Pennsylvania Guest Shares Multiple Bigfoot Encounters and Family Cryptid Stories

Posted Monday, June 22, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

So there's this episode that recently popped up on The Cryptid Profiler channel, and honestly, it's one of those interviews that sticks with you long after it's over. The host Danno brings on his moderator John, and what unfolds is a series of encounters that span decades and even generations of one family. If you haven't checked it out yet, do yourself a favor and give it a listen because the details John shares are the kind that make you sit up a little straighter. John's first run-in happened back in 1998 up on a mountain in Pennsylvania. He was in his twenties, hanging out with buddies, doing what guys do, just talking and shooting the breeze. Then out of nowhere, something let out a sound that he describes as a chimpanzee going off. Now, Pennsylvania doesn't have chimps roaming the wild, so that immediately put everyone on edge. One of his friends, feeling bold, decided to yell out into the woods. What happened next was enough to send them all packing. Within about 30 seconds, there was snapping and crunching coming from behind them in the trees. John said that was it for him, time to go. That kind of reaction, that immediate gut instinct that something is very wrong, is something a lot of witnesses describe. It's primal. When the woods start talking back to you in a language you don't recognize, your body knows before your brain catches up. Fast forward to 2014. John is living out in the middle of nowhere, and one night he hears a scream that he can't even begin to categorize. It wasn't a coyote, wasn't a fox, wasn't anything he could put a name to. He called his wife out to listen, and she heard it too, for about five or six seconds. That was enough for her. She wanted nothing to do with figuring out what it was. About a week later, John was outside with a flashlight, still thinking about that scream, and he spotted something up on a hill. At first he thought it was a possum sitting on a branch, but something was off. He could only see one eye at a time, and when he really focused, he realized there were only two trees up there but three shadows. His wife came out to look, confirmed the same thing, and that was the end of the outdoor investigation for both of them. But the encounter that really got my attention was the one John had with his friend Jeremy. They were driving through a mountainous area in a little Nissan when they spotted something off to the left of the road. John initially called it a bear. Jeremy insisted it was a wolf. So they stopped the car and watched. What they saw was something that was as big as a bear but moved completely differently. John describes it as slinking, moving with a kind of fluid, deliberate motion that just didn't match any bear behavior he knew. It walked right out into the middle of the road, stood there for about five seconds, gave them what John describes as a side-eye look, and then jumped up onto the bank and kept going like it was on a mission. It didn't care about them at all. They were just passing through, nothing more. Now, this is where the story takes a really fascinating turn. John's dad, who his entire life had dismissed anything related to cryptids or unknown creatures, sat him down about a year before he passed away and told him something that completely changed his worldview. His grandfather, living in Connecticut, had been dealing with something on his property for years. They called them "peepers" because something would look in the windows when the family was playing cards at the kitchen table. By the time anyone could get to the door, whatever was outside was already gone, vanished into thin air. The grandfather set up booby traps, nothing meant to harm, just tripping mechanisms to catch whatever was sneaking around. And this thing would bolt across the yard, through the woods, and somehow avoid every single trap. Not hit one. Ever. The stories didn't stop there. Tools would go missing and then show up sitting on the porch weeks or months later. The grandfather eventually moved, not once but multiple times, going through six, seven, eight different houses, eventually ending up in New York. And even as a kid, John remembers his grandfather suddenly insisting on driving him home at 1:00 in the morning for no apparent reason. Something would just shift in the air and it was time to go. The grandfather never spoke about any of it. He kept it all locked inside. What makes encounters like John's so compelling is the consistency across different witnesses and different time periods. The behavior described, the peeping in windows, the ability to avoid traps, the unusual movement patterns, the sounds that don't match any known animal, these are themes that come up again and again in Sasquatch research. Many researchers have noted that these beings seem to display an intelligence that goes beyond what we'd expect from a simple animal. The way John's grandfather's visitor avoided every trap, the way it returned tools to the porch, the way it seemed to know exactly when people were distracted, all of that points to something with a level of awareness and intent that researchers find genuinely puzzling. John also referenced a video from the Squatch Theory channel, something called the black thing at the pond, and said that's the closest comparison he could give to what he saw on that mountain road. If you've seen that footage, you know exactly what he's talking about. That dark, fluid movement is hard to forget. This episode is absolutely worth the listen. John comes across as a genuinely down-to-earth guy who isn't looking for attention or trying to sell a story. He's just sharing what happened to him and what his family experienced. And sometimes those are the most credible accounts, the ones where the person telling it is still a little unsettled by it years later.