Chapter 1: What strange encounter did Jeff and his wife experience while camping?
On a late November night in 2012, while driving in the foothills of Washington, two brothers were surrounded by mysterious creatures. Still haunted and forever changed, these men took to the internet, creating a forum for others. If you've had an encounter and no one else can help, maybe you can contact Sasquatch Chronicles.
Hello!
It looked like somebody was bent over and had their head in the window of the deer blind and it either heard me or smelled me and he pulled his head out of the tent and stood straight up and that shocked me. They don't make people that big. The way it moved, Almost as if it was gliding across the beach. I've never seen anything move like that in my life.
They were screaming at each other in gibberish. It sounded like a language and they were chuntering away back and forwards, back and forwards, back and forwards. I know what a bear looks like and there is no way on this planet that what I saw were bears. 9-1-1, what are you reporting? Jesus Christ, you better... Karen, see him! Hello? Get somebody out here. What's going on now, sir?
That son of a bitch is about six foot nine, I don't know. Do you see him now, sir? Yes, I'm looking right at him.
Uh-oh.
This is Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, Commanding Officer, Marine Ground Forces, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And you are listening to Sasquatch Chronicles.
Boom.
Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here. Tonight we'll be chatting with Jeff and Jeff comes to us from California. And back in 1994, him and his wife were out camping and they had a strange encounter. At first they thought it was a bear, but nothing about the bear made sense. And they end up cutting the camping trip short. I'll kind of let Jeff go into it.
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Chapter 2: What unusual sounds did they hear at night during their camping trip?
We moved back to California where I grew up. And we were living in Oceanside and one of the places where we used to go camping as a family when I was a kid was one of the places I wanted to show her. So we packed up one weekend and I told her I was going to show her Laguna Mountain in Eastern San Diego County, East County. We would drive through the town of Alpine, California to get there.
which you may remember from the stories about the Zoobies. There's some strange coincidences about the area, but nonetheless, we headed up to Mount Laguna, and there we were set up for camping one night, or for the weekend, I think it was a Friday night, and we pulled in, and it was the afternoon, we set up camp, and I noticed it was empty. We were the only ones there.
I thought that was very strange, but the campground was dead empty. It was beautiful weather, and when the ranger came around in his little cart to say hi, I asked him about it. He said, well, it was the first week of school. It was the first week of school, and so, yeah, there's nobody there. And I like camping, but...
I kind of suppose now that I look back on it, there's a certain security in a full campground that's lacking in an empty campground. And, um, you know, I had nothing in my mind about anything weird happening or anything. And, um, you know, we, we set up camp and, um, And the plan was the next day to hike out and see the desert. And that's why I love this campground because I do love the desert.
The neat thing about the Laguna Mountains is you have alpine on one side and you can be camping in the alpine. But the trail within a half hour will take you out in the dead desert. What you get is you get the mountains on one side with the alpine where you're camping because that's where the ocean water, the ocean marine climate hits.
On the other side of the mountain, it's dead desert and drops away into the desert. And the neat thing is you can just see for infinity from the mountains up there into the flat desert. And so that's part of the fun. Well, we set up camp that night and we had our dinner and whatnot.
had our fire still it's an empty empty cat ground we went to bed that night and now my wife and i living in in san diego we love the coyotes and so you know when you hear the coyotes you hop up from the table you run outside and listen to them and you watch them and it's always been neat thing. I mean, we sort of felt, in fact, camping at a different place than desert in Borrego Springs.
We woke up one morning to a, I mean, a granddaddy coyote sitting in the, sitting right in the middle of our camp just looking at us. He is beautiful. And I really enjoyed it. Felt a little bit of a kind of neat connection and he trotted off. So we love the coyotes and we heard the coyotes that night and we were expecting to hear the coyotes.
And when we heard them coming way off in the distance, see, they're coming up from the desert side, up the side of the mountain. And we heard them coming and getting louder and louder. And then we got a bit surprised. It was a little nerve-wracking when the coyotes charged right through the campground. I mean, they came right through the campground on all sides of the tent.
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Chapter 3: How did Jeff describe the creature he thought was a bear?
I simply didn't know this. And when the ranger came around the next morning, again in his little cart, said, how are you doing? And I said, wow, we certainly heard the wolves last night. And he said, you mean the coyotes? I said, no, no, we love the coyotes. We saw them run through here. He said, you saw them run through here, the campground? And I said, yeah. Yeah, they ran right around us.
