When Bigfoot Gets Too Close: Landon’s Shocking Skamania County Story!

0:01 You're listening to Bigfoot Society, and I'm Jeremiah Byron. Tonight's stories from a young man who went out hunting in the dense, mistfilled woods of Scamania County, Washington, a place famous for Bigfoot encounters. But what Landon didn't expect was that something in the woods would start targeting him. Boulders, big ones thrown at him from an unseen force, a sickening, pungent smell in the air, and the feeling that something powerful, something ancient, was watching his every move. And this is an a legend or a myth. It's a first hand account from someone who never believed until he had no choice but to face the truth. And this is the story of Landon who came face to face with a force he could never forget. So stay with us. I picked the Society got the privilege of talking to Landon tonight.

0:45 Landon's an individual that was forwarded an episode of the podcast and then reached out about some interesting things that have happened over the years in Schimania County, Washington, and so really excited to have Landon on the show. That's it's an area of Washington where a lot of interesting things have happened over the years regarding Bigfoot. But welcome to the show, Landon. How are you doing tonight? I'm doing pretty well, fantastic, Yeah, I'm I'm excited to see where this interview is going to go. So I'm going to go ahead and pass things over to you so that you have the time to share what you've experienced in what other people you know have experienced as well, and we'll be chatting about it along the way. But feel free to take it from here Landon and take us back as far as we need to go for this, all right.

1:47 The first encounter that I believed I've had it was two thousand and eighteen. It was right after the Eagle Creek fire happened, because Eagle Creek Fire was twenty seventeen, I do believe. And it was I think my first or second year of hunting. And I was usually with my dad through all that stuff, so he always take me out and you go explore and see if we can find anything and whatnot. But there was a spot that we, you know, predetermined to go the morning before and this was you know, autumn deer season that fall area, and I, me and my dad we went out to one of these spots. It's this huge cliff face that drops down and you can see these kind of like waterline from it just falling. It's just these dugout marks and there's little tiny holes, and we don't really know what lives in there. It's just kind of like a It could be kaya, it could be bobcats, it could be foxes. But there's just these little tiny holes all over this cliff face. And it's about one hundred and twenty feet up, you know, from top to bottom. And at the bottom where I was, there's these thirty feet by forty feet boulders and below and up like just

3:21 in size, like these triple ton ten ton boulders, and they're just kind of scattered everywhere because as it erodes, the things tend to fall. And I remember we woke up about six we got out there, it was seven seven point thirty, and we started hiking, and it was just you couldn't see in front of you, like you cann't see your hand, You can't see anything. And then eventually as you could see the daylight coming through the trees, there there was some olk in this clear cut off away and they didn't really want anything to do with us at that point in time, but it wasn't elk season, so we just kind of sat there and watched him for a while. At about eight thirty nine, you know, that they wandered off and we went our direction and we continued up the road towards the cliff face. And I remember getting up to the cliff face and I had a boulder against my back and a pile of small rocks and down trees in front of me, kind of like a brush pile to hide. And around this time it was that ten, you know, nine thirty ten o'clock area, and my dad went a different way. He went towards a tree stand which was a little bit further down the road. And as soon as he lost like as soon as I lost eyesight of him, and you know, I couldn't hear him walking no more or

4:52 anything like that, I sat there and it was just dead silence, like quiet, eerie, like not a bird that nothing. I was like, you know, like the kind of kind of off putting. And then all of a sudden, I don't know where, the forest erupts just you know, birds everywhere, you know, like like something moved, like they forgot that we were there or whatever. And then the port that really stood out to me was that it happens a lot when you're hunting. But there is this chipmunk chipmunk squirrel probably twenty feet away from me, up this tree about another ten feet and it was just staring at me and chirping, barking, and about ten minutes of that, I was like, that's really annoying. So I started grabbing rocks, a little tiny pebbles and stuff, and I was throwing them at the tree, trying to make me be quiet, like don't blow my covered types thing. And you know, eventually he quiet and wandered away. But as soon as he went quiet and I didn't see him no more, the forest was so irreally silent, like there was no breeze, there was no noise, you could hear your heart like you could hear the blood pumping through your ears. Type quiet.

