♪♪
[ bird caws ]
♪♪
joe: Even though it's been so many years,
it's almost like it happened yesterday.
There's something up the tree.
[ creature growling ]
"there's something in the woods, mom."
it was like an evil presence was there.
Okay, now we're being stalked.
I've heard stories over the years,
we all have, of things in the woods,
but I never dreamed that that would happen to us.
[ gunshot ]
♪♪
I couldn't really see just how massive the animal actually was.
It closed the distance between us within seconds.
It could've reached out and grabbed me by my hair.
You can't freeze.
You cannot freeze in a moment like that
because you freeze, you die.
[ creature growling ]
♪♪
in 1994, we basically wanted to leave the city
and raise our kids in the country,
and we bought some land in the foothills
of the appalachian mountains out in adams county.
We just kind of walked the property
and found a place to build a house,
leveled it off and started.
Four years later, it was done.
♪♪
joe is my son.
He was around 11, right around 11, and his cousin,
keith, same age.
Where should I put this?
Suzanne: Ever since we bought the land,
his cousin would come out from cincinnati and stay with us.
Oh, okay.
Him and I have really just been very close
since I was very young, and he would come out weekends,
you know, building treehouses and exploring,
and that was my right-hand man.
That day, the kids wanted to go work on their treehouse.
- Hey, joe. - Yeah?
Oh, thanks.
Now, don't leave my tools down there.
Yeah, I know.
You have to go up a long, long driveway
to a pretty heavily wooded valley.
I mean, it's thick, beautiful,
and there's nobody around.
♪♪
very secluded.
♪♪
the woods are so heavy, and on a cloudy day,
it can almost seem dark.
- Hey, joe, slow down. - We're almost there!
♪♪
suzanne: You have to understand where we built our house.
It was in the foothills of the appalachian mountains.
It was just very remote. There was no neighbors around.
I mean, there were, but you couldn't see anybody,
something I'm not used to
because I was raised in the city.
♪♪
[ birds calling ]
but the kids always wanted to be in those woods and play.
♪♪
there it is.
♪♪
the tree stand had been there for many years.
It was just something that was old, fallen down.
What was this for?
Hunting deer.
- That's so rickety. - Yeah.
We just got the idea one day that, you know,
"let's see if we can repair this thing,
"kind of restore and bring it back to life.
It would be somewhere cool to kind of hang out."
♪♪
hey, joe, hand me the binoculars.
♪♪
[ creature growling ]
- what is it? - Shh.
♪♪
we have some animals that were in the same area --
the mountain lions, the bear, you know, that we've seen out
there and heard, and it's nothing abnormal.
You just respect, you know, they respect us.
We respect them, and you go about your way.
♪♪
- okay. - Can I have the hammer?
We were having a great time,
and we had our material and our tools with us.
We were just really excited to get things moving on this.
I'm grabbing some lumber off the truck,
and I had made a little pile closer to the tree stand.
Keith was up in the tree stand,
going over some measurements and stuff that he needed,
and I remember looking up to him to talk to him.
The squawking of the chicken hawks
and the commotion caught my eye.
To be that close and making that much noise is
what really caught my attention because it was abnormal to me,
and they were circling and squawking.
They're going crazy. What for?
I don't know, but there's, uh, there's something up the tree.
[ creature growling ]
I saw a large figure,
three quarters of the way up the tree.
Even from being on the ground and that far away from the tree,
looking up, I mean, it was huge.
It was just massive.
It looked like it was 700 pounds, 8 to 10 feet tall.
[ creature growling ]
fear, I think, was the first thing that hit me.
We've seen mountain lions and bears,
and nothing ever looked anything like that.
There's something up there.
I didn't notice it climbing up or how long it had been there
or what it was even doing.
I mean, it knew we were there.
♪♪
it's -- it's looking right at us.
♪♪
[ howling ]
we needed to get out of there fast.
- Let's go! - Yeah.
We jump out of the treehouse,
and as we were running as fast as we could,
you could hear whatever it was had jumped out of the tree.
[ leaves rustle ]
it was so heavy, so dense.
The vibration when it hit,
I could feel it through my feet as I was running.
Come on, keith! Hurry up!
You know, a lot of fear came over both of us
because we had never experienced or seen anything like that,
and it really shook us.
♪♪
[ creature growling ]
we wanted to get to the house, you know, to tell mom
because it wasn't really far away, but at that time,
it seemed like it took forever to get there.
