New Mexico: La Mala Hora & Bigfoot

0:00For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace. Some blame wild animals. Others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in. But those who have survived, they know the truth. Welcome to Backwood's Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, dogman, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out. Those aren't so lucky. Are you ready? Because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember, some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads, and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Highway 76 leaves Chimayo in climbs, and somewhere past true jaws, the shoulder goes away.

1:09It's a two-lane road up the front of the Songred to Christophe Butthills, and at two in the morning and October, it belongs to nobody. There's no stripe down the middle for long stretches, since the paving crews don't get up here much, and the pinion comes right down to the edge of the asphalt on both sides. A driver coming through at that hour has the high beams on and the radio off, because the radio quit picking up anything past Espanola. The dashboard is the only thing in the car with any color in it. The road drops toward a low place where an arroyo runs under it through a culvert, and a dirt track comes in from the left and goes out on the right. So for about 50 feet, the pavement is the center of a cross. Something standing in it. It's on the far side of the culvert, in the right lane. The high beams should be lighting it up, and they aren't. It's black the way the inside of a closed barn is black. It has the outline of a woman in a long dress, a woman with her hands at her sides, and the outline is the only part of it that's there.

2:10No face, no hands really, just the place where hands would end. The driver's foot comes off the gas and doesn't find the brake. The shape turns. It doesn't turn the way a person turns. Hips first, then shoulders. It rotates. And as it comes around to face the car, it gets taller, not stepping up onto anything. Just taller. Until the top of it is above the edge of the headlight beam, and the car is still rolling toward it at 40 miles an hour. Then the car has passed it. The driver never feels the wheel go over anything. The rearview mirror shows the red of the tail lights on the road and nothing standing in it. And the driver keeps going over the next rise down toward Pinyasco and doesn't stop until there's a porch light. That's the story. That's the whole story. Every time for 300 years. The next part comes later at daylight when the phone rings or when a cousin drives up the road with his hat in his hand.

3:11Somebody has died. Somebody who wasn't sick. And the person who was on that road at 2 in the morning already knows who it's about before they pick up the phone. Because they saw it standing in the crossroads and they've known since they were children what it means. In the villages of northern New Mexico they call it La Malahora. The bad hour. This is New Mexico. This is the stop where the thing on the road doesn't want to eat you and doesn't want your livestock and doesn't seem to want anything at all. It just wants you to see it. And in this part of the country, being seen by it is the worst thing that can happen to you. We've crossed a lot of country to get here and the country's changed again. New Mexico is the fifth largest state and most of that size is empty. You can drive from Vaughan to Roswell, 90 miles and pass one gas station and no towns. You can drive Highway 54 south from Corona and lose your phone signal for an hour. The interstates cut across it, 40 going east and west and 25 going north and south.

4:13And along those you'll see truck stops and casinos and the lights of Albuquerque and Las Cruces. Get off them and it goes quiet fast. The state has two personalities and this episode has to deal with both. Most of the south and east is desert and grassland, high and dry. With the Sacramento Mountains and the Guadalupe standing up out of it like islands. That's where the long, empty highways run. The ones with a hundred miles between anything. The north is different. The San Gre de Cristo range comes down out of Colorado and runs to Santa Fe. With peaks over 13,000 feet and forest on the slopes, Ponderosa and Fur and Aspen. And west of the Rio Grande, there's the Hemess of volcanic range with a Caldera in the middle of it, the size of a county. Beyond that, in the northwest, the land drops off into the San Juan Basin and that's the four corners, oil country and Navajo country. With maces and badlands and highway 550 running through the middle of it toward Farmington.

5:17So there's desert and there's forest and there's a long stretch of road between them where the two overlap. The thing that stands in the crossroads belongs to the villages along the rivers, the old Spanish settlements in the north. The thing that walks upright belongs to the mountains above them and the road belongs to both. The Spanish came up the Rio Grande in 1598 under Juan de Oñate and they built the oldest European settlements in the interior of the country. Santa Fe was founded around 1610. The villages that matter for this story came later, after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 through the Spanish out. And the reconquest of 1692 brought them back. Through the 1700s, families pushed up into the mountain valleys north of Santa Fe on land grants from the crown and they built the places whose names are still on the highway signs. Chimaio, Trochaz, Cordova, Pignasco, Mora, Ojo Caliente.

