Kentucky Man Recounts Childhood Sasquatch and Dogman Encounters

Kentucky has long been one of those states that quietly sits on the map when it comes to Bigfoot reports, but every now and then a story surfaces that reminds everyone just how active things have been out there. A recent episode of The Cryptid Profiler podcast features a witness named Nick who has had not one, but multiple encounters going all the way back to his childhood, and his stories are the kind that stick with you long after you hear them. Nick grew up in rural Kentucky on a family farm where deer hunting was practically a rite of passage. His dad had him out in a deer stand at just nine years old, teaching him gun safety and the ways of the woods. By the time he was eleven, he was out there on his own, dad stationed about 150 yards away in his own stand. That's when things got interesting. The first encounter happened on opening day. Nick was up in his stand before daylight, facing down a fence row with woods behind him. He started hearing something walking through the leaves off to his left. Every time he turned to look, nothing was there. But the footsteps kept coming, getting closer, passing right by him through the fence row. He could track the sound as it moved through the leaves until it reached a big oak tree about 70 yards down. And that's when the invisible became visible. Right at that tree, a massive figure appeared. Nick describes it as around nine feet tall, four and a half to five feet broad across the shoulders, no neck to speak of, covered in brown hair, and built like nothing he had ever seen. He knew exactly what it was the moment he saw it. The second encounter came later that same season. Nick was facing down the fence row where it ran into the woods, with a creek about 40 yards in. That creek was roughly eight feet deep from bank to bottom. He heard something crossing through the water, and then a head appeared above the bank. The figure took just three steps to climb out of that eight-foot creek bed, which gives you an idea of just how long those legs were. When it turned and looked at him, Nick's grunt call fell out of his mouth and hit his .30-30 rifle. The creature heard the sound, turned, let out a big grunt, and just kept walking. Nick didn't leave that deer stand until his brother came to get him that evening. What makes Nick's story stand out from so many others is the relationship he describes feeling with whatever was out there in those woods. Growing up, he always had the sense that he was being watched, but not in a threatening way. He felt like they were looking out for him, almost like guardians. He played all through those woods as a kid, and here's the fascinating part. When he wasn't around, packs of coyotes would move through the area. But when Nick was out there climbing trees and exploring, the coyotes vanished. It was as if something was keeping them away, protecting him like he was one of their own. That kind of protective behavior has been reported by other witnesses over the years, and it lines up with the idea that these beings are highly intelligent and territorial in ways we are only beginning to understand. Nick's family didn't believe him at first. His brother thought he was making it up, and his dad felt the same way. That experience of being dismissed is something so many witnesses go through, and it's one of the reasons people stay quiet about what they've seen for years, sometimes decades. Nick mentioned that before his first real encounter, the only exposure he had to anything like Bigfoot was the movie Harry and the Hendersons, which is a pretty common starting point for a lot of people who later become researchers themselves. But the encounters didn't stop in those woods. Nick also shared a terrifying experience at Land Between Lakes, a massive recreation area that straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee border. He was there with a buddy and his girlfriend at the time, grilling out at a picnic area near a boat ramp. As it got close to dark, something let out a howl with a roar mixed into it, a sound that froze all three of them on the spot. They could hear something big moving through the woods, snapping branches as it came. It stopped about 20 yards from the end of the tree line, and what they saw was something out of a nightmare. Standing on two legs, around eight feet tall, with mangy blackish-gray hair, and canines that were at least two and a half inches long. The thing grabbed a sapling roughly three inches thick and ripped it out of the ground, smashing it against an oak tree. Their car was only about 30 yards behind them, and all three of them made a break for it without a single word needing to be spoken. Nick is pretty clear that if they had been any further from that vehicle, things could have gone very differently. Land Between Lakes has a long history of unusual sightings, and the area's dense, remote forests make it the kind of place where things can exist without much interference from people. Reports of large, bipedal creatures and canine-type cryptids coming out of that region are not uncommon, and Nick's account fits right into that pattern. The full conversation goes into even more detail about Nick's experiences and his lifelong awareness that there's more out there than what most people are taught to believe. It's worth catching the entire episode over on The Cryptid Profiler channel, because stories like Nick's are exactly why this subject matters. These aren't people looking for attention. These are folks who had something happen to them that changed the way they see the world, and they carry that with them every single day. Kentucky keeps producing these kinds of stories, and the more witnesses who step forward, the harder it becomes to dismiss what so many people have been saying for generations. Nick's encounters, from the deer stand to the creek to that terrifying night at LBL, are a reminder that whatever is out there is not just passing through. It's watching, and for some people, it seems to have been watching for a very long time.