Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I’m a lifelong hunter and outdoorsman. I started solo deer hunting at age 15. I hunt with a bow, shotgun, black powder or rifle, whatever the season requires, and I have hunted in five states all on the east coast.

Since a young age I have always had a minor interest in the bigfoot phenomenon. I would watch shows and read books when I came across them. I especially liked reading about historical accounts and First Nation experiences. My entire life, I was always of the belief that they were some sort of animal or distant human species and that they were restricted to the Northwestern part of the country, I readily admit that I discounted experiences that I heard from other parts of the country, because I thought of it as a geographical animal. To me it was like hearing someone say they saw a polar bear or a wolverine in Texas or Florida, so I would just immediately dismiss those stories.

In 2004, I moved to the town I currently live in, and I met one of my neighbors named Paul. We became instant friends though hunting. He was a much more knowledgeable and experienced hunter than I was, and he had hunted all over the country for deer, Elk, Antelope, Bear and even Mountain lions. My friend would take annual trips to North Carolina in the Eastern part of the state. He would always be a member of one or more clubs and in 2005 I started accompanying him as a guest every year during the rifle season. He eventually moved to North Carolina, and I continued to go down every year to hunt with him, which I still do. In the last 20 years I have only missed two hunting seasons down south.

Around 2014, my friend joined a club with thousands of acres that they leased from a family that have owned this property for over 100 years, and they still own it. This was by far the best property we hunted on in that part of the state and we were always successful. My friend ended up building a tiny two-man cabin for us to stay in that was near the entrance of this property.

The first story I want to pass on is not my own. One season I was at the club and another guest was on the property as well. I noticed that the guest had Oregon plates on his truck and camper, and I told my friend I was going to talk to him. I went into the camper and introduced myself. This gentleman was a retired business owner and probably in his 70’s. We talked about deer hunting for a bit and then I told him that I noticed he was from Oregon, and over the years I have heard many bigfoot stories come out of that part of the country and if he had ever seen anything or had any input on the subject. Without hesitation he said “Yes me and my best friend saw one about ten years ago while driving to my cabin at night” he told me that him and his friend were both born in Oregon and were lifelong hunters. They had both heard stories over the years, but they were both on the skeptical side, because neither one had ever experienced anything themselves. He told me that about ten years earlier he and his friend were on their way to his cabin in the mountains to get ready for the start of hunting season. He said it was late at night around 1:00am when he was driving slowly down a road that made a sharp left turn. As they came around the corner, standing in the road about 100 feet in front of them stood a bigfoot. He said he was already driving slowly and came to a complete stop, and the headlights were right on it. He said it was just standing there quartered away from them and they were looking at its left side. I asked what it looked like and he said it looked just like Chewbacca from Star Wars only it was very tall and very skinny, He said it never turned to look at them, it just stood there in the road. He said they watched it for about 15 or 20 seconds and then it slowly started walking forward and stepped off the road and into the bushes. At that point he looked at his friend and said, “Well there it is!” I said that was very odd that it was just standing there. He said that he and his friend discussed it and they both thought that maybe it was old or sick because it was so thin and maybe that’s why it didn’t react quickly. He said it walked away slowly like an old man would. I asked him how tall he thought it was and he said at least 8 feet, maybe a little taller. I asked about the color and again he said it looked just like Chewbacca, just much taller and thinner.

The first time I experienced something odd on that property was about a year or two later. It was about 9:00am and I was sitting in a tripod stand with no roof. It was a bright sunny morning and from behind me way off in the distance, I’m guessing at least a half mile or so in the distance, I hear a very loud and powerful roar. The roar lasted about five seconds then there was a short pause and then another five second roar then nothing. I had no idea what could have made that noise, and it came from the general direction of where my friend’s cabin was located. Around 9:30am my friend picked me up on his ATV and I asked him if he had heard it and he said no. There are no livestock farms anywhere in the area and I could not place that sound with any animal that I knew of. Years later I was watching a video on youtube of a couple and their dogs who recorded roars while they were stranded by the roadside in the Sierra mountains in California. The sounds they recorded sounded like the roars I heard.