6:22These were farm villages built around a plaza and a church and in a sequia. The irrigation ditch that carried mountain water down to the fields and they were about as isolated as any European settlement on the continent. Mexico City was a thousand miles south. The nearest American city, when there finally was one, was St. Louis and that was two months away by Wagon. They were on their own for 200 years and in that time the Spanish they spoke drifted into something with words in it that nobody in Spain would recognize and the stories they told drifted to. It came with them from Spain was a Catholic countryside full of witches and omens and things that walked at night. What it turned into in the New Mexico Mountains was particular to the place. La Malajora is the one that stuck to the roads. The name means the bad hour or the evil hour and in the oldest versions it isn't a creature so much as a time. There's an hour of the night when a person shouldn't be out and the thing you meet if

7:23you are out gets called by the name of the hour. In the older Spanish it shows up as La Malajora which comes from the same route and that's the form it takes in the earliest written record we have. That record belongs to a man named Arrelio Espinosa. He was born in southern Colorado in 1880 to a family that had been in the region since the Spanish period and he became a professor at Stanford and one of the first scholars to write down the folklore of the Spanish speaking southwest as a serious subject. During the round 1910 he published a long series of articles on New Mexican Spanish folk lore in the Journal of American Folklore and in one of them he described La Malajora. He wrote that it was a spirit that wandered at night at the crossroads and other places and that it usually appeared in the form of a large lock of wool, a fleece and he wrote that it would grow, that it could get as large as it wanted and that people who saw it were frightened out of their minds and that it was a sign of death, a ball of wool at

8:24a crossroads. That's what the grandparents of the grandparents were seeing, a shapeless white or black mass on the road at night that swelled as you looked at it. Over the 20th century and the versions told in the villages and collected later by folk lorests working in northern New Mexico, the shape got more definite. In some tellings it's still a black mass with no edges, a thing like a bundle or a bail that sits in the road and gets bigger. In others it's a woman, a tall woman in black standing at a crossroads and the ones who describe her can't ever give you her face. The two versions exist side by side in the same valleys, sometimes in the same family, and the people telling them don't seem to think they contradict each other. The thing takes whatever shape it takes. What stays constant is the crossroads, the hour, the growing and what comes after. What comes after is a death. Somebody close to the witness or the witness themselves.

9:25In the accounts folk lorests collected in the Ryo Porco Valley and around Kordava and Trocha's, it's usually within a day or two, and it's usually somebody who wasn't sick, a husband, a brother, a child. The witness comes home and the news comes to meet them. There are two other things in the old stories that ought to be on the table, because they show up in the modern encounters too. The first is that some people who saw it didn't die and didn't lose anybody, and instead lost their minds. Espinoza's informant said it drove people mad. In the village tellings, a person who meets it comes home and is never right again. The second is that it's connected to travel between villages. Almost every version has somebody going from one place to another at night, on foot, or on a horse, or later, in a car. On the road between Trocha's and Kordava, or between the Ryo Porco villages, or on the way to Santa Fe, it's a thing that happens to people in transit.

10:27You don't meet it in your kitchen. New Mexico's Hispanic folk lore has a whole population of things that walk at night, and they get mixed together by people who didn't grow up with them. La Yarona is the one everybody knows. The weeping woman who drowned her children and walks the rivers and ditches crying for them. She's in every Spanish-speaking community from Texas to California and deep into Mexico, and she's in New Mexico too, along the Rio Grande and along every Assequia in every village. She's a warning to children about the water. She is not La Malahora. La Yarona is a person, a woman who did something, and she has a story and a grief and a sound. La Malahora has none of that. It doesn't cry. Nobody knows what it was. It isn't anybody. Then there are the Bruchas, witches. In the Hispanic villages of the north, witchcraft wasn't a metaphor. It was a working explanation for illness and bad luck and dead livestock, and folklorists

11:31like Nessario Garcia, who grew up in the Ryo Porco Valley and spent decades recording the old people there, collected dozens of firsthand accounts. And those accounts Bruchas take animal shape, owls most of all. A witch becomes an owl and sits in a tree outside the house of the person she means to harm. She becomes a dog or a cat or a coyote. And at night, over the maces and along the river, people saw bolas de fuego, balls of fire moving low across the country, and those were understood to be witches traveling. In Texas and Northern Mexico, the owl witch has a name of her own, La La Chusa, and that name gets used in southern New Mexico too. So there's a long tradition in this state, going back to Spain and probably further, of people who become animals. The Hispanic villages had it, and the people who were here before the Spanish had traditions of their own. The Navajo Nation covers the northwest corner of New Mexico, and most of the country

