Let's keep this simple.
You can call me Joe and my wife, Jenny.
We had some things happen that we wanted to share with you.
Actually our neighbor was here and experienced something rather terrifying.
These things happen near Christmas, so keep this for your Christmas program if you'd like.
I don't want to say exactly where we live because it's a very small place and I run a business
in town.
You don't know what close-minded people can be like until your livelihood depends on
them as mine does.
But I will say we're in Colorado.
When I say it's small, I mean it's also very rural.
It's the kind of place where if someone gives you directions, they may tell you to turn left
at the old black barn with the rusted tractor out front.
Then go down a mile, past old Mr. Watkins place, then turn left where the big dead oak tree
is.
It's that kind of small place.
Our place sits on the shoulder of a long hill outside of town, past your slipping down
to a shallow creek, then back up to a thick woods of a good size.
Back then we ran a small beef enterprise as well on our land.
It wasn't big.
We kept 20 to 25 head of beef cattle at any time.
We took orders for them the year before and fed them out and finished them to order.
Now we've got a run of heavy-braid wire fencing with two strands of barbed wire on top.
It keeps stray people out and mostly kept our cows in, mostly.
I also had a farm dog back then and he was the kind that took his job pretty seriously.
He was just a mutt, but you'd think he'd been trained by the military.
Now he would patrol the fields daily and I caught him more than once tangling with coyotes
trying to protect the calves, though I never asked that of him and never would.
When he was a puppy he was such a little fighter.
We called him Muhammad Ali.
He was fearless and we started to call him Moe for short.
Our porch faces north, northeast.
If the moon is up, it throws out a beautiful pale light across the pastures.
I've always liked that porch to sit in the summer and watch the lightning shows.
But I never once thought about what it might showcase for me in the winter.
But I was about to find out.
This was the week before Christmas, 2020.
We'd had a good first snow of the year, a couple nights before, maybe three heavy inches
a powder that made the world look fresh and quieted all the road traffic.
The forecast said that round two would be rolling in quick.
Heavy flakes, temperatures right around 20 and a low wind.
It was the kind of night you step out to smell snow and you will hear all the little things
that get lost in the summer noises, branches cracking when the wind moves them, the pop
of pine cones falling somewhere, and an owl making his rounds.
We had finished supper and we were going to do some light gift wrapping.
I looked out and I saw that the snow was now falling.
I said to Jenny, "Hey, old girl, you want to go see if those flakes are as big as they
said?"
Jenny made us some fresh hot cocoa and put them in some thermal mugs for us.
Then we stepped out onto the porch.
Moe came to the door, gave the air a sniff, then decided, "Nope, he was going to stay where
it was warm."
And that was more often his choice in bad weather as he got older, so I didn't pay it much
mind.
I stepped out, and the first thing I noticed was how still and quiet it was.
Snow muffled sound and where we lived there's little sound anyway, but with a blanket of heavy
snow on the ground.
It's beyond quiet.
It's almost like a vacuum.
Seeing fat flakes were falling in a slanted line and everything smelled clean and sharp.
I walked to where the steps were, leaned against the post.
I was staying just under the porch covering to keep the snow off of me.
A second later, Jenny came to stand beside me.
I put my arm around her and we watched the snow for maybe a minute or more in silence
before we wrapped up in a quilt that Jenny brought out with her and we each sat down
in our chairs on the porch, sipping our cocoa.
Now, this sounds silly, doesn't it?
Rapping up in a quilt, going to sit on a porch to watch the snow when we could do that from
inside and warmth.
Now, maybe it is kind of crazy, but for us, it brings back just a touch of our youth.
You see, we met at a church youth event for ice skating.
I was hanging around and I saw the most beautiful girl out there on the ice.
I'd never seen her before.
I didn't know her.
She was from another church, but I got my courage up and I made a bold move to ask her if
I could buy her a hot chocolate.
"Yes, please," she said.
"No marshmallows, please."
And there we were, standing there, sipping our hot cocoa's just starting to get to know
each other.
When big, heavy snowflakes started falling.
