Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

Sent To Nick Orton “Imagine if you will: you’re on night two of land navigation out at JRTC for unit validation.

You’ve been listening to the suspicious rustles of wild horses and the rhythmic “meep meep meep” of the hogs while the deafening echo of the insects fills the rank, wet air.

You don’t know how it gets hotter at night than it did during the day, but here you are, drowning on dry land, cuts and scrapes line your cheeks as you bust ass to what SHOULD be your last point. When all of the sudden your foot brushes up against something… solid.

It feels like a tree, but you can’t feel one with your arms. A stump, maybe? You reach down and feel a solid anthill the size of a mortar round but something is strange. These aren’t ants. They are not furiously swarming out to bite you.

Instead, you recoil and note that all that noise, all that air, all that JRTC experience has just… stopped. It’s cold now. Silent too. You starting to get a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach but you are a goddamn AMERICAN Soldier! YOU are the thing that goes bump in the night! You are a barrel-chested attack dog for the American Freedom, and you WILL NOT be deterred.

That checkpoint should be right in front of you, but there’s nothing but a clearing. There is… something in the middle though. Maybe the point box got knocked down? Maybe some dickhead before you put it on the ground? Whatever. Better go check it out.

But it’s not a checkpoint. It’s not a little staple puncher. It’s a pile. A lone standing pile of bones of various sizes, shapes, and species. Your rational brain knows this can be anything. Maybe Cletus and Boudreaux have their fire pits here. Maybe some edge lord(?) Soldiers drag their pest control victims here. Maybe… maybe, but you can’t seem to shake that awful feeling inside of your and the deafening silence of the area isn’t helping.

For some reason you decide to quietly re-trace your steps back out the clearing, back through the brambles and brushes, back though the broken brush. But then it hits you. Like a break from the grave, just as you pass the empty anthill, you hear it.

A deathly, croaking moan like a Cheyenne-stokes death rattle comes leering out from right behind your head and fills your nose with the acrid smell that should have been in the pit.

You run for your life down the path you came in on, but as soon as you pass the anthill, everything is back to normal. You’re hit with that awful wetness, the buzzing of bugs, and the orchestra of leadership doing a sweep for the stragglers. You’re at a loss for what the fuck just happened.

You swore you’ve only been in the dreaded clearing but a minute. You should have like what, an hour left right? You can’t seem to explain it, but everyone is back at the patrol base and their watches are all 47 minutes ahead of yours.”
-Anonymous US Soldier

Welcome to Fort Polk, home of the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) specializing in Louisiana swamps, heat, humidity, and crushing the souls of all the hapless Soldiers who have to venture into the gates of Tigerland. Fort Polk sucks. It just does. But its massive footprint of maneuver areas for Soldiers to play a very realistic pretend war looms as an inevitable destination for all light infantry Soldiers in the Army. But besides the demonic OPFOR and lurking OC/Ts, something strange haunts the woodlands. Yes, since as far back as the 60’s, a legend has been whispered about in hushed tones in the smoke pit and bricks.

The Box Witch.
Now, what is a Box Witch? Well that depends on who you talk to. The Box Witch is either singular entity that haunts the training area. A woman who refused to leave her home when the Army bought the land out long ago. A woman who was a practicing witchcraft (some say a voodoo priestess), and to this day still refuses to leave her home in the forest. She is either the classic “woman in white” trope of ghost or a demonic entity that takes many forms. Sometimes she watches from afar, or stalks the edges of your defense perimeter. Listen carefully and you might be able to hear out of place laughing and screaming in between the oaks. She can be quite mischievous; it is said that she will sneak into many a patrol base and take one item of a pair or maybe tie your boots together or god forbid walk off with your weapon. She is known to walk up to sleeping Soldiers in vehicles or idling gun trucks, a woman out of place tapping on your window and vanishing as fast as she appears. During live fires, Soldiers have reported a woman running amongst the tracers and targets. But when “cease fire!” is frantically called and a search undertaken, she is never found.

Or the Box Witch is the collective term for the sheer amount of weird shit that happens in The “Box” (the scenario area). We are talking alleged instances of: shadow people, ghosts, cryptids, strange weather scenarios, haunted farms, the works. It gets especially weird when you start poking around Geronimo DZ and Peason Ridge, there are a lot of weird things that lurk in those MOUT towns and wooded areas. Many Soldiers report shadow people under NVGs and thermals. Orbs have been sighted lazily moving through the trees; silent balls of soft red, blue, and orange lights. For the souls that slept in the abandoned farms of Peason Ridge, they had to learn why those structures are off limits. The former inhabitants aren’t happy to have roommates.

Then there are the “The Gulley Monsters,” “The Bog Walkers,” sometimes commonly known as Sasquatch/Bigfoot. Yes Fort Polk is an unofficial hotspot for sightings of North America’s favorite cryptid, the big hairy guy that may or may not exist. Reports go back to the 1960s, with Soldiers and their families reporting a large, hairy, bipedal humanoid that moved quickly between the trees. Even sometimes between houses on base. Many Soldiers report strange screams in the night, not human and no animal they have ever heard, a ghastly smell, eye-shine too high off of the ground to be a deer, and large shadows looming over their tents. Sometimes if they are lucky, they will catch the large frame of a hairy creature retreating back into the wood line. OC/Ts have reported large humanoids easily gliding through thigh deep swamps like they were on the way to the corner 7/11. Paratroopers have reported, that on their slow descent, to have seen whole families of the creatures looking up in wonder as men fall from the sky. There is no shortage of the stories; the civilians of the Leesville, the two outside the base, and surrounding areas have talked about Sasquatch in their backyard for generations.

There is no shortage of weird and creepy stories that have come out of Fort Polk, we’re not even scratching the surface of what has been seen by the Soldiers, OC/Ts, OPFOR, and supporting civilians who are stationed there. So, if you are one of those unlucky souls condemned to Fort Polk, or just one those on a thirty-day rotation, keep your eyes open: you might see something truly strange.

“Nick” of Tales From The Grid Square is an active-duty member of the US Army with a long-standing interest in the paranormal. Several of his own experiences and experiences of his peers inspired him to start “Tales From The Grid Square” on Instagram where he collects and documents the paranormal encounters of military service members. You can share your own stories to the Instagram Account @Tales_From_The_Gridsquare or email: TalesFromTheGridsquare@gmail.com. Tales From The Grid Square Vol 1 and Vol 2 are collections of such stories submitted and available on Amazon.
Tales From The Grid Square Vol 1: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZL9BQ1D
Tales From The Grid Square Vol 2: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4819MW3