12:33beyond it, into Arizona and Utah. The Navajo people, the Dene, have a tradition concerning certain people who take on the form of animals in order to do harm. It's a real part of Dene's belief, and it is not a public one. It is not folklore in the sense that La Yarona is folklore, something told to children and printed in books and put on t-shirts. Most Dene people will not discuss it with outsiders. Many won't say the name. That's their tradition and their choice. Highway 550 runs from Bernalillo, northwest through Cuba, and across the San Juan Basin to Bloomfield, and it's one of the most talked about stretches of road in the southwest. Truckers talk about it. Oil field workers talk about it. And over the last 20 or 30 years, anything anybody sees out there at night, a dog that runs too fast, a figure at the fence line, a shape that's on four legs and then on two. It gets a name put on it by people who don't have the standing to use that name.

13:33Just become a habit, and it flattens two different things into one. There's what the Dene know and don't say. And there's what a trucker from Ohio saw on 550 at 3 in the morning and has been trying to explain ever since. For most of the 20th century and still in a lot of places, the roads in rural New Mexico were the reason people stayed home at night, not because of anything supernatural, because of distance. A breakdown on highway 54 between Vaughan and Carizzo at midnight in 1970, men at night in the car and a walk in the morning, and in July that walk could kill you. There was no phone, there was nobody coming. The old people in the village just told their children not to drive at night and not to stop for anything or anybody on the road, and that was practical advice before it was anything else. The roads were dangerous because they were empty. And then, in the same breath, the old people would tell them about La Malahora. Don't stop at the crossroads. Don't get out of the car.

14:34If you see something, keep driving and don't look at it and don't tell anybody until you're home. The two warnings came together and nobody separated them. The country was empty and things lived in the empty part and both of those facts pointed the same direction, which was to keep your foot on the gas. Lisa was 29 in the fall of 1978 and she was driving to the Santa Fe airport to pick up her husband. Stay tuned for more Backwood's Big Foot Stories. We'll be back after these messages. They lived in Chimayo then, in a house that had been her grandmother's and her husband worked construction jobs that took him out of state for weeks at a time. That fall he was in Denver. He was flying into Santa Fe on a late connection and she left the house a little before 10 at night to make the drive, which is about 30 miles down through Espanola and then south on the main highway toward the city. She'd made the drive 100 times. She had the kids with her sister for the night.

15:34She was in a Buick her husband had bought used the year before and she had the heater on because it was late October and the cold had come down off the mountains. Below Espanola, the highway runs through Pohwakke and there's a place where a paved county road crosses it, going out toward the Pueblo on one side and toward the foothills on the other. There's a light there now. There wasn't one then. There was a stop sign on the county road and nothing on the highway and at 10.30 at night the intersection was dark except for what her headlights put on it. She saw it from a quarter mile off and she thought it was a person standing in the road. Her first thought was that somebody had broken down and her second thought right behind it was what her grandmother had told her about stopping at night and she took her foot off the gas and didn't put it on the break. The Buick slowed to maybe 30. The figure was in the center of the highway right on the line at the middle of the crossing and as she got close she could see it was a woman or shaped like one in something long

16:36and black that went to the road. It was standing with its arms down. It was facing her. She said it was too tall. That was the first thing that was wrong. She put it at seven feet though she said later she never could be sure because what happened next made the height hard to judge. When she was about a hundred feet off still rolling the figure started to get bigger. She said it was like watching a shadow when the light moves. It didn't step or lean. It just came up. The top of it rising passed the top of her windshield and she said the black of the dress spread out on the road until it covered both lanes. She didn't see a face. She said she looked for one straight at where it should have been and there was nothing there. No lighter patch. Nothing that caught the headlights. The whole thing swallowed light. Her car went right through it. She didn't swerve. She was in the middle of the intersection with the thing filling the windshield and then she was on the other side of it and the road was clear and she could see the tail lights

