The White Sasquatch of the Quabbin | Massachusetts

0:00 You're listening to Biglea 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, all right, Big the Society. You've got the privilege of talking to John Coster today. John is an individual I got connected to. He is a songwriter, musician, author, and Harvard graduate, and he's on the show to share about his encounters out there in western Massachusetts that are written about in his book Convergence Encounters with an Impossible Being, which is a fantastic read I've read as well. And before before I hand things over to John, I just want to say this is a privilege to have John on the show. Longtime listeners will know that I grew up in Northfield, which is the northern part of the Pioneer Valley. So I've always tried my hardest to get individuals on that would talk about places like the Kabbin or Amherst Hadley, Greenfield, Northfield, gil And it's really, really, really hard to get those individuals on. So it's great

1:32 to be able to talk to an individual who's kind of mentions locations in that general area in his book. But you know, welcome to the show, John, How are you doing today. I'm doing great, So thanks for having me. And I had forgotten that you were from this part of the country. That's very interesting. Yeah, absolutely, you know, and it's a thing where there as you know, there's more with bigfoot that goes on in this part of the country then most people know because it's not really talked about publicly. And when I lived there growing up, I wasn't really in that mindset, so I wasn't going out and you know, into the different state force and exploring for that. But now I'm like, oh, I got to get back there and and kind of look at this a different way. But you know, John, your story is is incredible in in I've read your book and there's there's so much to it, so you know, would you would you mind kind of walking us through sharing what you've experienced over the years and and how this all started for you.

2:40 No, not at all. Well, first of all, my own encounter, or the encounter I had with my partner of the time and very close friend forever, was the last thing in the world that I expected. Having said that, I have to admit and confess that I had had, since early childhood a kind of a fascination with bigfoots, last the abominable snowman. I don't I mean, I can remember as a young boy reading some kind of a I think there was an article about the Abominable Snowman in Argacy magazine. And that's a long, long, long time ago.

3:27 Many years later, I found myself at Harvard, and in order to pass, I was studying history and literature. But in those days, and I thinks to today, we all we had to pass, and certain we had to take at least a full year of science, And I ended up studying human evolution, which needless to say, made us take a look at a lot of the close cousins that we have as a matter of fact, and close cousins in our evolutionary past, whether it's and that field is just dramatically exploded. So now that there's here, it is all these years later. There's not just Neanderthal and peking Man. There's all these everything in between. You know, there's all sorts of hominins or hominids depending on your classification. Stuff, a lot of close relatives to men, the living ones as well as the past ones that some of whom led to our line of, you know, our human beings as far as we understand things today. So but having said that, every once in a while I read something about sasquatching the Northwest or something like that, and I was always kind of interested in the subject, partly because based on the science studies that I had back in Cambridge in those days, everybody seemed like, well, you know,

4:58 when you consider how the ice is ages came and went during the Pleistocene, and a lot of early violent weather changes happened, and there were all these big forms of animals, like we had giant everything was bigger. We had a lot of giant creatures. We had you know, gigantic slaws, and we had mammas. We had all these creatures that were you know, were called megafona and even though anything over one hundred pounds, including us, is technically megafauna. Nevertheless, it made a lot of sense that some primate would have adapted to the comings and goings of the ice ages during that period, that really long formative period called the Pleistocene, which only ended at the end of the Last ice Age, and so we're kind of like barely out of it, if you'll think of things in terms of geological times. So I just thought, well, a big, big, you know, ape like creature that's a close relative of man.

5:51 It's it's almost would be as surprising if something like that didn't exist. So that was kind of my background. But I haven't really thought of any of this for a long time. And then I was living with my friend at that time and up or at the beginning of this recent encounter up in Pelham, Massachusetts, and we were about, oh, just maybe us A crow flies four or five miles from the Cobb And Reservoir, which is a very big wilderness area, the Corobbin is, as people referred to it as the accidental Wilderness, or the basically back I think it was in the late thirties the state developed the plan to dam up some of the rivers.

6:38 It ran through an old farming valley, and they built an enormous reservoir that reservoirs, but it's a major source of water of water for parts of eastern Massachusetts like Boston and places like that, so it's very important, and it's important to keep the area really clean and wild because you don't want development around a reservoir. And it's a big reservoir. It has about one hundred and forty mile miles of shoreline with a lot of wild forest surrounding it. I forget how many. It's like one hundred and fifty. I forget how I forget the numbers of acres, but there's lots of square miles of very wild country all around it. And actually where we were living at the time, there was even another big wildlife preserve between us and the highway, and on the other side of that was the whole quab And Forest Preserve. So it's a lot. There's everything is there that ever was here.

