YEAR: 2023

SEASON: Fall

MONTH: November

DATE: 21st

STATE: Texas

COUNTY: Jasper County

LOCATION DETAILS: [Investigator (MM) notes: The property owners do not want us to specify the location of the home. See graphic below to get a rough idea where the hunting lease is situated.]

NEAREST TOWN: Buna

NEAREST ROAD: FM 253

OBSERVED: My son and I were hunting the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Right before dark we heard a pig being killed. There was a lot of squealing. We have hunted our entire lives and are familiar with the noises pigs make. There was about 45 seconds of it screaming insanely before the noise just stopped. The woods went dead silent. It was probably about 130 yards from where we were sitting.
We thought a cougar got the pig because there is one in the area.

A few minutes later a doe and two yearlings came running out of the woods. The doe is blowing and stomping. She runs toward the wood line then back toward the field again. She then moves along the wood line toward the west about 100 yards, and does the same thing -- run toward the woods then away from the woods frantically. The yearlings were on her tail the whole time.

Then she walks over to the normal game trail into the woods that the deer use near the field. The deer go into the woods and out of view. They were acting very erratic. I have hunted this property since I was eight years old. This was not normal behavior.

After the deer entered the woods, a span of maybe seven minutes from when we heard the pig squealing, we hear what sounded like wood on wood knocks. It knocked four or five times. My son who is 13 looked at me like "What was that??" I said I don’t know.

Before I can finish saying that, we heard a response of four or five more knocks off to our northwest. The original sounds came from the northeast and they were in the same tone but little further away.

My son looks at me and says, "Mom it’s time to get out of here." I said no, be quiet, listen. Before I could finish telling him that we hear four or five more knocks. They came more from the north of us.

At this point it’s getting to where it’s too dark to shoot but we’re still listening. My son is trembling in fear. His teeth are chattering.

I bow hunt and have lived in those woods since I was a child. It’s family land. It butts up near deer lease. There is a slew that runs in the back of the property. We killed six boars the week prior and I dragged them out in the woods northwest of where we were hunting, at about 320 yards from our stand sets. A lot of those pigs were gone. There was no evidence that they had been eaten by normal predators in that area. Three of them were picked up and gone. No trace of them. They were the smaller boars. The larger boars were still there. They are decaying. Some coyote and vultures and stuff like that have been eating on the carcasses.

We are sitting there in the deer stand, listening. I don’t even know how to describe what we heard. It wasn’t whoops or hows. It was more like some thing kind of talking, but not English and not human sounding. It was a deep warbling growling voice. It was very peculiar, scared us both so bad that we jumped out the deer stand and took off.

We had a situation a few years back. My dad raises cattle. We pulled a dead calf. We had the ropes on the calf's legs from where we pulled it out of its mother. It was on a slip knot on each hind leg. We had drug this calf carcass out in the woods in the same area that I had just put those boars. We went back a few days later to retrieve the ropes. The calf is gone no trace of it. The only thing that was there were the two ropes laid out side-by-side in straight lines . My dad could not give an explanation as to what could lay those ropes outside by side, perfectly in line and unknotted.

I was a loan officer at the credit union a few years back. I was discussing with a friend some strange instances I had in this particular hunting club. He laughed at me. Told me I was crazy but then called me three days ago, telling me that he didn’t think I was crazy. Him and his friends were hunting in the same area that my stand was in the deer lease. They found a footprint. It was about the size of men’s 11 shoe, but only had four toes. He said they had all heard strange noises including tree breaks, and some noises that he said didn’t belong. He asked me to send him a screenshot of where my stand was in that deer lease so I did, and upon that picture, we realized that we were both hunting in the same area.

My sister, 23 years ago, saw something on the side of the road late in the evening in between the deer lease and where the footprint was found, and where we live and hunt currently. Maybe that is what she had seen. She was coming home late one night and went over a culvert in a hollow. Going over that the culvert she said that there was a “grizzly bear” on the side of the road. She was livid that we had not told her we had bears. We do have a small bear, but it’s not much bigger than a hog. She claimed this to be as broad as my dad‘s beefmaster bull. It had long red shaggy hair and stood up as she drove past it.

ALSO NOTICED: Several years later, when Finding Bigfoot came out, I saw a girl in town wearing a BFRO beanie. I asked her about the beanie and told her that I was sort of a believer too, and really enjoyed the show. She told me that her uncle had an encounter on the same road that my sister saw her grizzly bear. She claimed that her uncle was driving an 18 wheeler and it ran across the road in front of him.

OTHER WITNESSES: My son, Wyatt age 13

TIME AND CONDITIONS: Late evening, dusk dark

ENVIRONMENT: Pine forest and sloughs

Follow-up investigation report by BFRO Investigator Matthew Moneymaker:

I spoke with Samantha at length. Not often do I speak to a woman who has grown up bow hunting her whole life, in the same expanse of woods, and knows everything about those woods, like when which tracts were clear cut last, and which creeks have year round running water no matter what, etc., etc.

She and her son did not see any bigfoots that day but both were very certain that the knocks were not woodpeckers. She was certain these wood knocks were louder and more powerful than a human could make, and rapid. Both her and her son knew intuitively the sounds back in the woods were made by big animals with big strong arms (and they were right).

The location of the big hunting lease around which all this stuff seems to be happening is situated at the highest point above sea level for the whole surrounding area. It is basically on the ridge separating the Neches River Watershed and the Sabine River Watershed.

She did not know much about the Bigfoot subject. She asked if other people see them in her part of Texas. I explained that the Sabine River has sightings along most of it. The next biggest hotspot for bigfoot sightings in Texas is the Big Thicket Area. Her hunting area (adjacent to her parents' land) outside Buna sits right in between Big Thicket and the Sabine River.


Along the high ground between the Neches River and Sabine River there are wide mowed easements for pipelines and power transmission towers. They run north-south through this hunting lease and eventually merge. See graphic below.

These long straights swaths through the fields and woods provide a quiet safe dark pathway for deer herds at night. The ones intersecting the hunting lease create an unobstructed path more than 50 miles long. The top end of the power line route terminates, coincidentally, at the dam for Toledo Bend Reservoir ... where we shot parts of one of our Louisiana episodes, due the number of sightings around that area ... 50 miles north of Buna (pronounced BYOO-nah).

If Bigfoots want to head north from the Buna area up to Toledo Bend (the boundary of Texas and Louisiana for many miles) they will likely use this power line route.

Once at Toledo Bend they can follow the long lake further north, then continue north along the Sabine River, and then connect over to the Red River basin north of Shreveport. Deer and their predators can follow that river basin all the way to Boggy Creek Arkansas and will not be seen by any humans if they are moving late enough at night.






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About BFRO Investigator Matthew Moneymaker:

Matthew Moneymaker is originally from the Los Feliz District of Los Angeles, California.

- Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

- Founder of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization,1995.

- Writer and co-producer of the Discovery Channel documentary "Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science", 2001.

- Co-producer of the TV Series "Mysterious Encounters" for the Outdoor Life Network (OLN Channel), 2002.

- Producer of the "2003 International Bigfoot Symposium" (Willow Creek Symposium) DVD set, 2004.

- Co-host of "Finding Bigfoot" on Animal Planet Channel, 2010 - 2017.

- Current Director of the BFRO

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