17:37of a truck about a mile ahead. She said the car got cold. Colder than the heater could keep up with. The cold lasted about a minute and then it was gone too. She kept driving. She said she got to the airport parking lot and sat with the doors locked and the engine running until the flight came in and she watched people walk out of the terminal. But her husband never came out. She went in. He wasn't on the flight. The airline said he never checked in at Denver. She drove home. She said she took the interstate instead of the highway which added 20 minutes and she went through Pujoque with her eyes on the road and didn't look at the crossing. She got to Chimayo about one in the morning and sat up in the kitchen with the lights on. The phone rang at 6. It was the Denver police. Her husband had been killed the evening before and a fight outside a bar near the job site. Sometime between 7 and 8 o'clock Denver time. That was before she left the house. She said she didn't tell anybody about the crossroads until after the funeral and then

18:38she told her grandmother and her grandmother said I know and didn't ask her anything. Teresa remarried in the 80s. She still lives in the valley. She said she's driven through that area probably 3,000 times since that night and she's never seen anything at the crossing. There's a traffic light there now and a gas station. It's about the least mysterious intersection in New Mexico. Raidrow for a produce hauler out of Farmington in the early 90s and the run that put him on Highway 550 was the one he did most. 550 in 1991 wasn't the road it is now. The state has since widened most of it to four lanes but back then it was two lanes for the whole 120 miles from Bernalilo to Bloomfield with passing zones every few miles in a lot of country in between where you didn't see another set of headlights for half an hour. Ray ran it at night by choice. This traffic, cooler engine and he liked driving when the world was asleep. The stretch south of Cuba where the road comes down out of the high country toward the

19:41Rio Puercro has a reputation and Ray knew it. He said every driver who ran that road knew it. Things on the shoulder. Animals that didn't act like animals. He said he'd never seen anything himself in six years and he figured the reputation was the product of fatigue and coffee. The night he described was in February. Clear, cold, a little moon. He was southbound, empty, about 11 at night and he just come through Cuba and was on the long downhill grade where the road drops off the mesa. There was a figure walking on the shoulder. Southbound. Walking the same direction he was going so he came up on it from behind. He saw it in the low beams first, a dark upright shape at the edge of the pavement and he flipped to high beams and it didn't get any clearer. He said the high beams should have lit it up like a signpost. Instead it stayed black, a solid black outline of a person walking and he said the outline

20:41was wrong in a way he couldn't put words to at the time. Later he settled on this. The legs were too long for the body. It was walking with its arm swinging a little. But the stride was longer than a man's stride and the top of it was higher than the top of his hood. He said that would make it at least 7 and a half feet tall. He moved over to give it room. He said he did that on reflex, the way you'd move over for a hitchhiker and as the cab came alongside it, maybe 20 feet away, it turned its head. He said there was no face. He said he was looking at where a face would be, at 20 feet, with the cab lights in the moon and there was nothing there, not even a darker patch where a face should have been. The head turned toward him and the front of it was the same black as the back of it. And he said the feeling that came over him in that second was the worst feeling he's had in his life. Worst than the phone call about his father. Worst than anything. He said it was like every bad thing that was ever going to happen to him.

21:43Arrived at once and sat down in the cab. He hit the gas. He said the truck was empty and it jumped and in the side mirror the figure was still walking, one pace, same direction and then it was out of the mirror's range. He didn't stop until Bernalilla. At the truck stop he sat in the cab and shook he said for about 20 minutes and then he went in and drank coffee and didn't say anything to anybody. Two days later his brother and Durango rolled a pickup on Highway 160 and was killed. Ray said he found out on the phone at the terminal in Farmington and the first thing he thought about before he thought about his brother was the shoulder south of Cuba. He ran 55411 more years. He said he saw it once more in 2001 in the same place, walking the same direction and that time he didn't slow down and didn't look at it and nobody died that he knows of. He retired in 2008. He said he's told this to his wife and to two other drivers and now to this show.

22:44Her base family has been in Moorah County since the land grant and the warning came down through the women. Her grandmother told it to her mother and her mother told it to her and it was always the same and it was always about the bridge. There's a place on the county road east of Moorah where the road crosses in Asiquia on a concrete bridge and just past the bridge a ranch road comes in from the north and a field road goes out to the south. Her grandmother said you didn't cross that bridge after dark on foot and if you crossed it in a car you didn't stop and you didn't look out the side windows. Her grandmother had a reason and the reason was her own brother. The brother's story is a family story and it's from around 1926. He was coming home from a dance in Moorah on horseback, late and at the bridge the horse stopped and wouldn't go on and he saw something black in the road on the far side, a mass. Her grandmother said like a bundle of black wool and it was getting bigger while he watched it.

