your true tales!

So, maybe the title’s a bit of a misnomer since this first one is gonna be one of my stories. But what better way to kick it off, right?

Before I get to the story, if you didn’t know, “Your True Tales” used to be the title of a page that I was particularly fond of when I was kid. Not sure if anyone else here remembers it — it was where the people who ran about.com would host paranormal (or paranormal adjacent) user submitted stories. They could be really hit or miss, but it was a huge part of my childhood and was part of what made me want to have a place on the internet like that of my own.

Anyways, to the story!

***

All of this began some time in the summer of 2009.

About a year prior, myself, my mom, and my sister had been, more or less, left with no option but to move in with a friend of the family. We had lived, up to that point, with my grandpa in Plevna. When he passed away, we could no longer afford to keep paying for our house so, having nowhere else to go, a family friend with more room than she needed offered us a place to stay until we got back on our feet.

Her home was in a then small subdivision quite a bit outside of Huntsville, Alabama. To be a little more exact, we lived at the foot of Monte Sano (a mountain well known for its caves, sinkholes, and hot springs; the caves, interestingly, are vast – some even connecting to a large network that runs underneath the city itself). Monte Sano plays host to a fairly large nature preserve. Although it does have its fair share of trails and visitors, the mountain does have a few remote areas that see little to no hikers.

This mountain, and nearby Green Mountain, have been mini hotspots for local bigfoot sightings for just about as long as the area’s been inhabited. Now, growing up in rural Alabama, I had heard plenty of stories related to all sorts of sightings (bigfoot, UFOs, even the White Thang that some of the older generations here like to talk about. As a child, they terrified me.

We had lived, seemingly, in the middle of nowhere, so “city life” felt much safer to me. Little did I know, I’d have an encounter that would help to further fuel a lifetime interest. Life there was fairly normal for a very long time. We lived right at the edge of a nature preserve, so as a teenager, I had plenty of room to explore and wander (which I spent most of my time doing). We often, that summer, would spend nights sitting on the front porch, reminiscing. One night, however, we stayed up particularly late. It was around three in the morning, my sister and I had long since gone inside but not yet gone to bed, when my mom and the friend we were living with suddenly ran inside. They were terrified by a noise they had heard.

They described it as sounding to them like howling but not from any creature they had ever heard. The howl would pitch higher and higher up, warbling and almost screeching, then shift back down into this deep, barrel-chested kind of noise. My mind went immediately to bigfoot. Bigfoot was my first fortean obsession so I was fairly familiar with the noises people claimed to be related to the creature. I pulled up recordings that I’d saved from a now very long defunct website that used to chronicle Alabama based bigfoot encounters and very quickly found one that seemed to match what they’d described. I ran outside with them wanting to hear it for myself, but it had already stopped. The following night, however, I heard it.

I was enthralled; instantly, I was caught up in the idea of bigfoot living out in those woods. We would sit out, every night that we could, that summer listening for it. Most of the time, we would hear it, and always about three or so in the morning (though sometimes a little earlier or a little later). We’d hear whistling, the tree knocking kind of sounds you sometimes hear about, the occasional whoop, and, very rarely, apparent answers from off in the distance. Sometimes it seemed to get so close that it felt like whatever was making those sounds was just there on the other side of the tree line and might step out at any moment.

We heard it so often that it got to where we noticed patterns. For example, we never heard it on the night before a storm and, following a storm, it always took a day or two to come back.

It was, in a word, incredible. It was something undeniably weird, some creature that shouldn’t exist was making that sound, and there we were, witnesses to it. Unless you’ve heard it for yourself, I can’t describe how it feels to hear something like that.

We heard it all that summer. Eventually, though, it left.

I remember speaking to my aunt about it one day that fall (she still lives in a very rural area of the state, though not too far south of us, on Brindlee Mountain), and how we stopped hearing it. She suddenly got incredibly excited; she had heard something the night before speaking to me that sounded like the howls we would hear. After that, we started to wonder if perhaps they were, or at least this particular creature was, migratory.

