[Birds chirping]
My name is Matt and I'm 66 years old now.
I've lived in Georgia most of my life.
Blue collar, family man.
I spent my younger years swinging a hammer and my weekends out in the woods.
One of my thought to tell you happened back in the summer of 1986 when I was 27 years old
and still running around with my little brother Danny like we were still teenagers
with nothing to lose and no responsibilities.
To this day I haven't been able to make much sense of what happened
and maybe that's part of why I don't talk about it much.
And when I do, I keep it short, but every so often,
especially when someone starts asking if I've ever seen anything strange in the woods.
My story comes out.
And when it does, I can feel the way my inside shake just a little
exactly as they did that night when the river turned quiet
and the rocks started falling.
Now Danny and I had taken plenty of trips together growing up,
but this one was different.
It was the first time in years we'd managed to get away from our jobs and families at the same time.
Danny was 22 then and had just been promoted at the machine shop.
And me? Well, I was dealing with the long, slow death of my first marriage,
although I didn't know that's what it was at the time.
We both just needed some peace and quiet, and the Taluila River had never let us down.
We figured a three-day weekend out would be just good for us.
It's a wild stretch of water there in northern Georgia,
and if you drive past the main campground and keep going where the pavement ends,
you'll find long winding gravel roads that seemed to snake deeper and deeper,
taking you to a lost time.
And that's where we were heading.
Somewhere quiet, somewhere you didn't see another soul, unless you plan to.
We hit the river early Friday afternoon,
just after the heat had broken a little bit, but before the light had started to fade.
The trees there were casting long shadows across the water,
and that river had its usual song going,
steady and low trickles with little plops of water.
There's a rhythm if you listen to that kind of sound.
But we were hearing that, and the sound of the wind and the leaves,
the water tumbling over the rocks,
and the occasional croak of a bullfrog were the flap of a heron's wings as it took off.
We parked the truck off an old, rudded path,
and carried our gear about a hundred yards down to a flat, open area by the bank.
The river widened there, and it slowed down a bit, just perfect for casting.
And the gravel bar there gave us solid footing to set up camp.
We pitched a two-man tent about 40 feet from the water line, built a fire ring,
and unloaded the cooler.
Our dinner were some hot dogs, and some foil-wrap potatoes we roasted down in the coals.
We cracked open a couple beers, and leaned back on our elbows, watching the stars come out one by one.
The night was perfect.
Quiet, calm, uncomplicated.
It was soothing.
We sat around the fire to a well-pass midnight.
We talked about everything and nothing, just whiling away the hours,
the way brothers often do when they don't have to get up early the next day.
I remember feeling like I could finally exhale.
The air was still, not even a breeze, and I remember thinking, "This is the kind of weekend I'll remember when I'm very old."
Turns out I was right.
Just not for the reasons I first thought.
The next morning, we woked to the sound of squirrels fighting in the trees above us,
and the smell of wet earth warming up under the rising sun.
We made our coffee in an old blue enamel percolator, then stood around on the gravel,
drinking it straight from ten mugs, watching the fog lift off the river.
We spent the better part of the day waiting the shallows and casting up river.
It wasn't about the catch, you see, so much as the time being spent together,
because that's how it is when you fish with someone you know and trust.
You sort of just exist together in the space.
You don't even have to talk.
That's how it had always been with me and Danny.
Around two in the afternoon I was midcast when I heard it.
A splash.
Not the kind of fish makes, not a plop or a ripple.
This was a heavy, dull, solid splash, like someone had thrown a large boulder into the water from way up high,
and it had come from behind us, not far from camp.
Danny turned to look at me as I browsed up.
"What the heck was that?" he said.
"I didn't answer.
I lowered my rod and looked toward the bank behind us."
That stretch of the river has a steep climb of hillside right behind where our camp was.
And right there, from that hillside, that's where the rock had come flying out from the tree line.
I'm not talking about some little toss.
This thing arced through the air like it had been launched from a pitching machine.
It hit maybe ten feet from where we stood, right in the water,
and it disappeared with a deep, curplunk that echoed off the trees.
And it sank straight down.
It was pure dead weight.
Danny stood there with his line still dangling in the current, looking from the splash back toward the trees.
"Hey, we're fishing here," Danny called out.
He figured it was just some jerk back there playing around.
But no answer came.
Just the wind rustling in the tree tops, and the quiet bubbling of water around our ankles.
He waited for a minute or two, scanning the trees behind our camp and all the way up the hillside,
trying to see any movement, any sign that said someone was hiding behind the brush and just having a laugh on us.
But there was nothing. Everything was still.
And the trees there, it was so dense, the hillside was too steep.
It wasn't the kind of place you could bushwack through without breaking branches and making a lot of noise.
