An upcoming guest writes “I am a recent listener to your show and I have heard several stories that are close to my experience but none of them are identical so I thought I would reach out and share my experience.
Last year in mid – August my wife and I were on vacation in northern Minnesota (we are Minnesota residence). We were camping at one of the state parks and being avid hikers we had plans to hike a section of the Superior hiking trail. This section is a loop that starts on one side of the river, crosses over and heads down the other side back to the parking lot. In total it takes about 4-5 hours to complete. Most hikers head to a lookout point a couple miles up the trail and head back to their cars so after the lookout the number of people on the trail greatly decreases. To cross over the river there is a wooden bridge built by the Forrest service and as we were walking there were signs saying the bridge was washed out. We continued to the bridge with the plans of traversing it being that the water was pretty shallow at that point (we have hiked this trail numerous times).
We got to the bridge and there was a father and 2 boys that were just leaving the other side of the trail.The first thing I noticed is the bridge lo oked like it was tore apart but the wood was still relatively green meaning it was newer construction. The water here isnt higher than your knees and its a mild current so I was a little puzzled on how this bridge came down. When we crossed the water we stopped and looked for agates on the shoreline which we often do in that area While we looking I happened to look up and scan the tree line around me which I do every time we are hiking. We have had some wild life encounters through out the years of hiking and I just like to keep an eye on whats around me in the bush.This river bends to the left about 30 yards from where we were and in the tree line I noticed what I thought was a black bear between 2 pine trees about 5ft up from the shoreline right at the bend. I stopped and stared at it for a minute and realized the shape wasnt right for a bear. What I saw was a conical shaped head that went down to shoulders, no neck at all. It didnt have ears of a bear and the scale wasnt right. Judging from the section I saw it was very big. It was black and I could see it had shaggy hair but I saw no facial features it was just all black. I looked down at the rocky shoreline to take another step closer and when I looked back up it was gone. This literally was a split second. There was no sound of movement, nothing it was just gone. So I looked around to make sure I wasnt mistaking it for a tree stump and there was nothing there that would fool my eye. Where I had seen it in between the 2 pines there was a white birch tree in the background that was not visible before.
Now Im a little taken back and in disbelief of what just happened but I said nothing to my wife. I knew she would have shrugged it off as nothing. So we packed up from looking for agates and I had this thought roll through my head that seemed like it came out of nowhere. “I mean you no harm”. Again Im not sure at this point what to make of any of this so we continued up the trail. We go about a quarter mile up the trail and my wife stops and picks up an agate rock sitting in the middle of the trail. This was a first, we were both like where the #$%* did this come from? It was literally right in the middle of the trail and we looked around to see if it was kicked up from another hiker. There were no signs that we could see it was freshly removed from the earth. That was a little weird but we kept moving. Another quarter mile or so up the trail my wife stops again and sure as shit there is another agate sitting in the middle of the trail with no signs of the earth being disturbed. We both at this point were like WTF in the over 20 years of hiking together this was a bazar first. The other thing I noticed was both times the agates were directly adjacent to a game trail. We heard, saw, smelled nothing out of the ordinary on the trail. I did see a black lump on the ground off in the distance after we picked up the 2nd agate, but it didnt seem out of place to me. I also had a feeling like we were being watched during that section and the only other time I had a similar feeling was on the Appalachian trail in Georgia right at the beginning of the trail.”