Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “This document contains a list of encounters had by myself and close family members. These events go back from roughly 2006 to the present.I will try my best to list the events in chronological order. All of these encounters have happened in North Carolina, most in national forests.

A little background on myself and family. I am a Mechanical Engineer, and my wife is a science teacher. We are both skeptical to this sort of stuff, but after having just too many strange events happen we have become more accepting of abnormal phenomenon.

These first two encounters are the most mysterious and I do not believe it to fall within the realm of “Sasquatch” but more into the realm of gnome, dwarf, or what I have heard referred to as Bukwas? I hate to start off with these encounters as they are the most ridiculous events. But I rather get them out of the way

Location: Charlotte, NC
Time Frame: Late Fall 2006, ~10:00 PM
Witnesses: My Father and Myself

I was 16 when I had this encounter with my Dad in the woods right by our apartment complex. These woods weren’t anything crazy, probably only 100 yds deep and 500 yds wide. My Dad and I spent a lot of our summers in the middle of these woods (from 2004-2007) building and improving this crazy rope bridge hammock out of old tennis nets and cheap clothesline we bought at the dollar store. We had no common sense, but it was a great bonding experience with my dad.

One night in December, Dad and I decided to go out for a walk to our contraption and just watch the stars from a hammock platform we had built. It was a clear night with a full moon, the empty trees gave a perfect view of the night sky. We grabbed our flashlights, put on our coats (it was about 35-40F that night) and I grabbed my pellet gun that I liked to have just in case we encountered a rabid animal (has happened before).

We walked our way to our bridge and climbed up into the hammock which was about 15 ft off the ground (again we were stupid, I eventually broke my wrist on a test hammock that was lower). We were sitting up there just talking and watching the night sky when in front of where we were facing about 40-50 yds away I heard footsteps. I jabbed my elbow into my dad telling him to be quiet and listen. At first we thought it was just a homeless man who was just using the woods as cover cross from one area to another (which they were known for doing).

The footsteps kept coming towards us and towards this open clearing about 20 yds away which was lit up by the moonlight. So I sat up, watching towards this patch hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever it was, but as it got closer to the lit patch it softly turned 90 deg to its right and walked parallel to this patch. All of the sudden I caught a glimpse of a leg from the foot to the top of the knee.

This leg was bare naked, no socks, no shoes, no pant leg, nothing. I could see the ankle and foot definition clearly. The leg had this bluish hue (I’m assuming from the moonlight) and it was extremely short, I would estimate 10 inches in length from the base of the foot to the top of the knee.

I seriously for a moment thought it was a little naked kid in the woods. This thing then walked its way towards the shadows keeping parallel with the patch. Once it reached the shadows it turned 90 deg left towards us and made its way underneath a magnolia tree 8 yds away from us where we presume it was watching us from. The only sound made by this thing was its footsteps; no vocalizations, nothing. Freaking out, I lifted up the pellet gun and just aimed in the general direction of this thing and shot.

I believe I hit it as it let out this scream and bolted off in the direction where it initially came from shrieking, kind of like a little kid at a playground. I mean it was just crashing through the woods making a massive racket. We got down from that hammock as fast as we could and bolted back to the apartment absolutely confused as to what happened. It honestly was just so strange as we have never heard anything like this before. We were quite shaken up for a few months and would only go in the woods during the day. Not sure what this thing could’ve been, the leg was definitely human like and this thing was definitely a biped, but it was just so short. It possibly is the same thing we saw in the next encounter below about 4 years later.

Encounter 2
Location: Same area as Encounter 1
Time Frame: Early Summer 2011, 5:00PM
Witnesses: My Father, EX (call her H), Myself

I was in college at this time starting my summer break from my junior year. I had gotten a job with my apartment complex (the same apartments as the previous event) as an assistant to the maintenance crew. Part of my job was to do apartment inspections, and replace all bulbs in the apartments to CFL’s. I had amassed a shit-ton of old light bulbs and decided it would be fun to take them out to the woods and use them for target practice with my pellet gun.

My girlfriend at the time was visiting from out of town so my dad and I decided we would just show her some fun while we were out there. We had built this awesome potato cannon so we figured we would take that out with us too. So we grabbed our supplies and headed over to the rope bridge to set up the shooting range.