6:20 And then I heard this loud like thud, like wood on wood, or like if you were like kick a tree real hard or hit it real hard. This like this make three really loud thuds behind me, and there's that boulder and then a cliff face behind me, and I'm like this, there's nothing behind me, So I kind of leave my little area and I kind of wander up towards the cliff face, trying to figure out like what happened, like through the rock fall or something, making sure like, you know, there wasn't a slide going to happen and be in the middle of it, so I didn't find anything unusual. And then I go, I go back to my spot around this time it's noon, you know, sorry, and it's around noon, and then you just got this pungent odor scent, like it was just this awful scent, like something died. And I'm like, I was here before, I didn't smell that. Now I'm here now, and now I smell it, Like did the wind change? And I bought out like a little container of chalk like pressing, it shoots up in the air so you can tell what wind is going. And it just sat still, like it slowly moved and faded away, but it just didn't move a certain direction and it was just still. And I was like, interesting, So I'm sitting there, there's this

7:52 awful smell, there's this this eerily quiet and I'm sitting there and I'm waiting for something to pop out or a deer or bobcat or cougar or something, you know, just something to you know, gaze upon. And as I'm sitting there, I just felt awful out of nowhere, like this headache, Like it felt like I didn't eat for like two days, like that awful stomach feeling a headache. And then that happens for about ten twenty minutes, and it was like to me, it felt like as fast as it came on, it went off. But it was about ten minutes and I was sitting there and I'm like, did I eat something wrong? Like am I going? Am I getting sick or something? And then behind me again I hear these three loud wood thumps, and I'm like, what is going on? And so I'm sitting there from where I was, I'm trying to look over this boulder towards the cliff, and all of a sudden, this just probably three hundred pound rock just comes flying off the cliff and lands right beside me. Scares the daylights out of me, and I'm like, what's going on here? Like that doesn't happen, Like, yeah, it will fall off the cliff,

9:25 but it doesn't land that far away. It will land closer and then roll towards you, and I'm still like that startled me, and I'm like, where'd that come from? What is going on here? So I'm looking again, and I'm like trying to figure out where it came from. And a smaller one, probably like ten pounds, just twice as fast, twice as far as as soon as I saw it, it was past me, and it was like dangerously close, and I'm like, okay, I need I need to move, I need to do something. Whatever whatever it is or whoever it knows where I am, and it's trying to tell me to either go away or get gone or go away. And I'm like, I slowly, I don't turn my back. I'm looking the direction those rocks came from, and I'm just slowly walking down the trail I came. And then I heard this like low grumble grunt, like something that you would imagine like an angry bear making like a really low grumble grunt. And the same

10:56 direction those rocks came from, here comes this, you know, probably ton boulder, just comes off the hill, slams down into the ground, and goes rolling right past three. And at that point I turned around and I hauled back to the main road, and I called my dad and I'm like, I don't know what's going on, but something's throwing these huge rocks at me. And I either I'll meet you at the end of your trail or you can come through there and meet me at the truck.

11:36 And so he goes through, you know, coming back the way, because why wouldn't he, you know, like crazy guy. And so he's coming back through that trail go in the opfice direction. So he's coming back the way he came, which is from where I was sitting. He was heading northwest, so he's coming back that direction and heading I'm trying to think here, but either way, he's coming back from the way he came. You know, we're going directions, going going the direction we came from. And he smelled that awful smell. And instead of it being like a death, pungent like awful like rotting smell to him, he explained it more of a like skunk weed, like that those skunk weed plants, So it wasn't as bad, but it was that pungent, not that dead smell, just a pungent, awful like skunk smell. And and he was saying it as he walked along. He felt ill too, and he was feeling awful, like it was like sick to his stomach, and he walked on his way out. He didn't have anything thrown at him. He just had a smell and

13:07 an awful stomach, like awful feeling, like like a bad feeling or something. And that that was the end of that accounter. That is pretty intense. And you're saying, this is in Schimania County. Yeah, this was. This was upper Upper Scimenia County. Scmena County is pretty big from the Gorge side. If you're at the gorge, you kind of go right in the middle of the Screena County. It's right around. There, gotcha, Because I mean Skamenia County goes forever Man all the way up past Mount Saint Helen's right. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

14:08 Did you ever look to see if anything else had been reported in that area for big foot activity? I didn't, mainly because I didn't know where to look, Like I didn't know if I just go on Google or Safari, or if I go like on an app or like a certain web page or a forum. I didn't know where to go. And for the longest time, I just kind of blocked it out of my mind after it happened. It was just like one of those scary encounters where I kind of blocked it for a little bit, and I didn't really think about it that often until I started listened to your podcast and I was like, that makes a lot of. Sense because at this time, you would have been around twelve, right.

14:53 No, yeah, nineteen now and two thousand eight. I was twelve thirteen, Yeah, barely had a phone, just starting high school, you know, just ending middle school, starting high school. You know, it's like because my high schools kind of weird. You know, you middle school goes to the high school of seventh grade, and then your seventh and eighth grade is in the high school, and then you go to freshman. It was kind of weird. So during this this interaction where the rocks are thrown at you, you're like, let's get out of here. Were you thinking Bigfoot at that time or is that something where you had that realization later.

