The Beast of the Bayou! | Louisiana

0:00 You're listening to BIGFA Society, and I'm Jeremiah Byron. In this show, we go beyond the campfire stories to bring you first hand encounters from people who say they've seen something impossible. From backwoods trails and remote mountain haulers to quiet farms and crowded highways. The stories come from everywhere, and each one leaves us with more questions than answers. These are the voices of the people who've lived it. To settle in, because today you'll hear another account that just might change the way you see the woods forever. So stay with us. You've got the privilege of talking to Mike today. Mike is from down there in Louisiana, wanting to share some interesting things he's had happen over the years. Welcome to the show, Mike. How are you doing, sir.

0:45 I'm doing great, Jeremiah, and it's good to talk with you. Absolutely, I think it might be interesting. First, Mike, do you mind sharing what made you contact the show in the first place that you had shared with me a few minutes ago. I've lived on Cattle Lake my entire life, pretty much my entire life, moved off for eight years the East coast career wise or whatever, but came back and retired and these incidents, and these incidents that happened to me drastically changed my life. I was a big hunter and camper and trapper, and the last incident pretty much kept me out of the woods and just terrified me. And so I got infatuated digging into it a little bit deeper, trying to find answers and started listening to the missing.

1:33 For one one stuff, Fred roll up a Subarctic sasquatch and ran across your show and happened to listen to a lady that was talking about her encounters on Kedlea, And so it just inspired me to drop you an email and see if you were interested in listening to some of the strange things that I had happened to me on Kettle Lake. Absolutely, and the rest is history, and we were able to set it up, Mike, as that area is there's a lot of activity and a lot of history. But I'm curious to hear what you've experienced. Feel free to take us back as far as you need to when you started experiencing things in this area.

2:17 Okay, I had two back to back incidentss that really made me start thinking about things. And this happened in nineteen eighty seven, in nineteen eighty eight, and it made me think about things that happened with me, strange things that happened through the woods when I was younger. And I'll go back to those, but I want to talk about what happened in nineteen eighty seven. I was duck hunting, and I was duck hunting in a pond that was about a twenty acre pond that was just a few hundred yards from the main value James Bayou, right on Louisiana, Texas line. I don't know if it used to be part of the Vayu. I don't know why that pond was.

3:00 It's just but it was there. And the back half of this pond was separated from the main pond by a small group of trees. And the back half the pond was old, flooded timber, and the majority of it had fallen, had died, rotted and fallen. There was some buck brushing there, but a really great place for ducks to light. And so I built a small little duck line, just a one man duck line with a seat and something to stand on his chute and put wire around it and brushed it. And when you're in the duckline and you look to the right hand side of the pond, there was trees, very small trees that were very close together that came out into the water, probably twenty yards or so, but there was really thick back in there.

3:51 On the left hand side was an old pine forest growth and it was easy access into. And that's how I kept my little kayak there and got to my mind the night before I went hunting. This morning it had gotten really cold for us here. It's down in the twenties, which is rare but good for duck on ducks follow the weather. I was excited about going, and I left about forty five minutes earlier than I normally did normally did because I thought that there may be some ice on the pond and I might need to break the ice up so the ducks that have a place to light. And I got there and there was just a real thin sheet ice on there, and it broke up when I took my kayak through there, and I got in my duck mind and went to pour me a cup of coffee, and I heard some splashing to the bright of me and for some reason, Jeremiah, this is so weird. I instantly had this feeling of dread, and I've never had that feeling hunting before anything. And this was before the sounds. I could really make out what was going on, and so I just froze. And it was somebody walking in the water, and it was somebody walking in about died deep water and they were inside that tree line. And that tree line is treacherous.

5:18 I had shot a couple of ducks that had fallen back in there, and there was a bunch of dead falls and it was just very It was very dangerous to be and I had to go get some ducks out of there before and it was not comfortable. Plus there's some big alligators in that pond as well. And I could see the moonlight was lighting the ripples from the water from where they were moving, and I could tell that it was just right inside the tree line. It was still very dark. I couldn't see anything, and realistic though in the daytime, you really couldn't see in there because of the canopy of the trees. It was so dark. But this person just I could hear him stepping over the dead falls, and I knew it wasn't a deer or anything. It would have to jump, or a cow would have had to jump, pig would have been swimming. Beavers and alligators don't make noise like that.

