Sabine River Sasquatch Encounter of Texas

0:04 Welcome to the Bigfoot Society. In this episode, listener John shares publicly for the first time in forty years about his Bigfoot experience that he had in the Sabine River area of Dbast, Texas. You've experienced something similar to what John has, or have more information regarding Bigfoot or other cryptids in the same areas, please reach out immediately to me after this episode. Remember, your encounter could be the key to unlocking this mystery once and for all, so please don't hesitate to contact me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. All right, big for Society. I've got the privilege of talking to John. He's a listener from down in Texas. He's had some interesting things happened that he did want to share. So John, hope everything's going well. I'm going to go ahead and hand it on over to you, sir, Yes, sir Jeremi. So it's good talking to you this evening. I've read some of your podcasts and listened to him, so I wanted to share my story of something that I've never experienced before, of course. So basically I grew up in northeast Texas, a little town called Henderson is where we first lived when I was six seven years old, I guess, and it was we lived well in the country. At our closest neighbor was probably three miles from where we lived, and we had a property that was on about forty acres.

1:18 So I would hunt and fish. I mean, I was always outdoors. Got three sisters, so it was just me and my dad would come along sometimes lost the time he was working there. You know, he did pipeline, so he was gone a lot. So I spent a lot of times in time in the woods. And it's pretty thick woods up there in northeast Texas, and you got a lot of pine and oak and a cedar of course, and stuff like that. But I square hundred deer hundred. Nothing really out of the ordinary really happened all those years I've spent out in the woods, and so I guess when I was probably twelve, maybe thirteen, we moved to what I would call deep East Texas, which is Newton Jack area. It's if you look at a map, it's where Texas if you're not familiar with Texas, where Texas kind of jets out a little bit into Louisiana right along the Sabine River. You've got the Angelina and the Sabine River right there, Lake for Sam Ravern and Talda Ben to the north of that area. Closest thing I would call to a rainforest. It's got its own micro environment down there. It rains in the summer almost every day.

2:25 It's really thick woods when you get down in that part of Texas. When we first moved there, I would take a can of spray paint and I would mark the trees. When I was going into the woods, I wouldn't get turned around. It was literally, you know, that thick where you just there was some spots you probably couldn't even see fifty feet in front of you. And so I would wear my dad's welding shirts and some thick jeans. I'd have my mom. There used to be patches that you'd get for your knees, and i'd have my mom put those patches on my jeans so when I walked through the stuff, I wouldn't get tore up by all the the thorns and bushes and all that stuff going through there. It was really thick stuff. But I was a kid, and every day after school I'd got there and i'd be after the square hunting with duck hunting in the wintertime, the DUTs would fly through there, and the wood ducks and stuff, and the hunting acres and stuff like that. So I spent a lot of time in the woods. And one of my sisters had met this guy and they started dating, and so I got to know him, and his name's Mark and so, and they're still together now. But you know, at the time, he was probably seventeen eighteen years old, I said, I guess I was maybe twelve thirteen. This was around eighty two eighty three, I think. And Mark had this old Ford truck and his pride and joy and put a lot of money into it, and single cab, little old truck, and I had put some brand new Pioneer speakers in there with an AMP and just a typical high school kid. I think I was in middle school at the time. So he was always messing with me a little bit,

3:57 I guess, because I was a little brother and I was a younger ball, and plus I was his girlfriends his little brother, So he take me out and would test me and we'd go hunt and leave me out there to find my way back, and that sort of Thing's a little prank and so just fun. It's been fun. So one weekend, my sister had decided she was going to go to a party with some of her friends, and so Mark was like, uh, yeah, hey man, you want to go play some video games or something like that. So I met him over by his house and we were going to stay at his house that night. So we took off and the first thing he did is w's a little convenience store. And he was going these back roads and he wanted to stop the main roads. So we started off on what was a tar road and then it turned into a dirt road, and then he made her a ride into what was a old logging road. So I recognize you, and I was familiar with logging roads, and of course, growing up in East, taxes and get pretty common. So we were driving on this old logging road and go pretty loads. You could tell it had been there a while.