15:35 At the time, I was just kind of just scared out of my mind. It thought it crossed my mind in the beginning when I smelt it, you know, when I had that awful smell I'm like, oh, that's a skunk, and then it just got worse and I was like, that's that's not a skunk. And you know, considering that I was there beforehand and then I was there afterhand and it wasn't there before, but it was thereafter, I was like, something changed, there's something new, and there's no noise, there's no silence, like it's a predator, like there's something big that other things are scared of and they don't want to talk, you know. And it crossed my mind a couple months after the fact, and then I was like, I wonder. I wonder, but I never knew, and I listened to your podcast and it kind of opened my mind to newer terms or like being zapped. I'd never heard of that until I listened to your podcast, and I was like I heard a dude explaining to me, like explaining on your podcast what that felt like, what it was, and I was like, that's crazy, Like that felt kind of like how I felt, you know, and it was just kind of mind boggling. And then that's when I emailed you and I was like, hey, you know, wow.

17:03 That that is wild when you're growing up in this area of the Pacific Northwest. Was Bigfoot ever talked about or did you hear stories about like Okay, so and so just saw something weird or was that part of your your childhood? Oh yeah, I mean my grandma loves bigfoot like she don't. She don't. She says she don't believe in it. But she has like wooden statues, she has sweatshirts, she has metal portraits like like if you took like a laser cutter on a CNC machine and cut out a picture Bigfoot like. She has a like a hand sculpted wooden statue that's like up to your like knee high, it's like three feet tall of one. She has shirts like she loves the idea that, but she don't believe in it. Okay, she's chasing a rabbit.

17:54 To her, it's it's more just part of the culture living out there. It sounds like, yeah, very much, Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. The Eskimania County. Is it when you're going out hunting in this area or you're going out hiking, are you ever apprehensive of things that could happen? Is it pretty dangerous to go out in this area? Or you feel like you guys have a pretty good handle on things. For me and my family. It really really depends on where we're going landon. So you have this situation happened to you where you experience the quiet something getting multiple huge boulders getting thrown at you, and then how does this affect you after this?

18:44 Does you know? Sometimes when this happens to people, they go down this road of like, Okay, what's bigfoot? I have to figure this out? Or did it not really affect you a lot? Considering the young age I was, I didn't really look too deep into it. I just never like from twenty eighteen to now, I've probably been back to that spot two or three times, and it was never by myself. I never had someone leave me, if that makes sense. And I never go out in the woods without someone with me. I never go by myself, even if I'm hiking, like if I'm going off a paved road, like even if I know the road like the back of my hand, like it could be gravel, it could be a trail.

19:27 I don't go by myself. A lot of hikers around here do get lost, they do get themselves in trouble. There's a very popular hiking spot out here, it's called Beacon Rock, and a lot of people climb to the top and they roll their ankle and then fire department has to go up their social rescue has to go up there and bring them back down because they rolled their ankle, they can't walk, or they dissocuated their knee. Like a lot of awful things happen very quickly when you don't expect it. About twenty twenty area, you know, twenty twenty to you know, twenty nineteen to twenty twenty, my mom, sister, and my dad's friend's wife, they all went out road hunting. And I can imagine, you know, you only you know, you just go out a vehicle, you go along gravel roads and you see if you can find anything. If you find something that you're able to hunt, you did it. And they were out there, and they were just on a random road in the middle of nowhere in Simanea County and are out by Carson and they were rolling slow. They were going and get all the windows down, they're they're looking they're glass

21:00 and trying to see I they could find anything within the trees. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they had this awful pungent smell. And you know, when you're driving and you smell an awful smell like that, it's it's, oh, it's a dead animal, it's a it's a skunk. You know, it's something. But when it when you smell that smell for the next five miles, like when it follows you for the next five miles, you know, and then after that nothing that that's that's one of the that's one of the less severe incidences that I have in my little pocket here. So it's just that they had this awful pungent smell and it followed them for five miles, and they were swearing up and down that they saw bigfoot, and it was bigfoot that was following them, trying to see what they were doing, and you know, just observing, being curious and stuff.

22:00 So they're saying they actual had a visual sighting during that time. One person, the driver, says that they saw it, but no one else did. So it's just kind of like one of those things where it's like here and there, like I cannot be for sure that it was I wasn't there. Then there's one person saying that that they saw one person, and there's two other people saying I didn't see it, so it's kind of hard. But they all had the same story of they smelt this awful, pungent smell and it followed them for five miles and then it just disappeared. That is cool that they all experienced the smell, but did so the driver that that said they had the the sighting. Did they say any details about like it was by the side of the road or crossing the road or anything like that.