♪♪
[ creature growling ]
♪♪
joe: Come on, keith! Hurry up!
♪♪
we had never experienced or seen anything like that.
♪♪
[ howling ]
we ran inside the house, you know, to get my mom.
Mom!
Suzanne: Keith was crying.
Joe was freaking out, saying, "there's something in the woods.
It was chasing us."
there was this thing in the tree --
no, no, no, this was not a bear.
Suzanne: They were scared to death.
They really were.
Keith was screaming, "I want to go home, aunt sue!
I just want to go home," and I was freaking out.
I didn't understand why they were --
I didn't know what had happened.
Keith said when the ground shook,
he turned around and looked at it,
and it was chasing them.
I said, "keith, sit down while it's fresh in your mind.
Draw a picture of what you saw."
it looked like a monkey.
♪♪
he said it had red eyes, you know, like, big teeth.
It almost looked evil, like a devil,
I guess you would say, just very dark, very scary-looking.
♪♪
we ended up giving it the name devil monkey
because it looked so evil, like a devil.
Suzanne: I knew they'd seen something
because they were so scared.
I don't want to say I didn't believe them
because I knew something happened to them.
♪♪
[ bird calls ]
my husband had a tendency to think they either made it up
or they were just exaggerating something
because he likes to explain things,
and he didn't believe it.
So where was it?
Up -- up there.
Okay.
Go get the tools.
♪♪
my dad, just really a working man,
and he had other things on his mind other than something
that had just scared us in the woods.
♪♪
[ low growling ]
come on, boys.
You can get the lumber later.
♪♪
we never went back to pick up the lumber and stuff
that we had had on the ground, nothing.
We never went back to it.
♪♪
because of what happened,
keith never came out to the woods anymore.
♪♪
[ chuckles ] I hear you, ron, but he's just a kid.
He just lets his imagination run away, you know?
I agree, probably a bear.
Listen, just ignore joe. He just spooks easy.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Joe: At first, I was anxious to tell
people my story and what I saw, and I'd get made fun of,
"hey, man, tell them about the devil monkey,"
and then everybody would start laughing.
It's like, "you know what?
I don't have a desire to tell anybody anymore,"
because nobody was on board or believed me.
♪♪
I just decided that was the past,
and I swept it under the rug
and tried to erase it out of my memory.
♪♪
after we had purchased that piece of land where joe told us
he had seen this animal jump out of the tree,
my husband leveled that piece off and built a barn,
and we got a horse.
Ah, you're a greedy girl.
She was our very first horse.
We loved her. Her name was rose.
[ laughs ]
we would go to the barns twice a day to feed.
Anybody that has horses know
they know when they're gonna get fed,
and they always run to the barns.
Go find some grass. I'll see you in the morning.
♪♪
we loved that horse.
♪♪
[ animal snuffling ]
[ horse blusters ]
[ horse whinnies ]
♪♪
[ horse blusters ]
[ horse whinnies ]
♪♪
suzanne: The next morning, we went down to feed the horse.
Hey, rose. What's wrong?
She had these big claw marks on her hindquarters,
and there was, like, three, like, on each side,
all the way from the top down.
[ horse whinnies ]
hey, mom, get over here!
Oh, my god.
And it wasn't dead, but it was, like, in shock.
♪♪
something attacked that horse in the woods.
Those are deep. She needs the vet.
Jesus, get over here!
Joe: It almost seemed like something
had grabbed ahold of it because it was
on the hind of the horse.
Maybe it was running, and it had grabbed
ahold of it to try to catch it, maybe.
We weren't really sure.
Horses are very large.
It was 1,000 pounds or better,
so something that could even consider
taking on that size of an animal
had to have a lot of confidence itself.
Not knowing what it could've been as the day went on,
I started to put two and two together.
Could this have something to do with what, you know,
what we experienced a year or two prior to that?
Mom, what if it was that thing we saw?
The stable that we had built was probably about 50 foot
from the treehouse that joe had been working on.
I realized whatever is in the woods attacking my horse
were the same thing that chased joe and keith out of the woods.
The devil monkey.
My husband is very calm.
Everything has got some kind of a logical explanation
behind everything.
He doesn't believe
that kind of stuff.
It's probably plenty of animals could do this.
I'll call the vet.
Suzanne: When the vet came out, you know, he saw the horse.
He saw the marks.
He said no, he'd never seen that before, never seen that.
