The Angry Old Man

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If you are a regular here, you have already met Dave in Kentucky. He was the researcher who brought us the possible Kentucky Wampus Cat footprint and his experiences surrounding that encounter. Through my dealings with him at that time I came to the point of view that, if ever there were someone I wanted to have a bigfoot experience, it would be Dave in Kentucky. Now, why would I have that thought you ask? Because he’s one of the most meticulous and conscientious observers and reporters that I know of in this field.

Most people can be counted on to retell their stories. With a little prompting, you can even get most of the details that you could ever possibly want from just about any witness. With Dave, you get lagniappe (which, if you don’t know, is cajun for, “a little extra”); actually, that word doesn’t do it justice. With Dave, you get a whole lot extra. Dave will not only tell you what he experienced in meticulous detail, with supporting photos, drawings, and reconstructions, he will also tell you about every story local to the area. And he’ll actually track down those witnesses to try to interview them, in order to put it all into proper perspective. He has spent hours at his keyboard with a graphics program, seeking to get his renderings correct to the last remembered detail. He has spent time in libraries and newspaper morgues looking for the old articles people tell him they remember from long ago. He’s a bigfoot researcher’s researcher.

So I would say, on the one hand, that I was very glad when he contacted me this week and told me he had seen a bigfoot. But then again, there’s a reason that I’ve titled this post “the angry old man.” Dave’s bigfoot encounter was not your average fleeting glimpse of a placid beast with little interest in getting to know you. As you’ll see, this guy seemed to have a bone to pick with Dave. And it seemed personal.

Dave got wind of a sighting very near his family farm, the site of the possible Wampus Cat print. I remember that he told me about it, and that he was going to go check out that location. And then I didn’t hear from him again until last week. During all that intervening time, Dave was processing, trying to come to terms with his experience. It was obviously traumatizing to him, and he still gets upset when he retells the story.

He had been going out to this area, beside a large lake that is used sparingly for recreational purposes, for three weekends, when he decided his family reunion would be a great opportunity to set out his camera trap.

“I thought I’d put this camera up along this trail just to see if I would catch anything at all going up and down,” he told me. “And I spent a good three or four hours down in that area just hanging out and watching. It was a very slow day. There was nobody really fishing. One boat, I saw go by. I saw a blue heron fly by. I saw a fish leaping out of the lake. I was surprised that no one was really down there doing anything. And it was getting on towards dark and I decided to go ahead and put up the game cam next to this trail, kind of off the trail, but anything that walked by of sufficient height would trip it off. I was just going to leave it up there overnight, and come back and collect it early in the morning.”

A simple plan, and one many a researcher has used himself. The next day, Dave was planning to get the camera before going to the reunion.

“So I got up early," he said. "I got up around 5:00 in the morning. Had breakfast, because my mom was up. She couldn’t sleep. And it was an extremely foggy day. We do get foggy days down there, but this was like the mother of all foggy mornings. And it was funny because she made this comment to me, ‘Oh, you really don’t want to go down there this morning!’” He stopped for a quiet laugh, and then continued, “‘Because something’s going to happen!’ And I was just like, well, I do have to get my camera. And by the time I left, it was well after 7:00.”

It takes Dave about a half an hour to get to the location, so it was around 7:30 when he arrived. The fog remained thick, and he told me it was unnerving to be there. But he was only going to go get his game cam, and it was daylight, even if there was a fog. What could go wrong?

Dave usually goes into the woods armed. “Mostly because we have coyote and there are reports of black bear returning to the area,” he said. But that morning he left his gun in its holster on the seat of his car. He went down the path to get his camera, and then started back to his car. A simple operation, in and out. No muss, no fuss.

“I was a little nervous of it being that early in the morning and being pretty foggy, but I hadn’t seen anything myself in this area,” he said. “So I’m halfway up the path, and I heard something move. There’s a gully that runs parallel to this path, and all down this bluff, but it’s just a big gully that no person would normally use. It’s about 50' over towards the right. But there was a sound of movement in that area. I couldn’t tell what it was, whether it was a deer or anything else. I stopped, heard that, then progressed on up the path, and as I got closer to the top and I heard voices. Someone was on the lake. On the other side of the bridge down this other area, I could hear at least two men talking. It sounded like they were in a boat, and they were moving up toward the lake area.”

