"Ona Farm, you learned to trust your dog before you trust your own eyes.
So when my blue healer stopped halfway down the hill, staring at the hayrow and refused
to take one more step toward that back lot, I should have paid attention, but I didn't.
Instead I fired up the tractor, eased a spear into the top-around bale of hay, and started
lifting like I've done a thousand times."
What I didn't know was something had been sleeping in the gap behind that bale, something
big enough to flatten a bed deep into the hay, and big enough to stand up and tower over
the bale when I woke it up, and that something was, without a doubt, what people call a big
foot.
"Now since that day, I don't walk that back lot without my rifle and my dog," and
truth being told, "my dog does not like going out there at all anymore.
I think he only follows me because he doesn't want me going out there alone."
My name is Mark.
I'm in my early 50s, and I farm a little patch, a southern Ohio that's been in my wife's
family since about the time Ohio became a state.
We have hay, a few beef cows, and whatever else keeps the lights on.
I've heard different folks on your channel talk about things messing with their barns,
with their chicken coops, stealing feed, those sorts of things.
I used to think they were all just mistaken opportunities, and it was some kind of raccoons
or some coyotes or maybe some pesky neighbor kids.
I do not think that anymore because whatever was using my hay, row as a bedroom, sure
wasn't any of those.
Let me paint the picture a little, so this makes sense.
Our place sits in what they call "rolling farm country," which is just a nice way of saying,
"You're either going up or you're going down all the time."
The house and the main barn are on a little flat rise.
Out back of the barn, the ground slopes down into a flat spot that we call the back lot.
That's where I stacked most of my round hay bales.
It's easier to load from, and it's out of the way.
Beyond the back lot, there's an old barbed wire fence that's more falling down than standing
up, but it still works as a fence line, technically.
On the other side of that is a brushy fence row, hedge, thorny wild rose, wild grape thines,
and then it drops off into a wooded hollow.
That hollow runs for a good stretch behind our place and connects up to other folks'
woods, and there's an old railbed out there.
Eventually it makes it to the creek bottom.
So there you have it.
House-barned back lot fence brush and hollow.
For years I stacked my round bales in a long single row right up close to that old fence
line.
Sometimes too high if we'd had a good year.
It made a really nice wind break, and I really didn't think anything of how I put things
out there.
I run mostly grass hay, orchard, fescue, with some clover down in the lower field.
We do our own cutting and bailing.
This isn't a big operation, but it's just right for us.
Every summer is the same rhythm.
Watch the weather.
Cut.
Rake.
Baal.
Hall.
Stack.
Baal.
And you thank the Lord when the rain holds off.
Now this happened late summer, four years ago, after our second cutting.
We'd had a decent stretch, and I'd gotten lazy, stacking bales in the back lot, but not
moving them where I really wanted them by the side drive.
Then the forecast started telling me that a week of storms was about to roll through,
and I decided I had better get them shifted before the ground turned to soup, and the tractor
started making ruts that I would be fighting all year.
So the day started normal.
It did not end that way.
I've got a blue healer mix named Trixi.
Now she's ten years old now, but back then she was still pretty spry.
She was the kind of dog that loves a four wheeler, and she would lay under a running
tractor if you let her.
Nothing usually rattled her, not thunder, gunshots, engines.
You name it.
She was calm around at all.
That afternoon I fired up the tractor, hooked up the spear to the front, and headed toward
the back lot.
Trixi trotted along beside me, like she always did.
But about halfway down the slope she began to slow.
At the time I eased into the back lot, she had stopped completely.
She stood there with her ears up, staring forward at the far end of the hay road by the
fence row.
"Come on, girl," I called over the engine.
I patted my leg.
Then I said, "Come on, girl, let's get to work."
Trixi didn't budge.
She took a few steps backward, then circled behind the tractor, sat on the higher ground,
and watched.
"No, that wasn't like her at all."
I did notice it, but it went into that mental file of, "Huh, well, she's acting weird."
But I kept going.
I was more focused on what I had to get done, and I knew I was up against a timeline of
weather rolling in.
Now, there were maybe thirty bails in that row, all single file, into end, with a stretch
near the middle that was stacked too high.