5:02 Well, saplings were already starting to grow up in the middle of the road, and so we were taking it easy getting back up in there. So we got back there and he's got the high beams on and he cranks up his new stereo and you really couldn't hear yourself think almost over over the top of the thing. He's got van hale and blasting. So we get back in this the end of this logging road, and people that are not familiar with logging roads, most of them are half a mile to three quarter a mile long, and typically one side'll be logged out and the other side'll be pretty thit and so you can see pretty good ways back in there. There's a lot of new growth and stuff. And then towards the end of it, they got a turnaround for the trucks. I guess where they loaded them back in the day and they would have a place to turn around and get back out. So anyway stopped right before. That's the area where the turnaround wasn't It's just a big open area, and on my side it was pretty thick wood still, and on his side cleared out. People that have never been to East Texas or a place that's really away from the sea, you don't realize how dark it is out there until you really get out there in it when the moon's not out. If you get out in the woods, you can't see your hand in front of the face. It's just that dark where there's no light pollution at all in the stars. It's just amazing how dark it can get out there. I never really realized it until I went back. I lived in the city for a while and went back there, and it's just incredible. So we're sitting back there and just shooting the breeze,

6:32 talking about girls and video games and fishing and hunting stuff. Like I said, here's a prankster. So he cut the music off real quick, and I'm still singing and he's laughing about it. We're both laughing about it, and he cranks it back up, and so we're just sitting there hanging out and listening to music, and we hear something over the radio and muffled that. I couldn't tell what it was. It sounded like somebody's screaming, and so he turned the radio down and we were both looking at each other and not saying anything, and about that time, it was something like you would hear out of a horror movie. It was a lot of screaming, you know. At that time, those slasher movies were coming out, And that's how I referred to this, a woman screaming or torn apart, however you want to say it. Man, We heard just just a loud scream beside his truck, and about that time something hit the truck or hit it, or I don't know exactly how to describe it, our throats through something at it. The whole truck just shuddered, literally like somebody had dropped a fifty pounds log from twenty feet up into the bed of the truck, as what it felt like, and there was. It went from just us wondering what was going on to its sheer panic and none of them in seconds.

7:47 So he put it in reverse and we're haulm out of there in reverse, which trying to navigate down this little logging road and reverse, and we finally hit the road and he's, I mean, he's fishtailing out. I can tell he's he's freaked out. I'm freaked out, and we're not saying anything. We're just trying to get back to his house. So we hit the tall road, finally get back to his house. He jumps out of his truck man runs into his house. Before I can get around his truck. He's in the house and lock the door, and so I run up on his porch and I'm trying to get in. I go to one of his windows and his windows were unlocked, and so I was able to open the window and crawl through the window. He wouldn't come to the door. And so that was back in the day when people actually did leave their doors and windows unlocked. And we before we'd go fish or hunh. We could put all of our stuff in the boat and I don't have to worry about it.

8:43 So that was early eighties. And so anyway, all the commotion, I guess loc his dad up, and his dad came in there, and we're both just free, not knowing what to say. Man, this was just like something almost traumatizing would be word for it. So his dad comes in there and what was going on? What happened? He finally calmed down enough and he started telling his dad about what happened. And his dad had told us this story and that night. Later that night he told us a story that he had seen something. That they had some pastors behind their house. They had a few, had a cattle and that sort of thing. He had seen something behind his house one morning, early in the morning, he said he saw something stocking some deer back there, and he said he went to get his rifle to just look through the scope and get a better look at what it was, and before he could come back, the thing was gone. And so he said, man, you guys, that was probably a bigfoot. And I've heard a bigfoot when I was a kid.

