just mainly on Van Buren County?

46:37 Oh? No, Warren County, Van Buren County, Watt County, Grundee County, Sequatchee County. Most of those counties we yeah run around in. We found four other hotspots active research areas in about a forty five mile kind of area near where that the one is with the camp stop and the area of the Cumberland Plateau is really my main area that did we research and investigate. There's an area called Highway eight. People might Tennesseeans will know what it's hair as Oh what is it called? Okay, I mean I just forgot its name. Hey, that's all right, keep it safe, man, just completely gone, That's all right. But Highway eight up on the Cumbland Plateau. We've spoken to over a dozen families in a in about a six mile area that have all we were pretty sure he's sharing the same Bigfoot.

47:36 And the reason that we think it's they're sharing the same one is they've described when they talked about seeing him, they've described the same individual a couple of the different There's been three houses where he's window peaked. And what's wild is the people have described that he's got the same gray swath of hair on the front of his head. Yeah, and hearing these people talk about this stuff completely they have no idea about the other people experiencing this stuff. And then one of them talking about, yeah, you had a gentlemanly swath of gray on his forehead, and we're like, what do you mean gentlemanly? And he was like, you know how you get a swath just right there? It's pretty wild? Wow, Well that's that is wild?

48:18 Is there named Atticus? I love it? People in that area. That's a jit man. I love that. That's a great name. Have you looked into, like how the that area is set up? Do you think there's anything about the the topography or the climate to the area that. I do A lot of the houses that have actually had had Atticus messing with them. If you actually go off the if you look at the top of the plateau, it's basically he's just hugging the very top of the plateau. He's just walking the plateau and all of these houses where you've got these dips in the plateau and the topography.

49:00 He's going in and hitting all these houses along just the edges of this plateau and the way the roads go cut across the area. There's about four or five different roads that cut off the main highway of Highway eight. And so what you have is you have all these kind of black islands of roads where these people on these roads. Some of these people on the roads may know that stuff's going on, but they're only talking to their neighbors. And then a road down they're having the exact same stuff go on, but they don't know because they're just talking. They're not talking to their neighbors either. And it's hilarious. Oh that's hilarious, but also freaky. Man. You think about it, like they could be experiencing bigfoot stuff for years and have no idea their neighbors are being messed with. I guess it's just goes to show you know who your neighbors are and maybe you talk to them a little bit. Man.

49:52 Oh dude, that's wild. We had two girls up there that actually that saw one and broad daylight laying on a boulder. I said that it was looking at with the sun sun was down on it, so it looked like a giant orangutang almost, And when we were talking to them, we're like, have you talked to your neighbors? And they're like, oh, our neighbors are old, they don't ever go outside, they wouldn't know about any of this stuff happening. And we had already talked to their neighbors, and one of their neighbors knew this stuff was going on. And so it's just in rural communities. If you're having big foot activity, talk to your neighbor. You may be surprised just how much you guys are sharing.

50:34 Absolutely, have you ever let's see, and I'm not being from Iowa, I'm not like the best with Tennessee geography, sorry about that, but have you ever gone far into the far eastern side of the state? And yeah, ok, yeah, because like I talked to some people and they're like, it seems like the further east you get in Tennessee, like there's some kind of weird stuff that goes on over there. Do you think there's any truth to that or is it? You're like, it's all over the place in Tennessee.

51:15 There's Narry and he's really East Tennessee that I've been to several times called Delamo, and the largest bigfoot siding that I've ever had reported in me happened there right next to a Christmas tree farm. And dude swears up and down if this thing was twelve feet tall. The only reason I would I granted that he could judge hot was because for a living, he was one of those guys that goes out and works on poles, electric lines and all that. And he actually told me he's and I know how much twelve foot is because electric pole blah blah blah is fifteen feet from the ground to the blaw. And I think that I really wonder if they don't get bigger the farther east you go.