6:09 It was definitely somebody walking and stepping over the dead falls, and it came within probably thirty feet of me, and I just was froze, and I sit there and I listened to it walk until I couldn't hear it anymore to the back of the pond. And I'm thinking, who in their right mind would be walking through that without a light first and foremost, and who in their right mind would be walking through that to begin with? And my first thought was, Oh, it's got to be a game boarder. They must think I'm doing something wrong or something like that. And that's pretty much what I thought.

6:51 And I thought I'm gonna get checked. I made. I'm sure I did everything legal, and it was a good morning. I shot my limited ducks by eight or eight thirty that morning. I gathered my ducks and got my truck and went to leave and expected to get stopped by the game warden. Didn't happen, and I just since something was wrong. It was just not normal. Nobody would be walking through that in the dark without a light, as cold as it was, as treacherous as that was, and it just bugged me. The next day, I ran into the game warden and I asked him about it, and he was like, there's no way I'm gonna sit in my car in the heater and wait for you to come out. I'm not getting in that water. And that instantly sparked curiosity to me. So I instantly went back out there. And I had never walked on the bank on the opposite side, and so I went over there, and Lord and behold, it was clear on the other side of those trees on the bank. It was completely clear, and no underbrush and no thorn or anything. Somebody could have easily just walked down through there. I would have never heard them. And then it made me go. It really raised flags, and I'm like, whoever this was was really trying very hard not to be seen by anybody, and it freaked me out, to be unhnest with you.

8:25 I hunted there a couple more times, but only in the afternoons, and I was out of there by dark. It there was something wrong about it, and I could not put my finger on it, and I felt uncomfortable being there. It was a great duck hunting spot. It was the best duck hunt spot I ever had, but something was wrong right, and I felt it, and I just decided not to go. By spring forward to the next year, nineteen eighty eight, it was opening week of squirrel season, and squirrel season opened on this Saturday, and it rained very hard all weekend long, and I was off on Monday, and there was a place I wanted to go check down in the swamps that I thought would be a really good spot for deer, and I wanted to scout it and see if I saw any signs of deer and possibly shoot a couple of squirrels.

9:23 When I was down there and I got up that Monday morning, it was still downpour and raining, and it stopped about ten o'clock and I parked. I went out to the woods and I parked at their friends camp and I walked started heading towards the mouth of the swamp, and I stopped at some old oak trees and sat down for a while. Didn't see anything, and the woods were really quiet, but it normally is when the weather's bad, so I didn't think much about it, and I got up to go ahead and head down to where I was going, and a blue heron alerted on the value.

10:03 And for a hunter, that's really bad because the blue herons are really loud and they let everything know for a mile and a half that there's danger. And so I was like, dam it was the first of a squirrel season. The leaves are still on the trees, it was still pretty warm. I knew I was going to have a hard time to seend squirrels anyway, but I was like warned everything, But anyway, I'm down here to go look for deer tracks and scrapes and that kind of thing. So the area that I was going to go check out is actually a peninsula down in the swamp, and it's a white oak flat down in there, and these white oaks trees they have acorns the size of quarters, these huge acorns, and I always thought they would be a good spot for deer. You got on three sides, is only one way in and one way out, so I wanted to just check it out. And I got to the peninsula and I started doing my stalking hunt like I do, moving as quiet as I can, balking my movement as much as I can and i'd go about twenty thirty yards stop, sit there for about ten minutes and look around and listen, and it's kind of a zigzag pattern. And I zigzagged all the way back to the end of the peninsula. There. I didn't see anything, didn't hear anything. It woulds just really quiet. I started

11:38 my way back and I was going to use my zigzag pattern going the opposite way. And I was stopped, and I picked a path to go, and I used trees and things like that to try to mask my movement as much as possible. And I saw a spot and there was a low spot in the ground and there's a big mud puddle there. I was going to go by it, so I started that way, and as soon as I got next to that mud totaled this huge splash, just splash and just soaked me. Scared the heck out of me. And my first thought was, Oh, crap, a gator. And then I looked down and I realized it was just a few inches deep. And then I thought I walked straight up on a deer. And I looked and I didn't see the deer's tail flagging. I didn't see the deer going off and I'm thinking wood duck, and I'm looking there's nothing fine off and I'm confused.

