*This encounter comes from Arthur Doeschate of New Hampshire as told to Bigfoot in NH. It happened in Bloomfield, Vt which is included here as it’s right on the New Hampshire border.
First off, I want you to know one important thing: I will not do anything for money or recognition. I just want to talk to like-minded people in New Hampshire and Vermont who have had encounters in these states. My family and friends think it’s a big joke. It’s not. It changed my life dramatically.
I’m 68 years old and all my life I have spent every free moment I had in the woods. I even camped year round when I was younger.
My first encounter was when I was a teenager and I observed fresh footprints in the snow as I tracked a bear.
It was just a small bear but you could clearly see the impressions in the freshly fallen light snow.
I chuckled to myself at how much they came close to a human footprint. Of course these prints changed as the animal had continued to walk, likely depending on how fast they had been moving.
Anyway, I had been following these tracks for about twenty minutes when I came across some much larger prints. You could see where this little bear had come across them too and had taken off like a bat out of hell. The ground was all torn up and you could easily tell it had been running away.
At first, I got really excited because this seemed to be a huge bear. You could put four of the prints I was following into these new prints. As I started looking at them I noticed that the stride was off. You could see how the animal had come down the mountain and was headed towards the lake. But the alignment was incorrect, and the distance between the prints was way too large. I had to do a little hop to make the same distance between the steps. When I did, I would slide a tiny bit.
The tracks were more direct and you could tell the animal was walking not running. Nothing was kicked up and the prints were perfect. I could put one and a half of my feet into each print which were in a straight line as if the animal had been walking with a purpose.
It’s hard to explain if you have not tracked an animal before but a bear always stops to sniff the air, looking for something to eat. And most all animals change their pace as they walk. I knew this wasn’t right, so I got on my knees to study the prints better. The toes were definitely more human-like. There were no claws and the soles had different creases in them. The toes were different sizes, especially the large toes, but which lacked claws. Everything was off and it was at this point that I got scared.
I turned and started to walk out of there at a fast pace. The more I thought about it the faster I ran. I even fell a couple of times and broke the stock of my gun.
I told everyone at camp about this and they couldn’t explain it. By the time everyone started to come back in from their hunts, the snow had picked up pace and it would have covered up the tracks I saw.
Then there were those whistles which I mentioned to my science teacher who was a big time hunter. I asked if he knew of any bird that would give out a signal whistle in the dark. He couldn’t think of any. I even tried to find out by looking it up in the library. This phenomenon wouldn’t happen all the time but did a few times. Then there were those stones being thrown at me. These were little stones, not the big rocks I’d heard about. Then the knocks.
The prints, stones, whistles and knocks changed my life and is why I’ll never go into the woods anymore without a firearm.
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*Note: We do not use real names for these stories which are sent to use by real people.