Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “Saturday I went for a backpack overnight to Frozen Head State Park in TN. I was with my friend Donna and her boyfriend John. it was 5 miles in and 5 miles back. We camped at Tub Spring campsite. It is a primitive site and we carried everything in on our packs.

About 1/2 mile in and out of sight of the trailhead parking lot, all three of us heard a LOUD owl call to our 10 o’clock direction, and a reply LOUD owl call at 12 o’clock position. The trail curved up slope to the right.

That was really the only thing that happened during the day.

We got to camp a few hours later, after having trudged through a downpour and thunderstorm for 45 minutes. It has been a rainy few weeks and the forest was really green and dense. Near the summit there are also lots of rock formations, and undercut caves.

The campground has several half rotted table-benches and picnic tables as well as an old stone chimney and fireplace that was all that remained of an old cabin, apparently built by the CCC during the depression. They built the fire tower at the summit. There was a spring about 200 ft away that was encased in a masonry spring house.

We set up, cooked food, changed out of wet clothes, filtered some new water.

As we finished eating (maybe dusk?) John sits up straight on the picnic bench and says….eewww that poop smell, do you smell it? I didn’t and Donna didn’t but I certainly know what I thought it was. Nothing else happened until we went to sleep.

Of course about 2AM or so, I wake up. I hear this screaming with an almost yodel sound at the end. It was directly behind our tents, but well down slope from us. Then there was a response and similar scream about 90 degrees off, also down slope. this went back and forth about 3 times. I was pretty frozen in fear. I did not see any shadows on the tent wall and did not hear footsteps. I was quite scared and it took about 45 minutes of silence to leave the tent to pee.

I fell asleep until morning after that.

When everyone got up, my friends told me they heard me snoring and that it was really pretty, almost like I was singing or humming. I may have been but I don’t think so.

Also there was a loud crack/crashing sound down slope as we packed up… it was a tree fall. I hear those all the time now when I am outdoors. Neither of my friends had ever heard a tree fall before.

That was the last bit of weirdness for the trip. We hiked out Sunday during the afternoon.”