51:56 The stories that I've been told Larry that I live in we have over fifteen thousand caves in just about a four county region. So in a way, I kind of wonder if sometimes when people in this area report them as being leaner, if that's because of the like an adaptation actually to the caves that we have. That seems to be a recurring theme that has been coming up in the last few years, is that maybe there's a correlation between there's that graphic that keeps going around where it's I think it's like they overlay bigfoot sightings over like the cave systems in the US. It's a really interesting thing to think about. I don't know I could be.

52:42 Oh yeah, it's definitely a lot of shelter. Man. You are a total wealth of information, Randy. Have you ever gone out of state to investigate as any anywhere or is it primarily Tennessee? I have. I've been out of state to northwest to Louisiana a couple of times. That's the only place I've actually went out of state to go look for this stuff. Though. Okay, gotcha anything weird happened down in Louisiana. I got some good vocalizations, gotcha. Man, I gotta get down to Tennessee for sure. I just got it. That'd be funny. Did you get down here? Come to Montgomery Belle Man, I'll meet you down there and we can, Dude, I'll show you were Wolf Springs and we can go check out Ernest.

53:26 The camp and wear all springs. That's the ultimate combination. Randy. This has been a extremely fun chat and chatting with you, and I'm sure you'll have I'm sure there's gonna be stuff in the future as well. But I know you're a guy that you keeped your You're not really out there a lot, but are there ways? I'm sure there's gonna be people that hear this episode, and I just got a feeling they're going to be like, I gotta contact this dude. Are there ways that people can contact you if they've been having is shue you things happen in the same areas that you were talking about, the same counties, et cetera.

54:07 Sure. Sure, they can get hold of me on Facebook, they can get hold in, I can put my I can share my email if I don't know if I need to spell it out, or tennis squatch at Gmail, which is T E N E s qu A T C h at gmail dot com. Perfect. Yeah, I'm more. I'm We've got a team of six individuals in the town that I live in that go out and if we need to do field investigations and all that are cool. And you have a YouTube channel as well, people can. Follow I do, but I don't know, I don't have it off hand. Okay, well I'll put it in the link. It's forty forty in Tennessee, gotcha. And you have videos and stuff from different different times you've been out researching, so definitely people want to subscribe and follow to that. But Randy, any closing thoughts before we head out for the night.

55:08 Ah non I can think of man, I appreciate you, appreciate the opportunity. How can people lastly, how can people keep up to date with what's going on with the Tennessee Wildman Conference. Oh, easiest way to do that is just keep track of Tennesseewildman dot org. That's our website. We'll be changing it up. We'll have any kind of updates on there. Awesome, Oh Randy, such fun chat. Thank you so much for coming on tonight, and we'll definitely be in touch in the future. Please take a minute to help out the show by subscribing on YouTube, making sure you hit the bell so you don't miss any notifications, and share the episode on YouTube with a friend. Also, if you're listening to us on a podcast, thank you so much, make sure that you're subscribed, share the show with a friend. Really, it's all about sharing the show wherever you can. If you've had a Bigfoot encounter related to the following, or know someone who has, please reach out to me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com or pass on my email.

56:18 Here's the list. If you've had any encounters in Oregon, which I'm sure there's probably a few of you, out there. Please feel free to reach out immediately. You can use email Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. A special thank you to all the Bigfoot Society Patreon and YouTube channel members. It's your support that helps keep the show going and I extremely appreciate it. If you want to join in the fun, you can join over at patreon dot com. Forward slash the Bigfoot Society. I'll see you there, and again, thanks for listening.

57:37 Her and I can get on here. We can tell our stories. Maybe there's somebody else out there listening that's. Too afraid to tell their story. Maybe this will give. Them the courage to come out. And now it feels so bad about it, Who cares what anybody thinks. I know what I saw, I know what's out there. That's all I care about. Please let people know, Please let them know. If you ever see one of these things, you need to tell because if you don't, then shame on you.

58:21 You have. Shame on you.