40 Years of Bigfoot in Southern Missouri!

0:00 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 you 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. Forward slash the Big for Society, and now let's get on with the show. All right, Big for Society. You've got the privilege of talking to Tracy tonight. He's a gentleman from down there in the great state of Missouri, and I had seen him comment on a video and it was some really interesting things, and so I reached out to him and said, hey, you want to come on the show and chat about what you've experienced. And it seems like we are in four or quite a wild ride.

1:01 But Tracy, how's it going tonight? Man? It's going very good. I'm excited. Yeah, just a little background on me. I've lived here in southern Missouri pretty much my whole life, and a little bit about me. I studied geology in Springfield, Missouri at the Missouri State University, and that'll be showing up in some of this. I can give a little bit of a geological background to some of the locations because I theorize some things that I think about how some of these locations and potential Bigfoot cryptid sightings relate to that or whatever. So if you want me to get started, I love that.

1:42 And I'm actually really excited about that because that's the thing where I try to get that to come up. But usually the person I'm talking to is not trained like you are. So this is going to be really cool, Yeah, Tracy, go ahead, feel free to launch right into it. Also, on some of these I might even get into some psychology basically how the sighting or I didn't really have a sighting, but how the whole experience affected me psychologically and left me thinking about it for a while. But to begin, when I was six years old, my family we lived in Rolla, Missouri, which is on I forty four between about halfway between Saint Louis and Springfield, Missouri, And we moved from the city in December of nineteen seventy seven out into the country close by a few miles outside of town. And the night we moved in December, it snowed and left like a few inches of snow the next morning, and my sister told me this. They kept it hidden from me since I was only six years old, but my sister told me this later, that there were footprints that came out of our backyard, which was wood woods in our backyard, came up around the house, actually stepped up in a little garden you got those little gardens in front of your flower gardens in front of your house, stepped up on the timbers of that

3:13 and looked in the window, which was my sister's bedroom window. She was asleep, she never knew it, but it stepped up and looked right in the window there, because that's the only that whole side of the wall was windows, so that's what you would step up to do. And then went on out across our front yard and crossed the road, went to the woods on the other side. That was like the first night we lived there. But I didn't know that. My sister told me that later. But anyway, I'm guessing on the year here, I'd say it was probably nineteen eighty two. Me, my older sister, i'd had a younger sister at that point, which was an infinite and my mother. We're all standing outside on our porch. We just had company, me and we were still out there talking and it was right when it was getting dark, and there was just this enormous roar that came from the woods behind our house. It was just like instantly terrifying. Both me and my older sister just ran off and left my mom out on the front porch, just ran inside. And what she complained about all the time after that. She just left me with a baby out there. But it was that just instantaneous fear.

4:32 I'd never felt that before. I'd been scared before, but I've never just had something happen and just instantaneously just the fight or flight type thing, which in this case was flight. But we went and looked out a window that went to the back and never saw anything. But I was an outdoorsy kid and was out in the woods a lot. This is a generational thing. It was seemed crazy to day. But back in those days, fathers would train your son to with guns and how to hunt, basically take care of your family. You could hunt for food or defend your family at a younger age. Even in my teenage years, I always had twenty two or a shotgun or something. I never really went out of the woods without a gun, and I think that's probably one of the reasons I never saw one of these things. Really, my whole life has reinforced the notion that they know what a gun is, probably because they've been shot or shot at, or they just know what that does, especially a long gun. And I'll get into a pistol later because I have an actual occurrence with one of those.

5:49 That's interesting. But I'm always out in the woods every day. There's not really much to do out in the country. We didn't get good TV reception. That was back in the antenna days of watching TVs. You're out living out in the little middle of nowhere. Then I'm just roaming the woods and stuff. I'd always described it like later talking with my older sister, I'd always described that there would be days that I would go out in the woods and it's just, you know, nice sunny day everything seems great, and then other days you go out and there was just this hanging feeling of something, you know, a dread feeling in the woods, and I came to associate that with I didn't know if what we were dealing with was bigfoot or not, but I knew there was something monstrous in the area, and just from that constant It wasn't a constant thing. It was off and on.

6:49 But I did have a friend that was my same age that lived down the road i'd say maybe a half mile in a housing community of about one hundred houses, and he was always talking about how there was a guy that there was trails through the woods behind there, that he had seen bigfoot out there in the woods. He'd gone down one of the trails and saw a bigfoot and then ran back and never would go out in the woods again. And I was like, maybe that's what we're dealing with here. But anyway, over the time we lived at that house, which was from i would say nineteen seventy seven to nineteen eighty seven, about ten years, that was just ongoing all the time. And at one point I was out in the woods that was adjacent to that housing community. There was a trail through there, and I was walking on that trail and I met my buddy that lived down there with I would say four or five other teenage kids that were just out there.

7:57 So we just happened stance, met up and we're talking, and all of a sudden we hear this like very deep, kind of mournful howl, and it was coming from fairly close, and once again that was just an immediate fight or flight kind of thing. We all just took off, running back toward the I was running away from my house. Actually I went to the trail toward the housing community, and then I did have a rifle, so I was like, I didn't go and basically a trail comes out into somebody's backyard. So I stayed in the woodline and just walked out to the road, walked back home on the road because I didn't want to go back through those woods.

8:42 But I'd say the big thing that has really stuck in my mind was I'd say it was two or three years after hearing that roar. I would have been like fourteen fifteen years old at the time, probably maybe sixteen. We had a pond right beside our house. I'd say it was probably a quarter to a half acre pond, and it wasn't on our property, but we used it all the time. There's absentee owners or whatever. And where we approached it on our property was just like our yard, which was semi wooded, but about half of it was like very thickly covered, like with cedar trees and just dense brush. You couldn't really see through that. And there was a house over on that side, but it was real thick woods through there, maybe about fifty yards, and that was behind that pond was the general area I think that aurora had come from. And then behind it there's maybe a six seven foot dam on that pond, like earth and dam. Then behind it was like about a five acre lake. And I had gone through there quite a bit, but after we had heard that, I hadn't gone through there anymore because I figured that's where that roar had come from. And I don't know, I was feeling cocky on this particular day or something, and I decided I would go back there. And I had

10:14 a twenty two pistol with me in my hand. I was always hunting rabbits or something, and while I was walking through there, I got about halfway. I never saw anything, I never heard anything. I just became paralyzed with fear. It was like my lizard bring just shut my body off. And I've heard people talk about getting hit within for sound and a lot of times and not paralyzing you, but a lot of times it comes with stomach cramps or something. I never felt any of that. I just couldn't move. And I don't know how long that went on for. I don't have any kind of estimate, but it got more intense and I felt like it was coming from behind me. Something was coming from behind me, and I just heard this voice that said shoot the gun.

11:15 And I was able to click the safety off and pull the trigger and the gun went off, and pretty much immediately all that dissipated the fear. I was able to clear my head and move again. But I was mad at myself because I hadn't I wasn't even able to look down to see if I was going to shoot myself in the foot or not. That's like how intense that paralyzation was. It's like I was really good on the firearm safety into things, but like I felt that I needed to do something and I just didn't have the ability to do it like what I would consider safely, but the firing of the gun made all that dissipate, and in thinking about that later, I felt like something was doing that to me. And once I fired the gun, it scared it off because it was like an immediate dissipation of what was going on, and I hurried up and got out of there and never went back there again. But I always thought the psychology of want hampen there was interesting because I was very logical minded, even to the teenager. And for your brain to tell you don't move, which is the signal I was getting, don't move, or it'll see you when you're completely out in the open, like anything can see you,

12:47 is weird to me, but that was what was going on. My brain was saying, don't move or it'll see you. But I'm like not obscured in any way. That almost tells me that these things have some sort of and I don't know if it's in for sound, but I almost theorize they have some sort of other ability, like a mental energy prediction or something like that that they can do. And I've got more on that later, but that's the end of what I had for that location. We had moved in closer to town, and I didn't really have any more experiences like that until about two thousand and six. Talk about those childhood years for a little bit longer.

13:30 There's some really interesting things to happen in those years. For sure. Did they tell you how big that footprint was that they saw right outside the window. They were just going for memory, but I did ask. I said what I was like, did it have boots on? Was it like a guy? And then they said no, it was barefooted. I asked how many toes? And my sister is just like, I guess five. So it really wasn't like really set in the memory. It was just the general. But I was like, was it big? And she was like, oh yeah. She said my dad had gone out and put his foot in it. It was like pretty much dwarfed it. And it wasn't like it was an old print. It had to have happened overnight.

