[Crying]
If you'd asked me ten years ago, what could shake a camper hard enough to rattle the dishes,
but not leave a scratch on it? I'd have told you a good old Ohio Thunderstorm, and that
would have been the end of it. These days, though, if somebody mentions pounding on a
camper in the middle of the night, I get real quiet. Because once you stood in your socks
on a cold floor at two in the morning with the walls of your little home flexing around
you like a candy box in a kid's hand, and you know there isn't anybody out there that's
supposed to be? It changes the way you feel about the dark. That's what happened to me.
My name is Jacob. I'm in my early forties, divorced, no kids, and I've lived in southeastern
Ohio my whole life. We're talking rolling hills, second-growth woods, and more old logging
roads than actual paved ones in some spots. My cousin owns about forty acres that back
right up against a big chunk of the Wayne National Forest. It's mostly woods with one
little cleared spot up near the county road, where an old house used to sit before it was
burned down in the seventies. About four years ago, I bought a big square of that land off
my cousin, and I got that bright idea I was going to build myself a small house up there.
Nothing fancy, just a simple place that I could afford without a mortgage hanging over my
head. I worked maintenance at a factory about twenty miles away, so I'm pretty decent
with tools. And for three years right after high school, I worked construction on new home
builds, so I had the knowledge. I knew how things went together, and I had a lot of backpower,
so I figured I'd do all the work myself. Now to save money, I bought a used 24-foot travel
trailer off Facebook Marketplace and parked it up there while I built. We ran power from
the pole, and I figured out all the other logistics that I'm not going to bore you with.
It wasn't glamorous, but it was mine, and I didn't owe a penny on it. And other than the occasional
raccoon knocking over the trash can, it was really quiet. At least at first.
The camper was one of those older ones, with the fake wood paneling inside, and then aluminum
siding outside. You could knock on the walls, and it sounded like you were tapping on a soda
can. I had it backed up so the rear end was facing the woods, maybe twenty yards from the tree line.
On the door side, I'd set up a little gravel pad with a couple of long chairs, a firing, and my grill.
About fifteen feet out from the door, there was a single pole light, just one of those yard lights
that me and my cousin put up. It was one of the dusk-to-don deals with a greenish LED bulb.
Between that light and the one out at the road, the clearing was pretty well lit. Outside that
circle of light though, it went to black real fast. My closest human neighbor was over half a mile away.
You couldn't see another house from my spot. At night, it was just me, the trees, and whatever lived
in them. Like a lot of guys in this area, I grew up hunting. I've camped all over this
part of Ohio, and a lot of other states too. Coyotes, foxes, deer, owl. You name it. I've heard it,
smelled it, ran into them, or I've stepped in what they've left behind. The dark has never bothered
me much. But living alone out there with nothing but a thin skin of aluminum between me and the woods,
well, you develop a different awareness. You notice every little noise, and that's how this all started
with noises. The first time I heard the knocking, I honestly thought it was a branch. I'd been in the
camper for about three weeks. It was late September, just starting to cool off at night. I was in bed
dosing off with one of those little twelve volt fans worrying on a shelf above me,
and that's when I heard three solid thunks from somewhere behind the camper. Not loud enough to be
a car door, not metallic like somebody hitting the siding. It sounded like a stick smacking another
stick, dull, but hollow sounding. Thunk, thunk, thunk. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling.
The fan kept humming, then nothing. I laid there a few minutes listening, told myself it was just a
limb falling, or maybe a deer bumping into something out there. After all, trees make noises.
The woods are full of dead limbs that finally give up the ghost. But the next night, it happened again.
This time it was off to the left toward the little logging road that runs along my cousin's property line.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. That time it broke the pattern. It made me think of somebody
fooling around with a baseball bat on a telephone pole. I got up, slipped on my boots,
and stepped outside under the little gravel pad that I used as a front porch. The yard light
popped on over my head. Everything looked normal. I stood there in the cool air listening.
The woods sounded healthy, crickets, a barred owl off somewhere, and a distant
yet of coyotes. There was nothing that screamed trouble. After a minute or two, I went back in.
Those knocks happened on and off for about a week, never in the same place twice, always two to four
hits, and always after full dark. I'd catch myself sitting on the little sofa with the TV on low,
just kind of waiting for it, listening, waiting for the thunk.
Now sometimes I'd step out and I'd shine a flashlight around, but nothing moved. Nothing
crashed away, off into the woods, nothing that was saying, "Hey, you caught me."
