Terrifying Tales from the Trail: Bigfoot's Grip on Northern Georgia

0:03 Welcome to the Bigfoot Society. In this episode, I talked to Amanda, who shares the Bigfoot encounters she has both experienced and heard in the Blue Ridge, Georgia area. If you have experienced something similar to what Amanda has, or have more information regarding Bigfoot or other cryptids in the same area, 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, Bigfoot Society, I'm talking to Amanda Stowers tonight. She is an employee at the Expedition Bigfoot Museum down there in northern Georgia, and it's a pleasure to get to talk to you tonight. Amanda, I hear you're also known as the Bigfoot Lady, right, Yes, sir, that is correct. Yeah.

0:50 I just recently started using that nickname. My husband actually gave it to me recently because everybody always asks, Hey, isn't your wife the lady who works at the Bigfoot Museum. Oh? Yeah, my wife, it's the Bigfoot Lady. You should go talk to her. So I just ran with the name and decided it made a good PERSONA. So here I am Amanda the Bigfoot Lady. That is fantastic. I love it. It's a perfect nickname for someone who's going to work at the museum there. I've already talked to your boss, mister Bakera and listeners definitely want to hit that episode after this one. But before we talk about the museum for a little bit, I got to ask you, Amanda, so did Bigfoot come first for you or was it working at the museum and then you got into a Bigfoot after that?

1:36 It would definitely be before. Growing up here in the mountains of Appalasia, you'd hear crazy stories most of your life growing up from my dad and my grandparents and just general old timers as we would call them. Have plenty of stories of things that go bump in the night and don't staying out late after dark and things. And then of course you have the movies. It's the Legend of Boggy Creek and the whole bunch of others and the Discovery Channel all things like that. Bigfoot was on my radar before then. And then in about two thousand, two thousand and one, ish, me and my brother apparently got ran out of the woods by one. Yeah, that's that's an interesting story. Wow. Would you mind sharing that story with the listeners tonight? No, not at all, I don't mind a bit. I actually share it a lot more now than definitely what I used to since I started working at the museum. I'd probably share it probably at least maybe once or twice a month, if not more, depending on how the days or the weeks ago. Again, I'll start. I grew up here in southern Appalasia, here in North Georgia, and the property where this occurred is some of our family property, and it's been there in the family for probably it's a one hundred and fifty two hundred years at this point, and it was several hundred acres, and my father and my second cousin, who we refer to as my uncle, were chopping up trees for firewood, because that's how we supply our heat up here where we didn't have air conditioning, we didn't have sexual heat in there. We just had the woodburn and stove, so

3:08 during the summertime we would chop up firewood to prepare for winter. So they had turned us kids loose from helping haul firewood. My uncle had recently remarried, so he had a new step daughter, and so there was a tree on the property there that we all referred to as the Carbon tree. And it's super cool that over the years, over the generations, people had gone and carved their initials onto this tree. That's what we all called it was the Carbon Tree. Hey, let's go take Kelsey down to the Carbon Tree. Put her name on it, since she's family now. It was me and my brother and our new cousin. Kelsey traveled from where we were chopping firewood through the hayfield down past the creek into the tree line where this tree was at, and I'd say that would have probably been two three hundred yards.

4:02 It was pretty good sized hayfield. And I mentioned that because at the time it was summer, so the hay was really tall. I was about fifteen years old, so it probably came up above my waist. You know, it was going to be cut soon. Anyhow, we get to the carving tree and it is right inside of the tree line here beside the creek, and it was this super super cool tree. It was this massive tree that had grew up next to this giant rock that kind of came out of the side of the hill side the mountain because this creek was right in this valley. And then Appalachi, you know, we have a lot of these big boulder outcrops, and this tree grew up in front of it, so that underneath beside the tree and this rock was this big wallered out area where stars, mountain, lions, you name it. Anything could have bedded down in there. It was really cool. My cousin's even camped in there sometimes and he climbed up on top of the rock and that was where you would carve your name at And I can't the picture just because of I'm such a visual person. I'm remembering it in my head painting the picture, so I'd try to describe it in the same way. I was up on top of the rock and I was in the process of putting my name on the tree or yeah, I was carving it in there. And my brother and my cousin, who are both a little younger than me. My brother is if I was fifteen, he would have been twelve years old at the time,

5:33 and then Kelsey probably would have been close to the same age. They were down below the rock next to the creek and we're just having a good time chit chat and doing what teenagers do in the woods, and then all of a sudden, my brothers, Hey, we need to go. Well, I'm almost done, we'll go in a second. No, we need to go, like right now. And he's very freaked out about something. And at this point were mountain kids. I'm thinking, oh, shoot, he's seen a bear. My dad had mentioned he'd seen a panther in the area recently, so I'm thinking, oh snap, he's done seeing that. So I hopped down off of the rock and as I'm doing that, Michael and Kelse have done takeoff running. Oh snap, if they're running, I need to be running too. Within the time of me getting from the down around the rock to the creek and running to the edge of the hayfield, when I got to the edge of the hayfield, whatever this was my brother had seen let out the most god awful roar, scream yell that was so loud it nearly knocked me to my feet just from the volume of it and me being so scared. So I threw my hands up on my ears and nearly fell, and I was falling into the hayfield, almost stumbling, and as