22:56 It was I to put myself into her position, and she kind of like think of it in my way, because she didn't really give a death in it, like, you know, it was this many yards away or this and that. But from the driver's seat, from her driver's side car, she probably could see about, you know, five yards from her door to the edge of the road is about five yards, and from the edge of the road to the tree, she could probably see no other ten to fifteen yards, not very far. And all it's like it's new growth, so it's just trees and low hanging bushes, you know, very low growth. It's not old growth.

23:42 It's all new growth. It's small, it's brand new, it's very green. And so the way she described it is that she looked over and she just could see this. She described it as a bear. It looked like a bear that went from a upstanding position to as if it was going to fall over on all fours, kind of like if you could imagine you standing up and then you go to lean forward to run. Is kind of how she reenacted it and also explained it. And then she could see it past a couple of trees, and after a couple of trees, it just disappeared. It was just this black, furry blur of something kind of in an forward leaning position along the road with them, and it disappeared, so.

24:40 Just enough for her to think about that for the rest of her life. Definitely, that is that's wild. She still talks about it, like when she gets drunk enough, she'll talk about it. Yeah right, Oh my goodness, man, I would just be thinking about that all the time. Oh wow. Okay, So that's twenty twenty or twenty nineteen in Carsonaria, Okay. And then the most there's another one, but we'll get there when I get when we get there, but the most recent one would be this one kind of ties into two different things. But me and my buddy, we were very close. We're very outdoors, and I took him hunting for his first time, and he kind of fell in love with being outside and the whole entire hunting experience, and you know, he wanted to get a hunting license, he wanted to get his own rifle, he wanted to go do it all. And then he got he got the he got bit by the sasquatch bug, or he got obsessed with it. He just wanted to go find one.

26:07 He wanted to go, you know, camp out and have you know, that type of experience and stuff like that. So apparently he watched a whole bunch of podcasts and a whole bunch of YouTube videos and he triangulated high points of sightings a bigfoot out by Damascus and Sandy, Oregon. Uh, somewhere around there kind of by on Alaska is where he says. He says he camps out somewhere in the outskirts of on Alaska, Oregon, and him and his buddies they go out there and they go try to hunt for bigfoot. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, you're you're crazy, Like you're gonna you're gonna stumble upon something you don't want to find. So I'm sitting there and me and him are talking about it, and he's trying to cource me to go with him, and I'm like, dude, I'm good. I've had my fair share. I don't I don't, I don't need anymore yet. And so he I would ask him about it, because he would go every weekend and he would come back and talk to me and try to try to convince me. I'm like, I'm still good.

27:31 And then there's a couple of times, a couple of stories that he had, but I was like, yeah, I'm for sure staying home. But he had a couple of encounters where it it was him and his friends out someone in middle of on Alaska and they had a campground set up next by a little river and then there's a bigger river further out, and he was telling me that they had something. He didn't really go into too much detail, but he said that there was this kind of like eerie feeling like they were being watched the whole entire time. Dude setting up and after they got set up sun set, it like they got dark.

28:29 They started a fire and they went to bed for the next morning, and as soon as the fire went out. He said that he could hear something heavy come up and poke at his tent, like if you could imagine like a five foot tent. It was just reaching over, like as if something were to reach over and just kind of put its paw or hand on top of the tent and just kind of see how much it would flex, you know, just trying to see how much it would bend. And he's inside of it and his sleeping bag and he's sitting there and it wakes him up, and he goes, who's there. They stopped and you could hear it take a step back, and then it almost backhanded the back of the tent backhanded, either backhanded or swatted at the tent and just kind of brushed up against the tent. And that's when he pulled out his pistol and put three rounds through the set of the tent, and you could hear something run and breaking and just barreling through the trees. So he gets out. He wakes all of his friends up, and he's like rambling about this experience he just had, and I was like, I'm staying up all night. I'm going to figure out if

29:59 it ever comes back. So he stayed up all the night. He chopped all the wood he could find, kept the fire going, and stayed up. He stopped through the day. And you're saying that when he went out of the tent to go wake everyone up, he could hear it crashing through the trees and then you could hear it hit this big body of water and it sounded like a celle order to do a cannon ball. And so the next morning when he woke, you know, the afternoon he woke up, him and his buddies went out that direction and you can kind of see where this trail has been created. It's a very new trail that they didn't know if it was whatever it was, but they followed it and it led to the stream and you could see this It looked like beaver slide marks into the water, like two beaver slide marks, as if you were running real fast on mud and you went to go stop and you just kind of slipped. That's what it kind of looked like. And he was like, whatever it was, it went into the water, like he swears up and down that it was something big. It was something huge, like he laid three rounds into it. And they can't find no blood, no nothing, no anything. I'm like, all right, well, you know, just do your thing, be safe, you know, get flashlights, get like a thermal scope. And he was like, oh yeah, I didn't think about that one.

