I could not, with all my strength, take my eyes off it.
The teller grew up in a community of about 220 people in eastern Kentucky and has spent his whole life in the woods: trapping, foraging, digging roots, hunting everything from dove to bear. He heats with wood, grew up around sawmills, and says he can tell a young squirrel from an old one by its bark. He's a carpenter by trade, and he is not, in his words, someone who believes in haints or goblins.
About six years before the post, his great-uncle decided to build a hunting cabin on family land, property that had been in the family for 140 years. It sits halfway up a mountainside seven miles from the nearest paved road, reached by going down a deep holler, following an old creek bed and climbing around two hills. The slopes are thick with brush, hemlock and beech that block out the light on a cloudy day.
They framed the cabin and got the roof on in a few days. Then the uncle decided to clear more trees around it and offered the teller a hundred dollars and the firewood to help. One hot, humid afternoon in mid-June, they shut off their saws to rest and drink some iced tea.
In the quiet, the teller heard knocking. It wasn't sharp, more of a dull "thonk," like a round of poplar bouncing off a woodpile or a mallet striking the end of a seasoned board. Thonk, thonk, thonk, thonk. He knows woodpeckers, and this wasn't one. He looked at his uncle, and as their eyes met it came again, closer this time. Then came an answering set of knocks from further up the mountain.
His first thought was trespassers, two of them, and that made him angry. He grabbed a chunk of wood, smacked the nearest tree as hard as he could, and stared at the far side of the holler where the first knocks had come from.
Then he saw it. More than a hundred yards away, beside a maple and surrounded by tall mountain laurel, was a jet-black shape with a reddish tinge at the tips of the hair where the sun caught it. He could see half a shoulder, part of a chest and the top of an abdomen, but no head and no limbs. It was not a bear, not an elk and not a shadow. His blood ran cold. He kept asking his uncle what it was, but couldn't tear his eyes away to look at him. It shifted slightly, and it was gone.
When he finally looked over, his uncle was sitting calmly. He said only "Hmm," then stood up, started his saw and went back to work. The teller did the same, but he spent the rest of the afternoon glancing around, ready to swing the saw at anything that moved.
That night he searched for "tree knocks" and found page after page about Bigfoot. He says he still hasn't come to terms with it, and he grips his rifle tighter on the walk to his deer stand.
Years later a cousin came home after retiring from the army and mentioned camping on that same creek with the uncle in the 1980s. As they hiked out one day, they had seen something big cross the trail far ahead. The cousin believed the teller at once. The uncle, though, has never once acknowledged what happened that afternoon, however many times he's been asked.