During the summer of 2010, we seemed to get our answer: we started to hear it again, and clearer replies to its calls, too. I, for whatever reason, was emboldened by its return. Daily, I would explore the preserve, hoping to have a sighting. For months, I went up and down trails, even inadvertently making a few of my own with how much I frequented certain areas. For the most part, nothing of note ever happened. That is, however, until that November.

It had started as an uneventful day. I entered the woods through my normal means; at the time, a gravel road in the area led to a dead end where they cleared a lot or two to build new houses (since then, the houses have never been built and the lots remain empty, though overgrown — make of that what you will). I would normally use this road as my way in to the preserve. A particularly long game trail ran vaguely parallel to the road and I often would hike up through the woods to join it.

I walked up through one of the lots. This particular one had a very large and pointed rock (I’m talking four to five feet high) that I always passed by on my way up. On the point, I could see a very clear streak of blood that ran down to the base. Tracing the blood down, at the bottom, lay a huge turtle shell. It was obvious that something or someone had lifted the turtle up to the point, cracked the shell on the rock, and then scooped it out. The shell was left abandoned, scooped completely clean.

Unnerved by my discovery, I realized that I was experiencing what some call the Oz Effect. The birds had seemed to stop singing. I wasn’t hearing movement in the undergrowth anymore. It became very apparent that something strange was going on. Recognizing that this could be a sign that there was a large predator in the area, I stood still and quickly scanned my surroundings. Suddenly, as I turned, a deer burst out of some nearby deadfall, literally galloping past within a foot of me. I jumped back and decided to head back downhill (the direction the deer was headed).

I rejoined the road below me, walking towards a section of the woods that was particularly dense. To my left, the hill sloped up and I could see through gaps in the trees that I was alone. To my right, the hill sloped down and the growth was too thick to see past. Walking down this unpaved road, the sound of the gravel slushing with each step, I felt a little safer. I couldn’t help but think, though, that 1) I definitely didn’t feel like I was alone and 2) I kept thinking I was hearing something to my right.

I don’t think I’ve spoken about it here on this website just yet, but around this time I was talking via email to a couple of bigfoot researchers: most notably, a guy named Paul Fitsik based out of Seattle. I’d learned a few tricks from him, one of them being that (at least according to him) bigfoot was particularly fond of following people and walking alongside them just out of view. Following his advice, I came to a stop as jarringly quick as I could.

I heard it. Slushing in the fallen leaves and pine needles down the hill to my right. I started walking again, hearing faint footfall to my right a little more clearly now. Again, I stopped. Slushing, as it stopped too, followed.

I decided to wait it out. Surely, if I just stood there and waited, I’d see whatever it was.

I turned to my right, honestly terrified but enthralled with what was happening to me in that moment, scanning desperately through the trees and brush just wanting to see something, anything. I couldn’t see anything, but that is about the time the smell hit me. Whatever it was over there (and judging by the sound of its walking it was pretty big) smelled like a wet dog. It made a sound about then. A sound that’s very hard me to describe. It was this strange, slow, rattling kind of sound. It was very deep, not quite like a growl, closer to someone clearing their throat.

I waited for what felt like hours. All in all is probably no longer than a moment or two. I didn’t want to move in case I scared whatever it was and it left. Before I could decide what to do, how best to get a glimpse of it, I heard it turn around, it’s feet obviously sliding in the leaves, and it started walking away from me, down hill and further into the woods. I waited for a moment, until I could no longer here it, and I left. As soon as I was home, I hopped on my computer, emailed Paul, and he assured me that “… now you’ve really got the bug!”. Honestly, though, that would be the last time for a while that I ever explored anything paranormal. It was certainly the last time that I ever went looking for bigfoot.

I think a lot about the experience, recently, and how I reacted to it.

I didn’t once think that maybe it was a bear or a mountain lion, let alone just some creepy dude out there following me. I didn’t stop to look for prints if it was bigfoot. I didn’t do anything that I would’ve hoped I would do now. Chock it up to being a kid I guess, but it makes me think, to a degree, of paranormal apathy.

Maybe I really did encounter bigfoot and my brain’s response to something so psyche-shattering was to tell me to just go home, tell Paul, and just not touch anything supernatural until I could really handle it.

Who knows what it really was that I encountered that day.

-Scott