23:44He got the horse turned around and rode back to town and slept in a friend's barn. His mother died the next morning, not sick, 60 years old, just sat down at the table and didn't get up. That was the family story and Lupé grew up on it and in 1964 when she was 11 she saw it herself. She was walking home from a cousin's house with her older brother. It was summer and it was late, past 10 and they'd stayed too long and their mother was going to be angry and they were hurrying. The road was gravel then. There was a moon. They came down the little grade toward the bridge and her brother stopped and put his arm across her chest. There was a woman standing at the far end of the bridge in the middle of the road in black. Lupé said she thought it was a neighbor. She said there was a widow who lived up the ranch road who wore black all the time and for a second she thought it was her out for some reason at 10 at night. Her brother said don't look at it and pulled her around by the shoulder and she looked

24:45anyway over her shoulder and she said the woman was taller than she'd been a second before. She said she could see the top of the head against the sky and it was above where the bridge railing would have hit a grown man's shoulder and then it was above the top of the willows behind the bridge and it kept going up. She said the dress didn't have folds in it. It was a shape, not a garment. Her brother ran her back up the road to the cousin's house and they pounded on the door and the uncle let them in and asked what was wrong and her brother wouldn't say. He was 14. He told the uncle they'd seen a bear. The uncle drove them home in his truck the long way on the paved road and Lupé said her brother sat in the middle of the bench seat with his hands between his knees and didn't look out the window. Nobody died. Nobody in the family died that week or that month. Her mother was angry about the hour and that was the end of it. Her brother didn't speak about it and she didn't either and it stayed unspoken for eight years until the night before her brother's wedding when he took her out on the porch

25:48and asked her if she remembered the bridge. She said yes. He said I still see it when I close my eyes. She said he'd never said anything like that to her in his life. Then he went in and got married in the morning and moved to Albuquerque and lived a long time. Lupé raised her own kids in Moira and told them the same thing her grandmother told her. Don't cross the bridge on foot after dark. Don't stop the car. Don't look out the side windows. She said her son laughed at her and her daughter didn't. The daughter lives in the valley now with kids of her own. She said the only thing she'd add to her grandmother's version is this. Sometimes nobody dies. Sometimes you see it and it doesn't mean anything you can point to. He said that's almost worse because it means you don't know what it wanted and you spend the rest of your life waiting to find out. Marcos hit a cow on Highway 54 in June of 2009. He was 34. He'd been visiting his mother in Alamogordo and he was driving home to Santa Rosa, which

26:49is a little over 200 miles. Most of it on 54 through Carrizzo and Corona and Vaughn. Some of the amptiest road in the state. He left Alamogordo at nine at night to beat the heat. He was in a Dodge pickup with the windows down. North of Carrizzo, the highway runs across a flat that goes for 30 miles with the lava beds off to the west and nothing else. He said it's the kind of road where you set the crews and watch the mile markers. About 11. Passed the turn off for the Valley of Fires. He saw something in the road ahead and he thought it was a cow because there are open range cattle all along there and they come onto the pavement at night for the warmth. It was standing in the northbound lane, his lane and it was black and as he got closer, it was upright. He said it was the shape of a woman. Shoulders, a head, a long dress, hands down at the sides, standing square in the lane facing him. He got on the break. He said he was doing 70 and he got it down to about 40 and the figure didn't move.

27:52At maybe 200 feet, he could see that his headlights weren't lighting it up. He said the reflectors on the road posts on either side of it were bright. The center stripe was bright and this figure was like a dark hole standing in the middle of the road. He said the edges of it were sharp, sharper than a person's outline would be, like it was cut out of paper. He said it was over seven feet tall and it was growing larger. He said the top of it went up past his light and the sides of the dress went out past the lane and the dread came on him then. That's his word. Dread. And he said his hands got wet on the wheel and his stomach turned over and he thought very clearly my mother is going to die. He went through it. Same as Teresa, 30 years before and 300 miles north. He said there was no impact and no sound and the cab went cold and then he was past it and there was nothing in the mirror. He got about two miles up the road still shaking and the cow was there. A black cow, a real one, standing broadside in the lane and he was going to the

28:55two fast and he hit it. The truck was totaled. The cow was killed. He walked away with a cut on his forehead and a broken wrist. A state police officer came out from Carrizoso and wrote it up. His mother didn't die. What happened was that his cousin who'd grown up in the same house with him and was closer to him than his own brother was killed that same night on interstate 40 outside Tukum Kari in a wreck with a semi sometime around midnight. Arcos found out in the hospital in Carrizoso at 4 in the morning when his mother called him. He said he's thought about the order of things a lot. He saw the figure and then he hit the cow and while he was sitting on the shoulder waiting for the officer, his cousin died 200 miles away. He said if he hadn't hit the cow, he'd have been on interstate 40 himself by midnight, headed east towards Santa Rosa, on the same road at about the same time. He said he doesn't know what that means. He said his grandmother would have known. He drives 54 still.