12:33 And I looked back down in the water and there's this half rotten pine limb about I don't know foot in diameter, about two feet long, sitting in there. And so I thought, oh, a squirrel was running across the rotten limb and it fell. And so I looked up and there was no pine tree up above me. And right about that time, another pine limb conflying by the left side of my head, past my ear. I'm talking, Jeremiah, within the eighth of the inch of hitting me with velocity, I jumped and I instantly went to turn around to my right to look behind me, and something let out this scream. It was a short scream. It was just a couple of seconds long. It scared me so bad.

13:35 I can't even tell you what it sounded like, but I can tell you what it felt like. It felt like I was electrocuted or something. It shook my entire body, and before I knew it, I was like ten steps into a full run. My body my mind had not computed what was going on. And when I finally my mind finally caught up with my body as to what was going on, and my mind was like, Okay, this is not a flight or fight situation. This is a flight and fight situation. This is you're in bad spot here.

14:20 So I got to the bayou, so I had one side of myself protected and I stopped, and I kicked some squirrel loads out, and I put some slugs in my gun, and I looked maybe five seconds I stopped. I heard nothing. I saw nothing. I looked to my further to my right to make sure nothing was flanking me. I saw nothing, I heard nothing. So I just took off on a run. I ran all the way back to my car and completely terrified me. The feeling that that that Yelle made is it's really undescribable. It really is.

15:06 And that's when I realized there's something out there, and that's something that was out there was not throwing pebbles and pine cones at me to get my attention. That thing was trying to hit me. And for years I thought about it and thought about it. I thought maybe there was a young one there was protecting it. This, that and the other, and now I think about it, I think that it felt threatened by me. I had a gun. I think that it felt threatened by me by the way I was moving through the woods, and I think that it felt like I was going to see it eventually, and I think he was trying to separate me from the gun. I truly do. And unfortunately he didn't hit me with that, because if he were to hit me, it would have definitely knocked me out, maybe even worse. So that ended my hunting career and my camping career. I'm still an avid fisherman, but I have just never felt comfortable going back into the woods again, and it's a shame. And I'm thinking back on it.

16:20 My kids, my oldest child was a baby when this happens, and my two boys don't even know the person I used to be, the big outdoor hunting camper, all this stuff. They never knew that guy. It was terrifying. It was terrifying, And then I started thinking about odd things that had happened before that and started putting the pieces together, and I just remembered something in the last couple of weeks that I could have had a sighting. I was ten years old and my dad had a friend who was a big hunter. Their owned a bunch of land and he asked me if I wanted to come to your hunt, and I was like yeah, and so my dad took me in. My dad was in the hunter, and they basically drove me out to this box stand and set me in a box stand and they went back to the camp and probably had some drinks or whatever, but they weren't hunting. They just dropped me off. They gave me a flashlight and tell me to walk back to the camp after it got dark, and if I shot it, they would come out and help me get the deer out.

17:28 I said, in the in the stand and didn't see anything, and then all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose about one hundred and fifty yards in front of me, and I see these little trees just swaying all in the in the air, and stuff crashing and all this stuff, and something huffing and puffing. Something was angry and it was done. And I looked up and every now and then I could see something big and something black in between the trees. And this went on for a long time. This went on for like maybe forty five minutes an hour, and right before dark it stopped. It got dark, and I was like, I didn't know where this thing went or what it was. I wasn't getting out of the stand, and so finally my dad drove down in the truck and got me from the stand and asked me why I didn't. He's worried about me, asked me why I didn't do it, and I told him what had happened.

18:35 And there's a gentleman that had a farm five to ten miles from there, and he raised a bunch of bison, a bunch of buffalo. And my dad told me one of those bison must have got out, and it's a good thing you stayed in the stand, because those things can be pretty aggressive in their mean It's a good thing you stayed in the stand. And I never thought anything else about it. My dad. I was ten years old. My dad, to me at that time, was the smartest man in the world. And he said it was a buffalo. It was a buffalo. But now I questioned that then, and we spring forward. That was probably it was probably nineteen seventy three when that happened. So we jump up to nineteen seventy eight, and me and a buddy were running lines that night on the bayou and it was cold.

