YEAR: 1998

SEASON: Winter

MONTH: December

STATE: Virginia

COUNTY: Louisa County

LOCATION DETAILS: I don't live in the area anymore, but it's the only road from Louisa to Mineral VA. My friend who saw it with me, still lives in the area, and I'll try to get in touch with her.

NEAREST TOWN: Between Louisa and Mineral VA

OBSERVED: I had been working a swing shift at a paper press "American Press" from 3pm to 12 midnite, in the town of Mineral, VA (I think it was Mineral, in Louisa County.)
About five of us were travelling home to Louisa, VA on not-too-isolated country road, when suddenly I saw something cross and go into the skinny forest at the side of the road. The first thing that struck me about it, was the way it moved. On a very primal level, I registered that it moved like nothing I had ever seen before; and my instinct on that primal level, was a gut-wrenching fear-reaction. Everything was happening very quickly, and the only light was from our headlights, but I noticed it was tall, and skinny, a dark figure with bad posture (a little hunched over.) Taller than any man I had ever seen, and I couldn't figure out why a man would be at that particular spot, as there was not much around, and it was midnight.
I turned around to one of the people in the van and saw she was staring at the same spot and I said "Did you see that?" She said "Yes." She didn't want to talk about it much, but I asked her what her first reaction was, and she said "fear." When I asked her why, she said "because of the way it moved, it looked like a killer." So then we talked about how something "different" would cause our first reaction to be fear, but the reaction soon after was of joy and wonder that we (older women, been there/done that) had truly seen something we had never seen before. It made us both smile, and I looked Bigfoot up on the internet the next day, as I had heard about sightings all across the US, but had never heard of them being around populated areas in the Virginia area.

OTHER WITNESSES: Yes. She was a passenger in the backseat of the van, and I was a passenger in the front. I have her email address.

OTHER STORIES: No.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: About 12:30 am after midnite.

ENVIRONMENT: It was just scrubby oak forest, there were actually rural-type esidences across the road; in other words, wasn't super-isolated. It was a quiet time of night in that neighborhood. No other signs of life, which is why it stood out so much!

Follow-up investigation report:

I spoke with the witness by phone. She was able to add to the details in her report. She said that the head of the creature did have a kind of peak to it, like someone wearing a hooded sweatshirt. She also speculated that the creature was around 7' tall, and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 180#. She admitted she wasn't very good at estimating such things, but she thought it was extremely thin. She saw the creature at a distance of "3 or 4 van lengths away" for a period of 3 seconds or so. She and the other witness agreed that what made them think they were seeing something they hadn't ever seen before was as much the way the creature walked, "A graceful, glidey walk," as its size. She described the walk as, "Alien kind of movement," not at all like a human would walk. She said that she had seen bear in her time in VA, and that this was not a bear. She also estimated that they were about 2/3 of the way through their trip when they saw the creature, which gives us a rough estimate of its location. There are quite a few good sized creeks in that general area, and few houses.

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