7:03 I did that, all the birds and everything in the hay flew off. And that's what I remember in my head is this loud noise and then all the birds would catch up out of the field, catch my feet and I could catch up with my brother and my cousin and asked him like, what was that? What is this? Like? What is happening? Because they're still running, We're taking off at full speed. He I think it was bigfoot. What you can't be serious. What we knew that they were around and that there was a possibility of him. It wasn't something that was no quote unquote new to us, So it just was insane. So apparently what had happened is that my brother being down below us, he was looking up at me, and as he looked up at me, he saw about fifty foot behind me on up the ridge a little bit was a bigfoot creature standing up there watching us. And it said it had the just his most ominous feeling in the split second that he's seen it of You kids don't need to be around here. You all need to get out of here. This is my turf. I don't like albing here. We had walked up in his living room, and my brother described it as being just your classic brownish orange color, but it had the most piercing red eyes, he said he remembered.

8:37 And what was the craziest part about all of this is I actually was talking to my brother about this recently over the holidays, because I'm sharing this story so much and I wanted to make sure that I have my facts straight. I asked him about It's like, Dude, that's the main thing that I remember about this is I didn't see anything you did, but I heard that thing and that was the loudest thing I have ever heard of my life. Did you hear anything that day? And he says, no, I didn't hear. All I saw did was I saw it and I started running until you caught up with me. And that was just crazy. And we got over to my dad and my uncle and they saw us kids was upset, but they didn't think too much of is' all right you see something there?

9:22 And I was like, yeah, I think we saw saw bigfoot or something like that, and they're like, oh, they started giggling a laugh. Oh you kids done wouldn't see the booger, didn't you wait? What So, Apparently we'd heard this story of my whole life from my grandmother, dad's father mother, excuse me, my dad's mom, who grew up on this property, and we always heard stories our whole life there was a booger that lived out there. And you hear a lot of people use the term booger in Appalachia to describe the sasquatch creatures. Down in our area. We always referred to boogers as a general term for anything that kind of goes off for the night, mostly anything from your cryptid creatures to the things that shouldn't be there. We used hate as more for like ghosts and stuff, but boogers was for anyhow. We'd always thought that they were referring to the booger was just this weird apparition or something that hung around. We had no idea of putting two or two together that they were referring to quote the booger on the property as the bigfoot creature. That's my main story. I have actually seen some other cryptid creatures. I've seen a thing that looked like a pterodactyl flyover my mom and dad's house when I was much younger. I was probably around seven or eight years old. The only reason I remember that is because I remember this thing flying over this particularly large tree that we had in the

10:58 yard, and that tree cut down later on over the years, and I remember that thing. But it was very small. It wasn't like humongous like you hear people talk about giant thunderbird, humongous pterodactyl type things. It was very small, like a woodpecker or hawk. But what made me notice that it wasn't just a bird was that the wings werenimberdous. They were membranes, so I could actually see yellow and the little red veins in the wings. And it had a little point that came out of the back of the head and a really long beak on it, exactly like how you would see a picture of a small pterodactyl. Again, I've had so many weird things happened to me in my life. I don't know if I'm a conduit or a sensitive. Definitely sure I'm a sensitive. So I've had that happen to me, the weird bigfoot encounter with my brother. I've seen several ghosts, demons, and angel and I've seen another thing And whether it was a bigfoot or not to this day, I still don't know. This thing baffles me.

12:11 It would have been probably around the same time that my brother and I saw the bigfoot creature at the carving tree. My parents' house wouldn't be but maybe ten miles as the crow flies, as we say, from where that other property was. And our driveway was pretty long, so all of the US and the two neighbor kids, they would come over all the time, and we would all ride our bicycles up and down the driveway, and we were at this little spot that we that Mountain kids have a little fort spot that they've made in the woods where we made a little makeshift tree house and everything like that. It was at the end of our driveway because that's also where we waited for the school bus. And it was fall and the sun was really bright and the leaves were fresh fell on the ground. And I mentioned that for a reason because the other kids had jumped down off of the embankment to go down into the driveway and I was in the rear and I hear something behind me, and you could hear the leaves rustling really allowed to as something was coming in a glance back over my shoulder almost jumping, like if something's fixing at me. And I turned around and there was this thing laying in the leaves and it was big. It was really big. And I

13:41 always have referred to this thing as the bear skin rug creature because that was the only thing that this thing reminded me of, because it was laying there flatterele its stomach, with its mouth open, eyes dark red, almost black eyes, laying there with its mouth open, arms stretched out straight to the side like a bear rug would, but the color of it blended in exactly with the leaves, like from the waist down, I couldn't see anything. I could see the shoulders, the head was really clear, and the little bit of the back, and I could see parts of the arms, but the other parts, the from like i'd say, middle elbow to wrist, was behind two trees on each side of it. And all of this happened in a split second. And as you and I both know hearing this from other witnessers, it happened in a split second. It's like time slowed down on one of those things, like am I really seeing what I think I'm seeing right now? Because it didn't fit into anything. It didn't look like a monkey. It didn't look like a human, it didn't look like a bear. It was like all the things in one into this ugly thing laying there looking at me. And I hear my brothers and the neighbor kids hollering, man, come on, let's go. I just turned up. I'm like, huh. We realized they're still there, and in that second that I turned to look back, this thing is gone. And I shook for

