New York: Champ Meets Bigfoot

0:00For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace. Some blame wild animals. Others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in. But those who have survived, they know the truth. Welcome to Backwood's Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, dogman, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out. Those aren't so lucky. Are you ready? Because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember, some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads, and let's head off into the woods if you dare. On the edge of Port Henry, New York, there's a painted sign that lists the people who've seen the monster.

1:08And it's not a plaque or a historical marker. It's a hand-lettered board that runs down year by year with names beside the years. Some of the names are whole families, and some are a single last name with nothing after it. And the list starts in the 1800s and keeps going for a long time. Because for years, the village added to it as new reports came in. The way another town would update the population number on the welcome sign when the census came through. Under the list, the town wrote what it thinks about the whole business, and what it wrote was home of champ. Nobody on that board ever brought anything back from the water. There's no skin, no bone, and no clear photograph taken from the New York shore. And what the village has instead is that list, names, and years won under the other. Going back more than 200 years on the same bay where the first sighting anybody ever wrote down took place. Lake Champlain runs 120 miles from Whitehall, New York, at the south end up to the Canadian border. And for most of that distance, the state line runs right down the middle of the water.

2:11So Vermont has the east shore, and New York has the west. Vermont got the famous photograph in the Minor League Ball Club. New York got the first sighting, the first sheriff who said he saw it. The school teacher who spent 20 years trying to study it, and the town that decided to put the monster's name on the sign. It's a big lake, 12 miles across at the widest, and out in the channel off Essex and Westport, it goes down past 400 feet of cold water that stays cold all summer. On a lot of the New York shore, the Adirondex come right down to the lake, and the bottom drops away fast. So you can be standing on a rock in Westport with 30 feet under your toes, and a boat anchor just passed you, sitting over 150. And in the Bay's, the water isn't clear at all. In Bullwaga Bay and Cumberland Bay and the shallows around the mouth of the bouquet river, you look down into green and then into nothing. I'll say this much about Champlain, before we get into the stories. The shore is steep, the Bay's are murky, the lake is long, and there's more water in it than anybody has ever managed to look at all at once.

3:17And every account on that board in Port Henry happens in water, nobody can see into. We've been across the sand hills and through the pines and down into the swamps on this trip. And this is the biggest water we've stopped at, and the thing people say lives in it, has been getting reported since before the state of New York had a railroad. We'll get to that history. First, the water. Glen was on the town dock at Port Henry with a bucket and a rod at a quarter to six in the morning in September of 1983. And he had the bay to himself. He'd fished that dock for perch and smallmouth since he was a boy. And he fished it the same way every time. One rod out and one in his hand, with the thermos on the plank beside him. The dock sits on Bullwaga Bay, which is a wide shallow bowl on the west side of the lake, with the village on one edge and a long point on the other. And in September, the water's still warm from summer and there's usually a mist on it at first light that burns off inside an hour. That morning the mist was thin and the water was flat.

4:19The ferry wasn't running yet, and the only sign of anybody else awake was one light in a house up the hill behind him. He'd had a bite and lost it and was rebading when he looked up and saw a straight, dark line sitting on the surface out toward the middle of the bay. Maybe 200 yards out, and he thought it was a log. Logs come down that lake all the time, especially after a storm. And there'd been one two days before. So he looked at it for a second and went back to the hook. When he looked up again, the log had moved. It had come about 50 yards closer and it had changed shape because what had been one straight line was now two rounded humps with a gap between them. Dark and wet, and each one was about the length of the rowboat tied up at the end of the dock. So he set the rod down and watched. The two humps were moving across the bay from right to left, north to south, at about the speed of a man walking. And the water was folding off the back of each one and closing up flat behind the second.

5:22He looked for a head and never saw one. The front hump just came up out of the water and went back into it. And there was nothing ahead of it breaking the surface. Then a third hump came up behind the other two, rising the same smooth way, and the three of them held that shape and kept going. And he said the spacing between them never changed the whole time, like they were all part of one thing. And that from the front of the first to the back of the third, it had to be 30 feet at least. He said the color was a very dark gray, almost black, and that it looked smooth and wet rather than scaled or furred. And he compared it to the back of a whale he'd seen from a boat off Cape Cod years before, that same rubbery look. It went across the bay for about a minute and a half. And when it got near the shallows on the south side where the weeds are, the humps went down one at a time from front to back. And there was a swirl on the surface as wide as a car. And then the water was flat again. He stood on the dock for a while after that.

6:23And then he reeled in both lines and packed up and went home without fishing anymore. He told his wife that night. She'd grown up in the village and she told him her grandmother had seen something from that same shore in the 1930s. And that the family had never talked about it much, which was the first he'd ever heard of it. The next day he went down to the village office and gave his name and the date to the woman who kept the sightings list for the board. And she wrote it down. And he never asked what became of the paper. He fished that dock for another 20 plus years and he says the bay looked exactly the same every morning after as it had every morning before. And that he never saw the three humps again. And that he watched for them every single time. He still does at 71 from a lawn chair up the hill. Five mile south of Port Henry, the lake narrows at Crown Point where a bridge crosses over to Vermont. And that's where Denise took her two kids camping in August of 1996. She was newly divorced that summer. Her son was nine and her daughter was six.

