A listener writes “I have been listening to your podcast since I discovered it after my first (and only) encounter in 2017. I have not felt that my story was much compared to the people on your show but the story about Teddy Roosevelt inspired me to finally tell you my little tale because it happened at a National Park. Even if it isn’t episode worthy find it very comforting that through your podcast I have found so many stories that are like mine.
In 2017, I was 27 years old and I had always wanted to take a road trip across the country to visit as many national parks as I could before I got home sick. My girlfriend at the time wanted to come along so we packed up her car and drove off.
About two weeks in we found ourselves at Glacier National Park in Montana. This park has a very deep connection with the native Americans in that area and a lot of it is considered very sacred land. We had been flying by the seat of our pants on this trip, we realized early in the trip that if we tried to plan ahead we’d end up wasting our time. We could never make it to a destination or a camp ground when we thought we would so we had been finding what we needed as we needed it.
So when we rolled into the park area we started driving around to find a camp ground with room for us. We ended up renting a camping spot from a Native American woman for 25 dollars a night right by a river not too far from the park entrance. She had a few other people spread out camping in these woods and when I asked her if she’d seen anything around lately she said only a grizzly on the other side of the river eating berries one week before. At this time I was amused by Bigfoot but I didn’t believe it was real.
I thought it was all a hoax and thought it was a fun idea but I didn’t have that in my mind at all. I was much more worried about bears. I was completely unaware that there was a subculture of Bigfoot hunters and researchers, I didn’t know there were common places to encounter these creatures, completely clueless! I’d seen the Patterson film and that was it.
So the we set up our site and the first night was great, it was nice and quiet, could hear a few bugs but otherwise no animals really. The second day we went and hiked and planned to stay inside the park until nighttime to take this photography class where they would teach you how to take pictures of the stars and the Milky Way. It was so dark, it was incredible!
We didn’t get back to our camp site until around 1am. We stayed up for a little while longer looking at the stars and trying to photograph them through the trees, seeing if we could take the pictures like we’d been taught. At about 1:30 we went to the tent and started to get ready for bed. The other campers were not close by and we could not hear anyone up at this time. There was a fire ban in place so people were generally going down with the sun, no campfires to sit and chat around. It was very quiet. I am a notoriously bad tent camper, I am super sensitive to any noise at all and any lack of noise, it all makes me uneasy but I still love camping!
So I’ve learned to bring headphones for music or ear plugs so I can actually sleep. I remember this particularly because I commented on how deadly quiet it was, it was like the air wasn’t even moving that night. There were no bugs, no rodents rustling in the leaves, there was nothing. I put my music in and my girlfriend put on a movie for herself on her laptop just to create a little noise so we could sleep.
Shortly after we settled in, through the headphones through the movie I heard what sounded like something scraping down a tree. Like if you were to drag your fingers or if something had claws and dragged them down the bark of a tree. It was like if someone used a pine tree as a fireman’s pole. I took a headphone out and turned to my girlfriend and said “did you hear that?!” She said maybe someone at another campsite had sneezed?
I said that sounded like something coming out of a tree. We shrugged because we didn’t hear anything else and laid back down. To be honest my first thought was a big cat. Then through the headphones I heard a “WHOOoooP!” And let me tell you I don’t know what this was but my body was instantly filled with terror. I have never felt terror like this before or since, my heart hurt it was beating so hard. I turned to her again and was like “what the heck was that?!” I didn’t know any animal to make that noise. She said “maybe it was someone at another site?” I said, “it is so quiet I feel like no one else is up..” it seemed so close, definitely less than a football field away. I asked her if she felt scared and she said YES. Then it WHOooPed again!! We both booked it for the car.
We left everything, her laptop all of our stuff, and ran to the car. In the car we locked ourselves in and cracked a window to listen. Both of us were feeling this insane level of terror. It was just an unexplainable feeling. I don’t feel like it was even that close to our site yet but all of my instincts were to get out of there. We listened for a minute without hearing another one and we looked at each other and decided there was no way we were going to get any sleep in that tent that night after feeling that way. We decided to drive out and sleep in the car in the parking lot of a hotel outside the park entrance.
The next morning we woke up and talked about it again. We searched online of all of the animals that live in Montana, we listened to all of the different calls they make and we could not find anything that sounded remotely like what we heard. I started searching the sound itself “animals that make whooping sounds” and the Sierra sounds popped up. That was it. Those are exactly the sounds we heard. I cannot tell you enough how organically we found those sounds. We weren’t believers we weren’t looking for it, it just is the only thing that matched what we heard. Then we learned that Montana and the north west is considered a sort of Bigfoot country! I had no idea!! And through the Sierra sounds this is how we found your podcast.
We went back and packed up camp that morning. Nothing was touched it was all how we left it. We probably would have been fine but I could not get over the terror I felt at that site. I’m glad we left. We listened to your podcast for quite a while in the car after that, becoming more and more certain that what we heard was a Bigfoot.
We even slept in the tent for 3 nights later that trip in the redwoods where a cougar had been seen roaming our area that week and we slept better, so soundly! In contrast to that night.
And there it is. That’s what brought me here. I believe whole heartedly that this thing is out there now. There is no way that so many people completely independently of each other have these similar experiences and have that thing not be real. I don’t know what it is exactly but it is definitely out there.
Keep up the good work Wes, love the podcast! Hope I never have another encounter as long as I live!”