7:40 I mean, everybody that I know that's spent a lot of time there and basically admits that. There are the occasional cooar wandering through, and there are these big, big coyote wolf hybrids or whatever they are, we've seen them so and their moose are common and relatively speaking, so the wildlife has kind of come back. So if you were going to encounter something strange, it was, it was a pretty good area to encounter it. Lenniow to get to the beginning of the story, which I described in the book. One day, it was in September actually was the what's the equinox? Right that September twenty second. We decided to take a hike in that area because we were typically doing a lot of hiking. It's something we've always done. And so we went over to this particular area and we're hiking down to a spot that's a really beautiful spot where you can look out over the water and you know, see nothing. You could you could imagine yourself somewhere in the wilderness. I mean, you're you're not far from civilization, but you can't see a single sign of it. You can look out and you can imagine yourself in some big wildlife park out in the west or something, you know. And it got to be toward evening and we decided it was well, it's time

9:13 to get headed home, you know, and so we started walking up this trail that's maybe a half mile long. Wasn't that very long to where you could park at par And the first thing that I noticed, maybe even unconsciously, now that I think about it, was it everything got very very quiet. And if you know the woods in New England, you understand that mid to late September, particularly in the evening time around six and stuff, when the sun's just beginning to get low but it's still pretty light out, it's a very loud time that all the bugs and the crickets and everything they really go into the crescendo at the end of summer. And so we were walking along and I remember feeling just a strange kind of uneasiness which I couldn't put my finger on.

10:08 Now that I think back upon, it probably had to do with the strange silence, because even if I didn't register it consciously, the place was really quiet. All of the woods were really quiet. And so we're walking along up this trail and to our right there's an area that maybe had been logged out maybe oh five or ten years previously. In that area, there's a certain amount of logging is allowed and it's all done with an eye towards, you know, maintaining the forest and a good state that they they do take a timber out of their periodically in certain sections, and this is one of those areas. So you had a wide view over maybe one hundred yards or something at least. And I'm just walking along, feeling a little strange and for no reason that I could put my finger on. And then all of a sudden, I turned around because I noticed that my friend Donna was not all of a sudden, she wasn't right by my side. And I looked around and she was scaring off into across this sort of brushy area that had been logged out, and she had this very perplexed look on her face, and she said something to the effect of and it was a very strange question.

11:31 She said, is it possible for a moose to be white? And I'm thinking that's a weird question. But of course, every once in a while you have an albino deer, and maybe once in every ten years somewhere in the world is an albino loose. I don't know, but these things happened. And I said, well, wow, no, And then she described that she'd see something and the reason she said moose is because it was so tall. And the only that we were aware of it could be really big and be any strange color would be a moose because they're like seven feet at the shoulder. I mean, I've had them run right behind me and it's amazing how big they were. And so I didn't know. And then and then she started saying describing that she'd seen something and it was white and the white was really clear.

12:23 It was a bright sunny day, even though the sun's way low and horizon, but it was still bright. And she described as being very white, like noticeably white, like shining light, and as well as being tall, and she said there was something and it seemed to be looking from behind trees. And then she gradually started describing a creature with arms swinging, walking on two legs, which obviously is not a moose now. And she was totally fascinating, and we had very very different responses. And I immediately, and this is something which I'll always remember very clearly, she was just like standing there, almost like she got wants to go walking off in the direction of whatever this creature was. I simultaneously, in contrast, I had really I became overcome with a kind of panic. Now. I cannot exactly explain that, because if somebody told you that it was a really terrible looking, crazy thing out in the front yard and you looked out the window and you didn't see anything near, you probably wouldn't normally panic.

13:43 So whether this is something that you can attribute to the stories that people say that a sasquatch can project sort of energy and create fear, and people didn't create it in her that created in the me. I was a really I was really really scared, and so I kind of like grabbed her by the hand and said, look, I think we better get out of here. It's time to move. She didn't want it to use is kind of like, why are you so freaked out? Way, you know, And I couldn't really explain it. But anyhow, I convinced that it was time. It was time to go, and so we moved. We headed up the path. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, because of my background in the subject from the years before, I hadn't thought about this, so it was the last thing on my mind at this point in my life.

14:35 But it did bring back memories of my interest in not only the course of evolution that I had taken back at Harvard all those years before, but even earlier when I was, you know, kind of interested in the stories of the abominables moment. So anyhow, we got back to the car, drove back to the place that we were living, which at the time was a in eighteenth century restored, very small house. It had been built by a saddle maker actually in the first year of George Washington's presidency, so it was and it was and the guy that owned it had restored it. So the environment was and it was right next to the edge of this other big, big forest, which in turn was next to the Cobbon Forest, so it was a real rural setting to put it mildly and kind of pick her esque or picturesque. And so she was all kind of like amazed, and and she has she's got more sensitivity and more she's got more abilities in some way than I do by a lot. She's also like one of those people is really smart in ways that I'm not, you know, one of those people that can do math and do all sorts of high science and everything really much more easily than I ever could. So she's she's the opposite of being flaky. She's very emotional, and empathic, but she's really really brilliant and in ways that I I'm not gifted in those ways. And then so she's the last thing from she's a very rational person. And