My face-to-face encounter happened a couple of years later in the last week of October of 2019. I arrived at the club on a Saturday and on Sunday my friend put me in a stand that’s about a quarter mile down the road from the club’s entrance. This location has a grassy path that heads north in a straight line for about a half mile. Halfway down this path is a lean up stand on the right that has a shooting lane that faces westward. At the end of the main path is an enclosed deer blind that also has a westward shooting lane. That morning, I sat in the lean up stand and around 8:30 am I shot a doe. I called my friend, and he came and picked me and the deer up and we headed back to the cabin with no issues.

The next day was Monday October 28th, we normally get up around 4:30am, so we have plenty of time to get ready before heading out. When I stepped outside the cabin it was extremely foggy that morning and dead quiet. There was no wind at all. I don’t mind mornings like that, as I feel the fog helps cover my movements while getting to the stand. Our plan that morning was to go down the road to that same spot as the day earlier, but this time I was going to walk all the way down to the end of that path and sit in the small wooded enclosed box stand. We got in the truck and left the club property and drove the short distance down the road and he dropped me off at the entrance to the path. I grabbed my gear bag and rifle and turned on my headlamp and started walking in. This pathway is about as wide as a single lane road and is straight as an arrow all the way to the end. The fog was very thick, and even if it was clear there is not much to see. The left side of the path is just thick brush taller than me and the right side is thick hardwoods. When I walk down that pathway in the dark, I know I’m getting close to the first lean up stand, because there is a drainage ditch that starts on the left side of the path. When I see that ditch, I know I’m less than 100 yards away from that lean up stand.

I was walking slowly, taking my time and I saw the drainage ditch on the left, so I knew I was close to the first stand. A few seconds later, to the right of the path where the lean up stand would be, I saw what I first thought were red reflectors or the red flash that appears when you trigger an infrared red camera in the dark. But they were round and did not turn off. I noticed that these red illuminations were side by side like a very large set of eyes. I stopped walking and pointed my headlamp at them. I was roughly 20 yards away, but the fog was so thick, all I could see were these eyes and they were illuminating on their own, they were not reflecting from my headlamp. They appeared to be about 2 or 3 inches in diameter, and they were taller than me. I’m only 5-5 and I estimate that they were about 7 feet off the ground. The first thing that popped into my head was that maybe this was a Halloween mask or prop that someone had placed there, since Halloween was only a few days away, but a few seconds later they started moving from the edge of the path to the center directly in front of me. When they moved to the center of the path, they looked like they were floating in a straight line. There was no up and down movement. There was no sound and no smell. I remember saying to myself “WTF is that?!” They stopped directly in front of me, and we stood there staring at each other, while my mind was trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. The eyes were not just red; they had a changing glow to them just like when you look at the flames on an electric fireplace. I could see them change as if there was a flame or flicker behind them. My mind was racing to determine what has huge glowing red eyes, then it suddenly popped into my head that I had heard of bigfoot encounters where people had reported seeing large red eyes. Then the shock and fear started to hit me as we continued to stare at each other. I could barely make out the huge head behind the eyes and a huge set of shoulders below it. The head and body were all greyed out by the fog, so I could not see any specific details, just a huge hulking mass. I was frozen and after a few more seconds of staring, it then blinked once and quickly crouched down to my eye level and turned its head to the right. When it turned its head, I could see the outward curvature of the left eye and then quickly and without any sound, took off to my left up the shooting lane and out of the beam of my headlamp. From the time I first saw it, to the point when it took off was probably 30 seconds. I was in shock and what I did next still scares me. Instead of turning around and running for my life, like I probably should have done, I tried to act like I didn’t see it. I slowly started walking forward and kept my headlamp down at my feet. My hunter’s instinct kicked in whereas many times if you see an animal in the woods, like a deer and if you don’t look at it and just keep moving, many times they will just stand their ground and watch you pass. I slowly walked forward like a robot on auto pilot. After several steps I was at the point where it was standing. I did not stop and I did not look in any direction; I just kept walking forward. At that point I started to feel a strong presence beside me on my left. I was screaming to myself in my head saying “Don’t look! Don’t look at it! Just keep walking” I felt like I was walking out into a stadium with 100,000 people staring at me with no sound at all except for my footsteps. The presence stayed close to my left, and I felt that if I turned to look at it, I would die. I kept walking and after about 100 yards or so, I no longer felt the presence to my left. I said to myself, “whatever it is, if it wanted me, it could have got me, so just keep walking” I was carrying a 7mm Remington Magnum in my right hand, and it meant nothing to me. I felt as if I was unarmed and completely at the mercy of whatever this thing was in the darkness. After a few more minutes of walking which felt like an hour, I finally came up to the box stand at the end of the path. I entered the stand from the rear and sat in the chair. There were three windows in the stand. One facing westward and two on each side with no glass, just wide-open cutouts. I shut off my headlamp and sat there in the darkness for the next hour waiting for daylight to arrive. I was extremely anxious and kept expecting something to appear at one of the windows, but nothing happened. Daylight finally came and I just sat there nervously looking everywhere. I did not see one deer that morning or any other wildlife. When 9:00am finally came I left the stand and quickly walked back down the path towards the road. When I came to the spot where the encounter happened, I didn’t stop to look for tracks and I didn’t even look down the shooting lane, I just passed through that spot as quickly as I could until I hit the roadway.