♪♪
and we were thinking to ourselves,
"what kind of animal could even consider
taking on, you know, a horse like that?"
coyotes, dogs, they're very small,
and they usually shy away from larger animals,
including our dogs.
Something jumped on this horse.
I just don't know -- I mean, we don't know what it was,
but something jumped on the horse and attacked it.
♪♪
joe: So that afternoon, we had walked the fence line,
and we gathered some hair samples
and sent it off to a lab.
Don't worry, joe.
These tests are gonna tell us what's been here.
At that point, you almost feel like something
is messing with you, you know what I mean?
Like, whatever this creature is, is it trying to bother us?
Is it trying to scare us away?
Why now? You know what I mean?
I don't know. It was weird.
♪♪
we had sent off the hair samples.
Some of them came back -- cattle, horses, which we knew
because that's what was in the area,
and then some of them came back inconclusive,
and they could not give us an answer what it was
because it was not in their database.
No one had ever found a hair like it before,
so they couldn't compare it to anything.
Where's your father?
In the house.
- Jesus. - Hi.
I was just talking to andre.
He's just been attacked by something up on the ridge.
- What? - Yeah.
Our neighbor, andre, he has some hunting land
up above where our property is.
♪♪
he had a camper there.
It was an older camper, and that's the reason
why he was in his vehicle.
Andre told us that when he was sleeping in his jeep
up on top of the ridge,
something jumped on top of his jeep.
♪♪
it woke him up and the sound of slamming on top of his hood
and shook his vehicle.
He said it was a big, gigantic animal
and was staring at him in the windshield,
and he was scared to death,
and he said that it looked like a big monkey.
What he described to me was something similar,
very heavy, very hairy, dark,
the creature that I encountered a couple years ago.
Suzanne: He was afraid and he said,
"I will never stay up here again."
I know that he saw something.
I know something did jump on his vehicle.
I believe him.
♪♪
I had the feeling that we had invaded its territory.
I think it was living there because no one
had ever developed any of that land
all the years it'd been there until we came.
♪♪
[ creature growling ]
I was just afraid.
I was afraid because I didn't know what it was.
I was afraid because it had chased my kids,
attacked my horse,
so I decided to see if I could contact somebody
that could come out and tell me what could be there.
My mom was at a library,
and there was some bigfoot research investigators there
doing, like, a presentation,
and my mom tells them the experience
that we had with a creature.
♪♪
I told them what had happened
to joe and my nephew,
so he got all excited,
and he wanted to come out and look for it,
and he was like, "let's come over on Friday night,
"and let's go, you know,
see if we can hear anything in the woods."
when the investigators came,
I gave them a tour of the woods
where I had experienced the creature.
I took him down to the treehouse.
It's his spot.
Absolutely hate being up there. I feel like I'm being watched.
That particular area, it makes the hair stand up on my neck
whenever I get out there.
♪♪
[ creature growling ]
he set his equipment up overlooking the area
that I had the encounter.
I started to get really nervous.
I didn't want to stay the night by the tree stand,
but I was also very interested into what he was gonna find
because he had the equipment
that could probably capture things
that we'd never heard before.
Okay. I'm up and rolling.
Let's see if we can hear anything.
Joe: The first thing that he did was he recorded
the sounds of the woods.
Suzanne: You couldn't see anything.
I heard the normal sounds and little bugs, whatever,
in the woods but nothing unusual.
Joe: We were there several hours that night and nothing happened.
♪♪
because we weren't hearing anything,
he tried a different approach.
These things are known to be territorial.
♪♪
[ tapping ]
♪♪
that direction, over by the treehouse.
♪♪
[ creature howling ]
how do you describe that?
How do you really describe that sound?
[ creature howling ]
♪♪
it didn't sound anything like humans.
[ creature howling ]
it didn't sound like anything that I'd ever heard.
Coyotes, I've heard many coyotes,
nothing, nothing like that.
It had a totally different tone and a lot longer for every howl.
[ creature howling ]
he would take a few rocks and bang them together.
♪♪
[ creature howling ]
it's almost exciting, in a sense,
to really hear the response from what they were getting.
[ creature howling ]
♪♪
it sent chills down my back.
You can hear yelling,
breaking trees,
like, screaming.
[ creature howling, branches breaking ]
I was afraid.
[ creature howling, thud ]
and, all of the sudden, a very loud sound comes from behind.
