A Bigfoot Story: The Rope Swinging Sasquatches

The Rope Swinging Sasquatches

In 1976 I was twelve years old and that was the year I discovered several amazing things. The first of which was how you could turn a simple coil of rope into a ride that was every bit as exciting as any roller coaster that was restrained to not being able to do a loop to loop. I have to admit our rope swing could not do that but it could and did take your breath away, or perhaps better described as some people put it as having left their stomach behind.

It was the forests of Missouri and nearby our property was a tributary of one of the larger rivers which I believe eventually became the White River. However that was far from the little stream we made into our rope swing location.

My father took me out on my twelfth birthday with that new coil of rope and we found an oak tree with a trunk big enough you could hide a coke machine in it, that overlooked the stream which ran through the meadow. Its position would allow the swing’s length of the rope when at its furthest stretch, to avoid the ground or in this case the water which filled the stream.

Dad had brought a bow and arrow. A thin nylon line was tied to the end of the arrow and then my father proceeded to unroll the nylon string into a carefully accumulated pile of the string so that when he shot the arrow it would ideally unravel easily.

Since he wasn’t perfect with his shot on the first try it took several and each one required gathering the string back into a pile which would easily follow the arrow when shot. Eventually he was successful! Once the nylon string had been shot across a very high limb my father gathered the arrow and cut it loose from the string. Next he tied it onto the rope which was maybe as big around as a silver dollar in girth. Then he used the nylon string to pull the bigger rope back up and across that high limb. When he had both ends of the heavy rope in his hands he simply tied off the one into a hangman’s knot and then pulled the rope tight.

Next the rope was cut to length so as mentioned it would never be able to take the rider down into the ground. The tree we had chose sat a ways above the stream on a bit of a hill which added to the distance you could fall before the rope swing forced the rider to skim out across the stream and nearly over to the other side before the thing started its arc back.

After a few days of swinging we even added boards to the trunk of the tree which you could climb to get even higher for the jump off to enjoy the ride.

Now understand for a ride that we considered to be safe, it required always having the swing line at a tight or taught position meaning when you jumped off for the initial part of the ride that you were never free-falling so that the rope would suddenly go tight which would obviously jerk the rider terribly and probably seriously hurt them.

A great way to provide an example is to say imagine you are at the school yard and your parent pulls the swing back as far as possible with you sitting in it and then lets go. You go swinging through the air but the chains on the swing are always tight.

Next imagine if you stood on top of the swing set holding the swing seat under your butt and then jumped off. You would fall straight down and only right before smashing into the ground the swing would catch and stop itself from hitting the ground but you would likely fly off the seat when it stopped falling and then continue into the ground at a high rate of speed.

So the one way with the parent holding your swing at its end; is being a lot of fun swinging and the other way jumping off the top of the swing set ends in severe pain, maybe even death.

No matter how far up the tree trunk we nailed boards to make it possible to climb even higher for our take-offs, we always had the rope either tight, or just short of being tight so that when it did catch, it didn’t do so at such a hard jerk that we couldn’t stay seated on the swing. Perhaps I should mention the seat was just a board with hole drilled in it big enough to fit the rope through. So you straddled the rope swing seat making it very hard to accidentally fall off. Which was a good thing for certain.

After you took off from the swing it took you first down at a raging speed just short of how fast you fall, then the rope catches full, and the arc of the swing takes you out over the water to as mentioned, nearly the other side of the stream. During the summer, which it was; you can jump off the swing and land in water that is about chest deep. Plenty deep enough as long as you are careful. We were.

If you stayed on the swing like we did when fall came around, it would eventually bring you back around so you could jump off the swing and be on the little hill, or perhaps better described as a ledge, and avoid having to get wet. In other words having to get off the swing out over the water. Eventually we brought a one inch plastic pipe that was long enough in length we could use it to catch the swing when it was left out hanging over the water. We also used the same pipe to pull each other in when one of us would miss the chance to jump off the swing and back onto the ledge where the rope swing tree grew.