He noted the men in the boat and continued to his car. “I got to the top, opened up the back of the car. It’s like a station wagon, it pops up. I put the game cam in the box and stepped back. And when I stepped back, I caught a smell. And it was sort of your classic, very pungent, wet dog sort of smell. And that.." he stopped here, letting his words trail off. "It certainly seemed to have an immediate effect on me.”

He remembers that moment, and how it struck him. “As much as you think about these things, as much as you prepare yourself to encounter something, when you smell something like that, there’s this feeling of, ‘oh, this is a cliché, this can’t really be what I think it is.’ And I stepped back further and I couldn’t smell it, but when I stepped back up towards the car it was very strong.” Dave glanced over in the direction the smell seemed to be coming from.

“The wind was coming from my right. And I looked off down the edge of the road, because the road is right there, and the whole wood line is there. Down around where this gully emerges up into this ditch, which runs along the road which runs to the bridge, I saw something stand up. It looked like it stood straight up.”

The movement grabbed Dave’s attention. Even though he was there to look for a mythical monster, he couldn’t believe what he saw. “At that distance, which was around.. less than 100’ I would say, I could see pretty clearly, and it looked like a bigfoot,” he said simply. “It looked to be quite tall and quite wide.”

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Later, Dave went back with a friend and got some measurements. “We measured it and what I got was 7’ 4”. Across the shoulders, [it was] close to 4’. Really wide. It narrowed down considerably toward the waist. It didn’t have a big belly of any kind. It seemed to have a strong, muscled torso, and it narrowed down considerably toward the waistline area. It was almost a big triangle where the body was at. But the arms were very very massive, and very very long.” He noted the face. “As far as the face, [it was] very black, a lot of grayish looking..” He trailed off, remembering. “Not a pointy head, rounded.. the only feature that I could really see standing out was the nose,” he said. “[It] was not an ape-like nose. It was much more a large flat human kind of nose. I could see that from where the sun was coming down and hitting it. As far as a mouth, when it was making the sounds, I could just see a darker spot in the darkness. It was kind of an 'O' shape at times, and it was moving. I could see it moving, and I couldn’t see any whites in its eyes.”

He took note of it’s unique hair pattern. “In the center part of its body it was very grayish. It was almost like a blue gray down the center of the body. And over towards the edges, like the arms and edges of the torso it seemed a more brown, reddish color. The face was really black. It was like a very black, black skin. I could not see too much of the hands, because this was a very foggy spot where it stood up and it was kind of at waist high level. But it just seemed to stand, like I said, rising straight up.”

Dave is bothered by the head, but he knows what he saw. “It’s head was so low.. that was the odd part. I was expecting a standard kind of head and shoulder range, but the head was so low, it kind of looked like it was coming out of the front of the chest. Everyone talks about no neck, but this is like it’s coming out of the front directly. It’s almost like it has no head, but then you look down and you see this.." Dave mulls his words carefully, wanting to put the head right, because it really doesn't add up. "This could have been because it had its head low. Because when it stood up and looked at me, it let loose this very loud cry. And it was very.. it wasn’t high pitched. It was a very deep, sort of bellowing noise.”

Dave emphasizes the impact it had on him, his voice shaking as he relives the experience. “And that’s the kind of sound people talk about, it just kind of hits you. It literally just hit me, with almost a physical force. You feel it in your chest. And it just sort of backed me up. And I’m looking at this thing, and it’s just standing there, and it let out this bellow.”