16:10 so I just said, well, I immediately had thought sasquatch or something like that, because it's a subject type and interested in. So I said to myself, well, let's just google sasquatch at the Quabbin Reservoir. And we did that, and lo and behold were immediately taken to a video of some guy who seemed to be a little flaky to me, but he was talking to another guy who was just a local fisherman, your typical outdoors guy that likes to go fishing in the Crabbin. And that guy was explaining how he had been out in an area about a mile from where we were, you know, just one of his normal fishing excursions, and he had seen this creature that was very, very tall and walking on two legs with long arms and white walking through the woods. Now, the chances of somebody that we had never heard of or had no connection to, having a similar experience to what we had just had at that moment was a really overwhelming. She was overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed, and it really kind of blew our minds. We didn't know what to make of it. The next day, you know, I think it was a weekend day. I'm trying to remember,

17:41 but we felt like we had to clear our heads and we wanted to go take a we wanted to go take a hike, but we did not want to go back to the cravin I was too freaked out, and I think she was a little freaked out. And yeah, I like to collect rocks, and so we went some really nice stream beds up the other side of the county, up in uh Well, actually the other side of the Connecticut River. There's some real beautiful deep ravines and creeks where you can it's really good rock collecting. And it was a beautiful day and it was warm, and it was well, we've still got to get outside and we'll just got to collect ourselves. So we drove up there just to do something different, but to keep you know, get not to let the sunny day pass us by.

18:30 And so we got we got to this park part pull off spot and park the car, which in those days was a little red Honda CRV and old CRV and there was one of those steel fences you have to sort of, you know, hit yourself up and put your leg over and then get the other leg over. And I was just in the middle of getting over the fence, and then I could see that she was looking at the hood of the car and she said, hey, look at this, and and so I said, I said, okay.

19:16 So I got back to the roadside of the fence and came over, and there on the hood of the car there was clearly it was fate and you could only see it when you had to get the light just right. But there looked to me to be an enormous handprint. Now this is the car that we had parked down at the corobin, you know, the day before, when we'd have this enormous, this completely weird experience. And I have pictures, they're in my book. I just whipped out my iPhone and took a couple of pictures of it.

19:57 And you can see that hand and I'm not making this stuff up, and it's it's like twice as big as my hand, and you can it's it almost looks like, well, you know, if it's a sweaty day and your hands are dirty. You put your hands on a on a car, anybody, you'll see that you'll leave handprints on a car like fingerprints, only they're exaggerated under those circumstances. And so that was kind of the beginning of this whole journey. And it lasted. That was in September. It pretty much lasted for the next year. You know. She stayed in that house a little longer than I did. I moved out to another place back in the town of Northampton, but we always stayed very close and in touch, and and and even before while we were still there together or a lot of anomalous, strange experiences happened during that whole winter that followed the encounter, And that's kind of what this book is about. And to this day, I have a very hard time. The reason I say impossible being is because it's a being. It makes no sense there's something like this wandering around within ten miles of the University of

21:28 Massachusetts and close to some pretty major towns, you know, And yet it makes no sense that random people are describing the same thing if it doesn't exist people who have no connection to each other, as we had no connection to those two people that we encountered in that video. It makes no sense that random people are describing the same thing if it doesn't have some existence in the real world. So we went through a whole series of bizarre things. Sometimes it seemed like there was a sort of a poltergeist like activity happening in the house. Donna occasionally found things that looked like little tokens. I came away believing that the interest that this creature had was in her and not in me. For sure, I think that she has a particular I mean, we do a lot of hiking together, and every time we hike, it always seems like the animals make themselves appear. She's got a very pure, benign presence, and I think she sort of brings out the wildlife. Creatures kind of trust her something, and when they see her, they recognize something. I don't know, I'm just wildly speculating, But I went through the up and downs of belief and disbelief and then, and frankly, in a way that I'm not really proud of, I

22:58 became more public about it. Wes to her it was a private experience. I understand that now better than I did then. She didn't want to be blabbing on about it and uh, and I was, you know, all excited about what was going on. And to me, it answered a lot of questions that I'd always had based on my academic background on the subject years ago. But I feel like I was kind of insensitive on that front. But she had a deeper connection to what was going on in reality than I did. I was. I was more like the objective bystander making it during the narrative in some ways, like the guy Marlow and Conrad's novels about things going on ocean voyages. But at any rate, you know, to this day, I don't know exactly what to make of the experience except that a lot of strange stuff happened, and that's what I wrote about. I decided I would just keep a journal of it, and she did her own writing about it. And for a while we did these two parallel things, we wrote together, and then eventually I just we both we ended up doing our separate projects. She has done some writing about it herself, and I might send you the links to her stuff as well. To the extent that she wanted out there, I'm not sure about that. And at any rate, at times I really felt like we were under some

