A listener writes “I live about 30 miles as the crow flies from where Mike in episode 761 had his encounter. Our five-acre property backs up to a large timber tract to the north. After a couple of farms, everything else is basically timber up to the Chickasawhay River.
So we live in a bottleneck for wildlife. It’s not uncommon to have deer walk right by my porch in the middle of the day as they’re moving between these two areas of timber.
We’ve lived on this property for about two years, and we’ve heard several strange sounds. The first and most alarming was a scream so loud it woke us up from a dead sleep, and I instinctively jumped out of bed and grabbed my gun. It sounded a lot like a woman screaming in terror. People around here claim there are still panthers around, but I’m doubtful of that. But in either case, I’ve listened to a hundred panther screams, and none of them come close to the scream I heard. It sounded like it was right outside our window. I can’t remember exactly when that was. Maybe early fall 2023?
A few weeks ago, right as we were falling asleep, we heard howls in the woods. I didn’t tell my wife at the time, but it was a dead-ringer for the Ohio howl. We tried to come up with other explanations (coyotes, owls, etc.), but nothing matched. A couple nights later, my wife told me she heard it going off in the middle of the night for twenty or thirty minutes. I pulled up the Ohio howl, and she said it sounded exactly like it. She had never heard it before, and she has no interest in Bigfoot.
There are other signs too. A couple of times, I’ve walked out on the porch early in the morning and smelled a weird skunky smell. The first time it happened, I thought a skunk had sprayed my cat, but it dissipated very quickly. Normally, if a skunk sprays, the smell lingers around for a day or more, but this smell seems to go away. There have also been times when I was sitting out on the porch at night, and this sense of dread comes over me. Even if nothing seems out of the ordinary, I feel this strong urge to go inside and lock all the doors.
I’m writing this tonight because I just heard another sound. I walked outside, shut the door, took two steps, and there was a loud knock in the woods. I’d heard that before when I walked out at night, but I’m just putting two and two together now.
We haven’t had a sighting, and frankly, I’d prefer if we didn’t. Hopefully, if these things are around, they’re just passing through the bottleneck like all the other wildlife (if these count as wildlife). We’ve got a big streetlight in our yard, but I’ve been thinking about putting up some game cameras as an extra deterrent. We’ve also started being extra careful about letting our kids play outside alone.
This almost certainly isn’t podcast material, but for some reason, I imagine you have a big map with a bunch of pins it, and I thought it might interest you to stick another pin up there in south Mississippi.”