"The first time I understood I was not being watched by a person or some animal.
It was standing just beyond the reach of my porch light, with its head turned toward my
kitchen window, where I stood.
It didn't move a muscle.
It stood there in the dark, watching me.
I had lived there my whole life, right there on the edge of the woods.
I'd seen all kinds of animals and strange humans come through there, and I'd never been
frightened.
But that all changed one night in 2019."
My name is Carla.
I'll be 74 years old this year.
I live in South-Eastern Ohio.
In the same house I grew up in.
Before that night in 2019, things happened that I didn't give a lot of thought, too.
But then the first thing that I took notice of was my dog.
I had a blue healer named June.
Good dog, steady dog, not the sort to bark or spook easy.
She was nine years old then.
And every night before bedtime, I would let her out the back door for a few minutes.
One night I opened the door, and she stopped dead at the doorway and refused to go out.
Her ears went back.
The hair along her shoulders stood up.
She growled and backed up into my legs.
I remember being annoyed.
I was tired, and I just wanted to go to bed.
So I nudged her a little with my foot and told her to go on out.
She refused.
I looked out into the yard.
Nothing I could see as far as the porch light went.
But there was a feeling that I got when I looked out past into the darkness, like something
was out there.
I figured there was probably a coyote close, maybe some stray dogs.
I shut the door and took her out front on a leash instead with a pistol tucked into my
jacket pocket.
She hurried, used the bathroom, then pulled hard to get back inside.
The next morning there was nothing out there telling me what if anything had been out
back.
But it was the same thing the next night.
Now that time I got a flashlight and I stood on the back porch steps listening.
It was so quiet I could faintly hear someone's car alarm going off in town almost two miles
away.
Otherwise, dead silence.
There weren't even any crickets.
I swept the yard with the flashlight.
I didn't see anything.
But when I hit the tree line with the light, I saw something dark move behind a tree.
This was at the far back corner of my yard.
At first I thought it was a person, and it wouldn't be the first time.
I thought it was maybe some idiot from town, or maybe those teenage boys about a quarter
mile down the road that had been causing trouble up and down the road for the last couple years.
I thought maybe they were trying to scare me, you know, the single older woman living alone.
I clicked the flashlight up to high and focused in on that area.
Nothing moved there, but I know I did not imagine that I had seen movement.
I called out somewhat aggressively.
Who's out there?
There was no answer.
I listened carefully for a few more seconds, and suddenly my skin started crawling.
I went in and quickly shut and locked the door.
I did a circle around the house checking all the doors and windows.
I'm used to living alone, and I don't usually spook like that, but I also know I needed
listen to my gut.
I kept the shotgun loaded and within reach from then on.
The third night it was becoming something of a routine.
June now refused to go out back at all after sundown, and she didn't stay long out there
even during the day.
I put it down to her getting older, but my gut wasn't so sure.
There were still small things that I began to notice after that.
I had a bird feeder and a bird bath out in the yard.
It was one of the cement kinds.
It looks like a big half shell on a pedestal.
It's heavy, solid, concrete.
One morning it was empty, and it was sitting on the ground a few feet away from the pedestal,
which still stood upright.
The bird feeder was destroyed.
My ex-husband is the one who placed that bird bath there for me years ago.
Now mind you, in 2019, I was 67, and I'd already been through two spinal surgeries in previous
years, and I tried to pick up that bird bath top.
But there's no way I could do it.
I ended up calling my ex for some help.
Now for perspective, we bought it way back in the 90s at an estate sale.
The daughter of the elderly people who had passed away told us her parents bought it sometime
in the 1950s.
It was bigger than the ones you see today at Walmart.
I bet the top piece was 80 pounds just by itself.
But something had picked it up.
It was now set on the ground in a way that you could see it hadn't been knocked over.
Over the next week I found that quite often.
I would go through the trouble to put it back up on the pedestal and refill it.