7:25And she'd picked the state campground at Crown Point because it had a beach and an old fort to walk around and because it was cheap. The campsite sit up on a bank above the water and on the last night, a Sunday, the three of them carried their chairs down to the shore after supper to watch the sun go down behind the Adirondacks and the light go pink on the Vermont side. Her son had a pair of binoculars his father had given him and she says he hadn't let go of them all weekend. The water was dead calm. A few boats had gone north earlier but by the time the light started going, the lake was empty. And across the narrows on the Vermont side, there's a point with a lighthouse on it. And her son was looking at the lighthouse through the binoculars when he said, Mom, there's something swimming. She looked and saw a wake and it wasn't a boat wake because there was nothing at the front of it. It was a long V spreading across the flat water coming from the direction of the Vermont shore at an angle toward the New York side. And she figured it was a beaver or a big fish and said so.

8:26And her son handed her the binoculars without a word. Through the glass she could see what was making the wake and it was a head. It was up out of the water maybe two feet at the end of a neck and the neck came up out of the lake at an angle. Like a stick somebody had planted in the bottom and tilted forward. And the head was small compared to the neck. She said it was shaped something like a horse's head but flatter and that there was something on top of it that wasn't smooth. A long way behind the neck a single low hump was breaking the surface and going under again in a rhythm. And she said the whole thing from head to hump was longer than any of the boats that had gone by that day. Her daughter wanted the binoculars and Denise didn't give them to her. She stood up with the glasses to her face and watched it come across the narrows to within what she guessed was 300 yards of where they were sitting. And then it turned. The head swung around toward the north, toward the bridge and the whole line of it followed and went

9:26under the bridge and out into the wider water beyond. And they lost the wake in the dark on the other side. The kids saw the head with their bare eyes when it was closest. And her son said afterward that it looked directly at them. Denise said the head was turned toward the bridge the whole time she was watching it and she never saw a face. Her son wanted to walk up to the bridge and she said no. So they carried the chairs back up to the site and she got the kids into the tent and sat outside it until she couldn't keep her eyes open. In the morning she went to the campground office and asked the ranger on duty, a young man, whether anybody had ever reported anything from the campground. And he said, you mean champ. And she said she guessed so. He gave her a photocopied sheet with a phone number on it for a man in Wilton who kept track of sightings and she called the number when she got home and left a message and nobody ever called back. Her son is 39 now and he still has the binoculars. He's told his own kids about it.

10:26They never went back to Crown Point and she says it wasn't because of what they saw. She just never had a reason. Ray kept a 26-foot sailboat at the Marina in Westport and in the summer of 2004 he'd gotten into the habit of taking it out alone on weekday evenings after work. Up the shore toward Essex and back before dark. That's the deep stretch of the lake where the bottom falls away from the New York shore fast and the channel out in the middle runs three and four hundred feet down. And on a calm evening the water goes glassy and dark blue and you can sit on deck with the sails hanging slack and hear the Vermont fairy two miles off. The evening he described was in the last week of July and there'd been no wind at all. So he'd motored out and shut the engine off about a mile north of the bay and let the boat drift while he sat in the cockpit with a beer and his feet up. He said it was about eight o'clock. He heard it before he saw it. A sound like something big taking a breath, a huff off the starboard side and then a splash.

11:29And his first thought was that a fisherman had fallen in. So he stood up to look. About 60 yards off the side of the boat the water was moving. It was flat everywhere else but there was a ring spreading out from one spot and in the middle of the ring something was coming up. What he watched come out of the lake was a neck. He said it was as thick as a telephone pole where it met the water and it tapered as it went up and it kept coming and his honest reaction in the moment was that it wasn't going to stop. It came up to about eight feet above the surface and at the top of it was a head, dark and wet and the same color as the neck which he said was a slate gray with a green cast where the light hit it. The head was shaped like a snake's wider than the neck and flattened on top and he could see an eye on the side of it, round and dark and about the size of a saucer with no white in it at all. The head turned toward the boat and held there and he said he could see water running off the underside of the jaw and a steady stream the way it runs off a dock piling

12:31when a wave drops away. He didn't move. He said the beer was still in his hand and he doesn't remember setting it down but when it was over the can was on the deck at his feet. The neck stayed up for what he counted as close to twenty seconds and then it bent and it didn't go straight down. It folded forward the head going first in an arc and the neck following in the same curve and as the head went under a long back came up behind where the neck had been, dark and ridged along the top and rolled over and went down after it with the water coming off it in a sheet. He said there was 15 or 20 feet of animal above the surface when the back rolled and that he had no idea how much was still under it. The last thing he saw was a swell moving away from the boat toward Vermont. Not awake so much as a hump of water that the surface never broke and it moved faster than his boat could have gone under power. He sat in the cockpit until it got too dark to see the shore and then he started the engine and went in. The next morning he told

13:33the man who ran the marina. The man said he'd heard three or four of those over the years from people who kept boats there but he'd never seen it himself. Ray kept the boat four more seasons and he always took someone else out with him just in case. Valcor is a wooded island a mile off the New York shore south of the city and the water between the island and the mainland is a channel that runs a hundred feet deep and more and that's where Kevin fishes. He runs down rigors which carry the bait down deep on a weighted cable and he watches a sonar screen the whole time to find the fish and the bottom. In June of 2011 he had a father and son from Albany aboard and it was mid-morning with a light chop and they were trolling south along the west side of the island in about 90 feet of water. Kevin has spent thousands of hours looking at a sonar screen on that lake and he knows what a school of smell looks like and a single lake trout and a sunken log and the bottom and the line where the warm water sits on top of the cold. He says he reads that screen the way you'd

14:39read a clock. Something came on to the screen at about 60 feet down that he couldn't read. It was a single solid return an arch which is the shape sonar draws when a fish passes under the boat except that a lake trout draws an arch about the size of your thumbnail on his screen. This one was as big as his hand. Stay tuned for more back woods big foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. It was below the school of bait he'd been following. Moving up through it and as it came up the bait scattered. The whole cloud of it breaking apart and spreading out on the screen the way a school breaks when a predator comes through. The sun saw it on the screen and asked what it was. Kevin told him he didn't know. The return kept rising from 60 feet to 40 to 20 over about a minute and the shape stayed solid the whole way and then it went off the top of the screen which meant it was above the transducer which meant it was at the surface. He looked up from the screen and about a hundred feet behind the boat right in the middle of his trolling spread.