Dave has had an opportunity to see big cats at his local zoo, where he has a friend who works with the tigers. He thinks the effect of the bigfoot yell is similar to when a tiger roars. “When they turn loose with a sound like this it’s exactly the same kind of feeling. You really do feel it physically, and almost on a deeper level, something almost immediately telling you, this is a bad idea! I really shouldn’t be where I’m at.” He described for me what it looked like as the creature was vocalizing. “When it made these sounds, I could see it sort of shake. It wasn’t like it was trying to shake, it was putting so much energy into what it was doing.. It was like when someone yells at you. They kick forward and their arms twitch and their shoulders twitch. And when I saw it the couple of times when it was making these low, guttural grumblings, it really did seem to be just forcing that out, like it was yelling at me. And I understood. I’d been there for probably three weekends straight, and it was probably quite aware of my presence there.

This is the part that still upsets Dave. “And my reaction was just, I don’t know, it was a pure kind of raw animal kind of reaction to just back up and get away. And when I started to back up, it started to walk forward. And it was doing so pretty slowly and, I would say, pretty cautiously. But it was definitely walking towards me.” Dave noticed that there was a new smell, too. “Underneath the wet dog smell, there was another smell that was a much more pungent odor, that’s much more like.. decay is the closest thing I can come up with. It was a very intense, death-like, rotted flesh, rotted meat.” It was enough. Suddenly Dave was no longer interested in interacting with this angry old man. “I slammed the lid and went around to the other side of the car, and my immediate thought was that I just have to get in there and get out of here,” he told me. “I’ve got a video camera in the car, and I’m not even thinking about it. When I got around to the other side of the car, it made this other sound. And the sound it made was more like a speech, more like a guttural speech-like noise, low, really low and garbled.” He struggled to describe the word-like quality of the sounds. “There was this weird inflection. It definitely had this sort of inflected tone where there these wordlike sounds coming out, but it was coming out in a very forceful, kind of angry delivery. It was like a scolding kind of experience.”

Dave paused for a laugh here, but he was obviously deeply upset in reliving his experience. He stops and starts, choosing his words, trying to hit on the right combination to describe what he felt like. He knows I’m interested in the sounds and their effects, that I’ve got theories about this, and he thinks he felt them that day. “It really is like something is short circuiting. And I know, anytime I talk about it, when I get to the other side of the car, that’s the point that I just kind of have to stop for a minute. Because it’s the most vivid point. It’s not like when I saw it was the most vivid, this is the most vivid because, here I am, I’m just this cowering thing with this creature on the other side of a car, and I’m thinking.. I really just want to lie down here. I really just want to stop. And my rational mind is thinking, ‘Good God, if you do this now, this thing is going to come around this corner any moment now!’”

He reiterated his feeling of being scolded. “It’s funny how I felt. I felt almost ashamed to have been where I was when I was. It was almost this feeling of, you’re not supposed to be here, what are you doing here? Why are you bothering me? And whenever it would reach the low end of these sounds, it’s like I could feel it.” The impact of the sounds was having a physical effect on him. “I was almost doubling over..”

Dave stops here to compose himself. This is where he always has trouble when he tells the story. And there’s no doubt in my mind that his emotions are raw and real, testifying to the reality of his perceptions. “That’s the hard part, that’s hard to talk about,” he says. “I was almost, like, just doubling over, forward, and.. I was on the other side of the car when this happened. And I realized what I’m doing, I’m just sort of bending forward, almost looking at the ground,” He repeats his thoughts from that moment, reliving it, “And I’m, like, thinking, ‘My God, this thing is coming towards me, and if I keep doing this, it’s going to come around from behind the back of the car.’” He struggled to regain control of himself. After a short time, he won the struggle. “I kind of broke out of it and just got into the car, and I was relieved to see that it hadn’t really moved from where it was.”

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“At this point it was something like 50, 60’ away. I started the car, and because it wasn’t moving, I leaned forward and looked out my window, I could see it.. and as I started my car, it started to come forward again. And it was moving a little more quickly, and it had that kind of vigorous arm-swinging kind of walk, and was bringing it up towards the edge of the ditch.”