And often I would find it empty and laying somewhere else.
As for the bird feeder, I never replaced it.
It was futile.
I still didn't know what was happening.
Every couple days I was finding something else that told me something was coming around
my house.
One day I went out to find a full-size patio cushion was missing from a chair.
There had been no storms and no wind.
I thought that was strange.
Who takes one patio cushion?
Another day I came not to see that all of my orange ditch lilies that had been planted
along the back fence had all had the top eaten right off.
Now, if you aren't familiar with those flowers, they're pretty tough and deer don't eat
them.
But something ate every single flower off the top of the stems and they had been eaten.
You could look at it and tell.
My mom planted those way back in probably the late 1950s or very early 1960s.
I remember when she planted them.
So in over seven decades, not once has anything ever eaten a single one of them.
So I was pretty stumped.
At first, each thing that happened seemed like it was just an oddity on its own, something
separate.
More and more things were happening though.
Some things like June refused to go out the back at all, whereas previously I had trouble
to getting her to come back in.
But more and more happened, and after a while I began to think of them as not separate,
but connected.
I caught myself avoiding the back of my yard from sundown onward.
I told myself I was letting June make me paranoid.
But I could not shake the feeling of being watched and that something was somehow different
out there now.
I used to see a lot more animals out there, and I didn't anymore.
There didn't seem to even be squirrel chatter.
And almost no deer was seen that whole summer.
And there were no foxes, no coyote that I saw, although I did hear them often the distance
quite often.
One night, and this was in late August.
I was standing at the sink, washing a couple dishes by hand.
I suddenly got that really weird feeling.
I swear it felt like my hair was marching across my head.
The only light on in the kitchen was the one above the sink.
I reached over, and I flipped the switch to turn that light off so I could see outside without
looking through my reflection in the window.
The back porch light was still on, so I could see out in the yard.
I didn't see anything.
But I stood still for probably a full minute looking.
Then I thought foolish.
And I was about to flick the light back on when June, who had been lying in the kitchen
doorway behind me, stood up and walked over to her food and water dishes, which were at
the end of the counters there, near the sliding patio doors.
She took one by the food, stopped, looked out the doors, then began to growl, marched
over to the doors with her fur bristling.
That was really unlike her.
So I walked over, staying back in the darkness of the kitchen, and I looked out where I thought
she was looking.
There.
I just saw it.
There was something out at the far edge of the yard.
It wasn't in the trees this time.
It was in the open.
But right at the point in the yard were the light started to vanish.
It was standing near the old clothesline pole, which was at the farthest bit of light.
And for a second, my mind still tried to see it as a person.
Then it moved.
It straightened up, and I got a real idea of its size.
The clothesline pole was at least a foot shorter than what I was looking at.
And what I saw was broader across the shoulders than any human I've ever seen.
And I've seen some really big ones.
I had a hard time seeing where the arms ended in the darkness, but I know they didn't end
where they would have ended on a person.
And I could tell its whole body was angled toward the house.
It had been watching me all lit up there at the sink like I was on television.
There was no curtain on that window, just to top the lance.
I had never meted one.
There's not a neighbor in sight.
I couldn't tell you the exact height, just that it was taller than my clothesline pole,
by at least a foot, maybe much more.
And that pole is just over six feet tall.
So we're going to say seven feet plus.
It was all dark brown or maybe black.
Everything I saw was dull looking, not shiny.
I couldn't see all the detail, but I saw the shape and it was covered solid.
What I mean is, there were no clothing line breaks, which you would see.
You would see where a jacket or a coat would end at the bottom him.
You would see the pant legs.
But I didn't see any of that.
It was solid and unbroken.
There was no different color to the face either.
It was very solid and very large.
And I remember one clear thought.
This isn't possible.
June started barking and growling.
It must have hurt her and it moved.
It began to walk away toward the trees and the darkness.
It wasn't running, but it moved fast in a way that seemed out of sync for its size.