9:45 We used to go up put to those arcs around that area, and I guess bigfoot's kind of a bigger deal up there. I knew about bigfoot. I've never heard any vocalizations of course, or anything like that, so I really didn't expect. I didn't know what to expect. So he said, men, I'd seen something out there a few years ago. I don't think he ever told Mark about it. We stayed up the whole night, we didn't sleep, and we came out the next morning and went out to Mark's truck and they had a big dent in the side of it, right behind the passenger on the driver's side. When Mark was said, there was a big dent in the back of his truck. And I don't know, something through something at his truck and hit the truck and made the dent, or something actually hit the truck with his fist. I don't know how it got there. I just know that I'm assuming that's what caused the truck to shutter.

10:39 That's his baby, I guess you'd say. And I took really care of it, so I knew what the didn't wasn't there before we went out to the woods. So yeah, it was just one of those things that you had never experienced before. And I didn't see anything. I never saw what caused it. He didn't want to really talk about it. He's one of those guys. I guess some people are open to telling a story, and it's just the first time I've really told it public forum in my life. So it just happened over forty years ago. So but you know, I told my wife and stuff about it through the years. I've asked Mark when he's basically just says, yeah, I remember that happened, and it's scared the shit out of me. But other than that, he really didn't want to talk about it. So, yeah, this is really the first time I've shared that story. It was just something that's never happened since it did keep me out of the woods when I was the next couple of years, I would go into the woods, but I wouldn't really. I was subconsciously, I guess, just didn't want to get in that thick stuff like I did care free in the past. I was still go out there and squirrel hunts, but I was scared to go out there. I had friends that would go out and coon hunt at night, and they would run dogs and chase the coons and all that stuff, and I just I didn't want to get out there at night again, even though I didn't really see anything, just hearing that. It took me a couple two or three years to get back into the woods and mean to actually go back out there and a

12:13 coon hunt and deer hunt and that sort of thing back in that thick stuff and never saw anything or heard anything again that that was like that night. So of course, years later I got married and I would tell my wife about it if I was hey. This one time, me and Mark went back there in the woods over and where you used to live in East Texas, and we heard something, and I think, I guess she believed me. I was just one of those deals we believe or you don't. And we were sitting there watching TV one night, and I've always been fascinated by UFOs and ever since then kind of bigfoot stuff, and so we were listening with one night, I just want bigfoot Hunters or one of those shows like that. It was in that same general area deep East Texas, right around the Sabine River. Were talking to a lady that said that she had big foots around her house, and so we were watching it and I described for my wife what it sounded like, and so she said, do well, She told these guys, I've recorded some vocalizations of what this bigfoot sounded like.

13:16 I'd heard in other shows, the whoops and the howls, but I had never heard the same screen, never that same intensity, I guess. But when she played the recording, the hair literally stood up on my arms in the back of my neck. I looked at my wife and I said, that's what we heard. Just everything came back that night when it was got kind of emotional body. It was just like, okay, well, that kind of confirmed it for me. We had heard a big foot back there and back this logging road in the middle of nowhere, and this lady apparently had heard the same thing and recorded it and that sort of thing. So, like I said, it's been forty years I've been back there and never anything has never happened like that again. But that's what happened on a winter's night and back in nineteen eighty three, that's wild. Do you know what else happened in a winter's night in nineteen eighty three? I do not.

14:11 I was born all right. Anyway, now you're making me feel oh so yeah, that area that you experienced that, there's a lot of Bigfoot things that happen in that area of East Texas. There's a really good book you can pick up called, I believe it's just called Texas Bigfoot's by Lyle Blackburn, and it does go into detail about Bigfoot in that area, I believe. But there was a part where you were talking about how the scream you heard was really loud. You describe in any way like how loud it? It seems like it was like you felt it in your chest. I don't know, it was like being in a movie theater, but three four or five times as loud as luck as that's when the slashery movie started coming out, I guess Friday the thirteenth and those sort of things, and so you would hear that audibly, but you didn't feel it physically. And this was like if it's I would guess maybe the thing was standing beside his window and just let out of Yeah, it could have been. Like I said, we never saw it. I don't know exactly where it came from.

