Shane Carpenter
Missouri, 1984
My first encounter happened on my uncle’s property in West Plains Missouri when I was ten years old. His dog would often run off in the woods and typically he would just whistle and it would come back within thirty minutes, but it didn’t happen on this day. So my uncle asked me if I’d go out to the wood line and holler for him a bit. So I did that and got twenty to thirty feet inside the tree line hollering for this dog named Sam.
So I ended up crossing a field and was walking eastward just inside the tree line hollering for him. I knew these woods well as I grew up playing and hunting here with my cousins and also hiking with my uncle and my dad. As I entered the woods it felt different this day. As I’m walking along I started getting this weird feeling which I now call the “vibe”. I focused in on this tree thirty feet in front of me. I knew something was there and was frozen in fear before it stepped out from behind the tree and when it did it just stood there staring at me. We stared at each other for maybe ten to fifteen seconds, which felt like an eternity to me. At the time I didn’t understand what I was seeing and had never heard of Bigfoot or Sasquatch.
The thing was bipedal and covered in hair. Based on what I now know it was a young, male juvenile. The hair was black to dark brown maybe two and a half to three inches long and covered its body. It had the typical Sasquatch brow ridge with brown eyes and high cheek bones, but no sagittal crest. I could also see the whites and its nose was more like ours, but the area between the nose and upper lip was much longer than a human by proportion. It had hair all around its mouth so I really couldn’t see much in the way of lips which was the same thing with its ears. You could see where they were, but not the ears themselves. My focus was on its eyes, so I’m able to pick details about its face and head, more so the rest of its body. Eventually it turned, walked away and as a beam of sunlight hit its back I noticed its hair had an oily sheen shinning to it. Overall, it had a blue appearance.
After crested over the hill and I couldn’t see it anymore that’s when the fear set in and I took off running out of the woods, across the field and back to my uncle’s house. While I was gone my dad had gotten there and was inside with my uncle. When I seen our car I started screaming and crying for my dad. He consoled me and did the fatherly thing to get me calmed back down. After that I didn’t go into the woods for a long time! My dad tried to convince me I was seeing shadows or “letting my young mind get away from me”, but it was ingrained into my mind and I knew exactly what I saw, even though I couldn’t identify it. However, it was traumatizing and too much of a load to carry and eventually locked it into the back of my mind.
Things returned to normal and over time I grew up, got married and had kids with no mention of what happened at the young age of ten. I had gone back into the woods from time to time, but never the deep woods. Then in 2013 I decided to take my family on a hike. I wanted my kids to enjoy the things I enjoyed when I was a kid, discounting my sighting. So I got on Google Earth, found a great spot and the next morning we were hiking! About an hour and a half into our hike I started getting this weird feeling (vibe) that I only had once in my life and I knew exactly what it was. I thought to myself, “This is not the time”! I’m with my family and this is not what I want to happen.
The kids were busy messing around on the trail and I told my wife to stay right here while I stepped about twenty feet off the trail and started scanning. Then I saw four heads behind a downed tree watching my kids. I snapped a couple of picture with a crappy phone that I had, stepped back on trail with my wife and tried to act as nonchalantly as I could. I told my wife we needed to turn around and head back. She didn’t ask or say anything, but just went with the flow and I got my family safely back. Then I was faced with the task of explaining to my wife, not only what had just happened, but of my childhood encounter as well.
Experiencing this a second time as an adult, I needed answers. As a seasoned Mixed Martial Arts fighter I had learned much about controlling my fears and the next morning I was sitting in the parking lot in my car waiting for the sun to come up so I could go back on the trail… and again the next day and barely made it home in time to shoot fireworks with my family. I was just trying to gain some firsthand knowledge. I wasn’t on Facebook and didn’t realize there were all these people who had similar experiences. In this time period I had glimpses of two individuals more than once. So with this began an obsession which eventually evolved into serious research looking for Missouri’s Sasquatch.
Notes:
Shane Carpenter and his team of researchers called Ozark Mountain Sasquatch studies a 400 acre tract of land in the southern Ozarks with a small group of Missouri Sasquatch. He will soon release the first of a documentary series called “Into The 400” on Amazon Prime. Shane had a great interview on Gary Spikes Jr., Poorboys Paranormal Podcast (P3) that covers everything listed above and much more.