There's a metal drum, like a metal fuel tank that's empty.
It sounded like something very heavy slammed into that.
When I heard that sound, I felt scared
because we had heard the noises in front of us,
and it was behind us so fast.
Now it snuck up behind us, and, you know, we're like,
"we're being stalked."
it scared everybody really bad.
Go, go, go, go, go!
That night, I was scared but also reassured,
knowing that I'm not crazy.
[ creature howling ]
♪♪
[ creature growling ]
[ creature howling, branches breaking ]
♪♪
I was afraid that whatever was in the woods
was coming closer to my house,
and I tried to keep living there and not thinking about it.
♪♪
some time later, some friends of our called and said,
"hey, you know, roger just got this deer and killed this deer,
"and can we bring it up there?
We're gonna gut it," and this and that,
and, "we're gonna, you know, make deer burger
and all that stuff."
♪♪
so my husband hung the deer up. They skinned the deer.
They began grinding up the meat and all that,
and we just made an afternoon out of it, evening.
Everybody is cooking out. Some of our friends came.
[ laughs ]
♪♪
and they all left.
They would always just, you know, take the carcass
and throw them out in the woods because coyotes, whatever.
♪♪
and it wasn't wintertime because the windows were open.
You know, it was a beautiful evening.
I woke up in the middle of the night.
♪♪
I said, "jesus, get up! Get up. Oh, my god.
I think there's a fire. I smell, you know, some fire,"
and he said,
"that's not smoke. There's nothing on fire."
he said, "I don't know how to describe it
except smells like burning hair."
there's something here.
He said, "you know, I'm afraid the blood from that deer
drew something to the house."
it was so strong.
It was, I want to say,
a sulfury, a burning-hair smell.
It was like an evil presence was there.
♪♪
what are you doing?
♪♪
I'm thinking, "the creature is in the woods,
and it's running around my house."
that's what I thought.
♪♪
when I looked into his eyes that night, he had fear.
I hadn't seen that before.
♪♪
[ heavy stomping ]
up in the woods, you could hear something walking,
but you couldn't see anything.
[ heavy footsteps ]
I wouldn't be surprised if it was less
than 100 feet from our door,
and you could hear it walking through the woods.
[ heavy footsteps, growling ]
♪♪
these sounds were different.
You could hear that, like, a bark and, like,
a real angry scream.
It kept doing that over and over.
[ growling ]
I was really scared there. I really truly was.
[ creature growling ]
he says, "I'm gonna unload this gun right now.
I'm just gonna start shooting."
[ gunshots ]
♪♪
he just shot his gun
all into the back of the hill behind our house.
♪♪
and after that, we didn't hear anything else at all.
♪♪
even now when I go out into the woods,
I feel like I'm being watched.
What I've learned is that there's definitely something
out there that we don't know about.
Just because so many people haven't seen it
doesn't mean it's not out there.
[ sighs ]
when people tell me they see things, I believe them.
[ creature howling ]
I thought, "I just want out. I want to move so bad.
"I just want to go back to the city.
I'm not cut out for this stuff. I just don't want to live here."
I was afraid.
♪♪
if I could do my life over again,
I would have never built a home there, never.
I wish I had never gone there.
[ howling ]
♪♪
I could really see just how massive
the animal actually was.
It closed distance between us within seconds.
It could've reached out and grabbed me by my hair.
You can't freeze.
You cannot freeze in a moment like that
because you freeze, you die.
♪♪
I'm from the twin cities of minnesota,
basically grew up out in the woods.
From a young age, my dad started me with,
like, firearm safety to get me ready for hunting
when I was 11 or 12.
I've been doing that ever since.
I've always liked it.
It's always been fun to just be out there.
♪♪
the cabin is located in a town that's not far
from siren, wisconsin, and northwestern wisconsin.
We would go up there several times a year,
especially during the summer.
It's literally just surrounded in miles
and miles of thick forest.
It's the middle of nowhere. [ chuckles ]
♪♪
once it got dark there, it was spooky.
It was a scary area to be in.
♪♪
for years, we would have campfires in the firepit,
and from the firepit, you can look up the hill
that goes to that tree line, and it'd feel like at night
like there was something watching you.
♪♪
I always felt like their eyes just locked on
to you from up there.
♪♪
you didn't want to wander around those woods at night.
My mom, she always felt the same way.
♪♪
that day, I was hanging out with my cousin.
Ow!
He was about my age.