24:29 kind of spell during that period, the period of that winter and on into the spring a little bit, and sometimes it would all seemed completely unreal. We had various weird encounters. I mean, I remember one in which I came back from working downtown and we both knew that simultaneously we had decided that we were going to go take a walk back to that part of the quad and where we haven't been in a long time. And we just knew it, and we barely had to speak to each other. We knew that we were going to go back there. Okay, we're going to go back there that day. And we went back there that day and then we uh, it was another beautiful day and it wasn't like there was anything completely strange going on. And we were walking along a trail and the uh, all of a sudden, I heard a whistle coming from our right as we were walking basically in the direction where we parked the car, and the whistle was louder than anything I've ever heard in my life. It was like a referee, you know, like a football referee whistle. You know, it's it's like there was a football referee about, you know, ten yards away in the underbrush. We couldn't see anything.

26:01 Absolutely everything looked normal, didn't see anything. This enormous whistle erupted out of the brush and a flock of turkeys went scurrying across the road. That was it, just that one whistle, But that whistle was unlike anything I've ever heard. And then if you look at sasquatch or I didn't even realize this until after that fact, you find that Native Americans in the Northwest at least carved pictures of the sasquatch with its mouth or its lips pursed and whistling. Evidently that's part of this whole syndrome, er not syndrome, or this sole behavior pattern of whatever this creature is.

26:42 And then there was sort of the what was a climax to me of that period of my life and our lives, you know, particularly for me. More things happened to her, and she, like I say, was in many ways more connected. So when I described those things in the book, I am sometimes I'm experiencing things, and but I was keeping a journal of events because I knew I would forget about this stuff. And even to to this day there's things I won't remember unless I go back and read it. So when I finished up the book, I edited for grammar and stuff like that. But I but I wasn't making stuff up that I hadn't recorded as it happened, because I knew it was also weird.

27:22 It would go in money or out together or something like that. But what for me was kind of a climax was that at one point we were hiking back in this in the same gate they said, they call them gates. There's places where you can park a car and you can walk into the quad and it's it's open to fishing and recreational hiking. You can't take dogs in there. You have to have a license to go fishing or to or to do any boating. It's strictly regulated because it's a very ecologically sensitive place. So we're walking along the shoreline very near where this thing had happened, and all of a sudden they rocked. It was bigger than I could have frown, came sailing out through the trees and landed in the water with a big splash.

28:12 I guess it was maybe thirty yards out in the water. And that was something that no mortal man could have ever done, you know, I'm sure of that, and that was another that was sort of for me, not necessarily for her. That was the last really concrete manifestation of this phenomenon. And then later I think, if I recall correctly, it's all there in the brook at the end, at the end of that summer when neither of us was living there again but occasionally would go back. At one point it seemed like there was another handprint on the car, which almost symbolically seemed like to me, it felt like a goodbye or the end of this bizarre experience, which I can't really explain because even though I can think of a quote theoretically what a safspotch is and look at it through the eyes of somebody that, you know, in another lifetime, I might have gone on and become an anthropologist or something. I was always into that stuff, you know, But that's not the way life worked out for me. But so it seems almost like a bookend to the experience of that first day and the second day where a handpri had appeared on the car. So that's kind of a nutshell summation of the whole thing.

29:45 And it's interesting too that other reports historically have occurred in that same area. I did find out during this period that a guy who I was aware of, who was kind of it, was a very famous Harvard anthropologist named Carlton Kuhn, and he was a physical anthropologist, and he taught at Hardford for a number of years, long before I went there. I think he left in the fifties or retired or whatever he was. He had passed away before my time, but he became very interested in the subject, and based on reports that I eventually that I learned were maybe we're over the border in New Hampshire, about thirty miles away from where the quabin actually is.