15:26 It felt like it came from his side of the truck, and that's where the mark on the truck was, or the den in the truck was on his side. So it was not only something you hear audibly, but you could feel it in your chest. Just the repercussion of it from the just the intensity of it was something I've never heard before since. So, like I said, the best way I could describe it is I thought that when I first heard it, it was like, is he playing a prank on me? Out here? I see you have one of his friends out here screaming, But it just it didn't make sense. And then to have the big dent in the strict I know he wouldn't have gone to that extreme to try to scare me, to put a dent inside of his truck. So after I've told the story, people said, you just heard a black panther or something like that in the woods, And to just all the I guess explanations that people gave just didn't make sense to me, because why one, if you're going through the woods, if you have the radio on the high beams on the truck. You're making a bunch of noise coming back through this on this logging road. You're going to scare everything off. It's within a mile and a half of that area. You know, this thing had no truck of the noise were I'm making just like like I said, it was something that we just heard over the Like I said, when we were talking back, we couldn't talk back and forth overready. You had to yell back and forth to hear yourself even or try to hear him over the radio.

16:55 And this thing was audible over the noise inside the cabin of the truck, could hear it from outside, And then like once he cut that radio off, it was it was just an overwhelming loud screen. You said that when you heard the scream it felt like you could feel in your chest. Did it affect you emotionally in any way that you remember thinking about it? Not so much at the time of that night. Yes, But like I said, I didn't I couldn't explain what it was, and we never saw it, so I just knew that it was something that wasn't normal. I'd spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours out in the woods, and I'd never heard anything like that off in the distance. I'd never heard anything like that up close. I never knew anything could make that loud of a sound out out in the woods. And like I said, it took me. I guess, I guess on a subconscious level, it did. At fact me, like I said, I really couldn't go back in the woods, or didn't go back in the woods for a couple of years. I spent more time fishing and duck hunting and stuff were more open. Well, I didn't have to go back into that thick stuff. It took me a while before I've got the nerve to hunt at night again. Even I used to go out and shoot rabbits. I'd go out in the fields behind our house and have a shotgun and I'd go out there and hunt rabbits at night and that sort of thing, to spot lighting them, and man, after that, I would I still went out in the woods, you know, I worked

18:27 up the nerve to go out there at night, but I made sure that I had a couple of shotgun slugs with me in my pocket when I was out there. It had the sick shot or whatever seven and half to shoot the rabbits with. But I made sure that I always had some slugs or some buckshot in my pocket because I guess it was back there in the back of my mind, something's out there in the woods of East Texas and it doesn't want you out there. Like I said, it only happened one time, but it made an impression them. Any looking to that area where you had that situation and see if anyone else has had any weird things happen in that area. No, I really didn't. It's such as those really small communities out there, So he didn't really talk about Mark, my brother in law, now, he didn't really talk about it. Like I said, his dad had seen something. His dad really never talked about it. So I followed their lead. I guess, like I said, I told my parents about it. When I got married, I told my wife about it.

19:33 But as far as going back, I have been back to that area since then. I've never I know exactly where he took as like a small town, so I just never really wanted to go back to the exact spot. I don't know if he could still get back there. Day. The trades has been pretty good while now I guess that's grown up, but been on other logging roads and stuff, just hunting and stuff us And when I started going over the story in my mind, but I really never thought about it a whole lot in the years recently. But it made sense that something, if predator is in the woods in East Texas, they would be hanging out along with logging roads and that sort of a natural ambush area. I would have logging roads when I was a kid. There'd be brush piles and stuff on the side of these logging roads, and a lot of times, you know, you could jump on the brush pile and the rabbit run out.

