I know I sound crazy, but I know what I saw.
The teller's family are all outdoors people who camp, hike, fish and hunt together. About five years before the post, two of the teller's uncles took their children to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, to show them where the family had camped with the grandparents in the 1970s and 1980s. The area has since become a wildlife refuge, closed to vehicles, and it was quiet. It was cool out, probably autumn. One uncle brought his son, about fifteen. The other brought his daughter, about six.
Along the trails there were birds, squirrels and chipmunks everywhere. Then they reached a pond, where the little girl started trying to catch frogs. The more experienced woodsman of the two uncles described what happened next: everything went silent, as if someone had turned off the sound. No wind, no birds. The hair stood up on the back of his neck. He looked at his son, who looked just as unnerved and said, "Dad, I want to leave."
He quietly told his brother they needed to go. The brother hadn't noticed anything until he was told to listen, and then he agreed. They called the girl away from the pond and walked straight back to the car. That uncle has run into bears and bobcats without fear, but he says that day he felt watched, and his gut told him to get out before something bad happened. He has refused ever to go back. For years the family teased him about it.
Then, recently, the son told the teller, privately and clearly nervous, that something else had happened that day. "I saw a Bigfoot."
As they reached the pond he had been trailing a little behind the others. Out of the corner of his eye he caught something dark moving. He turned and saw what he took for a bear beside a tree at the edge of the woods. He stopped and watched it, and realized it wasn't a bear. It looked like a large man covered in hair, crouching beside the tree.
Then it stood up. It looked at him with eyes he describes as red, turned, and walked into the woods out of sight.
He had kept it to himself for five years and begged the teller not to tell the family, terrified they would make fun of him. The teller says he is a quiet kid with an active imagination, but that keeping it secret for so long doesn't sound like something made up. Since hearing it, the teller says, walking alone to the tree stand before sunrise has made them nervous in the woods for the first time in their life.