I planned to pull the top ones first, where I had doubled them.
Then I would work my way along.
The hollow behind the fence row was in full leaf, all green and shadowed.
The air down there smelled damp and rich as it always did.
But I noticed there was a sharper note under it that day.
A bit of sour and sweaty, like something had been bedding down close for a long time.
Probably dear, I said to myself.
I dropped the tractor into low, and rolled up to the first double-stack section.
If you've never moved round bails with a spear, the ideal is pretty simple.
You ease the spear into the flat side of the bale.
You pick it up, and try not to tear the twine.
Why lined up?
Ease the spear in, and lifted the top bale pretty as you please.
As I backed away, that top bale rose up off the one underneath.
And for just a second, I could see the flat face of the bottom bale, and the few feet
of ground between it and the fence.
There was a hollow chewed into that space.
The hay had been pulled out, pressed down into a large man-sized depression.
I don't mean like some little mouse nest or maybe a raccoon den.
I'm talking.
This was a man-sized hollow pulled out, and shaped from the hay.
I had just enough time to register what I was seeing before something else drew my eye.
Movement.
Not where I had just lifted the bale, but further down at the far end of the row, near
the corner where the fence turns into the woods.
Something was standing up back there.
At first it was just a shape, darker than the shadows behind the last two bails.
Then it kept rising, and that's when my brain stopped trying to figure it out, because
I had nothing.
If you don't know how tall a typical bale of hay is, well they vary, but mine are a little
over five feet.
Now this thing, when it straightened all the way up behind that in bale, it was taller than
that bale by a good two feet.
The bale stopped roughly mid-chest on it.
My stomach did a slow roll.
My hands tightened on the tractor wheel.
It had been lying down in the gap between the last bale and the fence down there.
The way a dog would tuck itself up along a wall.
The curve of the row and the brush had hidden it when I drove in.
Now, as it unfolded itself, I understood why Trixie hadn't wanted to come down.
It turned sideways, and for a moment its upper body was in clear view between the two bails.
It looked like a very big, very strong man, like somebody had been wrapped up in dark brown
hair.
It was bigger than that Jack Reacher guy on TV.
Way bigger.
Words can't explain it right, though I am trying.
The shoulders were wide and rounded and very muscular.
The hair was shorter there than on the arms.
The chest was broad, and a little bit rounded.
The hair on it was messy and clumped up.
One long arm was braced against the back of the bale.
The hand spread, using the hay to push itself fully upright.
And that hand told me everything I needed to know.
It wasn't a paw.
It sure wasn't a hoof.
What I saw was clearly a defined hand.
Five fingers, thick and long, with a thumb set a little lower.
I could see each one separately against the lighter hay.
The hair was thinned across the back of the hand, and the skin that showed on the neckels
was dark and leathery, made me think of old work gloves.
Its head was big and blocky, forehead sloping back from a heavy brow ridge.
The hair on its head was a little longer there, hanging down around the sides, but I wouldn't
call it a main, just uncombed and wild.
The face, well, that's carved in my memory.
The hair along the jaw and the cheeks was there, but around the eyes and the nose and
the mouth, the skin was showing dark grey brown.
The nose was broad and flat.
The mouth was wide, with thin lips a shade darker than the rest.
The eyes were small and dark and set back in the skull with leathery skin all around.
And all over it were bits of hay and leaves stuck to the hair.
It blinked slowly, and its eyes met mine across maybe 25, 30 feet of distance.
These eyes weren't glowing and there was nothing supernatural about them, but they were
deep set, and they were dark eyes that I knew were there even if I couldn't see them in
detail.
We stared at each other over the nose of my tractor, me with a hay spear in the air,
and my engine rumbling.
It, half out of its hiding place behind my own bails.
It was clear I had disturbed its sleep, and it was trying to escape.
I don't know how long this lasted us looking at each other.
Probably just a couple of seconds, but it was long enough for me to feel the weight of
its attention, like I was standing in front of a big bull and I was hoping he was in a good
mood.
It drew in a big breath.
I could see its chest expand under the hair.
