[Cudzie's "Wall of Cudzie" plays]
When that wall of Kudzuexploded open in front of me, I was close enough to get hit
with dirt and torn leaves.
I'd been standing there, trying to figure out just how far those vines had crossed over
onto my property when something inside that thick green tangle rose up right in front of
me.
The first thing that hit me was its size.
Its shoulders were broader than my chest was long.
Its arms hung low and heavy with muscle, and dark hair was matted with leaves and dust.
In the face.
That face.
Flat nose, heavy brow.
Dark skin showing under the hair.
In the eyes?
Well, they weren't animal eyes.
And they were fixed on me.
Thinking, deciding. And I already knew I was not looking at a man.
[suspenseful music plays]
My name is Travis.
This happened in Eastern Kentucky in late of August, 2023, on the back edge of my property
above the South Fork of the Kentucky River.
My wife and I live on a few acres that used to be part of my grandfather's place.
Behind the house the land slips down toward a brushy hollow.
On the far side of the old fence line is my elderly neighbor's property.
And by that summer his side had gotten overrun with Kudzu.
If you've never dealt with Kudzu, picture a living green wall of vines.
It swallows fences, saplings, dead fall, houses, anything it can reach.
By that point it had already pushed over onto our side in several places.
And I knew if I didn't do something about it, quick,
I was going to lose that whole edge of my property.
So that afternoon after work I pulled on some old jeans, grabbed my gloves, a pair of
loppers, some flagging tape and a measuring wheel.
And I headed down to the back line to see just how bad it was and where the fence still
ran.
My wife, Megan, asked if she should come with me.
I told her no, I didn't think I'd be gone very long.
That was my first mistake.
The second was, I got too close to that fence line.
I realized the Kudzu looked a whole lot different from inside the woods than it had from the
back yard.
On the back porch it just looked overgrown, but up close it looked thick, heavy, built.
Layer over layer of broad leaves and thick, ropey vines were thrown over the old wire, fallen
timber and half dead saplings out there.
It had already swallowed entire sections of the fence, whole.
Bent little trees under the weight and in some places it looked less like plants and more
like something that had been put together to hide, whatever was behind it.
I started near the back corner by the shed and worked south along the line.
Where I could still find fence, I tied an orange ribbon and where I couldn't, I cut just enough
vine to trace the old posts from one to the next.
It was hot work, gnats were thick in the low places there, sweat kept running into my eyes.
And the farther I went, the more something started to feel wrong.
Not because I was hearing something strange.
Just the opposite, because I heard almost nothing.
Not a single squirrel out there fussing, no crow's calling, no little birds working out
their way through the brush.
Just some bugs, my own clipping, my own breathing.
Once I heard something shift inside the kudzu down along the line ahead of me, a rustle,
then a heavier, dragging kind of sound.
I stopped.
My thought was deer.
Kudzu was thick enough to hide one for sure and easy.
I called out, expecting it to blow out of the kudzu and crash off through the hollow.
Nothing.
No movement, no deer, just stillness.
And that was the first thing that got my attention.
The second thing was the smell.
At first I took it for low ground in August, green, wet, rank.
But the smell was stronger.
It wasn't rotten or dead.
It was more like wet dog, some old sweat, and freshly broken plants all mixed in together.
And it kept coming and going all around me on the air.
I moved another fifteen yards and found where the fence disappeared completely under a mound
of kudzu that had rolled over it like a big wave.
I stood there, trying to decide whether it was even worth cutting into.
If I hired someone, I needed to know if a machine could get in there, or if the whole thing
was going to have to be cut by hand.
Now that's when I heard vines pulling tight.
I have never forgotten that sound.
It wasn't leaves rustling or brush moving.
It sounded fibrous, straining, like something heavy shifting inside a big net.
I looked up.
The whole face of that kudzu bank trembled.
In a section maybe six feet wide, bowed outward.
Instinctively I took one step back.
For one split second I thought maybe a black calf had gotten loose somewhere and bedded
down in there.
Then my next thought was, I'm looking at a bear.
But then that wall opened fully.
And what stepped out was neither of those things.
It stepped out bent slightly at first, dragging vines with it.
Then it rose up into plain sight.
I've already given you my first impression of it.
But there are details that got burned deeper into my mind.
The hair was not glossy or thick, like something out of a movie, like a costume.
It looked very coarse, dirty, and it was matted down bad in some places.
It was dark brown over most of the body, and a little lighter across the outer top layers,
like where the sun had been hitting it.
The chest had thinner hair on it, so you could see the skin and the outline of pecs underneath.
The face was broad and hard, very real.