15:44The lake humped up. It came up the way water comes up over a submarine in a movie. A broad smooth rise and then a back broke through it. He said it was dark brown closer to brown than black and that it looked leathery rather than smooth and that it was wider than the transum of his boat which is eight feet across. It rolled. He saw a low ridge running along the top of it and then it went down and as it went down both down rigor cables snapped hot and both rods slammed down into the holders and one of them broke off at the second guide. The father grabbed for the rod and Kevin yelled at him to leave it. Both cables went slack a second later. When he reeled up the down rigors both of the weights were gone and the cables had parted clean about 10 feet above where the weights should have been. In all his years on the lake he'd never lost a down rigor weight to anything but a snag on the bottom and they were nowhere near the bottom. When he looked back at the screen the return was there at 30 feet and going down and it went off the bottom of the screen and the

16:47bait drifted back into the water column behind it like nothing had happened. He took the clients in early and didn't charge them. On the dock the father asked him whether that had been champ and Kevin said he had no idea what it was and the father said well it was something and Kevin said yes it was definitely something. He replaced the weights in the rod and he still fishes the Valcore Channel. He says he's seen a big return on that screen twice more since then both times deep and both times it stayed deep and both times he reeled up his lines and moved. He's never told a client about it since. He says it's bad for business and it isn't something he can explain and he'd rather they caught a fish. Lorraine's is older and it's from a dock and the dock is the ferry landing at Essex where the boat runs across to Charlotte Vermont and has been running one way or another for 200 years. In the summer of 1976 she was 17 and working the season at a restaurant in

17:47the village and on her breaks she'd walk down to the landing and sit on the pilings and watch the ferry come and go. It was a weekday afternoon in July and the ferry had just pulled out and was about a quarter mile across and she was sitting with her back to the village looking at the wake when something came up out past it between the boat and the Vermont shore. It was a head and a length of neck and it came up straight rather than tilted like a periscope and she said it was four or five feet out of the water and maybe 300 yards off on the far side of the ferry's wake. It was dark and the head was small and rounded and the neck under it was thick and didn't taper much and at that distance she couldn't make out any features on the face. It stayed up for a few seconds then swung sideways and went down and where it went down the water turned over in a boil about the size of a car. The ferry kept going. Nobody aboard seemed to have seen it and she said the deckhand was looking at his lines. She went back up to the restaurant and told the cook

18:49who was from Essex and had lived there his whole life and the cook said yep and went back to the grill and she says that was the entire conversation and that it made her angrier than anything that he wouldn't even look up. That night she told her mother and her mother told her not to repeat it at school. She's 67 now and lives in Rochester and she comes back to Essex every few summers and goes down to the ferry landing and sits on the same pilings if nobody's on them and looks out past the wake. She says she doesn't expect to see it again she just liked to. The record on this lake goes back a long way and on the New York side it starts with a man who claimed to have measured the thing. Before there was a New York though there were the people who lived around the lake and they had a name for something in it. The Abanaki whose territory included the eastern shore and the north end are the ones most often cited and the name usually given is Tatos Kalk which gets translated as something like great serpent. The Mohawk on the western side are sometimes credited

19:53with a horned serpent tradition tied to the lake but when you go looking for where that claim comes from it tends to lead back to a modern book rather than to a Mohawk speaker. What I can say with some confidence is that both nations have serpent figures in their stories and that the modern name for the lake monster got attached to the Abanaki word by people writing about champ in the last 50 years. Whether the Abanaki themselves ever pointed at the lake and used that word for a particular animal is a question that has never truly been answered. Then there's Samuel de Champlena who put his name on the lake in 1609 and who according to nearly every tourist pamphlet and half the books on the subject saw the monster that same year but he didn't actually see a monster. What Champlena wrote about was a fish about five feet long and as thick as a man's thigh with a head like a pikes and long jaws full of teeth and he said the local people told him it ate birds. That's a garfish

20:55and anybody who's pulled one out of a river would recognize it. The story that Champlena saw a serpent seems to have been born in a magazine article in the 1970s and it's been copied from one book to the next ever since so the first year appearing to write about the lake saw a gar and the monster had to wait another 200 years for somebody to put it on paper. The man who did that was in Port Henry on the same bay where Glenn was fishing. In July of 1819 a man identified as Captain Crumb reported that he'd been on a scow in Bullwagabe when he saw a black creature about 200 yards off moving through the water at speed and the Platsburg Republic imprinted his account. He said it was 187 feet long the head was shaped like a seahorses and rose 15 feet out of the water. It had three teeth and eyes the color of appealed onion a white star on its forehead and a red belt around its neck and that a school of fish was following it. That account gets printed today as the first