31:30 But they go back out, and the next two weekends, you know, two weekends after that, they go back out. They are in the same area and him and his friend, or him and his two buddies, his other two buddies are a little little under the bottle and they're walking up this road looking for a grouse or you know, a grouse or pheasant, just just something. I don't really agree with it, so that's not the season for it, but they're they're they're going for it. They're just looking for something to you know, get down and eat it for dinner or lunch or whatever. And he said that they were out there for so long that the sun went down and they got dark, and he had the flash light and the other two didn't, and they're walking down this gravel road and he could hear something in the bushes on the side, and he shined it over and it looked like something just kind of dipped out of the light. And then there's this awful smell and he just was like, okay, I want to go back to camp. Let's turn around. So he turns around and go and head start back down to camp. And he's walking down and you know, you could you could hear the two other guys behind him, but he's talking and he's not getting a response. You can hear the people

33:00 behind him. And so he's going down this road. He's talking, they're not talking back, and so he like turns around to go, like, you guys, okay, and all he sees are these two figures just dart to either side of the flashlight. And his friends are two hundred yards up the road at the very top, just sitting there wondering word win. He turns around and his friends are two hundred yards away and they're wondering where he's at. He's the only one that flashlight and they're down there, you know, they're they're they're under the bottle a little. They're all hanging out, messing around. It's dark out, and he turns around and they're not behind him, and he sees these two figures jump off the side of the road, like either side of the road, and it scares him so bad that he lays like a whole entire mag down the hill the way that they ran, like whatever it went down the hill wherever it went, and he says he could hear as if it like got hit, like a little like like a like like a grunt, like like as if it either got hit or something hit it, whatever it was, but it was just this low rumbling grunt.

34:22 And he runs back to the other two, tells him what happens, and drags them all the way back down to the camp. And he just stayed up all night and watched the fire, made sure it was lit. And that night he swear he could hear like things around him moving, but it wasn't just like something walking. It was just kind of like sitting there, like swaying back and forest. It was like if you were sitting there in a bush and kind of like sit there and try to sway with the bush or something that you could just hear a bush rattle. And that's all here all night. And he didn't want to go near it.

35:03 He didn't want to mess with it because he was only one up. If he couldn't see it, he was okay. And that that's that's the end of that one. That's that's extremely interesting. Is he still pretty gung ho into the whole Sasquatch thing after that? Oh? Yeah, it just feeled the fire for him. Yeah, absolutely. And you said this was around Sandy on Alaska. Is that in Washington or Oregon?

35:43 I think it's an Oregon on Alaska Oregon? Okay. I was just checked, like I usually try to follow along with when the individuals talking, and only on it's O N and then Alaska is how spells? Right? Yeah? Yeah, the only one I can find is up in uh like by Shahlis. But uh, I guess, yeah, maybe there's some unincorporated thing in Oregon. Off to take a look closer. Very very interesting, he he. I was like, like, what's the location, Like send me like you know the coordinates or whatever, you know, like maybe I want to want to go one day, and he just I can't remember. So he said it was out by Sandy because him and his family they have he has some family out by Sandy and Damascus, Oregon.

36:40 And he made it sound like, you know, because I was like, I've never heard of on Alaska, Oregon, nonetheless on Alaska Washington. So he was just like, yeah, it's over by on Alaska. But the two places I do know of is Damascus and Sandy. And he said that it's also near that area, and I was like, all right, man, yeah, somewhere somewhere over by Damascus and Sandy for sure. I don't know about the on Alaska part, gotcha? Which you know, just south of Sandy you get into some crazy stuff, you go, if you go south south of Andy or south of Sandy, you're getting into like Esticada and there's wild stuff down there. I mean that whole area listeners will know.

37:28 Sorry is the Nameada? Sorry? Okay, that makes that makes way way more sense. Yeah, Esdcada is crazy for bigfoot dude, It's it's bonkers. Okay. So that puts that account in a whole different light. Wow, okay, very cool, very cool. And he fired fired through the tent three times. Yeah, Oh that's so weird. I think that's the first account where someone is actually fired through the tent because I mean it's interesting because like he wasn't able to see what was out there, he's still fired through the tent. That's wild.

38:14 Well, I mean I don't really blame him, you know, like personally, eyewinners shot through the tent because you don't know what's on either side, right, you know, it could have just been a fend fucking with you. But when you all get you know, just under the bottle, and everyone passes out in their tents and it's dead quiet, and you're going to bed and all you could hear the fire cracking, you know, the crackling of fire, and then out of nowhere, just something comes up and you could hear it walking outside of your tent and starts playing with your tent. Kind of freaks you out. You're you're a little underneath the influence at that point in time, and you know, you just you just do the first thing that comes to your mind, and he puts three rounds through the tent. Yeah. No, it definitely definitely makes sense when you think of the whole context. So yeah, Wild Wild Area as kid has got a ton going on. And did you say was that pretty recent?