I started thinking I had a mischievous neighbor that I hadn't met yet. Maybe some kid from down
the road coming up through the woods just to get some kicks. I considered walking the fence line
in the daylight to look for a path, but life and work kept getting in the way, and I kept putting it off.
I wish now I hadn't. The first time something actually hit the camper
was on a Tuesday night. I remember because I was dead tired from working overtime that day.
I'd gotten home late, grabbed a quick shower, and heated up some leftovers in the little microwave.
By the time I crawled into bed, it was close to midnight.
Some time later, I don't know how long, I was in a deep sleep, and I was jerked awake by a sharp
metallic ping from right above my head. The whole camper shivered a little, like somebody had
flicked it with their finger. I sat up, heart pounding, the fan was still going. The yard light
through the blinds looked steady. Then I heard something small rolled down the curve of the roof and
plop off the side of the camper. Now that's a very distinct sound, and you know it if you've ever
camped in one of those old rigs. It wasn't a squirrel or a raccoon. It was solid, like a rock, or maybe a nut.
I lay there, listening so hard my ears hurt. After a few seconds there was another ping farther
back toward the back this time, in another one toward the front. This wasn't hail.
The sky had been clear when I went to bed, and there was no rain on the roof,
just these individual strikes spaced out by 10 or 15 seconds.
I slid out a bed, pulled on my jeans and boots, grabbed the flashlight that I kept by the door.
When I stepped outside, the yard light kicked on with that soft, womp, electrical sound.
The air was cool and damp, that foggy kind of night where sound travels, but in weird ways.
Nothing moved out there in the clearing. I walked around the camper sweeping the beam of light
around the ground. That's when I saw it. Right by the back corner of the trailer, just under the
little drip line. There was a chunk of gravel about the size of a golf ball. My driveway in the
pad out front of my camper are made of limestone gravel, so gravel in itself wasn't weird.
But this rock was sitting in a little patch of bare dirt where there shouldn't have been any loose
gravel. I found two more along the side where I'd heard all the hits. One of them had a little
fresh scrape on it, like it had been bounced off of something metal. I stood there with the flashlight
in my hand and this slow, cold realization then crept up on me. Something had been standing out
there in the darkness, picking up rocks and checking them at my camper. Not hard enough to break anything,
but enough to get my attention enough that I came out of the camper into the dark night to have a
look around. Now I can already hear folks saying, "Oh, that was probably just some kids doing that."
And I'll be honest with you, I was still in that camp too. Kids throw rocks, drunks throw rocks,
bored people with nothing better to do throw rocks. But I will also tell you that I walked that
drive with the flashlight for a good half hour that night and there were no fresh tire tracks,
no footprints that looked like boots, nothing to suggest a vehicle had pulled in and turned around.
And if one had, I'd have heard it. And if it was some kid on foot, boy, he was sneaky and fast,
and he was persistent to keep coming back like that. I didn't sleep very well for the rest of that
week. The night at all came to a head was a Saturday, about two weeks after the rock incident.
It had been a long day. I'd been setting post for what was going to be the front porch of my little
house. I was digging holes, mixing concrete by hand and rustling with lumber. It was one of those days
where your back starts complaining before lunchtime. But you keep going because your stubborn, the weather's
nice, and you know winter is coming. By the time the sun went down, I was whipped. I grilled up a
couple of burgers on my little charcoal grill, had a couple of beers and sat by my small fire,
and to the mosquitoes said it was time to call it a night. I locked the camper door, turned off
the inside lights, and left just the yard light on the outside on. I do like a little glow coming
through the blinds. I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. Somewhere deep in the
night, a boom hit the side of the camper so hard, I really thought something had exploded.
The walls flexed in, the window above the dinette rattled, and a couple of plates in the cabinet
clinked together. The whole trailer rocked on its stabilizers. I came out of sleep mid-air,
I swear to you. My heart went from zero to sprinting in one second. Before I could even process
that first hit, another one landed, this time on the back wall. Boom. Now that one made the little
shelf over my bed shake. The fan wobbled and almost fell. The camper rocked again, harder.
I heard myself yell something. I don't think it was really words just yelling out sound,
and I did that as I scrambled out of the bed, fighting with the blankets nearly falling on my face
as I did so. The air inside the camper felt charged, like right before a storm. My ears were ringing
from the impacts. A third hit came. A little farther down the side this time, like somebody walking
along and hitting the wall as they went. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Every time the whole rig would sway, creek, and then settle. My first half awake thought was truck.