I quickly called my ex-husband Jim, who just lived a few minutes away.
And just so you understand, we get along good after our divorce and we are good friends
to this day.
We rely on each other a lot.
I called him and he came right over with a spotlight, a pistol and a rifle.
Jim has hunted his whole life.
He grew up down the road too.
He's also a Vietnam veteran.
He then served in the Marine Corps for another 22 years after Vietnam.
I'm just saying.
He's not the kind that's afraid to go after something, even in the dark, you know?
Jim got there and checked the yard and it looked like something had sure been coming around.
It had even made tracks up to the porch and the kitchen window he said.
Dang to find out how he could tell all of that.
We hadn't had any rain for a month.
The ground was hard as I'll get out.
At one point he got down and he looked at something in the grass about ten feet from
my kitchen window.
I couldn't make out what he was looking at, but he sure saw something there.
He said something had stood there and shifted around for a while, probably watching me stand
at the kitchen sink.
Only other thing was he said that what he saw was older and it hadn't happened in the
last couple hours.
I asked him what was it, a bear?
He waited a second.
He kept looking at it.
Then he finally said, "Well, maybe it is a bear.
Maybe it stood here on its hind legs, looking in at you through the window."
He then walked the fence in the tree line again and there was nothing concrete there, but
something he said had been trampling through the dry grass.
Over the next week, whatever it was kept coming back, not in a way that I could predict
it and never enough to get a good look, but I wasn't trying to either, because I figured
it was a black bear.
That's also why I didn't call the sheriff.
I assumed it was just a wild animal.
The thing is, I didn't go back out after sunset anymore, and June got walked out front all
the time now.
I also bought a curtain that covered the whole kitchen window and I made sure it was closed
at sunset.
After a while, I just got to where I left it closed.
The most disturbing night for me was when I realized it had changed its habits because
I had changed mine.
I was now taking June out the front before dark, but as the months went on and the days got
shorter, sometimes we had no choice.
We would have to go out again when it was a little dark.
One night I took June out front as usual.
The porch light was on.
June was just finishing up doing her thing when she suddenly turns to look at the right
side of the driveway.
There's a runoff ditch over there on that side of the property.
It runs close to the trees.
I looked over to where she was looking.
She was now growling, bristling, and running back to the porch.
I about jumped a mile up when I saw a shape move in the darkness.
It was crouched right there in the ditch.
I could barely see it, but I saw it.
The thing was, as soon as it saw me see it, it stood up and jogged over into the trees.
And I do mean it jogged.
It was doing a type of a light run.
Scared me out of my wits.
I had a hard time telling myself that's a bear.
I knew better.
I know I've never seen a bear run on its hind legs.
I'm sureling not that fast.
I almost called Jim again, but from the first night that I had called him, I bet I'd called
him five or more times just over the last few weeks.
I couldn't keep doing that.
The real truth for me came the day.
I saw it in broad daylight.
I saw the top of its head, and one shoulder is its slid behind the shed as I looked out from
my laundry room.
I felt like I'd been hit by lightning.
I knew what it was.
That's Bigfoot.
Now that really shook me up.
But where the thing is?
I wasn't as scared as I was when I thought I had a bear out there prowling around.
It's something I can't explain.
I am not in the camp where I think Bigfoot is a big harmless, cuddly thing.
But I also didn't feel like it was bear type of dangerous, either.
I have zero logic for this, and I know it.
I started really looking for it after that.
But I only saw a shape move at night, right out of the light.
That happened a lot.
Now why it came out that one day?
I have no idea.
As autumn came on, I hesitated sleeping with my windows open, which had done my whole
life.
I thought it through.
I still kept the shotgun within reach by my bed.
So I decided to cut some wood pieces to put into the windows so they could not be raised
more than a couple inches when I left them open.
If something tried to force the window, I would hear it.
But I only did that for a few nights.