My friend picked me up at the road with his typical question. Ya see anything? I just said “Nope” and got in the truck, and we drove back to camp.

In the days that followed, I tried wrapping my head around what I had seen and tried to rationalize any natural animal but nothing fit. A day or two later, during an afternoon break, I was walking down the dirt road that leads from the camp to the main road. The woods to my right had very little vegetation in that area, so I stepped into them looking for any fresh deer sign. As I was looking around, I saw a tree that was about 14 inches in diameter, that appeared to be pushed right over with half of the root ball exposed. The leaves on the branches were still green and there were no marks on the tree at all. About ten feet from this tree was one about 6 inches in diameter. This tree was broken, bent and twisted at about the 7 foot mark. and it also still had green leaves on it. There were no other trees in that entire area that were damaged like this. I grew up cutting trees for firewood, so I am very familiar with how strong trees are and what it takes to get them processed. This is in North Carolina, so it wasn’t because of snow load, and if it was wind damaged, the many trees around these two would also be damaged. There was no way to get a vehicle to that spot and no reason for anyone to just destroy two trees even if they could. I intentionally looked all around that area, and those were the only two like that. Something pushed that larger tree completely over and snapped and twisted the other one, and I could not come to any rational conclusion as to how they ended up that way.

The rest of that week, I felt like I was in a haze and I can’t even remember if I got another deer or not. That Saturday, I got up early and left the cabin at around 4:00am to start my 14-hour drive back home. It was also foggy and still that morning. I drove down the long dirt road and took a right onto the paved road. I was driving very slowly because of the fog, and I didn’t want to end my trip by hitting a deer. As I drove down the road, I was approaching the entrance to the path where I had had my encounter earlier in the week, I then noticed on the left hand side of the road a set of eyes, I slowed down to a crawl expecting it to be a deer, but as I got closer, I noticed these eyes are were about as tall and proportionate as a man and they were peeking out from behind a tree. They were not red; these eyes were white and smaller than the ones I had seen. Something was clearly standing behind this tree and poking its head around and back. I watched it do this, two or three times, and a few seconds later I was right beside it. As my headlights passed that spot, I looked to the left and just saw black woods. I did not stop or reach for my flashlight; I just kept driving.