I somehow imagined some drunk idiot had swerved off the driveway, clipped the back of the camper,
and that's what I was hearing. But there had been no engine noise, no headlights, no screeching tires,
no gravel, no nothing, just pounding, and then more pounding. A truck hitting the camper
well, wouldn't do that. I grabbed the flashlight and my phone from the little net pocket by the door.
I didn't have a firearm handy, and that's something that I have since changed in the way I do things.
But at that time my pistol was locked up in the truck out front, which didn't do me look
a good right then, did it? I stood there in my T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, breathing like I had just
run a race. I was staring at the door. There was another lighter wimp that hit the back corner,
kind of like a test shove. Because the camper moved under my feet.
Something big was out there, something really big. I don't care who thinks I'm a coward. I did not
fling that door open right away. Now I stood there with one hand on the knob, listening, trying to
decide if I was safer inside my little aluminum coffin or outside, where I could at least see what
was about to kill me. Then everything went quiet for a few seconds. Then I heard it. From just
outside the rear wall, maybe six or eight feet from where I stood, there came a deep, heavy breathing.
This wasn't fast panting like a dog, and it wasn't a deer snorting. This was a slow and powerful
breathing, like someone had a chest the size of a 55 gallon drum, and they were filling it all the way
up, and then letting it out again. In and out. In and out. I didn't realize I was holding my breath
until my lungs started to burn. Well that did it. I had to know what was out there. Now looking back,
I don't know what I was thinking. I'm just telling you what I did. I went out there in the dark,
unarmed. Yes, stupid. I do know. I flicked on the flashlight, took a deep breath and yanked the door
open. The yard light kicked from its dim mode into full brightness as soon as the motion sensor
registered me out there. That sickly greenish white glow washed over the clearing. For a second,
all I could see was the empty gravel and my old pickup sitting off to the right. The night air hit
me cool and damp full of the smell of wet earth and leaves. Then I stepped out onto the little
pallet porch and leaned around so I could see down the side of the camper toward the back.
There was something standing there at the rear corner just outside the circle of the yard light.
At first it was just a darker shape among the shadows, big and wrong and too tall.
I raised the flashlight and the beam hit it square in the chest.
What I saw in that cone of light is burned into my brain. It was standing upright on two legs,
turned slightly toward the back wall of the camper. One arm still half extended like it had just
pushed the other hung down by its side. The first stupid thing my brain tried to tell me was
man in a coat, but that thought didn't last long. This thing's shoulder was level with the top
of the back window of the camper. I measured that window later. It was just under seven feet.
That put the top of its head at eight, maybe eight and a half feet.
The body was thick through the chest and shoulders, like somebody had wrapped a refrigerator in fur.
The arms were long, hanging well below what would have been its belt line if it was wearing one.
The hair or the fur, whatever you want to call it, looked dark brown or black,
with some lighter almost rusty strands here and there. The face is what really locked me in place.
It turned its head toward me when the flashlight hit it, and for one moment in that light filtering
up from the beam of light on its chest and the yard light combined for one moment I saw it clear.
The brow stuck out heavy over deep set eyes. The nose was wide and flat, somewhere between a human
nose and an apes with big nostrils that flared slightly when it breathed. The mouth was wide and
set in a tight line. Lips darker than the surrounding skin. There was hair on the cheeks and along the
jaw, but less around the nose and mouth, so I could see patches of leathery looking skin, a dark
charcoal color. The eyes reflected a dull amber glint, not glowing like headlights, but just
catching the light like a deer's will, but they were set in that very human looking, intelligent face.
By intelligence, I'm saying it didn't have that detachment of most animals that I have ever encountered.
You know a thinking, reasoning creature when you encounter one. Trust me. We stared at each other.
My brain ran through a whole list of options in a nanosecond. It went through the idea of someone
in a costume, to a mutated bear, to several other things, and less than that nanosecond.
And my mind projected all of them, like someone in a batting cage, docking each ball away as fast as
they were pitched. My hands started to shake. The beam of the flashlight wobbled over its chest
and upward toward the face. When the light hit it directly in the eyes, it squinted and turned away
slightly, like it didn't like the brightness. It huffed once through its nose, and irritated
almost disgusted sound. Then to my surprise it took a step back. It backed away from the corner of
the camper, one slow backward step, then another, keeping its body angled toward me the whole time.
I saw its legs as it moved, thick, powerful, with hair hanging in little plumpes around the knees.
I still couldn't see the feet clearly in the shadows and the gravel, though.
When it reached the edge of the yard light circle, it paused, and then it looked toward the
tree line, and it looked back at me one more time. I don't know how else to say this, but the
expression on its face looked annoyed, ticked off, like I had somehow ruined its evening and its fun.
