PART ONE

NESRA – Friday April 15th, 2005 – The wilderness of the Southern Adirondacks.

It was a cold, but clear night. At 37°F, it was not your typical camping weather. Chuck and I stood near the campfire at our makeshift base-camp as the pork chops hissed and sizzled on a store-bought rack. We exchanged light conversation as Chuck tended the fire and I leaned on a wooden horse hitch, made from what appeared to be cut-up telephone poles. By all the signs, we were the very first campers to use that site since Fall of 2004. Little did we know that as the clock neared 10:30PM, the pace of things was about to pick up quickly.

“I think I just heard a wood knock from the West,” Chuck said suddenly with a calm but serious tone in his voice.

His statement brought all my senses to immediate attention. I looked at my watch. It was 10:29.

Within ten seconds of the first knock, there came two more, only much closer, and this time, much louder.

Thwack! Thwack!

Being from the Whitehall area, Chuck had heard this unusual wood-knocking phenomenon before but this was new to me.

I took it as my cue to grab my “knocking” board and position myself to return the gesture. Earlier that afternoon we had taken several “practice” swings with a board against a tree to determine what sounded right, but we had done no other “knocking” of our own that afternoon or evening. This wood knocking incident appeared to be completely unprovoked.

Things That Go “Thump” in the Night

As I was just about to make my first return knock, both Chuck and I began to hear strange “bipedal” sounding “thumps” approaching our camp from the West. In concert with the first thump, a barred owl began hooting loudly in the distance as if it were alarmed. I immediately put the board down.
Chuck and I became motionless and silent, pointing simultaneously in the direction of sounds that were now becoming louder and more intense as they approached.

Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!

At their closest point we could not only hear these unusual thumps but we could slightly feel them as well. We also both noticed that these noises were not quadrupedal in nature. There was no “flam” or “gallop” to these sounds such as a heavy moose or a bear would make. These were single and very distinct “thuds” that crescendoed with slight but discernable vibrations in our ankles as they followed the smoke trail toward our camp. Just on the other side of a forested knoll the strange sounds paused for few short seconds, and then began to decrescendo off into the distance, heading Northward, away from our camp. There were more than thirty of these thumps in all, spaced a little less than a second apart.

Chuck and I looked at each other as if to say, “What the heck was that?”
This was supposed to be a dry run – an experimental expedition that was meant to prepare for Kevin, Mike and Brian, who would be joining us the following night. We really weren’t expecting to encounter anything at all that first evening.

After a brief discussion, I took a flashlight and investigated the hill. Other than some disturbed leaves and some indiscernible indentations, I could find nothing that yielded any clues as to what had made the unexplained noises. The following morning, I tried to reproduce the noises as Chuck listened from the camp but I failed at every attempt. Even the heaviest boulder I could drop did not come close to reproducing what both Chuck and I heard and felt that unforgettable evening.

Was this an actual run-in with the legendary Sasquatch, or was there some other explanation for our encounter? Hours of speculation lead to no definite conclusions. Chuck is a seasoned hunter and I’m no stranger to the woods myself, but neither of us had ever experienced anything even remotely like this before.

The Evidence Mounts

This was our first official NESRA expedition into the Adirondack wilderness and we had set up camp only five or six miles away from the famed town of Whitehall, New York. We didn’t pick our first expedition site randomly; we selected the Whitehall region knowing it has a rich history of face-to-face Bigfoot encounters. In fact, earlier that afternoon we had met with a very credible witness who reportedly had a hair-raising, face-to-face encounter in 1997 with a seven-foot-tall, hairy, manlike creature, less than a mile from where we had parked our vehicles. Apparently, he had fallen asleep in his car and was awakened by scratching noises on the metal roof at two in the morning. He tried to open his car door but it bounced off of something! He pushed it again and the obstruction seemed to be gone, but as he stepped out of his vehicle, he literally wet his pants as he found himself only a few inches from a towering hair-covered creature! He saw the creature’s hands and knuckles illuminated clearly by the dome light. It let out a blast of air as it made a deep, “purr-like” growl and then walked ever-so-casually back into the woods with a smooth bipedal stride. Needless to say, this man has been hesitant to even go near those woods at night ever since.

The Stone Giants Meet Rogers’ Rangers

Stories of an ongoing Bigfoot presence in the Whitehall area extend as far back as the colonial days and even into the legends of the Iroquois and Algonquin Indians. Around the year 1390, today's State of New York became the stronghold of five powerful Indian tribes – the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Seneca and the Cayugas joined together in a sacred covenant and became the great Haudenosaunee Nation. (Years later, in 1715, a sixth tribe, the Tuscaroras, was accepted into the Haudenosaunee Nation which is today sometimes referred to as the Iroquois Nation.)

In their legends, the Iroquois made frequent reference to the “Ot-ne-yar-heh,” a race of creatures known to them as “The Stone Giants” or “Stone Coats” named for their supposed inability to be killed with arrows. The Mohawk in particular viewed these creatures as giants that would cover themselves with sticky tree pitch and roll around in gravel until the rocks would cling to their fur.

Many Algonkian Indian Nations such as the Micmac and the Passamaquoddy also have a similar figure known as the Chenoo. (The Algonkian tribes also include the Montagnais-Naskapi, Algonkian, Ojibwa, Cree, and the Blackfoot tribes.) The Chenoo, like the Witiko, Windigo or Wendigo, was supposedly a tall and fast creature that would lurk among the trees of the forest and cannibalize its victims, especially during the harsh winters when food was scarce. Today it is often referred to as the “Old Man of the Woods” or the "Wildman of the Woods."

The Whitehall area is the location of a Sasquatch encounter by the famed Rogers’ Rangers. The account is said to come from an officer’s diary. It seems that rocks and sticks were being violently hurled at a group of the Rangers by what was described as “mountain apes.” It appears that with one volley of shots, this primitive attack was ended. I’ll update this post if I’m ever able to locate the actual officer’s diary and verify this information. The Whitehall area has an interesting history nonetheless.

Whitehall – A Strategic Location For Many A Living Thing

Whitehall—once named Skenesborough, in honor of its Tory landlord, Philip Skene—is located at the southern end of Lake Champlain, a strategic location with a plenteous water supply for many a living thing. In 1776, Benedict Arnold built the first American Naval Fleet there and because of it, the town of Whitehall is known today as the Birthplace of the United States Navy. Nestled in eastern foothills of the rugged Adirondack Mountains, the wilderness of Whitehall is the perfect location to conceal and preserve a lumbering creature such as Sasquatch, or a whole army of them for that matter.

The Adirondack Mountains of northeastern New York are home to the six-million-acre Adirondack Park, a patchwork of public and private lands protected under state law. More than 2.6 million acres within the park are owned and managed by the state. New York's Constitution states that these public lands in the Adirondack Park must never be developed and "...shall be forever kept as wild forest lands."

This protected land, which ranges from remote backcountry to well-traveled mountain trails, provides a tremendous resource both for preservation and recreation. With so much room to move and hide, it’s no wonder that tales of hairy monsters lurking in the woods near Whitehall are not new. They’ve been told and retold for many successive generations.

To be continued...

Coming Soon..

*Some information from Monsters of the Northwoods by Robert Bartholemew and Bill Brann.