Now about the point of this story. Our swing was a popular attraction to more than just ourselves. Somehow word spread about it among the kids at school and by the time I was fourteen we had to take it down to get the traffic off our property. Kids not only from our school but from surrounding schools started coming out there and it sometimes created friction.

The first two years which was basically the time the swing existed, few people knew about it but there were signs that somebody, or as it turned out, some things, were using the swing besides ourselves. It became apparent the first summer not long after we nailed up the boards on the trunk of the tree which I think I mentioned we used to get even higher for our take off which really added to the thrill of the ride.

I or my younger sisters of course, never associated the big give-away about what was using the swing. At least not until I finally saw them which was the final straw for my father. He said anything which would cause me to tell such a tale, and that invited so many kids (troublemakers was the word he used) onto our property without permission: had to go!

First the tell-tale sign. Now that I look back on things that is; at the time all I thought was that it was really weird. In the end I just chalked it up to being because some kid had got wet all the way up to his shirt and that it was his body that made that wide wet mark on the boards. I never thought it might have been caused by something with a foot that was that wide. Who would? However now I realize it made perfect sense. I realized it as soon as I saw them.

You should have seen what they could do! It was something but I’ll get to that in a minute. First let me tell you about the sign that I saw but didn’t see, and then about the scary part of things.

As I said the boards which we nailed to the tree trunk so that it looked like any tree trunk you would see with boards nailed into it. It basically created a ladder which you could climb up and if you held the rope swing while doing so you could then put it between your legs when you reached the height you were comfortable, and then you jumped out away from the tree trunk and the swing would do the rest.

As the days passed we would usually manage to bring another board with us when we went swinging. Now understand this was a huge oak tree which we chose because it would never be a worry to break when someone was swinging and it also provided a tree trunk which was straight and that had no limbs for quite a distance. The reason we needed to nail the boards into the trunk in the first place, nothing to use to climb up. However it also ensured no limbs were in the way of the swing and with the exception of one limb the entire arc of the swing was thankfully free of the rope catching and causing the ride to be rough.

The one limb which did interfere was far enough out on the far side of the swing’s arc that it was a minor inconvenience for what all else that was accomplished. Either my dad was THAT good at choosing where to put rope swings, or we got really lucky as to the way it turned out. I suspect it was a little of both because it was so perfect.

After we had started nailing up the boards is when I saw the water stain made on the boards. It was every other one, without fail. The stain was never on the bottom board we nailed up and it was never on two boards next to each other. Understand this was so common that the difference that showed on the boards from what was wet against them, and otherwise, was literally stained into the wood. In other words even after they dried out there was still a visible spot where you could plainly see that something wet had been up against the wood.

Every other board. Don’t forget it as it all comes together so clearly once I knew what was causing it. But we had no clue at first. Around where we lived we never heard any howls or growls which were so out of place that we ever thought there was any kind of bigfoot nearby. Yeah there were strange noises in the forest. Especially at night. But have you ever heard a bobcat or even what a coyote can do?

To this day when I see some of the bigfoot videos I am always put off almost right away because the first thing they seem to do is to start making a bunch of noise across a night forest which it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize, was pretty quiet before they started making all that noise; so what makes them think that if there are bigfoot out there, that they are suddenly interested in announcing themselves to the world? Just wasn’t my experience.

Shoot if they’d have warned me they were out there, I would never have went. I got no problem leaving them alone and in fact its when I saw them that I stopped having interest in the swing. If we had left it up I would have never let my sisters keep using it especially not the way that we used it before I became aware.

So yeah, I’m not near so sure that the places where people don’t think that bigfoot is around, are correct, and I’m not so sure that the places where these hunters are making all that noise, are likely to have bigfoot found there. I think they are a lot stealthier than we give them credit, even despite the fact they are already so rare as to be viewed as not existing. I’ve seen them at play on and around a big tree. They maneuver it the way a squirrel does only they aren’t relying on their sharp nails to keep them attached to the tree.

