Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I was born in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up throughout southeast and central Georgia, including Woodbine, Brunswick, Dublin, and Augusta.

My father owned shrimp boats, so I spent a great deal of my childhood on the water. We fished the rivers, lakes, and ocean, and I spent many weekends and summers alongside him on his shrimp boat or running trot lines in the rivers. My father whom I will refer to as Charles also took me hunting and taught me many of the things I know about the woods.

I am providing this brief background because, over the years, I have had multiple unusual experiences of my own, as well as experiences that my father told me about before he passed away. Some occurred with him, and others occurred without him. They range from the swamps of south Georgia to the natural cold springs of central Georgia.

My mother also played an important role in shaping my understanding of these kinds of experiences. Her mother was half Cherokee, and my mother shared stories with me that had been passed down through her family before she died. Some of those stories stayed with me throughout my life.

I was probably around ten years old, around 1977, when I first became familiar with the idea of Sasquatch. Like many families at the time, we would watch *In Search Of…*, along with *Gunsmoke*, *The Waltons*, and other television programs.

At that age, however, Sasquatch was simply an interesting subject to me. I had no idea that I would eventually have experiences that would cause me to take the subject much more seriously.

My Father’s Stories

My father served in the Merchant Marines from World War II until after the Korean War. During his years at sea, he made numerous convoy crossings between the United States and Great Britain.

He would sometimes tell me stories about his experiences during that period. Many involved strange lights that he and his fellow sailors witnessed at sea. Others concerned the sinking of Allied shipping by German U-boats.  As a child, I generally assumed these were simply sailor stories, tall tales told by men who had spent too much time at sea.

As I got older, however, I began to wonder whether some of the stories were not quite as exaggerated as I had originally believed.

I also had family members who had served in the military. My uncle was in the Navy during the Korean War, and my older brother served in the Navy during the Vietnam War and continued serving into the 1990s. They both had their own stories and experiences to share.

In other words, I was exposed to stories of the unusual from a very young age.

My First Experience at Sea

When I was about ten or eleven years old, around 1977 or 1978, I began spending my summers going out on my father’s shrimp boat. It was during one of those trips, several miles offshore, that I had my first experience that I would consider genuinely unexplained.

I saw strange lights and unusual shapes both in the water and above the ocean. I didn’t know what I was looking at, and I had no explanation for what I saw. Whatever those experiences were, they changed my perspective. I became much more open to the possibility that some of the things people reported as paranormal or unexplained might actually be real.

The Trot Lines

Some of the most significant experiences my father and I had occurred while hunting or checking our trot lines late at night or in the early morning hours before sunrise. On several occasions, we would discover that some of our trot lines had been pulled in and were almost coiled up on one side of the bank or the other. The fish were gone, and so was the bait from the hooks.

Our first assumption was that someone was stealing our fish. Eventually, however, we began finding something that made us question that explanation. When the tide was low enough to expose the mud along the riverbank, we would sometimes find extremely large human-like footprints in the mud.

That caused us to reconsider what was happening. Instead of simply assuming someone was taking our fish, we decided to approach our trot lines as quietly as possible and try to determine what was actually disturbing them. Eventually, we were able to see what we believed was responsible.

The Creature on the Riverbank

The animal we observed was approximately six feet tall. It appeared to be covered in dark hair and had extremely long arms. Its eyes appeared dark and penetrating, and its face had an oval-like shape. It was heavily built and extremely muscular, yet it moved with a speed that seemed almost unnatural.

From what we could determine, it appeared to be male. The light that night was primarily pale moonlight, so we were unable to get a clear look at its features. What I remember most clearly was its dark appearance, its powerful build, and its speed. Then it vocalized.

The howl or scream it produced was unlike anything I had ever heard. That would not be our last encounter.

The Second River Encounter

Several months later, we encountered the creature again, much farther down the river. This time, we saw what appeared to be the creature in the river itself, taking fish from one of our trot lines. It was partially submerged and approximately waist-deep in the water.

We did not get a good look at its face. We primarily saw its back and side as it moved through the river. The creature eventually swam to the opposite bank, climbed out of the water, and disappeared into the woods. My father was particularly struck by what he had witnessed. He told me that in all his years on the water, he had never seen anything like that swimming in the river.

The Alligator and the Skunk Ape

The last encounter my father and I had on the river was considerably more dramatic. It occurred a little more than a year after our first encounter. We were checking our trot lines when we both heard a sound that terrified us.

Neither of us had ever heard anything like it. The closest comparison I can make is the sound of a wild boar when it is dying but this was much louder, deeper, and more powerful.

My father slowed the boat almost to a crawl. As we moved toward the sound, we eventually saw the source. What we witnessed was something I will never forget. An alligator was being torn apart by what I can only describe as a Skunk Ape. The creature noticed us. It turned toward the boat, screamed and hollered at us, and then took off into the darkness carrying part of the alligator with it.

It was an extraordinary sight, and it remains one of the most vivid experiences of my life.

The Okefenokee Connection

I should point out that Woodbine, Georgia, is not far from the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. As a fun aside, Scooby Doo is often associated with the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

My father and I also found large footprints on several occasions while hunting in Camden County. Some measured approximately **14 to 16 inches long** and roughly **5 to 6 inches across at the toes**.

At the time, we had no way of knowing exactly what had made them. But they were considerably larger than the tracks I would normally expect to see from an ordinary person.

My Mother’s Stories and My Later Experiences

My father wasn’t the only parent who passed unusual stories on to me.

Before my mother died, she shared stories from her side of the family. Her mother or possibly her grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, and some of the stories she inherited had been passed down through that side of the family for generations.

Those stories have always stayed with me. I also had several unusual experiences of my own as a teenager while living and spending time in Laurens County. Taken together, these experiences have given me a lifelong interest in the unexplained, particularly reports involving Sasquatch, the Skunk Ape, strange lights, and other phenomena associated with remote areas of Georgia.

I don’t claim to have an explanation for everything I have witnessed. In fact, some of these experiences remain just as difficult for me to explain today as they were when they happened. What I do know is that I have spent much of my life in the woods, on the water, and in some of the wildest parts of Georgia. I learned from my father to pay attention to my surroundings and to trust what I observed.

That background is important because the experiences I have described are not based solely on stories I heard from other people. Some of them happened directly to me.”