30:45 He'd gone out and had his own investigation, and he basically exploded somebody. Some campers had described having their camper ew camp or rocking back and forth when they woke up one morning like somebody big was pushing it around, and they freaked out and they said there were these big footprints and Carton Kuhn had heard enough of these stories, so he decided to go out that way and he took plaster casts of those footprints, and he eventually came to the conclusion consulting with some other people, I think a couple of other anthropologists in Pennsylvania, which was another hotspot traditionally. He came to the conclusion that he said, well, the most logical explanation is somewhere in in North America there is a small population of very big, really large, unidentified primates. That was a tenured professor at Harvard. Once again, he was not pop here. He was tenured, but he ruffled a lot of feathers. He was very politely incorrect because we talked about differences in different populations in terms of the physical and mental characteristics, and that was something that was politically as incorrect as you could get. And given the mixed up population we have on the planet,

32:17 it doesn't really have any meaning anymore anyhow. So that was an interesting footnote to the whole thing. And so that, in a nutshell, is the story, and a lot of the weird stuff that happened in between is in the book, you know, blow by blow, day by day. It is really a fascinating story. And you're absolutely right, many more details, but I do have some questions for you. Absolutely just so the listener knows what year did this start to happen? This whole long series of encounters it happened started in September twenty fourteen, and by twenty and fifteen we had both moved to different places. We were always in touch today to day we still will go back and pay hikes there, you know, and but but it was so it was basically the intense part, particularly for me, was sort of the autumn, early autumn of twenty fourteen all the way through the following year. And it's those dates are right there. I think the dates are right in the book there. So so that's that's that's the time frame.

33:32 Yeah, you mentioned that Donna at points would find tokens around different areas. Can you share a little bit about what kind of things were maybe being left in a gifting situation? I remember, I think there were once there was Sometimes it would just be a really interesting little rock. It looked kind of like gem like and we can't we couldn't tell. And she he's the last person in the world who would say, oh, I can disprove that somebody was, you know, this amazing creature was giving me gifts. She's not trying. Once again, this woman is as rational and academically brilliant as you're going to find. Takes my butt all the time. Anyhow, but they did show up. And the other thing was blue jay feathers, which seemed to show up when you weren't expecting them, and that seemed to be happening. And there was another guy we mentioned that, another guy. We ran into this other guy, I can't even remember now how we ran into him, and he was going through similar experiences and he had had another he had had another sighting of something big and white at the quabin, and somebody put us in touch with him.

34:50 I've lost track of him. I think that she may still be in touch with him periodically, and all of our lives have changed dramatically, you know, since those days. There was one point when you know, she had sort of symbolically left a necklace sort of buried in a spot where nobody would find it, and when we went back there, it was gone. And I don't know how that was gone. You know, there was there was a time when and there's pictures of this in the book there where there was a one of the trails that we typically took because we were always hiking in these areas.

35:44 These were like this was you know, how we spent free time. We would hike and explore the countryside and There was one time when there was a tree. It's a little it was. It was a young beech tree. It was a sapling, but it was big. It was like maybe three and a half, probably four to five inches wide. Something had taken that tree and bend it with such force that the bark split vertically up and the tree was down across the road. It was almost like, folks, stay away from here, just don't come down here for a while. Okay. It was a healthy tree, the wood was green. And I don't even know. I mean, I don't even know how you could do that. If you had a bacco, you bet you might end up pulling the roots up before you'd break a tree like that.

36:41 The force it would take to break a young, healthy beach tree, to just bend it to the point where it actually splits vertically, you know, up and down part of its trunk in order to bend. I mean, I can't explain that. I can't say that the sasquatch did it, you know, but it did seem to be symbolic. And that's all I can tell you. I just don't know. I mean, it's it's. From from what I remember from the book, So I believe the gentleman you're talking about. It also had the white Sasquatch sighting in the quab and his name was Matt and I think you had you had met him through Jonathan Wilke with the bf o O and Squatch a Chusets.

37:31 Yeah, yes, that's right, that's right. Which I mean that that group, a squatch a chuses group does great work. Love those guys and if they're listening, I would love to talk to anyone from that group. H Now, something I've heard in you know, I've taken lots of reports, a few reports from Massachusetts over the years. Have you ever heard of any bigfoot sightings in this area of the Kabbin where it resembles more of a rangutan look at all. No, I don't not to No, I don't think I've heard of that. I have heard of people, just people, and some of this goes back historically quite a long time too. But I have heard of people. The idea of a white white one was not expected that that would seem to be rare, although there's millions of creatures will sometimes be white and sometimes the other colors, so that's not, you know, that odd a thing. But I've heard of other dark brown colored ones that other people claim to have seen, you know. And then I do mention in the book too that there is a long history of this in New England, uh way, going all the way back into a native Native law. So it's

39:04 it's not whatever the phenomenon is. It's not just the west coast. Oh, absolutely, there's a lot that goes on in the northeast. The orangutan type one i'd heard from an individual is actually a southern Coobin area around Route nine, kind of by the Herman Covey WMA was crossing the road there. Now, do you have any thoughts at all? Do you think there might be a possibility that sasquatch has a connection to music or musical patterns or anything like that. Well, the only thing that I can tell you in regard to that is I have no idea. But and I think I mentioned this in the book, there was a night I know that we were both at least that night we were both staying in that old house there in Pellum, and and I had a musical gig at a musical festival. Because you know, I've been a musician and I've done a lot of record albums over the years, and this is the last thing that's connected to the sasquatch world, you know. But I was a guest with a pretty well known jam band called Max Creek, and they were headlining this big festival. They were One of their trademark songs is a sort of a trademark song on my own cable Stones and Brooken Bones. I