19:33 I remember it was cold, and on the byu we were on, we were always told on the west side of the bayou, if anybody comes hollering at whatever, you go over there, because there was not a bridge over the bayou and there was no phone lines over there, and somebody was in trouble. It was like an hour drive to the hospital. We were down there checking our lines, and all of a sudden we heard somebody hollering. We shined our light over and there was this gentleman on the end of this pier, and so we cranked the motor up and went over to him, and this guy just jumped in our boat and was like, go, and so we did, and we went about one hundred yards down to bayou and my buddy shut the motor off and we looked at him, like, what's the matter? Are you okay? And he was like, I came to go deer hunting with my buddies, and I was coming down the road and I hit something and it was on all fours, but then it got up on two legs and ran off, and I came all the way to the camp and I came out to see if the door of the camp was open, and this thing must have followed me and it was tacking my truck. And to be honest with you, Jeremiah, we were looking at this guy like it was the seventies, right, So I'm thinking, Okay, this guy on some acid or some mushrooms or something.

21:04 And then the buffalo came back into mine. I thought maybe he hit one of those buffalo made him mad. In this road that's over there, it's very undeveloped road. It's a dirt road. He couldn't have been going more than twenty five miles an hour when he hit whatever he hit and done, so I'm thinking we were thinking all kinds of things. We never thought bigfoot, right. So the gentleman came back to our camp and tried to make some phone calls, but it was like four in the morning and everybody was sleeping. This guy was terrified, and I think he got angry at us because we kept saying that there's some guy that has buffalo over there.

21:45 When he was finally quit talking to us, but he told us he wasn't going to go back to that camp till daylight. So we stayed up with him and took him back, and when we pulled up, we saw that there was other vehicles there. I wished we would have stopped and got out and looked at the guy's truck and whatever, but we were tired and we left. I actually, after I had my encounter, had contacted the BFRO and told them about that scary encounter I had, and also asked them about this encounter of the gentleman supposedly hitting something, and they never got back to me.

22:26 But I know the gentleman. I'm sixty two and the gentleman is probably ten to fifteen years older than me. I don't know if you still around, But if somebody hears this that knows something about that encounter, I would love to hear from them, because I'd love to hear more on that. I wish i'd have paid more attention instead of just thinking the guy was crazy or just scared of being in the woods. It's basically what we thought. The next year, we were at the same place running lines and we decided to quit. When we came in and the camp you had to use the key to lock the door front door, and we left and we got down the road and I thought, I don't remember if I locked the door, and so I said, we'll go back, and so we turned around, we went back.

23:16 I had my car running. We both walked up to the on the porch and I had locked it, but my buddy said, hey, I want to get a coke out the fridge. So I unlocked it. He went and got a coke, and when I was locking it, right beside the house was a small scores shed and we had to go down the steps and walk right past it to get to our car. And it was right there and something started huffing and puffing behind that thing, and it sounded agitated, and it soundedn't matter than hell, and it was more breathing with a guttural kind of growl at the end of it. And I looked at my buddy and I said, don't run. And about that time, this thing led out a yell, and it was one of those yells, just like the yell that I heard when I was on that peninsula. You felt it. And I looked at my buddy was already getting in the car.

24:15 He had taken off. So I took I running and got in the car and we left out there and we laughed about it. We talked, what could it be? We do have an occasional bear every now and then and have wild hogs. And we did go out there to go look see if we see tracks the next day, but it's pine forest and soul pine straw, and we laughed it off. We didn't think even though we were only twenty five miles from Foul. But my dad just told me that was a movie and it wasn't real. I believe that nobody spoke of back then, of encounters or anything like that. I had never heard of anything. So the last thing we were ever thinking about was a big foot or a cryptid or anything like that.

24:59 But that and that's pretty much the things that have happened to me. Now since that time. I have had a few strange things. This happened. I was fishing with a guy. We were down in the bayou. We were catfishing, and we heard a muffled voice come from the swamp and it actually said the guy's name. And the guy looked at me and said, did you hear that? I'm like yeah, he said, was that my name? And I'm like yeah, And there's no way anybody was out there, and we moved the boat. We went on down the swamp a little bit and found a new place to go.

25:40 Another time, I was out there and I anchored up to fish and had that just that weird feeling that something was wrong. And the first cast a hooked to fish, a good fish, and I heard something, but I was concentrated on catching the fish, and all of a sudden, this tree cracked and fell into the swamp on my right hand side. Scared me. So I'm fighting this fish, trying to get this fish in, and I'm like, I'm gonna get this fish in. Before I could get that fish into the boat, another tree on the left hand side of the value came down and crashed into the water, and that freaked me out. And the wind wasn't blowing.

