A reader who shall remain anonymous for reasons that the post will make self-evident kindly provides us with an eerily intriguing diversion.
Cousin lived with my grandparents in a hunting cabin in Missouri. Still lives there now that they’re gone. Their neighbor back then was this old Indian guy who raised buffalo. Decent guy. Told us not to go down paths with certain markers or the old man of the woods would get mad ad throw rocks. If he throws rocks leave. Well, being boys gotta explore and find those markers test it out.
Woods in that area is like a series of clearings connected by game trails (some natural some cut by hand) and off the game trails are briar thickets about 10-20′ tall and so dense you can only see about 10′ in any direction. Makes deer hunting a nice ambush exercise. Also means you can’t see shit like coyotes and mountain lions until you step on them, heh
So we find some of these markers and nothing happens the first couple years. Eventually we start hearing something parallelling us in the briars, and when it was upwind you could smell this like rest stop that’s not been cleaned in a week smell. If we kept going after it got close, small rocks would start landing at our feet
You’d also get it approach and get rocks tossed but never come out out the brambles if we’d target practice at their range for more than an hour.
We figured old man of the woods…some stinky hobo squatting. So one time we yelled and took shots into the tree canopy near where we heard it. Then the brush and trees started shaking like crazy, my cousin got beaned in the forehead with a golf ball sized rock, and it took off through the brush making shitton of noise
After that we’d get pelted with rocks if we waited until it got to the edge of the briar while we were shooting, so we got to where we’d just bug out back to the house. Grandma saw the rocks hit us one time and freaked out because apparently her brother ran into the same thing back in the early 50s and he said he managed to flush it out one time and it was the Beaman Monster,which is like the area’s pre-bigfoot name for a Bigfoot, and it went on a rampage through his chicken farm and killed all the birds. She wouldn’t let us go out without my uncle being with us armed with one of his big game rifles after that, heh
Stinky Bushman hasn’t been back since there was a population explosion of coyotes and cougar in the area
My comment:
Cryptozoology has been a sporadic hobby of mine since childhood. I’ve studied the research of investigators like Loren Coleman, Jeff Meldrum, and John Keel for years.
I can’t tell you what our guest blogger encountered. I can tell you that his account perfectly aligns with multiple data points consistently found in the most credible Bigfoot reports.
One of those points, which particularly impressed me, is the witness’ aversion to the words “Sasquatch” and “Bigfoot”. He only uses the latter twice, and only to explain the Beaman Monster to readers not familiar with the local lore.
This is consistent with the most reliable and best-attested accounts. Bob Gymlan points out that such witnesses tend to use terms like, “whatever it was”, “that thing”, and “it”. Our guest blogger uses “The Old Man of the Woods” because it was the term he was given by a more knowledgeable resident.
If you’re inclined to scoff at claims of an undiscovered large ape inhabiting the forests of North America, recall that the mountain gorilla was only recognized by science in 1902.
Even cryptozoologists admit that 95% of reported Bigfoot sightings are misidentifications of known animals. But all it takes is one authentic report.