Back in 2004, my husband and I were given three of our grandchildren to raise. They were boys aged 1½, 3, and 4½ years old. The boys were followed a few months later by their sister, a newborn, who was also given to us to raise. After having raised our children, my husband and I found ourselves as “new parents.”
We lived in a small town in New England, so small that you could step out of the house and see the police station, fire department and post office just beyond the house. When I was young, we had stop signs downtown where there are stop lights now. My grandmother and father were born there and I lived for six decades in that town. It was the kind of place where, if you needed some vegetables for supper, you went to a neighbor who had a garden, took what you needed and left the money on their front porch.
We lived on the Main street but were surrounded by many forested acres. Three rivers run through the town and we had a large field behind our house. There were many fields throughout the town, and other towns nearby were similar in makeup. There were also farms in the area and in the neighboring towns too. They were very New England type towns, small, comfy and cozy.
When the children first came to live with us, both my husband and I worked. He worked at a transit company, in a local city and I worked as a paralegal. My job was a four-hour commute. Two hours in the morning and two hours at night. I would be gone from the house for 12 hours a day, at a minimum. I often worked on weekends too. My husband took a leave of absence from his job and stayed at home with the children for 2½ years. When he returned to work, he worked the night shift. That enabled him to watch the children during the day. He did his best with the children while I was at work and given the circumstances, he did a good job.
One day after work, when the youngest children were 6 and 4 respectively, I came home to find the house in a state of disarray. Supper hadn’t been made and the kids were running to me with quite a story about a “big gorilla” that had been outside that day. The two youngest let me know that during the afternoon, they saw a “big gorilla” in front of the house, running along the street. They said it was “very fast.” Then, the “big gorilla” jumped our picket fence and ran into our yard. The children said they had their noses pressed against the window pane and that the “big gorilla” came up to the window, growled at them and then pushed its “paws” against the window. The children said they tried to wake up my husband, but he had fallen asleep on the couch and they could not rouse him.
The “big gorilla” then ran into the backyard where it broke some car windows and threw about some trash cans. I didn’t disbelieve the children, I was just too exhausted to deal with it and responded with my “that’s nice” comment, that I used for anything I couldn’t
handle at the moment. I do recall reading in the newspaper a few days later that the police were warning folks about vehicle damage, but I never gave that any further thought.
I didn’t give it any further thought even though a few years prior to the “big gorilla” incident, I had seen a very large dead wolf that I presumed had been hit by a car, laying on the roadside. It was not a coyote, nor was it a coydog that we had in the area. I had
seen pictures of wolves and this one was immense. I had personally seen coydogs while riding my horse along the trails. The wolf body was gone the next day and no mention by authorities of any wolf sightings was in the newspapers. I thought that was sort of unusual. Did we have wolves in our area? Wouldn’t that be newsworthy? Did anyone else see this wolf? Obviously, someone had as its body was gone the following day.
I also did not give the “big gorilla” story much further thought even though years before the children came, both my husband and I had witnessed large dog-type footprints in our backyard. We mentioned those prints to a friend of ours, the animal control officer in a nearby town, who didn’t seem too surprised by our find. However, we never discussed anything further.
I didn’t give the “big gorilla” story much thought either, even though at about the time, we saw the dog prints in our backyard, our cats had started to go missing. I found one of our cats, Peter, the best hunter in town, high up on my neighbor’s roof. The house was three stories with the first floor and second occupied by tenants and the third an attic. Lots of those older homes in New England always had full attics. I called Peter, managed to enter the building and climbed to the second floor with a clothes basket. I climbed onto the porch railing, put the basket above my head and up to the house
gutters, and Peter obligingly dropped in. Thankfully, we managed to save our wonderful cat. Even one of our friends asked why Peter was up on the roof. Peter was not scared of anything. But I was still not connecting the dots.
Back to the “big gorilla” story. When the children got a little older, we moved to North Carolina. It was in North Carolina when the children were nearer teen years that I found your Dogman Encounters program on YouTube. I listen intently to the narratives on your program. Recently, while driving down the street, I connected the dots. The idea of it jolted me and my brain awake. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “Did they say “big gorilla” and “something very fast” when the children told me their story? Did the children have an encounter with something those years back?
I immediately spoke with our 12-year-old and 14-year-old separately. “Do you remember the time you told me the story about the ‘big gorilla’?” The 12-year-old energetically told me every single thing she remembered. The animal was very large and very fast. It had black hair and a long bushy tail. It growled. It had paws with fingers. It had stood up and pushed on the window with those paws. It ran very fast and had jumped over the fence. It had run into the backyard and made a lot of noise breaking things. The 12-year-old said it did not have the face of a gorilla or monkey but she couldn’t tell more about the face because of the hair.
The 14-year-old shivered when I asked if he remembered it. He said he would never forget that thing coming into the yard. He remembers it clearly as if it were yesterday. He too remembers the swiftness of the creature, the black hair on it, and how it had jumped the fence and was running amuck from the front to the backyard. He said he doesn’t know what it was and still doesn’t, but that he hopes never to see anything like it again.
The children now know about Dogmen, Bigfoot, and other cryptids. They didn’t when they saw the “big gorilla” though. Neither did I. We’ve all received an education from listening to your program. We’re aware that Dogmen don’t always stay in the forests.
They’re often seen among neighborhoods. And perhaps, just perhaps, the creature my children saw all those years ago, was just that. A Dogman in a small New England town.
Anonymous
Time: 12:00 PM
Date: Summer of 2009