40:35 was up there playing that song, you know, and with that group, and it has a very distinctive rhythm pattern. It's one two three three, one two three four or five six seven eight one two three. It's a distinctive meter. And there was this tapping outside the house about the same time I was playing this tune with his band at a festival. Supposedly there was this tapping. It was in the same rhythm, and Donna was making note of it. Neither of us put it together for a while. There was this weird rhythmic tapping outside the old house, and I was playing a song that is based on that one riff rhythmically riff if you were to write it out.

41:27 And that's I mean, that's the only thing I've never even thought about Bigfoot or sasquatch or any of this stuff in relation to music. You know, but music is kind of universal across a lot of different creatures probably, I think, and as you know, maybe there there was more and more evidence that some earlier forms of manly even Neanderthal a period of maybe had some kind of interest in music or even I think that's one of the newer ideas as it's south here. So but yeah, that's all I like, that's all I know about that. I have no idea. Yeah, it is a thing where it kind of comes up in different ways and reports like sometimes people will hear what they what to them sounds like singing in different parts of the US and and bigfoot related areas, and sometimes you know, if you hear wooden knocks through there usually be in a pattern of three. And that's me speaking from experience. Uh, it's it's pretty weird stuff.

42:33 So I don't know. There might be something there for sure. Now, you know, you've been looking into the subject for for a long time and you kind of alluded it, alluded to it a little bit. So you have you heard bigfoot reports from other people in the area that you've talked to, maybe people working out in the forests or things like that. I haven't heard anything recent but my life has taken me in very very different directions, you know. I mean, we've had so much crazy history in the years between, oh, the last ten years. I mean think about it, between all of the crazy times and all of the other stuff going on, you know, and the only every once in a while we still run into really weird stick structures.

43:30 As a matter of fact, I know we were hiking in an area well you maybe remember, well, you know, the whole malholy Opra Range and Mount Tom and all that stuff. Absolutely, there's lots of stuff that happens up there. Yeah, yeah, because there have been I had This isn't new, but back when this was happening, there were reports coming from there about really weird screams and you know, the kind of sounds that I don't think they would have come from a cruder or a mountain lion. They do occasionally show up here. There's too much proof in that. They don't like to admit it, but they're out there.

44:11 I know. I can't count on both hands all the people I know that have seen them, and I've even seen pictures that people have taken things smift apart, you know. And I know that our friend Matt has drifted off. I haven't talked to him in a few years now, the only and a couple of things. And I'm speaking purely for myself. This is not for her or for anybody else. But there was a period when all this was happening where I kind of felt like I was under some kind of a spell. Now people could jump at that and say, well, that just shows you because you were like imagining everything and your psyche was creating all this. Well the psyche didn't. My psyche didn't bend that birch tree over the road, and it didn't throw that stone, which I could barely lift thirty yards out into the water through the trees from god knows how far away. So I don't know what to make of that, but I can say that when I have gone back to some of these same places, everything seems like it's returned to normal, at least in recent times. That could change at a moment's notice. I have no idea. I had one weird experience in Connecticut years A couple of years after that, I was visiting my daughter and she had at a little small dog and she'd rented. It

45:47 was a pretty little funky ass, but she likes out of doors do, and it was on a nice piece of property. And one night the dog went running off into the woods, yapping and barking and coming like going like crazy, you know, and she had injured foot. I think you had a legging or her foot in the cast and she think she broke a bone in her foot, right, And I said, so, okay, I'll go try to find the dog for you. And I went out there, and I never found the dog, but I shined this light and then I saw these two eyes staring at me from the woods. This was near Litchfield, Connecticut, where there have been some weird things, you know. And at first I thought, oh, that's some kind of a reflectors on a roads, on a sign or something, because I mean, this is an area that was surrounded by malls and shopping centers, even though there was a lot of land in this one little patchect ground. And I remember seeing these two It looked like two eyes staring and I thought, well, that's just reflectors on something. There's nothing, because it was way high up. It was like seven feet off the ground anyhow. And so I put the flashlight then and I couldn't find the dog, and then I shined it back there, and I did that a couple of times, and the eyes didn't move. And then the third time, I raised the flashlight beam and shined it into the woods, and then I saw the two eyes. It looked like eyes, and they looked like they were staring at me. And then they turned, just the way two horizontally spaced eyes

47:19 would turn, so that visually the distance between the two points narrowed. And then I heard something slowly moving through the trees. It sounded like it was on two feet. I had no idea what that was. Maybe it was a deer and there was a little bit of a higher ground there. I don't know. I didn't see any high ground when I went back the next day. That was one weird experience. And then another time in the two years afterwards or so, my daughter and I walked back to the quab and hiked around there for a while. We were hiking the same year where a lot of this stuff had happened, and my daughter is kind of like psychic, said she thought there was something interesting, and we climbed up this rough bank and we found this very interesting stick structure. It just made no sense because it was not something that it wasn't that big, but it was very it was a bundant obviously it had been made, and we couldn't see any purpose for it, I mean, why anybody had done it. And it wasn't in a place that anybody would logically see and because it was an odd place that you wouldn't typically walk through or around or see it, so that was weird.