And the hands.
Well, I can still see those perfectly in my mind.
It had one fist full of vine where it had ripped through to get out, and I could see
the fingers separate, each, long, thick, strong looking.
They were not paws.
I looked at it, and it looked at me.
I think I said something like, "Oh my God," I know I backed up.
There was an old woven wire fence between us, already half flattened, and leaning every
which way.
The thing stepped right up to that fence, and it stopped there, like it was considering
the problem in front of it.
The problem being me.
At that distance, twelve feet away, maybe?
I could hear it breathing through its nose.
I could see movement high in its chest and shoulders every time it drew a breath.
There were bits of kudzu leaf stuck to one of its forearms.
One side of its neck looked damp, like maybe from sweat or recent creek water.
And then it made a strange sound.
It wasn't very loud, but I heard it.
It was like a grunt that was forced through close teeth.
But it was loud enough I heard it, and every instinct in me told me to run.
But the ground behind me was sloped, and I had already cut vines and saplings that were
scattered all over the place.
One bad step, and I'd have gone down hard.
And some part of my brain knew if I turned my back on that thing I was done for.
So I started backing up very slowly, clumsy, doing my best not to fall.
I was trying not to look like prey.
It tracked me with its eyes the whole time.
Its head moved slightly as I moved.
Then it did something that scared me worse than actually seeing it, something that turned
my blood to ice.
It looked past me, uphill, toward my house.
And where we were through the trees, you could just make out a piece of my back porch.
It looked up there, with meaning, for maybe a second or two.
Then it slowly shifted its eyes back to me.
And I swayed on my parents' graves.
There was something in its expression that I still don't know how to explain, except
it looked smug.
It didn't look angry or startled or confused.
It looked smug.
It almost had a smile tugging at its lips.
It lifted its chin just slightly at me.
Like it was letting me know it knew something I didn't.
It's hard to describe.
But it was like it was telling me it knew exactly where I lived.
Maybe even who was up there now.
My blood was total ice.
Because up until then I had only really been scared for myself.
But right then I got scared for my wife.
Before I could even process that, it put one hand on the leaning fence wire and stepped
over it like it was nothing.
Just one smooth step.
Same as me or you stepping over a log.
For one terrible second it seemed to be coming right at me.
But it wasn't.
It got over the fence and then angled away and started down the slope through the young
maples and sycamore saplings and all the low brush.
I watched as it walked away upright on two legs.
No bear in the world moves like that.
And no man moves like that in the woods either.
It covered the ground in a way that didn't look hurried, but it was moving fast all the
same.
After maybe twenty yards or so where the slope dropped harder into the hollow, it lowered
down slightly, pushed through the brush with one hand and disappeared.
Gone.
Just like that.
I stood there frozen for probably ten or fifteen seconds unable to move.
I don't know how long.
I remember a breeze hit my sweaty skin and it made me shiver and that broke whatever
spell I had been under.
I turned and I moved uphill as fast as I could without falling.
I didn't stop until I hit the back porch.
Megan was sitting out there breaking some beams.
She knew from the way I came up something was wrong.
I ran up.
I got on the porch and I'd been over trying to breathe.
I put one hand on the railing to steady myself and the other hand was still hanging on to
the pair of loppers.
The first thing I did was turn around and look back toward the woods, afraid to have my
back to it.
A alarm at my state Megan got up and said, "What happened?"
I caught my breath and I told her, "There's something down there."
She said, "What?
What do you mean?
Like a bear?"
I just shook my head.
That was all I could get out at first.
I was still having trouble breathing.
She told me to sit down and she'd get me some iced tea.
I shook my head now.
I went in with her.
I wanted my rifle.
She looked at me strangely but she knew something was up.
As she was inside getting the tea, I got my rifle and came back out to the porch.
Truth be told, I didn't even want to be sitting out there.
It didn't feel safe.
I kept thinking about the way it had looked toward the house.
And from where we stood, you couldn't have seen Megan from down where we were, but I couldn't
shake the feeling that it knew someone else was still up here.
That thought got inside of me and it stayed there.
It's still there today.
I sat on the porch with the rifle across my lap and I drank that whole glass of tea in
just a couple of straight gulps.
My hands were shaking bad enough, some of it ran down my chin and onto my shirt.
When I could finally breathe and talk straight, I told her exactly what I had seen.
She listened.
She didn't laugh.
She looked confused more than anything.
We both grew up right there in and around Hydealburg.
We'd heard of Bigfoot the same as anybody else had through TV and stuff, but that was always
something that you heard about happening somewhere else, somewhere much farther away, not behind
your own house in eastern Kentucky.