39:05 Then? Yeah, that was within the past two months. Okay, wow, that is very recent. O goodness, it sounded like there was. You had one one other account to share as well. Yes, this this one I can say from personal as from like the first one, but in chronological order, from what I can definitely say what it was to what I can't definitely say what it was. This last one is what I don't really know about, gotcha, And yeah, it's it's that scared the crap out of me.

40:02 That is a weird whistle out of nowhere, dude. Right, I'm sitting outside, I'm sitting outside of my driveway because it's the new place that's quiet, and that weird whistle if he's out of nowhere, and I turn around and I almost put myself But it was just some dude right in the sea on the road. Oh nice, just a random segue guy. That's cool, all right. Oh, let's get the crap out of me, all right. But the other, the last encounter, this one's going to be more of a longer one, and it I was a little I was I know, I want to do in chronological order, but you got to say the best for last. This was around middle school, you know, beginning of middle school, middle you know, like the beginning in the middle of middle school that time frame, and me and my good buddy and his dad, we all went out camping. I don't remember where. I don't remember the camp site, but it was just you know, it was mainly like a tent tent site, you know, no campers, no pop up campers, nothing like that. Just tense tense grills, you know that sort along the river. And me, my friend and his dad. His dad's ex military. My friend

41:33 he he's about the same age I am around that time, maybe a little bit younger, like by a couple, you know, nothing mad year right, maybe by a year or so. And I remember us setting up, us getting ready, and this campground is like super popular. It's the middle of summer, you know, like nice water, middle of summer. It's hot, it's sunny, it's nice out, clear weather. You know, you just want to go outside. You want to go you want to go do something, you want to go camp that. It's that, it's that weather, and it's by this river. I wish I remember the locations, but I don't, unfortunately.

42:16 And I remember we went out, we had a great time, We set up camp, We went out, We had a great time. We come back and this camp grounds, you know, full of them. When we arrived and we you know, we relax, we get some wares going, we we go to we start, you know, getting our way to bed, and you know, the campground slowly, you know, you know, the lights start going out and you get ready for bed, you know, it gets gets quieter and everything. And so I remember us going to bed. We were in two different tents one first, Dad had one for me and my buddy, and we're going to bed and we're quiet, the water running, A couple couple of people are still up, you know, talking around the campfire. And I remember going to sleep, and then me and my buddy we wake up to a car peeling out and we're like, oh, someone got drunk and decide to go for a drive or whatever. And so we wake up and I'm like, okay, I'll go to the bathroom since I'm up. I get up and I go outside the tent. I look across the campground and everyone's gone. It's about probably one am around this point in time. I get up to go to the bathroom and everyone is gone. I couldn't tell if it was just the people close to us left

43:48 or everyone was gone. It was dark, but it looked like everyone left. And so I was like, that's strange. And so I wake my buddy up and I'm like, hey, the campground's empty, and he kind of was like taken aback. At first, you know, he just woke up and he's like, huh, like what's going on? And I'm like, the campground's empty, isn't that strange? And he was like, yeah, that's that's weird, but it's probably, you know, nothing big, nothing serious. I just like a little confused, a little like what's going on? Like what happened? And then I do my business and I go back to bed and then maybe it didn't even feel like my eyes closed, but I dosed off.

44:38 It was super quiet when I woke up. But I was woken up by something hitting the tent and it just sounded like something like if you were to like you know, when you splash water with the back of your hand and you're like trying to splash water to someone. It was almost like that, but against a tent instead of water. You're just kind of flicking your fingers at it and trying to push it. And I'll wake my buddy up and I'm like, dude, what is going on? Like like like is you're dead with us? Is like, what what's happening? And he wakes up and you know he's taking am back again, you know, and he it rattles him awake pretty quick after he sees it happening.

45:29 Something's pushing up against the tent, and then just like the other one with the camp, it almost seemed like if it reached over the tent, grabbed it from the middle and just kind of lifted it up and put it back down, lifted it up, put it back down while we're in it, no lights, no nothing, and we're sitting there trying to whisper, like we don't want to piss whatever's off, you know, if it's outside, we don't want to piss it off. It obviously can lift up the tent while we're in it, and it's lifting us. It's lifting and us up, but not enough to get off the ground, but just enough as if you were to feel weight and you put it back down, feel weight and you put it back down. And we're we're this sight out of her mind, like what in the world is going on right now? Like what is out there?