15:13 a second. Did I really just did I just see that? Did that really? Just? No? There ain't no way, There ain't no way, no, And I just filed it back. And then my brain, along with all these other crazy things that I've had and seen, it happen to me in my brain. And it honestly wasn't until I started working back at Expedition Bickfoot in twenty nineteen that the memory of this bearskin rug thing came back to me. And it was only because I had heard something from another witness was describing something and I was like, oh wait, yeah, I think and it reminded me of it, and that memory came flooding back, and for three or four nights I had a hard timing, like I would wake up in the middle of the night, and I would see this thing in my you know, were in the memory of it, and it was just like, ough, gross, I don't want to I don't want to see this thing ever again. And so yeah, that's my other big story.

16:12 I guess you want to call it, Amanda. That's incredible. All this has happened in northern Georgia. You said, yes, sir, right here where I'm from. It's in Gilmour County. If we want to be exact. I won't go into any other exacts to it, just because there's all my family and everybody still lives here. Most everybody knows who I am and my family and everything. But yeah, I'm not the only one who's seen and heard crazy things. You know. My brother part two to the story of when the Bigfoot ran him and us out of the woods, apparently he told me over Christmas. Okay, we've rewind So unfortunately my me and my brothers, I'm being the old eldest. I left home as soon as I was eighteen, so I didn't talk to my brother for a very long time. And the life and stuff. I moved cross country for a few years. He moves to Florida, and all this stuff. So we hadn't really got to like just sit this talk and especially talk about these kind of things other than just hey, how are the kids doing and stuff. Over the holidays, me and him really got to sit and talk, and I was again asking him about the details of this encounter where it ran us out of the woods, and he said, oh, yeah, I'm going to tell you. Me and Brian went back up there. So him and my cousin. I have many cousins. I come from a very large family.

17:45 So they went back up there a couple of weeks later. A week or two later, they said, and they were going to hunt this thing. So we still had the old family big hay barn on the property, and they took one of the little in there and made them a little makeshift hunting cabin. They said that they went up at night from the hay barn and walked up the creek up going towards where the carbon tree would have been, and sure enough they were flanked. You know. They would walk, it would walk, they would walk, it would walk, they would run, it would run, they would stop, it would stop. And they got freaked out and went back to the cab. The camp that they had made in the barn, and that night they had something circling the barn and coming up to the sides of the walls of a sniffing and making rat rookus, hitting on the walls and everything. Needless to say, them boys didn't go back up and mess with with that anymore. And the crazy thing too, is that two years ago apparently somebody in that general area captured a bigfoot call on their ring camera in that exact area. It just validated everything and put it all together and like, oh my goodness, So this is mostly either like a perpetual habitation or this is a hole where they come through all the

19:15 time. If something says as my family had been talking about seeing this thing for fifty years ago to us seeing it to modern day people are still having encounters in this area, it's just it's truly fascinating, it really is. When we get reports that come into the museum will, depending on the witnesses comfortable with us putting anything out there. A lot of times we'll put out on our David Wills put out on the Facebook page a particular siding with a few details in general location, and next thing, you know, the comment section will start blowing up with oh in this area, I've seen this, or all these different little stories will start coming up out of these areas, and it's so neat, and it gets people talking about these things and people connecting in those different areas, and it's just a really cool phenomenon to watch.

20:08 The Facebook page for the museum is incredible when you guys put up, when you guys put up some accounts, and yeah, it really does go viral for sure. The comment section in there is pretty incredible. I wanted to ask you, are you religious at all? I am very I try to be. I should say, okay, yes, I'm a born again Christian. I don't really claim a particular denomination. I grew up a Church of God Protestant, and so up here where I'm from is the buffalo of the Bible belt, as they would say, this is where a lot of the big what's the word I'm looking for? The big revivals happened at the turn of the from eighteen hundreds to the nineteen hundreds in this general area.

20:57 And my great grandfather, on my father's excuse me, my mother's side, actually started the church that I grew up in. We were in church all the time, whether it's regular Sundays on Wednesdays. My mom was the youth group leader and everything, so we were all the time busy with that stuff. And I bring that up saying because a lot of the stories that I heard growing up about things that go bump at the night actually came from a lot of my family members who were members of this church. They had many experiences with different ghosts, panthers, who know, all these kinds of things. So they were actually very open to a lot of this. They were, you know, if they believed a very hardcore that if Jesus is real, the devil is very real, and not saying necessarily that all these things are quote unquote evil, but they definitely had feelings on it about that.

