Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I have about 5 or 6 experiences starting at around the age of 10 years old and last experience around 10 years ago, all but one in the North Eastern part of Washington state but I only have one actual sighting.

I was raised in the woods as the son of a logger and avid hunter/camper. My first experience at about 10 was at a family logging camp in northern Idaho where we could hear them howling nightly but nearly always from a distance and when we tried to get closer our dogs would stop at a certain point and refuse to go further. First time I experienced seeing my Dad so unnerved. Eventually Mom insisted we leave the camp.

As a logger and hunter myself we had a number of odd experiences through the years both together and separately and even at one of the homes we lived in The tops of large trees shaking violently seen by the whole crew, the gibbering sounds they make at many locations, the smells, more distant howling, wood knocking and possibly rock knocking, odd structures, house slapping, oddly placed dead logs over barb wire fences and apparent gift giving.

My second experience was while deer hunting and I think I jumped one coming in my direction from the opposite side of a steep finger ridge on a clear cut. I heard what I thought was a deer coming at me and as we got closer to each other it stopped just under the top of the ridge and while we both paused and it became dead quiet I started smelling a strong skunky/poopy odor. I finally decided to try and creep closer to the top, about 20 feet. away but as soon as I moved it exploded in the opposite direction. Sounded like a whole herd of elk stampeding down the other side. As I came over the top of the ridge to take a look the smell about took the wind out of me but whatever was making the noise and smell was way gone into the tree line. I thought I would at least see tracks or damage in the low brush but there was no real signs of anything ever being there.

The same year (1982-83ish) while hunting the same area I made a regular drive on foot across the slope of this one mountainside with trees thick as hair on a dog’s back. On the third or fourth time I made the drive I got lost as “f”! I finally meandered out and I did the same hunt the next day and it went just fine. But in days to come I got lost as you can get 2 more times. The area was small and contained enough that no one should ever have gotten turned around in there. My Dad ribbed me but I ended up challenging him to try the same short hunt I waited until well after dark for him to show up at our meeting point and when he finally did show up it was the first time I ever saw him scared We took a number of other experienced hunters and woodsmen to the location and they managed to get lost too. Which freaked everyone out and they all came out scared. Listening to your podcasts about infrasound or possible other ways to “influence” your thoughts or actions makes me now wonder if we were being “encouraged” somehow to make a wide route around this oddly terrifying patch of the woods.

My third hard to ignore experience was while camping with my wife and 3 little kids in about 1995. We backed my 79 bronco up to a very large yellow pine tree and made camp at a location that had been a large logging camp at the early part of the last century. We almost left on the second night because just after dark and about 50 feet up this huge tree we heard what sounded like an owl hooting repeatedly and it was loud and impossible to sleep. Just when you thought you were going to drift off to sleep it would hoot again. After about an hour of this it started changing it’s voice into crow sounds, other bird sounds and off and on sounded like a drunk man just saying the words “hoot hooot” without even trying to sound like a real bird any more. Got weirder before it got over but I never saw anything.

The last hard to ignore experience I had was driving north up hwy 395 just outside of a small town and about a hundred feet off the road I saw an “impossibility”. I never related it to big foot until listening to your show and I’m still not certain what I saw. I think it was about 1999 or 2000 on a brilliantly sunny, early summer morning around 10 or 11 AM. There is a creek about 60-80 feet to the left of the road and about another 10 feet above the creek in the green grass was a creature stretched out and running on all fours. It was easily close to ten feet long or longer. I slowed down to get a better look and watched it run for about 30 or 40 feet while I tried to figure out what it was. It dove into some taller brush and grass and disappeared but it never stood up. For lack of a better way to describe it, I would say it moved like a cross between a snake, an otter and a spider. It was almost but not quite jet black but as it moved in the sunlight you could pick out a dark brown. It seemed to have very thick but short hair, no ears came above the top of the head, it had no tail and it’s front and hind legs worked almost like an otter scrambling away but they were too long for otter leg’s but not obviously like I would have thought bigfoot arms and legs would look like. At no point did it look or behave like a “GoddamnBear”.

My first thought was that I was that I was straight up hallucinating then I wondered if it could have just been a trick of lighting near the water and that it might be a smaller creature being augmented in size and being projected to another location by atmospheric conditions (because I have heard of some things like that). I wondered if it could somehow have been a south American river otter as they get about 7 feet or longer. I guessed some stretchy trick of light and maybe it was a black cougar. Even a sick bear was a guess because nothing else was fitting right.

I tucked it away as just having to be an unsolved mystery for life until I heard your podcasts.”