But I couldn't lie to myself and I wasn't about to lie to her.
I knew exactly what I had seen.
If people around there want to call them wood-buggers, that's fine.
I don't care, call them whatever you want, but they are out there.
And what stepped out of that kudzu and looked at me that day could be only Bigfoot.
A rose by any other name is still a rose.
Megan listened to me and then asked if I wanted to call somebody.
I remember looking at her and saying, "Who am I supposed to call?
Bigfoot Busters?"
And that was that.
We stayed out there on the porch for quite a while, though I didn't feel comfortable, not
even in pure daylight, even with the rifle on my lap.
I kept staring at that far away tree line, half expecting something to step out into the
yard.
That evening I shut the driveway gate early, turned the flood lights on and spent most of
the night sitting in the kitchen looking out toward that side of the property until my
eyes burned.
The next day at work I thought about it all day and I tried to reason it away, not because
I thought I imagined it.
I knew I had seen something.
But my mind kept trying to force it into, some shape, something that I could live with better
than Bigfoot.
It was some trespasser, some hunter who shouldn't have been out there dressed up in a huge gilly
costume.
It was my mind just playing a trick on me of some kind.
I went through a million explanations and all of them meant that I didn't see what I thought
I saw.
And by the time I was heading home I had just about talked myself and to go back down
there alone and finishing what I had started.
That's how much I had convinced myself.
I was wrong in what I had seen.
Now that notion lasted right up until I stepped out onto the back porch and looked down
at the dark under those trees.
I shivered inside.
And I knew I hadn't gotten it wrong yesterday.
Because every part of me still recognized that place as dark and dangerous.
I never went back down there alone.
Instead I hired a couple of guys with brush cutters to open that line up for me.
I told them that I'd seen a black bear down there recently, and I wanted the area cleared
back from the yard to the first bend where it dropped down into the hollow.
That was my reasoning for staying with them the whole time and carrying a rifle.
When they got near the place where I'd had that encounter, one of them shut his machine
down and pointed into the cutback vines.
He said, "Hey, Mr. You know there's something been laying in here?"
I asked him what made him think that.
He pointed again and he said, "Come on, take a look at it.
It's all mashed down up under there.
It's a big place, too."
He and the other guy were both looking at it with great curiosity.
I was about ten feet away.
I just nodded and I never walked over to inspect it.
I did not want to.
I just told him, "Well maybe that's where that bear had been staying."
Of course in my mind I knew better.
I had never seen a bear bedding down in vines.
It got enough opened up that we could finally see the line again and enough was cut back
that the cudzu no longer felt like a wall waiting to split open.
After that I worked out a treatment plan for what was crossing over onto my side and that
was the practical end of that.
But it was not the end of the thing itself because I still think about it.
I can be standing in my kitchen and look out toward that side of the property at the back.
And I think about how close I got before I ever knew anything was there.
I think about that smell and I think about the size of it.
I think about those hands.
But more than any of those things, I think about the way it looked uphill toward my house.
I think about that little chin lift.
Smug expression.
That one motion has stayed with me far longer and deeper than anything else.
Much more so than just seeing it or hearing it breathe or watching it step over that fence
like it was a log.
Because that one look it gave me made it feel less like I had stumbled onto a wild animal
and more like I had interrupted something very intelligent, intelligent enough to understand
exactly what mattered to me, exactly how to threaten me without a word.
That's the part that turns my blood ice cold.
Now, there was a time when I could drive past Kudzu, waterfall hanging over the road cuts
in great big green curtains and I would think it almost looked beautiful, especially down
there in the fog in the early mornings.
Not anymore.
I see deep, thick, heavy cover for anything that wants to hide.
I see hiding places.
I see something big enough to stay hidden until it's too late and it's already on top of
you.
I do go check that side of the property.
I just do it from farther off now and usually with somebody else around.
I do not go pushing into thick vines tangled looking for fence posts anymore.
I'll tell you that.
And I never go without a rifle.
Well, nance, that's all I've got.
I don't have a blurry photo or some hair samples.
I don't have any proof that I can hand anybody that this happened.
Only my wife Megan knows how much this has changed me and my behaviors on this land.
I wasn't out there looking for evidence of anything.
I was just trying to mark a fence line and cut back Kudzu.
I know though what came out of the vines that day.
And if I live to be a hundred, I will never call it anything but a big foot.
You've been listening to the Bukai Bigfoot podcast.
Find more stories, hundreds more over on our YouTube channel.
Just look for Buckeye Bigfoot.
[END PLAYBACK]