21:56 So I was very open and susceptible to a lot of that's not susceptible, but I wasn't sheltered right from all of this knowledge, it feels like it is definitely a part of your upbringing and the culture that you were in, for sure. It's just a really interesting thing to think about. Sometimes I contemplate if there's some sort of connection there. I don't know. I'm not sure how to formulate it. Into words. I think there are certain types of people that are definitely more open to seeing things like this, maybe that might distracted by other things. Yeah, and I think a lot of mine not only was it a spiritual gift, but also genetics in a way.

22:42 Because my mom's mom, my grandmother, she was a seer. She could almost predict the future. Sometimes she would have prophetic dreams of different things, especially whenever my grandfather was in the military. He was in Vietnam and twenty years in the military, and she would have prophetic dreams about like his ship getting blown up and all these kinds of things that she would just get on her knees and then pray and pray about it. And back then, telephones and things wasn't really a thing, so he wouldn't tell her any of the spooky stuff that, you know, hey I was in a battle or anything like this, until after he came back on shore leave that hey this happened.

23:26 She's like, oh, yeah, I know, I know what happened. Wow. And her mom was the preacher's wife, and she had twelve kids of her own, so she was a very preyed up woman and she all the time helped perform miracles and all kinds of things, like she'd ever count a story of her casting out a demon, seeing ghosts and getting rid of them out of people's houses, and blessing the water and the food in everything, and then even going farther back than that. Her mother, which would be my second grade mother, would been what was considered a granny witch.

24:10 She was one who could go out in the woods and find any kind of herb and any kind of thing that you could think of to heal and to Basically, there wasn't modern medicine back then. She was the midwife. She was the healer and everything. And they shared stories about ghosts and things that go bump in the night and bookers that they ran into, and those are the stories that they shared with us. Whenever I was little, I would get off the bus and go visit her before I would walk on up the hill and just go have story time. And those are some good fond memories. So I think that definitely molded me to being the person that I am today, to being a lover of stories and a collector of folklore and all kinds of fun things. Our stories and the folklore of our ancestors is so important that isn't forgotten or erased because we didn't take the time to listen to it and then to share it with the next generation. You'd mentioned it really quickly. You're starting to talk about spiritual gifts for a little bit.

25:18 Yes, do you think in your viewpoint, could any of those be connected to the things that you are seeing or if you have any thoughts about that? Oh, yes, I one hundred percent beliefs so because I used to be plagued with nightmares and stuff as a child, and I would see, you know, monsters in my dreams, or I would see shadow people and all kinds of things almost like I could sometimes I could see things that other people couldn't see. And it's just I've seen a demon on my brother's bed once. My youngest brother had just graduated from his crib up to a toddler bed, and we had just gotten this toddler bed second hand, and he used to scream and scream and scream and scream at night once we got in this bed. He already was a crier a little bit before then, but man, he would scream. And we were playing hide and seek once and I went to go hide in what would have been his room at the time, and I could have swore to you there was a light, but not like a lamp light, but was shining on the bed, and honestly, goodness, there was a silhouette of a human type figure sitting on this bed, and it turned and looked at me with the most evil red ember eyes I have ever seen, and it scared me so bad, and I went

26:52 and we told my mom and she got out the holy water and the oil and her and the other church friends came over there, and one of them was very discerned. She's, oh, yeah, you know, there's a demon attached to this bed because something terrible happened from the previous owner that it's attached to it. And so we all prayed over it and the problem went away. We rebuked it and it left and the problem with that bed went away. And that's only one example. We used to at the church have holy ghost revivals and laying hands on people. You would see sickness come out of people. And I would see angels at the altar, different lights and things standing there. And it wouldn't be like a fool like I could see a whole persons standing there. Was more like a light shape kind of thing.

27:41 I just knew that there was something there, but it was a white, a light presence, not necessarily anything dark. I could really tell when there was dark presences around. So I was like, you're talking at more maybe about the gift of discernment. Yeah, probably, Yeah, probably, that's cool. That's awesome. I am totally on board with that, for sure. I think is very interesting to talk about stuff like that. For sure, it is, and I think people we should talk more about that. I know there's a lot of divide within the cryptid world of trying to incorporate some of the more paranormal aspects of things into cryptids and mysterious creatures and things. And I think that if we were able, if we could all come together and discuss these things more openly, we see how much more all of it connects, way more than what people try to want to avoid in some cases. And I don't know if that's maybe just my personal opinion from personal experiences and sort of listening to so many people and other stories, but like I said, I do believe there's way more to this than just some kind of unknown things out there. I absolutely agree. Thinking back of back to how you've heard your relatives talk about that property and how there was the booger sighting over the years. Were there any aggressive interactions or was it a thing like if you leave it alone, things are going to be okay type

29:12 deal. From one I remember of the stories I heard, we never really put two and two together that it was a big foot. We actually thought it was they were talking about a ghost because we had heard stories about there being ghost in there from Civil War battles and we had a lot of Native American deaths and stuff due to the trail of tears being in that area. So we'd always thought that they had talked about like, oh, carbon just seen him a ghost up there, and that's why he didn't want to go back in the woods, because the fog would settle in the creek bed there real heavy. Sometimes it would be super spooky. So you're like, oh, better watch out, the ghost is out there, but the booger's out there. Never thinking it was bigfoot, never thinking that never came together until that incident happened. From you've talked to your brother who saw the creature, and you've talked to more than a few people. It sounds like over the years, what do you think when we talk about Bigfoot, what do you think it is that we are dealing with. I personally think it's a combination of both of flesh and blood and spiritual creature. And I say that in a very broad strokes, not necessarily. I'm trying to think of the vocabulary.