21:57champ siding and it usually comes with a note that the author may have been having some fun at the newspapers expense because 187 feet is longer than the fairy and nobody has ever figured out what to do with the red belt but it's imprint so it must be true right? The next big cluster is 1873 and that's the year the lake got famous. In July of that year a crew working the railroad grade near Dresden down toward the south end on the New York side reported seeing the head of an enormous serpent come up out of the water close to shore and the white hall times ran it. The crew described ahead with a mouthful of teeth and a body they said was 30 or 40 feet long and they said it went under when they yelled at it. In the weeks after farmers around Dresden reported livestock missing near the water and in August the steamboat WB Eddie was reported to have struck something along that same stretch hard enough to throw passengers off their feet

22:57and nearly put the boat over and the captain said whatever it was rose up beside the hull and went under. That's when PT Barnum got into it. Barnum ran a notice offering $50,000 for the hide of the lake-shamplane serpent to be shown in his exhibition and nobody collected and in 1887 he offered 20,000 and nobody collected on that either. Barnum's money never produced a monster but it produced a lot of newspaper column and for a few summers the serpent was a regular item in papers from Albany down to New York City. In July of 1883 the sheriff of Clinton County, a man named Nathan Mooney reported a sighting of his own near Plattsburg. He said he was on the shore with a companion when he saw a water serpent about 50 yards out with 25 or 30 feet of it showing and its head and neck raised five feet above the water and he described around head and a mouth and said he could see the muscles working in the neck as it moved. Mooney was an elected

23:58law officer with a name to protect and his account ran under that name and it's still on the board. After that the sightings thin out for a while. There are reports through the 1890s and on into the 20th century. Most of them a paragraph in a local paper, a few humps, a wake, a farmer's wife on the shore and they don't stop so much as they stop making the wire. What brought the whole thing back was a photograph and the photograph was taken from the Vermont side. On the 5th of July, 1977 a woman named Sandra Monsey was on the shore near St. Albans Vermont with her family when something came up out of the lake about 150 feet out and she had an instant camera and she took one picture. It shows a dark shape, a hump with a net curving up out of it to a small head against gray water and a far shore. She put it in an album and didn't show it to anyone outside the family for years and by the time she did she said she'd lost track of exactly where

24:58on the shore she'd been standing. The negative is gone. What exists is the print. The print got out in 1981, ran in the New York Times and went to a university where an oceanographer named Paul LeBlanc at the University of British Columbia analyzed the wave patterns in it to estimate the size of the object and came back with a range of 16 to 56 feet. Other people looked at it later. In 2003 the investigators Joe Nichol and Benjamin Radford went to the lake and tried to find the spot where Mansie had stood and they argued the object was closer to shore than she'd thought and a good deal smaller than LeBlanc's range and their explanation was a tree trunk, a piece of driftwood with a root or a limb rising off it, turning in the current. Mansie said it wasn't. She said she watched it move and watched the head turn and she died in 2018 without changing her account. Joseph Zarsensky was a social studies teacher from Wilton up near Saratoga Springs and starting

26:01in the middle of the 1970s he began collecting champ reports the way a county historian collects deeds. He founded something he called the Lake Champlain Phenomena Investigation and ran it for the better part of two decades and he kept a card file and he went out on the lake with sonar and he interviewed witnesses and wrote their accounts down with dates and locations and compass bearings. In 1984 he published all of it in a book called Champ Beyond the Legend. He's the man whose phone number was on the sheet the Ranger-handed Denise. In 1981 he organized a seminar at Shellburn Vermont and got working scientists to come and sit through it which is more than most people in this field ever manage. He was also the one who pushed the politicians. In 1982 the Vermont House passed a resolution to protect champ from any willful act resulting in death, injury or harassment and New York's Senate followed in 1983 with a resolution of its own, encouraging the protection of the animal and the study of the lake. Neither state ever said what

27:04it was protecting and both resolutions are still on the books. The year after New York's resolution the lake produced its biggest crowd-siding when a tour boat called the Spirit of Ethan Allen was out with some 70 passengers in July of 1984 and the captain and a good number of them reported watching a creature with several humps 30 feet or more of it moving alongside the boat for several minutes before it went under. The accounts differ on how many humps there were anywhere from three to five and on the color and nobody aboard got a usable picture. After that the case went quiet for a while and then technology came for it. In 2003 a company called Fauna Communications working for a Discovery Channel program put hydrophones in the lake and recorded sounds they described as echolocation clicks. The kind of sound dolphins and some whales make and nothing that's supposed to live in a freshwater lake in the northeast and the researchers put their names to the recordings and nobody has ever identified what made the clicks. In 2005 two fishermen from Vermont shot several

28:10minutes of video of something moving in the water off Burlington. A dark shape with a wake and what some viewers took for a head and neck and it ran on network television with a naval expert saying he couldn't tell what it was. In 2009 a man walking at a park on the Burlington waterfront shot a short cell phone video of something crossing flat water at dawn that brings the road trip back to Port Henry and the board. Port Henry is an old iron town. The mines shut down in the 1970s and the village has been losing people since and somewhere in there the town decided that the thing in the bay was an asset. They put up the board with the sightings on it and they put a sign on the highway calling the village the home of champ and there's a green champ statue with a smile on it and on the first Saturday in August the village holds champ day with a parade and vendors and a lot of green foam hats and people come across from both sides of the lake for it. Over in Burlington the minor league ball club named itself the Lake Monsters and the Vermont side has a bigger tourist

