And these people that claim or carry themselves without actually claiming to be an expert, a bigfoot expert.

I mean, come on, what the hell is a bigfoot expert?

There is no such thing as an expert when it comes to bigfoot.

They know in an instant that you were in the woods.

There is no hiding from them, There is no being quiet or.

Sneaking up on them.

As soon as you walk in the woods, you walk.

In their front door, thinking that you are going to surprise them.

You're only kidding yourself.

We have got to get it out of our heads that anecdotal evidence is not evidence.

The best way, in my opinion, that we have to learn about these creatures right now is by listening to and talking to those that have experiperience them, those who have witnessed them and experienced them in their own environment.

We do what we do to try to bring away in as thin as topic, to be an open door for somebody to walk through, to be able to share their story, a listening ear, a support hold for those who have held their own encounters with that which is not supposed to exist.

We've got to open our eyes, people, there is something out there.

All of these thousands of people that have seen something.

They're not all aligned, they're not all crazy.

There are some very reputable, good people out there that have seen something.

All right, ma'am, how have you been.

You've been doing all right?

I've been fine.

Medical issues as always, but things are getting better for me.

I'm a little more mobile than I used to be because I've been doing a lot of aqua therapy.

But uh, you know, anybody out there who prays, please keep me in your prayers because I have some liver issues that need to be but let's not talk about that.

That's boring.

You got a pretty good tand going from the swimming.

Yeah, yeah, because I the last two days, I've had to do the therapy outside and because they closed the indoor pool for repairs.

And one of the medicines that I take is called lie Centerpril, which is for the heart, and anybody who takes like Centerparl for the heart can tell you that it makes you super sensitive to the sunlight.

And so two hours an hour a day outside and I look like I don't know how to put on mascare or not mascare blush because I have this straight across my face.

I can't admit that because my face hurts.

For once, my face is hurting me, not other people who figure figure.

You know what now on the E Factor, worst thing that happens to you this year, you're you're probably gonna do all right, you know?

I agree?

Sorry, Well, we're gonna talk about the Missouri Blue Man, which when when you and I were talking earlier, you had asked me if I had ever heard of that, and I said no, but I want to.

So that's what we're going to talk about tonight.

And if you have any other stories, well we'll definitely get to those, but I want to talk about the squatch out for a minute.

You will be leading us off on Friday night, the first night of the event, with our were stories campire stories.

Do you have anything in mind?

I mean, don't give it away if you don't want to, But have you been given any thought to what you want to talk about?

What kind of stories you might share?

Well, of course, because everybody always wants to hear them when I tell them, and because we're actually so close to Montgomery, Bell and Dixon, I thought I would start off by just sharing the Werewolf of Werewolf Spring story because everybody likes to hear that, but I as long as people don't mind that it's slightly fictionalized.

I have my own version of the story of the massacre, and I know that isn't Elijah going to be there.

Yes, I think that he'll probably be much better at sharing the reality of it.

But I thought on Friday night, I would give you a kind of a more dramatized, frightening version of the story.

And of course, because we're in Kentucky, there are a lot of weird animal things that go on, and there are a lot of stories in the LBL that people may not be aware of.

The couple under the bridge, there's the man, there's the torn up tents.

Of course, you know we I'm sure that I would love it.

In fact, if I don't think he will though, because I think he's been very ill.

But Martin Groves, Elijah's good friends with him, and so I would love it if Martin came and told his story.

Now, I asked him to be a speaker, and due to all of his he wanted to, but all of the health issues that you spoke of, but he just couldn't make it.

But I've never met him, and i'd like to hear some of his.

The well, I can certainly share his stories with you.

In fact, one of these many books I've got surrounding me is his is his first book.

He's since written a second one, and I haven't had a chance to pick it up yet, but I thought that I would share his encounters, probably to me, the one of the most harrowing encounters I've ever ever heard anybody tell.

And I'll tell you how effective it is when he tells it.

And of course when somebody else tells your story, it's never going to have that that gut wrenching, you know, feeling, So don't expect it to be anywhere as amazing as is.

But we had gone to Paris, Tennessee, to a conference two or three years ago, I guess now maybe four years ago, maybe my husband and I now, my husband is a complete and unbeliever.

He you know, he tolerates the fact that his wife fills the bedroom with oh did you see this?

I got this from you?

And then also my flag?

Where's my one?

With my flag?

It's too dark in here for me to see it, but my flag is up there too, And you know, he tolerates the fact that his wife fills the bedroom and the rest of the house with bigfoot paraphernalia, and and that I drag him two conferences halfway across the country.

And he accepts the fact that he's mister Neoma fan.

But he's a non believer, you know.

And his attitude is when I see one, I will believe.