20:32 Or one time I walked my big brush pile and there some hogs in the brush piles. So I could see where a logging road would be an ideal ambush spot. I guess if there is something out there in the woods for something that big in that same area growing up in there were there any other reports of strange things, not necessarily Bigfoot related or anything else weird that what happened over the years in the same area. Well, my dad told me a story one time, he's a tournament fish on Raven and Salida Ben when we were living in Houston time. Another I was probably three or four or five years old. He said he was coming back from a fishing tournament.

21:22 Like I said, they that fished on I guess I think it was Raperl that fished on Rayburn. And this was back in the early seventies that this happened to him. So it was him and another guy, and they teamed up and they were following each other pulling the boats coming and they were coming through Conroe, which is still East Texas. It's not deep East Texas because that area run Newton Jeffrey. They call that the big thickets. Now it really thick with it thins out when you get deep out of that area a little bit. And he was coming through. He told me the story. He was coming through Conroe and it had already got dark, and they saw something in the woods and he said he thought the woods were so him and this other guy pulled over and they were looking at it, and he said, I thought it was just force fire, and so they stopped and got out and we're looking at way he did the way he described it.

22:14 Had been sitting there looking at for a couple of minutes and something he said, well, he said, what looked like a saucer, lifted up out of the woods, got the tree top level and was gone in a second. He'd never really told me that story before until I shared my story with Mark, and so yeah, he had he saw something over there close to Conrad, which is probably an hour away from the area where I saw or heard. We never saw anything, but we heard the vocalization of what I believe was probably a bigfoot. My wife has actually seen a UFO. Who grew up in Pasadena, heavily populated area in passage. She was outside with one of her girlfriends and their kids and her girlfriend's kids, and she said she looked up and there was something that was coming over her house, no noise. She said, the thing was huge. I tried to press her on dimensions and stuff. You know, she's not real good with that sort of thing. So she just described it as probably as wide as a football field and a chevron shaped is what she called it. And nothing, nothing happened. I just watched the sing as it glided over her friend's house and then out of sight, and that was the end of it. She was just her friend ran inside with her kids, and my wife stay out there and watched the thing fly by, So I've never seen anything like that.

23:47 I, like I said, I've never heard another vocalization. That was really the only thing that happened to me. The whole area of East and southeast Texas, there's some weird stuff that goes on, for sure, the area of around Newton where your account takes place. What do most people think that they're dealing with when they think a bigfoot down there? If you've been able to talk to other people about it as well, I really didn't. I've never His dad was really the only one that had shared anything about bigfoot.

24:29 We lived there, probably it wasn't a long time that we lived there, probably from the time I was thirteen twelve thirteen to time I was about sixteen. We ended up moving. Like I said, my dad was a pipeline welder, so we ended up moving to the Lagrange area, so we moved out of that area. But we had lived in Northeast Texas and like I said, deep East Texas from the time I was about four years old until I was probably sixteen. And I said this happened when I was I guess, I said middle school. I was seventh eighth grade, so I guess I was twelve thirteen, so I didn't know what it was. I didn't really know to ask or think to ask anybody have you seen a bigfoot or heard a bigfoot or anything like that, because so unusual that And like I said, his dad shared his story with us that he had seen something really big and hairy and black. But it was early in the morning. It was the back of his very back of his farm land back there probably I would guess, three hundred yards away from his actual house, so he never really got a good look at it. I guess in his mind that was probably what it was, a bigfoot, And that's how I described it to us, was just a big, hairy, black creature. I know that some people have said there are black bear in that area. I'd never seen a black bear. I've never seen any scat from black bear. People always talking about in a lot of people that I have come across, and hey,