14:18 And I then asked, I was like, do you think I was like, the snow wasn't that deep, But I was like, do you think it could have been somebody with snow shoes on? Or which snow shoes aren't really worn down here in Missouri. We don't really ever get that deep a snow really, right, and so I was trying to like at least get rid of all the possibilities. But it sounded like, who's got a really big foot running around barefooted in snow in the winter. Absolutely, that's that is so strange. Especially back then you didn't have to worry about people that were wearing like those vibrum shoes that it makes you look clear right barefoot right, they were not around, I believe at that time history. Do you know if do you still keep up to date with the area that house was in?

15:06 No, I don't have. When we're in the area, go by it occasionally, just for old times sake, memories. Big for society. Who will be right back after these messages. When my older sister lives in Pennsylvania now and when she comes back, we might go by it. But now we live far away from it. So we've gone by it a few times over the years, but don't really know anything about what's going on, other than the fact that a lot of people have moved in, so it's not nearly as it's less sparsely populated than it used to be. Okay, that kind of makes me doubt that there's as much activity as there used to be.

16:00 Stories like this are always fun where it's like you've had the activity at your childhood house and you move away and then the area grows up a little bit. Because there was a situation like this down in Alabama and the lady was like, it's grown up. There's no way it's still happening. And I talked to a researcher in the area and he's like, I showed him the spot and he still happens there every year, two a year and aw. So it's like, you never know, man, It's. Just I know as I go through my experiences here, like my theories get blown out of the water like about half the time. Yeah. Another side note about the place there from that I had all the activity in the eighties was we also saw what I believe is another cryptid. Now this isn't a paranormal cryptid though, Okay, the black cat, black panther thing, Oh I'm not. Yeah, I saw that and I got a really good look at it. I actually looked through a rifle scope at it.

17:08 I didn't have any intention of shooting it. That's the only thing I could just get but it was only about one hundred yards away, and looked at it through a rifle scope, and a lot of people say, maybe that's one of these black pumas or conservation Missouri Conservation will tell you that a black mountain lion only happens about one in a million genetically. This didn't look like either one of those. This essentially look like a house cat but the size of a German shepherd. Wow. Yeah, it didn't have the musculature of the mountain lion or really thick like a jaguar. It just looked like a house cat, just really big. So yeah, I got a really good I only saw it once, but my mother and younger sister saw it, I think three times. They would just come and hang out in like a grassy field next to the property next to us.

18:09 That's weird. Have you heard many other reports down in that area of similar creatures being seen since then or. Not? Of the cat? And I don't really have a contact over there anymore, okay, or anything but my parents up until two thousand. My mother passed away in twenty fifteen, and then my dad moved out of that area in twenty seventeen, and in between that time, between two thousand and fifteen twenty seventeen, my dad had sold a mule to a guy that, oh, I would say he lived maybe four or five miles straight line from that area, and he was always talking about these really big wolves that he saw. We're getting into the dog man subject here, but he would see these really big wolves and they were just ridiculously fast. There's no wolf that runs that fast.

19:13 He'd see him like on a far hill. He's got like a out and cattle farming country. And also he said that there was an old man that lived out there by him that found like he was driving into town, which would have been Ralla, and he came across this just big furry thing in the road, like he was huge. He didn't even know what it was, like, is this or just a really big bear or something, and he thought it had been hit and maybe he was wounded. So he didn't want to get out of his car and he was gonna hurry, so he like drove on into town. It was like a doctor's appointment or something, and he was like, on the way back, I'll check it out, see what it was. When he came back, it wasn't there anymore. So I was like, did something get hit and get up and get away or was that just some tricker it was pulling there? Who knows?

20:08 But it makes you wonder because so if I'm looking at the right place, Ralla is, You've got Fort Leonard Wood over there, the Paddy Creek Wilderness. You've got Mark Twain National Forest to the east. So it's right in the middle of some wild stuff. Oh yeah, I've been all out through that National Forest, and yeah, it's a there's a some trout fishing out there. I got into trout fishing. I'll talk about that here in our next little segment, because it was like camping and trout fishing that some of my occurrence has happened at too. But yeah, Fort Leonard would there's always been like stories coming up out of there of sightings by soldiers even absolutely they'll get stationed out overnight and just be freaked out by what was going on and everything.

20:59 But so at that point we moved into town. I graduated high school, ended up going off to college. I'm living in town, and I moved back to the area in two thousand. I get a job at a small engineering company and so my next occurrence is in two thousand and six in September, me me and my friend Tom. It's the same guy that lived in the community that I was talking about earlier down the road from me. We kind of life lifetime friends. We'd gone to our families, had gone to church together, so we've been For instance, we were like four or five years old. He got me into trout fishing and I was into camping, so we just combined the two things. And so in September two thousand and six, we take a two day camp trip and we go camping at Montauk State Park, which is in between Licking in Salem, which is south of Rolla there and that is the beginning of the Current River here in Missouri, which is a pretty famous river.

22:13 We didn't get the camp out at the state park because it's always full, very popular place. So there was a little camp area down the road. It is like a private campground, very poorly run, but it's just a field you could go pitch some tents in, and so that property butted up against the Montauk State Forest. So I always like to go to the furthest corner, get back to the will get back as far and in the woods as possible. There weren't any trees in the field really, but like I wanted to get right up against the fence by the forest, and it's really healthy forest there, the Montak State Forest. Anyway, we do the standard camping thing. We both got, like I said, tense and whatnot. And as soon as it got dark, I started hearing owls and at first I was like wow, it was like I hear a couple different ones, and then more and more keep popping in. I swear I was hearing like five different owls, and I was like, man, this is really healthy forest. You've got that many owls in it. And then then I started thinking, that's odd to have that many owls in earshot. They're solitary hunters there, I would think they would have a territory. And so I later found out that Bigfoot uses owl calls. I didn't know that at the time. I just thought it was really odd, but that they use owl calls to

23:45 communicate at night, which makes sense because if you're trying to hide from something intelligent like a human, you can't use like a blue jay call at night or they're going to know something's left. So you got to use a bird that calls it night. So anyway, I was like, I thought that was interesting, but just really didn't give it any thought. So about three o'clock in the morning, I looked at a watch. It was somewhere around three just hear the shriek, just this piercing scream come from probably I don't know, quarter mile away or something like that. And I get up and literally come out of the tent because I want to see how many other campers There was other campers there that woke up, and I saw a couple of lights come on. There was RVs and stuff in there, but for the most part, nothing happening in the campground. And that shriek was just so loud that it would have to make you think, because a lot would that what could that have been? I'm up for probably fifteen minutes, nothing happens. I go back in the tent, go to sleep. Probably thirty minutes later, I hear some noise and then I hear my buddy slip out of his tent, and so I get out and I was like, what's going on. He's just had a bunch of deer run right behind me along the fence and the inside the forest there, and I was like, huh,

25:19 I was like deer running at night. Usually they don't do that unless something's after him. That was pretty much all of that, but I remembered the owl thing because I just thought that was so odd that there would be four or five owls just right there with a earshot and hooting so often. I was like, I would think an owl would fight for its hunting territory. There wouldn't be you just hear one owl. I've only heard one owl most of the time that I hear owls, there's just one. But I don't think they're flocking birds. Yeah, that's really weird. And did they sound like the normal size owls as well? Like the volume of it. It's hard to say, because, uh, the volumes were different, almost like one was further back. They weren't all bunched right together, but that could have been a volume difference to It's hard to say how close. If you go quieter, it makes you sound further away or whatever. But I didn't really notice weird tonality or like a tonality change, like I've watched other bigfoot channels that would talk about how if you're listening real close you can hear a tonality change over time, and the owl call when it's a bigfoot and I didn't really hear that, but I have heard that since at another location, and I'll get to that later. But did you have a question.

26:43 Something that will get brought up sometimes is they'll say, here, it sounds like an owl, but it sounds like a eight hundred pound owl. It's like way too big. So nothing like that. No, nothing's me off other than just the number of them in like that close little areatcha. And at the time, I didn't know I was into bigfoot, Like I'd read a lot of sightings on BFRO, but I'd never come across the owl call being a bigfoot thing. I just thought it was curious that and then it stuck in my mind. And then later when I heard that, I was like, Aha, Then I put that as I heard that scream, there's not many things that can do that loud, and it just made me think that's what we were dealing with. Well right well within two hundred yards of the current river, which is yeah, so it's really nice forest.