48:42 And then she was kind of like on some vendor for exploring, and the reservoir was lower at that time, and we went out onto a point of wand that was normally under a few feet of water. And I have pictures of this. This happened after the books, so there's nothing in the there's nothing in the book about it. But there was this these footprints, and it was very muddy so you couldn't couldn't tell and they were really really deep. I mean they were like really deep, and they were about the general shape of a very like a giant human footprint, but it was too muddy to see them clearly down there. But it was like one to one two and I you know, well, moose tracks are abundant in the same they were all over the same area. They're very very different they look like a horse or a deer, you know, they're undulate tracks. I had no idea what the heck that was. They were bigger than they They were bigger than even a sasquatch footprint could have been. I have no idea what it was.

49:51 But they really looked like some sort of generally human shaped footprint. But the bottoms were obscured because it was, you know, slushy. But it wasn't it wasn't that slushy. I mean, you still had to be very heavy. They would press it that far down because there were moose tracks from the same period, and the moose track is a much smaller track, and the moose is a big animal, and they were nowhere near us deep not even I don't know what that was. I have no idea, you know, maybe maybe it was a sasquatch, who knows. What. How what length would you estimate the tracks to be?

50:35 They were like over twenty inches, Wow. That's like Pacific Northwest sides. Dude, three inches yeah. And they were like and they were like four feet up astride. Okay, something like that. But were they in a straight line? Yeah, No, they were basically in a straight line. They came up. They came up, there was a channel, there was woods on one side. We're hunting and fishing and everything. You're not supposed to go there. There's a big area of the crobin which is off limits. I think they give like twenty deer permits a year or something you can buy if you want to, but it's off limits to hunting and fishing and everything. You're not You're just supposed to stay away from there. And there's a there was a stream. There was a feeder stream that came into the reservoir at this area, and there was a channel coming out of that feeder stream, and the tracks emerged out of that channel, coming from the direction of the Prescott Peninsula. They came up onto this point of land, which isn't always there, only there when they lower the reservoir enough. Then they proceeded out the length of the peninsula and then they just like walked off into the water.

51:55 It was a very weird thing. So you're saying, you're really like, that's not public access. I didn't know that. Yeah, No, that that area is. It's not public access. Most of it's off limits. You're not supposed to go there without a special permit or you know, and I know that there are certain I think that a certain number of hunting licenses are giving out for that area. At least they were because they were concerned about their beatom many dear. Sure, but I don't think anything else. Yeah, I think that's the extent of it. There's only certain parts of the quadum where you're allowed to fish, Okay, yeah, I mean they're strict about it, and they even patrol it with boats. Like if you if you're doing stuff you're not supposed to be doing, they'll bust you. You know, they don't want you in every area. Yeah.

52:49 Absolutely, I would say listeners, you definitely want to do your due diligence to always look at areas and see what the limitations are that you can lead really go to before you just go to an area. So doing due diligences, make sure you look look it up yourself with your your local law enforcement. But wow, Oh and there's one last question, and thank you so much for your for your time today, John. But and this has already been asked, but I'm kind of also asking it for the listeners as well. If there is anyone that has ever heard anything Bigfoot related or experienced anything Bigfoot related in the Franklin County area. I would love to talk to you about it, and I would love if you could reach out to me Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. One day I will have an episode that I'll be able to say, yes, that happened in Franklin County.

53:49 This kind of a thing I'm working towards. So it sounds like you haven't really heard anything from that area yourself, though, correct. You know, I am trying to remember, because you're jogging my memory now, because as I've said, my life has moved on into so many other different subjects and I've got other book projects that I've been involved with and for a while, you know, during the most of the time between when this happened and now, I was a writer in residence at an Astaraic house in Amherst, which has basically been devoted to poets and writers of actually writers of poetry, and I did do a book of poetry.

54:36 And I have been a songwriter, and that was, you know, that kind of work was what I my own younger days. And I studied English literature, That's what I studied. I was fascinated with anthropology. I studied at Harvard, but I wasn't one of the guys that majored in that stuff or anything like that. So but something is I'm seem to remember something about Northfield, your own hometown, which is a very wild place. It is. Yeah, I mean that's wild, rugged, strange country and a lot of it's swampy and boggy.