I saw the ribs lift.
When it let the air out, suddenly the smell was on the breeze, and it hit me.
Right, sour body odor, mixed with damp hay and mud.
It was revolting.
It was strong enough that I could taste it in the back of my throat, even with the tractor
between us.
My survival instincts finally kicked in.
My right foot eased onto the clutch.
I didn't mean to move, but the tractor rolled just to hair, and that broke the moment between
us.
It let out a short, low sound that I could hear even over the tractor's engine, sort of
a half grunt, half growl, then it turned toward the fence.
I sat there frozen.
Hands clenched on the wheel, foot holding the clutch down.
I didn't think about flipping the throttle or dropping the spear, or any of the things
I could have done.
My whole body was stuck between, don't move, and get the heck out of there.
It moved with a kind of heavy grace.
I don't have a better way of describing it.
It swung one leg up and over the sacking top strand of the barbed wire fence, like it
was stepping over a coiled garden hose.
The muscles in its thigh bunched under the hair, and I got a clear look at the foot for just
a moment.
It was long, wider toward the front.
The toes were clear to me, and the foot was bare.
There was not a hint of a boot or a shoe anywhere.
The bottom that I saw was a medium gray color.
I remember it because it was a very different color than the hair or the leathery skin that
I saw on it elsewhere.
This was old, dry, and cracked looking.
It set that foot down on the far side with a soft thump in the leaves, then brought the
other leg over, let go of the bale, and straightened up completely on the hollow side.
From that slightly lower ground, the top of the round bale reached just under its shoulder,
and that's when I really soaked in the size of this thing.
I went out and measured, and I did a lot more math later on.
It was every bit of at least seven and a half feet tall.
It turned its head back just once, looked at me one more time, and then took two long strides
along the fence line parallel to the bales.
Branch is snapped, is it brushed through the brush?
And then there was a third stride, and the trees of the hollow swallled it up whole.
The tractor engine was still idling under me.
My hands were still locked onto the wheel.
My heart was beating hard enough that I could feel it in my throat.
Up there on the slope, Trixie barked just once, sharp, and scared, and then she went silent
again.
I sat there in the tractor and waited ten seconds, twenty, thirty.
I'm not sure how long, but I was waiting to hear and see if it came back up, waiting to
see that head rise up over the brush again.
But there was nothing.
Finally, I realized I had been holding my breath for a long while.
I let it out in a big rush.
When I eased my foot off the clutch, the tractor lurched, and that little jolt shook me the rest
of the way loose.
I backed away from the row, turned the tractor, and only when I'd put some distance between
myself and that into the bales did I finally kill the engine.
The sudden quiet pressed in.
Without the tractor motor noise, the hollow sounded completely normal again.
Birds, bugs, a breeze in the leaves somewhere.
But the memory of that smell and those eyes, they were sitting right there on my chest.
I sat there for probably close to thirty minutes, waiting, watching, thinking, reasoning
it out.
I was having arguments with myself, and after a bit, curiosity and starrowness started
wrestling with my common sense.
My better judgment.
I started up the tractor again, and drove right back to the line of bales.
When I got there, I climbed down from the tractor and walked closer to the stack.
The nest, and that's the only word I've got for it.
Well, the nest was big enough that I could have curled up in it and had room to spare.
The bottom hay was pressed down in the shape of the body.
There was a paint darker patch in the center where it looked damp, sort of like from sweat,
where something had been laying there a lot.
I could see where the outer layers of the bale had been huge pieces that had been pulled
out by something with hands.
And the hay had been pulled.
It hadn't been mashed around.
Now stuck to one of those pulled bits.
I did see hair.
I don't mean some little bity mouse hairs or the hollow guard hair off of a deer.
This was longer.
Dark brown, almost black, maybe four inches long.
Course as a broom bristle when I pinched it between my fingers, with a little lighter
brown toward one end like it had been sun bleached.
I remember saying out loud, "What in the world?"
But I already knew what in the world it was.
It was a big foot, better known as the Ohio grass man in these parts.
I looked at that hair, then at the hollow, then toward the fence row.
