Paranormal Story Archives
February 2001
– Page 28
I Saw
Bigfoot
by Kristian W.
I saw a Bigfoot when I was 17 years old. That would have been in 1987 or 1988. I've told very few people about it because they always look at me like I'm crazy, but I know what I saw. I'm an intelligent person and I have no reason to lie about something like this. It was in the Allegheny state park of Pennsylvania. My friend's father had a sailboat and my friend Chuck and I would go down there on a regular basis to camp. We would launch from the New York state side from an area called Kinzua, then sail to a bay called Willow Bay, nicknamed "Sandy Beach" because it was the only bay in the entire Allegany reservoir that had nice sand on the beach. This particular weekend, though, we went to Johnny Cake, which I believe was further south into Pennsylvania so we could camp. Usually, we didn't camp too far from the boat, but this particular weekend we hiked all day long up into the woods. I suspect it was probably a few miles. Chuck and I always wanted to camp all night without his brother Daniel or his father along. We were "coming of age" and wanted to camp all by ourselves to prove to ourselves we were capable men and not boys any longer. Chuck's parent's finally agreed. They camped in the boat along the shore while we spent the day hiking into the woods.
It was a little bit after nightfall. Maybe an hour. We had been talking by the campfire and decided to go into our two-man mountain tent to play cards. The tent was the thick canvas material like Army tents are made out of (I know because I joined the Army a year later - I was in Intelligence and served in the Gulf War). Anyway, it's pretty quiet all the way out in the woods like that. You can hear pretty far. I heard a stick break right outside our tent. It sounded very close. Chuck and I froze. Our first thought was that his little brother Daniel (then about 10 or 11) had followed us up all day just out of sight, then laid in wait until after dark to scare us. Chuck was my friend from Elementary school, so we knew each other pretty well. I could see him thinking the same thing on his face. Then he discarded that idea as quickly as I did; his whiney little brother wouldn't have been able to carry out an extensive plan like that.
I decided to take a look outside. We had a BB gun with us. A pump-up pistol. I pumped it slowly and loaded about 10 BBs down the barrel. While I was doing that, we heard something circle the tent. Once it got to the other side of the tent, it sounded like something was lightly touching the tent up around our heads... like a scraping sound.
It completely circled the tent and came back around to the entrance. I then mustered my courage and slowly opened the tent flap. Drawing it back, I could see nothing. I smelled something horrible, like a dead animal, but I couldn't see anything. Then I realized that what I was looking at at was a huge, furry leg. It was blocking all the light into the tent from the campfire outside, which was still burning. I had the pistol in my hand, pointed at the doorway. A split second after I realized what it was, I think Chuck did. One of us screamed. I pulled the trigger.
It was Bigfoot, and it was standing right outside of our tent - maybe four inches from my face. I was terrified. I quickly pumped the pistol again, but I didn't even get the third pump before it was gone. I actually counted its footsteps as it ran; I don't know why. I actually heard it hit the ground twice before it disappeared into the woods. Its walking stride-span (whatever you call it) must have been huge. Our campsite area was probably 25 feet in diameter around the fire, as far as the campfire shown. In only two steps it was gone. What impressed me so much about that as being something other than a man (or boy) in a big ape suit was the speed and the length of its stride. It zapped out of the campsite noiselessly and at a speed I had never seen anything move before. That was uphill too, further up into the woods.
Chuck and I ran all the way back to the boat. It seemed like the boat was only a few feet from the campsite because we weren't even winded by the time we got back there. We screamed the whole way, too, we were so afraid. We woke up his parents who heard us coming all the way into the woods. We told them what had happened, and of course we instantly ran across our first skeptics - our own families. That's why I don't mention it to many people. I haven't talked to Chuck about it for at least 10 years.
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