27:43 We got a nice sized river right there. It's just perfect habitat for everything. How long that's just scream that. You heard, I'd say, it went. It wasn't long. I'd say it maybe went a second and a half. It was more of a shriek. Really yeah. It started high pitched and then came down and ended. That's really interesting. It's also interesting that a lot of a few other people woke up in the campsite as well. And I expected more people to come out, so I had and be like what was that? But I was the only one. I guess they were comfortable and nobody in the tent came out. But I saw a couple of lights come on in pull behind campers and stuff like that. And you've heard a fox before, right, I'm guessing you yes, you know what foxes like? Yeah?

28:29 Not that. Like I said, this was like at least a quarter mile away and was just really loud. Wow. Yeah, That's why I was surprised more people didn't come out. I was just like, maybe they're just so sleepy. There was like oh for me to get out of my tent and it's got to be pretty bad. But anyway, same camp trip. So got up that morning, went trout fishing. When we were done there, I was like, I was like, where do you want to go next? And I was like why don't we go to Tomsawk Mountain. That would have been the first time camping there for me, and I was like, let's go over there. So it's about one hundred mile drive. So we drove over there, set up camp. Now they're campground there. I've camped there a lot, and I've had other experiences there and the one sighting that I've had it's the weird sighting. I can't say it's like a definite siding, but it was there also, and that's been more recently, but it's still September two thousand and six. The campground there is you go down a road and it goes of just a shallow s curve.

29:42 On the left hand side there's about five camp sites and on the right hand side there's about ten. Go down to the end. On the right hand side, we're basically in one of the last camp sites. Like I said, I always liked to camp at the end, back by the the woods and get away from the middle of the people or whatever. And we set up camp, just do camp and stuff. Tomslock Mountain, that's the highest point in Missouri. Big for society will be right back after these messages.

30:31 And you're in the Saint Francis Mountains, and those are volcanic mountains. Basically, the mountains are made of volcanic rock what's called a welded tuff, which is basically volcanic material that comes out red hot falls and then more of it falls on top and the weight of that presses it all together while it's still hot. Very interesting. But there's also some granite and quite a bit of grind in the San Francis Mountains, and that's your basic two rock types. They're on tom Sawk Mountain, but anyway, they're wooded mountains, seventeen hundred and seventy some foot high, if I remember correctly, Highest Point, Missouri. So there's an overlook that's a couple hundred yards from the campground where they've cleared trees out and you can just look out over the rest of these mountains. They're not real high mountains, but it's like nubby Appalachian. And so I'm over at the overlook, and if you do the overlook at sunset, you want to stay till it gets dark because colors change.

31:39 It's really interesting. And so it's getting pretty dark when I start to walk back to the campground, and this is all along a gravel chat white chat road, and so I'm walking along and I'm the gravels crunching is about the only noise there is, and I just start hearing this like kind of a low growl coming from my left, which there's about a clearing of about ten foot off of the road to the woods and it's mode and it's really thick brushy stuff. I start hearing this growling, and I was like, that's not a coyote.

32:20 I was like, so I'm thinking it's like a there a dog up here or something like that, or occasionally we get a regular wolf here in Missouri and stuff. So I was just like, I don't know what that is. And so I like veer off of the road. On the other side, it's like a semi wooded park area for just day use, and I just could hear away from the road and just walk through the park area to get away from that growling. And so I walk on down to the camp and I'm tired, So I was like, I ended up going in my tent and taking a nap. My buddy in his tent. He's still up and around camp. I wake up maybe three hours later, and I go over he's in his and he's not asleep, and I said something to him and he was like, he's like, did you hear did you hear what happened?

33:16 He's like, did you hear that? And I was like, I don't know. I was asleep. He said that there was this like a tree fell over out in the woods and it was down by our campground across the road. So the campsites on that side of the road end probably fifty seventy yards back up towards the front. But since there's only five campgrounds, there are campsites, and then we've got about ten on this side. So across directly across the road from us is just woods. And he said that a tree fell over and then there was like a bunch of snamping of branches and stuff like that didn't seemed to be affiliated with the tree, and he said it freaked out pretty much all the campers in the campground. They were all like, oh, well, these people have been partying and everything, and then they get all freaked out. I swept through the whole thing, but I was like I started thinking about that. I was like I got growled at by something up there, and now we've got like this going on and just thinking about two different occurrences happening within. It's almost like whatever was up there just went through the woods down to Mike.

34:34 I wouldn't say it would be able to follow me by sight, but went through the woods and then just started creating a rookus. When you heard the growling, did it affect you in any way? Did you notice you started feeling weird or just you heard it like that. No. I just thought it was weird because I couldn't like really fathom what it would be. I've camped up there, were people's dogs come up there. They're usually just farm dogs that are roaming or whatever, and they're usually really friendly and hungry. I knew it couldn't be a coyote. They don't go that deep, and so I was just like a fuzzle. The wolves are pretty sporadic here in Missouri, so I was like I could growl that low. Here's the thing with tom Soong Mountain being volcanic rock that the Ozark Trail goes through there, which is a pretty long trail for hiking. It's the premiere hiking trail here in Missouri, and it goes through there and right on their website. They tell you as you're HIPing through the Saint Francis Mountains to bring as many bring whatever, water filters, whatever you can do, water furification, all of that stuff with you because water is pretty sporadic through there. So I was thinking that if you're gonna camp on tom Soog Mountain, you're probably not going to see bigfoot there because they're usually associated with like large water bodies. There's more food sources there, and so I wasn't thinking bigfoot,

36:08 but I was like, that is big behavior though, and anyway, that's into that one. It was just a couple of things. But how big that was? The tree that got pushed over? I never saw it, but he said it was like a pretty big one. We didn't go out and investigate or anything. He just said by the sound of it, it sounded like it was pretty big. Which maybe it was a half dead one or something like that, who knows, but he said it made quite a crash and then there was limb snapping after that. That you expect linn snapping as like the thing falls down or whatever, but he said after that there was like limb snapping and whatnot, And I was like, it's weird. Yeah, are there. A lot of missing persons cases that happened in that area?

36:53 No, I said, I do think that there's one that was mentioned in Politis's book. It's not really a National park area, but I think there was one there. But I don't really know much about the missing Purse's thing. But I was watching, and this has been years and years ago, but I think I watched something on cryptids on a channel and somebody in the comments was taught They were talking about dog Man, and somebody put in the comments Potosi is a town that's just north of there, maybe forty miles or so, and he said that he had seen it twice around Potosi dog Man while he was fishing. I actually got a hold of him through email.

37:42 I looked up somehow I found his email address, and I emailed him and asked him more about it, because here's a guy like I know Potosi area from my own state that's seen him twice or whatever he's fishing. I emailed him and had a conversation with him, and he said that both times he saw it at the same place. It was a buddy of his had some property, had a good fishing pond on and he went over there and he saw one and it scared him off, but he was thought, I've never seen one of these before me. It was just freak. So he went back and saw an even bigger one which kind of got aggressive. He was able to get away, and so basically he was telling me, I'm not going to quit fishing, but I went and bought a five hundred magnum man, so I'm not going back out there without that.

38:30 Wow, that's wild. That's cool. You tracked him down though, Nice work. Yeah. Yeah, So that's it for that particular trip. Now, that was September, so two thousand and six. October so the very next month. And this is in Howell County, Missouri, which is West Plains, Missouri's like your biggest town in that county. It's down on the Arkansas border. A couple of my cousins both bought their own pieces of property adjoining property there, both about one hundred and eighty acres I think, and so they bought it took for deer hunting, turkey hunting, all that. In October. I went down there to get it ready. It hadn't even been hunted yet, so they were putting up blinds and stuff like that stayed overnight. It's me, my dad, and the two cousins that don't it, And we stayed in one of the cousins cabins about I'd say about midnight that night, I started carrying the whoops. I'd heard them on the internet thing, and i'd heard them on the internet, but I'd never heard them in nature before. But his cabin that the properties are between two rivers, another famous river here in Missouri, the Eleven Point River is on one cousin's side, and then a tributary to that's on the other side, and

40:00 we were closer to the other tributary. I can't remember the name of it right now. His cabin was it was up this gentle sloping hill that comes up about three hundred yards or so to his cabin, and that's where I was hearing the whoops going down to the river on that slope, and I think I made out three different ones at three different distances, so it was like three of them, just kansas in that hillside. And it went away and then it came back, and then it went away again, and then it came back. So they were just going back and forth, and there's a lot of it's a really good habitat lots of year there, and so I thought that was neat. I've had a lot of stuff happen on that property. But now let's see, we're back to Tomsawk Mountain again. May of two thousand and seven. I decided to do a solo camp, so I set up in that same campsite from the previous year September two thousand and six. But I'm by myself this time, and I get there, I set up camp.