The brush behind the bales was mashed down in a spot about three feet wide, right where
the nest lined up to it.
The barbed wire strand had fresh scuffs on it.
A little brown hair was caught on one rusty barb.
The top wire sagged there in a little u-shape more than I remember it.
Something had been coming and going right through there.
And it was using the hay bales as a nest.
A very warm and convenient bed.
I began to think about the dozens of times that I'd been out here over the months.
I thought at the times over the years that I've found a hay bales partially torn into or
moved around.
I had always put it down to a stray cow or some neighboring kids or some strange animal
burrowing into it, like maybe a nest of raccoons.
I had no other explanation, so I used what was convenient.
I thought back to how it looked when the big foot had stood up.
It looked disturbed, perturbed, and surprised all at once.
Maybe it had been bedding down there many, many times, and no one ever bothered it.
Who knows?
I might have rolled by it on the tractor many times.
Maybe it had listened to my tractor come and go for months and decided we had an unspoken
agreement.
I would leave it alone.
And then somehow that day I broke the agreement.
The more I thought back on things, the more sure I was that it had been around for quite
a while out there.
But until that minute I hadn't had a clue.
I walked to the end of the hay row where it had stood up.
The hollow side of the fence is a little lower, as I'd said, and the ground there holds
some moisture.
It's soft, but not swampy.
But it does take impressions well.
And right there was a clear print.
I don't mean some big cartoon print like you see in books.
The edges were messy with leaves and pebbles, but the shape was there and unmistakable.
It was long, broader at the toes, narrower at the heel.
The toes themselves had pressed down just enough into the damp soil that I could see five
little rises, with the big toe more in line with the others than ours usually sit.
I wear a size ten boot.
I set my foot next to that impression.
My heel lined up with where its heel had been.
And my toes came up almost three inches short on the front end.
It was easily four inches wider at the ball than my boot was.
I almost got a little dizzy looking at it.
Farther along the fence, there were two more impressions in the right spacing, like it
had taken those long, efficient steps down into the hollow.
There was no question.
I was not going to follow them.
I walked back and looked at the so-called nest again.
Knowing what I had seen when it stood up, it somehow looked different to me now this
nest.
The hay all around it bore the marks of very large hands, pooling and arranging it deliberately.
It seemed to be a very thoughtful design, if I can say that.
By then I'd seen enough.
I straightened up and I suddenly had a chill go right down my spine.
I felt like it was still near and it was watching me.
I climbed back into my tractor, started it up and backed away slow, watching that hollow
like a hawk at the whole time.
I didn't move another bail that day.
I drove straight up to the barn, parked, and I went into the house.
My wife looked up at me in surprise.
She later said my face looked a little grey.
"Are you sick?" she asked.
"Nah," I said, "I'm okay."
It wasn't entirely a lie.
Now I didn't tell her right away.
She doesn't ever go beyond the house, so I wasn't worried about that, but I just didn't
know how to say it to her.
I would sometimes start to say, "You're not going to believe what I saw," but I always
stopped.
I was hearing how it sounded my own head.
It wasn't until that winter when we started noticing the hay-row was being messed with
again that I finally opened my mouth.
Our cattle do not have access to the back lot hay.
I keep their rolled bales in a feeder up in the winter pasture, cut net wrap, and I let
them make a mess of it in one designated spot.
If that back row moved, I knew it wasn't the cows.
And if you've never moved a hay-bale like that, well, you don't know just how heavy they
are.
We're not talking some hundred or two hundred pounds.
They're a lot heavier than that.
Now about a month after my siding, I went down to check the bales after a windstorm.
Two of them at the far end had been shifted just a little, not rolled or speared, but nudged.
And not that the meat lying now had a wobble in it.
There were fresh scuffs on the wire again, and there was a bigger spot of trampled brush.
Yeah, so I had seen this before.
I knew what it was.
And it made even more sense as winter was coming on that the bigfoot would need a warm
and dry place.
In the middle of a big roll of hay, that's a pretty good spot.
I did not poke or disturb.
I left it alone.
That's when I told my wife.
I didn't exactly say the word bigfoot, just that I'd seen something big and upright by
the hay, and I didn't believe it was a person a cow or anything else like that.