In short any time you are near a tree big enough in circumfrence to hide the width of a sasquatch, it might likely be hiding just on the other side and you will never know it. And if you were to try and walk around that tree, I suspect that rather than move away from the location that they will boldly hug that tree trunk for its camoflauge and probably a feeling of safety and security, since when is the last time you saw either a bullet or a huge bull moose capable of going through even a modestly thick tree trunk? Safety, security and camoflauge.

So anyways we got the boards nailed up on the tree trunk creating a ladder of sorts. One that went further and further up the tree, causing a wilder, more raging ride the higher you went for your jump-off. Well I started noticing that there were stains in the wood which told me something wet was being held against the boards, and that something was as brave as myself. It had obviously climbed up to the highest board I had nailed, and then taken off.

Until the day when I had nailed another board up and this one happened to fit into the puzzle as being the ‘every other one’ that didn’t get stained. Only I noticed there were water stains on the top part of the board. Like it had dripped down onto the board from further up but how was that ever possible? It would have meant that whatever was causing the water stains was climbing higher than the highest board which was impossible.

You see climbing up the tree trunk with the rope swing in hand, you reach a point where if you went any higher it started leaving slack in the rope. We already have discussed what happens if you stand on top of the swing set and jump down, its all good until the chains on the swing hit their reach and then it stops while you continue to smash into the ground.

And that specific point is where or perhaps better said, when the ride starts getting good. You nail a couple more boards up so that you can climb higher than that point I mentioned, and then you try to find that sweet spot where the drop takes your stomach away from you but it isn’t as such to the point where it can hurt you or to cause you to be harmed in some manner.

All that said, as great as the rope swing was, its really true genius was the limb onto which it had been secured. It was quite easily strong enough to handle any weight put on it short of maybe a car, yet it had enough flexibility that it added to the thrill of the swing’s arc by also bouncing with the weight that it was seeing added. So the heavier riders got a much bigger thrill than those who weighed less. Next imagine that I could see the difference, it was obvious, and that was just the difference in the weight between myself and my younger sisters. So as we go along and you are hearing also imagine what an added extra zing the ride must have had when it was employed by something which weighed several times more than myself.

On a side note that extra zing mentioned also was where that one limb I spoke about that was interfering with the otherwise incredibly perfect arc of the swing, really made itself known. So imagine how lucky I thought we had been when something broke that limb off at some point in time when neither myself or anybody else was there to witness it? Quite a stroke of luck that a limb made of oak and in perfect health would suddenly have been broken. It wasn’t even broken off the tree, just broke enough so it no longer was a problem to the swing, even to those really heavy riders. It did make a huge improvement on what was already fantastic.

So I had seen evidence almost from the start that something was using the swing and if my deductions were correct, it was climbing higher than the highest boards nailed, and dripping water down onto the top board. Mind you, it wasn’t staining the top board the way the other boards, every other one, was stained.

Well naturally I couldn’t have it that someone else was climbing higher than myself to ride MY rope swing. So I brought another two boards down with me and climbed way up there and managed to nail those two more boards on to the tree trunk. So I could climb even higher to take off. Which I did and it was as far as I dared ever to go. Any higher was really risking the fact that when the rope swing went tight after you jumped, it meant you had to hold on to the rope as the jerk happened or you would end up falling off the swing or at the least hanging upside down from it with your legs caught in the rope.

To my astonishment when I visited the rope swing the next time the stain was there, on the bottom of the two boards. The one at the very top was once again, only water stained on the top ledge of the board. Like the water had been dripped own on it from above.

It wasn’t until I saw what was using the swing that I figured out the water stains on every other board was due to the fact that what was climbing the ladder was so big it only used every other board and when the boards ran out it just kept going up.

At the time however I was just dumbfounded. What was causing this to happen? I only was sure of one thing, and that was that I wasn’t nailing any boards any further up. I felt like I had already really pushed my luck taking things as high as they currently went. Whatever kid was climbing higher had guts far beyond any I had ever known to exist.