41:12 There's no one else in the campsite. I see a tent set up, but there's no car there. And I walk by and look and the door is open. There's nobody in the tent. I don't really know what's going on. I don't as far as I know, nobody ever even showed up to the tent, which I didn't think was super unusual, because that is our trail goes not too far right behind that, and there will be people that hike that and then come in set up their tent in the campground and maybe do some other hikes and come back to it or whatever. So I never ended up figuring out what happened with that. There's just a tent with nobody in it. But otherwise there's nobody in the whole campground. I'm the only one there. I remember like I was going to sleep on an air mattress and I forgot the inflator. I had to blow that thing up with my hand with my mouth, And usually I pick up the sticks and start a fire, but after doing that, I didn't even feel like it. Or generally I clean up my campground of all the twigs to start the fire with, and that's important for later.

42:24 That took up so much daylight that I'm having to use a lantern to cook at night, and I ended up burning. I tried to make some kind of macaroni and cheese and I ended up burning it, and so I only get about half of it, and the other half is stuck to this bowl, this metal bowl that I cooked it in. By the time I get that eat, I'm ready to go to bed. And I just I knew I was going to get marauded by raccoons. You do every time, But I left all that stuff out and I was just like, if they wake me up, no big deal. So sure enough, about midnight, the racoons come by, they grab that bowl cheese. Union is just rattling around for ten minutes or whatever. You know, that burned macaroni and cheese really puts out a stink, so I'm sure everything in the woods can smell it. Once all that's done, I go back to sleep. Well about four o'clock in the morning, I wake up to I don't know how to explain it any other difference, and sounds like a person walking. It's like bipedal footsteps. And once they get close to my tent, they started twigs start snapping, the ones I didn't pick up to make a fire with. So these twigs start snapping, and I'm like, what is going on? It just gets closer and then I feel my tent just come up off of the ground, like it kicked my tent at the corner and not

43:56 super hard, but like enough to pull the steak out. And I was at that point I was just like, oh boy, what we got here? So there was silence. I can always maintain my silence, and there's just silence, a little pause of about five seconds, and then I hear the footsteps can start coming around and I'm like, if it comes to the front of my tent, I have a gun. I was like, if this thing is whatever it is, a person, whatever starts messing with me, it's going to be bad for him. Stops again. I may have made a little bit of a noise. Stops again for a little bit. Then I hear it going over and start messing with that bowl and like other utensils I left out, and I was like, this isn't Everything runs through your mind, what could this be? Is is this another raccoon? And I was like, there's no way this is a raccoon. Snap and all these twigs walking on two feet or anything like that. I'm up the rest of the night until daylight and I get up and I thought my cooler would have been gone through and everything wasn't. In thinking about that afterwards, I was like, why wouldn't whatever this was raid my cooler?

45:14 I think it smelled the burnt macaroni and cheese and it just went for that. Big for society. Who will be right back after these messages. What I do with my coolers is usually I don't do anything with them after I go camping and they get a little nasty, so I bleach them out and real good, use a lot disinfected on them. And I don't know, maybe it couldn't smell food in it. Because of that, I would think if it just knows what a cooler is by side, it would do that. But I don't guess this one did or whatever. But yeah, I'm pretty sure it was a bigfoot because the next morning I got up, I intended to do a hike, about a five mile hike, and I just felt I was like followed the whole way, at least down off of the mountain. I didn't feel like it followed me back up, but it went down into the valley that I went down into with me. I'm pretty sure because I just had that sneaky something's watching me feeling that whole time, and then k not the way back. So that was a pretty intense thing. To get to your tent kicked.

46:38 Oh yeah, I don't know how I would, man, I don't think I could. That would be hard to deal with. Like you're inside the tent, it gets kicked enough so that the steak starts to come out. Dude, that's yeah, yeah, yeah, I checked that. The next morning. The steak was like up out of the grand Did. You see any footprints around or anything like that. No. The way they did their camp sites theres they bring in a lot of sand and chipped up rock gravel and so no, not really and it was for May. It was dry. It did rain that morning, like my whole hike was drizzled on, but that's after the fat But it really didn't rain enough to soften the ground for footprints anyway. But anyway, in two November of two thousand, I'm back in Holle County to the property again. So for a couple of years, I'm just going Tomshag Mountain, Howle County is where I'm having my stuff. We actually had footprints. I was working a job at the time, so I was only going on weekends. I went the first weekend and I would talk about bigfoot. I didn't really care. I'd get some guff over it, but I would talk about it the way. I come back the second weekend and they're like, hey, one of the guys, one of my other cousins, he found the four footprints.

48:01 Over there's this little pond in the middle of the woods. There's like a little clay dam that somebody built and created this little pond. It's not big, maybe twenty feet across, twenty five feet across, something like that, and that year. One of my cousins worked for US Forestry actually, and he said that we were in a fifty year drought in that area at that time. So that made sense to me that a big foot would come up to that little pond because those rivers, both the rivers there are what's called and here we're getting into the little geology here are what's called losing streams, which means they're in limestone. And basically the rock under the river is so cavernous that unless there's enough flow to fill all of that up, it doesn't flow on the surface. So you have to have a pretty good rain at that point in the river. Now on downstream on the eleven point, there's some big, fairly good sized springs that keep it flowing constantly, but there you'll end up it's dry bed a lot of the time, so the animals aren't getting their water out of the rivers. In times like that, there's little seep springs around that they'll just create, like a little five foot pool or something. But anyway, we had footprints on this pond just up in the middle of the woods because that's where things were coming for

49:32 their water. And so they told me that and I was like, I was excited about it. So I was like, I'll go over there tonight. So it's probably like ten at night. I grab a flashlight, I go over there. I had no idea what to expect. I didn't have the right tools. Found out the next day I had to have a rake to break the leaves off. The leaves had fallen in that week between the two weekends. But I go over there the night before and it's pretty close to the driveway of my other coven cousin's cabin, and I'm walking down the gravel road and as soon as I step off into the leaves, I hear something start to move, just maybe fifty feet away from me.

50:19 All I've got is like a little petzel headlamp, not particularly bright, and it's not even one of these. It wasn't even one of these newer ones with the it's one of the old bulb kind. I'm like, I wonder what that is. I'm thinking maybe dear or something. I kept. I take a few more cautious steps, and every step I took, it took a step back away from me, and so I would advance a little bit and then I would retreat a little bit. And it would do the same thing. It would if I move forward, it would move back, and then if I moved back, it would move forward again. And I'm like, what is this deal? You know, I'm over here looking for bigfoot footprints, and now I got a weird acting deal here. You know, I was figuring if it's a bear or a deer, they just see you, they take off, right, And so I've actually got like a radio and I'm calling back to the guys. I was like, I got some weird over here, which they think's hilarious. But anyway, I just that goes on for a little bit and then it just starts cracking branches. And the place was logged off, and that was the reason it was cheap enough to buy for hunting land. It had been logged off. So there's a lot of down to branches everywhere, which makes for good hunting land. There's a lot of cover for wildlife.

51:33 This thing just starts grabbing branches and snapping them out. It's as loud as a shotgun going off, So I don't know how big the branches have to be to make that noise, four inches something like that, but it just starts doing that, and I was like okay. I was like, I'll leave you alone, and I just book it back to the cabin. And so me and my cousin go over there the next day and we drive over there and we go up to look for the footprints, and the leaves are over there. So he's all, we got to go back and get a rake. So we go get a rake, rake them back, and there was four footprints. I know, soil is pretty good. I worked in a soils lab in engineering, and that clay was just the right consistency to just perfectly mold that foot.

52:20 The only thing I didn't have was the end of the toes. The water had lapped up in probably an inch or less of toe had gotten lapped off. But my cousin in has sense said that they planted those there. But I know that's not true because here's what told me that these were real footprints. That thing squatted down. It's got a big toe that's very separated from the other toes. These footprints were about fifteen and a half inches long, six inches wide were the ball of the foot would be. I imagine that thing kind of squatted down and as you lean forward, maybe to cup some water, like if you think about it, your foot, your way gets distributed to the front of your foot. That soil curled up in between all those toes, especially the big toe, the big gap. So there, can you imagine what I'm talking about. Yeah, that soil curled up in between those toes, and that was preserved there. And I was like, there's no way, it's like some wood carve out hoax thing.

