Bigfoot Encounters Mailbag

Loretta was 17, and the potatoes were coming out of the ground with frost on them.

She'd walked down to the bottom of the field ahead of the digger to set out her barrels, and there was already something in her row.

It was bent over with its back to her, picking potatoes up off the dirt and biting into them the way you'd bite an apple.

We've been on the road a long while now.

The backwoods cryptid road trip has taken us to a turtle town in Indiana and a renamed lake in Nebraska and a lot of gravel in between.

And the map on the dash has more ink on it than blank space.

So this week we're pulling off.

The truck's parked, the engine's off, and I've got the mailbag open on the seat beside me.

It's been filling up.

Every stop we make, more of you write in.

And a lot of what comes in has nothing to do with whatever state we happen to be driving through.

It's your own encounter, something you saw once, on a morning or a night that started out like any other, and have carried around ever since.

I picked five for this episode.

They come from five different parts of the country, in five different decades, and the people who sent them don't have a lot in common beyond what they saw.

A teenager on a potato harvest in northern Maine in 1959.

A railroad man walking track at night in West Virginia.

A woman bringing in horses at an elk camp in New Mexico.

Two college kids in a canoe in Minnesota.

A man mowing a pipeline right of way in East Texas.

Here's what's in the bag.

Back to Loretta, 1959 on a farm outside Presque Isle in Aroostook County, in the far north of Maine.

Aroostook is potato country, and in 1959 it was a lot more potato country than it is now.

Every fall, the schools let out for three weeks so the kids could work the harvest, and Loretta had been picking since she was nine years old.

Her family didn't farm.

Her father ran a saw at a mill in town, and her mother took in sowing.

Loretta was 17, and the potatoes were coming out of the ground with frost on them.

She'd walked down to the bottom of the field ahead of the digger to set out her barrels, and there was already something in her row.

It was bent over with its back to her, picking potatoes up off the dirt and biting into them the way you'd bite an apple.

We've been on the road a long while now.

The backwoods cryptid road trip has taken us to a turtle town in Indiana and a renamed lake in Nebraska and a lot of gravel in between.

And the map on the dash has more ink on it than blank space.

So this week we're pulling off.

The truck's parked, the engine's off, and I've got the mailbag open on the seat beside me.

It's been filling up.

Every stop we make, more of you write in.

And a lot of what comes in has nothing to do with whatever state we happen to be driving through.

It's your own encounter, something you saw once, on a morning or a night that started out like any other, and have carried around ever since.

I picked five for this episode.

They come from five different parts of the country, in five different decades, and the people who sent them don't have a lot in common beyond what they saw.

A teenager on a potato harvest in northern Maine in 1959.

A railroad man walking track at night in West Virginia.

A woman bringing in horses at an elk camp in New Mexico.

Two college kids in a canoe in Minnesota.

A man mowing a pipeline right of way in East Texas.

Here's what's in the bag.

Back to Loretta, 1959 on a farm outside Presque Isle in Aroostook County, in the far north of Maine.

Aroostook is potato country, and in 1959 it was a lot more potato country than it is now.

Every fall, the schools let out for three weeks so the kids could work the harvest, and Loretta had been picking since she was nine years old.

Her family didn't farm.

Her father ran a saw at a mill in town, and her mother took in sowing.