He said, that's interesting. I said, yeah, but that's not it. The wolves we heard all night. And he said, he looked at us. He's like, there are no wolves here. There are no wolves in Southern California. We're like, well, okay, well, I heard wolves. And he said, my dog's part wolf. You might have heard him. And I'm thinking, no, we heard lots of wolves in lots of places.
And so the idea is I didn't know until later, but it wasn't wolves we were hearing at all. Now, in hindsight, but we didn't know that. And I didn't know that. So we thought nothing of it. I mean, literally nothing of it. I wasn't a Bigfoot fan or I had nothing to do with any of this at the time. So none of this was coming registering in my head.
So the next morning we had our breakfast and the big deal was to go out on the trail to the Pacific Crest Trail. And I don't know if you want dead locations, but this is the we were in the Burnt Rancherra campground of Laguna Mountain State Park. And the way to get there, the only way to get there is up through the town of Alpine. So we went out for our hike and it was hot.
out there because it was you know it was spring so so in california starting to get dry and dusty because in california it's the winter that's green and by the time we had gotten there the green was sort of disappearing and it was starting to get kind of crunchy out there desert wise so we had it on the trail and we were hiking on the trail And enjoying the views and whatnot. It was quiet.
We did notice saying to ourselves, wow, it's quiet out here, but it was very hot. And hot and quiet kind of go together. But we saw Bigfoot, but we didn't see him face-to-face charging through the trees at us. As a matter of fact, we saw Bigfoot in a way that we didn't even know we were looking at Bigfoot. And that's the truth.
But I think by the time we finish here, you'll probably, you might come to the same conclusions we did. So we were out walking on the desert as part of the PCH, the Pacific Crush Trail. And we were out walking on the PCH and it was just hot. We weren't seeing anything, nothing coming along in the, And we had enjoyed the day. We'd been out there maybe an hour.
And the strangest thing, we came around a corner and there was a pile of dead trees laid across the path, almost in an X shape.
they were you know not big six inch trees they were they were like uh snapped off dead trees you know but they were big they were you know maybe three inches a you know a good handful around but they were piled up perpendicularly across the trail and it almost looked like they were laid in an x shape um as if you were looking from above Now, it's a big trail.
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Chapter 4: What was the ranger's response to Jeff's sighting of the bear?
Again, I had no idea of any of this stuff yet, and this is all coming together in hindsight. We walked across the, we'll walk around sort of through because it was, it was up on one side and way down into the desert on the other. So we kind of walked through it. And I do remember as soon as we went through that, I don't know how far we had gone down the trail.
When I said to my wife, I said, what is that sound? And she's like, well, she's I don't know what she says. I hear she's looking around. I'm looking around. They said I remember saying it sounds like a dead cow or sounds like a dying cow. And it was loud. And I mean, I guess when I said a dying cow, I was thinking big animal. making noise for some one reason or another.
And, um, it continued and we stopped and we looked around and I heard it. Then to stop for a little bit and, um, well, nothing. And at that point I, um, there was a big boulder there, a great big boulder right next to the pass. And we had brought some sandwiches. We were going to have, you know, our little picnic and we hopped up on the boulder and,
started unpacking lunch and we heard the sounds. What is that? I started looking down in the valley and the valley goes, you know, maybe, I don't know, a quarter, half mile down and then started heading back up the other side. So half up the other side of this gully, I saw a tree shaking. So we're hearing the noises. And it's not like we were close. It was the other side of the valley.
And the tree was shaking. And again, I didn't think anything because I didn't know it at the time. And then I saw something banging on the tree. Now, you would say, if you see something banging on the tree, it's Bigfoot. But I had no frame of reference. I wasn't into it then. At first I said, well, there's that cow. What's he doing banging on the tree?
Because that's where the sounds were coming from. And then I looked again and I said, that cow is standing up. That's not a cow. Cows don't stand up against trees. And so... I said, there's a bear, look at that. And it was a long, you know, it was further, it was a longer way away. We didn't, we weren't afraid to run. We were on the trail on the other side of the gully.
So we saw this great big red haired sort of red, brown, red, orange, brown haired bear banging on the tree. And we could see it banging up against it and turn around backwards. and slam into it backwards like it was hanging fists up in the air. But we thought it was a bear. We heard the sounds. We saw the tree shaking. And we said, oh, that's interesting.
And, you know, I thought that maybe I saw a barbed wire fence or something down in the bottom. As a matter of fact, I do now remember seeing
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Chapter 5: What evidence did Jeff find that suggested something was unusual about the area?
