Zach writes, “I’ll go into my encounter in 2005. I lived in South Webster at the time and we were maybe five miles from the Wayne National Forest Trail Head.
I graduated high school the year before and we would go up to the national forest and drive around the gravel roads up there. We called it the New road because it was built sometime in the 90s and allowed access throughout the forest. They set up primitive campsites and trails for 4wheelers and hunters. I deer and coon hunted it a lot as a young man and ran traps in the rivers running through the forest for muskrat and mink. Never in all my years out there have I encountered anything unusual beside a couple wild dog encounters and seeing a giant wild boar one morning. It was a last minute camping trip with friends one night that we all had an encounter.
Me and some friends decided to camp out on the new road one Saturday evening. It was the end of September and the nights were becoming cold and chilly. We packed up my buddy Erics box van with beer and blankets then he followed me up the road behind my ford escort. We got to our campsite which was a dead end gravel road in Wayne National Forest. The locals use the circle turn around spot for target practice so there’s always shotgun shells and broken beer bottles everywhere. We cleaned up the area then start a fire. It was dark when we started the fire and kept it roaring through most of the night. We backed the van close to the fire and sat in the back just hanging out and bull*****. The first weird thing we noticed was every once in a while we would hear a ding off the top of the van. The first few times we didn’t pay much attention to it. I thought it was acorns falling or a bird dropping something from the trees over head. Well it kept happening so my buddy Eric climbs on top of the van and finds two gravel stones laying on the roof of his van. It was the same gravel from the gravel road we came in on.
We laughed and though maybe it had popped out from under my tire and landed on the roof of his van because he did follow me a few miles through the forest on that gravel road. But it kept happened and as it got closer to midnight it was happening more often. Sometimes two rocks hitting at a time. We heard 4wheelers in the distance earlier that night and so my buddy starts yelling into the woods thinking it was someone messing with us. After Eric yelled and threw gravel back into the woods it seemed to stop. We finish our drinks (which was a 12 pack of Natty Light) then later down in the van to sleep for the night. I wanna say it was around 2am when we hit the hay.
Anyway a couple hours later maybe around 4am I woke up to the sound of wood breaks and crashes in the forest. I woke Eric up and we sat there and listened to the woods cracking around our camping spot. If you ever seen the Blair Witch Project and remember the campers being woke up at night and the crashing in the woods around them. That’s what it sounded like. It was coming from different directions and once we stepped out of the van we noticed the sounds were coming from down the hill around our spot. The camping spot sat at the top of a hill and it was a sharp incline down on both sides and completely forested. After standing out here and listening for 15 mins or so we heard a loud crash closer to us so I grabbed the spotlight and we started shining down the hill into the woods.
I shined for a few mins before I saw two yellow eyes looking up towards us from a bush thicket. I couldn’t make out the figure in the brush but thought it was something tall or something on a tree because the eyes looked like they were above the ground quite a bit. We watched it for a min then the eyes disappeared. I thought maybe it was a raccoon messing around. There is bear sightings there but it’s very uncommon to cross one. We started shining on the other side of the hill and soon we heard a big crash again. Like wood logs being smashed into the brush. We ran back over and shined down. This time we got a better look at the creature and it had red eyes instead of yellow this time. It was a tall dark figure but is hard to size because we were looking down at it form the top of the hill. We lite that sucker up with the spotlight and there was a Sasquatch. I have no other way of describing it.. it was built like tank and stocky. Looked more like the patty Bigfoot with the cone head. It’s fur looks black/gray and was matted in balls. The thing was Matty looking. Covered in dirt and mud. It’s hair did hang down a bit like a orangutans but was matter up bad. We didn’t smell anything tho.. that sucker was maybe 200 yards down a steep hill looking up at us. My Buddy Eric was freaking out and I was scared to death. I turned the light off and we packed up and was driving out of there in a matter of seconds lol. It didn’t really do anything besides stare up at us. No growls or movement at all. It was standing there still before I turned the light off and headed towards the car. We still talk about this story sometimes when we hang out. Made both of us a believer for sure. Sorry for the long story. My mom had several night encounters around her house. She has heard the Ohio howl out there at night. Long whoops too. My late great aunt had an encounter when she was little out there. She saw something walk through the corn field and it was taller then the corn…
Also wanna mention the encounter I had last fall the creature was tall and linky where the creature we saw in 2005 was huge.”
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I will also be welcoming M.K. Davis to the show.
M.K. Davis has been researching the Patterson Sasquatch film for the last 20 years. He has traveled extensively and has amassed one of the largest collection of images from the film. M.K. has trekked the Bluff Creek drainage of Northern California on many occasions and his observations have led to several important discoveries on the film itself. While the Patterson film is only a very short piece of film, it continues to yield vital data that may one day lead to a more complete understanding what it is that is on the film and what it means to all of us.
Check out the Episode's page on the Sasquatch Chronicles website to view the videos M.K. mentions in the interview.