It was just like being in a movie, looking at her through falling snowflakes on a winter's
evening.
So there, now you know why we sometimes go out to have hot chocolate in the snow.
We're old, but we're still in love.
We weren't sitting there, but maybe two minutes when Ginny suddenly says, "Do you hear that?"
I said, "What?
The knocking?"
I said from where?
The barn?
She shook her head no, and then she pointed ahead and to the right, out toward the fence
in the pastures.
I listened.
It was faint, but then I heard it.
It got louder.
It was a hollow bang.
It was definitely wood on wood.
It wasn't the sharp, cracking tap of a woodpecker, and it wasn't the clean sound of an ax hitting
wood.
This was different. It was hollow and dull, yet resonating.
A clear sound of wood hitting a larger piece of wood is what I thought.
It was faint, and then it would get loud.
Then it would get faint again.
You could almost miss it if you weren't listening.
But I was listening now.
Then it suddenly stopped.
A few minutes later, Moe was doing a mix of snarling and growling at the door, digging
at it from inside.
I opened the door to see if he wanted to come out with us.
But he didn't.
He backed up instead, and the growling mix with snarls got even louder and worse.
I had never seen this from him before.
He was almost scaring me.
At one moment I thought he was going to come for me, and then I realized he wasn't looking
at me.
He was looking past me, out into the snow.
I remember thinking, "What in the world is wrong with this dog?"
I shut the door and took a look around outside.
Everything now was in purple shadows on the snow as the daylight was beginning to fade.
I walked, stand at the top of the porch steps again, and looked out.
I really didn't see anything out there that could cause Moe to act like that.
I took one last look, and I shrugged it off.
I knew we wouldn't be out there much longer anyway.
It was bum-chillingly cold, and getting colder.
I moved one foot to turn to go sit back down when I saw something dark streak across from
the far right side of the fence, go across part of the pasture, behind the barn off to the
left, which concerned me, and then I saw it come out the other side, and it went on
until it cleared the fence all the way across the pasture.
"What was that?"
Ginny said.
She was up and out of her chair and standing by me now.
I don't know.
That's all I said, because I really didn't know.
It went across at a speed of a running deer, maybe even faster.
No human could have ran at that speed.
I know that.
Now I have walked that pasture in those fences thousands and thousands of times, and I will
tell you, for me to walk from one side, clear to the point where it jumped that fence is
easily four to five minutes solid walk.
Now that wasn't the wide part of the pasture.
That's further back.
But walking that fence through there, I know.
That's not a short area.
Now it had come from the far right side, and I wonder how long had it come?
It had been out there, and I hadn't seen it.
The dark shape that we saw moved fast, and it was a good size.
But the one I saw next showed me that the first one must have been a much smaller one.
Because before I could tell Ginny, I think we need to go inside.
Here came another shape, walking across the pasture in the exact same direction as the
other had gone.
Only this one was much larger.
And it was not in a hurry.
Ginny, I said softly as I could, and I pointed with two fingers.
She pressed her hand over her mouth quickly, stopping the surprise little squeak that she
almost made.
We both froze.
This bigger shape was moving fast, even for just a walk, but it wasn't running like the other
one was.
It was also half turned, looking directly at us for a few seconds as it walked.
It knew we were there, I have no doubt.
We were at least fifty yards from it.
It was walking near the front fence line than the other had gone.
I had the idea.
It was like bringing up the rear, and it was watching to make sure we weren't going to
be a problem.
It was much taller than the fence by a good deal.
It was moving slow enough that I could see a few things, but the fading light in the distance
meant I couldn't see other things.
I could tell it was covered in hair or fur.
I knew that.
Snow sat lightly on the shoulders and on top of the head, but it wasn't getting thick.
Not the way the snow was falling.
If it had been a fake fur costume, it probably would have started accumulating faster.
It had the form of a person.
But we both knew, that was not a person.
The first one didn't seem to be all that big.
This one was much bigger.
I'm not guessing the height when I tell you it was seven and a half feet tall.
The next day we set a pole out there and I marked off the height with ribbons.
We kept moving the ribbons until we found one that looked about right as we stood there
on the porch.