Her first reaction was to worry about two legged trespassers, the kind that are known to start
cutting all your copper, or they would steal all your equipment, or worse.
The kind that would take over a farmhouse and the housewife during the day while the man
was away, you get the drift of what I'm saying.
I know it can't be said on your show.
Unfortunately, that had been happening recently.
Now when I described the size compared to the bales, the way it stepped over the fence,
the footprint, she went quiet.
The neighbor down the road, she said finally.
He always said that something was getting into their silage pit at night.
He blamed it on coyotes, but I have never heard a coyote's going for silage.
I'm thinking they were wrong.
Huh.
I looked at her and I nodded.
Yeah, he was probably wrong.
Let that unspoken word, the word Bigfoot, it remained unspoken and it hung heavy in the air
between us.
We started hearing things then, or maybe we had started noticing things that we'd been
hearing all along but paid no attention to before.
Late at night we could hear heavy steps down in the hollow when the nights were still.
It was clearly a two-foot rhythm.
And one time there was a deep, chesty huff that floated up through the trees when I took
the trash out very late.
I moved the next year's haystack farther up toward the barn, well away from that fence.
It's less convenient in some ways for me, but my gut rest easier and strangely so does
my dog.
I know how all of this sounds.
If you're a city person or even a country person who's never seen anything stranger than a big
buck that you just startled out of its bedding, well it probably sounds like I'm telling a
big tall tale to pass a slow winter's night.
I'm not.
And I'm not really a big-foot kind of guy, not even now.
I believe most of the stories I've heard out there are pure fake.
I believe most of the so-called photos and videos and other evidence are also fake.
So I'm not going to blame anyone that doesn't believe my story.
But you have to stop and think that at least some of these stories are true.
I know that mine is, even if you don't.
I'm not saying I know exactly what a big-foot is.
I don't know if it's an ape or some kind of wild man, a relic of something we don't have
in the books.
I only know what I saw.
A huge, hair-covered upright creature bigger than any man I've ever stood next to.
And it was climbing out of a bed that it had made behind my round bails, stepping over
a fence like it was a sidewalk curb and walking into a wood hollow and disappeared.
I also know what my dog did, and that was refused to go near that into the lot, and it bristled
when the wind came up from the hollow with that scent.
I know what my nose remembers.
That rank sour smell of something that sweats and sleeps and lives rough.
I also know what I haven't seen since I moved the hay.
I haven't found any more big, man-sized nests behind my round bails.
The wire hasn't had fresh hair on it.
The brush out there is still trampled in a line where something large used to come and
go, but it's older now, like a trail that just isn't getting used much anymore.
Small new things are growing in the middle of it, and other things along the edge are reaching
over into the path as they grow.
Maybe it moved on, maybe it found a quieter hollow where the hay is easier to steal or burrow
into.
I still hear things once in a while.
Heavy steps late at night, just inside the tree line near the house.
But nothing's there when we light it up.
I've heard some strange noises that I have heard again over the years, but again never
thought much of them before.
Well I think about them now.
Even if all of that is big-foot activity, I can't say for sure if it's the same one, or
if there's even only one out there.
There are more woods in this county than settled spots.
So when people say, "Oh, I don't believe in it, we'd have seen something by now."
I always ask them, "How much time had they spent way back yonder, and how far have they gone?"
They always look at me like glaze dyes and confusion.
I always tell them some of us have been back yonder, and some of us have seen something
by now.
Now nobody around these parts wants to hear their neighbor's name and the word "bigfoot"
in the same sentence.
So we're going to keep it at just mark.
But maybe, just maybe, some of the farmer who keeps finding his hay shifted, or his
silage disturbed.
Maybe he'll hear this, and he'll think twice before he writes it off as just animals or kids.
And if he ever does find a big man-sized nest behind his round bails, and his dog decides
that backlot just isn't fun anymore.
Well, he might want to remember, there aren't things out there that appreciate a good windbreak
and a soft bed just as much as we do.
And they don't always ask permission before they move in.
You've been listening to The Buckeye Bigfoot podcast.
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