And I'm fine with that.

He's he's not a naysayer.

He's just a non believer.

And there's a big difference, and I'm glad of that.

But we had gone to Paris, and we had sat through four or five different speakers, and this kind of grizzled looking man with a beard and you know, a big belly, and he gets up and he's and he starts telling a story.

And I watched my husband go from uh, I'm not going to fall asleep, I'm not going to fall asleep to Holy Cow.

And he's listened to Martin's entire presentation.

And we stayed a little longer, and we lived so close to that particular conference that we didn't stay the night, so we left early and drove home, and all the way home, Brad's telling me, you know that man saw something.

You can tell that man saw something and that's as close as he has ever come to being a believer because he knows that man saw something and it affected that man's life.

And that is how powerful his story is.

Because my husband has had to sit through a lot of speeches where a lot of people gave their encounter stories and they did not face him.

Martin Groves made him think.

And it's funny because it's about a year later, maybe a year and a half, because this was in the winter.

We were in Franklin, Kentucky, which is just down the road from me go to buy my groceries and stuff, and they had done presentation there was we had our own here in Kentucky.

We had our own Roswell incident there and the fighter pilot, oh gosh, of course I can't remember his name when I need it.

Basically, he chased he got into a dogfight in the air over Franklin, Kentucky with UFO, and he crash landed between Franklin and where I live.

It's the crash sites probably maybe four miles from my house.

And that year was the anniversary of that particular incident, and they had the Historical Society had done a whole presentation, they had this guy's grandson come down and receive a plaque and to talk about his grandfather's encounter, and and yeah, I saw that.

That's kind of why I stumbled, because it's like, yeah, I get that, rest it's exactly true.

And we were sitting there and after it was over, of course, because my husband, I thank you, Mantel or Martel?

Is it Martell or Mantel anyway, but we're sitting there and the presentations over him.

Because my husband and I are both history buffs and we're basically have the now the ability to wander aimlessly through the Historical Society, which has a really nice little museum.

We start walking around and all of a sudden, my husband comes over to me.

He says, hey, hey, He says, that guy over there he's talking about Bigfoot and he looks familiar.

Who is that?

And I went, oh, Martin Groves.

Turns out Martin oho lives about ten miles from me.

Oh wow, yeah, so small world, but yeah, he is really effective.

And if he says he's not going to be there, and I do know his stories or the big the most frightening one, I would love to share that with you.

On that Friday night so those are the things I'll probably be talking about.

Yeah, a lot of them are.

I mean, every one of them that you mentioned, I'm not familiar with.

So I can't wait to hear those.

And I was thinking tonight, you know, before you came on, before we came just the ability to tell stories.

I don't feel like I'm a great storyteller.

I don't feel like many people are, but you are certainly one of those that can tell a good story.

And you were talking about Martin being able to tell his that way, and it just makes me think about, you know, being younger and sitting with your grandpa, your grandma and just listening to them tell the stories from when they were a kid, and you're right there.

You know, they take you right there, and when you tell stories, That's what I feel like, and I just wish I had that ability.

I had three amazing storytellers in my childhood.

One was my great grandmother, one was my great uncle who was her youngest child, and one was my and that was on my mom's side, and then the third one was my dad's brother.

All of them were great storytellers.

And I'll tell you why, and I'll tell you what makes a great storyteller.

They were animated, they weren't afraid to when when there's a scream, they would scream.

They'd send me running out of my chair every single time.

And I want more than anything to carry that forward.

And I hope neither of my sons is really big on telling stories.

Although my oldest used to be really good.

He had a head injury in the military in Afghanistan and has a He's not as sharp as he used to be.

But I'm hoping that someday I'll have a grandchild or a great grandchild who will pick up the mantle and carry it on, because I can remember sitting for hours out of hours and hours out in the front yard with my great grandmother, snap and beans and listening to her stories my great uncle, her youngest son.

This is not I promise you we will get to the blue Man.

I promise I'll tell you that story.

But I want to tell you this story because to me, this is I this is such a profound story.

I will never forget hearing him tell me this.

It was a little girl.

And we have all of these legends in my family of people coming from the dead to warn of death, and this is one of those stories.

He my, My whole family's from Arkansas.

I'm the only my sister, my one brother, and I all born in Illinois.

Everybody else had the other brothers, my mom and dad, all my aunts and uncles.

Because it's all from Arkansas.

And my mom said, the families from what they call the East Bottoms and it's hot and swampy, and it just a miserable, miserable place to be in the summertime.

But and how am I And there's really many people were pour down there so poor that when the depression hit, people are like, what depression, It's normal here, It's that bad.

And so my great grandfather made his living making moonshine, and other families have hey, we have, other families have photo albums.