46:19 And so we're sitting there and then I remember it going real good against the tent, and I cannot remember if I screamed or my friend screamed. One of us screamed, and it stopped. And then as Dad woke up, because the way that the tints weren't set up. If from the side it was playing with the tent, if you were to walk backwards about five feet, you would hit his tent. So we screamed, and you could you could kind of hear it, you know how you can, like if something's really close to you and it fades away, you can hear more as if something left. It was kind of like that. It sounded like something kind of backed away, and we could hear the river again. And then his dad wakes up and he's gung ho out of the tent and he has his flashlight and his gun, you know, rest over wrist, and he turns his flashlight on and just starts laying into whatever it was. He was right there next to his tent by the time he got out of his tent, it was down by the river, and just flashes lights on and just starts screaming like bloody murder, like get out of here, go, go, go, get out here, go, And he starts just laying down rounds towards it as whatever it was was running away, and it just ran and it never seemed to stop

47:53 like it. They never seemed like he ran out of Ammo. It never looked like it never seemed like he couldn't see. It was kind of more of a scary part, you know, when you're younger, and then all of a sudden, you know, just whatever it is, just one of you screaming. Then all of a sudden, within like it felt like two seconds, a grown man is yelling with a flashlight and a gun and just yelling while shooting at whatever is outside. And it was quite a awakening per se too. Exactly how bigfoot, you know, because because his dad was like, that was a big foot. We packed up that night and we I didn't sleep in the car. I don't remember, but I know I didn't sleep on the whole ride home.

48:46 But we left right after that. All we did was the tent and the sleeping bags and put everything in whatever was left. It wasn't important. And we get in the car and we leave. I've never been back there, and me and my friends still talk about it every now and then. His dad does every now and then too. It's nothing like we're trying to be like, well, what you know, like, don't talk about that. That's that's something we don't talk about. It's like that was crazy, Like we still wonder what it was, But his dad swears up and down, my friend swears up and down that it was a big foot and it was toying with the tent and it was messing with the light, like, you know, everything that was outside of the tent. You know, you leave stuff out of the tent when you're a kid, like the lights or you know, like a little lantern light or you know, s'mores or chocolates or whatever. So I, you know, our first thought was like, oh, it's an animal, you know, just eating the smores that were left out.

49:44 But his dad said that that thing was on two legs and it was moving like ten fifteen miles an hour, like it was bolting and it he was saying that the height of it was about six to seven feet tall, broad shoulders and really hairy. It had a head, it had arms, It had legs. You know, the knees bent like the human. The arms swayed lucky human, but the arms are down. If it was standing straight up, it was kind of more of a slouched. The knees were bent and the hands were by the knees and it was just sitting there messing with her tent. And when it took a step back, when we screamed whatever it was, because I still don't know, but you know, these other two are like, oh, speak, I wouldn't doubt it, Like I don't doubt that it was bigfoot, but I didn't see it. I had no idea that, if anything, it was.

50:54 And whenever it stepped back, it stepped on the corner of the tent and broke the fiberglass little rods that held the tenth up. And that's what woke his dad up. His dad has you know, a seatpath he snores. He you know, he didn't have a seatpap. We were in the middle of nowhere, but he uses a seapap and all that good stuff, because you know, he's a bad breathing so you know, he's a heavy, deep sleep sleeper, and he probably I know it was his forty five millimeter in probably a fifteen round mag and dumped the whole entire mag at whatever it was, threw in another mag and he watched the woods and around us as me and my buddy tried to pack everything up. It wasn't mean, it wasn't pretty, but we just packed everything up into the back of the car SUV and we never went back, and we didn't talk about it until the next morning, and in the next morning, it was just kind of like a everyone just was a little off. It was.

52:06 It was one of those experiences that you go through and you wake up and you just have this weird feeling like something's different, something's new, something changed, and you're just like you're going through your day to day life, but you're just a little scared because something changed and you don't know what changed. And it was like that for probably a week to two weeks, and then that kind of feeling of something changed or something new happened kind of went away. That's that's extremely extremely intense Land and Man, and it sounds like you it's hard to remember the specifics of where it was. We definitely know somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, do we know maybe if it's more Oregon or Washington.

53:00 I know that we're It was about an hour to two hour car ride from Woodland, Woodland, Washington. I don't know what direction, but he was staying in Woodland at the point in time, and it was an hour to two hour car ride away from Woodland. Gotcha, Yeah, that's that's a It's a pretty pretty big area. Yeah, there could be a lot of different directions that you went. That's extremely interesting. I mean that must have affected you in was it a long time after that that you started going back into the woods or or how did that affect you?

