A listener writes “In 1979 I was 15 years old. I come from a middle-class family in northern Indiana, so when we went on vacation we would usually go camping and fishing around the Great Lakes. This particular year our whole family including aunts and uncles headed out to go on a fishing excursion in northern Minnesota. My Dad and his brothers had rented a houseboat large enough for all of us and we were headed for an area just Northeast of Lake Superior known as the land of a thousand lakes. After a pretty long drive we had finally entered Minnesota. We ended up driving through the Superior National Forest. Being an Indiana boy, this was like nothing I had ever seen. This was an old growth forest the largest and deepest Woodlands I had ever seen.
After camping for one night at a roadside Minnesota KOA, we finally arrived where we were to pick up the houseboat. We were very close to the Canadian border at this point. I don’t really remember the name of the place that we acquired the houseboat, but I do remember that this area was where many lakes chain linked together along the Canadian border. Many of these Lakes were directly on the border. The southern shorelines in the United States and the northern shorelines were Canadian. The Lakes were named things like Lac La Croix, Rainy and Saganaga Lake.
When my cousin and I finally laid eyes on the houseboat, it was actually a bit old and weathered. It almost appeared to be an old trailer that someone put on top of two very long pontoons and then stuck two motors on the back of it. But even with it being what it was, my cousin and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Our families had brought two boats with them, smaller fishing boats. One was my grandpa’s boat, it was the larger of the two, a Mastercraft with a steering wheel and nice motor. The other boat was just a small flat bottom aluminum boat with a 5hp engine that you steered with a tiller. My cousin Tony and I had our eyes on the smaller aluminum boat, we knew that that would mostly be our plaything on the lakes. I remember my Uncle explaining to the man that we were renting the houseboat from that we were planning on towing the two smaller boats behind the houseboat, to use for fishing. That’s when the man looked directly at me and my cousin and said to never get out of eyesight of the houseboat because it was very easy to get lost in this area. The area we were in was called the land of a thousand lakes for a reason, all of the different lakes on the Canadian border were chained together and almost formed a maze.
There were thousands of channels, peninsulas and Islands all through these lakes and many people have had to be rescued after getting lost. If you zoom in on this area in Google Maps, you can see exactly what I mean. There was a lot of talk between the houseboat guy and my dad, uncle’s and grandfather about navigating through this area. It was all about the yellow buoys floating in the lakes that had numbers on them, and one of the cabinet doors inside the houseboat was actually a map with the numbered buoy locations marked on it. This was very important because there were only three or four places to get fuel for the houseboat once you were back in this wilderness and they were all on the American side of the Lakes.
There was also a radio in the houseboat to communicate with these small marinas. It kind of looked like one of those old CB radio home base units. You have to remember we were going out into this area at a time when there was no GPS no Google Maps and no smart phones. It really was a different world back then. After all was said and done, and groceries were bought. The smaller boats were dropped into the water via the boat ramp and we all climbed aboard our Aquatic Trailer Park Home and sailed off into the unknown.
Now let me kind of explain to you about what kind of pure wilderness we were in. By the second day we were deep into the Lakes. We would find spots to anchor the boat and have fun and go fishing. So at one point and my cousin were out in the smallest boat, kind of putting around on one of these lakes when we saw what must have been a pack of 10 to 12 wolves running along the bank. We only saw them for a few seconds and from about 150 yards away when they turned and bounded back into the tree line and disappeared. During this same little excursion we also saw from a distance, on a different shoreline what we thought were bears. Two dark furred animals on all fours that seem to be large enough to be bear cubs. When we headed in closer for a better look, the closer we got the more we realized that these were not bears. They were beavers. They were sitting on their back haunches, stripping the bark off of small branches and paying no attention to us. I had no idea that beavers got to this size.
The way they were sitting they looked like they would have came up to my waist in height. During the entirety of this vacation, we saw moose, bears, beaver, and wolves. So a lot of large animals and carnivores that two Indiana boys are not used to.
On a later day in our vacation, we were pushing the limits on the whole “keeping the houseboat insight at all times thing”. We were pretty far out and did go into a small cove where we could not see the houseboat. We were fairly sure we could just come out of this cove, turn left and see the houseboat. The reason we went into this cove is, we saw the massive face of a cliff. It was pretty tall and we could see tree line at the top of it. It was all rock, almost like it was made out of one rock. The face of it was at a little more than a 45° angle.
