A listener writes “I have hunted the same 600 acre block of woods in Northwest Mississippi for 35 years. My now-grown sons and I have all had weird encounters with what we believe to be a troop of Sasquatch. It’s just part of our outdoor experience-we know they’re there during the late fall and early winter.
Last week my 26-year-old son was slipping into the woods after dark to replace the batteries in his cellular trail camera. He was using his LED headlight. When he got to the spot where his camera was, he looked around. There was a rabbit feeding 10 yards away. But farther back, maybe 40 yards into the woods, he saw a pair of large green eyes reflecting his light. The eyes at that point were about even with my son’s knees. Thinking he was looking at a free-ranging cow or donkey (which we have, occasionally), my son drew his Glock and took a couple of aggressive steps toward the eyes to scare the creature away, and added an aggressive grunt. Instead of leaving, however, the eyes rose to the point that they were higher off the ground than the top of my son’s head. He’s 6 feet even.
My son froze. The creature, without making any vocalization, without even making a sound in the leaves, moved away. All my son could see as it left was a single green eye reflection, like it was looking back as it silently left.
>100 Yards north of this spot he and I discovered the skeletons of 4 deer and a young calf, all within a 10 yard circle, two winters ago.
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MY OTHER SON, several years earlier, was in his mid-to-late teens. I had dropped him off in the predawn darkness to walk in to a stand where all 3 of us have had creepy feelings for years. This spot is about 3 miles from where my older son had his green eyeshine encounter. On the way to the stand, my (younger) son realized that something was paralleling him as he walked. It stayed just outside the field of his flashlight, and it stepped when he stepped and stopped when he stopped. My son felt he was being stalked, so a few steps later he spun 90 degrees, dropped to a knee, and shouldered his deer rifle, with the full intention of having to defend himself. Whatever was pacing him sprinted away to the north, bipedally, at a speed my son cannot even describe.
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3 Deer seasons ago, I was hunting that same spot with my hunting buddy. Between the two of us, we have 75 years of deer hunting experience. LOTS of time in the woods. He and I were set up in 2 ladder stands, 100 yards apart, along the east bank of a drainage. It was November 28th, in the afternoon, and the temperature was in the low 50’s. The breeze was out of the east. That’s going to be important.
At prime time, 4:10 pm, we heard what sounded more like a big lion roar than anything else, only much louder. It was right behind my stand, about 100 or 125 yards back in the woods across the drainage. I stood up in my stand and glassed the area with 10x Nikon binoculars. The roar was repeated, and I pinpointed the spot where it originated. I SHOULD have been able to see at least the legs of whatever it was, but could not. It was directly downwind of my stand.
The roars continued every minute or so, always the same roar-the same volume, pitch, and duration. My hunting buddy and I were texting back and forth. Boar hog? Black Bear? Gator? Nothing made sense. The next roar was exactly halfway between our two scent streams. The creature had moved 50 yards south. The next roar was directly downwind of my hunting buddy’s stand. After a couple roars there, it had moved back north to the halfway point between our scent streams again. After that it was directly downwind of me again for 3 roars. It moved back to the “halfway point” for another roar, then roared downwind of my hunting buddy’s stand, and then continued south. The last roar we heard was about 1/2 mile away. The encounter lasted for about 45 minutes, all told. We never saw anything, and never heard anything moving on the ground. The conditions were such that had it been even a squirrel on the ground, we would have heard it from our stands
My hunting buddy and I got down and got the heck out of there, at prime time, during the whitetail deer rut. No way did we want to be there after dark!
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Two deer seasons ago, I actually recorded (on my phone) another series of roars, 4 miles to the south, after I had seen a tennis-ball-sized ball of light dancing across a pond from me on the way in to the stand. These roars lasted about 3 seconds each and I don’t think they were directed at me. This creature was maybe 1/2 mile away behind my stand, and I listened to the roars being repeated for over an hour, with about 45 seconds between roars, on average.
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All of us have seen “the lights” out here. Our first inclination is always the same-another hunter, or a poacher, coming in with the aid of a flashlight. But there’s never another truck parked, never a shot fired, never a duck call or deer call made.
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WEIRDEST of all, several years before the “lion roar” encounter with my hunting buddy, I was walking around the woods after deer season, scouting. 10 yards from the ladder stand I was in when we later heard the downwind lion roars, I found a MASSIVE whitetail deer skull. !0 yards from the stand. It had been dead for at least 2 years. There were no other bones around it. It was literally on the trail we used all season to get in and out of the stand. We had spent easily 20-25 man hours in that stand, hunting for deer. NO WAY was this skull there during deer season. We would have had to have stepped over it 20 times without seeing it!
This skull measures over 170 inches of antler, even after 2 years of shrinkage and drying out. On the hoof it was likely 190 inches. A Boone and Crockett record book buck.
Nobody goes there. Especially not after the season is over. And nobody who lives in the Mississippi Delta is going to leave that skull as a prank or a gift. They’re going to do what I did-take it to be mounted!
Crazy as it sounds, the most logical thing to me is that a bigfoot, having watched us hunt that spot on numerous occasions, gifted the skull. Who knows?
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Last Season, I was hunting the same spot when the woods fell silent about 30 minutes before sunset. It was creepy. Then I heard a commotion and two does came running past me, full, speed, with their tongues hanging out. They went past me to the north, then paused, and sprinted back south past me. At no time did I see a buck, coyote, or anything chasing them. I felt like I was caught in the middle of a deer drive and I left the stand early. Just another day in the Delta.
Wes, there’s more, but those are the highlights.