And my great grandmother literally had an album of all the times that my great grandfather had been arrested in tone and jail for getting up moved.

That was our family album.

Anyway.

So they lived way down in the Bottoms and this was nineteen thirty too, I think, and they didn't have a car.

They still hitch the mule to the wagon and went to town and my great grandma hitched the wagon up and she told my great uncle, we got to go to town and get supplies.

So he jumps on the way and with her and they start heading to town.

They're probably five miles outside of town.

They get to the point this split in the road and it goes around this big like swampy area and there's a trail that ran through that, and right in the middle of that is where my great grandfather still was.

And so my great uncle jumped off the wagon.

He said, I'm going to go through there, and I'm going to stop and talk to Paw and I'll meet you on the other side.

And Mos says okay, and she takes off in their wagon and he heads up the trail and about halfway up the trail to halfway between there and the still here comes my great grandfather down the path and my uncle Nolan said, O, Pa, I was coming to see you.

And he says, well, he says that I'm I'm glad you were, because I want you to know you need to take good care of your mom.

And my great uncle was weird, Okay, I'll do that, and he heads on up the because he's I got to go.

I got to catch up with mom in the wagon.

So Paul heads on back towards the house, and my uncle Nolan heads on up to the and he gets to the still and there's my great grandfather sitting under a tree dead and he'd been for hours.

My great uncle did not meet his living father on that trail.

And I love that story.

And I can see my great uncle telling that story to this day.

And they're all gone now.

Of course, you know, my Ma died in eighty five and my uncle Nolan died in the nineties.

But I'll never forget that.

And I can remember the shock.

I felled my chest when he said that to me, and I thought, I want to be able to do that to people.

I want to shock their hearts.

That gave me goose bumps.

Yeah, there's a lot of stories like that in my family, but people.

That didn't come here to why started with that one?

Though?

That that was good.

I like that.

Maybe when maybe next weekend, not this coming week and the weekend after right, Yeah, maybe I'll tell a couple more of those stories.

I think there's tell us about this blue Man in Missouri.

The blue Man is such an interesting story.

I'm guessing this blue Man must be a Bigfoot story.

It's a Southeast Missouri legend.

You can look up the places.

There's the I wrote this down because I never came North Fork.

There's Indian Ridge, and there's Spring Creek.

All of these our hills, and Spring Creek is an actual creek that runs.

But there's a Spring Creek Hill, and there's a Spring Creek Creek, and there's the North Ridge.

And I believe that this is one of those amazing wild man stories that were it to originate today, would probably just be considered a big Foot encounter.

It starts in eighteen sixty five.

Now you got this old mountain man.

His name's Old Blue Saw Collins.

I don't know why they called him Blue Saw, but that's what Maybe that was his name, Maybe his mom named him blue I don't know, but his name was Blue Saw Collins.

And he was the kind of loner who lived up in a cabin off on the hill by himself.

He made his way through life hunting and trapping.

He maybe had little garden, you never know, but he was a loner type of a guy and well known in the town at all.

And you know, not rude or anything, but definitely the kind of guy that lived up on the hill.

By himself, and he did.

It was late winter, early spring.

It was early enough in the spring that he wakes up this morning on this particular day and a nice light powder of snow had fallen on the ground.

Now, it's really too late in the year for him to count on anything that may have been in, you know, leftover from last year's crop, for whatever gardening he may have done.

He doesn't have any meat, you know, hanging in the smokehouse, and he needs to go out and he needs to do some hunting, and he figures this is the perfect day for it, because with this light powder of snow, he's going to have clear footprints.

And boy was he right.

He had an abundance of them.

He sees rabbit prints, and he sees keep.

Stay tuned for more, but the big footb board.

We'll be right.

Back, Prince.

And he sees raccoons and deer and all kinds of animals, and he's I'm just surrounded by Prince.

And he's standing there literally trying to make up his mind when he wants for supper.

You know, maybe I'll catch a rabbit and have rabbit stew or something.

And he happens to look over and he sees the most bizarre set of princes he's ever seen in his life.

It looks like a giant, barefooted man had just walked through the middle of all these prints.

But it was kind of such an odd shaped It wasn't really quite human, but it definitely wasn't animal, and it was massive, and he thought, I don't know what the heck that is, but I'm going to follow it and I'm going to find out.

So off he goes, following these tracks, and I mean he spends the whole day following these tracks.

He's up one hill and down the other, crossing creeks and back and forth, and he'd spent just about every once daylight when he finally catches up with the creature that made these tracks.

And when he looks up, he sees this thing that he says is nine feet tall if it's an inch, and it is covered in a thick mat of black, curly hair, and he doesn't quite know what to do.