53:37 It's like when that was a dynamic foot that did that. And so there was two footprints like that, and then it like stepped over its on foot with its right foot stepped over it not to step out into the water to go along the bank. And there was two more, uh kind of they weren't nearly as good, but along the bank. So yeah, there's four footprints there and I got pictures of them. I couldn't find my camera, but my dad's camera. I got pictures of them, but somehow in the processing they got deleted, so I didn't end up with the pictures. O. Man, Yeah, oh that's too bad.

54:18 I know, it's like just one of those things. But so but yeah, those were just beautiful. If those could have been plastercasted, there have been so much detail in those because it was in one substrate. A lot of these things there's gravel in them, sticks and all that. It was just perfect red clay that those were in. But I know there's bigfoot there. Now. I've seen the I've had the experiences with them. I've heard the whoops, I've seen the footprints, and so anyway, yeah, that was That was in November two thousand and seven. So in the summer of two thousand and eight, me and my buddy Tom, the guy, the same guy I've been talking about this whole time, we decided to go camping at Washington State Park, which is about twelve miles north of Potosi, the town I was just talking about. It's actually in Washington County. That's why it's called Washington State Park. We pull in there and it's we're not in a big hurry to set up the tent. We just got one tent this time, one big tent. We're not in a big hurry. As dust starts to come around. The Big River is a river that goes through the through the state park there and it's just down the hill from us.

55:39 As it starts to get dusk, I start to hear wood knocks, which I had never heard before I read about them, but i'd never heard them, but like very obviously and probably I would say three different places. They were coming from all around us because we're on a ridge that is downhill on all three sides, and I think the river kind of contours around that ridge. We couldn't go exploring because they'd had a storm like the previous year. There's trails, but the trails were closed because they hadn't been able to clean up all the broken limbs that were still hanging up in the trees. So I always like to go exploring, but we couldn't do it because of that, because they closed the trails because they were afraid limbs would fall out and hurt somebody.

56:26 But anyway, yeah, I started hearing these wood knocks and I just become so fascinated with it. We had a thunderstorm like riding up on us, and we just become so fascinated with it. It starts raining on us, and we didn't ever put the tin dups. We just went back home because we didn't. You can't put a tent up in the rain and not expect to have a wet night. So but the interesting thing about Washington State Park is there's Native American rock carvings there. I don't know if you call that Petrick glyphs. Yeah, yeah, I think I think, yeah, I think you would. Yeah. So it's in limestone, so it's not like some of the red rock ones that you see out west.

57:09 They're they're hard to make out, but like the park Service there will chalk line them for people. They'll draw them and chalk the two interesting things. There's several things that they were wanting to communicate, and then I think these are probably as old as I want to say, between four and nine hundred years old. The state archaeologists I had a card that had all that information at one time, like a postcard that they put it on. But there were drawings of thunderbirds, and then there was several feet which the archaeologists interpreted as the native's feet, despite them being like flat footed and four toed. Really yeah, So I was like, I don't if you're going to carve something in rock, I think you like are going to put the effort in to get it accurate. So I don't know why you would like make a weird your own foot look weird. Yeah, four toes and flat footed. Yeah, so that's pretty good indication that they were seeing these same things one hundred years ago. Yeah, so that's what it's mean about the Washington State Park. They've got that.

58:22 Whether there's not a lot of that in Missouri with the petroglyphs, but yeah, there's a nice little area there. See the woodknocks that you heard in that park, was there like a pattern to them at all? Yeah. I'd say you'd hear they would do more than one from the same location, and then there'd be a pause, and I can't really say how long the pause was. It wasn't long. It might be twenty seconds or something like that, and then you'd hear them in this other location and then further, like I said, we're not on this peninsula type ridge, yeap, And they were kinding from like the three sides, so as almost like we were surrounded on the three sides. And like I said, like it's downhill to the river on all three sides, like a river goes around that it could bend, and so yeah, they were downhill from us. So yeah, it varied, but like I'd say, there'd be ten to twenty seconds between them or something like that.

59:30 Interesting that Yeah, Yeah, that whole that Washington State Park. It definitely has. That river has some interesting curves to it, and they always say to look at those curves. Interesting little fact about the Big River is that there's very little fish in there. Big for Society will be right back after these messages.

1:00:11 Very few fish because of mining activity into Saint Francis Mountains from like a hundred years ago. There wasn't really any mining regulations back then. They would take their mind tailings and just pile them and the rock this volcanic rock. Geologists call it acid rock, this particular kind because when it rains on it, it creates a kind of an acidic solution. And what they're mining is led is the main thing. The lead beltier in Missouri is the biggest one in the world, but there's other minerals in it. So basically what got leached out. The main two things that got leached out of that rock and ran off into tributaries and it eventually ended up in the Big River was and zinc. Fish can tolerate lead, but they can't tolerate zinc.

1:01:06 So the zinc killed the fish, which that sounds like an environmental disaster, but I guess the one good thing you can think about was the fish. Since they can tolerate lead, they build it up and if you caught that fish, you'd be getting lead. But it died, so that kept anybody from eating those fish and getting lead poisoning. So that's a good point. But wow wild. Yeah, but you know, you think about bigfoot being close to the river because there's like a lot of fish and stuff like that. But I guess they go for other things there because there's I fished in the Big River before I knew that, and I never caught anything.

1:01:47 Of course, I don't know how far downstream that is effective. You're quite a ways downstream at Washington State Park. I've never fished there, so I don't know. But anyway, the next thing I have is two thousand and eight, November. I'm deer hunting in Hallll County again and it's at the end of the season. This was very disturbing to me. I'm not I don't think this was bigfoot, but it's at the end of the season. It's just me and my cousin on the property and I decide to I go out in the morning or no, I went out in the afternoon. It was afternoon towards the front of the property, and I'm just being lazy. I just was like, I'm just going to sit in the chair, this chair up the hill and there's like a draw that they run through, but it's very a lot of small trees, so you can't they can't see you. You can't see them till they come out at this point, and I was like, I'm just going to hunt this. So I get there about one in the afternoon. I'm just sitting in a you know, a chair and overlooking this well.

1:02:59 I'd say about three o'clock, I'm sitting there a Sunday day blue skies. I just started getting this like feeling. This was literally like a projection of emotion, and it was hatred, like very intense anger hatred. And it wasn't like what I felt back when I, you know, I was talking about being paralyzed. It was different from that. It was very powerful, and so much so that like when I was talking about earlier about being paralyzed by something, I knew the general direction I felt like it was coming from. Something was coming from behind me. This had a vector to it. I knew exactly where it was coming from exactly. It was like I was getting raided with this, and I I left in my rifle because I wanted to look. It was a little dark piece of woods and where I felt it coming from, so I wanted to look through my scopes if I could see something. I never saw anything, but that went on for probably a good minute and very unsettling. So I didn't get scared. I didn't get intimidated off because I've got a high powered rifle and so I was just like, I'm going to sit here and see what happens. I

1:04:30 know bigfoots on the I kind of attributed it to bigfoot because I was like, I know they're here. I've seen the evidence. So I was like, yeah, it's just mad at me. I'll just get out of here and not come back over here was my thinking. But it was like, I'm not going to leave right now. So it comes four point thirty, it's getting dark by five, and I'm like, I'm not going to wait till dark here. I'm just I want to have I want to be able to get back to the cabin. Well, it's like it's it's probably a good four hundred yards walk back to the cabin. So I take off, but I'm so ill at ease that. Like every thirty or so steps, I'll look and check my six I want to see if something's following me up. So that's it's like that.

1:05:15 The whole way back. I get back to the cabin. The sun's just starting to set. As soon as I stepped into the like I have to go through woods, but it's a road. I'm walking along road that whole way, but the cabin's in a big clearing. Soon as I stepped into that clearing, I was like, I'm just thinking myself, Hi, you didn't get me right. And as soon as that happens, I just hear this howl and I knew it wasn't a kyle. There's lots of coyotes around here, hear them all the time. It just sounded like a normal wolf. I would say, it wasn't any louder than a normal wolf, but definitely not a coyote or anything small. And I was like, and it was probably halfway from where I was to me at that point, so it was like four hundred yards it was. It had closed two hundred yards.