Our target holder was a shower curtain rod someone discarded that we jammed into the ground and the backstop was a massive oak tree 5 yds from the rod. I started by setting up a bulb onto the rod and stepping back about 10 yds. Dad and H were about 5 yds behind me fiddling around with the potato cannon getting it prepped to fire. I shot at the bulb, breaking it then proceeded to set up a new bulb. I had done this about 10 times and Dad and H had gotten off one or 2 potatoes. After setting up another bulb, I walked back and shot, but this time when I walked towards the rod to reset, this thing just bolted from this bush 5 yds to my left. I saw it run up this small hill, down the other side and out of sight into the thorn brush.

It was running on 2 legs and was about 3 ft tall. It was brown and covered in shaggy medium length hair. It swayed it’s arms like a speed walker would as it ran away. Both Dad and H saw this thing running away and immediately wanted to leave the area. H was freaking out. We packed all of our stuff and got out of there fast.

What was strange was I never saw this thing in the bushes, never heard it walk up the entire time. We were completely unaware that something was watching us from 15 yds away, and in my case even closer.

Thing is, looking back I absolutely do not think these two encounters were related or the same thing. The first one was hairless, I am 100% sure on that and this second one was definitely covered in hair. I haven’t been back to those woods in a while as I moved a few years later.

Encounter 3
Location: Pisgah NF, NC
Time Frame: Late Spring 2015
Witnesses: Wife (gf at the time, call her S), Her Father (J), Her Brother (M), Myself

This encounter was mostly my wife, but later on our hiking trip the entire group encountered something strange. My wifes encounter is the following:

“Went on a hike to Pisgah National Forest with my husband (Stephen- though he was just my boyfriend at the time), my dad and my brother. The route we took was about 13 miles around in a loop, which started at Turkey Pen Gap.

We hiked the majority of the uphill stuff on the first day, and planned to stay overnight before we got to some creek crossings on day two. We like to go at a pretty leisurely pace, so we only did about 7 miles on day one. We set up our camp on the edge of the first creek crossing, in an area that was some very old looking forest. Not much undergrowth, tall old trees, soft soil. We hung up our hammocks near each other, with the exception of my dad staking out a Mylar tube on the ground for himself as he loaned my brother his own hammock, said it reminded him of being in boy scouts (building his own shelter) so he did not mind.

I was set up between my dad ten feet to my left, my husband- ten feet to my right, and with my brother behind me about twenty five feet. (They formed a kind of triangle, and I was in the middle of the hypotenuse.

We had an uneventful sundown for the most part, just heated water for our dehydrated dinner and ate- then pretty much went straight to sleep.

Full disclaimer, I am the world’s lightest sleeper. I will wake up to pretty much any noise, even if it is to someone putting their hand on my bedroom door in the middle of the night- I’ll sit bolt upright in bed immediately.

I woke up a little past midnight.

I looked up, and there was a massive shadow standing over me. It blocked out most of the pretty full moon. It was hard to process it for a second, I thought I was having a dream. I then realized that whatever this was, it was definitely real. I reassured myself by sliding my hand up to my Glock 26 on my chest, but immediately realized that I was totally under gunned. In the midst of this, I realized that I’m totally having a panic attack. I think to myself ‘holy shit, this is a f**** bigfoot.’ I had laughed at the concept before, I’m an atheist- I don’t believe in god, much less crypto-creatures , I thought it was total bull. But holy hell; there it was, standing over me. I could see very easily how big it was, I was about three feet off the ground, and I was below the middle of this thing’s thighs. It’s arms hung all the way down to the middle of its thighs, and its head was just a large, rounded, knob on top of the biggest shoulders I have ever seen. It was super wide, easily much wider than my dad, who is 6’2 and 230 pounds.

I thought to call out for a second, but immediately decided against it. I thought it would spook the creature if I yelled, and I didn’t have enough firepower to stop it if it decided to slam an arm down on me and kill me.

I felt totally irrational in those moments that I stared at the thing. I thought if I breathed too loudly it would know I was awake. I thought it would carry me off into the woods, wrapped up like a wonton in my hammock.

I had a freak out moment when I realized that maybe it came over to me because ( hopefully this isn’t too much information) I was on my ‘time of the month’ and the creature could smell it.