There was a fence line of some kind between us and it in the bottom of the valley. But even so, I wasn't afraid of a bear that was that far away. And so we made our way around. We were at the end of the trail. We came in. We thought nothing of it. And other than normal day stuff. So we weren't even afraid. We weren't even in a position to understand what we had seen.
Originally, it looked like it was slamming into the tree, not with its fists like a punching bag. It was like slamming into it. And then it eventually turned it at one point had turned around and was definitely slamming it into the backing into it. You know, like a kid does on the bathroom door when he wants to annoy you, a little baby or something is going bam, bam with his backside.
And so that's what was happening. And like I said, I saw the fists were up in front of it. That's how I noticed, you know, that was turning around backwards because I could see its hands. But I couldn't see hands. They were far enough away for me to think it was still a bear. And so that's that's how he was. And the tree was shaking. There's a whole row of trees.
And this was on the edge of this little forest. There was a little forest going up the hillside. And this tree was on the very edge so we could see it. It wasn't hidden in the forest. It was like the very last row of trees before it tumbled down into the desert scrub on the other side of the valley. And, you know, I try to think about how far away it was, maybe a quarter mile. I don't know.
So we leave and we go back to camp. We're still not thinking anything of it. And you can see how I later on after learning things in life, learning things that when I realized that the trees across the path. And right when we crossed over the trees across the path was when the noise, the sounds started, the dead cow sounds.
And it was between those trees across the path and the rock was when we heard it all. And it had stopped. As we stopped to listen to it and look around, it had stopped. Then we went and sat up on the rock is when it started again. And I started to see the tree shaking.
So in my mind, in hindsight, I kind of, you know, was something looking at us, trying to wait for us to decide if we're going to leave. And then when we decided to stay and climb up on the rock for lunch, basically to watch him, it was when it stopped. It started banging on the tree backwards, and the noises started back up again.
So we leave the trail, finish up the trail, go back to camp, and kind of take a nap in the afternoon, got up for dinner. And so we saw the ranger come around for the third time. This is the evening rounds. Of course, we were the only ones in the cab crowd, so we didn't have anybody else to talk to. So he pulls up in his little cart and hops off.
And this is the part that sticks in my mind more than anything. Even more than seeing the bear or there is that I said to the ranger, you know, we went on the trail today. He said, yeah. And I said, you know, you got a big bear over there. And he looked at me and he said, there are no bears in these mountains.
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Chapter 6: How did Jeff's perception of the creature change after the encounter?
And he said, there's no, oh, he said, there's no bears in San Diego County. That's what he said. But there are no bears in San Diego County. And he said, oh yeah, there is. I just saw him today. And he did the weirdest thing. And this is why it sticks into my head. He got real close to me in my face. And even at the time I didn't think about it, but he got in my face like a drill instructor.
And he stared me in the eyes, and he said, there are no bears in San Diego County. And he just stared at me. And I kind of backed off and said to my wife later, I said, did you see that? That was weird. And I remember being struck by it. Now, I see his eyes in my dreams now. And he was not... He was not having fun.
And I look back at it now, he might have been saying, I'm pretty sure now he was saying something that I wasn't hearing at the time. And it was the night before that he said, there are no wolves. This time, he got in my face to say there are no bears. So here am I, looking for the coyotes, hearing the wolves, and then seeing bears. And
I can still remember the green of his uniform, the look of his eyes, his hat. And then he got in his little cart and he drove away. And I went back to my wife and said, do you see that? That's kind of weird. Why did you get in my face? What was he so upset about? And still I hadn't put anything together. But still I had not put any of this together. This all came in hindsight.
And so it was evening. We had our dinner. Oh, yeah, I remember this. There's something I forgot. We had asked the second day, we asked the ranger if we could move our campsite from the one we had, which we had reserved. out to one that we had preferred, which was out there on the trail.
We're very close to the trail, so we could almost, you know, walk up the little hillside and see down into the desert. So we were really close to the trail. I think it was probably the closest campsite we could get to the trail without being on it. So we packed up and we moved out to the trail to the spot. Basically, we set up for a second night and we went to bed.
And there is, to me, a scary part coming. So there's a scary part coming for me anyways. Still, we hadn't put anything together. We were asleep in the little tent, little two-person tent. My wife was asleep, but we were, I wasn't asleep because I was hearing rustling all around the tent. And like I said, the grass had started getting dry. So it was my mind that there are rabbits out there.
So there are rabbits all around this tent.
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Chapter 7: What theories does Jeff propose about the nature of Bigfoot?