Then it turned its whole body, took three long ground-covering strides and slipped into the dark
under the trees. I stood there on that pallet with the flashlight pointed at nothing.
My bare feet were freezing. My heart was slamming against my ribs so hard I was afraid I'd pass out.
I didn't chase or yell. I instead backed into the camper, closed the door,
and locked the deadbolt and the little chain, like somehow that would do anything if it decided to come back.
It was a long night of no sleep, I'll say that. Now you'd think after something like that,
a person would call the sheriff or their cousin or somebody, but I didn't call anyone. Part of it,
I think, was probably shock in my own disbelief. Part of it was that I had no idea what I
would even say. "Hey, I've got an eight-foot hairy man out here beating on my camper. Could you send
out a car?" "Yeah, they'd have sent somebody out for me, all right. A van to take me straight to
the psych ward." "So I sat in the little dinette in the camper with all the lights off, the flashlight
on the table, and my phone in my hand just staring at the door all night. Every creek of the camper
settling made me jump. Every brush of a branch outside made my skin crawl. At some point, I worked
up the nerve to pull one slide of the blinds up just a hair to look outside." The yard light hummed
peacefully, shining down on the gravel and on the front of my truck. Nothing moved.
The woods beyond looked like a solid wall of black. It was a long, tense night for me, sitting
there upright at the dinette. Every now and then I'd almost doze off, then I jerked back awake.
The pounding did not start again. No more rocks hit the roof. Whatever it was, it seemed like it
had made its point. Whatever that point might have been. When the sky finally lightened to gray
and the birds started waking up, I eased the camper door open and stepped out. The world looked
completely normal. Due on the truck a little mist hanging in the low spots, squirrels scolding
each other in the trees. If it hadn't been for the way my hand still shook, I could have almost
convinced myself that I'd dreamed the whole thing almost. And I walked around to the back of the camper
and the first thing I noticed were the smudges. About six feet up on the rear wall toward the left
side, there were two big dark streaks on the aluminum siding. They weren't scratches or dents.
They were areas where something had smeared across the dust and pollen. Maybe it was an oily hand,
maybe it was just mud. They were about the width of my hand if you put two of my hand side by side.
The smudges were parallel, like something had shoved with its palm and the heel of its hand.
On the side wall between the back corner and the little bathroom window, there were a couple more
smudges at about the same height, and one lower down like something had pushed or slapped there too.
In a couple spots, I noticed the aluminum was lightly dented inward. Nothing very noticeable,
but if you put your side eye up against it, you could see if you looked down the camper side.
I put my palm over one of those smudges again. My fingers didn't reach the edges in any direction.
Farther down the side, just behind the axle, I found what still makes my stomach flip when I think about it.
There, in a slightly dusty patch, was the outline of a hand, or something very much like a hand,
and it had been pressed up against the siding. I could make out where the palm had been,
and the lighter areas where four fingers in a thumb had left impressions in the dust.
The middle two fingers were longer than my whole hand from wrist to fingertip.
The thumb was angled down, compared to the fingers. I called my cousin then. He pulled up about a half hour
later in his work truck, sipping coffee out of a thermos, expecting, "I'm sure, something mundane."
I didn't tell him all of it at first. I just said, "Something was messing with the camper last night.
Can you come out and look at this?" He got there, and he walked around back with me,
and then he leaned in close to the siding, squinting. "Well, I'll be," he said. "That's weird."
He put his hand up next to the smudge the same way that I had.
"That's a big somebody, all right?" "You reckon you got some pranksters out here?"
I looked at him and just believed, at two in the morning, out here. There's no tire tracks, no beer cans,
no footprints. He shrugged. "Well, drunk kids do dumb stuff." I looked at him and said, "Drunk kids
don't walk around barefoot from the National Forest." Then before I could talk myself out of it,
I told him the whole story. I told him about the pounding, the breathing, the rocks,
and what I had seen standing under the yard light. He listened with one eyebrow creeping higher.
His mouth went a little tight. When I finished, he took a long pull from his thermos,
and then he looked out toward the tree line. "You sure you weren't dreaming it?" he said.
"I've had bad dreams all my life," I said, and ate none of them left handprints on my camper.
He did not laugh. Instead, he said, "Well, I will tell you this much. I've had a few nights in a
deer stand back there where the woods felt just wrong, and I always blamed it on my imagination.
Maybe I won't anymore." We walked the edge of the clearing together for an hour, looking for prints.
