A listener writes: “Hi Wes, I’ve gone back and forth about writing this because I’m not looking for attention, and I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. I simply wanted to tell someone who has spent years listening to people describe experiences they can’t explain without immediately dismissing them.
I own a farm in rural Albemarle County, Virginia. I’ve spent my entire life hunting, fishing, farming, and being outdoors, so I’m very familiar with the wildlife in this part of the state.
The weekend before last, my wife, Cathy, and I stopped by to visit our elderly neighbors, who take care of our animals when we’re away. We were sitting around talking when my neighbor mentioned that he had recently gotten permission to hunt on a roughly 100-acre property about ten miles from our farm.
I told him that sounded like a great opportunity.
He immediately replied, “I’m not hunting it.”
Naturally, I asked why.
He answered, completely matter-of-factly, “There are ape people up there.”
I asked him what he meant. He said the landowner had recently been chased off the mountain by them. According to my neighbor, the landowner says there is a male and a female living around the property, that he has seen them walking past the windows of his house, and that the area where they stay is all torn up.
My neighbor wasn’t laughing, exaggerating, or trying to tell a campfire story. He simply said he wasn’t going to hunt there because of the ape people.
He also told me they smell extremely bad. According to him, the landowner sometimes knows they’re nearby because he can smell them before he ever sees them.
That detail caught my attention because my neighbor isn’t interested in Bigfoot. As far as I know, he doesn’t have access to the internet or follow the subject at all. I don’t believe he even realizes that a strong odor is commonly reported in alleged Sasquatch encounters.
This past Thursday, I spoke with him again. He told me the landowner supposedly has photographs of the creatures and that a handful of other people who live in that area have seen them as well. I have not met the landowner, and I have not seen the photographs, so I’m only repeating exactly what my neighbor told me.
That conversation caused me to tell him about something that had happened on my own property.
In September 2023, I had friends staying at the farm for the weekend. I took two of the women down to an old homesite on my property that overlooks a wooded draw. While we were standing there talking, something let out an unbelievably loud roar from the woods.
I’ve spent my life outdoors, and I have never heard anything remotely like it. It wasn’t just loud it was powerful enough that you could actually feel it in your chest. It was close.
All three of us heard it. I looked at them and said, “I have no idea what that is. It’s time to go.”
We immediately walked back to the house, which was only about 150 yards away.
After I finished telling him that story and explaining exactly where it had happened, my neighbor became quiet for a moment and then told me something I had never heard before.
He said that about forty or forty-five years ago, when his wife was pregnant, they were walking along the road near their home at night. As they passed that same wooded draw, he heard what he described as very heavy bipedal footsteps coming through the woods toward them.
He sent his wife back toward the house, pulled out his pistol, and fired into the woods to scare whatever it was away.
He said it answered with a roar.
I have known this man for years, and he had never told me that story before. What struck me was that neither of us had been talking about that draw until I told him about my experience. Only then did he tell me about his own encounter in the very same place decades earlier.
The only other unusual thing I’ve personally experienced happened shortly after I bought the farm.
The house had been vacant for about four years before I moved in. One evening, I heard what sounded like four or five tremendous impacts against the outside of the house, as though someone were striking it with a sledgehammer.
I grabbed a flashlight and my pistol, went outside, and found nothing. The next morning, I inspected the exterior because I expected to find damage based on how hard the impacts had sounded, but there wasn’t any.
A few days later, I called the previous owner and asked if he had any idea what could have caused it.
Without laughing or sounding like he was joking, he simply said, “Must have been the Sasquatch.”
At the time, I dismissed the comment. Looking back now, after everything else that’s happened, it’s one of those things that has always stayed in the back of my mind.
I’m not writing to tell you I’ve seen a Sasquatch, because I haven’t. I’m also not saying I know what any of these events were. I only know what I’ve personally experienced, what my neighbor has told me, and that there now appear to be ongoing reports coming from a property only about ten miles from my farm.
I honestly don’t know what to make of it anymore.”