Of course we wanted to climb up and look around. We had fun climbing and we had one of those old school throwaway Kodak film cameras. We took turns taking pictures of each other. Sort of profile views and turning the camera to make it look like we were climbing straight up. Like Spider-Man. When we got to the top the edge of the forest was right there. As we stood there staring into the forest we both kind of got this uneasy, prehistoric feeling in the pit of our stomachs. This was deep old growth forest on the Canadian side of this Lake. It was not at all like looking into a woods in the farmlands of Indiana. Where we were from, when you looked into the woods you could usually see glimmers of light from the other side and if you couldn’t see through you always knew you could just walk through and there would be a country road or farmer’s field on the other side.
Looking into this deep Canadian forest was different. It was kind of like the first time you ever see the ocean and you realize there is no other side, it just keeps going.
As we looked through these huge tree trunks, beneath its canopy and trying to see in between the trees, it just got darker and darker until it was just blackness and this was the middle of the day.
I remember Tony saying to me that you could walk back into that Woods and make one wrong turn and die. No one would ever find you. I looked at him and a little shiver went up my spine. But when I looked back into the trees, the shivers became a kind of dread because something was different. A ways back into the forest, I could have swore that before I turned to my head to look at Tony, there had been several different trees that had large bumps on the sides of them. These bumps were all several feet off the ground and at the time of seeing them I thought they just looked like when a tree gets a deformed lump or growth on its trunk.
If I had to guess there were maybe 7 to 10 of them, ranging anywhere from 30 to 60 yards back into the forest. After that it got too dark and hazy to see. Now after turning my head back towards the forest, there were no lumps, all the tree trunks were smooth and straight. My brain almost didn’t realize it at first until the dread set in and my voice cracked as I said to Tony,” you’re freaking me out let’s just climb back down to the boat”.
After that we made our way back to the houseboat. My uncle had anchored the boat so that the front of it was touching a small sandy beach, I guess I should say the bow of the boat. The beach was on one side of a small strip of land that connected an island to the main Forest. If you were to look down from the sky at this little area, it would look like a round Island about the size of maybe four or five football fields.
Connected to the mainland buy a strip of land about 60 yards long and 15 to 20 yards wide, like an umbilical cord. The island was full of the same old growth trees, and we explored and played on most all of it. Around the outside of the island and on the side of the strip of land opposite of the beach, were large rocks and boulders. The rocks and boulders formed a rocky border about 30 to 40 ft from the water’s edge, to the tree line, all the way around the island.
My story has a lot to do with the rocks and boulders around this island. Right at the water’s edge between the large boulders and the water there was a two or three foot wide area of gravelly rocks that formed a small beach that was also around most of the island. This will come into play later in my story. When the day was done about an hour after sunset we heard wolves calling to each other in the distance. The sound was pretty far away but you could tell it was a lot of different wolves.
I have a love for nature and animals and I remember thinking how beautiful it sounded. They sang to each other for over an hour, everyone on the boat could hear it. What ended their singing was one long howl that sounded much louder, deeper and different than the other howls from the wolves. It still sounded far away but you could tell it was closer than the wolves. It was strange how long and monotoned this howl was, it almost sounded like a siren.
Everyone was standing on the roof deck listening to the wolves when this happened, we all kind of went silent and then my uncle said “man that was a big one” and we all kind of laughed and brushed it off. I would later come to believe that the last howl was absolutely not a wolf.
The next day my dad, uncles and grandfather decided that we would stay in this spot for another day or two, because they were catching so many fish when they would take the fishing boat out in this area. They were catching mostly walleye, but some crappie, perch and a few northern pike were also caught. Tony and I would go out on the boat with them and also catch quite a few fish. We would also mess around on the island during the day, stealing cigarettes from my grandmother and heading to the other side of the island to smoke. We were after all teenage boys and it was the 70s.
Tony and I had also decided that we were going to be big and bad, and take the smallest boat to the other side of the island and that night we were going to fish all night long. So we pilfered two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, another pack of my grandmother’s cigarettes and some Twinkies. Right at about sunset we putted around to the other side of the island in our little boat. We ran the boat up onto the Gravelly Bank and tied it off to a rock. We then set up on the bank for a night of fishing.
This night would also end up being one of the most terrifying nights of my life. We set up our little night fishing spot as follows.