1:06:16 I'm assuming what howel was also what was messing with me over there? I was like, I'm just gonna go in the cabin and not come out. I went in the cabin, had dinner or whatever. So it's five o'clock my cousin comes in. There's no electricity to the cabin, so you're just like by lantern light and everything, and so usually you go to bed early. So about seven point thirty, I've gotta take a peeve. So basically I just stepped out onto the front porch, which is just a foot above the ground or whatever, and like right there by the door, there's no porch just to the right, so that's where everybody peesing is up stinking after a while, so I'm paying and it is just pitch dark out there.

1:07:02 I literally couldn't see my hand in front of my face, Like literally I did that. I like shook my hand in front of my face like a foot, couldn't see it. I thought, what, it must be a new moon. I didn't know what moon cycle we were in, but must be a new moon or something. Before I'm even done, I start hearing this. Something's trotting toward me through the grass, grows up to you two and a half feet there. I can hear it coming from a ways away, and it's just this it's not a fast run. It's just this very confident, steady paced trot. And so I was finished, and I just slipped back in the door and closed because that is a weird feeling when you don't know what it is. It's pitch dark and something's coming towards you and you don't know what it is. Could have just been you. You think maybe it's just a beagle or something. But it was bigger than that, of course, But so I just slipped back in. I'm like, especially after one of these happened two and a half hours ago.

1:08:01 So I get back inside and I hear it jump onto the porch and it comes over to the door and starts scratching at the base of the door with cloths, just scratching the door. And that goes on for I'm going to say thirty to forty five seconds. It's just trying to dig through the bottom of the door. And my cousin's on the phone talking to his girlfriend on his cell phone, and I kind of wave and get his attention. I was like, you hear this, and he like listens for a minute and I hear his girlfriend says, what is it? And he goes a Kyle, dies are just trying to dig through the door and get us, and he just laughs it off. But anyway, he gets off the phone. Like right after that, we get a flashlight over look out There nothing there anymore. So I'm like, okay, that's the end of it. So we go to bed about eight o'clock. I wake up about two in the morning, got a pee again, and I'm like, I'm going out on the back porch this time. The back porch is higher off the ground, you got about two and a half feet, and I'm taking the headlamp and a pistol this time. So I go out and now there's light.

1:09:28 It's like there was there must have been heavy cloud cover and there, but there is a moon and you got some ambient light. As soon as I come out and start doing my business, I hear something over in the woodline, which is I don't know, fifty yards away from the cabin at that point. Get up and start coming my way, and I'm like, this thing is still here trying to get me. It's just stalking me. And so I can see it. It's on four legs. It's a dog, and it's about the size of a ah, maybe a great gain or something, maybe a smaller maybe not quite that tall, maybe a big german shepherd or something.

1:10:14 I can see it cutting through the grass as it's coming toward me in just the ambient light. I haven't turned my light on yet. I wanted to get closer before I turned the light. So finally it gets close, maybe it's thirty yards away or so, and I have to twist that old petsil for it to come on. I twisted on, hit it, and it immediately side skirts super fast. But I got to see it for that little millisecond there was I'd say it was like a brown color, like a medium brown color, but it's side skirts, and so I look around. I go back inside, and so the next morning when I get up, I'm like, on full alert, is this thing still out there? And I never had an encounter with it again, But that was pretty because it was like, what was really disturbing to me was the fact that it just kept trying to get me. It was like it would fail and it would just wait for another time. It'd wait another six hours to lay out there a way for me to come back out again.

1:11:16 Oh, I agree. It's the patience that takes for some yeah, I'm just going to camp out here because he's got to come out eventually. That's exactly. So I've always after that experience been like it got to the point where, like my first bigfoot experience there, with the breaking of the branches, I was like, it's just warning to take off, buddy, And I was like sure, I've never really been afraid of the bigfoot there, but this thing has had me ill at ease over there ever since, because it's like it's wanting. Yeah, if it's willing to sit there and wait for you for hours and hours to come out, it's got bad intent. But yeah, in two thousand, I've got a note here that I remember in twenty twelve, so this is four years later. Another hunter that I hunted with there. I think there was about four of us. We're just standing out in front of the cabin. It's the middle of the day, maybe the one in the afternoon or something, and we're just talking bs and I see him like look over and I looked at him and I can tell like something wrong. I was like, well, what's going on?

1:12:25 And he goes, I just saw something down there, and he's looking down a road. It's not the road that I had walked in on. It's like the road goes further, he goes in front of the cabin, goes further on that the other direction he goes, I just saw something come out of the woods down there, and I was like, what do you think it was? And I'm thinking it's like we'd had a black bear on the property. So I'm thinking. He's like, it was black and it was big, and I was like, was it a black bear? I was like, because we had one of those here, you know, a couple of years ago. And he's like, it wasn't a bear. And then I kept answering questions on it, and he just refused to talk about it anymore. That's always made me wonder what he saw. Just he said it just stepped out of the woods and looked at us and just went back in. But he didn't even say if it was on two legs or four legs or anything like that. He wouldn't talk about it anymore.

1:13:17 And this is just clammed up. This also on your cousin's property. Yes, yeah, same cabin everything. Yeah, it is like right in front of our cabin. Yeah. So my next one is in twenty eleven, and this is where my parents lived. This happened where my parents lived the first property I talked about when I as a teenager. We moved into town for about three years, and then we moved out to this location and they lived there for let's see, seventeen years or so. So this is twenty eleven October. This is the only thing that ever happened there. But this is a really interesting one. I think about it a lot even to this day. And I remember when it happened because it was the night of the seventh game of the World Series when the car you think Louis Cardinals won the World Series in October twenty eleven.

1:14:11 And the situation was my parents kept some chickens, We had a chicken pin, and we had raccoons were just constantly marauding thing killing the chickens. Those things can get in like little squeeze spaces you wouldn't believe actually had We weren't sure what it was that was killing this time, because it was grabbing stuff during the day. Because we'd opened the chicken pin and just leave the door open until they went back in for the night and then closed it. It was going in and grabbing them during the day. And we'd lost about three chickens. But the last one it got, it had pulled out of the chicken house and drug it over to the fence and it got caught in the fence. My dad had mules that he liked to let in the yard, so he had the whole thing fenced in with that fencing that's got the wire rectangles that are forgot, I forget what you call that stuff, but you can't even fit a chicken through it. So whatever dragged the chicken over there, the chicken got stuck in the fence and was dead.

1:15:20 Those raccoons like will rip the chicken's heads off, and it was like that stuck in the fence. So I was like, I'm gonna stake this chicken out and see if this thing comes back for it. So I did that till dusk and nothing came back. Big for Society will be right back after these messages. So then I went in and watched the game. It didn't get over till about eleven at night, and so I was like I was staying there in like they had a little guest house, and I was like, I'm just going to stay at night here. So I was like, I'm going to go see what happened with that chicken, if something came back for it or not. And I go out there, and my dad always has wherever he lives, he builds all kinds of buildings on the place. So there's like a corral for a little building that he stores stuff in. I'm in between that, and then a bigger building for more storage. And then there's the mule barn, which isn't like a regular sized barn. It's a fairly small barn. It's on the other side. So and that's right by the fence. So I got to go in between these two buildings to where this is. And as soon as I turn the corner on that building and

1:16:50 start walking up, it's just a fifteen feet on back to the fence. I hear rustling. So I'm like, oh, okay, whatever, whatever killing the chickens is right here. I walk on up. I've got a bright flashlight, twelve gage shotgun. I don't see anything. The chickens still stuck in the fence like it was, but there's something sizable there. So I walk on up and I keep hearing like little noises, and I realized that whatever on the other side of the fence is probably two and a half foot tall weed, fescuish grass, weeds, stuff like that. I realized whatever has duck down in that, and so I come up right like I'm right with the fence. I'm shining my flashlight over and I'm not seeing anything, but I keep hearing it move. And this gets creepy because I would I basically realized that whatever this was had laid down flat and was at least as long as me, because I would hear a hand move and make a little leaf noise, and then i'd hear over here a foot kind of adjust and make it the leaf noise, and then a hand or elbow noise up here, and like I heard about three or four adjustments from like hands, arms and

1:18:21 feet type thing, and I was like, this thing's at least six foot long, and I can't see it. I literally stuck my flashlight over the fence and never saw anything. I could have seen my cat, but whatever the six foot long thing is, I can't. I can't see a thing, and I'm just confused. I literally stood there for about five minutes just thinking what it not? Another sound for probably the five minutes, and then out in the woods, this is what really got creepy, very sharp stick break, not something a deer would break off or anything like that, just walking through the woods. Just a very loud, not not particularly loud, but very sharp stick break. And I had read enough big foot encounters off of the BFRO website, Like I went on there and read hundreds of them, just trying to glean information. And that had been talked about quite a bit that when somebody sees one another, one will make a noise to distract you so that one can possibly get away. This one was in a situation it wasn't going to get away. But when I heard that snick break, stick break, then I started getting worried about something coming from behind me with all those buildings in the way and everything. So I got a little nervous, but I stood there for a couple more

1:19:52 minutes and then was just like I just got the feeling is this isn't what the problem is, and I'm just going to leave it alone. So I just walk on. You could walk behind the big building that I was by. I just walked down the fence and I'm still shining my light, and I shined my light up in the top of this tree and there's this raccoon up there, and I was sure that was what was killing the chickens. So I had also had a twenty two pistols. So I shot that raccoon out of the top of that tree and it fell out of that tree and hit the ground and took off running. But I heard it stop out there, just came to a stop, died out there.