55:19 So I do know your area there, and maybe I'll email you if that comes back in there. Such a such an interesting conversation, you know, John Cosser, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really hope that people, you know, take a look at your book, Convergence Encounters with an Impossible Being. It really is a fascinating read. I highly enjoyed it. You can get it as an ebook or you can get it as a physical copy on Amazon. I really recommend people pick up a copy. It is a cool read about an area where there's not a lot of big related things written, So definitely recommend to pick it up. But, you know, thank you so much. John. Is there a way for people to check out your music?

56:07 I'm not hard to find online. I mean my music is it John Coster, which is just j O H N C O S T E. R. John crostermusic dot com. And there are albums are there are links to albums and you can buy albums there and you can in some cases you can go to places where you can download them and stuff like that. Yeah, and also I think there are links to this book and to the poetry book. And that's what my life has been about. It's been about writing and doing music. And so this was not something I ever expected to be. I'd never expected. As a matter of fact, I was really beginning to do a whole other historical book based on a box of letters, of Revolutionary War letters. I still haven't gotten it done because so many things keep between me and it, it seems. But I love the out of doors and New England is actually an unusual place because people don't think about New England oftentimes as big and a lot of it's really overbuilt, lower parts of it and everything, but a lot of the ecology in New England is pretty robust. I live now. Actually, where I'm living now is out in a place called Shootsbury, which is once again, I'm probably only four three or four miles as the crow flies from where all this stuff happened years ago,

57:38 and it's a beautiful countryside. It was heavily heavily logged over and cut down and sheep farms were everywhere back one hundred and fifty even two hundred years ago, and a lot of the forest has come back in New England, and New England has a lot of wildlife, and there are a lot of pockets that are pretty equy, echo lot rich. More so now, I mean, bears are just all over the place. And you know, when I was a kid, I always thought I wouldn't wouldn't it be cool to see a bear? Now you see them all the time. I mean not all the time actually, but they're they're really common and they're thriving. So you know, people will tell you that if bears can thrive, supposedly a sasquatch can thrive. I don't know. I can't. I don't know how that all works. And and I have, Uh there's a guy that was a very close friend of mine and he had enormous footprints show up in his backyard what is it two and a half years ago.

58:46 I mean they were just ridiculous. You can see the toes and every it happened like about it was. It was a day when there had been a very light snowfall that was kind of slushy, and the dog and went crazy at about three o'clock in the morning. He was out pretty far out in the country and that's over near Granville, which is heading west into the Berkshires. I mean, once again, he is on the edge of a very big national forest. And there are other stories and reports from that area as well, and I encountered I've encountered a couple of those. I haven't encountered anything particularly new around here. So whatever this phenomenon is, it does appear to be in New England. And yeah, those those those footprints were just amazing. Yeah, I do have pictures.

59:39 I'm sprised that Granville area is extremely active right now. I've talked to a few people about that area. It is is pretty wild up Cobble Mountain, specifically that area of Granville. Well, that is so interesting because this all you know, he called me up and said, you got to see these footprints that showed up in my head backyard the other day. And the footprints came from they walked all the way down this long Fiel across this area where he's got equipment stored like he does logging work. And stuff like that. And and these are big footprints, I forget. I think they're like eighteen inches or something like that.

1:00:20 And there are bare footprints and you can see the freight in toast. Now you tell me what's going on. Does he have a gigantic crazy neighbor who wanders around people's backyards in the middle of the night scaring the dogs? I don't think so. Yes, yeah, absolutely. In Grenville, if you did that, you'd be likely to get shot. It's like it's a rural community. It's not like the university town at Amherst. You know, so yeah, a little bit different. It is so active down there. They actually call it the Kobble Mountain Critter and they have a festival for it that started this year too, which is pretty well, this is so interesting.

1:01:00 See this is something I never even knew about. Wow, So people keep that in mind for maybe next year. But John, thank you for taking some time today chatting about your experiences over the years. And it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. And you know, listeners, make sure you go check out His book will be linked in the show notes and you can check that out and read the rest of the rest of his story for yourself. But thank you again for coming on John my pleasure. Thanks a lot, and I'll be looking to see what other new exciting news you're turning up, because it is a fascinating subject and I think it has significance for the crazy time that we're living in. Whatever is happening to the Bigfoot or the Sasquatch or whatever these things are.

1:01:50 They're not worried about, you know, being monitored too closely by the government, and they don't pay taxes or have right a social credit score they're. Trying to maintain exactly. So they learned something, then probably we'd all be better off if we understood anyhow, On that relatively numerous note, Thanks a lot, and it's been nice talking to you. I'll love you following what you're up to. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Bigfoot 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.

1:02:51 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 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.