We set up our little night fishing spot as follows. We sat on two large rocks at the water’s edge, using our orange life jackets as cushions for our back sides. We had a Coleman lantern, the kind that used the liquid fuel and you pumped it up and it made that hissing noise after you let it. It burned very brightly. We had a piece of foil wrapped around one side of the glass on the lantern, so the light would only shine out into the water and not back into our eyes. That was an old night fishing trick of my grandpa’s. We had two fishing poles and two old wool army blankets.
From where we sat on the rocks to The Waters Edge there was a three to four foot wide gravelly strip of beach, like I spoke of earlier in the story. It was right at the moment that we caught our first fish that we realized we didn’t bring anything to put the fish in or on, we had no stringer. My cousin Tony had the idea to dig a hole out of the gravel right at the waters edge so that the water from the lake would run into it and form a small pool for us to put our fish in. It worked very well. We lined the edge of it next to the water with larger rocks forming а little dam to keep the fish in. After that we really started to catch fish. We caught quite a few and they were all large crappie.
I think we must have had somewhere between 12 to 15 fairly large fish in our little dugout pool. We actually had to make it bigger a few times as we were catching fish. Now for the creepy part. Late into that night I feel like it must have been maybe 3:00 in the morning. We were kind of getting tired but we were still catching fish. The moon was out the stars were bright, so you could kind of see out across the lake. Our Lantern was shining out onto the water.
Suddenly, down the bank maybe 50 yards, further than we could see in the dark, we heard a deep splash. That kind of splash that sounds like a depthy kubloooch kind of sound.
My cousin said that it was probably just a beaver or a big fish jumping. It just didn’t sound like that to me. The beavers we had seen swimming in the lake, when they would see our boat coming they would always slap their tail on the water and then dive down, making a completely different sound than what we just heard. A fish jumping usually makes a slapping spattering sound not that deep depth sound that we just heard.
It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes after this happened that we heard something back in behind the tree line. It was like footsteps, wrestling leaves, cracking sticks. It didn’t sound heavy like giant footsteps. It sounded like someone trying to be careful and being sneaky. Either that or just some kind of animal walking through the woods.
We immediately thought that it was one of our uncles or our dads trying to scare us. Tony yelled back into the woods behind us “if you’re trying to scare us it’s not working. We know you’re back there”. When Tony did this, the footsteps and wrestling noise immediately stopped. After that it was silent for a few more minutes and then we heard the wrestling sounds again. They sounded like they were going on past us and away through the woods.
A few minutes later we hear another deep splash on the opposite side of us from where the first splash had taken place down the bank. Picked the lantern up and shined it in that direction for a moment and saw nothing. I sat the lantern back down and had a seat back on my rock. We were both getting fairly nervous at this point and being quiet.
Just sitting there with our fishing poles in our hands. For a brief moment we could hear the footsteps behind us in the tree line again, when suddenly we hear a branch crack high up in the trees directly behind us. At this moment we are still looking out over the water where the lantern is shining light on to the lake. That’s when we see it. A rock the size of a football tumbling and flying through the air it came directly over our heads about 20 ft High and flew out into the water 40 to 50 ft. It hit the water and made that same deep splash that we had heard two times before. The rock and the splash were directly within the area that was being lit up by the lantern. The Rock sent a splash straight up into the air like a pillar of water.
Tony and I immediately jumped straight up and faced the woods. The boulders and rocks that framed this island were between us and the tree line. The distance to the tree line was about 40 ft. We looked into the darkness and saw nothing. I don’t think either of us were brave enough to pick up the Lantern and shine it towards the forest. We were both scared out of our minds. Tony whispered to me, his voice cracking “Bears can’t throw rocks, can they”. Now then, let’s do some math. A rock the size of a football came from somewhere in the woods, cracked branches high in the trees when it came through the canopy. Flew 30 to 40 ft over the boulders and 40 to 50 ft out into the water over our heads. Conservatively that’s 80 ft. Having said that, have you ever picked up a rock the size of a football and felt the weight. There is no way a human being could throw a rock that size, that far and that high.
Immediately after Tony said the thing about the Bears can’t throw rocks we heard a deep guttural huff type noise come from the woods where we were looking. It sounded like a large bull letting out an abrupt sigh. Something large with big lungs.