1:20:35 So I was like, I'll go out there and get it in the morning. So I just went back, went to bed, went out in the morning. I expected the chicken to be gone. The chicken was unmolested and still stuck in the fence. So I went over the fence, went out there. That property was like a business neighbor we knew really well. He didn't care if we went over there. I went out there, ever did find that raccoon. Now I can't say whatever that was got the raccoon, but it made me feel like it that's what got it. But I also felt the whole reason I was At one point I thought, was this a person and they were milling around and they just didn't want me. But I would have seen them. There's no way I couldn't have seen them with that flashlight, right over them. That grass wasn't so tall, you couldn't, like I said, I could have seen my cat much less of something the size of human or bigger. But I guess why it was there is it probably smelled that dead chicken. That's what probably had brought it in there. So that was just a little weird thing. That's really the only thing that ever happened on that property. But that just told me they're around everywhere.

1:21:47 Oh absolutely, Yeah. That the stick brakes are what get me. I've experienced that out in the woods as well around campsites. Yeah, makes you take no for sure. Yeah, especially when you've got something weird happening, and then that happens and you're like, Okay, there's about a seven year period where I've got nothing. I moved to another place. So I'm down here by Pomplar Bluff, Missouri, living here now and down on the state at the state line. It's the Missouri artisas state line, same county, Butler County that the Pomper Bluff is in. There's a conservation area called Big Kne Conservation Area, and there's little camp sites there there. It's nothing like a state park or anything.

1:22:40 It's just little fire rings and a little pulloffs, but the woods there are really interesting. You're out of the ozarks and into what a geologist would call the Mississippi Embatement. It's most people around here just call it the flat land. And it all used to be very swampy woods, but it got turned into farmland. So the Army Corps of Engineers came in and dredged out drainage canals so that they could turn this into agricultural land. So there's very little of this swampy woodland around anymore. And so this Big Cane conservation area is like a little vestige of what used to be. And I'd say maybe there's a square mile of woods in Big Cane, but it connects to a larger area of woods that goes down to the Black River, which is about a mile away from the probably the closest point at Big Cane. I didn't really know if there'd be bigfoot there or not. And I just like camping, so I camped and up in the middle of the night. It's a full moon night.

1:23:46 I don't really sleep that well on full moon nights, and I get up in the middle of the night and once again, here's I've got multiple owls really close to me, I'd say seventy five fifty seventy five yards into the woods, and this time they don't. It's almost like they got in an argument. Like I walk out, I'm still on a road. I'm not going to walk out into the swampy woods. It's like snakes and all kinds of stuff there. But I walk along the road away from my campsite and get closer to it, and at some they sounded like owls at first, but the closer I got, they started getting like you said, a four hundred pound owl, and the actual tonality of it started getting screechy, not like a screech owl, but her is more monstrous sounding. And it actually sounded like there was an owl argument going on between probably three of these things. So I was just like I stood there and just let it happen for a while, and then I was like, I'm just going back to the truck, and I don't know where this is going to go, because at this point I'm camping out in the camp or in a truck. Look. So that was my one experience here in this county, but I've camped there two or three times, and that's the only time I've had them anything like that. But I might be going back soon.

1:25:14 But twenty twenty one in July, we're back at Tomsok Mountain. Actually, I just camped out three nights in a row. I wasn't planning on camping at Tomsack Mountain, but I was fairly close by, and I was like, I haven't been over there in a while, so I decided to just drive up there. And this is in the early morning, probably seven thirty in the morning, and so I'm driving off the access road, which is from the highway you come off of. I think that road's about five miles long, and I'm probably within three four hundred yards of where you come to the camp site. And I'm coming around.

1:26:00 It's an S curve. It's gravel at this point, and so you're making a right hand turn and then it will go back the other direction and this S curve. As I'm coming around, my peripheral vision is seeing the other end of the curve where it curves back around. And I never looked directly at this, but I'm on my peripheral vision, not like far to the side, but fairly close peripheral vision. I see this big brown area right on the side of the road. And what my mind immediately thought was, I'd been seeing them for the last three days, these big forestry signs. Yep. They're like huge and six foot across in brown, dark brown. That's what my mind went to. That sign hadn't been there.

1:26:53 I was like, Oh, they got a new sign, because there'd never been anything there like that. That's just what my mind instantly went to. Because I did look directly at it. I just saw that, and I was like, I'm having to keep my eye on the curve because it's constantly turning, and so I don't look directly over there, and I'm just thinking, oh, I see what that says when we get over there. At some point, I'm not looking at it at all. And this is just seconds. I get up there and there's nothing there, and I was like, I know, I saw a big brown thing over here just less than ten seconds ago, and I'm thinking it, could this be a bear? Is it running right now? I got a small truck, so it's not very loud, little Toyota Tacoma. I get out and I lessen it's just the normal bug sounds or whatever. But I just don't hear any running of anything. I'm expecting like some crashing of a bear through the woods, and I'm just like, this doesn't make any sense because this thing was huge. Really for it to be the size of that sign, that's bigger than bears. It's not really the right color for a black bear, even though I think they can be brown at one point in their development or but this was way bigger than black bears get.

1:28:08 And I was just like, I don't know what the explanation would be to it, but I've had enough experiences over here to make me think I might have seen bigfoot. It's a weird sighting because it's unsure, but that's my one siding of it. If that's what it was. Oh man, that is wild though, and I have I've heard a few similar that's just that's really interesting. Yeah, I've heard people talk about how Bigfoot should be there and you just can't see it both the time with the chicken. If that's what that was, that's the only thing I can think it was, because I would have seen, like I said, looking through that grass, I could have been in. I could have seen my cat, but I know there's something big there. There's just nothing to see and then this thing. I see it at one point and then seconds later there's nothing. I can't hear anything moving anywhere. And Yeah, I like listening to these shows because people say some stuff that, like people that talk about, oh, this thing disappeared. I believe that because I've had experiences. That's the only explanation I can come up with on several issues. But the infrasound and the disappearing.

1:29:29 When you were in that area where you saw something and then it wasn't there, did you feel weird in any way or did you have anything going on like that? No? Not, no, not at all. Didn't feel weird. It's just that I felt weird that because just mentally, because it was like, hey, I know something was just here and now it's not here. That's just nothing paranormal per se. But it's weird to be confused like that. But I went on up to the campground and drove through it. I almost had the urge to get out and tell campers that there might be a bear or something in the area, but there wasn't really many people up or anything like. I just felt that urge, just like, hey, there's something big I saw down the road. Here, you might keep a heads up. I didn't want to. I didn't want to wake anybody up to do that. You never know on the campers. But anyway, my last thing here happened last June. And this happened at Quiver River State Park, which is the only one that's not in southern Missouri.

1:30:40 Big for Society will be right back after these messages. Rivers actually north of the Missouri River. It's close to a town called Troy, Missouri, which is i'd say it's about forty to fifty miles to the northwest of Saint Louis. And basically what I'd done, I'd gone up to see my sister in Davenport, Iowa, and so I go right through Troy, Missouri and going up there. And I'd went up there for a few days. And this is integral to the story. There was a new bakery that she was excited about there in town, and so she was like, we both have to eat gluten free because we have the food oology with the gluten and when you find a place that cooks that stuff pretty close to tasty, you go there. They made really good, she said, they made really good the breads. So I wanted a garlic cheese bread. And the day I was going back, I was going to leave about nun And usually I leave early if I want to get all the way home.