26:32 It was not a storm. It was just as calm day as it could be. Got the fish in the boat, I untied my boat, and I got the hell out of there. But those are That's pretty much the jest of everything that strange has happened to me. Mike, You got any questions, Yeah, Mike. You really have had a lot of wild stuff happened over the years. If you look at everything like chronologically in order, it's there's no surprise that you got to a point in the eighties, and you're like, you know what enough is enough? And you take into consideration the stuff that you experienced as a younger man, as a boy. You're about fifteen years old, I believe when you had that incident with the guy jumping into your boat saying that he had run into a big foot. That's absolutely wild, dude.

27:22 Yeah, yeah, And I'll be honest with you, Jeremy, the last thing on our mind was me and my friends both were bigfoot, even though we were right here at foul. We even knew some people that were in the movie, but nobody talked about it, and it's really strange. Oh and I got to tell you this. So the gentleman that I was fishing with when we heard somebody mummer his name out there right about three months ago, stopped. He saw me out burning some brush and stopped and he said, Mike, I got to tell you this. He said, we were down where you had your encounter and I had my girlfriend. Were going for a boat ride down through the swamps, and he said, you know the old duck line back there, and I said yeah. He said.

28:08 We stopped and I was looking to just see what kind of shape the duck line was in to see if it was salvageable. He said, I was thinking about maybe using it this year. And he said, all of a sudden, I heard a big splash, he said, and I anstantly thought it was a beaver, but it didn't sound like a beaver. And for people that don't know, beaver will slap his tail on the water, But it sounds like a slapper. It sounds like a gun going off. He said, this sounded like something heavy throw in the water. It was more like a cadooche. And he turned to start the motor and he saw this huge rock come flying and it landed right beside his boat. And this was three months ago. And this guy is a young guy, but he's an experienced woodsman and boatsman and all that stuff.

28:56 And he scared of them and he got out of there. He made a point to come tell me about it the next day. So it's still ongoing. It's still ongoing. It's I don't go out there. I stay in the boat absolutely. And all these sorry, in all these that you're telling me about, these all happen around Cattle Lake. Then yes, they were on Cattle Lake, on the very north end of the lake. If you look at a map, you've got the main lake now where the other lady had her experiences on the complete opposite side of the lake, on the west side of the lake over there. Mine is really way north. So if you look at the map of Cattle Lake, it goes into James Bottle, then you will see where it basically turns into swamp for probably I don't know, seven ten miles of swamp, and then it opens up into another little value and they call it Monterey Lake. And most of my experiences happened on Monterey Lake or in the swamps. And separating Monterey Lake from Jeanie's.

30:13 Value, Oh yeah, I'm seeing that, man, that is way up there. When you get up to Monoey Lake, you're really really going up there. Yep. Okay. And I when I was a kid, I used to explore and stuff, and I literally took the very north end of that and hiked falling creeks all the way into Arkansas. If you look at that, if you ever heard of the Mike Wooley incident in Louisiana, where, yeah, less than hour's drive from where we're at, the Big Thicket in East Texas has got a lot of reporting. That's about an hour's drive from us, but we all share the same watershed, so you put all that together, it's kind of okay. I can see where they my great and could my great down through here easily and like it. And most of my encounters, all my encounters were in the fall or in the winter. I never had anything happened. I never had anything happen weird happened in the spring. I never had anything weird happen in the summer. I used to camp by myself when I was eleven years old, out in these values and stuff, and I loved it, and I nothing scared me. I was taught to respect nature and understand it, and as long as you respect it, you will be okay. And I never had it. Like I said, I never felt

31:46 uncomfortable in the woods as a kid. And for this instance to happen to me, to just completely keep me out of the woods, it was just a life changing event for me. It was terrified me. I'm not gonna lie to you, Jeremiah scared me. Oh absolutely, Just when you're out there by yourself, you can get really interesting. Growing up in this area. So when was it that you had seen the Boggy Creek movie Legend of Bogga Creek. I saw it when it came out. My dad took us to Texas, Canada go see it. I was nine, okay, and I was like, oh crap, it's weird. But my dad told me, Dad, that's just a movie. And my dad and my mom or in my mentor that taught me hunting and stuff. My dad was not an outdoorsement so I had this manner, wonderful old man that taught me to hunt and fish and trap. They didn't have a problem with me camping out in the woods by myself and going out by myself, and as a kid, you're thinking, well, there's something out there that could hurt me that I don't know about or I haven't seen yet.