29:12trade and gets more of the credit but the bay where the first sighting happened and the board with the names on it and the town that decided to stand behind the whole business with a sign on the road those are New York's. The list on that board runs from Captain Crumb's Scow up into the 1990s and depending on which years version of it you read the number of sightings is somewhere above 130. Nobody's ever done a serious audit of the names. Some of them are documented in newspapers and some of them are a name and a year that somebody wrote down at the village office and nothing more like Gleens. The last of the lake sightings comes from the far south end from South Bay which is a long narrow finger of water that runs down toward Whitehall between two ridges. Stay tuned for more back woods big foot stories we'll be back after these messages. It's shallow and weedy and at the bottom it's more marsh than lake. Paul was fishing it from a canoe in June of 1989 home from

30:13college at 22 and he'd put in at the bridge on the road out of Whitehall and paddled north along the west shore where the weed beds are. It was a still morning with a haze on it and he had one rod and a tackle box and was working a plastic worm along the edge of the weeds. The first thing he noticed was that the fish quit biting. He'd been getting a strike every few casts and then he wasn't and the water along the weed edge went dead with no baitfish flipping and nothing moving and he says he noticed it the way you'd notice a fan shutting off in another room. Then the weeds moved and it wasn't a patch of them. It was a line out toward the middle of the bay about a hundred feet from the canoe. A lane of weeds bending over and going flat like something was pushing through them just under the surface and the line of bent weeds was coming toward him. He sat still because he couldn't think of anything else to do and the canoe was sitting in about four feet of water. The line came to the edge of the weeds about 40 feet off his bow and stopped and the water there

31:16humped up and what came up out of the weeds was a back. It had strands of weed draped over it that slid off as it rose and it was as long as the canoe which was 16 feet and it was a dark olive green with bumps all over it. He said it wasn't smooth at all that it was knobbed like the skin of a pickle with a row of bigger knobs running down the center. The canoe rocked. There was no way if he could see but it rocked hard enough that he grabbed the gunnels and he thinks now that the thing had passed under him and that the back he was looking at was the middle of it and not the front. At the far end of the back toward the middle of the bay the water broke and a head came up about three feet broad and blunt and greenish with a mouth like a line running back along both sides and it turned toward the canoe and he saw two small dark eyes set high on the head and close together. It held there for a couple of seconds then dropped straight down and the back sank after it and the weeds stood back up and aligned going away from him toward the east shore.

32:20The fish came back about 10 minutes later and he caught two more before he made himself stop and paddle back to the bridge. He told his father that night. His father had grown up in Whitehall and worked for the town and he told Paul that everybody in Whitehall knew there was something in South Bay and that it wasn't the thing people in Whitehall talked about. Paul asked him what he meant by that and his father told him about August of 1976. Whitehall sits at the very bottom of Lake Champlain where the lake stops being a lake and becomes a canal running south toward the Hudson. It's a canal town and a railroad town and it has a claim to being the birthplace of the American Navy because Benedict Arnold built a fleet there in 1776 and for a long time that's what the sign on the way into town said. The newer sign has a Sasquatch on it. What happened in Whitehall in the last week of August 1976 is the most documented bigfoot event in the state of New York and it's documented mainly because the people who saw it were police officers

33:21and police officers write things down. I carried a badge for 16 years and I'll say that a patrol report filed at three in the morning by a man who'd rather not be filing it is a different kind of document than a story told at a bar, whatever you make of what's in it. It started on a back road that runs out of the village past open fields and a swampy stretch of woods toward the Vermont line. On the night of the 24th three young men in a car on that road reported seeing a large upright creature covered in hair, cross in front of them and go into a field. They said it was seven or eight feet tall and that they heard it scream. They drove into town and reported it to the Whitehall police and one of the three was the younger brother of an officer on the force so the police went out. On the night of the 25th a Whitehall officer named Brian Goslin, the older brother, was sitting in his patrol car on O'Bare Road with a state trooper in a second car nearby and his account, which he gave to the papers at the time and repeated in interviews for decades after.

34:25Is that around three in the morning something came out of the field and walked toward his car. He hit it with the spotlight. What he saw was a creature between seven and eight feet tall, upright and covered in dark hair with its arms held up in front of its face against the light, about 30 feet from the car. He had his revolver out and pointed at it and he didn't fire and the thing screamed. A sound he said he'd never heard from anything alive and turned and went back into the field. The trooper in the other car reported seeing it too from farther off and Goslin's father, who was also a Whitehall officer, was part of the search over the nights that followed and there were reports of tracks in the field and deciding by a group of residents on the road a few nights later and then it stopped. Goslin stayed on the force and told the story for the rest of his life to reporters and television crews and researchers and he told it the same way every time. He said he had no interest in being the big foot cop and that he'd rather have never seen it

35:27and that when he thinks back on it, what stays with him is the arms coming up in front of the face, the way a man would shield his eyes. The town took a while to come around to it. For years, Whitehall treated the whole thing the way small towns treat the thing they'd rather not be known for and then at some point that flipped. In 2004 the town board is reported to have passed a measure making it a violation to harm a big foot within the town limits and whether that was a formal ordinance or a resolution passed for the papers isn't clear. Every September now, Whitehall holds a Sasquatch calling festival where people get up in front of a crowd and do their best big foot screen and there are vendors and a parade of sorts and a wooden Sasquatch carving standing in the village and the back roads get a lot of slow moving traffic that weekend. New York has a lot of trees and people forget that. The Adirondack Park is six million acres, the largest protected area in the lower 48, bigger than Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon put together and most of it is