I decided to go and have ourselves a little battle,
going around with bb guns that shoot plastic bbs.
It's a fun game, but it doesn't feel good to get hit by those
bbs because they fly pretty fast.
- Ah! - Ooh, that sting?
I was more into it than my cousin was.
He dressed in regular, plain clothes.
I had on old army woodland camouflage, and I figured,
"hey, camouflage, woods, they go hand in hand,"
and then I retreated to the wood line
to try to utilize the camouflage.
He was chasing me into the woods.
As I was bouncing from cover to cover, he would shoot.
I would duck, and then I would shoot, and he would duck.
[ laughter ]
every once in a while, we'd get hit.
♪♪
I would crouch, stay low and try to stay less visible,
kind of like I was hunting.
♪♪
hey, let's not go too far into the woods, john!
♪♪
we were at the top of a hill where there's a slight
clearing in the wood line,
where you can see for a good 50, 60 yards.
♪♪
time out!
I called time out because, mostly, I was winded.
I was tired from running, and I figured,
"hey, let's take a break."
[ laughs ] I got you good!
In your dreams.
I noticed that the woods were dead quiet.
All the birds had stopped chirping.
♪♪
it clicked in my head that there's something wrong here.
♪♪
what?
When the woods go quiet, it typically means
there is a large predator nearby,
whether it be a bear or a mountain lion.
That's something that I'm familiar with
because I've had multiple encounters
with predators in the woods,
and it's a terrifying experience.
♪♪
I began to look from left to right across this clearing
because I had the feeling of being watched.
♪♪
I was expecting a bear,
was the most likely option.
When I went from right to left,
about halfway is when I locked on to it, when I saw it.
♪♪
[ creature growling ]
what stood out was white,
and I saw the white, focused,
and it was teeth,
large canine teeth,
and it had massive jaws.
I could really see just how massive the animal actually was.
I saw its eyes.
The way that that was looking at us, it was like daggers.
It was darting its eyes between my cousin and me.
[ creature growling ]
I tensed up immediately.
I did not want to deal with this situation.
You can't freeze.
You cannot freeze in a moment like that
because you freeze, you die.
[ growling ]
it sounded like it closed distance
between us within seconds.
I could hear it directly behind me.
My cousin has stopped.
Let's go! Let's go!
Just keep going. I'm right behind him.
This thing is right on me,
close enough to where it could've reached out
and grabbed me by my hair.
♪♪
once we cleared the tree line, we stopped hearing the animal,
and we ran straight for the cabins.
♪♪
what was that?
And he seemed about as freaked out as I did,
and at that point, I didn't know what to say,
so I told him it was a bear
because I knew that my grandparents,
who were with us, would not believe any of that.
[ growling ]
♪♪
the first person I told was my mother.
It wasn't a bear, mom.
It was something else.
And she said it had brought back bad memories for her.
I've seen one.
She told me she had seen one as well
in the same area of wisconsin.
♪♪
she said that an animal began crossing the road.
The size of the animal was more than twice
the size of a regular wolf.
She described the way that the creature had moved
as being unnatural.
It looked like it was uncomfortable in its own feet.
[ creature growling ]
it looked right at her vehicle
like it wanted to scare the living crap out of her.
[ growling ]
it immediately charged to the car.
She believed that what she was looking at was pure evil.
[ growling ]
and decided to break off and run into the woods.
♪♪
the research I've done,
I find out that people are calling these dog-men.
Personally, I find the name to be a little silly,
but I think that it matches the descriptions
of what the other eyewitnesses have seen.
[ creature growling ]
I believe that this creature was in the woods, waiting for us.
It was an uncomfortable feeling to have, to realize,
"oh, hey, there's something out here that is likely
as intelligent as I am, and it's hunting."
[ growling ]
♪♪
after the encounter, I was way more cautious
when going out into those woods.
I didn't want to take the chance
of having to outrun something like that again.
♪♪
there might be more dangerous creatures out there
than what science likes to talk about.
I'm more accepting that
these creatures can exist.
Since then, I haven't stepped foot in any forest
without carrying either my handgun,
rifle or a knife
or a combination of all three.
I will not go out unarmed, not out into any wild areas.
If I could I go back in time,
if I had the knowledge that this creature
was going to be in the woods at that moment,
I never would've gone to the woods,
but can't really change the past,
so, I mean, I'm stuck with it.
I'm stuck with what happened.
♪♪