32:53 They would tell me and they wouldn't let me go out there. But as far as the Boggy Creek movie goes to this day, if I'm at somebody's camp or a house that's out in the woods and they have a couch that sitting next to a window a table, yeah yeah, I still to this day will not sit on that couch. Yeah yeah, yeah, it is. I think that's what most people think of with that. That's what I think with that movie is that it's like an amazing jump scary. Yeah, what have you ever seen the Have you ever seen the movie The Creature from Black Leg? I haven't yet. Actually, I need to look that up. You need to look it up. It's actually really good and it's filmed. Where I had my violent encounter is about two hundred yards from where they filmed the scene where the monster snatched a guy out of a boat. Really honestly, yeah, yeah, it was about two hundred yards down the swamp from there. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

34:05 That's awesome. So when you were the one account you shared where you heard something huffing and puffing, I know that a lot of people will bring up that maybe was a deer. But the cool thing in you're it was is yet. It was black. It was black. It was not a deer, and it was not grunting like a good deer. It was black. Now, could it have been one of those buffalo that got out of that guy's farm. It's not like we have wild buffalos in Louisiana and he stutch us. But this guy did have a big herd of buffalo and he raised him for years after Could it have been a buffalo that got out of the can and had been down there, Absolutely, But it was big. It was not a deer, and it was black black, and it wasn't snorting like a deer. And this was a continuous This was a continuous huffing and puffs and puffing and tearing trees down and shaking trees and it was whatever.

35:05 It was not happy. But like I said, my dad said, probably one of those buffaloes got out, and they're nasty, and just be aware if you see a buffalo in the woods to keep your distance from it. And I okay, And it could have been it could have been one of those buffaloes that got out. I don't know, but it might not have been. Absolutely. Yeah, it's wild to hear stuff like that out there. I was just solo camping in Iowa. And it's it's, oh. My goodness, what time was it. It was late. I was the only one out there in this area, way out there, and all of a sudden, something is like out moving outside the camp and like making this huffing noise for a second half. But I do sometimes you gotta do a little research with sounds. And I was like almost one hundred percent sure that was a deer, but still man freaks out rightly.

36:04 Hear. When I was a kid, where I used to camp, it was down in the Bayou. And I will tell you, Cadillac's a beautiful, amazing place. If you ever get a chance to come see it's one of the most beautiful places in America, I can tell you. But it's full of life, full of wildlife just everywhere. But at night it really comes to life and it's a roar. It literally is a roar all night. It is so loud and all the frogs and insects and stuff. And it used to it was like great noise to me when I was a kid. It would just put me right to sleep. Now what would wake me up is when it got quiet. And this was way before cell phones or anything like that. But when it got quiet, I knew a storm was coming. I knew they had a big thunderstorm was sixing to come, and it was six start running like hell, and it always did. It was like the weather protector predictor. Something could have been walking around my dad gumb tent and it would have had to been awful loud for me to hear it. Because it is a roar down in those values. It is super loud at night. But I never had any problems at all. I kept my camp lit up. I had three Coleman Leonards. I had I strung ropes around my camp site and I'd fill them up at night before I went to bed in case I got up and had to take care of business that I wouldn't step on the snake or something. But I've never had any

37:36 issues whatsoever. Never it was strange. Down in that area. What do most people think that Bigfoot is? Do you have any thoughts about that, Mike. I don't know. It just seems like now in the last seven eight years, when you get to talking about it, people will openly say, man, let me tell you what happened to me, or this happened to my dad or whatever. Before then, you didn't hear much. I haven't really heard much on what people think they are. I think, you know, with everything I've been watching and hearing, and I think they're more human than there are anything. I think that DNA shows that they're more human. I think they've got the ability to think and reason. I think that this thing got aggressive with me when he did because he knew I was a threat, and I was at that time.

38:44 If I would have seen it and it was staring me down, I'd have probably shot it at that time. I probably would have now if it was walking away from me. No, but I think that they can think and they can reason, and they're smart. And the fact that Jeremiah, this is what's so crazy. So when that really scary incident happened to me, I call myself a very patient hunt. I moved very slow through the woods, very quiet. I take my time, I don't move my head around when I'm talking. I use my eyes, I mask my movements. I'm smelling. We have a lot of cotton mouth snakes here and they smell really bad, and usually smell them before you see them. Same thing with copperheads.