I started hearing things out there that I'd never heard there in my whole life of living
there.
Three falls, one or two a night.
Sometimes there were more of them.
And there would be no wind or storms to be knocking them down.
And they were spaced apart just right, like maybe two or three minutes.
It seemed controlled.
And then I would hear these strange, garbled vocal sounds.
I don't know quite what else to call them.
They weren't yells or screams, and it wasn't like that samurai chatter.
I don't know what to call them.
They were just strange calls that came in from the tree lines.
When June would hear them, she would either bark and growl or go hide behind the couch.
One night the windows were open just a couple of inches, and I woke up because June was digging
and scratching on the wood floor, trying to get under the bed.
I have those underbed storage boxes where I store extra blankets.
She was whining and digging like crazy.
I remember I woke up, trying to figure out what was going on.
I opened my eyes in the darkness and listened.
I was about to scold her when I realized what she was doing.
But then I looked over at the window.
As soon as my head moved, something moved outside my window.
It was there, then it was gone.
I heard the feet running away.
It scared the wits out of me pretty bad.
I can't lie.
I did not ever sleep with the windows open again after that.
I don't know exactly what it was doing other than just watching me, and I mean just watching
me.
I thought watched all the time.
But it was taking things too sometimes.
And sometimes it was reading my trash cans and would make a terrible mess.
And in all the years I'd lived there, nothing had ever bothered my trash cans.
I began to alter my habits more.
I did not do dishes at the kitchen sink at night, at all.
I tried to stay out of the kitchen completely after dusk, actually the whole back of the house.
I only went into the kitchen if I absolutely needed to at night, and I never turned a light
on.
I think my alteration of my habit is what caused the next thing to happen.
I think it got mad.
So one night I'm sitting there watching television in the living room, and all of a sudden it
sounded like a tree hit the side of the house.
I mean big impact.
I actually jumped from the sound.
I had no idea at the time what it was, but I wasn't going out in the dark to find out
either.
I couldn't call Jim.
I knew he was up at Lake Eryon a fishing trip.
I thought of calling the sheriff, but I know that small towns have big mouths, as they say.
I turned off the lights and sat quietly in my recliner in the living room with the shotgun
on my lap.
I didn't mean to, but I fell asleep there.
The next morning I went out and investigated.
I discovered the vinyl siding on the left side of the house looked like a meteor had slammed
into it.
All the vinyl was dented, cracked, and bent.
It was in a long shape.
It looked like someone had picked up a big log and used it like a baseball bat right up against
the side of the house.
I had no choice.
I had to file a report with the sheriff.
If I wanted to make an insurance claim, I had to have that.
I told him the truth as much as I could, which is that I didn't know what happened or
what caused it.
The deputy never said anything, but I think he had his own ideas, and I found out a little
bit later on about that.
I was in town running errands, and I ran into a woman that I had known since kindergarten
at the post office.
She asked if I was the one seeing that other thing that had been behind the brewer's place.
I was shocked and I said, "What thing?"
She then told me something big had been seen crossing the road near the old gravel pit
just a few weeks earlier.
Now, I was perplexed how it came that she would ask me about that.
"Aha," I thought.
I suddenly remembered.
Her daughter works a dispatch for the county.
She'd have known about my siding incident.
Then, she said another man had reported something killed two of his hunting dogs, ripped their
cages open like potato chip bags.
I stood there and listened.
So I wasn't the only one with strange things happening.
But the worst night was the night I lost power.
Bad thunderstorms had rolled through.
Lots of lightning and thunder.
The kind that made the house shake.
We lost power, which I have expected.
I lit two candles in sat in the living room working a word-cross puzzle.
June was sitting there pressed up against my leg.
She had always been terrified of thunder.
I was brought deep working that crossword puzzle.
When I heard a sound I knew all too well.
The back door handle began to jiggle.
As soon as that started, June lost her mind.
She was barking so hard she was slipping on the floor.