It looks human.

He's thinking it's a man, but it's the biggest man he's ever seen.

And this man is running around barefooted, except he's just got the curiest body he's ever seen.

But he's wearing a loincloth, and he just can't quite make out what he's looking at.

Should he shoot it or should he not?

Well about that time, this thing sees him and eyes up on the ridge and he's down at the bottom of the hill and there's these big old rocks, and it just takes one right down the hill, running rolling right towards him, and he has to jump to get out of the way.

And before he can even get back on his feet from jumping out of the way of that one, here comes another one.

And he finally gets his gun up and he tries to aim it and shoot at the thing, and it picks up a boulder, a big boulder, like the size of a beach ball.

We're not talking.

It didn't pick up a little rock, you know, and like that, we're talking something the size of a beach ball, raises it up over his head and throws it at blue salt.

He turns around and he starts running, and he did not stop running till he got all the way into town.

And I mean he's out of breath.

It's after dark, he's sweating, he's had you know.

It's the most harrowing experience of his life, and he goes running into the locals wherever everybody hangs out, and he is just huffing and puffing, and he says, you're not gonna believe what just happened to me, and he relates the story.

He talks about seeing these bizarre footprints, and he follows this thing and he gets to this thing and it's huge and it looks like a man, but it's covered in hair, and it's got a loincloth on, and it's throwing bold.

It's strong enough he can throw a boulder the size of a beach wall, and he wouldn't call it a beach ball, but you know, bigger twice the size of a cannon ball at him.

And of course this gets all of the town folk riled up, and so the men they decide they're gonna go out.

They're gonna get a posse together, and they're gonna go out and they're gonna hunt this thing down.

So they all go to bed that night, they all get up before daylight the very next morning, and they go out and they, you know, they do the same thing up the hills and down the hills, and then you know, across the hollows and the creeks, a couple of times they thought they got a glimpse at him, but they never got close to him.

They certainly never got close enough to pull a shot off, but they did think that they happen to get a glimpse at him.

So disappointed, they I'll go back to town.

But from that point forward, it seemed like every few days someone had come running into town.

Farmer had come in and say, man, I heard something screaming in my back pasture, and I don't know what it was, but it certainly wasn't anything I've ever heard before.

Kids had come home running home from school and they'd say, you know, something chased us all the way from the schoolhouse to the house, and you know, it was scary, and moms were keeping their kids home from school, and dads were not leaving the house without their guns, and life was really scary.

And that went on for a while until it just stopped and there was nothing for nine years, not a thing, No one heard, a single had a single story until one day in eighteen seventy four, there was a farmer and he had to be out looking and his pasture he'd lost to heifer, and it was his prize heifer and he'd been out looking.

He'd searched high and low because he just was sick over losing this effert and he was hoping he'd find or wandered off somewhere, but of course he didn't.

However, what he did find, and it was the craziest thing.

He found a cave.

And so he came back to town and he said, look, I've found this cave that i've never seen before, and I think something's been living in there.

So a group of men grather their guns and they head out to this cave and there's nothing in the cave, nothing living at that moment, but they see over in the corner there's a bed of sticks and leaves where something has been sleeping, and scattered all over the floor of that cave are animal bones where something's been eaten on.

And so they figured this must be where the blue Man lives.

So again, there were the occasional between then and nineteen eleven was the next real serious incident.

But between then there was the occasional farmer who would come and say something was screaming in my back collar.

There was, you know, the farmer's wife who said something has been robbing my garden, or there was once a little girl who said, well, you know, something stood on the edge of the road and it watched me while I played in the backyard.

And school kids complained about being chased home by the thing until nineteen eleven when this farmer was out there looking and he was trying to find that heifer, and instead of finding the heifer, he came across he was crossing a creek and there was the Blue Man standing in the middle of the creek, fish and fish with its bare hands.

Now, of course he went back and he grabbed everybody and he said, y'all, you got to come up here, and you got to see what this thing is, because you know it's And so again they formed another posse, and they went out looking for the thing, and they did everything they could find it, but they they couldn't find it.

They no matter how hard they looked, they could not find this this thing that everybody kept saying.

Now, I want to I want to stop right here, and I want to say this.

There are a lot of reasons why they think they called it blue the Blue Man.

A lot of people say they called it the blue Man because of the possibility that this thing happened to be uh.

It was the first person who saw it was Blue Collins.

A lot of people say, well, they named it the blue Man after Blue Saw.

You know, it's an association thing, blue Man, Blue Saw, and a lot of people say.

Other people say, and I believe this more than the other.

This thing's covered in a thick mat of curly black hair.

Now in the direct sunlight.

Some people say that when the sun shone on that black hair, it was so black that it shone blue.