53:41 I mean yeah, I mean after that. I don't really after that. I just after that happened, honestly, it just kind of shocked and rattled you. And when you were outside by yourself as a kid, you're already scared of the dark, you know, and that didn't help. So I was if I was in my room and the light was off, I was scared shitless. I was thinking that whatever it was is going to come knock on my window and you know, pull me out of my window. And it was definitely an experience that I won't forget it, and I know the other two won't forget, and it's something that you'll always keep in the back of your mind, Like when I'm out in the woods, even when I'm with someone, I still have that like, you know, I head on a swivel, like if you smell something like I lost my sense of smell to COVID, so I can't really smell. I can smell it if it's awful awful and I can smell it if it's like super super sweet. Those are like the two ranges of scent I have. And that's the main reason why I go out with someone. And I'm like, hey, if you smell something and it stinks, if it smells awful, if it doesn't stop, like, let me know, we'll go. Like I'm not gonna sit around and wait for whatever it is to reveal itself or you know, try to do something well.

55:17 Landon. You guys have been through some pretty wild stuff up there. You and the people that you know. I just want to say, you know, thank you for coming on the show to share what you've experienced. Is it a thing where you want to keep having experiences when you go out or you could live without any from here on out. I definitely could live without more experiences. But it at the same time it interests me, like it scares me, but it intrigues me, Like it's intriguing like, hey, like this happened. You had an experience like you. I'm not craving for another experience. I'm not going to go looking for it, but if it comes finding me, I'm going to be there. You know that That's that's how I feel about it, Like, if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen.

56:14 I'm not going to stop it, but I'm not going to make it happen. Absolutely. Do you have any advice to people that might be listening where they're like, they really want something to happen, but they haven't had something happen, Like what happened to you yet? I mean out here When when you have an experience, you're going to lose your sense of direction, You're going to lose your sense of reason, You're going to go into fight or flight mode. Unless if you're genuinely prepared or you know, if you're ex military, you're going to be ready for those types of situations. You're going to be ready to confront whatever it is. But if you're new to the experience, if you never had an experience and you really want one personally, if you're that determined to find an experience or go looking for it, don't do it alone. Bring someone with you because if something goes wrong, it's much better to have something someone with you that can help you and that can call someone, like if you like on Bigfoot related like like if you were to fall and twist your ankle and you dislocate your ankle, there's someone there that can hold you and walk you back to camp. Without that person, you're gonna sit there and there won't be much that you

57:46 can do, especially if you don't have a phone, or if you lost your phone when you fell, or your phone cracked when you fell. It's better to have. The way I like to look at it is less hand make more or less hand or more hands make less work. Four feet are better than two, and two eyes are better than or four eyes are better than two. It's when you have that extra person. It's more security. The more people that you have with you, the more confident you will feel about doing whatever you're going to do and however you're going to approach it. Just don't do it by yourself. I think that that's uh the best great advice for going out in the woods in general and doing anything in the outdoors. But you know, Landon, thank you so much for coming on the show. I want to make sure that you were able to share everything that you had been wanting to share it today.

58:44 Yeah, I mean, and for people who are thinking about coming on and talking. When I first emailed and I was kind of like, am I really doing this right now? Like am I? Am? I genuinely going to do this? And it took me a couple of days to genuinely set up the date just because I thought about it. I was like genuinely debating, like what like what is this going to change? Like what if this does change something? What if this does does something? Like what's going to happen? Like all these what ifs? Just if it's something that you feel like you want to share, share it, if it's something that you want to talk about, talk about it, it's if you don't. If you're listening to this just to hear other people's experiences, you can listen. But when you're trying to gain that courage and that momentum to go through that email and genuinely reach out and try to get in contact with the Bigfoot Society and everything like that, just there's nothing that can happen, like the worst that can that can happen as you lose cell service, like your WiFi goes out, the phone call hangs up.

1:00:04 You know, I think that's a great way to put it. I appreciate you sharing the thoughts you have about that. I you know, I think that's Yeah, that's a perfect way to put it. But you know, Landon, thank you for coming on the show. If anything else does happen in the future, you're always welcome to you know, reach out if you need someone to share it with. And yeah, I just appreciate you coming on tonight. Yeah, of course, thanks for having me. Just want to take a minute to say thank you for listening to this episode of the Bigfoot Society podcast. Landon Story is one of those rare encounters that will stick with you, not just because of the rock throwing sasquatch, but because of the eerie silence that came before it.

1:00:51 If you enjoyed this conversation, please make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube and hit the bell icon so you don't miss any new episodes. And if you're listening to us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please follow the show and leave a review. It really helps others find us. If you've had a big Foot encounter, especially in Washington's Scamania County, Carson or the surrounding areas, we want to hear from you. Please send me an email at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com and let's talk about it and thanks again for being part of 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.