36:30woods that nobody walks through. The cat skills to the south are smaller and steeper and older and the hills along the Vermont border where Ubeir Road runs are the northern end of the Teconics, thick and swampy and empty. Out west there's the Tug Hill Plateau which gets more snow than anywhere east of the Rockies and the Allegheny Hills down along the Pennsylvania line and between the Hudson Valley and the Great Lakes there's a lot of country and the reports come out of all of it. The oldest set of reports after Whitehall comes from Columbia County in the Hudson Valley south of Albany from around the village of Kinderhook and they're mostly the work of one family. Bruce Hallenbeck grew up in Kinderhook and starting in the late 1970s, members of his family began reporting an upright hairy creature on and around their property on a wooded hill outside the village. His account which he's written up and given in interviews over the years includes a siding by his aunt in 1980 of a large dark figure on two legs crossing a road near the house

37:35along with siding by other relatives, footprints and screams, heard at night from the hill. The local paper picked it up and the thing got a name, the Kinderhook creature and Hallenbeck went on collecting reports from the county for decades and writing about them and he's the reason the Hudson Valley has a bigfoot literature at all. The Kinderhook reports never produced a photograph or a cast that got past the local paper. What they produced was a cluster, a run of siding from one hill over a few years which is the same shape as Whitehall and the same shape as most of the places this trip has stopped. The rest of what follows never made it into any paper. Terry was hunting deer in the woods east of Scroon Lake, up in the Adirondacks about 30 miles west of Port Henry. In the second week of November 1998, he was 44 and he'd hunted that area since his 20s. On state land, off a dirt road that runs back toward a smaller lake called Paradox, through a stretch of hard wood and hemlock that climbs onto a ridge and then falls away into a

38:38beaver meadow on the far side. Around 10 in the morning he came up onto the ridge and stopped at the top to look down into the meadow, which was about 300 yards below him and mostly dead grass around a beaver pond with a skim of ice on it and there was something at the pond. It was standing at the edge of the water with its back to him and it was black and big so he thought it was a bear. He put the rifle up and looked through the scope. The first thing he saw was that it was standing on two legs. It was upright with its arms down. The shoulders were rounded and hunched forward and the head sat low in front of them. He said it was taller than the altars it stood beside and those altars were over his head when he walked through that meadow. It was doing something with the ice. He watched it bend at the knees rather than the waist and put one hand down flat on the skim of ice at the edge of the pond and press and the ice broke and he heard the crack carry up the hill. It broke a piece off and lifted it and turned it over in its hand and dropped

39:40it in the water and then it did the same thing a foot farther along the edge and it kept it that for what he guessed was two minutes. The way a man might idly break ice with the toe of his boot without any reason for it. The hair on it was black and long, longer on the back and the backs of the arms and it hung and swung when the arm moved. The hands were dark and he could see fingers and the arm from the shoulder to the hand looked longer than the leg from the hip to the ground. He said the head was rounded on top with no neck he could see so that when the head moved the shoulders moved with it then it stood up straight all at once and turned and looked up the ridge. He was in the open on the ridge top wearing blaze orange because the law says you have to and he said the thing looked directly at the orange. He had the face in the scope for two or three seconds, dark skin, a wide flat nose, a brow that came out over the eyes like a shelf and a mouth that was just a line and he said the eyes were set far apart. It walked off along the

40:42edge of the pond away from him toward the far side of the meadow and into the hemlocks. From the moment it turned until it was gone was about 15 seconds. It never ran and never looked back. He stood on the ridge for a while after it was gone and then he went down. The grass at the edge of the pond was pushed flat where it had stood and the ice was broken along about 10 feet of shoreline with the pieces floating in the water and in the mud at the edge he found one print. He said it was almost twice as long as his boot and much wider with the toes sunk in deeper than the heel. The mud was still settling in the bottom of it when he got there. He measured it at 17 inches. He hunted the rest of that season on the other side of the road and he's hunted every year since and most years he goes back to that ridge and looks down at the meadow where the beaver pond has silted up and gone mostly to grass. His wife asked him that night why he didn't shoot it. He told her he'd had the crosshairs on it for the better part of two minutes and it never once

41:44crossed his mind. Joyce grew up on a dairy farm outside Fort Anne which is the next town south of Whitehall on the road toward Glens Falls and the farm backed up against the same hills along the Vermont line that the Whitehall creature came out of. Her sighting was in April of 1984 when she was 15. Her chore that spring was the evening milking which meant bringing the cows in from the back pasture at five and the back pasture ran up to a wood lot along a creek at the base of the hill. That evening the cows wouldn't come. They were bunched at the near end of the pasture by the gate, all 30 some of them, standing with their heads up and looking at the wood lot and they wouldn't move when she opened the gate and they wouldn't move when she walked out among them and slapped rumps. She'd seen them bunch for a thunderstorm and bunch for a dog but she'd never once seen them refuse the barn so she walked out into the pasture to see what they were looking at. The wood lot was about 150 yards off, a strip of maples and a few big pines along the creek

42:47and the leaves weren't out yet so she could see into it and there was something standing in the trees. It was behind a pine or beside it so that she could see one side of it, one shoulder and one arm and half of a head and the arm hung down beside the trunk with the hand below the lowest branch which she said was about five feet off the ground. She thought it was a man. There were camps up in those hills and her first thought was that somebody in a coat had come down out of them so she yelled at it and it stepped out from behind the pine. It was a reddish brown with hair over all of it and it stood taller than that lowest branch by the whole height of its head and shoulders which would put it close to eight feet. The shoulders were as wide as the pine trunk was thick and that was a pine she couldn't get her arms around. It stood facing her with its arms at its sides and she saw the face flat and dark like a man's face and an ape's face at the same time with a heavy brow and a wide mouth and what she noticed most was that it was looking at