Whatever the case, I was so panicked I closed my eyes and started counting in my head. I got to about 300 when it finally moved away, it’s footsteps were so quiet I strained to hear them. When I opened my eyes again it was gone, but I laid there for the rest of the night awake.

The whole time the next day, I felt like I was being watched. I couldn’t focus on the hike. I didn’t tell anyone until I told my husband and my dad a few weeks after we got home. I was looking at every Rhododendron Hell wondering if the bigfoot was behind them or in them watching us. I was freaked out the whole time, keeping my whole group within eyesight until we got back to the car.

There were a couple of other weird things that trip that are unrelated, but that you might find interesting.

On the second day, while I’m still freaking out about bigfoot, we were crossing over what was described online in the hike description as “a couple of creek crossings.” It was a river, and it was canoeable, but that’s beside the point. We went over this ‘creek’ 13 times, as the trail doubled over it a ton because someone decided that was a good idea. On the 10th or 11th crossing, we stopped at a large rocky shore, that had nice sized rocks that two people could sit on. We had given up ages back on switching out of our boots and into water sandals, so we had gone in the water in our boots, and we know that Gore-tex keeps water out, but it also keeps water in, and we were trying to dry out our feet for a minute, and wring out our socks. (We’re a little bit idiotic, I know.)

We sat there eating Peanut M&Ms, wringing out our socks, when my brother, who was bored, gets our attention from behind us in the trees off the bank. My husband and I got up, and went over to him.

My brother then started pointing out all these personal effects of someone who had camped there, but not recently. There was a sleeping pad, dirty and half buried in the soil. A sock thrown by the base of a tree. A tent pole, and some fabric ripped off to the side. There was old and weathered materials strewn about, totally abandoned. It weirded the boys out, but I was internally flipping out, because of the night before.
Dad shrugged when he saw it, saying it was weird, but not a big deal. We all put our gear back together, and our shoes back on, then continued our hike.

Just after the 13th crossing of the “creek”, we saw a family come around the bend ahead of us. They were headed in the opposite direction that we were. There was a couple of kids, dressed in swimwear with flip flops on, a mom right behind them, dressed similarly. A small dog that didn’t acknowledge us, and what I assume was the dad and another son behind them by about ten feet.

We were almost on top of them and they hadn’t acknowledged us, my dad being friendly greeted them. They seemingly ignored him. He tried again, and the woman as if in a daze, looked up at him. She stopped and said “hi.”

Dad asked her if they had just come from the parking lot, and if so, was there another river crossing up ahead?

She shook her head slowly and said “no.” then kept walking. The others of her group did not even look at us.

We stood there for a minute looking after them as they disappeared around the bend behind us, and we were thinking “well that was rude.”

We walked ahead, and I kid you not, right there thirty feet from the place we talked to them, is the river, and there’s the trail on the other side of it.

Dad stopped, and said out loud, “NOPE.” Then started looking for somewhere else we could walk to avoid going over the river. We saw that there was a crappy little goat trail above us to the right side above the river, so we went up it, and paralleled the river instead.

We walked quickly, eager to get out of there, we were hot and a little weirded out. We heard noise of a family in front of us, we looked down, and we all stopped in our tracks. There was the family, with all there stuff set up like it had been there for ages, playing in the water of the river
.
The only thing I could think was “how did they get there, when they were behind us- going the opposite direction, and we were hauling ass up this trail?”
My brother exclaimed in his seventeen year old way “it’s a fu**ing ghost family!” We looked at him like he was nuts, but quietly agreed, and then hauled our butts up the rest of the trail, which was thankfully near its end. We still bring it up at family dinners, and that was a good three years ago now.”

These next encounters happened in Uwharrie NF, most in the same location at a campsite my wife and FIL enjoy. But the first one on this list was relatively nearby further down a road.

Encounter 4
Location: Uwharrie NF, NC
Time Frame: Mid Summer 2015
Witnesses: Only Me

Sometime in mid summer 2015, My Wife (gf at the time, call her S), her father(J) and I decided to go car camping in Uwharrie NF. When you pull into the south side of the NF there is a gravel road that drives into the forest that lead to many campsites. We have a spot that we enjoy that is right off the gravel road with a nice clearing for stargazing and great trees for hammock camping (what we primarily do) and is really close to the trails in case we want to do any hiking.

This place will come up many times in other encounters as we have had a lot of activity in this area.”