26:02 while you never find any bones of this thing, while you never see any tracks of this thing. And I'll say to that, I say, I really never found a lot of bones of anything out in the woods. Occasionally I would come across some deer bones because there was a hunting lease that was behind my house. That was probably went back about ten or twelve miles back there, and I guess occasionally somebod would shoot one it run off and die. And so I found deer bones. I found a couple of times I found just a little small whatever it was, I couldn't really tell, just small bones. But as far as seeing anything else, I know bobcat lived back there. There's been, like I said, people saying that panther and that sort of thing. I never saw a bobcat or a panther either, So to not believe that something as big as the Bigfoot could live back there, I just it doesn't make sense to me that something if something like as common as as a bobcat, and I've never seen one in the wild, out in the woods, could be back think of there. Why couldn't something bigger be hiding out in the thicker part of the woods. And I always tell people, And then when they questioned me about it, I said, you don't find bigfoot, Bigfoot find you. And that's where I left it off. And I do tell people. People asked me where I grew up, and for the most part, it was East Texas and deep East Texas, and I said, Hey, if there is such a thing as Bigfoot, that's where he'd be. And not too long ago, one of

27:33 the guys at work, I'd taken a customer home. I buy cars over here in San Antonio now, and one of the guys at work was at history ride with me. And after we dropped the guy off, he bsing back and forth, you know where, you know, he had asked me where I lived, and you know, I told him I lived in East Texas. And I said, man, if there was such a big thing as Bigfoot, you know, that's where one would live. I think, you know. He said, it's funny you say that, John. He said, I used to sell cars, you know, in Northeast Texas. And he said he told me a story. He said, I was coming home one night. I was driving down Farm the Market Road. I come around the curb and my headlights hit something on the side of the road and it was eight nine foot tall and covered with black fur, black reddish fur.

28:18 And I mean, it wasn't a whole lot to the store. He just said he saw it, he recognized what he thought it was. And I pressed him a little bit on it, and I said, well, what happened. What did it do? And I said, well, it just stood there when I drove by it, I said, well, how close were you? He said, well, I was close enough to it that if it would have reached out, it could have hit my car as it was going by. So he got a pretty good look at whatever it was. And it just like the same kind of deal with me. And he said, the first time, last time, the first time I ever saw anything like that, and I've never seen anything like it again. It was just one night in the middle of nowhere and it just happened. It's one of those fascinating stories where you know you didn't have a visual but it's just enough to jog the memory of people that listen to this. And you know, I'm sure I will hear from quite a few people that are like, you know, I've seen stuff in the same area of East Texas, So I do like accounts like this for sure. But John, I definitely want to thank you for coming on the show, for reaching out and sharing what you experienced with me about forty years ago down in deep East Texas.

29:36 Well, Jeremy, I appreciate I appreciate the time. Like I said, this is the first time I've really told the story and really even thought about it and as much depth as I had revisited it, so to speak. And in some ways, I guess I'm glad that I didn't see it. If I would have seen it, I don't know if I ever would have gone back in the woods and been able to go back there, and certainly not at n It was, like I said, it was always been in the back of my mind, something unusual happened to us, But it wasn't until we saw that show on TV that really sank in that this was not this Probably it probably was a big foot. It's just like I said, it just it was just a normal night. We just had gone down this old log road and we get off the main roads. You wanted to drink a few beers. We're just sitting there, bullshitting, going back and forth, and it just happened. You can't explain any better than that. And then that's usually how it is. There's no way to be prepared for.

30:41 It usually just happens, and it's wild. I love talking to people about what they've seen or what they experienced, what they heard. It makes my day so thank you so much. For coming on, John. I'm sure your account will will help some listeners that are listening out there for sure. Like I said, thank you very much, Jeremiah. I appreciate you allow me the time to share the story and like I said, recount it in my own mind, just relive it. I guess you'd say, I hadn't really thought about it in a long time. So thank you, and I hope this helps somebody maybe struggling to figure out what they heard or saw or whatever, and there's something was out there I don't, Like I said, I never saw it, heard it and it's scared to crap outs. Yes, sir, you have a great night, all right, Thank you, Jremah, Thank you very much. Yes, sir, I just wanted to take a few minutes to say thank you to you home with listeners for listening to the podcast. 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

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