29:57He said he's never seen anything else on it. Cow's included and he keeps it at 60 at night and he doesn't stop between Carrizoso and Vaughn for anything. Stay tuned for more backwood's big foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Danielle worked in the oil field north of Cuba for three years and the thing she saw on Highway 550, she has never called by any name. This was 2016. She was 31 and she was working as a pumper for a company with wells out in the basin, which meant she drove a company truck to wells sites at all hours, alone, on lease roads and on 550 and she'd gotten used to the country. She said she'd been warned about the road by the other pumpers, most of whom were from Texas and Oklahoma and she said the warnings always came with a name attached and she decided early on that she didn't have any business using the name and wasn't going to. Her closest friend on the crew was a DNA woman named Rose, who was from counselor and

30:57who never talked about it at all. Danielle said when the Texas guys got going on the subject, Rose would get up and go outside. The night had happened was in late September. Danielle had been to a well site off a lease road north of Noggie Z and was headed back toward Cuba a little after one in the morning. While I 50 out there is four lanes now, divided and it's straight and she was doing 75 with nothing in either direction. She saw it in her lights on the right shoulder and it was on four legs. She thought at first it was a dog, a big dog, black, trotting on the shoulder, same direction she was going and she thought about the reservation dogs that get out on the highway and she moved over a lane. As she came up on it, it was keeping pace with her. She said that's the thing she can't get around. She was doing 75, the dog or whatever it was, was on the shoulder trotting and it wasn't falling behind. She pulled even with it and she looked over.

31:57She said it wasn't a dog, it was the size of a dog and it moved like a dog but it was too long in the body and the legs were too thin and the head was flat on top. And it had no hair that she could see, just gray black skin. And then, while she was looking at it, it stood up. She said it went from four legs to two without breaking stride. It just came up onto its back legs still moving and now it was running upright beside a truck doing 75 and it was tall taller than the cab and the front legs were arms now. Held up in front of it, bent at the elbow and it turned its head and looked at her through the passenger window. She said she screamed and put her foot down. She picked up speed to 80 and it stayed with her. She said it stayed with her for what she guessed was a quarter mile, running upright, looking in the window. Then it dropped back and in the mirror it was on four legs again and then it cut off the shoulder into the sage and was gone. She drove to Cuba and sat in the truck and the lot of the gas station with the doors locked

33:01until it got light. Then she drove to the yard and turned in the truck and went to her apartment and called in sick. She said she told Rose everything, exactly the way she's told it here and Rose listened to all of it and didn't say anything for a while and then she said, you shouldn't have looked at it. That's all. Rose didn't tell her what it was. She didn't say the name. She just told her not to drive at night by herself for a month. She quit the job the next spring. For reasons she said had nothing to do with the road. She lives in Albuquerque now. She said she's told this to maybe five people and every one of them who wasn't Rose. Immediately said the name and every time they did she said it felt like they were talking about something else. Nobody died. She said she watched for it for a year and nothing happened to anybody and she doesn't know what she saw and she's decided she doesn't get to know. Now we go up. Everything so far has been on the highway in the open country where the thing that appears doesn't leave tracks and doesn't want anything.

34:03New Mexico has mountains too and the mountains have a different tenant. The Sangre de Cristo's north of Santa Fe are real forest with peaks over 13,000 feet and canyons full of spruce and fur that most people never walk into. The Hey-Mess Mountains west of the Rio Grande are the rim of an old volcano, ponderosa and meadow and hot springs with the Vala Caldera in the middle. Down south the Sacramento Mountains stand up out of the desert around Cloudcroft and Ruedoso and hold the Lincoln National Forest and southwest of there, the Heila is 3 million acres of the roughest country in the lower 48. The Jicarrilla Apache and Mescalero Apache reservations sit in the middle of two of those ranges. Elk, Bayer and Mountain Lion live in all of them and so does the other thing. New Mexico doesn't get talked about much in big foot circles but the reports go back as far as anybody was riding them down and they come from every range in the state.