The ground was mostly gravel and leaf litter, not good for holding tracks,
but we did find a couple of spots in some bare dirt where something had stepped and left deep
roundish impressions. It was too big to be deer, and it was too wrong of a shape to be a boot.
And the stride between them was very long. My cousin suggested calling the sheriff anyway,
just to have it on record. But the more we talked about it, the less since it made.
And what would they do about it? Write up a report that said,
"Unknown large animal startled resident," and then file it under weird stuff until the next
meth lab blew up? In the end, we didn't call anyone.
I had to stay in that camper until just after Thanksgiving. I never had anything pound on the camper again,
but I did hear knocks out in the woods a few more nights.
Once I was sitting by my little fire, and a rock about the size of a plum dropped into the dust
just outside the circle of firelight. It rolled a couple of feet and stopped.
I looked up and I aimed my flashlight toward the trees, but there was nothing there to see.
The feeling of being watched though never, ever really left me. I took to keeping my pistol on the
little shelf by my bed, and I started going into town more often in the evenings just to be around people,
the quiet which I had craved and loved so much at first now started to feel very heavy.
I still worked on the house during the day, and I worked as fast as I could.
By early winter, I had the shell done, the roof on, and doors and windows in, and there was enough
insulation and wiring to make it livable, even if it wasn't aesthetic or pretty. The night that I
moved my mattress into the house and slept under a half-danish ceiling with wires hanging out of the
walls. I felt safer than I had in that camper since the first knock started. I ended up selling the
trailer cheap to a guy who wanted it for a hunting camp, two counties over. I never told him why the
aluminum had a few light-dense in it on the backside. What do I think about it now? Well, I've had a
few years to chew on this. I've listened to a lot of stories on your channel as well as many others.
Some of the stories I take with a grain of salt, I think people make up half this stuff,
but some of them make my hair stand up on my arms because they line up too well with what I saw.
I don't think I need to tell you that it was bigfoot that I saw. I'm betting you already know that.
I also can tell you what it wasn't what I saw. It was not a man in a suit. There's nobody in the
right mind that's going to spend hours wandering around the backside of a national forest in the dark,
just on the off-chance. That some guy in a camper will come outside so they can give him a show.
Somebody would have to come back night after night after night. Why would they bother? What
purpose would that serve? That's right, none. And no way was it a bear? Bears don't have hands like that.
And they don't stand there under your yard light and look at you like you're the one that's
inconvenience them. Now folks around here just call it bigfoot saskwatch. And sometimes they call it
the grass man. And I think whatever it was it had been watching me for a while. Looking back the
whole pattern makes sense. First the knocks in the woods, letting me know something was out there,
then came the rocks on the roof, testing how I reacted perhaps. Then when I didn't get the hint
or didn't leave fast enough it came right up and put its hands on the camper. Then we had a good long
look at each other. Was it trying to scare me off? Was it mad that I had moved into its regular path
along the tree line? I don't know. What I do know is that I got the message loud and clear.
I still lived there on that land. It's mine now. And I lived there in the little tiny house I built
and I love it. I still hear knocks now and then way back out toward the National Forest, especially
in the fall. Once in a while the dog that I have now will stand at the back door. It's neck bristling
and it will rumble low when it's chest, staring out into the darkness like there's something there
that he can't quite see. And when that happens I check that the doors are locked. I make sure my pistol
is where I can reach it. And I remind myself that whatever is out there it had a chance to come
through thin aluminum walls at two in the morning and it didn't. It could have lunched at me and
got me when I stepped outside that night, but it didn't. I had the real impression that it was
annoyed with me or maybe just the camper being there and it was hitting the camper as a way to
let me know like venting frustrations. And then again all my thoughts and ideas could be very wrong.
All I can tell you is that's what happened to me. If you do decide to share this on your channel
maybe it will help somebody else who's living in a camper at the edge of some dark patch of woods
and they're hearing knocks they can't explain. Tell them they're not crazy and they definitely aren't alone.
Tell them others have been through the same thing. And tell them if something starts pounding on
their camper walls hard enough to make your dishes rattle in the cabinets. Tell them they have to
decide real quick if they're going to stick it out there or if maybe just maybe they should go ahead
and move back to town at least until they can get a sturdy house with thick walls built.
Well that's what I would tell them anyway. Thank you for reading this signed Jacob.
You've been listening to the Buckeye Bigfoot podcast. Find more stories hundreds more
over on our YouTube channel. Just look for Buckeye Bigfoot.
Thanks for watching.