As soon as we heard this we both took off running for the houseboat. We didn’t even think about jumping in the boat that was right beside us. We ran down the bank full speed in the dark, our feet jumping across the tops of large boulders like ninjas in a kung fu movie. Skinny teenage boys can run very fast, especially when they’re terrified. When I think back on it, if one of us were to have fallen we would have probably been hurt very badly. We would have probably broken some bones.
When we did make it the 200 or so yards back to the houseboat, the makeshift gangplank was pulled up for the night. That did not stop us in the least. We dove up onto the edge of the houseboat, our feet splashing through the water and scampering up onto the bow of the boat. We practically broke the sliding door down as we went into the houseboat. We found everyone asleep, but our noisiness was waking everyone up. At first they were not happy but then they realized we were in a panic.
I think the fact that everyone was still on the boat made us truly know that it wasn’t one of them trying to scare us. It made our state of panic even higher. After a moment we were finally able to explain to them what happened to us. My dad and uncles were having a hard time believing us and said that we were imagining things and that it was just fish jumping, or a moose, or a deer in the woods. My grandfather on the other hand, said nothing. He walked out onto the deck of the boat, pulled up the two anchors, started the engines on the houseboat, and backed it off the beach about 150 yards out into the lake. Then he cut the engines and re-anchored the boat. I can tell you the reason my grandfather did this later in my story. About a half hour later, everyone had fallen back to sleep. I was in my bunk, high up close to the ceiling in the front of the houseboat. I had a tiny long rectangle of a window exactly beside my lofted fold-out bunk.
.
I laid there staring out at the night. I could see the beach and the land bridge and part of the island being backlit by the moon. I could see a slight mist around the rocks and cattails that were growing on the land bridge. there were also many sapling trees that were not much taller than a man scattered amongst them.
I was almost becoming more relaxed, then I saw it. I really saw it. I stopped breathing, my stomach shrank and I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. The silhouette of a large figure upright with shoulders and just a bump for a head. It walked across the land bridge on the opposite side from the beach. I guess trying to stay out of sight from the houseboat. I could see it from the waist up. The cattails that came up to my chin we’re only up to this thing’s waste the sapling trees came up to just below its shoulders. At one point I saw what looked like an arm reach out and push aside one of the larger sapling trees as it lumbered across the entire length of the land bridge. Then it disappeared Into darkness, into the main forest. I never told anyone what I saw. I don’t know why, I just didn’t.
I believe I did fall asleep for just a little while. The next morning when I woke up, I felt weak and sickly. I didn’t want to leave the boat but my dad said that we have to go get all that stuff you left on the other side of the island. Tony, both of my uncles and my dad and I all walked the same path that me and my cousin had made that terrifying run the night before. I don’t think I looked into the woods one time. When we got to where we had been doing our night fishing nothing was disturbed.
Nothing was missing, nothing was broke. Our fishing poles were laying exactly where we dropped them and the lantern had run out of fuel. However there was one thing, there were no fish in the little pool that we had dug. There were no bones or scales around the hole, like some Predator may have just stopped there and ate them. They were just gone.
For the rest of this fishing vacation I pretty much stayed on the boats and fished. When I did get off the boats I did not go into the woods or even look at the woods.
One of the days later in our vacation, my grandfather pulled me aside and told me a story. He said there was a time that he was fishing in the Upper Peninsula Michigan on a large lake. That they had pulled their boat up to where they could see some abandoned cabins. He said the cabins looked fairly new but they looked abandoned with broken windows and overgrown brush and a half sunken doc. He told me they were about а hundred yards out into the water fishing when rocks the size of
baseballs started splashing in the water all around their boat.
He said the rock were big enough that they could have killed someone. When they turned to look at where the Rocks were coming from, he said they were coming from the trees and brush around the cabins. They couldn’t see what was throwing them but they could see them coming towards them and splashing all around them. He said it was a lot of rocks and they had to quickly start their motors and run their boats further out into the lake.
He told me that he didn’t know how a person could throw a rock the size of a baseball a hundred yards, and then he told me that was why I pulled the houseboat off the beach the other night. My cousin will acknowledge that this happened to us, but he won’t talk about it or tell this story. Whenever the subject of Bigfoot comes up in any conversation, or if I am asked if I believe there is such a thing as a Sasquatch. I say yes, I think they’re probably is and I tell them this story.
I couldn’t see any detail in the figure I saw that night through my tiny window. I could only see it silhouetted by the moonlight through the mist from about 150 yards away, but I believe that it was a Bigfoot.”