35:04Bernie drew a bull elk tag for the Hey-Mess in 1989 and he'd waited six years for it. He was 42 and he lived in Los Alamos where he worked for a contractor at the lab and he'd hunted the Hey-Mess his whole adult life, mostly for deer, mostly without luck. The bull tag was different. He took two weeks off. He scouted in September and he found a meadow up a side canyon off the Fenton Lake Road, a long narrow park with a spring at the head of it and aspen on the north slope and a wallow the elk were using and he built a blind out of dead fall on the timbered edge of the meadow and left it. The first morning of the season he was in the blind an hour before light with a 30-aught six and a thermos. It was the first week of October, frost on the grass. He said the meadow was gray and then it was white and then the sun hit the aspen on the far slope and turned it gold and he sat there and watched it and didn't see an elk. He got eight in the morning something walked out of the aspen.

36:04It came out of the trees on the far side of the meadow, about 200 yards at the upper end near the spring and his first thought was that it was a bear because it was dark and big and it was where a bear would be. He put the scope on it. It was upright, walking on two legs and he took his eye off the scope and looked with both eyes and it was still upright. It walked down to the spring, not hurrying. The way a man walks across a yard, arms swinging and at the spring it stopped and bent at the waist and put one hand in the water. He watched it through the scope for what he guessed was a minute. He said the hair on it was dark brown, almost black on the back and shoulders and lighter, reddish down the arms. He said the head was set forward and low without much neck and the shoulders were wide enough that he thought of a doorway. It was bent over at the spring and when it straightened up he used the aspen behind it for scale and the aspen were young trees, 20 or 25 feet and its head came up to about

37:07the first fork on the nearest one which he went and looked at later and put it just under 8 feet. It drank from its hand. He said it lifted the hand to its face twice. Then it stood there with the sun on it. He could see the hair move in the little wind coming down the canyon and he could see the face. It was dark, bare skin, with a heavy ridge over the eyes and a wide flat nose. He said the eyes looked small for the head and set deep. He said it looked in the scope at 200 yards like somebody he might have known. And even after all this time, he's never been able to explain what he means by that. He said it turned its head and looked right at the dead fall he was sitting in and he took his finger off the trigger guard and laid the rifle across his knees. He said he didn't decide to. His hands just did it for him. It walked back up into the aspen, same pace. He said it went into the trees and the trees closed behind it and he could hear it for a while. Not loud, the sound of something heavy going through leaves and then he couldn't.

38:11He sat in the blind until noon. Then he walked across the meadow to the spring. The ground around the spring is soft, black mud with elk tracks in it. And in the mud on the near side, he found one print that wasn't an elk. He said it was a foot. Five toes, heel, no arch, 17 inches long by the tape he had in his pack and the mud was pressed down in it and inch deeper than the elk tracks beside it. He didn't have a camera. He had a notebook and he drew it and wrote the measurements next to the drawing and he still has the notebook. He said there was one more print, partial, on the edge of the aspen where the ground got hard and then nothing. He hunted the rest of his two weeks. He said he didn't see an elk in that meadow again and he didn't see one anywhere else and he ate his tag. He said the meadow was empty every morning, no elk, no fresh sign at the wallow and he'd sit in the blind and watch the aspen and wait for something to walk out of it and nothing did.

39:12He told his wife and he told one friend at the lab, a physicist who listened to the whole thing and then asked him if he'd been sleeping enough. He didn't tell anybody else for 20 years. He drew another hey mess bull tag in 2004 at 57 and he hunted a different unit. He said he could have put in for the same one and didn't. He killed a bull that year, a good one and he said it was the best day of hunting he ever had and it didn't come close to the other one. Joyce has driven the sandy accressed road at night more times than she can count because for 11 years she was a night shift dispatcher for the tramway at the top of it and the road was her commute. The crest road climbs about 4,000 feet and 14 miles from the village of Sandia Park to the top of the mountain above Albuquerque. It's paved, it's two lanes and it's switchbacks through Ponderosa and then fur and then spruce and then a stunted forest of wind-bent trees at the top and at night it's black.

