Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I really enjoy your show and it has been very educational, I am not a believer, I know they exist first hand, and this has changed everything. Here are the experiences I have had or know about from east TN.

After the first video of Patty I used to talk about that and my dad told me that there was no such thing as a Bigfoot and that this stuff was nonsense. A few years later one of my dad’s good friends told him of an encounter that he had in the early 60’s. We lived in Morristown Tennessee and my dad’s friend lived on Cherokee Lake and he owned a gas station on Hwy 11E and their house was right behind the gas station and the lake backed up to their yard. At that time, Elmer worked a second shift job after he finished at his gas stations during the day. His son was 10 – 13 years old and he had they had gone fishing that day and his mother asked their son to go and get their shirts out of the boat that night as she was going to wash clothes. She walked back to their laundry room and after about 5 minutes she heard a gun shot and a door slam. She ran into the room and her son was locking the door holding a shotgun and he told his mother there was a monster outside. She scolded him and told him his father would address this in the morning. Elmer said he got home and his wife told him what had happened so he goes in to talk to his son about the incident the night before. He asked him what happened and his son told him as he went outside there was a terrible smell and he heard loud breathing and that he could hear a heart beat so he got a gun and shot it in the air to scare it off.

Elmer then went on to explain to him how there was no such thing as monsters and that it was probably some of his friends trying to scare him and they went out to walk down to the boat and get the shirts and Elmer said I walked down there to find a set of huge 3 toed footprints coming up out of the lake and I had just told my son that there weren’t any monsters but here he has a monster’s foot prints coming out of the lake and walking along the edge of the water. He called TWRA, (Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency), and they came out to investigate and then they called some other people to come out there and one of them said that this would be easy to debunk.

There were clear foot prints in the water and on the land so they cast both of them, measured the depth of impression and calculated the weight in the water and out of the water based on known impression they created. After they analyzed all of their data they were befuddled when both calculations came out to be 1300 lbs in and out of the water. Whoever the expert was in that group said that this couldn’t have been hoaxed. He as a plaster cast of print and it seemed as if it was walking on the ball of it’s foot and that measured 13 inches long and I forget the width but it wasn’t any known animal. In the next week there were several other sightings by community members and in one case a man heard his dogs fighting one night and when he went out the next morning all of the dogs were dead and they had been shredded and one was tore in half. He had a concrete planter on the front porch that was around 6 feet long and it had been thrown about 50 ft out in the yard.

One of my friends went hunting one day on Clinch Mountain and there were three of them in one truck and it was bow season so the arrived and parked in a field and then they agreed that if anyone get’s one to blow the horn on the truck and they would all come and help whoever needed it. At about 20 minutes after daylight my friend told me that someone was just laying on the horn, they just kept blowing it so everyone came out of the woods and the one person at the truck was as white as a ghost. They asked what was wrong and he explained that a 9 or 10 foot tall hairy man-like thing walked right below him in his tree stand.

He said he heard it coming and thought it was another hunter walking in on him and he was trying to get his flash light out to spot them and before he got it out he saw it, it walked almost under his tree and when it was downwind he said it paused, raised it’s head and was smelling then it took off running up the mountain. He wanted them to go with him to get his bow and tree stand so when they got to where he was hunting, his tree stand was still about 15 feet up in the tree, his bow was hanging on a limb. the guy was so scared he jumped out of the stand and ran all the way back to the truck. My friend said they weren’t really sure about what to believe but there was something obviously that had scared their hunting partner to death. When they finally got his stuff out of the tree my friend said they were looking up the mountain and all of the sudden what they thought was a stump raised up from a squat position and walked off.

We hunt in middle TN and we have a lease of 1600 acres and this area is right at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau and this isn’t a heavily populated area and there are literally millions of acres of wilderness. In this region of TN there are allot of rock in these mountains with caves and so on. I used to take off in these mountains and just walk and hunt and I never thought there was any wildlife that would endanger me with the exception of the occasional bear or mountain lion. Anyway there was one specific year that my father and I were hunting there and we were staying in an old camper and of friend of ours was there with his young son and they had an old FedEx truck that he had converted into a camper. This was approximately in the early to mid 90’s, and one morning that week while I was walking in to my stand I suddenly became very uneasy and all of the hair stood up on my body and I felt almost as if I was in danger.