1:31:59 It's about eight hour drive. But I was leaving about noon because I wanted to stop off and camp there at the Quiver River State Park. And they didn't open till eleven, and so they we got it worked out where they had special bake that garlic cheese bread for me. Well, we got there and had just come out of the oven. Usually they put it in plastic. They put it in a box instead because it was too hot to put in plastic. This is the intervals to the story. I just kept it in a box and I started home, and so I drove. Yeah, I probably got the Quiver River State Park about five thirty or so, so i've got It's June, so I got a couple hours of daylight.

1:32:45 And so I cooked some brons, I got chips, just a basic dinner or whatever, and I've got that, I've got some other food. I never really leave anything out. I never really leave anything out. And yeah, something just rocked my truck. I never leave anything out. Yeah, I might be somebody messing with me. Wow. Okay, oh, it's my cat jumped up on it. Yeah, as my cat anyway, So that garlic, I got some other food and that garlic cheese bread in the floorboard on the passenger side of my truck. And so I'm going to sleep in the bank I got. I'll keep my cooler back there with me. So I got everything tucked up, just firewood, and my lantern is alts out. And then I got like a Walmart bag I'm using add as a trash bag.

1:33:42 And all I've got's like aluminum cans in it. And I hung it on a really light branch so that a raccoon or anything can't go out on it. And I hang it high. It's like I'm six foot tall. It's like over my head. I pulled the branch down and tied it to it. So I get back, I go to sleep. I wake up. I start hearing owls about one thirty in the morning. I checked my watch. I'm here in owls, but they're far off. The whole reason I wanted to camp here is there's a lot of bigfoot lower around this place. Okay, probably seven eight sightings or something like that on BFRO. I've watched yeah, I've watched the I picked my campsite. I'm down close to people, but I'm there's quite a bit of They're pretty good for a state park and like keeping like brushing between the campsites so you get a little privacy.

1:34:39 So I'm like within probably one hundred yards or so, maybe just eighty yards or so of probably three other camp sites that are And then there's a guy in a car kind of caddy corner across the road from me. He's not very far, he's probably fifty yards. So I go and I go to sleep, wake up about one thirty. I'm hearing owls, and I'm like, could this be you know? And so i hear them moving around and I'm like, I was like, I'm not sure if owls move around that much. And it's more than one and so I'm thinking maybe something's going to happen. So I'm cozing in and out probably about two o'clock. That goes on for a while, probably about two o'clock. Right behind my campsite, crunch, just a bunch of wood just getting twisted, just crunched apart, like real loud, and I'm like, oh boy, here we go.

1:35:42 And I'm thinking Wow, that's brazen. This close to several people. There's about a minute goes by, and then all of a sudden, just very intense leaf rustling, like right next to my truck. I just hear this sh and it just goes on for probably twenty seconds. And that had me confused because they raked up the campgrounds. I'm like, there's not any dry leaves out there in the campground, and this is like right next to my truck in the campsite. Right, of course there's dry leaves out in the woods. But and I didn't figure that one out to the next day. There was trees right there. It was shaking a tree right there next to my truck.

1:36:27 And I realized right at that moment that it's testing me to see if I'm going to wake up, or if I do wake up, if I'm going to come out and do anything. I realized back over all the reason my kent got kicked back on Tomsauck Mountain, why this thing's doing that. They're testing you to see if you're going to come out shooting, or if you're going to wake up or whatever. They're they're testing it to see if they can go ahead and come in and do something. And I woke up, but I just stayed quiet. That's what I do every time this happens, and nothing's ever happened to me. But at that point, it wasn't immediate.

1:37:07 But I started hearing little things. I heard my cans get jingled a little bit in that bag. I hung up, and I think it came about fourth I'm dozen back off even like I'm relaxed. I think maybe they've moved on. Dozen back off, and then I'll hear a little thumping else. I was like, they're still here, but I'm not like really stressing it there. I think what makes me comfortable is the fact that other people around I know that they're not going to get crazy. They're being real cautious, even though they were loud with what they did. And anyway, about four point thirty, I turn over like I was getting sore resting on one side. I turned over and it shakes the truck a little bit, and I hear it. Actually, I think I made that louder as it went. It was louder. Basically, it was five running steps away. It was like like that into the woods, which I've read stories about, never heard. Got to hear that but that would that just impressed me. I was like, how heavy do you have to be to make that sound? That was just like it sounded like an elephant running off or something, you know. I was like, there's no way I could get out and try to make anything close to that. When daylight came, I got out, packed up

1:38:41 and left, looked around, didn't That's when I figured out that he was shaking the tree because there wasn't any leaves on the ground or anything right there. Packed up, left, But in thinking about it, what happened was I got home, I ended up going down the gravel road, and then on that passenger side door, I noticed some dust and I got to looking and it was fingerprints. Dust had like from going down the gravel road had landed and attached to fingerprints on my side door there, and I realized what they were doing. They had laid down next to my truck and the fingerprints were right at the crack where the front of the door is. They were smelling that garlic bread in the floorboard of my truck, and they were leaving hand They left like a couple of handprints and some fingerprints right there on that door, and I think that was going on when I turned over and scared it and it ran off. Oh wow, So that's all I've got till I go camping next time.

1:39:53 You weren't kidding forty years some wild stuff tracys. Your cousins. Do they still own that area? They do? Yes? Wow? Is stuff still going on over there or do you not know? I don't go over there a lot. What ended up happening is the two cousins got in a feud real but and that kind of ruined the fun times over there. So there's not as much nearly as much hunting activity human wise going on over there too. Yeah, that's why I haven't had anything reason I still go over there. But I think it was why it was so wild in the beginning was there was so many people that there'd be twenty people on that three hundred and sixty acres.

1:40:38 Something will happen then, but now maybe eight in a good year. And then you've got people that like if they have something happen, they write it off or just a the raccoon or something exactly. You don't have the right type of people over there to realize what's going on. What they're just not going to believe something like that exactly. Wow, Tracy, this interview has given me so many new locations to be aware of. It's incredible. Yeah, most of these places I'd never heard of before, and that's extremely helpful. I know there's a ton of stuff going on with southern Missouri, but it's great to know some areas to look into for maybe a future interviews and stuff.

1:41:22 Howell County, Noblet Lake, I've been there once. You're out middle of nowhere, there's it's part of the Mark Yeah, it's part of the Mark Twain. It's called that section of Mark Twain's called the Devil's Backbone Wilderness. Yeah. Wow, okay, very interesting. So yeah, that county definitely has stuff going on for sure. Yeah, and it's probably mainly because of the Noblet Lake is a pretty good sized body water, and then you got the eleven Point. But like I said, it befuzzled me because there's not a lot of times where it's like running there. It goes underground. You need a rainfall for it to really run on the surface. So a lot of times when you go down there, it's just gravelly creek bed some pretty good sized rocks, but not much water. A lot, especially in the summer. That kind of I was thinking, would you have Bigfoot here like year round if it's like dry part of the time or whatever, But they make it work somehow.

1:42:27 Crazy Tracy, thank you so much for chatting with me and for sharing everything you experienced over the years. It's been incredible, And keep me in mind if stuff does continue to happen to different places you're going. I would love to hear about. It, no problem. Yeah, I'll let you know if I hear anything else or see anything else. Awesome. You're a big for Society. Article is to provide a platform for those that have encountered Bigfoot to share their encounter and is safe and respected environment. But we need to hear your story. If you've experienced something that you just can't explain, please send me an email at Bigfoot Soociety at gmail dot com. Then we can start the conversation. I know a lot of you have not shared your encounter at all. It's been twenty years and it's time that you get this off your chest and then you can get some well deserved for rest. Because I know you haven't been sleeping. I understand what you're going through, and I appreciate every.

1:43:32 One of you listening Bigfoot Society podcast hosted by our Captain Jeremiah Byron, where it's all Bigfoot, all the time. Have you ever had the urge to do more? To be more? Now you can by joining Bigfoot Society on the patreons. Get at free episodes and even number only episodes, take part in movie Night and even live video chats. Interact behind the scenes with Jared and other Patreon members like me, Play it the powerful podcast goes on, and you may contribute a verse in our Patreon community car padm Seize the day, big flitters and make your lives extraordinary.

1:44:15 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. Here's the list. These are all on Oregon. By the way Oakridge, Dexter Fall Creek to Shoot National Forest Area, cult Sla Spirit Lake, Subtle Lake, Mackenzie River Area, Sweet Home Area, the area west of Crater Lake, east of two thirty West Diamond Lake Highway, and north of sixty two Crater Lake Highway. 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 big Foot Society. I'll see you there and again, thanks for listening.