And my dad was one of the few people I ever knew whose hair was that black.

He had black hair so black that if he stood in the sunlight, it looked like it had a blue cast to it.

And I think that might have been why they called the Blue Man the blue Man.

Now there is I don't know if anybody's ever heard of the Blue Fugate family.

Are you familiar with them?

No, So they're a family in Kentucky, and I believe in eastern Kentucky.

And if you look them up on the internet you'll find pictures of and they are smurf blue.

Not so much today because today they've kind of come down out of the mountains and they've married.

But what happened was this family was so isolated up in the hills.

What were their names again, real quick, Yama.

The Fewgate family, Fugate, the Fewgate family.

They call them the Blue few Gates of Kentucky.

And they were so isolated up in the hills of Kentucky that they started inbreeding, and the inbreeding caused the recessive gene to become prominent, and that recessive gene turned and made their skin all their skin blue.

And it wasn't until probably the nineteen maybe the nineteen fifties, I don't know, I can't get the year exactly right that they started not being so isolated and meeting people and intermarrying.

That that gene has finally kind of shut down and there aren't so many Blue few Gates.

There might not be any Blue few Gates left living.

I think the oldest one may have died about twenty or thirty years ago.

But you can look them up on the internet there.

I'm doing that right now, and they are blue.

Yeah, smurf blue.

So I wonder.

And the only thing that makes me think that this may not be true is the fact that even Blue Saw Collins said that this guy was nine feet tall.

But I wondered it couldn't help, but wonder if maybe this was a few gate that had just migrated west.

But no, he was covered in hair, and none of the few gates look particularly Harry.

Well.

You know.

Also, now, Moe, what while you're saying that, I was thinking, are you familiar with guns at all?

You know?

Because you call the gun you call you either got stainlus or blue, and blue is black.

It's the color of black, but it's a blue gun.

They call it blued.

Yeah.

My dad had a twenty two browning, Belgian browning, and my brother borrowed it from him and kind of let it.

He didn't take good care of it.

And I went and got the gun, a Belgian browning.

They're expensive and a beautiful.

Kind of walnut stock on it.

And my brother cracked the stock, but he let the barrel rust and I took that whole thing apart, cleaned it, did everything I could.

I had to take it and get the whole barrel reblued, and I brought it as close to as I could back to my dad had to take the stock and have he had a guy that he knew rebuild the stock.

The part that my brother cracked off and you couldn't tell, But my dad knew that part of that was the original Belgian walnut stock, and part of it was the remake that the guy made for him.

But yeah, I know what bluing is on a cut.

That's kind of what I thought about when you called him the blue Man.

I mean, blue is.

Black, that's and that was like, that was my dad's hair.

My dad had gun metal blue hair when he got older and it started to turn gray anyway, but yeah, it was black, it was, And that's that's what I mean.

And I think that that's where a lot of people get the blue Man too, is I think that's a more logical explanation, is that that blue machine that truly black hair has.

Yeah, and.

Something else I took real quick from that story was him saying that he was wearing a loin cloth.

And that's the only thing that you they really differs from today's reports.

But you got to think this was eighteen sixty five and they probably didn't want to sound, you know, batshit crazy, so he just embellished and said, yeah, he was wearing a loincloth instead of saying this thing was butt naked.

I will also say, however, that in the eighteen seventy four reports always reported with the loincloth, and then I've got I'm going to skip forward to nineteen thirty eight because this is my favorite story about the Blue Man, and it involves two brothers, the Bump Brothers.

Now, I don't know if the Bump brothers are I don't know their first names, but I can imagine they must have been a lot like my family.

The backwoods people bottom landers, as my great uncle would have called us.

Swappers is what a lot of other people would have said.

But they're backwoods people living off by themselves.

They live off the land.

They hunt, they fish, they you know what they what's in their freezer is probably what they killed last winter.

And they were real big on coon hunting.

They had real nice you know, people went to these guys to get by the coon dogs because these these guys were really good at training their dogs.

And just December, so they could have been hunting there, but they didn't have guns with them for whatever reason.

So I'm going to assume that they were just out training their coon dogs and they're raccoon dogs, because if you get in trouble saying that second half of that word without the first half these days.

But you know what I mean.

Anyway, so they're out and they happened.

They've got the dogs going, and you know anybody knows anything about coon dogs.

They've got their bark that they do as they're running through the woods.

And then when they treat something, they've got a bay and it's very different.

You can tell the minute they've treat something and they hear the dogs and right away they think, well that they're band but it doesn't quite sound you know, it's different.

It's like they don't know what they got up that tree.

So they run through the woods and they get to the dogs and they look up the tree and what they saw sitting up in that tree was the sorriest sight of a man they'd ever laid eyes on in their life.

