Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listeners writes “The following is what happened in the summer of 1979. The is more background here than actual encounter.

The actual encounter lasted probably less than 10 seconds. After we had the encounter as the years went by we rarely talked about it. The last time we talked about it my cousin has rationed out what we had seen was a bum, we called them bums back then, in a orange poncho. I don’t know if he believed that or it was something he rationed out for his own sake. We never spoke about it again. He was killed in a climbing accident a sort time later.

This all started back in the summer of 1979. During this time my grandmother, aunt, and cousins lived in the trailer park outside of Jasper Alabama. I would often stay with them during the summer while my parents worked.

The trailer park in question was surrounded on 2 sides by real dense woods. There were trees in the woods with large leaves, we called them elephant ears. Because of these leaves you couldn’t see more than a couple of feet into the woods off the trails. The adults of the trailer park didn’t want the kids going into the woods, which of course we did all the time. Tell a kid that he can’t do something and that would be the first thing he did. The trailer park teens would also go off into the woods to smoke and drink. They didn’t want us little kids following them out there so they would tell us that bigfoot or the ‘hairy man’ lived out there.

Nobody would ever stay in the woods after dark, if they could help it. The teens would all be out way before sundown. We never saw anything out there up to this point but after the sun started going down you would feel like you were being watch.

There where rumor of bigfoot living in the woods around the trailer park. Every now and then a teen or an adult would come stumbling out of the woods saying they saw bigfoot. They were always drunk or otherwise not in the right frame of mind. Believers would take them seriously, the rest of us would just laugh at them.

As I stated earlier you couldn’t really see off the trails for more than a few feet. The woods themselves where littered with trails, they all met up at this one trail that was the main trail. The main trail itself was probably an old logging road. It was about that wide and was hard packed earth. It ran the entire length of the woods from the trailer park to another logging road. It is hard to judge how far this trail run from end to end but I’m just going to say a mile.

About a quarter mile down the trail it opens into a clearing with a creek running through it. This clearing is where the teen agers would go to smoke and drink. The trail also split, one running up the creek and one running down the creek. The down path lead to a part of the creek that some of us had constructed a dam and backed up the creek to make a small pond to swim. Bream where also present in this pond.

It was the summer of 1979, and my cousin had just turned eleven. I was a few months older than him, but we were inseparable. For his birthday, he got a 202-fishing rod, just like the one I had. We decided to go off and do some fishing. The pond that I mentioned earlier is where we decided to go.

There was nobody else home but the two of us. We took our fishing rods, a green plastic pail, and some hotdogs to use as bait. We didn’t’ see anything while we were walking to the dam or while we were there. We managed to catch a few small breams while we were there. After about an hour we decided to move somewhere else.That somewhere else was the catfish pond down the trail. The main trail lead to old logging road. About half a mile down this logging road there was a farm. An on this farm there was a catfish pond. The farmer didn’t’ like us fishing in his pond but we did it anyway.

We being the teens in the trailer park when they went fishing. My cousin and I had been there once, last year. The teens had taken us fishing with them. All along the way they teased us not to get to far away or a monster would snatch us. They even pointed to a tree and told us it was Bigfoots toilet. My cousin and I decide that we would go there and catch some real fish. We collected our stuff, the pale of bream, and started off down the trail. I would say we walked for about half an hour before we exited the trail and came out on the logging road.

We started down the road to the pond, my cousin leading the way. We crested the top of this hill and my cousin stopped in his tracks and was looking down the road. I didn’t see anything till he pointed to it.

There was a movie that had come out just a few months ago called Every Which Way but Loose. It had Clint Eastwood and an orangutan named Clyde. That is what I thought I was looking at, an orangutan.

It had climbed up onto the road from an embankment. It was still pulling itself up on the road and was crouched down. We were maybe 200 feet away. From that distance, it looked like we were looking at an orangutan’s back. Then it stood up. It was not an orangutan, it stood up like a man and it was huge.

One of us made a noise, I’m not sure if it was me or my cousin but it also heard it. It swiveled around and looked at us. I couldn’t tell much facial detail from that distance but thinking back now I think it was just as surprised to see us as we where it.

That was it, we were done. We dropped everything we had, turned and ran. I don’t’ know how long it took us to run down that trail and get back to the trailer but we beat our shadows there. Thinking back, I don’t think it chased us and from what I have heard if it did it would have caught us. But I know this, to catch us it would have had to work for it.

We ran in that trailer and locked that door. There was nobody home of course. An hour later my cousin’s older brother came home. We didn’t want to let him it. It took him 20 minutes to talk us into opening the door for him.

Once he got in he was able to talk us down from the excitement and finally he got the story out of is. He told us we had seen the hairy man and not to worry. He never comes to the trailer park.

Word got out what we had seen. The next day my cousin’s brother and some of the other trailer park teens wanted us to take them back out to where we saw it. We made it clear that we wasn’t going back out there. But we did tell them where we saw it. It was several hours till they came back. They had found the spot because they were carrying our fishing stuff with them. They said didn’t find anything and there was no foot prints. There was about a dozen of them and they had taken some guns with them. A few .22 rifles and some shot guns.

Well that is the story. The whole encounter lasted maybe 10 seconds, if that long.”