Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “In the summer of 1962, over 60 years ago, I schedule things that happened in my life around that time as occurring between when JFK came to my little Illinois town and spoke in the public square (Oct 1960) and when he was later assassinated (Nov 63). I think the year was probably 1961 or 1962. I can’t tell for sure. I was six or seven years old; my brother was two years older than I and I had two younger sisters spaced apart by about two years each.

My uncle, who is long deceased, was a bank officer at that time in our little town in Illinois. His bank having foreclosed on a little house in our town. He purchased the house and my dad and my uncles’ friends cut up the house into large pieces and transported it down to the Lake of the Ozarks on a truck and reassembled it. They now had a cabin at the lake.

We got to use it once it was placed so our whole little family went to the “lake” for a vacation for about a week. The cabin had no electricity, It had hand pumped water and a toilet only – very rough. I should mention because it is important to the story, that my brother and I fought constantly with each other. He was two years older and we scrapped and wrestled constantly – it was just something we did like a couple of bear cubs. So… I’ve set that stage, now I can move on. Its important in the story.

When we arrived at the cabin it was on the steep sloping shores of a medium sized lake cove. The road was so rocky that our car frequently “bottomed out”. The Lake of the Ozarks has literally tens of thousands of these coves. Our cove was not big and not small. We were near the pointed end of the “V” or end of the cove. The end of the cove was filled with downed timber and was a messy, swampy jumble of rotting material. The sloping shores of the lake are actually the stoney sides of the Ozark mountains. I often found myself looking toward the dead end of the cove because it was dark and mysterious and seemed to compel me to look at it. I often thought someone could be watching us from there.

My brother was an avid fisherman and couldn’t wait to fish. While the car was being unpacked by my parents, we went out onto the small dock at the rear of the cabin that went out on and over the lake. The sides of the mountain were relatively steep, about that of a 4 on 12 roof pitch and the shore ran into the dark lake water steeply, getting deep quickly and in short order. I suspect my brother and I had already been pushing each other and scrapping a bit here and there and mention that because it is important to substantiate the intelligence of the creature I would meet later in this strange story.

My brother fished and pulled in three catfish of varying size rather quickly and hoped to get my mother to cook them. She was too tired on that first evening and suggested we put them on a stringer for the following day. We went to bed that night and woke in the morning. I went for a short exploratory walk toward the dark end of the cove. When I returned, I asked my brother how fishing had been. He was upset because his three “cats” of the previous day were gone! I asked him to clarify. He said they had been pealed like bananas and laid on the dock. Their skins were pulled down to the tail and the spines and skull had been absolutely cleaned of all meat. They had been lying side by side according to size, small to large, in a very neat row aligned with the boards of the dock. I said, “let me see”. He said Dad already swept them into the water. He said Dad said a raccoon did it. I said that was preposterous. The neat arrangement of the fish in a line according to size was too coincidental for a raccoon to perform. He agreed it was weird but reiterated that “dad said it was a raccoon”, shrugged and that was that.

The next day, largely having forgotten about this experience I went for a walk out on the road toward the open end of the cove where it joined with the lake, the opposite of the “V” end of the cove. As I walked along the flat rocky road I noticed it had been cut-out from the mountain side. It left a four-foot high rough but vertical wall on the right side of the road then continued up. It sloped down and to the lake on my left side as I advanced. I looked to my right and up the mountain. I decided I would go up into the hills of the Ozarks and quickly realized that if not careful I could come down in a spot different than I had gone up and easily get very lost. I contemplated this and continued walking. As I walked, I came upon a trickling waterfall from the side of the vertical cut that spilled out onto the road. It came down the mountain above and to my right.

I thought this would be a perfect little stream to follow and keep me from getting lost. I scramble up the vertical cut face next to the little waterfall and followed the trickling stream upward like an Indian.

I followed the stream; I can only guess to be about 1000 yards or so when I came upon a rocky dam which caused the stream to back-up upon itself and spill out laterally and create a pond. While water still came through the dam just creating the little stream that I had followed, it had created a nice cool pool of Ozark Mountain water. The pool was roughly 20 to 30 feet in diameter. I say that not because I was a particularly good judge of distance but because of my eyesight and my ability to see the things I am about to report. As I came to the dam, I noticed a figure at the far end of the pond opposite the end where I was. I presumed he couldn’t hear me because I had walked adjacent to the trickling stream . He had his back to me. The figure was black and looked like it had on a sweater of scraggily moe-hair. It was only four to five feet tall, a bit bigger than I and was skinny and rangy with a round head that was fuzzy with hair. It had its back to me. It was a strange creature, and I found my brain ping-ponging back and forth trying to justify that it was a person or not. I watched it as it sank itself up and down in the water with its arm out horizontally to the sides and the scraggily hair hanging down, like it was trying to keep its arms out of the water. I noticed that it appeared to be wearing coveralls and they were slick to its chest. I couldn’t imagine it lived in a house and reasoned that it must have stolen the coveralls off a clothesline. Only later did I realize its hair was flattened and stuck glistening on its body giving the appearance of wet Levi like material. I thought it must be retarded and that its mother would be wondering where it was.

I am pretty sure now that It knew I was watching it and was trying not to scare me away, by turning and facing me – I realize that in retrospect for at the time I thought it couldn’t hear me. As I watched it, it reached down into the water, first with its left arm and one at a time pulled out a crawdad with each hand left and right. As I watched from my position at the dam, it then held the crawdads over its head, pinching them between thumb and index finger, and pushed them together exciting them and making them fight each other. Simultaneously it vocalized a “yee yee yee” sound as it pushed them together. The crawdads arms opened wide and the claws gaped. He leaned first to the left making the noise and then to the right, making the noise and pushing them together creating the fight and the noise which I suppose represented the verbal sounds fighting would produce or maybe mimicking the trash-talk of my brother and I when we wrestled.

He then stopped and turned slightly more to the left and showed me his profile. His face and facial skin was shiny and black with a border of black fuzzy hair all around. His features were remarkably human-like yet different enough from a human to confuse me. He took the crawdad, pinched in his left hand and dropped his jaw and pushed the whole crawdad into the gaping profile v shape of a mouth, he closed on it, crunching, chewing and swallowing it up in a few bites. He then leaned to his right, showed his profile from that side, and did the same thing. I was shocked and amazed at the act of chewing up and swallowing crawdads. We had crawdads in the creek behind my house at home. They are tough. It then occurred to me that he had eaten the catfish as well and that this was a man or a creature that ate things raw out in the woods. It disregarded the boney shell of a crawdad and crunched it like it was a cracker.

It turned back to its left profile again, this time turning still a little further. With its cupped left hand, it reached back toward me and made a come-hither motion with its four fingers. I backed away. I knew that this was an incredible moment and that if I followed this creature into the woods, I would likely be its next meal and would never go back home to my family.

I continued backing out carefully, staying low and crabbing along sideways and began to go faster and faster down the hill. It did not seem to follow me. I made it to the road, turned to my left and headed precisely back the way I came until I reached our cabin. I walked in and saw my mom who said she had been wondering where I was. I said nothing about what I had seen. I never told her or anyone except my wife and a friend.

When I thought about this later, often and through the years, I realize how intelligent this creature was. He did a little pantomime of my brother and me fighting with the crawdad fighting display, he also skinned and lined up those catfish to communicate that he had a sense of organization. It was with purpose to communicate that this was not a raccoon.”