30:30 To forgive me, I'm a mountain girl. I don't have that much on vocabulary. So there's just way too much of these things in the paranormal aspects that go along with these things for it to be just a flesh and blood Now us people, there's people who have different abilities telekinesis, reading people's minds, somebody being able to touch and heal somebody, all these kind of crazy things that us people can do when we're flesh and blood, and once we die we can. There's the theory of purgatory and ghosts and all this kind of craziness that goes along with it. Why can't they be the same thing with these creatures as well? If we are susceptible to possession and things of that nature. People talk about the ones that are just so mean and so evil, can if they're just as human as we are, can these creatures not also have some of the same problems that we do in the spiritual world, not to mention that you could go down the whole rabbit hole of these things being from another world, much less ourselves being from another world.

31:45 So I personally don't have an exact answer. I'm open to any of these theories because nobody has the answers, and looking at all the puzzle pieces, it's a big puzzle that's going to take a while to try to put together. You just said a whole lot that I'd never thought of before, and that's very interesting, Amanda, to think of. The thing about Bigfoot is we don't know because we haven't been able to actually have a specimen that can be studied so far from what we know right exactly, not anything that we've been allowed to know anyways. Yeah, when I talked to David, he was saying that he had stories that were locked up, that it was just stuff that he couldn't even tell. It was absolutely wild, and I believe f one hundred percent. Let's talk about the museum for a little bit.

32:37 Do you have a favorite artifact that you're able to have in the museum. Oh, good question, there's so many of them there recently, I had a customer come in and ask and say, Okay, if you could pick one thing, one thing out of the entire museum, out of all this evidence, say all the rest of is fake, and he could say, this one thing that could prove that the whole thing is real, which one would you pick? I was like, Oh, that's a good question, and so I thought about it for a second, and I came back with the Elkins Creek cast one. Because it was cast here in Georgia, Georgia represent and at the time it was cast, it was the largest print ever found east of the Mississippi. People always associate Bigfoot in Sasquatch with the Pacific Northwest. They don't think about it being a whole United States don't even go into the whole possibilities of that this is a global phenomenon. But at the time, this was the biggest one east of the Mississippi, and it had the police report to go along with it, so you had the validation there.

33:49 And on top of that, it also is one of the ones that they used to determine that these creatures have dermal ridges or fingerprints on the soles of their feet, the same way that US and other apes. Would this had to be able to disprove that all that evidence combined to that one artifact. That's my lynch pin for me. I think I remember hearing about it that Jimmy Chilcut was involved with that as well. I think it was back in nineteen ninety seven. But yeah, that is yes correct. Some that I think are cool that we have there is we have one of the massive handprints that Paul Freeman got out of Washington and this thing is massive is looking at it. And then of course we have the Tom Slick's gear there.

34:37 David has talked about he got the opportunity to get a hold of to Tom slicks stuff, so he has all these first hand pictures, the original pictures of the original notebook of his journeys into Nepaul looking for the yetti. So I think that is just super super cool to have. And then of course you have Raven, our big guy that we have in the museum. He's our full size replica that is the main face on our page. And people look at it's like, oh, it's cool, but it's more do you know that a police officer made this thing? I look at these pictures right here, these are the ones where he took the time. Nobody's gonna believe me. He took the time to rebuild this thing to show this is what I saw, all the way down to the detail of it having that little white tough of hair on its chin, to show Lord, this is what I saw. This is how tall it was, This is how broad the shoulders was, this is how big it is. The police officer took the time to do this through the ridicule of it all, and here he is our main attraction inside of the museum. I just I'm like a kid in a candy store. I just think the whole thing is cool. That is incredible. Is speaking of Bigfoot recreations. I have to ask, because I'm based out of Central Iowa, have you been privilenged enough to have seen Clifford

36:07 Lebrex Bigfoot? No, I'm not. It's still in storage. And trust me, as soon as I see that, I am like gonna be just gobsmacked because I remember seeing pictures of that thing in magazines and on documentaries as a kid. And I wasn't working at the museum at the time. I had moved out of state for a little while, and I happened to see somewhere on a Bigfoot group post, somewhere where somebody the family was getting rid of this thing. And I messaged David about it, and I never heard anything from him. And the next thing I see later that he's getting u hauled. He's going to Arkansas and he's going to be surprised, and I see all these pictures. He actually got it. That is so awesome.