He wasn't wearing nothing but a loincloth.

He's covered in blue fur, didn't have nothing on his feet or hands.

In its middle of winter.

He should have been frozed half to death, but he's just sitting there.

Well, the one brother, he decides he's going to run back to house and he's gonna get a gun because he just doesn't know about the sky and the other brother.

He stands under the tree and he's like, why don't you come down out of that tree?

And the thing won't answer.

He said, you know, come on down.

I got some food here.

Why don't you come down here and eat?

And he said, all the guy did was growl at me.

And he says, I'm not kidding you.

I mean, We're not gonna hurt you.

I'm gonna put the dogs away.

Come down out of that tree, get warm, We'll take you back to the house, will make you a nice supper, we'll put you in a nice warm bed.

But you have to come down out of that green and all the tree, and all that guy did was growl and show his teeth.

Now, the one brother, he is a little taken back by that rudeness.

So the other brother comes and you know, he tries to get him down out of the tree, and he won't come down.

So they give up and they finally went back to the house.

Now, a lot of people around town asked, you know, you had the blue man treat, why didn't you shoot him?

Why didn't you come into town and get one of us?

And we had to come back out and we'd have captured and we'd have had it done.

And the two brothers said, will Town's a long way from our house, and we ain't got no car to drive into town or truck or anything.

And the mules were put up for the night.

We didn't want to walk.

We figured, if he's there in the morning, we'd let you know.

But he wasn't, so we never thought gave it another thought, which is why their story never got told for two or three months after they treated.

But that was as close as anybody ever came to catch in the Blue Man.

Now there is one more story, and it takes place in Arkansas.

Now where this happens in Missouri is down not too far from Poplar Bluff.

If anybody knows where Poplar Bluff is, that's the not too far from the boot heel in the southeast corner.

The story I'm going to tell you actually took place in northwest Arkansas and War Eagle, and War Eagle's one of my favorite places to go in Arkansas.

If anybody's ever been to Arkansas, they need to go to War Eagle if they're ever in that part, because there's a War Eagle mill there and go get some beans at War Eagle Mill because they're good, and you can the mill still it's a gristmill, and you can get you know, brown corn and flour and stuff there too.

But and it's beautiful.

It's a beautiful They've they've got the restaurant, they've got the mill.

It's it's and they've got the bridge that you that leads across war Eagle Creek.

It's just absolutely beautiful.

And but there's a story there that happened in nineteen sixty six.

The field was called, I believe I wrote it down Peter Bottoms is what it was called.

And there were these two brothers and they decided that they were out riding their horses and they were headed down.

They were headed down the a road towards Peter Bottom, which is there by war Eagle and not too far from the mill.

And there was farmer and he was coming up the road from him, and he said, don't you boys go down there in that field.

There's there's a monster down there in that field.

You need to stay away from there.

Can you tell two teenage boys there's monster in a field?

To see what they do?

And that's exactly it.

They headed straight down that field, but they got about halfway down the hill, and their horses started acting up so bad they had to get off and walk them otherwise they're going to get thrown by them.

And both horses were really having a fit, so they get they kind of get the horses down the field, but they get to the edge of the field and they finally gave up and just tied them off because they you know, and left them there.

And they start walking across the field and they happen to notice a big pile of fur.

It looks like a dead animal out there, and they're getting closer and they're, you know, discussing what they think that they're about to come up on.

And this thing stands up and it is nine feet tall and it raises its hands and it growls at them.

And the boys turned around and they they ran back and they grabbed their horses, and the horses, of course, are already throwing fits.

And they barely get on the horses, and they can't even control the horses.

They just take off running and all they can do is hang on.

Stay tuned for more, but the big foot report, We'll be right back.

This scared the boys so bad that one wet his pants and both of the boys had to be taken to the hospital and treated for shock.

Now a lot of people say that that was the Blue Man.

I think that's a little too far away for it to ben the Blue Man.

But the thing that's interesting and what ties that together is the fact that there is a legend of back way back when Spain or maybe France still owned that hole before the Louisiana purchase.

And I don't know how far back this goes, so I couldn't tell you which one owned it at the time, but at one time or another both have owned that area.

And there was a trapper who was married to a Spanish wife, and she was as beautiful woman as you ever saw, with glossy black hair and flashing blue eyes.

But she had the worst temper any person has ever seen.

And after about two or three weeks of hiking on up into that territory and running traps in that territory with his wife, who never ever shut her mouth, he got fed up and traded her for an Indian woman, and that made her go crazy.