And they were getting noisier and noisier. The rabbits were just keeping me up because I was not that they were making so much noise, but they were just snapping twigs enough for me to keep waking up every time I tried to sleep. And I just said to myself. You know, I'm not going to stand for this.
And so I unzipped the tent and I went out and I just started making noise and waving my hands and yelling and making circles around the tent to scare all the little rabbits. Actually, I thought they were probably like field mice at the time. But if they had been field mice, they were kind of swarming us because I could just hear so much of it.
Didn't think anything of it because, you know, had I thought anything about Bigfoot or anything at this time, you'd think I'd be scared out in the nighttime, but I wasn't. I went back in the tent, zipped up, went down to go back to sleep. Started hearing the wolves again from the night before. Started hearing the wolves again. And it was uncomfortable, but, you know, no big deal.
We stayed in the tent until I started hearing the wolves. And then I started hearing the rustling around the tent again. I previously thought were mice. Now, I don't know what caused me to do it differently this time, but one of my camping implements is a big, long... World War II bayonet. It's got a nice sheath on it. It's strong as a baseball bat, but it's sharp.
It's sharp, and I kept it sharp, and I always carried that with me. So for some reason, I said, okay, I'm going to go out there and stop this because I don't want to sleep. So I unsheathed that bayonet. You know, it's 12, 14, 16 inches long. So I got my little sword and I unzipped the tent and dove out because whatever it was out there, I wanted to scare it.
I don't know why I was scared because I guess I thought it was mice or bears, but I was feeling different this time. And I said, I'm not going to stand for this. And I took the knife with me or the big bayonet and I dove out of the tent and I stand up and I start yelling, you know, get out of here, whatever, leave me alone.
And I'm, I'm hacking at the bushes and the, and the, the grass and the brush with the, uh, the knife, the bayonet. And I look, I don't see anything. I'm sorry. There's no, there's no, you know, movie style, Bigfoot sighting here, but all of a sudden, And it was the first time I thought something was weird. Because obviously thinking there's rabbits, no big deal. Mice, no big deal.
I even jumped out of the tent still thinking it was rats or mice or something. But I brought the big knife with me and I was a little bit nervous, I guess, at the time. And I stood there looking out across the desert side into the dark. And there was no noise. I didn't hear the wolves anymore. I heard nothing. It was dead still. Dead still.
And all of a sudden, I got overcome with a fear that I cannot explain. Something that made me instantly abandon everything. I went around to the front of the tent and I shook my wife awake and I said, we're getting out of here. And she said, well, I said, we're just getting out of here right now. We're not staying. And she said, what's the matter? I go, I don't know. I was just terrified.
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Chapter 8: What conclusions does Jeff reach about his experience in hindsight?
And when she woke up, it was either me being scared that got her scared, but she got scared too. What we ended up doing was grabbing everything. I just grabbed the whole tent without even taking it down. and all the gear that was inside the tent, I threw it into the back of my truck, and I went and grabbed the camp chairs and threw them on top. And by the time we left, I'd never looked back.
I was just terrified. And I had not seen anything. And I didn't put together anything that had happened during the day, even yet I had. And what the ranger said about the bear. No bear. And so I still hadn't put it, I had this, there was no reason for this fear because I hadn't put anything together yet. And I threw everything in the back of that truck. We burned out of that campground.
And I remember being out on the road heading down the mountain and still looking around behind me as if I'm so scared. I'm scared of something I'm not even seeing. We drove all the way home. And believe it or not, that's hilarious. I remember listening to Art Bell that night. He was talking about something else.
It was heading through the desert and the mountainside, listening to our bell at three in the morning after we had just abandoned our campsite. And that turns out to be it. In the end, we went home. And it wasn't until I started just by circ happenstance, listening to or reading online about the...
The things that had happened in San Diego County, I first heard the story about the Zoobies and Alpine and the doctor, and then something weird happens now, and this is something for even today. Now, I looked back at the map years later, to see what the area was. You know, what was that valley?
See if I could see the spot where I think I had seen Bigfoot because now I had put all of it all together and it all made sense, even chronologically, and exactly the chain of events that happened all dropped into place as soon as I heard it was Bigfoot that I had seen out there banging on the tree and not a cow and there are no bears. So, So I run across a couple of stories.
One is a story about the old lady who lived out in East County, San Diego, who wrote the book about the Indian reservation where she had seen, are you familiar with that story? She had some Indian friends and then they took her out there and said, we're going to show you where he lives. And they said, we won't go there.
She came back again and they had blocked the road with a bulldozer and all that. Do you remember that story?
No, I don't think I'm aware of that one.
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