You know those times when you're walking near dusk or maybe you enter a creepy attic for the first time and the hair on the back of your neck starts to raise and your heart rate starts to pattern.

You stop moving, you look around, listen harder for a sec, and you know nothing's gonna happen, but you also feel kind of like something might happen?

You think something's out there, even though you know, you can see there is not.

Most of us have those moments. Those times where we know something isn't rational or real, but...

Welcome to Strange and unexplained. I'm your host, Daisy Egan.

Each week we explore a story that makes us wonder how much we really know about the world around us. It's like the X-Files, but it passes the Bechtel test.

This week, Bigfoot, the myth, the legend, the stinking ape that haunts people the world over, even while the government tells us, she doesn't exist.

When I was 14, I did Outward Bound, which for those of you who don't know is an outdoor adventure program for teens and adults to build character and learn to believe in themselves or something.

Clearly, it didn't work, as here at 41, I believe in myself, about as much as I did when I was 14, which is to say, not much.

Just kidding you guys, I 100% believe in myself. I've met me. I know, I exist.

One of the challenges of Outward Bound is a three-day two-night solo in which you are dropped in the middle of the woods with nothing but a tarp, a sleeping bag, and a bag of trail mix.

It's your choice if you get naked, but you sure as shit are afraid.

On the first night of my solo excursion alone in the woods of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I woke up to the sound of something very close to my head just outside my tarp.

In that moment, I was confident of two things. One, there was a monster, a few feet away from me, and two, I was about to die.

In full of fear of the huge and vicious thing outside my tent, I reached for the only thing I had, my flashlight.

Sure that this would be the last doomed act of my life, I clicked on the flashlight and waved it around wildly.

I did this for maybe a full 30 seconds. When it turned out I was still alive, I opened my eyes to see what it was.

A single white-tailed deer. It didn't even flinch, you just kept eating the grass two feet away from me.

What made me so certain it was something huge and sinister? I had been camping many times before and had not once encountered a big foot or a werewolf.

I never even had a run in with a bear, but in that moment, before I flashed the light I was 100% confident it was a monster.

The woods are a scary place. The imagination can be scarier. And still all this time later I can remember how sure I was that something, something big, was out there.

Part of me still thinks it was.

...