And they say that she married the Native American man and she had a kid buy him, but she took that kid off and she went into the wilderness and she raised her children alone in the wilderness, and they say some of her children aren't all human, and they say that that's where the blue men in some of those north Northern Arkansaw bigfoot encounters originate with that Spanish woman with the bad temper.

Yeah, I'd just like to throw that in at the end, because I can see my husband trading me off.

You know what, every every story like that, there's at least a little grain of truth, you know.

And let me just pull this up here.

I found while you were telling the story.

Blue fugate family right there.

Weird it's that.

That's a recessive gene caused by inbreeding.

Mm hmm.

So wow, I've never heard that before.

Yeah, sounds like, yeah.

I got the big feet and bading.

So that that's the story of the Blue Man.

And I think it's really an interesting one, and I think it's a shame that it doesn't get told more often.

Yeah, yeah, I had never ever heard of it before.

We've got some time, if you know, if you got another shorter one that you want to share, well.

Let me think kind of like to that whole area.

You know, I spent a great deal in my childhood and most of the Arkansas that I know is everything north of Little Rock.

My mom's side of the family was the northeast, and my dad's side of the family was the northwest.

Northwest part of Arkansas is far more beautiful, I think, But I'm a lot more familiar with the northeast because my when I was a teenager, my I'd go down with my grandma and I'd stay at my uncle's house all summer with my cousin who's my age, and so I got to spend a lot more time in that part of Arkansas and that whole I mean, they have such really cool I can remember my great uncle, the one that told all the great stories.

He used to.

He'd go out and and he'd cut a cypress knee.

Have you ever seen a cypress knee?

So it's it's a.

Part of the cypress route that comes up out of the water, and it comes up and it just looks like a little almost like a stalagmite.

And he'd cut him off and he'd bring it back to the house.

That's so stupid, he tell me, Now, you stripped that down and boil it and sand and and we'll dry it out and and uh, and we'll stand it and stain it, and then we'll sell it, and I give you the for it.

Well, i'd boil it and strip it down, and but you got to let that darn thing sit in the sun for months and dry out.

And so by the time that was done, all he had to do was a little light standing and staining, and then he'd sell it and make all the money.

And I did all the hard work.

But I can remember him taking me down in that in those backwaters on the Black River and the Strawberry River, and and and we'd be going on the boat and we'd hear something scream and he'd, you know, he'd stop and he'd sit for a minute and he'd listen.

And then if he didn't hear something, he didn't, you know, if he heard something that made him uncomfortable, he would never tell me why, But he'd say the same the day to go looking for cyprusnies.

And I've seen him.

He ran troutlines as far as I knew of my whole life.

But I've seen him turn around and not run his trout lines because something in the woods didn't feel right to him.

And I're on that river, or he'd hear something or you know, or smell something and he'd turn around and he'd go back, and I always wondered.

So we all know my story, and I don't want to tell it cause I'm tired of telling it.

But one of the things that I can remember as a kid up in Illinois was my grandmother used to tell me all the time to stay away from that end of the island where I eventually had my Yeah, I bet they do, a bet every gift shop in Arkansas does too.

But when when I was growing up, my grandma always told me to stay away from that end of the island.

There's a wild man that lived over there.

And I can remember my uncle telling me that there was wildman down in those swamps.

You know, you had to be careful of the wild man.

And it wasn't until I was in my forties that somebody pointed out to me that wild man was Arkansas for Bigfoot.

I didn't know any better.

I literally was like, Oh, They've been telling me all those years that there was bigfoot down there, but I didn't know because I'd never I was a Yank Yes, born raised in ottais not with I was lucky.

I knew what those people were saying anything about anything, because their accents were so thick, and they never never finished a word.

You know.

My uncle said, way, I'm I'm gonna go, and it could go on, what what what, I'm gonna go up Yon?

Yeah, yeah, what yonder?

He just kind of dribble off with his words, and so, yeah, I didn't know that that was.

But I can remember my uncle he'd stopped the boat the Saint Today for it, and he turned around and we go back home.

Yeah.

Wow, Well, so when did you move from Arkansas?

I never lived in Arkansas.

I lived in Illinois.

My mom and dad left Arkansas nineteen fifty one, gotcha, But because they had all of my grandma, Well that's not true.

My mom's parents moved to Illinois nineteen fifty.

What it was is, back then all of the jobs were in the factories up in Illinois, and so everybody moved up there to get a job working for John Deere or Caterpillar or Harvester International Harvester, and my grandparents moved up there.

My grandfather got a job working at the Rock Island Arsenal, but he fell off the bridge and broke his back and so he could never work again.

But he was a mobile still.

I mean, he didn't become paralyzed, but he was so damnaged.

He always walked crippled up, and he was always in a lot of pain.

And my dad went up there and he became an iron worker, and that's because he had all the skills.