43:50the cows and not at her. It's head turned and it looked along the line of them, bunched at the gate. Then it looked at her and she said her legs went out from under her, not a faint. She just sat down in the pasture and it turned and went back along the creek into the wood lot at a walk and she watched the top of it moving through the bear trees for a long way before the ground dropped toward the creek and she lost it. After that the cows came in. She got up and walked back to the gate and they followed her in the way they were supposed to and she milked and she didn't say anything to her father until they were done. He listened to her. After supper he went out with the flashlight and the shotgun and walked the creek and came back and said he hadn't seen anything and that the cows were fine and that she wasn't to go to the back pasture alone anymore and he moved the milking to the near pasture for the rest of the spring which meant more work for him and he never gave a reason. He did one other thing. About a week later she found him at the kitchen table with a road map of

44:53the county and he folded the map when she came in. Stay tuned for more back woods big foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The farm's gone now. Her brother sold it in the 90s and the back pasture is a hay field, somebody else cuts and Joyce lives in Glenn's Falls and she says she still can't drive past the Whitehall Sasquatch sign without thinking about the cows bunched at the gate and the creature that stepped out from behind the pine. Marcus was fishing the Allegheny River inside Allegheny State Park way down in the southwest corner of the state near the Pennsylvania line in May of 2007. The park is 60-some thousand acres of steep wooded hills, hemlock and hardwood, with a couple of lakes and a lot of creeks and the country around it in Caterauga County is about as empty as New York gets. Marcus was 33 and from Buffalo and he'd come down for the weekend to fish the streams in the park for trout and he'd rented a cabin. The morning had happened he'd driven to a trailhead and walked in

45:56about a mile along a creek to where it opened out into a stretch of pools with a gravel bar on the near side and he was waiting in hit boots. It was about seven and overcast and the creek was up from rain earlier in the week and running colored. He'd fished up two pools and was standing on the gravel bar at the third time on a fly when he heard a rock hit the water upstream. About 70 yards up where the creek came around a bend under a high bank with hemlocks on top. Something was squatting in the shallows on the far side, crouched on its heels with its arms down in the water and it's back to him. It was the size of a bear so he assumed that's what it was. So he started backing down the gravel bar to give it room. But then it stood up and it was much taller than any bear he'd ever seen. It stood the way a man stands out of a squat, straightening at the knees and then at the back and when it was upright its head was level with the roots hanging out of the high bank behind it which he later paced off and said were more than seven feet above the creek. It was dark brown and

47:01the hair was long and wet and hung off the arms and the belly and points with the water running out of it. It was holding something in one hand and it looked at whatever it was holding and then flung its side arm out into the middle of the creek and he saw it hit the water and figured it for a rock. Then it turned downstream and looked directly at him. The face was dark and hairless with heavy features and the mouth was open a little so that he could see the lower teeth which were flat rather than pointed and the eyes were set deep enough that he couldn't tell their color. It stood looking at him with its arms hanging and he said it was the stillest thing he'd ever seen. He counted to ten in his head because he didn't know what else to do and at ten it turned and walked up out of the creek onto the far bank through the shallows and he saw the legs thick and hairy and bent forward at the knee more than a man's would be and it climbed the bank which was steep using its hands on the roots and went over the top into the hemlocks. He could hear it in there for

48:02a minute. Brush moving, going away up the hill and then there was nothing but the creek. He didn't fish the third pool. He waited across and went up to where it had been squatting and the gravel in the shallows was turned over. A dozen rocks flipped and lying wet side up in a patch about six feet across with a small pile of broken crayfish shells on a rock at the edge. He looked for a print and found one in the sand at the base of the bank, deep with five toes, longer than his boot with his foot in it and the sand at the edges was still crumbling in. He had a phone with a camera and he took a picture of the print and it came out badly because of the light, a dark shape and dark sand and he showed it to a few people since and they've all told him it could be anything and he agrees with them. He drove back to the cabin and packed up and went home to Buffalo a day early and he told his brother who fishes with him and that fall the two of them went back down to the same creek and fished the same pools. He still fishes the park

49:04but he fishes it with his brother now instead of alone and when he comes to a band with a high bank on it he stops and looks before he wades around it and he says his brother has started doing the same thing. Angela's is the newest and it happened on a marked trail in the cat skills with her dog. It was October of 2015. She was 28 and living in Kingston and on weekends she hiked the state land west of the city. Mostly the lower peaks where the trails stay quiet and that Sunday she'd picked a trail up a mountain near Phoenicia that she'd done twice before. She had a shepherd mix named Bo on a leash and a pack on her back and she started up around eight in the morning with the leaves mostly down in the air cold and clear. The trail climbs through hard woods for a mile and a half and then levels off into a saddle between two summits and the saddle is thick with spruce and balsam and full of blowdown. Big trees lying on the ground with their root plate standing up ten feet high and she'd stop there for water both times before. Bo stopped first.

