YEAR: 2001-2004

SEASON: Winter

MONTH: March

DATE: 3/01/2003

STATE: New York

COUNTY: Delaware County

LOCATION DETAILS: Location directions withheld by request.

NEAREST TOWN: Treadwell

NEAREST ROAD: County 14

OBSERVED: My wife and I have had our farm near Treadwell, NY in Delaware County since the summer of 2001. The farm is above 130 mostly wooded acres (I don't want to give the exact number of acres to avoid someone figuring out which one it is), with about 30 acres of fields, with a few trails throughout the woods. The property is bordered by probably 2,000 or more acres of continuous woods (privately owned), and countless more acres of woods and fields that lead all the way up to Canada by just crossing dirt roads, except for one major highway (88). I have had a fascination for Bigfoot since I was young, and read about reported sightings, etc., so I am keen to notice things that could be attributed to these possible creatures others might not notice. I say possible creatures because even though I have a strong feeling they exist, I have not seen one with my own eyes. The first thing that happened was not long after we got our place. We were sitting around a campfire we made not far from the house, when we began to hear the sound of wood being pounded against wood coming from what seemed to be our woods up on the hill. The distance up to those particular woods is probably 300 yards or more, but this sound was clear and strong. I told my wife what I thought it could be and she told me she didn’t want to hear anymore about it because it frightened her. There was no other explanation that could explain that distinct sound to me though. I tried to duplicate the sound in the woods myself, but could get nowhere near the resonance that must have been produced to carry the distance I think we heard it from. On another occasion I took our dog out for his nightly walk, and heard a tremendous short howl/scream/yelp with a whole lot of modulation. It gave me a chill down my spine. It was just a huge sound. We have coyotes all around here and I have heard them make some strange sounds, but I have never heard that sound from a coyote. Whatever made that sound I would imagine had to be a pretty big animal. It did not seem far away either, so after shinning the flashlight along the edge of the woods, I hightailed back to the house checking over my shoulder often. Perhaps along this same line, my wife was out with the dog one early evening in the field, and this is the mildest dog you will ever encounter, it has only ever growled while asleep and chasing something in its dreams. My wife told me that she had never seen our dog behave this way, and it doesn’t even pay attention to deer when it sees them anymore because it sees them so often. The dog was looking intently at something along the wood line and growling. My wife could see nothing, but the dog saw something that scared it. It may have been a bear, as I have seen tracks and sign occasionally? The last incident, and probably the most convincing to me are the tracks that we saw in our woods this past winter (2004). We have never been able to get into our woods in the winter because the snow has always been too deep, and the hill to those particular woods to steep. The snowshoes that we tried in the past just sunk in the powdery snow. We tried a new type on a snow with an ice crust and we were able to get into the woods for quite a ways. We came across a trail of two pairs of tracks going in a couple of different directions and meeting up again a hundred yards or so later that no humans could have made. I at first I thought the tracks could have been made by deer leaping, but the tracks appeared to be a two legged stride with one foot pointing a little right and one a little left alternating perfectly. I am 6 feet tall, and I took my snowshoes off to see what king of stride I could make, and I was about a foot or two short of reaching the stride of these prints. The prints were pretty old as they had been snowed on, so I couldn’t see much, and tried to feel for features like toes, but could not say for sure that I felt any. They were quite long, but the snow could have melted to make them bigger? What struck us was the length of the stride though.

So, that is our experience to this point for what its worth. I only wanted to let you know that there could be something to these incidences. I would not dare ask my neighbors if they have had any strange thing happen, even though they are very good friends of ours. I find it ironic that they may have had more significant encounters and may be afraid to say anything to us about it. One neighbor did say they heard what sounded like a dear being attacked and screaming in the woods in the night. They have never heard anything like it, so that was their only explanation. One of them works for an environmental agency that I won’t identify and spends a lot of time in the woods.

ALSO NOTICED: Nothing that was not covered in the report

OTHER WITNESSES: My wife was a witness on two occasions when we were together.

OTHER STORIES: I mentioned in my report an incident that my neighbors thought was a deer being attacked in the woods. I have also read on this site of some incidences in this area of the state.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: The several incidences occured at different times. The only one that occured during the day was the tracks we spotted.

ENVIRONMENT: The area where we have our farm is a transitional forest, with white pin, many maples, ash, oaks, etc. There are streams and several ponds, one pond is about 15 acres. The woods are just packed with uncountable numbers of blueberry bushes. There are also a number of wetlands, and raveens that run through the woods.

Follow-up investigation report by BFRO Investigator Paul J. Mateja:

After speaking with the witness the following should be noted:

- The witness and his wife observed two sets of tracks in the snow. The track way extended over 200 yards. A typical track was approximately 15-16 inches in length and had a human shape. The tracks looked old, possibly because of snow melt. The typical step (between foot prints, left to right) was approximately 52 inches. The two trackways separated for a time then came back together. The tracks were seen in the March 2003, not 2004 as noted in the submitted report (this was a simple mistake as the report was submitted in July 2004).

-The wood knocks were heard at 11:00 p.m. There were 3-4 successive knocks, a pause, and then 3-4 more knocks. The pattern was repeated several times.

- There has been no recently observed activity.

- In subsequent correspondence with the witness, we discussed further the possibility that a leaping deer had made them. The witness provided the following explanation:

“I was just up in our woods last week after a fresh snow, and I know the type of track that you are describing, they are everywhere and can go for quite a distance. You can usually see the hoof prints in these tracks when they are fresh, but what differentiates these tracks from the tracks that I saw were: 1) the tracks that I saw where more defined in the shape of a large human type track, more flat at the bottom; 2) they alternated between right and left more than deer tracks, which are pretty much in a straight line when they are leaping. The tracks that I saw where alternating more like a human’s walk. The distance between the deer leap tracks is very similar to the distance between the tracks that we saw. That is the only similarity.”