A while passed as the summer fell into fall. Eventually I deduced that whoever it was that was climbing higher than myself; had to be doing it at night! No kidding, it had to be. That both impressed and scared me. I was impressed anybody would have the guts to climb that high in the darkness with or without a rope swing. It scared me because I immediately was aware that if I ever met this person they were not going to be intimidated by my presence at all.

Clearly I had not had the guts to take the swing any higher, even using my “chicken-sit” boards I had to nail into the tree to be able to even get that high. The other rider was not only climbing every board I nailed into the tree but they were going higher and dripping water down on my top board almost like it was a challenge rather than being a natural result of a combination of something wet and gravity.

Well this went on for a couple of years and then when I was fourteen I started smoking a little weed. Often times either myself or me and friends would slip off down to the rope swing using it as an excuse and we’d smoke up down there.

That was really when things started to get spooky. I attributed it to the smoking, the paranoia just a side-effect of the high. When I finally became aware I was able to do some math and the two and two added up to my having been correct, or most likely correct, the times I thought something was watching me or us. Now I realize we probably were being watched.

The odor was certainly there often enough. But understand that I just thought we had a family of skunks living nearby. We had a couple of dogs, one of which came up missing that last year the swing was up; that always were hunting so I just thought the skunks had been busy unleashing warnings.

Anyways so one night, or just before night, it was like when it is dark out yet if you were to lay on the ground and look up at the sky and there was a tree above you, that you could see the outline of the tree as it was darker than the sky above which is still catching light from the sun that hasn’t yet went far enough around the globe to stop sending rays of light into the above sky.

It was like that when I went back to the rope swing to get my bag of pot and the jacket it was in. You know how it is that you can see but you can’t see. I basically had just enough time to get down there and grab the jacket and make my way back before things would become so pitch dark that you needed either a flash light or to wait until the moon made an appearance to be able to move around without tripping on things.

So I was much more focused on keeping from falling over things than I was on what was going on ahead of me at the rope swing. As such I was almost on top of them before I became aware, but I was still a step ahead of the creatures because no, they had not seen me.

Now also understand that although I had heard of sasquatch, that I wasn’t any where near so enlightened as that was my first, or even third or fourth thought as to that being what was at the rope swing. What I thought they were when I finally looked up and noticed their huge sillouettes against that slightly lighter sky while they stood on various limbs of the tee. Imagine seeing the dark outline of the huge oak tree against that lighter sky behind it and then noticing these huge creatures, also completely dark sillouettes, standing on the limbs of huge tree.

When I saw the first one literally drop from one of those limbs way up in the tree and then I realized it had the rope in its hand that the closest and best way to describe the sight I was seeing is if you have ever seen a drawing in a comic book of spiderman as he is whipping through the air hanging on to that web with one hand, chest out and back arched. It looked like that!

I lack the proper ability to describe the way that creature did a turn around on the rope when it reached the extent of the swing’s arc but it was completely and absolutely deserving of some sort of medal from the olympics because it was so graceful, so deliberate, so perfectly timed. It was like watching perfection in motion. I was only fourteen, stoned, and still I was aware that what I was seeing was something close to a religeous experience.

Yet at the same time it was terrifying on a level that I also lack ability to describe properly. I truly thought they were demons which might not have been real enough to actually be able to touch if you got close enough. Remember I could only see their dark outlines, huge as they were, so I did not see the face of an ape. Or of some sort of cave man I only saw extremely tall, and very wide, dark creatures which were capable of such athletic prowess as to be gazed upon with astonished and unbelieving eyes.

Despite being certain as to whether these creatures or beings, were real enough that they could be physically touched, I never doubted that things would not go well for me if they became aware I was watching them. Which is why I did not stay long even though I knew I was witnessing a once in a lifetime event which few people would ever see even if given a dozen life times.

Let me ask you this: if you came upon a scene where Jesus was there, doing something, and of course you were very curious as to what, but at the same time you could clearly see there was also a big bomb that was in some sort of countdown that you couldn’t see exactly when it was to go off but you could see the amount of digits involved meant it was going to be soon. How long would you stand there observing Jesus and what he was doing before turning and running for your life because you knew the bomb was going to go off soon?