Dave’s voice gets emotional again as he remembers. “I’m completely irrational as far as I can describe at this point. I looked down, and I saw I had the gun in the car. I picked it up. I leaned forward and I pointed it out the window. I did not point it at the creature, because I’m not one of these people who believes you should go blasting away at something. I leaned out the window and I pointed the gun pretty much at the ground and I popped off a couple of shots. Basically so that it knew I had a weapon.. I just wanted it to stop.”

Dave got his car moving, but realized he needed more than he had if he wanted to tell this story right. “And that’s where I stopped and did the one sort of semi-sensible thing I did that morning. I stopped, I looked at it, I kind of registered where I was sitting in the seat. I looked at where it was, I looked at its height, and I measured it just by eye, as to where the top of its head was compared to the top of my window. I was trying to gauge roughly where it was and roughly what size it was in my window at this point. Like I said, it was a very sensible move, and it was the only thing I did that morning that was sensible.”

Unfortunately, Dave forgot he had the gun in his hand, and when he reached to put the car into drive, he discharged it into the center console. “[It] was deafening, because I’m inside basically a metal box,” he told me. He suffered hearing loss in his left ear for almost a month afterward.

When Dave got home, after attending to his car, which would require extensive repairs, he sat down and began drawing what he’d seen in a graphics program. He was fairly satisfied with his first effort, but something didn’t seem right to him.

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That’s when he started looking on the internet for other people’s pictures. He found one by Scott Davis, called the Old Man, that seemed to have the body right. “The physique and the stance in the Old Man was dead on, and I ended up taking what he did and taking the piece I did and just blending them together in [his computer program]. And got a very close approximation.” [See image at top of post.]

He was still processing his experience at this point, trying to get all the details down for the time when he would be able to tell the tale, after the rawness wore down a little.

I asked Dave about the after effects of his sighting. “I didn’t sleep well for a short time. It’s like my sleep pattern just got turned completely upside down. Part of it was I guess just the nature of the experience, part of it was my hearing was shot in my left ear. I didn’t burst my drum but I bruised it pretty bad. I had constant tintinitus for a while. It was just a sleep disruption for about a month.” Many witnesses report having nightmares, and I asked Dave about this. “I never have had bad nightmares. I’d tend to relive it in a conscious way. I go over it in my mind. I get to that part where I’m on the other side of the car and it’s just a raw feeling. I keep reliving it, and pondering how I acted. I’ve been thinking about [seeing bigfoot] for years, and you think you’re ready. But you think you are ready for it to happen at a distance! You’re not ready for this to happen within 50’ of you, especially where there is some obvious anger directed at you. That you are not ready for.” He pauses in thought for a moment, thinking of how seemed to lose his rational control. “ That’s part of what I kept coming back to. Like, my God, I just can’t believe I behaved the way I did.”

So did Dave experience infrasound? He thinks that was at least partly responsible for his experience. But he also suspects the smell he encountered played a role too. “There definitely was an undercurrent that makes you feel hot, makes you feel ill, makes you feel nervous. I assumed it was a pheromone. Being that my friend is a zookeeper, I have been in enclosures with gorillas, and there was a male gorilla that was kind of aggressive at the time, and yeah, you could smell it, and yeah, it did something to you. But it wasn’t the same kind of smell. With gorillas, it’s a very strong, distilled B.O. Very sour. But this was more like decay. A concentrated putrescence that smacks you in the face, and almost clings to you.”

I wondered what Dave thought about bigfoot since his experience. “I don’t look at bigfoot like it’s a pongid,” he says. “I think it’s human. This is a creature that has probably lived there for a long time. There’s probably a population that has been there for a long time.” He knows they are there now, and he plans to keep researching, to keep looking for it. As frightening as the experience was, he cannot give it up. “ I don’t really have an agenda as far as proving something exists or not, or proving it’s this or that. It’s fun to theorize.” He pauses again. This has been a very difficult thing for him to talk about, but there is determination in his voice. “Even though it was a very unnerving and odd experience, in a way the most surreal experience I’ve ever encountered..” He let the sentence trail off. Then he said with a chuckle, “You see something and you just kind of get the desire to maybe see it again.”