Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “Wes, I’m not sure it was a Bigfoot but I’ve been listening for the past few weeks. Just picked up your podcast and some things I’ve seen are very similar.

So back when I was 14, I lived on a large cattle ranch in mid Missouri. Sparsely Wooded areas but a lot of caves and large creeks. When I was 14 I was an avid Hunter. My father had been a big game outfitter for a number of years as well as manager of of large cattle operation over about 1800 acres in mid Missouri over the Auxvasse creek.

I hunted since I was 4 and started shooting at that age as well. My father is a large man 6’5” and was a rodeo cowboy, ranch hand and professional hunter in his younger years.

Fast forward to parental divorce and I’m living with him on a large cattle ranch in mid Missouri. Starting about age 9. I’m with him all the time when I’m not in school learning about being a Midwest cowboy. He has been an outfitter since his late 20s in Colorado, Montana where I was. Born, Wyoming, the dakotas and Missouri after my mom wanted to move back home as well as some Canadian territories. So he’s been around, I grew up with bear and cat dogs that were to run them up trees and were just frightening dogs but loved me and protected me.

So parents split, I live with dad, on a very large ranch in central Missouri. We have an old farmhouse about half a mile from a 6 acre pond and a 60 are lake east of us that I would hunt and fish all around but the smaller 6 acre pond north of us just kinda gave off a bad vibe.

I’ve now learned that bigfoots make those teepee things out of downed logs and I just thought trees fell that way during storms because they were close.

So I’m 14. I have a black lab that is my hunting buddy. We hunt everything. He will retrieve doves for me but he has to eat the first 2 then he will drop them for me. So we hunt all around the huge ranch.

I looked out the two story window and see ducks out on the large pond by the place that just seems creepy in the woods around it and it has a large dam on the east side. So I decide we can sneak up on them and blast some ducks and my dog will retrieve them. Being a hick kid in the middle of nowhere I didn’t really care about migratory bird restrictions and took the plug out of my Remington 1100 and had #4 goose and duck loads. We walked the over half mile around to the dam side of the pond to sneak up on these ducks. Needless to say he was a little too happy to be there and scared all the ducks off. So no duck dinner.

This pond was kinda shaped like a sperm, the midsection going into the tail was all wrapped up in heavy thick woods. Those woods just have off to everyone who went there a very bad vide like the woods didn’t want you in there. So we usually strayed from them. But after the botched duck hunt I was following my lab hoping we could get a rabbit or squirrel or whatnot.

We were walking the dam and get to a point where the grassland meets the trees. About 60-70 yards past the grass it goes into woodlands around the tail of this pond.

So my lab is sniffing around and I’m hoping he pushes something out so I can have supper ready for my dad and I.

This is probably 5pm early October 1998. On the outskirts of the tree line there was a HUGE rose/bramble bush I’m talking maybe 3 VW beetles in size and probably 7ft tall.

My lab is all about it, he zeroing in on it. He was 1/4 pointer and nose down tail straight and going into it. I kept asking him “what you seeing boy” and he keeps inching closer and looking at me and our house and he does this every few steps.

I ask him again what he’s seeing and he just lunges into the bramble and he comes reeling out and feel over backwards. He falls down and forgets about me and starts running back to the house. About that time I hear a scream/roar that I’ve never heard before, can’t recreate and haunts me to this day. I was closing in on my dog who was wading into this bramble and was maybe at most 15 feet from it. For some reason this patch of wood was always dark. Even in the lightest of day it was dark. Like I said it just felt that that area didn’t want you there. So my dog flips over backwards after he stuck his face in the bramble after basically telling me to go home. He runs off and the noise I heard will haunt me till I die. The whole bramble erupts and starts shaking. I’m an afraid 14 year old and I can see a kinda black mass in the middle of it and I just fire. Nothing in North America could take 5 rounds of that goose load at 15 feet and live. I’m a almost 20 year gunsmith, hunter and reloader, ballistician. An elephant couldn’t take that load like that.

So shotgun is empty, I almost dropped a $1300 shotgun and ran and as I looked over my shoulder I saw something running on all 4s that it’s back was probably up to my chest and it was grunting. Knocking over saplings and small trees up to maybe 7” as it ran screaming. I ran back to the house knowing my dad would get off the ranch soon.

I reloaded the shotgun with buckshot and just sat there with my frightened dog till my dad got home.
Now he was a very seasoned hunter, outfitter and I know for a fact he beat a mountain lion with a malfunctioned rifle that was attacking his catch dogs. He’s no slouch.

He gets home and I tell him the story and he’s hesitant at first but he is inclined to believe because stuff he’s seen in the wild. He grabs his 338 mag and I already have my shotty full of buckshot. We go to where it went down and my dad is a gifted tracker. I barely got out of the truck long enough to show him where it happened.

So we get out I show him the shell casings and tell him the way said creature ran. So he starts the stalk. He picks up blood and prints. Side note this is a man who has killed an elk at almost half a mile a client wounded and he tracked for 6 hours. He knows his shit. So he’s tracking the THING I shot and I’m watching him work through my jaws creepy woods. (I didn’t notice at first but there were multiple structures made by downed woods I just at the time thought trees fell down that way)
I’m watching him stalk the tracks and he gets maybe 100-150 deep and just stops.
He recoils up and looks around a few times. I’m looking though binos at the time and can’t see everything but he saw something.

He looks around and brings his gun up and starts backing out of the woods very slowly. He gets back to me and said “I didn’t see anything, let’s go home and never talk about it again”

I can go more in depth if you would like to talk about it but this is the most frightening thing I’ve ever dealt with and the roar was out of this world.