And the one that looked right was seven and a half feet off the ground.
The darkness of the creature was a very sharp contrast to all the snow around it, even though
the light was fading.
I clearly saw the swinging of the arms.
I saw the snow between the legs as it walked.
I saw the head sat down on a thick chest, kind of the way a high school kid looks with all
of its football padding on.
The shoulder muscles didn't look like muscles, not like ours.
They ran a little higher and made the neck look short or missing altogether.
The head had a slope to it, not a sharp cone, but it was noticeable against the snow behind
it.
From the side profile, I could see the face was much flatter than a man's.
And a bigger shock was coming.
Behind it, a few steps back and a little to the right.
There was another shape, less than half its height.
And if you've ever watched kids trying to keep up with their dad, that's what it looked
like.
It matched the pace but with a hop step.
And it did a little bit of a run to catch up to its dad, and it had to keep hop stepping
to stay near it.
The little one never looked at us, but the big one he was really giving us the eye.
And I have every reason to believe it was a male.
We stood there in what I can only call a stunned silence.
Ginny had a hand curled on my sleeve tight.
In the space of that one second, I had dozens of thoughts, but none of them are clear enough
that I can tell you today exactly what they were.
We watched them for the space of maybe two minutes or so until they got over to the other
side and went over the fence.
The big one grabbed the little one by its arm and just swung it over like a rag doll, but
it didn't seem to hurt the little one at all.
"Jo," Ginny said, finally finding her voice, "I think we should go in now."
"In a second," I said, "look," and I pointed.
The big one came back to the fence at the far end of the field.
It stood there at the fence.
It was more than a hundred yards away, but I believed in the shape and outline of it.
It was looking our way.
It stood in that silent way for a while, a dark, looming shape.
Finally my scalp was crawling.
I agreed it was time to go inside.
When we went in, Mo was under the dining room table and refused to come out for over an
hour.
It hit me then why Mo had acted the way he had.
I told myself that I would pay attention to him if he ever does that again.
That night the snow came down hard and heavy, giving us more than it said it was supposed
to according to the forecast.
The snow was so deep it filled in all the prints from the previous evening.
You couldn't even see an indentation.
Your house has Christmas lights on it, and I always outlined the front of the barn so people
can see it from the road.
A couple times I got in from town really late after work and went out to care for the cows,
and I felt like I was being watched.
You know, that scalp crawling sensation?
After that I never went out there without a gun on me after seeing them in the pasture.
I knew what they were, but nowhere could I find information that I trusted.
But on whether or not they were dangerous, and I wasn't taking any chances.
I always made sure the barn was locked up tight.
Now the barn does have electricity inside it, and there are some lights inside, but there
aren't any electrical outlets to plug things in.
I guess when the barn was built in the 1950s electricity itself was a luxury to have in
the barn just for lighting, and they didn't do anything more like outlets.
So for the Christmas lights I ran a heavy duty outdoor grade extension cord setup from the
barn to the nearest outlet on the back of our house.
Now that meant that I was stringing together over 500 feet of cord, and that means multiple
cords hooked together.
I never had a problem with them in all the years that I ran them until that year.
That year I kept finding the cords unplugged out in the field.
They were pulled apart.
I had no explanation for that.
I even tied them together and then plugged them in as they show you to do.
Something had untied them and unplugged them.
We were sitting one night having dinner, and the Christmas lights outside were all on.
I was facing the window that looked to the barn, and all of a sudden everything went
black out there.
The lights were just out on the barn.
It was about 7 p.m., but that's midnight dark in the winter hours.
I stepped outside against Ginny's protests.
I shined a spotlight all around, not that it went that far out, and I did not go into
the pasture.
But that spotlight lit up a couple hundred feet from me.
I was shining it back and forth, when out of nowhere came a brick hurled right at me.
I barely moved in time.
It hit the back of our house hard, dinging the wood-plank-siding, leaving a scar there forever.
Ginny came to the door and yelled, asking what was that?
She was trying to come out the door, but I was already up the steps pushing her back inside.
