My dad told me years later that that day was the scariest moment in his entire life. It was the day a Bigfoot, or two, tried to lure me away beyond our cornfield, and into the deep, dark woods.

I remember that day myself, as well as the weird experiences that led up to that moment. I believe these creatures, or animals, exist, but were they trying to lure me away? I don’t know that for sure, but I do know they are real, and they are scary, that’s for sure!

Here is my story…

For The Love of Corn.

1979, and I was nine years old. My mom loved Fleetwood Mac and the Doobie Brothers, and my dad shared her taste in music. I was into Michael Jackson’s new Off The Wall album.

The year before this experience, my dad had inherited a sizable amount of money as well as some rental properties my grandfather had owned. Grandpa was a funny and very loving person. He was also a very successful real estate investor.

They sold the properties and invested in a farm outside the town of Mcloud, California. It was not large, but big enough to grow as much corn as they needed to make a comfortable living the rest of their days. They loved the idea of growing corn; it was a discussion I’d heard at the dinner table since I could remember, up to that point.

A new school. A new home. New friends. It took a month or two, but when you’re nine, getting used to all of it and finding new friends was not as hard as I had made it out to be.

The property my parents purchased was surrounded on three sides by pine-covered hills that gave way to mountains and more forests. The farm itself sat in a large open area right in the middle of it all. There was a small town nearby where I went to school.

The cornfield was big, but not as big as you see in the Midwest part of the country. But it was big enough to get lost in. We never did a corn maze; my parents were pretty business-like themselves when it came to their crop.

It was not until a year later that some weird things started happening around the farm. It all started with what people call wood knocking today.

Knock-Knock Jokes.

During the spring, my dad and mom would plant the corn. He would also harvest firewood for the next fall and winter. That early spring evening, he was felling an old dead tree in the back of the property when he heard it for the first time.

The tree was down and was cut into large rounds. He started chopping the wood when he heard what sounded like three slow, but repetitive knocks coming from the woods.

Every time he would stop splitting wood, they would come, three repetitive knocks. He knew the sound was wood on wood, that was for sure. After a moment or two, it occurred to him that it could have been one of the neighbor kids down the road messing around.

We lived a ways out of town, but we still had neighbors, and some of them ran small farms as well.

My dad had no real idea about Bigfoot. He was raised in the Bay Area, a city kid with dreams of the farming life. To him, someone, a person or persons, was joking around.

He got back to splitting wood as the knocking continued. He thought nothing of it until he mentioned it over dinner with my mom and me that evening. She was in town earlier and said she’d run into a couple of our neighbors and their kids at the grocery store.

That convinced my dad of who was out there.

It was a week later when I heard it myself. That night was pretty warm; it got so warm my dad worried about the crop. Spring was usually wet and cool here, not this hot. It was just a freak heat wave; things returned to cool and rainy a few days later.

I kept my window in my room open that night because of the cool breeze that came. The moon was full, I remember. It was not ten or fifteen minutes after my head hit my pillow that I heard two loud knocks that echoed through my window.

It did sound like wood on wood. It was solid-sounding, like the crack of a bat when Keith Hernandez or Willie Stargell would hit a home run that year. Then I heard a more distant one as I walked towards the window. This, I could tell, came from the opposite side of the field.

Two knocks from the west, then a single knock from the east side of the field. This continued for several minutes or more. Then it stopped. I stood and listened for a little while until my eyes were too heavy to keep open.

Dead Deer.

The middle of summer, and the corn had grown almost as tall as me already. One day, I popped out to see what my dad was doing and to see if he wanted some lunch.

I reached the edge of the corn when I saw him pop up near the middle of the field, then duck down again.

Game on, I thought!

He would pop up real quick, somewhere in the cornfield, and I would try to catch him as he snuck off to another spot. We started the game the previous year, our first spring and summer on the farm.

Eventually, I got smart. I would stand still and watch the tops of the corn. Corn rows in a field that big leave little room, so as he moved through the field, I could see the tops he would brush up against sway.

It still took a good fifteen to twenty minutes to find him. It was fun. My dad was a fun guy, always willing to take a moment or two out of his busy day of farming to hang out with me and have some fun.

As we walked out of the field, my dad had noticed some deer huddled together just inside the treeline, four of them. They looked rather nervous, ready to bolt off in every direction at the drop of a pinecone on the ground.

He’d never seen them so nervous. He did not like them around, that was for sure. He is a farmer with a crop to protect and grow. This was the reason for the electric fence that surrounded the whole field. For the most part, it worked out well.

This behavior of theirs was odd to him, I could tell. I noticed he started looking out into the trees and the thicker parts of the forest. He seemed to focus on something a few seconds later. I looked in the same direction and noticed it too.

A dead deer hanging from a tree. Not near the ground either, this thing was slung over a large limb that had to be about ten feet off the ground, and that was a lowballed guess. It was missing a couple of extremities. My dad reached back and put his hand on my chest, saying we should head back to the house for the evening.

Later, before the sun sank and the night began, my dad took a walk out there again, this time, however, with a rifle in hand. When he returned, he seemed a bit concerned over what he found. I could not hear the whole conversation between him and my mom, but I do remember not being able to venture out into the woods like I had been after that night.

More Weirdness.

A couple of weeks went by, and the corn was starting to take off. I must have been going through a growth spurt, because I noticed that if I stood on my tippy-toes, I could see over the tips of the stalks, still.

Getting taller, though, was not the most important or exciting happening in my life. Whatever was running around the woods, however, was becoming more and more thrilling, at least to me. My folks, though, had a different feeling about the weirdness that was starting to become regular.

There came howls. Not canine howling, but more like long, deep, but clear and crisp howls that seemed to float from the hills beyond and land on our little farm below. Exciting, yes, but chilling to the bone, which is how I started to feel, too.