I did not have my flashlight on at the time and it was an hour or so before daylight but when this sensation came over me I turned my headlamp on and got my handheld flashlight out and on and looked all around me as I chambered a round in my rifle. I didn’t see anything or hear anything but something was up. It was either that night or the next but we were all standing around our campfire and up on the mountain side in front of us we heard a noise that none of us could identify, it started like a cow then turned into a roar, but the volume was unbelievable!! (About the time that Finding Bigfoot came on they played a recording of a Bigfoot roar/scream and I knew immediately that was exactly what we had heard.) Anyway, my father, my friend , and I immediately cut our eyes at each other and you could read the expression on each others face like, what is that? My friend’s son asked what that was and we didn’t want to alarm him and we jokingly said it was a sick cow but all of the adults were alarmed!. I have heard bears, coyotes, foxes, mountain lions, panthers, as have the others there with me and this was something other than that. After about 30 seconds we heard the same scream again about 500 yards to the left of where the first scream or roar came from which was either another one or the same one that could move very quickly. Later that night as we were getting ready to go to bed I asked my dad what he thought that was and for the first time ever I saw the “concern” on my dad’s face and he didn’t know.

The next morning I asked my buddy while his son was still in the camper what he thought that was and he said he knew what it was……………. I asked him how he knew that and he said that roughly 20 years ago he and some other guys were on this same property one night on a tractor that belonged to on of their dads and they drove up on a Bigfoot and it scared them to death, they called the sheriff’s department and they said that the boys were mistaken and that it was a bear, but where they saw it there were 4 or 5 inch diameter limbs broken 12-14 feet up in a tree.

There was another event where my father and I were night fishing for bass on Cherokee Lake on a bluff behind Panther Creek State Park. There are deer all in that park and we heard something walking in the woods and initially we thought it was a deer, but as it was getting closer we could tell it wasn’t a 4 legged animal walking, it was bipedal. We made eye contact because where this area was no person would be walking at night without a light so this began to capture more and more of our attention.

This area was very steep, hence the “bluff” name of this area so it wouldn’t be safe to be walking there at night without a light. At one point it what ever it was fell and it sounded like someone fell and landed on their back and made a noise like getting your breath knocked out of you. We were using a black light for fishing which provides very little light but the black light I had also had a “white light” on it to light up structure on the shore so we could see outlines but no detail. This “thing” walked out to the edge of the water and we were both on extremely high alert at this point and it starts wading out towards us and since it was so steep there it was in deep water very quickly and I started to dig out the spot light and hook it up and my dad yanked the trolling motor up and said to get out of here!! All I can say is that it was walking on 2 legs, very big frame, and a good swimmer. I cranked the motor and gave it all of the gas it had, (I had a 19 ft bass boat with a 150 hp motor), so we were out of there quickly. We rode about a mile or so down the lake and we just stopped and sat there, didn’t talk, but we were shook up. We couldn’t fish or didn’t want to fish anymore that night so we left. That was in the early 80’s and to this day when I ask my dad what he thought that was and he will say I don’t want to know.

I have heard several tales, (I will call them), about people seeing Bigfoot type creatures all around Cherokee Lake and on some of the islands and I do think there is something out there. There are now several sightings in east TN that you can find on the internet and it’s more heard of now than it was then.

I used to go on a 4-5 day hunt by myself every year and about 5 years ago I was on our lease in middle TN and we had purchased a 12 X 24 out building to use as a hunting cabin and I heard alot of “strange” noises, sounds, things hitting my cabin walls at night but the big difference was that I got that same un-nerving feeling or anxiety and I wonder if there was one on our property at that time.
Best Regards,”