39:32 You can usually smell them before you see them. They blend in with everything. So I did not see anything, I did not smell anything, and I did not hear anything. And that freaks me out because I was a pretty observant hunter and an observement of my surroundings. And the fact that I never heard anything, and the fact that I ever smelled anything or saw anything that blows my mind. I don't know where this thing could have been to where I didn't see him. Obviously I passed him twice. There's only one way in and one way out. So how I didn't see him twice, I don't know. That blows my mind. It's got to be a very smart animal.

40:25 Oh absolutely, And you really hit the nail on the head there. That The thing I always notice is how there really is a massive intelligence. It's not. It is not dumb like you always hear about. You don't sneak up on it, you don't fool it. You're definitely not gonna trick it, that's for sure. I think I think that it was doing what I was doing, and it went down in that peninsula and the only escape is one way out there's water, unless you're going to take to the water, there's water. He sides. I think he made a bad decision and he got trapped, and he, like I said, he obviously felt threatened because he was had made a decision he was going to try to take me out or separate me from my gun.

41:20 So I think what happened was is he went in before me, and that's with that blue hair and alerted he saw and he alerted everything down there that hey, there's some bad coming to your way, and I just followed it in and I had him trapped. Is the way I'm thinking about it now, after I've had all these years to think about it. Wild stuff, wild stuff. Why do you think people are at the point down there where they're coming forward with what's happening or they're more likely to share it with you now? Oh yeah, no, absolutely. When I bring it up, or sometimes you sitting around the campfire having a fish fire, somebody will say something and it will spark a conversation and you know, this happened to Sow, and this happened to my daddy, or this happened to me. They're way more open about it than what they were back in the seventies and the eighties. You just never heard anybody say anything at all. So I think people are warrime or you're just way more open to it. I didn't say anything to anybody for a long time. I told my wife at the time. She knew something scared me, but she didn't believe in bigfoot and stuff like that, and so I didn't tell anybody for years. I just kept it to myself because I didn't understand it. I didn't really know how to explain it.

42:48 Absolutely, it sounds like you're still able to go fishing, though, correct. You're still able to go. Oh yeah, that's my hobby. And as a matter of fact, I go down in the swamps fish or swamp so lot, and I go right past where the d counter happened. I go by there very quickly. I just want to let you know, these boots will never get on that piece of ground ever again. But I do. And like I said, and there's been a few times when I'm down there fishing and I get this odd feeling that something's not right, and I move, and I move, And that's only happened a couple of times since this has happened, but it has happened. And I listened to my gut and I got out of there.

43:35 Mike, You've had an amazing life when it comes to being out in the outdoors, the Bayous and the swamps, and what you've experienced is definitely intense. I just want to say thank you for coming on the show and for sharing with us your experiences. I want to make sure that you were able to share everything that you came to the show to share today. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed talking with you and maybe hopefully, like I said, I hope that somebody listens to this, and especially the gentleman that said he hit one. If they know anything about it, but reach out to you, I want to hear about it. So if you're from the Catalac area and you've had some weird areas, reach out to Jeremiah. We'd like to hear them. Absolutely.

44:23 Mike, stay in touch if you ever have anything else happen. But hopefully it cools down for you. You're welcome to reach out. But thanks for chatting and you have a great rest of. Your day, sir, you too, Jeremiah, thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Big Society podcast. Every encounter we share reminds us that the world is bigger and stranger than we think, and that the truth is often hiding just beyond the tree line. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the channel on YouTube hit the bell so you don't miss the next episode, and share this with a friend who's into mysteries, monsters, or the unexplained. And if you're listening to us, on Spotify or Apple Podcast. Please follow the show there and leave us a five star positive review because all that helps more people discover the show.

45:09 And remember, if you or someone you know has had a Bigfoot sighting, please I'd love to hear from you, so email me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com and let's start the conversation. If you haven't gotten a chance yet, check out our membership community over at www dot Bigfoot Society podcast dot com and that's where you can hear tomorrow's episode today early in ad free and members only episodes every week. Also, it's a place to connect with other people that are into the Bigfoot subject as much as you are. Thanks again for following along with the Bigfoot Society until next time, keep your eyes open, trust your gut, and never stop asking what else might be out there? And see you in the woods.