Bigfoot Hates Hogs

Date 1/3/2003

Ecounter: Bigfoot

Location: Texas and Louisania Near Keatchie La.

I grew up on a ranch in a very rural area of Louisiana and have hunted and fished my entire life. I’m a larger-than-average man at 6’8” and 300 lb+, and I’ve always worked cattle and horses, so I have a lot of experience dealing with large animals. In my 20s I moved to Texas, where I had a ranch near the Texas/Louisiana line. It was about 100 acres and bordered 10,000 acres of International Paper Co. land and the Sabine River bottoms. After my first year of ranching, I started having trouble with coyotes and wild hogs, so a few times a week I would go out at night with my game call or team up with my neighbor who owned hog dogs to thin out the hog population. One night I went to my usual spot along a tree line overlooking a field and set up my game call, which plays a high-pitched injured-rabbit sound. I sat there for a while with nothing moving, which was strange because everything from bobcats to possums, coyotes, and raccoons usually comes running at the sound. I got a funny feeling but didn’t see anything. After sitting there for a while with no movement or noise, I decided to head back to the house because I’d promised to take a buddy fishing on a lake on the ranch the next morning. The next morning, about 30 yards past where I’d been hunting, just on the other side of the tree line, there was a dead hog about 200 lbs, crushed. From the blood splatter and knocked-off bark, it looked like something had grabbed the hog and bashed it against a tree trunk. I thought about the funny feeling I’d had the night before and still don’t know of any animal that can grab a hog and swing it into a tree. I’m very strong for my size, but I couldn’t have done that. I don’t know if I interrupted whatever happened when I arrived or if it happened while I was calling, but it was very unnerving. A year later I saw a Bigfoot story on a TV program called “These Woods are Haunted” about a deer hunter named Mike Wooley who was chased out of the woods by a group of aggressive Bigfoot, and I realized it occurred about five miles from my ranch near Keatchie, La.