But still, not knowing what else to do, we shrugged it off.
Maybe it was a rock slide. Maybe a deer up the hill had kicked something loose.
I mean, that still didn't make perfect sense. But it wasn't something to panic about.
We just went back to fishing.
Maybe twenty minutes passed before the next one came.
And this one didn't just land. It flew.
I was turned sideways, and I saw it in the air before it hit.
A dark shape cutting across the sunlit sky, spinning just enough for me to catch side of the dark stone,
right before it hit, like a cannonball about twenty feet from us.
It hit hard. Water sprayed upward like a geyser.
The ripples took nearly a full minute to settle.
Now I was uneasy. That is not the kind of thing nature does on its own.
That was calculated and deliberate.
It sure was not random.
I knew that rock had been thrown at us, and it was a big rock, not something that would fit in a man's palm.
I reeled in and scanned up the hillside again, feeling that same tightness in my chest,
like I hadn't felt since I was a young kid, and knew I was going to have to square off with the street bully that afternoon.
Something about all of this was off.
I felt like we were being targeted, but it didn't make sense.
I'm thinking that as the third rock came.
Now this one came from directly behind us, lower, and it landed feet from us,
spraying our back sides with water all the way up to our shoulders.
I dropped my pole, and I took off running up the bank.
Gravel scattered under my boots. My heart was thudding.
If there's somebody out there doing this, I was going to find them, and it had been thrown from directly behind our camp.
I got to the tent in just a few seconds, I sweeping the woods behind for any sign of movement.
But there was nothing there. There were no people, no footprints, no busted brush or broken limbs.
Just tall trees swaying slightly, and the river gurgling behind me.
Danny came up behind me out of breath.
Did you see anything? I shook my head no. None of this made a lick of sense.
The first stones I knew had come from higher up on the hillside,
and this last one had come almost directly from behind our camp in the tree lines.
Now, either there were several of them, or someone can move incredibly fast, without letting us know they're moving.
And all of this, it was not random. I knew it wasn't.
So whatever, or whoever was throwing those rocks, they were moving fast, and they were able to stay out of sight.
Either that, or there was more than one of them.
Neither made me feel easy.
We didn't say much the rest of the afternoon. Eat a quiet supper.
Danny got the fire going again, and he kept glancing over his shoulder toward the trees.
I sat sideways, so I could see the tree from my left eye, and from my right eye, I could see the river, and the sky beyond.
Around 9pm, with the fire popping in a flask, making its way back and forth between me and Danny, we heard more rocks.
These didn't splash. They were hitting. Not hard, though. They were landing softly, much too soft.
It was the sound of something heavy, dropping onto moss or leaves.
The kind of sound that doesn't belong when you're sitting next to a river surrounded by nothing but trees and rocks.
Danny stood up. Flashlight already in hand.
We'd both have ours out, and swept the beams across the bank. The tree tops, the gravel bar.
But there was nothing there. But the feeling came anyway.
That feeling that prickling along the back of your neck.
That weird animal sense you have that tells you you're not alone.
You're being watched.
Then we heard it.
A whistle. Short. Two notes.
"Who weed? Who weed?"
It wasn't a now. It wasn't a bird call. It was a whistle.
Nothing I'd ever heard, though, come from a natural melt.
It came from the ridge above us.
Danny turned slowly. Looked at me. His jaw tight.
He reached down and picked up the camp hatchet that we'd used earlier to make our fire wood.
"We're leaving first thing," he said. "Voy slow and tight."
I didn't say anything. I just nodded.
But we didn't make it to the morning.
I woke up somewhere around 2.30 a.m.
It was the kind of wake-up that doesn't come from dreams or an alarm clock.
Something had nudged the tent and nudged me through the tent.
I wasn't shaken. This was being nudged, like some boot testing the fabric.
It had pushed in far enough. It hit me in the shoulder.
Danny was already sitting up.
The bright moonlight outside made everything inside the tent glow a faint blue.
Just enough I could see the whites of Danny's eyes.
I grabbed my flashlight again, clicked it on, and unzipped the flap of the tent.
As soon as I started unzipping, I heard a light pounding of feet, like someone was running away.
Then I heard the footsteps slow and stop.
I got out, and I shined my light all around, and I was looking for what had awakened us.
My small flashlight was dim, and it didn't cast a far light, and it wasn't bright enough to my taste.
But in the end I saw enough.
Standing maybe 30 feet behind our tent, right at the edge of the trees, was a figure.
A big one.
It was tall, six and a half, maybe seven feet.
But it wasn't the height that stunned me.
It was the built thick, broad-shouldered shape, and it looked like a man, but it wasn't a man.
No man was that wide, thick, and heavily muscled.
