Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “My sighting took place at a campground in weld Maine in the summer of 1997 I was 11 years old. It was the summer before the ice storm of 98.

My family had a seasonal camp site about an hour and half from where we lived so during the summers my parents would go to work and us kids would stay at the campground. Our campsite consisted of a camper from the 1970s and was just hanging on along with a shed and deck. The site sat right on the beach and had beautiful mountain views. I remember having certain camp chores that I would have to wake up and complete and after that I would have free range to go wherever I wanted. So during the week I would have complete freedom during the day and on the weekends my parents were around so I would have less freedom. That morning I remember wanting to go exploring a trail I had seen close to night time the day before. At the time I thought it must be a hiking trail leading to someplace cool but hindsight looking back it was far too narrow to be a hiking trail and was probably most likely a game trail.

I knew if I asked to go exploring on my own that day there’s no way my parents would let me and I didn’t want to wait until Monday to find out where it went so I woke up early and told my parents that I was going to head to the campground bathrooms to take a shower. The bathrooms were about a mile and half away and I figured I would have enough time to go explore and return to camp with wet hair from one of the many water hookups between exploring and returning to the camp site to cover my tracks. I took my bike and rode to where I had seen it the evening before.

The trail itself started at the end of one of the campground roads that didn’t connect to all the others so essentially it was a dead end dirt road. My plan that morning was to take my bike down the trail but upon getting there and seeing it up close I realized that it was going to be way too narrow, windy and bumpy for that so I ditched the bike at the beginning of the trail head and I started walking in. The trail had big roots sticking up here and there and it zigzagged between trees in a really jerky fashion to the point that I had to keep my eyes down at the ground so I didn’t trip.

I walked maybe a quarter mile in and came up to a big tree that I had to kind of hug as I walked around it to keep from falling into these ferns that looked like were growing out of some shallow swampy water. I got to the other side of the tree and the trail continued through this clearing. The clearing was oval shaped and was devoid of trees but had ferns growing in it about waist high on me. The trail zigzagged through the clearing and I was looking down and was following the trail with my eyes through the clearing to see if I wanted to continue any further.

I remember thinking that if I returned to camp dirtier than I left I would be in trouble and would have to explain that I lied and went into the woods without telling anyone. And as I was thinking that and my gaze scanned the far side of the clearing I saw what looked like an elongated black figure standing in the trail roughly five or so feet from the tree line on the far side of the clearing. It was completely black and the morning light was coming through the trees in such a way that I knew it was looking right at me but I couldn’t see its face. It’s like the light was being absorbed by just how black it was. It stood so still that I was starting to think that it was a weird tree stump or just a really realistic shadow when it moved. It moved so quickly it went from standing straight up to the ground so fast I couldn’t at first see where it went. I was too afraid to move I was frozen staring at the spot where it just was and it was gone.

I was paralyzed with fear until I saw in the trees at about my 9oclock the thing going from tree to tree just outside of the light inside the tree line. It was making its way to me by going in a semi circle around the clearing. What jolted me to start moving was the realization that if I tried to go back the way I came and had to go around the big tree behind me I would come face to face with it. I broke into a full run right into the woods at my 3oclock knowing that if I kept going that way I would eventually come to the camp road which was a long single car lane dirt road. I ran and tripped and crawled all the way to that road and the whole time the thing was right behind me never closing the distance between us but always within eye shot. When I made it to the road I didn’t stop running I ran all the back to the camper and I must have made up a story to get myself off the hook for being absolutely covered in mud and dirt but honestly I don’t think at the time I really cared about being in trouble I just knew that if I tried to tell my parents there’s no way they would have listened so I’ve kept it mostly to myself throughout the years.

The thing I’ll never understand is that at any given time it could have gotten me. It moved so fast that it could have gone across the clearing before I would have been able to register it. But it never got closer than a hundred feet of me. It never dawned on me that what I saw was a Sasquatch until I was an adult as a kid I thought it was demon or some kind of monster. “