Right after that brick throw, before Ginny started yelling, I heard the clear sounds of pounding
feet running, and they were very close.
Every hair on me was standing straight up and feeling like little needle-prix all over
my skin.
If that was some prank from a kid, well, they did a cracked job of scaring two grown adults.
But the stupid thing is, when I walked out there, I had my shotgun with me.
It was broke open and hanging on my left arm, but the shells were in there.
All I had to do was snap it shut.
Every kid in that area would have seen that shotgun, and kids around there are raised on guns.
I do not believe they would have thrown a brick at an armed man.
I knew exactly where that brick came from.
When we moved in years before, there had been a very old brick outdoor barbecue grill,
the kind you used to see in the '50s, right?
Well it was probably wonderful at once, but when we moved in it was crumbling and old,
so we dismantled it.
We used a lot of the brick on other projects around the farm, but we still had a stack of
quite a few leftovers behind the barn.
It was definitely one of those bricks.
Now all this time, I was checking the cows to make sure nothing was bothering them.
As far as I'm aware, those cows were never bothered in any way.
We had planned to drive to Colorado Springs to spend Christmas with our daughter, our
son-in-law, and grandchildren, and the other children and grandchildren who would come
there for the holidays.
As such, I had made plans for the good neighbor I trusted to come and care for the cows for
the days that we would be gone.
Now they've helped me out four years before that.
I paid them for their time and they made sure everything was done right.
We always took my with us to our daughters, and by the way, so don't worry about him.
I was so worried about things going on there that we almost canceled going to our daughters
for Christmas that year.
I was worried about my neighbor, because I knew that he would be out there in the dark
hours of the morning and the evening, before and after going to his job in town.
So I completely leveled with him.
I told him everything that was going on out there and what we had seen.
Now he's a no-nonsense kind of fella.
He listened.
He nodded.
He rubbed his jaw and he said, "Well, he'd be on the lookout, but he'd be all right."
Now normally when we're gone, I have all the Christmas lights set on timers.
Let's call it another form of security.
First thing thieves look for are houses that stay dark, especially at Christmas.
I didn't know how that would work with the cords being pulled apart all the time, though,
but I did warn my neighbor.
So we went to our daughters as usual, but I called my neighbor every day that we were gone.
First night right off the bat, he said that he drove up and everything was dark.
There were no lights on at the barn.
He goes out.
He traces to the unplugged part, ties it back up and plugs it back in.
He goes inside the barn.
He's with the cows when he realizes the outside lights were now off again.
You could see them through some of the upper cracks between the boards inside.
He said he was looking at that, and then he heard feet pounding and running around the barn.
Being a no-nonsense kind of fella, he wanted to know who or what it was.
He was carrying a gun, and he said he listened and followed as the feet went around the outside
of the barn again.
He gauged when they would be by the front of the barn corner, and he stepped out of the
barn just when the foot sounds were coming around the corner to the front.
He was pretty shook up.
He said it looked like a big black freight train was barreling down on him.
He quickly backed up inside the barn, but he didn't have time to close the barn door behind
him.
Those big old doors take a lot of work.
He said he stood there, and that big black creature came to a stop just outside the open
door.
He saw its breath coming out white in the cold air, he said.
It was breathing hard.
All he had on him was a nine millimeter, which he thought would be enough for anything
he would encounter out there, thinking it was most likely somebody pulling a prank.
But he wasn't feeling too good about that nine millimeter being enough to deal with
what he was looking at.
He was being very careful on the phone as he told me all of this, and I knew him well
enough to know.
He was more than a little shook up about it, but he said it stood there for probably half
a minute looking in at him.
He said it was also taking time to look around the inside of the barn.
He said he saw its eyes look at him, then shipped away quickly to glance around the barn, then
quickly they would go right back to him, and it did that several times.
It looked like it was trying to decide if it was safe enough to come in after him or not.
Then he said it suddenly took off running, and it was gone.
He said from inside the barn he called his son and told him to drive out there, to come
through the backpastor gates, drive right up to the barn, light it up with his high beams
so he could come out safely.
I don't know quite what he told his son on the phone, but his son did as he requested,
then drove him down to his truck by the house.