36:58 All the people in the world to get it, for David to get it and add it to his collection, that's perfect. Couldn't have asked for a better person for it to go to. Yeah, the whole story is wild, and David shares a little bit more about it in the episode that I did with him a while back ago. But yeah, I actually was just listening to that recently. It's some of the only evidence that still remains from the whole period of the Iowa Bigfoot Information Center in the late seventies, which was a group of gentlemen that we're investigating all the Bigfoot reports in Iowa in the late seventies, and unfortunately, from what I've heard, most of the reports, the tracks no longer exist unless a listener knows that they exist, and you have them then please reach out to me. But I believe that that Bigfoot is one of the only things that exists from that time period.

37:50 But anyways, there's other Big for Society episodes you can listen to on that where I go deep into it. I bet you have a sweet gift shop too. Oh yes, yeah, our gift shop is off. If there's anything and everything you can think of that's Bigfoot, you'll find it there in our gift shop. And Melinda and David they've done a fantastic job of procuring different items for that, and it was funny. David'll share the story like when he opened the museum, he talked about the museum part was the main attraction, and he had a few things from the gift shop. I think he might as maybe I had a T shirt or a few odd things. Nothing big than of coming in after they would visit the museum be like, oh do you have this? Oh do you have this? And he realized like, oh no, the gift shop that might actually be a big deal.

38:36 And I'm like, oh yes, yeah. People are definitely picking back up on the tourism aspects of things and souvenirs and things. So yeah, definitely had to pick up on the gift shop and yeah, they've done a great job. And they're all the time bringing in new things, and it's like Christmas for all of us employees. Whenever they bring in new merchandise, that's awesome. I mean, if I visited and if you guys have a sweet book selection, I'm going to be in trouble because it's hard to find. Oh, yes, you will be in big trouble. Absolutely, as books are my downfall, for sure. I am right there with you. Thinking over the years that you've been able to work at the museum, you have been able to hear a few stories. Do you have any that that stick out in your memory? I have several I've spoken to you have your one hundred dime a dozen as you want to call them, classic road crossing reports that will get in all the time, or people who have just heard something or had rockstone in at them from their tree stand. One of my ones that comes to memory right off the top of my head that's not necessarily wu or too paranormal, was I was. It was one of my early days I was working there, so I was actually working by myself at the time, and this really nice old mountain Feller came in, Big Beard, Big Overalls came in with his wife. And the first thing you tay,

40:07 you welcome to the museum. I can help you the street get tickets. First thing he asked me, he was, do you got any sounds in here that I can listen to. I was like, yes, sir, we have an entire audio station back there. When you get to that section, let me know and I'll help you get the volume in and everything so that you could hear it. He's okay, he was real quiet, and I'm already my wheels already turned into my head to go like he's heard something, all right, And so I give them their tickets and let them in the museum, and they spend a long time back in there. He comes back out and sure enough, one of the audio stations that we had back there, one of the howls or the ars, I don't remember exactly which one it was. He's like, I've heard that up at my my hunting camp up here in Cash's Valley. He was an older man, so he didn't have a tent rything. He had a little pup camper that he took up into the woods, and that's what he camped and hunted out of so he had went up there to his camp and he was walking to wherever his tree stand was, and it was by the creek, and he kept hearing the dunk, the dunk, the dunk of someone throwing rocks into the river or the creek, and he's thought that was weird, and it spooked him enough to where he decided to go back and set in his camper for a little bit and just sit and waiting. He just kept listening and listening, and then he could hear he started hearing the chatter going on, and then he hears a massive boulder get thrown into the creek right behind his little canter.

41:40 And then that's whenever it howls and roars as he's driving off, because he said, nope, I'm not going to stay here anymore. And sure enough, he said, one of those roars that we had back here on the audio station sounded exactly like what he heard. So that's one that comes off the top of my head that I always remember, and it's always it's so nice to have some of those good local faces come into there and share their encounters and experiences. And another one that comes to mind is a gentleman who was on the army base down in South Georgia near the Valdosta area, and this was in the sixties or early seventies, I believe, and he was actually the photographer for them and for the local newspaper, and he got called out to a scene one night on the military base and he was writing in the jeep. It was him in the passenger seat and the MP in the driver's seat, and they were just briefing him on we just want you to take pictures of this and then you know nothing else, don't ask questions, Okay, this is weird. And they get to the scene and it is just a jeep in the ditch and from the ditch, across the ditch you can see the fence line and then the military barracks. And he's already thinking, you know, is this all you brought me out here for?

43:07 This? Is it? Why was you making such a big deal about it? So he gets out to start taking some pictures and sure enough, there's tracks around this jeep. And as they're taking pictures of this, and he's talking to the other MP's the skunk ape as they call him in South Georgia and Florida, and that's what the guy called it. He said, the skunk ape was over there in the barracks and you could see it running back and forth between the barracks, and then it charged towards us, jumped the fence and then ran pasted all not past them, but diagonal of the fence line and into the woods. And he didn't, of course, even get any pictures of any of that, because they were all just gobsmack that he was this thing and same thing. He had to go to his superiors and they told him, you'll talk about this, this is hush. You say anything and you'll get court martialed and everything. So he just wrote up his little report that you know, oh it's a jeep wrecked for some audre reason.

