I was told this story twenty year or more years ago by my mother (passed away in May 2006).

It came up in conversation during which we were not discussing Bigfoot, but she retold a story that my grandfather had told her and her siblings sixty-five or seventy years earlier. (roughly 1916 –1921)

My grandfather and grandmother were Greek immigrants that worked in the fruit canneries in the Central Valley in California and my grandfather worked many years for the Southern Pacific Railroad, doing track maintenance and building RR track.

My mother told a story that was refuted by her and her siblings when my grandfather told it, (these were children of the early nineteen hundreds, going to school bi- and tri- lingual, as my mother told it, when grandpa told the story they were convinced that he was telling a tall tale primarily because they all learned in school that there were no apes in North America). The story goes:

Grandpa was working for Southern Pacific Railroad building track in the northern California -Oregon border area in the early nineteen hundreds, I do not know the year; during this work project, he was dispatched to work on a line camp in the woods, they had a base camp that the work crew worked from and each week the work crews would split in to two man teams that would work an area clearing logs and ground and at the end of one week they would go back to the base camp to check in and replenish their supplies and then set out after the weekend for another week in the woods.

During this time, one of the two man teams came back to base camp with only one man, they were told that the other man had disappeared. The group at the base camp apparently gave a brief search to no avail.

The next week the crews went out in two man crews and continued the work on the railroad line clearing. Some weeks later, I am not sure how long this was as the camp moved north and the group of railroad workers came upon the missing man; he was naked and hysterical/crazed, and apparently died soon after he was found. He told of being abducted by a female ape that kept him in a large open pit. During the time he was in the pit the man told of being forced to have sexual contact with the ape many times and said that the ape kept him in the hole or pit by licking his hands and feet raw, so he was not able to escape from the pit. Apparently my grandfather saw this mans hands and feet and said that they were completely raw.

My mother and her sisters and brothers laughed at my grandfather as some one who was uneducated and unable to understand that this was impossible due to the fact that there are no apes in North America.

I always found this to be an intriguing story, has any one else reported a similar story?

John Lewis
San Francisco, California
Logged: Sunday, February 11, 2007 1:52 AM

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