My dad was not worried for our lives or anything like that, but my mom, on the other hand, was a bit more anxious about what they were hearing.

As the summer moved on, and the corn grew tall and healthy, so did my dad’s concern about me being out in the fields alone. Again, in the early part of August, a deer was found high up in a tree, and missing some of its extremities.

He also noticed that there was a small section, maybe seven or so corn stalks, ripped out of the ground in the far southeast corner of the field. The corn was gone, and the stalks were torn apart and strewn everywhere.

There were no tracks to tell which animal was the culprit. Nor was the fence damaged. It was as if something leaned over, grabbed a stalk of corn, ripped it out of the ground, and ate it without even touching the electric wire that ran the course of the top of the fence.

Again, my dad became more perplexed about the whole thing…

More sounds were heard by all of us floating on the night air that late summer and early fall. My mom made sure I never went out too far past the yard without supervision. She even kept an eye on all the teenagers they’d hired to harvest the corn that was now ready to be picked.

One night, I think it was the last weekend before school started, I swore I had seen a large shadow out in our yard near the edge of the corn. The howling was louder than usual that night.

This time, I had the guts to get out of bed and see if I could spot what was making the sounds. It was a full moon, so there was no mistake in what I saw. I stood at the side of my curtain with it pulled back just enough to see everything below me.

I did not see anything for nearly a minute or two at first. My attention span was almost nil at that age. I was about to turn and head to bed when I heard footfall coming out of the trees. I could hear the crunch of limbs and pinecones crushed under its weight.

Then, under the bright moonlight, there it was. It was a tall dark shadow, very dark, and I mean pitch black. On a well-lit night, the darkness and shadows are not as pitch black as usual. This shadow, however, was so black against the night that it stood out like a sore thumb.

Like I said, it was tall, blacker than night, and to my surprise, it had the shape of a human, but much bigger! Then, in an instant, it walked off into the woods.

I froze. I was still not scared, okay, maybe a bit, but I stood there for almost an hour after that listening to the whoops and hollers wanting to see that thing again.

I didn’t. It never came back. At least not yet…

We spent September picking corn and shucking the personal amount we kept for ourselves. Still, at night, not every night, but most, the whoops and howling continued. I never found myself afraid of it, just aware, and I mean I WAS AWARE that something none of us had ever seen before was out there.

And it was true…

Hide and Seek!

It was October. The howling and the other strange sounds died out almost completely, almost. It was so quiet on our ‘western front’ that my mom even let her guard down, and I was able to have a bit more freedom around the property.

The corn stalks were brown, many bent over, and shorter than they had been just a few weeks before. Halloween was not far off, and I decided to head out and pick a pumpkin from my mom’s garden out back.

I was grabbing two, one for me and one for my friend TJ. He asked for one during school that week, and my parents were more than happy to give him and his family one or two.

It took almost no time at all to choose, after all, I helped plant them and watched them grow! I chose two, cut them free, and carried them in the house. I washed them off making sure all the mud from the latest rains was off. I would bring it to school and give it to him on Monday.

I finished wiping them and set them on the porch. That is when I noticed the silhouette near the middle of the cornfield.  Dad was at it again!

This time, I might have an even better chance as the corn was thinned out. I waited for him to duck down so I could follow his movement through the cornstalks. He stood there a little longer than usual, but after a minute, give or take, he made his move, and I made mine.

To the south, he moved. I ran down the porch, leaped off the end, and headed straight into the field. I still had to jump up a little to see over the tops, I realized, but when I did, there was his dark silhouette against the early evening sky.

I jumped again. He had moved to the north. Boy, he was fast! Faster than usual, I thought. He was going to make this last hide-and-seek of the season difficult.

Again, I jumped and jumped until I saw him again. He’d moved to the far northern corner in a flash. I headed in that direction. Then, I heard him running past me. The one thing that caught my attention was the speed and heavy footfall. My dad was a tall guy, but heavy? Not really.

I jumped again, and there he was, back near the house! This was getting a bit ridiculous, I thought. I ran in that direction and heard him moving to the south side of the field again. This time, I’d cut him off.

By the time I got there, though, he was silent, and so was everything else. I jumped up two, maybe three times, before I saw him again. This time, however, I got a good look at him.

It was not my dad!

It stood there with the sun angled behind it, just enough to realize that a massive dark silhouette of a literal and scary beast was standing mere yards from me. The shoulders were huge and wide. The head seemed to sit on top of their shoulders with no visible neck, and it was covered in the blackest hair I’d ever seen.

“Timmy!” I heard the voice yell my name. It sounded frantic and terrified.

It was my dad.

I turned and could see over the top of the cornfield that my dad was on the porch with something long in his hand. He yelled again, telling me to stand still, and that is when I heard the pop of his gun go off!

The scream from whatever was standing maybe fifteen yards from me was soul-shaking. I started feeling so scared that I fell weak at the knees, and my stomach started turning over and over. Then, I literally passed out.

The last thing I remember was waking up as my dad was walking me quickly back through the cornfield and laying me down on the porch. My mom was gone, shopping in town.

This Land Is My Land.

My dad told me what happened. He also explained to me what he saw. There were two of them, not just one. Both were nearly the same in height and build.

Were they playing with me like they’d seen my dad do? Or, were they trying to bring about my dad’s worst fear, luring me away further and further from the safety of the house?

Neither of us knew that answer for sure, and we never would. Eventually, the incidents and experiences died off months later.

I own the property today. My mom is still with us. She lives in the new mother-in-law suite we had built a few years back. The wife and I have two kids, one girl and one boy.

And while we play many other games at home and out in the backyard, hide-and-seek in the cornfield is not one of them…, and it never will be.

That is my story, thanks,

Tim.