The shape was dim against the back of the darkness of the trees, and my little flashlight showed me plain and clear though,
that it was covered in hair or fur of some kind.
The fur looked black or near black in the light.
It looked thick and coarse, covering everything I could see.
Now I couldn't see the face enough to make out details, but I could see there was a face.
I could see the impression of where eyes and other pieces of the face were, but they weren't details that I can describe for you.
And I knew by the orientation of its body and the face impression that I saw, that it was facing us and looking directly at us.
The thing that I could see in the dim light, I saw the parting of the lips, and then it whistled, the same two-note whistled we'd heard earlier.
"Who weed? Who weed?"
And a moment later, an answer came.
It was the exact same whistle, the same two notes, but this time from the other side of the river.
Danny didn't say a word. He just grabbed his boots, shoved them on, and started tossing the gear out of the tent.
I followed.
"We took only what we needed. We left the tent behind. We left the cooler. We left the fire rings still smoldering.
We ran to the truck, flung the doors open, and pealed out of there so hard we nearly tore the bumper off backing over a rock in our panic.
If you've ever ran blindly in the dark from something, say, maybe something fun like a haunted house run or something like that.
I'll take that jumpy, frightened feeling, and multiply it several hundred times.
That's what it was like to run through the darkness to the truck, knowing those creatures were out there in the darkness with you.
Were they following us? I didn't know, but we ran as if they were.
When we hit the gravel road, Danny looked back over his shoulders, still breathing heavy.
"Did we just run into Bigfoot?" he asked.
His voice was steady, but I knew my little brother. Well, that and the dashlight showed me how wide his eyes were as he asked me the question.
Quietly, I told him, "Yes, I thought we had."
Now mind you, Danny was twenty-two, but I thought like we were little kids again, or that I had a six-year-old in the truck with me asking non-ending questions.
Things like, "Was it there to kill us? What did it want? How many were out there? What did those whistles mean? What if it wasn't Bigfoot? What if it was some serial killer dressed in a costume? Does Bigfoot eat people?"
Now look, if you've ever been cross-examined by a curious six-year-old on a topic that you don't have the answers to, you know exactly how it went in the truck with us.
I answered all of Danny's questions with a simple, "I don't know. I don't know."
Except for that serial killer question, I do remember him asking that one particular, and for that one I said, "No, I don't believe we did run into a serial killer."
But every other answer was, "I don't know."
I got Danny home, and we talked outside for a few minutes. Then his wife came out to find out what was going on, and she heard it from us both.
So, exactly what happened? Her eyes went big, and she started telling us all kinds of Bigfoot and weird stories she had heard and read that happened in the area.
Now most of it was probably hearsay and junk, but it was probably a lot of truth in those stories.
I had no idea it was going on around there, because if I'd ever heard any of it, I'm sure I had dismissed it.
I left Danny's after about an hour of talking, and I weirdly headed home. When I arrived home, it was just after 5 a.m.
My house was empty. The bed was still made. My wife did not work. She did not go to church.
And any day of the week she sleeps in until mid to late morning.
And here it was, early Sunday morning. She was expecting me to be gone from Friday all the way to late Sunday. That's what I told her.
And that was our habit when we did go out. And this happened long before cell phones, so she knew I wouldn't be calling.
I guess I don't have to spell it out for you, do I?
But to confirm it for you, my wife came rambling home Sunday around noon.
She walked in, surprised to see me, because she didn't see my truck. I did that deliberately.
She didn't have a story cooked up to explain where she'd been all night, because she didn't think she'd need one.
She'd be home before me.
Well, all I'm going to say is, on this one, Bigfoot did me a big favor.
Who knows how long that marriage would have dragged on. With me not understanding why I just couldn't make things right or better, make her happy.
And in the process I was miserable the whole time.
I could have gone on for a very long time from what I came to understand later, because it had been going on for a very long time.
I'll thank you, Bigfoot, wherever you are. You did save me from that.
Anyway, I'd gone fishing since then. But I stick to boat ramps and day trips. I hike with people.
I camp in places with lights and rangers, bathrooms, and a lot of other campers.
Neither me nor Danny have ever gone back to that stretch of the river. I don't think we ever will.
I wasn't close enough to count eyelashes the way some people say they'd gotten with Bigfoot.
But I don't think it was anything else but a Bigfoot.
I can list all the reasons why I'm sure it was a Bigfoot and not someone else like in a costume. But it doesn't matter.
"I do you believe me when I say I saw a Bigfoot or you don't? Me listing out all kinds of reasons isn't going to make a difference."
I know I've seen Bigfoot, and I believe he wanted us out of his territory.
And for 30 years more, I've respected that and stayed out. I expect I will, the rest of my life.
Signed, Matt.
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