44:12 I forget what he said he made up, but that was one of a super interesting one for me because it was one of those same ones that's very similar the ones that David gets, because you hear him talk about these are this is there's something I just got to get off my chest before I die because and so this gentleman was much older as well, since this has happened in the sixties and seventies, and so it was super cool and I felt almost honored. I was like, oh my goodness, this is one of my first big stories. Somebody wants to get off their chest before it's too late that they can't share this story with anybody else. Thankfully, I was able to get the guy's information, and him and David, I think chatted after that. So that was one of my favorites. And then one of the craziest ones I've heard that I've personally taken about a bigfoot, because I've actually taken reports about mothman, and I even talked to somebody about a gollm Rake type creature they saw one time in tons of dog man stories as well. But one of the most bizarre bigfoot stories I ever took was earlier this year when I came back to work at the museum. These two ladies from Colorado came in, and one of them was Native American and the other wasn't. And they were just like two peas in the pod, two sisters, and they were having a good time already when they came in, and I'm doing my usual thing, Welcome in, how are you ladies doing.

45:44 Let me introduce you to the museum. Here's the things to look for as you walk through, and of course they start asking me different questions about these different things. Right off the bat is popping off questions and so I'm trying to answer what little bit I can, and so they start sharing a story with me about this is something you're not going to believe, like, oh, try me, let me see what you got. And us at work, we are required to wear our logo shirts. So I had our logo on. On one half of the logo, it's round, it has the Sasquatch face, but it's in one of the tribal masks, and on the other half of the face is a Sasquatch but it's like just an outlined creature of it, and then that's what forms the full face. The lady said that the dreadlocks they called them on the drawing of the on our logo looked exactly like the dreadlocks on the Sasquatch creature that they saw. And they told me the story that they were at a spiritual gathering or whatever tribe this one lady was a part of out there in Colorado and they were doing the whole like drum circle thing. There was tons of people there and they were in the back of the group, and they were there together and it was dark, and they get this kind of like ominous hair standing up on the back of their neck feeling, and they both turn and look to their right and

47:16 there is this six or seven foot tall sasquatch looking at them, but it is wearing clothes it has looked like. And she said, it wasn't like it just got dressed or something fancy. It looked like something that they just pulled up out of the woods because it was muddy, it was button funny, the buttons wasn't lined up quite right, and I really regret and I forgot to ask them if the arms were whipped up like the Incredible Hulk or something, so I don't remember if they said the sleeves were torn, because they said it was a business type button up man's shirt and cans and they're gobsmack looking at this thing, and it looks back at them and smirks, yeah, you saw me. That's right, you saw me, And it proceeds to walk on past them into the crowd, and as it's walking, it's continuing to trance into a human form, and they the two ladies are looking at each other and they look over to their left, and the guy who was standing beside them, whom they didn't know, saw the exact same thing, because he was standing there with his chin to his knees. And both of the ladies as they're talking, one of them popics it sounds so crazy, it sounds so crazy. I don't know, I don't know.

48:34 And the other one is talking to her. It's like, it's okay. I mean, you can talk to her, you know, gil't have to be scared to talk about it. And I'm encouraging her as they're talking. You know, you can tell me about these things. It's okay. And at the same time, I'm also trying to keep a straight face and that going through the craziest story I've ever heard in my life. This is amazing. And they got all those details out to me, and they went on in through the museum, had a great time, enjoyed the evidence, and then we talked a little bit more as they came out, and of course, like any other day, it was really busy, so I didn't get to talk to them that much. And I'm about ninety nine percent sure I got their name and number, So that's one of the ones I'm pretty sure that David has locked up in the vault somewhere. What do you do with that information? That's just crazy. It just makes your brain go in so many different directions. It would be hard for me to work there because I would just be like, oh man, it would be awesome. Actually it'd be really fun too. But yeah, that would be like the coolest job ever. It is the coolest job ever, and I'm so blessed. Yeah, there, you talk to people that have seen bigfoot all over the US, then pretty much correct. Yes, Yeah, we even had the opportunity to talk to somebody who saw rock apes in Vietnam. Really, that's been super cool too. Yes, that's so rare to be able to talk to someone about that. It is, and it's he's such a nice gentleman too, And that's one of the nice things. The cool things about a lot

50:05 of these witnesses is just like me, just that they're just normal, average people. They're not people who are out here asking for this. Ninety nine percent of these people aren't these people going out in the woods and knocking on trees and setting up croud cams looking for them. They don't ask them this to happen to some of them, it really messes with them. Like even for myself, it was very hard for me to talk about this. I didn't talk to anybody, including my own husband, until after we were married and I started, you know, watching Bigfoot documentaries on and things like that. So just soon you know, this thing happened when I was younger, and I don't actually think I've ever told you before. It's these crazy things in this world that's wild. So you mentioned that you have people that come in that also are telling you things that are not Bigfoot related, so you get a lot of people talking about dog Man as well. Correct. Yes, I've actually taken several dog Man reports one, two, three, four that I can remember off the top of my head, and then we get them a lot more often than we would like, because as much as many things go bump in the night, out of everything, those things scare me the most. Oh sure, yeah, same here. I would much rather see a big Foot than a dog man, no question. Oh yeah, any day the accounts that you're taking, is Bigfoot usually involved with these stories or is it just the dog man by itself or any connection there? Good

