I have read with great interest all of the encounters located at the web site and I would like to add my own experience. 

It was July of 1967 and myself and two very good friends were on an all night bass fishing excursion on a strip mine pit just west of Farmington, Illinois. The fishing was bad because of intense rain that came and went as the evening wore on.

Around 11:00 pm I was standing next to one of the two friends when I heard a sound coming from down the gravel road that went by the lake. The sound was coming from quite a distance and at first I thought it was a Katydid but I was surprised at the volume and realized it was not an insect sound but something much larger.

As the sound drew closer the volume increased to the point where my friend, who was fishing in the same location as me, stopped reeling his line in and asked "What is that?"  I told him I didn't know but I noticed that it was getting louder and sounded like it was coming toward us.

The sound got louder and louder and was actually very irritating to the ears. Our other friend finally hollered at us and told us to knock it off. We told him it wasn't us making the noise and we stopped fishing and walked over to where he was standing.

By this time the noise was excruciatingly loud and the frogs and insects had stopped croaking and singing. Suddenly there was the sound of a very large body jumping into the shallow water slough next to the lake we were fishing in.

Whatever it was that jumped in the water began making deep booming sounds in the water by lifting its feet clear of the water and then crashing them back in flat-footed. We just stood there in the pitch-blackness and listened until the creature came out of the water on our side of the bank and started making its way through the eight foot tall reeds between us and him. I walked a few feet away from my friends towards the sound it was making walking through the reeds and stopped on a footpath that went around that end of the lake and stood there as the creature stepped almost all the way through the reeds.

I remember looking up at something that towered over me but was just a black mass in a mass of tan colored reeds. I didn't smell anything or see anything clearly but whatever it was stopped and stood there as though it was looking at me.

Instantly, I took off on a dead run around the lake toward a house on the other side of the lake to see if I could get some help for us. When I got to the back porch of the house I heard a couple more splashes and saw by the dim porch light that my two friends had jumped in the water and one of them had drawn his knife and was hollering for me to get back over there as the thing was standing just a few feet away.

I took off running and when I got to the other side in 20 seconds or so the creature had backed off and was now in the reeds again. It jumped back in the water and got back out and approached us again and this time the three of us hid underneath an overturned Jon boat that was lying on the bank.

The creature stomped around the boat and I got the knife from my friend and prepared to stab at any fingers that attempted to lift the boat off us but the creature just went back to the slough and jumped back in.

It walked up and down the slough for the rest of the night screaming that sound until the sun was about ready to come up at which time it went back down the gravel road in the direction it had come from and gradually out of our hearing.

I have heard recorded sounds allegedly made by Sasquatch or Big Foot in the Pacific Northwest on other internet sites and the sound this creature made was very similar especially considering the intense volume.

Our encounter with this creature lasted for at least five hours and I will never forget it and the terrorizing effect it had on myself and my friends. This account is true to my best recollection of an event that occurred over 43 years ago but seems like it was just last week.

Steve Boylan
Nov 5, 2010, at 10:14 PM

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