The next year when Covid hit, I did not go down to NC to hunt. From 2021 to 2023 I did go back to the same club and hunted without any issues at all. Only once during those years, did he put me back in the same area where I had my encounter. It was a dark and rainy morning when he dropped me off at the beginning of the path. I was very nervous about going into that area, but I just kept telling myself that other guys have hunted this spot and I’m assuming that nothing bad had happened to anyone or I would have heard about it. I turned on my headlamp and kept it pointed at the ground just in front of me and said a prayer the entire walk in. I never looked up until I came to the deer blind. That morning I shot a deer and I recovered it from the brush. My friend came on his ATV and that was the last time I hunted in that spot.

In 2024 I was back in NC for the beginning of the rifle season. The very first morning, he put in a box stand that is in the farthest corner of the property. The floor of this stand is 8 feet off the ground and there are four large open cutouts on each wall with no glass. The road dead ended at that stand and there were shooting lanes cut for every window. I was sitting on an old office chair that allowed me to swivel around 360 degrees to look out any window. I had sat in this stand before in previous years but had never shot anything from it. When facing north, to the right side of the shooting lane there is a block of old hardwoods that are completely covered in vines and vegetation so thick that you can’t see into those woods. I was sitting facing North. The sun came up and it was a beautiful cool and clear morning but there was no deer activity. My friend was going to pick me up on the ATV between 9:30 and 10:00am that morning. At around 9:00am from those woods to my right I distinctly heard my friends voice yell out the word “HEY!!” I sat there staring and listening. I knew for 100% certainty that my friend was not in those woods. He was back at his cabin and the path that we drove in on was the only way to get to this spot. I sat there listening and wondering what I had heard. My friend has a very loud and distinct accent to his voice. If I were blindfolded and walked into a room with 100 people all talking at the same time, I would be able to find my friend easily because of his voice. I was very puzzled at what I heard. I was sitting there looking straight out the front window and listening when about a minute later I heard it again, only this time, it was very loud and it felt like it a was a foot away from my right ear. “HEY!!!” It scared the shit out of me, and I must have jumped six inches out of that chair. I kicked the chair to the side and stood there looking out the windows with my gun at the ready. WTF was that!!!! Again, it was my friend’s voice, there was no mistaking it. I was leaning out the windows and looking under the stand. There was no one and nothing around me. I opened the door to the blind and stepped down on the stairs for a better look around. Nothing to see, no other sounds, just silence. I stepped back into the blind and sat down. I know what I heard and it didn’t make any sense at all. Especially the second one that sounded like him yelling in my ear. When 9:30 came, I could hear my friends ATV way off in the distance. I started getting my gear ready and a couple of minutes later he pulled up and drove me back to the cabin. I didn’t say anything to him about what I heard.

That afternoon and the next morning, I hunted in different spots with no issues. The next day around noontime, my friend drove into town to do some errands, I stayed behind at the cabin to just rest and chill out. The weather was warm and sunny, so I decided to go for a walk. I left the cabin and started walking on the main dirt road that leads to most of the property. There was no one else in camp, and it was quiet and peaceful. A couple of hundred yards from the cabin, this road enters and goes directly through the middle of a very large crop field. This field is roughly 500 yards wide and 1000 yards long. I was slowly walking on the dirt road soaking in the sun and enjoying the warmth. I was about halfway across the field, when from the woods in front of me I heard my friend’s voice yell out. “HEY!!” I stopped in my tracks. I scanned the woods and saw nothing. Again, I knew with 100% certainty that my friend was not out there yelling at me. I turned around and quickly walked back to the cabin. I hunted for the rest of that week without any other weirdness. The next season I made excuses to my friend, and I did not go down there to hunt, he expects me to come down there this season, and I already have excuses not to go. Obviously, I’m not happy at all about the way this turned out. Hunting down south was my favorite pastime, and I looked forward to it all year long. Now it gives me anxiety thinking about what happened and anything else that could happen. I may go back again, but honestly right now I’m scared and I don’t want to be worried about it the whole time I’m there.”