The next two nights he came out with his son, everything lit up, and they drove out all
the way to the barn, whereas previously he used to like to walk out to the barn.
I almost called it quits early at my daughters when I heard all that.
I almost told Jenny it was time to go home, and I wouldn't have blamed my neighbor one
bit if he told me to shove it he's not going back out there, but he insisted he was fine
with it, long as his son went with him, and he told me to enjoy my time in Colorado Springs.
So now my neighbor had seen it too, we weren't crazy.
The real question for us was, why was this happening here and now?
None of us had ever had any trouble like this before?
And if it wasn't bothering my cows, why was it going through that exact area?
Why didn't it just stay in the trees?
Why was it crossing open pasture again and again?
And why didn't it like my Christmas lights on the barn?
Now if I was making this up and writing this as some wonderful story, I would be sure
to tie all of those things up nice and neat with little bows and give you a bunch of little
answers.
But I don't have any answers.
The only thing that me and my neighbor think is it wasn't there to stay in the area.
Was it passing through?
We don't know.
We do know that by spring there were no more issues.
Now when we did get home after Christmas, I pulled down all of our Christmas lights early.
I figured there's just something about them that seemed to aggravate the big foot.
And I knew darn well, that's exactly what was out there.
So did my wife, and so did my neighbor.
We do kind of think that we figured out something about the wood knocking we heard.
We think they were knocking on our fence posts.
And it seemed to be a way of saying, we're coming through.
And now that message wasn't for us, we don't think.
Because there was another snowy evening that we heard those knocks.
We went to the big window, and we watched from inside a dark room as a smaller big foot
once again went right across the pasture from right to left, just like the first time.
Only it wasn't going at breakneck speed.
The biggest difference was from the left side, there came what I believe might have been
a female big foot.
It was the one and only time we think we saw her.
It was bigger than any of the small ones, but not as big as the male.
Now the female came out, met the little one, and waited for the next small one to come across,
just like any mother would.
And the whole time the male was standing at the far right fence line, and only started
to cross when the second little one was over the fence, and about halfway to the female.
They all met up together and walked behind the barn, then back over the fence to the trees
on the other side.
I think that knocking was a way of saying, "Look out, here we come."
But I think it was also to signal the female to look for them.
But it's just a guess.
Now once I knew there were big foot out there, I never once let Jenny go back out to the
barn unless I was with her.
It is.
We sent all those cattle that year to be processed.
We fulfilled the next year's orders, and we shut down our beef business.
Part of it is we were just getting too old for it, and we've got more than enough in
retirement set aside, and my business in town still does all right.
I didn't want to keep going out to that barn in the darkness of winter.
That was the real story.
I paid close attention to Moe too, and whenever he acted like he did that first night, I
made sure we stayed in the house, but it only happened three more times.
Moe is gone now, and I really don't know if Rusty, our new dog, will alert us or not.
There were many other small things going on around that time all over that farm, and at
various neighbors' properties, and we did see them a couple more times, but a farther
distance.
I never had the type of encounter that my neighbor had with them, and I am thankful, by all accounts,
it sounded terrifying.
But none of that changed the unsettling creep of fear that pervaded our property that year.
I didn't relax for at least a year after it last siding them.
Even then, on dark winter nights, I check, check, and recheck my areas again before I walk
out there.
I always carry a gun with me outdoors.
Sometimes a shotgun, but always my desert eagle is with me.
I bought that for myself, down in Colorado Springs, that Christmas after the phone call with
my neighbor.
I am thankful I did not experience that terror that my neighbor did, but I take no chances
around here.
My neighbor is also vigilant.
Me and Jenny still are here, though, and we have the lights out on the house and the barn
again this year.
I don't know what Bigfoot had against those Christmas lights on the barn, but it must have
been something.
I hope you don't mind the jumplediness of this.
I tried to remember it all in order and put it down that way, but I might have gotten it
all wrong.
We'll be careful, everyone.
Merry Christmas to you all from Snowy, Colorado.
I've been listening to the Buckeye Bigfoot podcast.
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