I was not a believer until I was 24 years old.

It was 1990 and I was visiting my parents in West Virginia.

As soon as I came into the house, my mom told me what she had found on the property.

There were eight inches of snow on the ground and a half inch of ice on top of that, the kind

you can walk on without breaking through.

She had taken the grandkids out to play when over by the well, she found footprints

18 inches long and seven feet apart.

They came out of the woods at the top of their yard and led down to an artesian well,

where it looked like the creature knelt to get a drink and then continued on down through the yard

onto the county road.

But along the way it stopped at my mother's feed pile. All the snow and

ice had been pushed away and every piece of corn was gone, even the ones picked out of the

frozen dirt. A year or so later, I was deer hunting from a tree stand on the property with my

rifle when I heard something 200 yards

away. I thought it was the big buck that I'd been waiting for since it wasn't making any effort

to be quiet. But as it got closer, I started to get disappointed. It was walking upright, not on

four legs. It was probably just someone walking through the not on four legs.

It was probably just someone walking through the woods, I thought.

Whoever was messing up my hunt was being extremely loud about it,

cracking sticks and splitting trees.

And then came that smell.

It was so horrible that I thought I might get sick. I listened to this guy ruined my hunt for a minute, getting more and more scared with each lumbering step that he took,

...