If you want to be an iron worker and you happen to have been in the navy, odds are you're going to know everything you need to know to become an iron worker from what you learn in the navy.

But oh, all of my uncles and great aunts or great uncles, and they all went to work in the shops, didn't And that's what they would actually go down to Arkansas and they would recruit people, recruit people to go up there and work.

So they didn't have enough people to fill those jobs.

And my dad always said that Arkansas was the land of opportunity because everybody had the opportunity to leave, Alma said, and the only ones that left were the ones that were worth their salt.

The rest stayed in Arkansas.

And I don't believe that because I think a lot of my relatives at stayed in Arkansas worked a lot harder life than my mom and Dad did because they had to get there living out of the soil and out of the bottoms.

But we would go down.

I mean, that's where we would go for Christmas and Thanksgiving and then when not every time, because by the time I was born, we really didn't go for the holidays so much.

But I would go down with my grandmother in the summertime, and I would stay all summer with my cousin who was my age, and we'd get up every morning real early.

I know, this is nothing to do with Bigfoot, but we get up real early in the morning to get all of our chores done on the farm so that we could go swimming in the afternoon.

Because this, boy, once it got to a certain time of day, it turned out to be one hundred and twenty degrees down there that those sand roads wuld burn your feet.

And there's the there was a spring that was ice cold water.

Boy, we couldn't wait to get to that spring about two o'clock in the afternoon.

That sounds a lot like today, you know.

I get everything done as early as you can because it gets hot as hell in the afternoon.

And back then they just I don't here's I'm sixty years old, and I we got air conditioning in our house in Illinois nineteen seventy three, Central Air, and we were the only members of my mom and dad's family that had central Air for probably fifteen years.

And when I.

Moved out and got married, I never lived in a house with air conditioning again until two thousand and twelve.

And I can't imagine living in a house without air conditioning.

I don't know how y'all are still alive.

Well.

What we would do and is my I loved going to Arkansas, but I didn't care to stay with my uncle as much as I did my great aunt and my great uncle.

Because.

What they would do is there was a big, long back sun porch on the back of their house, and my aunt had two big fans, one at each end, and we'd get in the shower right before we went to bed with our slips on.

We always slept in and we wore dresses most of the time, so we had white slips and that were under our dress, and we'd go to we'd get in the shower with those on, and then we lay on the bed under those fans in our slips, and that would keep you cool for about an hour.

Hopefully you fall asleep before you before you got too hot.

I expect you to say about half the night.

No, you know how to try and fall asleep before you got too hot, because then maybe you can sleep through some of it.

But a lot of times you'd wake up and you'd still be wet.

But it wouldn't be the wet of the shower, would be the wet of sweat.

You know.

I always leave a perfect imprint on the bed.

I didn't have to worry about menopause.

I was going through that at fifteen.

God, oh, no, you're good.

I never know what you're gonna get when you come on.

I love it.

Yeah, you don't always get big foot stories, but you don't get something.

I get a menopause story or two.

I knew all about menopause by the time I got there because I had lived it as a teenager.

All right, Well, believe it or not, we are at the hour mark.

So it's been awesome, always is, and can't I say it all the time.

I'll just say it again.

I cannot wait until the squatch out this year.

And when you get up there, the thing that you do, your little event is one of my favorites, even though you've only done it once before.

You know, you were sick last year.

I couldn't make it last year, so this is the second time.

But I just remember that first time and now awesome it was.

And I'm glad that a lot more people are going to get to experience it this year because you do a really good job.

I love telling stories as you can tell.

Yeah, all right, and I will hit you up for the thing that you offered in the private chat.

I'm sure I will take you up on that, and I know we'll talk again soon.

But thank you again for coming on man, thank you.

For having me, and I will see you again sometimes.

Ye yes, ma'am.

Enjoy the rest of your evening.

All right, bye everybody, Bye.

Hey, everybody, thank you so much for checking out this episode of The Bigfoot Report.

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We'll talk again soon.

Through the woods, the pine trees sway, shadows long at end of day, Bigfoots call on the whispering breeze.

Secrets kept by an shoot trees, dog man house bring echoes in the silent tracks.

We fine, but answers none.

A hunt for truth, that's just the gun.

We're searching past the fire light.

Four creatures hidden our sight in the forest heart where shadows lay seeking see Chritsen the twilight, through the fall a shape did gly skin walker eyes wide legends of Oh we chase to night in the dark, our lanterns bright by the Creek, queer water spill whispers wry, the windsow chill, fullest, deep, and tails on top.

In this land the myths of We're searching past the fire light full creatures hidden out of sight, in the forest heart, where shadows lay, seeking seacrets.

In the twilight break, h