Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

It was early May, 2003. I was taking my younger brother on a camping trip in Northern Michigan. We were camping in a large section of land on the Huron National Forest off a rarely used two-track. We setup camp late in the day, ate dinner, and started a small campfire just before dusk. Our campsite was in a valley between two small hills (its Michigan, so the hills were only 30′ to 40′ tall). We are sitting around the campfire, and it is dusk, so the sun is down but there is still some ambient light. My brother mentions that he hears something moving around on the hillside above camp, but I discounted it as probably a squirrel. About 15 minutes later, we hear what sounds like a log get rolled over on the hillside above us. At this point, we figure there is a bear around camp. We thought it probably came in to the food we were cooking, and rolled a log over that was on the ground to eat the grubs that you can find underneath them. We toss some more wood on the fire, and are making sure we have all the food locked up in the car.

Another 10-20 minutes pass and the dusk has faded to darkness. We hear a yell that we think is around 100 yards down the valley that is like an “AHHHHHHHHHH” yell. It was loud, really loud, and was drawn out 8-10 seconds long. It sounded angry, and sounded like it was directed towards us. We started talking about what animal it could be. The volume it could produce and the length of the yell was unlike anything we could imagine. We kept saying it has to have a massive set of lungs. We sort of ruled out a bear at that point. There is an elk herd around an hour north of our location, so we thought an elk was the only animal in Michigan that had lungs big enough to produce the yell. But we could not wrap our heads around that vocalization coming from an elk. Then another yell from a slightly diffferent angle / location down the valley. We keep talking and trying to figure out what animal it was. 2 minutes later another loud scream from a slightly different location. The vocalizations were definetly directed towards us, and they sounded angry. We were picturing some massive 600lbs. + animal pacing around staring at us. I convinced my brother that our presence or noise was making some animal angry, and if we go inside the tent, the animal won’t see us, and leave. So we heading inside the tent, waited around 30 minutes while whispering in the tent, and no more yelling. We both fell asleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up hearing somebody talking. I listened for a couple seconds, and heard an unintelligible voice talking towards the tent from the outside. I went from being middle of the night groggy to 100% awake in a millisecond. It sounded like a deeper male voice about 10′ outside of the tent and above me. It sounded like backwards talking. Like when they play an audio track backwards. It sounded like human speech, but if somebody just randomly tossed together syllables. It would talk for 3-4 seconds, then pause for 10 seconds, and repeat. I was sleeping in a sleeping bag with this really loud nylon fabric. Anytime I moved too much in it, you would hear this fabric noise. I was frightened and did not want whatever was outside to know that I was awake. I slowly pulled my arm out of the sleeping bag making sure not to make a noise, and started poking my brother. He was not waking up. The backwards talking happened for a total of about a minute. I stopped trying to poke my brother awake. Nothing was making sense, I thought at the time it had to be some person from a foreign country speaking a language I had never heard before. But why would they be out in the middle of the woods, and outside our tent. I thought they were trying to rob or murder us. I sat in the tent quietly waiting for them to either leave, or get closer to the tent. I had never been more glad to have that thin layer of tent fabric between me and whatever was outside. I waited, and waited, and waited on guard, keyed in to hear them move. It had to have been 2-3 hours. I never heard anybody move or walk away. The sun came up and I was exhausted from being on vigil for that long. I figured we were safe because it was light out and i dozed off.

My brother woke up, and I told him all about the backwards talking and how I wanted to see if we could figure out who had been out there. We got out of the tent and went to the bush by the tent that I head the talking coming from. On the other side of the bush, facing towards the bush and tent was a massive barefoot footprint. It was massive. No claws, just what looked like a giant human footprint with 5 to. We went down the valley towards where we heard the yelling, and 30 yards away, there was another low spot on the ground that was pretty moist, and we saw another huge massive footprint. We grabbed a tape measure from the car and measured both of the prints and both were 18″ long. We tried stomping as hard as we could in the dirt next to these tracks, and could not leave much if any of an indentation in the ground. At that point we both knew it was bigfoot. We had thought it was a Pacific Northwest thing, but there were massive footprints. We measured the bush at 8′ tall, and figured from the orientation of the footprint, it was probably tall enough to see over the bush. We thought it was historic to have bigfoot in Michigan, and wanted proof. So we decided to drive the 15 minutes to town to try and buy some plaster at the local hardware store.

The store did not have any plaster. We were talking non-stop with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension about if the bigfoot was going to return agian tonight, and what we should do. We stopped by a lake we had planned on visiting on our way back, and stopped for lunch. We headed back to our camp in early afternoon. As we were driving down the two-track to camp, and got 300 yards away from camp, we both mentioned we felt like we were being watched. As we rounded the corner where we could see out camp, we immediately saw that our tent was upside down. Before we got out of the car, we dediced we were not going to spend another night out here and were going to head home. It was a windy day, and we did not stake the tent down. But we each had a sleeping pad, sleeping bad, duffel bag of clothes and misc.items in the tent. They must have weighed 30-40lbs. So the wind could have blown the tent over, but we weren’t taking chances. The sense of being watched was so strong, we did not want to both be in the tent packing up our stuff. So one of us went into the tent, while the other brother stood guard keeping an eye out on the treeline. We packed up and left our camping trip 2 days early.

Sasquatch Sierra Sounds by Ron Morehead & Al Berry