50:07About a hundred yards into the saddle he put his nose up and stood and then he turned around and pushed himself between her legs which he'd never done in his life and he was shaking. She thought bare and looked for one. There was a root plate about 60 feet off the trail, a big one. The roots of a blown down spruce standing on end with the dirt still packed in them and there was something standing beside it. At first the shape blended with the roots, dark on dark and what separated it was that it moved. It leaned out from behind the root plate the upper body only and looked at her. She said it would have been seven feet if it had been standing straight and it wasn't standing straight. It was leaning. The hair was a black brown and the head came to a point on top or maybe it was just its hair. She couldn't say which. She saw the face for a few seconds. It was gray scanned and wide across the cheekbones with the flat nose turned up enough that she could see the nostrils and the eyes were dark

51:12and looked wet. It leaned back behind the root plate. Then it leaned out again a little farther this time and she saw a hand come around the edge of the roots and take hold of one, a hand with dark fingers as long as her forearm gripping the root the way you'd grip a door frame and by then bow was pressing so hard against her legs that she had to widen her stance to stay up. She backed down the trail. She said she didn't turn around for a long way that she walked backward with the leash wrapped around her hand and that it leaned out one more time to watch her go before the trail bent and the saddle went out of sight. At the bend she turned and ran and bow ran ahead of her the whole mile and a half down and the leash tore the skin off her palm and she didn't notice until she was at the car. She sat in the car with the doors locked and looked at her phone and it said 920 so she'd been on the trail 80 minutes and she drove down to finisha and sat outside the general store for an hour before she drove home. On Monday she called the

52:14state park office and asked if there'd been a bear reported near that trail and the woman told her there were always bears in the cat skills. Angela said she'd seen something that stood up and the woman said oh and then said that if it was a nuisance bear she could file a report and Angela said never mind. She went back once in June of the next year with two friends and no dog and walked them up to the saddle and stood at the spot on the trail and pointed at the root plate. There was nothing behind it. One of her friends walked over and looked and said it was a good hiding spot and that was all anybody said about it. She's never taken bow back into the cat skills. He's 11 now and slow and she walks him on the rail trail along the river and she says when they drive past the trail head sign on the road out of finisha he still puts his head down. The last one is Gordon's and it comes from the Tug Hill Plateau which is the snowiest place in the eastern United States and one of the emptiness places in the state. Tug Hill is a high flat block

53:14of country between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks and it gets 200 inches of snow in an ordinary winter and 300 in a bad one and for that reason almost nobody lives on top of it. It's woods and swamp and old farms gone back to woods and the only people who work up there in winter are loggers and the crews that keep the snowmobile trails open. Gordon was logging it in February of 1994. He was 50 and he ran a skitter for an outfit cutting a hardwood lot on state land near the middle of the plateau and he'd worked the woods his whole life in Lewis County and up into the Adirondacks and one season in Maine and he says he'd seen every animal that lives in New York and most of them more than once. The lot was about two miles in from the nearest plowed road. On a road the crew had cut themselves and kept open with the skitters and they worked in daylight and left by four. On the day it happened Gordon stayed late to move a load of logs up to the landing so the truck could get it in the morning and by the time he was done it was dusk and he was alone with the snow

54:19about five feet deep off the road and a light snow coming down. He was walking back from the landing to his truck a quarter mile along the packed skitter road with a flashlight in that gray light that comes just before dark and something was standing in the road. It was about 150 feet ahead of him in the middle of the road facing him and he stopped and put the flashlight on it. He said his first thought was moose because moose had been coming back into that area and this thing was as big as a moose but then he saw that it was standing on two legs and he set out loud what the hell is that it was gray a gray like an old barn rather than brown or black and the hair on it was long and in the flashlight beam he could see snow caught in the hair on the shoulders and on top of the head. He said it was over eight feet tall the shoulders were as broad as the front of his truck and the arms hung to its knees. He had the face in the beam for about five seconds and he said it

55:19squinted. The eyes narrowed against the light and the brow came down over them and the mouth opened and he saw teeth big flat ones and a tongue. The face was black scanned and lined like an old man's and the hair on the head grew right down to the brow then it stepped off the road into the deep snow and this is the part that he's never understood. It stepped off the packed road into five feet of powder and didn't sink. It went into about the knee where he'd have gone into the waist and it walked away through snow that would have stopped a man in ten steps. He kept the flashlight on its back going away through the hard woods for a long time before the trees closed it off. He walked the rest of the way to his truck. He got in and started the engine and sat there with the heater running. In the morning he drove back in with the crew and he stopped the truck where it had stood and got out and the crew got out with him. The trail was there, a line of holes in the deep snow

56:19going away from the road into the hard woods spaced farther apart than any of the men could step and each hole went down about two feet and was the size of a snow shoe with the front end wider than the back. One of the crew, a young guy named Rob walked out along the holes for about 50 yards and came back and said he didn't want to go any farther and nobody made him. They cut that lot for two more weeks and nobody stayed late again and nobody said why. Gordon retired in 2003. He says he's told the story at the diner in Lowville a few times and it usually ends with somebody bringing up Moose and he doesn't argue with him. He says a Moose doesn't squint at a flashlight and it doesn't have hands and then he lets it go. That brings the road trip back around to the board in Port Henry. There's no board for Terry's meadow or Joyce's pasture or Gordon's Skitter Road and nobody in Fort Ann or Lowville ever painted a sign. What those people have is the same thing the lake people have which is the memory of a few seconds in daylight seeing something they can't

57:23explain. Port Henry decided a long time ago that was enough to put on a sign. The village wrote down the names in the years and stood the board up where the highway comes in and called itself the home of a thing it's never caught and every August it throws the thing a party. Whitehall at the other end of the lake has come around to the same idea with a wooden sask watch and a screaming contest. The lake sits between the two towns 120 miles of cold water with a state line down the middle and it doesn't care what anybody puts on a sign. The bays are still green and you still can't see into them and the channel off west port is still 400 feet down and every summer somebody on a dock or in a canoe or in a sailboat sees something come up and goes home until somebody they trust and that's usually as far as it goes. Next stop on the backwoods crypted road trip we head south into my home state of North Carolina until then keep your eyes on the tree line and always watch your