It may not be the perfect example but I think it is close. I was so very curious an interested in these … things, big things, that were there doing such acrobatic things on the rope swing yet I had a very instinctive feeling that if they saw me it was going to be bad. So I watched longer than I felt safe doing so and not close to long enough to be able to figure out what was going on.

One thing I noted about them was that they were very quiet except when they didn’t want to be. By that I mean they were having fun, or were excited, and it was made more clear because of their breathing / grunting / talkng to each other. Like when one would come swinging back in it would breath-grunt while handing the rope over to the other one and it sounded sort of excited. I took it to be that they were communicating and the one just getting back was saying what a blast he had and now it was the next one’s turn.

Now years later after having watched some of the youtube videos about sasquatch including those which claim sasquatch uses infrasound to not only communicate but that it can also be used to cause confusion, dread, calm etc. If there is truth to that then I would be left wondering why the creatures made any noise at all. It seems natural to me that any animal which breathes, will make breathing noises. I’m certain these creatures were making breathing noises and I felt like they were communicating with them at the time. Now I have to admit to questioning either whether I was right or if the YT videos are correct about the use of infrasound. I have a lot of doubt that both are used. Except of course those times when sasquatch wants us to hear them.

So I watched the creatures as they played on the oak tree rope swing. Then I slipped away and in all these years have only shared the story with a handful of people. I don’t desire to be mocked and if there is any money it, well I haven’t seen enough to make me want to stand up and be counted, so to speak. But I won’t ever forget what I saw, though I have questioned myself more than once as to whether I had imagined seeing such a sight, which I know in my heart I did not; in the deepest parts of the night I still wonder if it was real?

I mentioned we had that feeling of being watched and it became a place which seemed to always end in anxiety. I attributed that feeling to being because at the end my dad was uptight about all the kids coming to the swing, so it was a source of anxiety between myself and him for that reason alone. Then the fact we were using it as a place to smoke weed. And then later when I saw the creatures I realized all those weird, scared feelings were quite possibly not imagined at all. That we had very real reasons for feeling scared or anxious and that it could have been the creatures were literally just on the other side of the tree trunk. They moved around it with that much ease.

After telling my father about what I saw he and I went down to the rope swing that next morning and we tried to cut it down. He brought in the rope and reached up as far as he could and he cut the rope.

I went down there a couple of days later and was shocked to see the rope had been tied back together but in the strangest, worst-looking knot I had ever seen. It was clearly not safe to use. Dad was worried some of the kids would come down there and try to use it but now that it had been tied back together it was much shorter. It seemed too short to be good to anybody but still there was the worry somebody would figure out a way.

What we ended up doing didn’t get rid of the entire rope but it did get rid of enough of it that it was clear no kids would be able to use it. What we did was to fill a super-shooter water rifle with gasoline. Then we used it to shoot gas all over the knot and the rope. Next we used the plastic pipe to tape a lit match on it and then we held it out to the knot.

Eventually we managed to get the rope to catch fire and it burned a ways further up than from where we had cut it. There was still about half the rope still hanging but it was way too short for anybody to use. What was weird was that about a week later I went down there and the rope was not hanging down any longer. It was up in the limbs of the tree. I imagined the creatures were still using it and had left it up in the limbs.

Now that the swing was gone there was little reason to go down there and hang around. I figure the area returned to being used exclusively by the sasquatch which is fine with me. They can have it.

As I mentioned they were quiet and continued to be that way for as long as we lived there. I think that they are much more prevalent than people think based on how many I saw and how quiet they were, even when having fun. Plus they only come out at night so if they were careful about where they used the bathroom, such as there are certain birds which will only defecate when over water, and either ate, burried or hid in caves, their dead, then they would be extremely hard to discover.

I never had any interaction with them. As I said, frankly they terrify me. But I know they are out there and I think it may be in numbers which are much greater than even the most optimistic squatchers believe.

Thank you for stopping in.