I stood up, grabbed the shotgun, and backed up toward the hallway where I could see through
to the back door.
But the dark without power was so absolute I really couldn't see anything.
Growing up, the back door was a wood door with the upper half, nothing more than a set of
small window-pains.
I seemed to recall the R9, three rows of three windows.
After we moved in, Jim insisted on a more secure steel door with a very small wagon wheel-shape
window at the top.
I remember arguing, wanting to keep the other door out of nostalgia.
Plus, I could barely see out that door window without being on my tippy toes.
Jim won out.
And right then I was thankful that there was a steel door and not one made of half glass.
Something slammed the door so hard I felt the vibration through the floor where I was standing.
It wasn't like it was exactly trying to get in.
It felt more like a test of the door.
I yelled out, "Get out of here!"
I yelled it as loud as I could.
I know it heard me because the jiggling stopped and nothing happened for a few seconds.
Then with the best or maybe the worst timing, however you want to consider it, the power
came back on right then.
The porch light was on when the power had gone out, so when the power came back, the porch
light came back on too.
And for a split second, I saw its face looking in at me through the little wagon wheel window.
It must have bent down to do that.
The thing was, as soon as the lights came on, we had instant eye contact.
What I mean is, I think it had had its eyes on me all the time, that it could see me in
the darkness because when the lights came back on, it wasn't searching for me in the hallway.
It already had its eyes on me.
I had that look at it for that second, then it took off.
I heard the porch board's creak as it left.
That was not my imagination.
And you know, I don't know what came over me, but I ran to the kitchen window and had to
look out.
As scared as I was, I had to know.
I had to see.
I got to the window just in time to see it running across the yard for the trees.
It went right over that fence the way me or you would step over something on the sidewalk.
But for one instant, I saw it clearly, the most clear up to that point.
It was massively built way more than I had first thought.
It's really hard to appreciate the size of one of these things until you see it.
I thought it was big and tall from what I'd already seen.
But watching it leap the yard, I got to look at the whole body, at least the backside,
top to bottom.
Massa Hartley describes it.
It ran with its head pushing forward.
The whole body was leaning forward actually.
It ran with a weird gate, like the lower legs rotated a little at the knees with every step.
That still isn't a good description, but I can't give a better one.
Then it was over the fence and gone into the darkness and back in the woods in just two
seconds.
I frantically called Jim.
He came and he picked me in June up and took us to his house for the night.
I ended up staying there for the next several weeks.
I moved back to the house when Jim and two of his friends cut trees and brush further
back from the back edge of the yard.
They also wired up brighter floodlights with dusk to dawn auto lighting.
To my knowledge, the big foot never came back onto the porch again.
As winter came on, it got quiet.
There was no activity.
Then in the spring there were a couple times that June acted as if it was out there again,
but I did not see it.
Then everything stopped.
The best I can figure is it moved on.
Yes, I still live here.
This has been my home for my whole life.
My children were partly raised here and my grandchildren have a lot of memories here.
This is home.
I don't intend to leave until the corner takes me away.
I'm not afraid to go outside after dark now, and I don't necessarily feel watched.
But I also don't go standing around in the backyard looking into the trees.
And I'm careful not to leave the curtains open at night, even though there are no neighbors
who could look in, except for the ones that live in the woods.
I'm just careful not to frame myself as if I'm on television at night.
I think you understand that.
There are people who ask if I believe in Bigfoot.
I always tell them, "That is the wrong question."
"Believe is for something you have not seen."
I saw Bigfoot, and he stood out there for many, many nights.
Probably more than I ever will know, studying my house and studying me.
As for his behavior and the actions, I can't explain them.
Someone better versed in Bigfootology might be able to, but I can't, and I don't care to.
It will be five years this spring since it all happened, and I hope I live the rest of
my life here, without anything else ever happening.
And I never...
There's my story as I promised you.
Signed, Carla.
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