51:37 question. Most of the ones that I remembering off top of my head that I've taken recently was just dog man. I can't think of any off top of my head of more than one, meaning one both dog man and bigfoot together. Nothing like the Martin Groves kind of story or anything like that comes to mind. I have talked to somebody who had a big creator encounter that involved with the orbs and stuff once. That was a pretty neat encounter. I don't remember too much of the details about it. That was when I first started working there back in twenty nineteen, and he was seeing the orbs of this dry creek bed around his property or his hunting property. And it wasn't long after that he had a bigfoot encounter. And the one that really stands out to me as far as non Bigfoot related ones was the gollum type creature. But this witness came in and I don't remember how the conversation got and started, but it was him and several other people. Was either some siblings or some friends. They all grew up together. And this was also in North Georgia, but a little farther southeast of us, like just for a general area, I'll say, in the Rome Cartersville Calhoun area for people for listeners, and they said that they were coming in from school and they were walking up their driveway and they seen this thing in their driveway and they said it looked exactly like how Gullham from The Lord of the Rings looked in

53:13 their driveway looking back at them, and it took off into the woods. And apparently they seen this thing several times, didn't tell anybody about it, but somehow another they were in class and somehow another that got brought up, and this girl sitting in the desk beside him said, oh, yeah, we've been seeing this thing on our property as well. We've actually been leaving it out food and stuff. And he just what And I said the same thing. I'm like, oh my goodness, So like, how long did this go on? He's honestly, After that, after we talked about it together, we didn't really see it much more after that, and we never really talked to anybody about it. So that was one that was super cool to me, because you have your main man Cryptis, you have dog Man, Bigfoot, Mothman, and lake monsters, so to hear and get a report from somebody of something super obscure was just that was super cool to be privy to be the one to take that report from that person. Yeah, those encounters always get me with either pale Crawler or whatever you like to call them. It's just really thank you, Jeff. Yeah, not my cup of tea, But if anyone wants to talk about it, I will definitely talk about it. Man, Amanda is such a fun chat. You're doing some incredible work down there, you and Cam and all you guys together.

54:40 And I would just recommend, even though I've never been there, I'd recommend if listeners are able to go to that museum, definitely check it out. From everyone I've absolutely it's worth checking it out. Yeah, And I'll chime in on that point as well, because even though I'm a little privy there because I am an a, I highly recommend it because even before I work there growing up in that area, Saul, if you're opening a Bigfoot museum in Blue Ridge, at first, it's like, oh man, really, our area hasn't been starting to be a little bit more touristy. So I was thinking, oh man, this is gonna be something corny. It's gonna have all these things in there. It's just gonna make fun of it, it's just gonna be something awful, and it's the exact opposite that David has done an amazing job of putting this thing together. He does use it as a hub to run his research out of, so that it is a safe place for people to come and if you're just curious about the subject matter, or even if you're just looking for something fun to do, if it's not necessarily your cup of tea. I tell people all the time of hey, if it's not your thing, you can how many times can you save into a Bigfoot museum? And I usually get a good laugh out of people from that. Amanda, thank you so much for coming on. What's if people want to I always ask this, if people want to reach out to you and maybe they have something they want to share with you about your encounter, is there any way they can reach out to you or anything like that.

56:09 Yeah, they can reach out to me on any of my social media's. Again, I just made the online personality of Amanda the Bigfoot Lady as a way too I can do exactly that so that I can interact and talk with witnesses and our customers in the museum. So you can see me on any of the social media accounts TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. You can even throw in my email address in there if you want, which is just Amanda the Bigfoot Lady at Gmail. And of course always hit up the museum. You can just look us up. If you just look up Expedition Bigfoot dot com on any web search, it'll pull up our museum and we'll be more than happy to talk with you. We are a safe place for people to share any kind of encounters and stories, anything or even if you just have questions about it. That's what we're here for. We're here to help.

57:01 That's fantastic. The more places we have, the better where it's a safe place for people to share what they saw and have questions answered. But thanks so much for coming on tonight, Amanda. Oh, it's been a pleasure to amur. I absolutely just wanted to take a few minutes to say thank you to you all my 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.

57:45 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. Number one encounters from Franklin County, Texas. Number two encounters from the entire state of Iowa. Number three encounters from Oakridge, Oregon or the surrounding area. Number four any individuals that know about bigfoot being flown off after the Mount Saint Helens eruption. Number five. Individuals that have had a bigfoot encounter while in the military. Number six those that have had a bigfoot encounter in the southern New Hampshire or north central Massachusetts area, including Franklin County, Massachusetts. Number seven individuals that have had a bigfoot encounter in a Bible camp or boy Scout camp setting. Number eight individuals that have had bigfoot try to enter their house forcibly while they were living inside.

58:39 Number nine individuals that have actively have a bigfoot living on their property. And lastly, any sightings that are in the Wachitaw National Forest area of Oklahoma or Arkansas. 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. I'll see you back next time. Listeners, new shows on Mondays and Fridays. I'll see you then,