Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “First of all, I’ve got to say I’m a huge fan of your podcast. Been listening on and off for about a year now, and find it extremely entertaining as well as creepy at times. The feelings that your witnesses often describe are very relatable, and I greatly appreciate your support to them in that regard. Many people hope to have encounters, but I wouldn’t wish one on my worst enemy.

I’d like to give some background on myself. 27yo male originally from NYC, working full-time as an electrical engineer. My whole life I’ve been an outdoorsy person. As a very young child, I would summer in a beach town on Long Island. So lots of swimming and fishing for me. After summer was over, we would take frequent weekend trips to the Catskills, where a family friend had a cabin on a stream. Lots of hiking, shooting, swimming, fishing, etc. Never really got into hunting, but I still do a ton of fishing, and lots of hiking and camping these days. I’d be happy to elaborate if you’re interested, but long story short, my activities can get pretty intense, and I feel very comfortable in the wilderness having dealt with large predators (both land and sea) before. The story I’m going to tell you, was extremely uncomfortable in every sense possible.

A buddy of mine has an uncle with a hunting cabin up in the Adirondacks, so we decided to go for some hiking in early November 2021. There are multiple parts to this, so I’ll do my best to summarize briefly and let you decide if it’s interesting enough to hear more. The cabin was situated on a shelf of a small mountain, with about half an acre cleared off to have some open land around the cabin. The open land was in the shape of a rectangle, something like 75’x250’ish. The front of the cabin was facing downhill, and the back facing uphill. Both slopes were pretty steep. Must have been a solid 30degrees both ways. All heavily wooded. Your visibility up or down the slope from the treeline was like 15-20 yards tops. Out of respect for my friend and his uncle’s privacy, I won’t offer up any location-specific details, but this cabin was backed up by several hundred thousand acres of remote wilderness. If you look at a map, it won’t be hard to figure out where. No cell service, no utilities. After all, we wanted to disconnect.

First night, myself and a couple of buddies decide to stay out by the firepit late. Sometime after midnight, we begin hearing movement beyond the treeline uphill. Whatever it was, it was circling us for about an hour. Eventually, we get up to investigate and are met with growling and rock throwing, which we tried to dish back. After seemingly scaring the animal away, we put the fire out and head inside trying to figure out what just happened. We came up with bear and called it a night.

The next day we started getting harassed at the summit of the mountain, and were followed all the way down to our cabin with rock throwing, growls, and whoops. Never got a glimpse of any animal in the 2ish hours it was happening. When we got back to the cabin, the vocalizations stopped but the rock throwing continued. We stayed inside the rest of the day and through the night. The cabin was getting hit and the shed was ripped open with the garbage bins being knocked over. Eventually, we went out with a 22cal rifle (lol) that we found stashed in the cabin and fired a few rounds hoping to scare whatever this was away. Luckily, it worked.

Next morning I went out to fix the shed, when I caught wind of an awful stench. Smelled like landfill mixed with ball-sweat, and smelly armpits. Just god-awful. It wasn’t garbage, as we still had ours in the cabin and the bins were empty. Figured it was lingering from the owner last time he was there. I later found out that there hadn’t been anyone there in a year. Anyway, I went about my business and went back in. The rest of that day was uneventful. We went down into the valley and hiked along a stream down there, did some fishing, and had a nice picnic. We ended up finding our courage again, and decided to start a fire that night. Few hours later, we noticed the movement again. Everyone goes into high alert, but this time we have the rifle with us so we’re going to try to be a little more brave. We keep doing our thing, seeing if we can lure it in a little closer to have a look. After an hour, we hear a branch falling off behind the cabin. We all look over, get the maglites over there, but don’t see anything. I look over to the left with the maglite as we’re settling back into our seats and notice eyeshine. We get the spotlight out and it’s a large, dark, seemingly bipedal animal that’s in the ‘taking a knee’ stance. Right after we see it, it takes off running. This thing was not small. That was enough for us. We get in the cabin, starting packing our stuff, and load the trucks while my BIL stands guard with the rifle and my buddy with the bear spray. It was the longest 15 minutes of our lives. We couldn’t possibly stay there another night having seen what was around us all that time.

We ended up driving all the way to Albany to get a hotel room. We still couldn’t wrap our head around what we had seen. That wasn’t a bear. Wasn’t a coyote, bobcat, or fox. Was it a person? I guess it could be, but how were they getting around with no lights under a new moon in the middle of nowhere? How could they make those sounds? How could they be so large? And so hairy? And have eyeshine? We had no idea, but didn’t care to find out.

Truth be told, it wasn’t until 2023 that I started actively thinking about it again. This came about by a rerun of Finding Bigfoot on Animal Planet. All the feelings came rushing back in and all of a sudden I was scared to even go fishing on Long Island, where it was so unbelievably unlikely to have a similar experience. Not too long after I ended up finding your podcast, and binging it. So many episodes were talking about such similar things that it made me start believing. The rest of my group isn’t thinking much of it, and believes that we simply got overwhelmed and it made it worse than it was. I can’t shake the feeling that they’re wrong. What say you?”