A listener writes “Hi, I have been listening to your podcast for quite a while now and I had an encounter when I was 14 years old in Tygart county West Virginia at my grandmother’s cabin.
It was January 4 2020 I was home alone because my parents and grandparents went into town for supplies around 4:00 pm and the nearest town was 2 hours away. Around 4:30 I went outside to let my dog out and she started barking and growling.
The weird thing is she has never ever barked or even whined. At this time the sun is just setting so I go out on the porch and look around. I didn’t see anything, then that’s when the smell hit me. It smelled like a combination of a wet dog sprayed by a skunk and bathed in their feces.
so I go inside because it reeks so I go inside and close the sliding door about 15 minutes later this rock goes flying into the window and shattering it I was terrified I grabbed my grandmas .450 marlin hunting rifle this gun can kill a 1000 pound grizzly so I walk outside and start yelling whos out there.
Then this god awful scream that I later found out was the Ohio howl and when this thing stopped screaming it came charging out of the tree line 30 yards away and when I saw this thing it was 8 feet tall dark reddish brown with piercing red eyes. I was frozen in fear but I managed to cock the .450 marlin and I shot at it. When I shot this thing screamed like it was hurt for about 5 minutes while it ran back into the woods. Just then my parents pulled into the driveway.
They saw me with the .450 and were pissed because that gun was only for defensive use. I fell over in tears and vomiting explaining what I saw. My parents thought I was crazy and they still don’t believe me. The next day I went out to the yard where I shot at it and found a pool of blood on the grass. I mailed the blood to a crime lab in Philadelphia and the test results came back as an unknown species and they tested it three times and they all came back the same.
I believe in bigfoot then but now I am a true believer I don’t go out into the woods without a gun and bear spray now I haven’t been back there since but the thing that surprised me was that the tygart valley hundreds of bigfoot sightings and after those sightings the witness dogs disappear so that was concerning for my labrador.”