40:12With no lights of any kind until you get to the parking lot at the crest and see the whole city spread out 10,000 feet below. In November of 1996 she was coming down the mountain after a shift at about 1 in the morning. She was in a Subaru wagon. It was cold and clear and there'd been snow that week. A few inches, plowed off the road but still on the ground under the trees. About halfway down on a hairpin where the road swings back on itself around the head of a drainage. Her lights swung across the slope above the road and there was something standing in the snow. It was maybe 60 feet up the slope, standing beside a big fur and it was upright and the lights went across it and off it as the car went around the curve so she saw it for about 2 seconds. She stopped. She said she doesn't know why she stopped, that everything she'd been told her whole life said don't and she stopped anyway and backed up and put the lights on it again. It was still there. She said it hadn't moved. It was standing with one hand on the trunk of the fur, the way a person leans on a tree

41:17and it was looking down at the road at her. She said it was black against the snow, a solid black shape and the snow gave her the outline of it better than she'd have gotten in summer. It was tall. She used the fur for scale and said the top of its head came to the lowest branch. She went back up the next week in daylight and found the tree and the lowest branch was 9 feet off the ground. She said the arm on the tree was long, the elbow above the level of the shoulder and the body was thick through the chest and thin at the waist, more than a bear and the head was high and round and close to the shoulders. She could see the face in the headlights. She said the face was flat and dark and the eyes reflected, not much. A dull green like a deer's eyes but bigger and farther apart. It looked at her for a long time. She sat there with her foot on the break and her hands on the wheel and it stood on the slope with its hand on the tree and neither of them did anything for what she guessed was a minute. Then it turned and walked uphill.

42:19She said it walked away from her, up the slope, through snow a foot deep and it walked easily, lifting its feet high the way a person walks in deep snow but without any effort in it and it went behind the fur and into the trees above and she lost it. She drove down. She said she drove the rest of the way at 15 miles an hour with her high beams on, looking at both sides of the road and she got home to sandy a park at 2 and sat up until her husband got up for work. She went back the next week in daylight on a day off. She found the hairpin and the fur. The snow had melted off most of the slope by then. She said she found where something had stood by the tree. A trampled place in what was left of the snow and above it, going up through the trees, a line of impressions in the mud under the snow that she followed for maybe 40 yards before the ground went to rock. She said she didn't measure anything. She said she wished she had. She worked the night shift for 6 more years. She said she drove that road down the mountain a thousand times after that and never saw

43:22it again and she looked every time at that hairpin and she still looks when she and her husband drive up to the crest for the view. Thomas was 17 in the summer of 1974 and he'd gone into the hila with his uncle to fish the middle fork. His uncle was a ranch hand from Glenwood who'd been going into the hila his whole life. In every July he took his nephew and a pack horse and went up the middle fork from the cliff dwellings for a week of trout fishing. It's a river canyon, deep, with sheer walls and places and cottonwood and sickle more along the water and ponderosa on the benches and it's some of the most remote country in the southwest. You walk in, there's no other way. They were four days up, camped on a bench above the river where a side canyon came in. And Thomas had gone downstream alone in the evening to fish a pool his uncle had pointed out. He said he'd been added an hour and caught two fish and the light was going. The canyon walls turning red on the tops and dark, down where he was.

44:23Something came out of the side canyon across the river. It walked down the side canyon and out onto the gravel bar on the far side of the river, about 70 yards from him. Coming upright, down to the water's edge and stopped. He said it was gray, not brown, not black, a gray like a wet rock and the hair on it was long and hung off the arms and shoulders. And he thought at first it was an old man because of the gray, a hermit or a crazy person maybe. Then it squatted down at the water and he saw the size of it. He said squatting on its heels, its back came up higher than his uncle's head and his uncle was six feet. He said the arms were on the ground in front of it, hands in the gravel and the hands were the size of shovel blades. It put its face to the river and drank. He said it drank like a horse, head down and he could hear it from across the water over the sound of the river. Then it looked up with its face still low and it saw him.

45:24Stay tuned for more back woods big foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. He was standing in the open on a gravel bar with a fly rod in his hand and nowhere to go. He said the face was lighter than the body, a gray tan, bare with a brow that stuck out in a flat wide nose and a mouth that hung a little open. And the eyes were dark and looked directly at him across the river and he said he's been looked at by people who wanted to hurt him since then. And it wasn't that. He said it looked at him the way you'd look at a dog that wandered into your yard. Interested, not concerned. It stood up. He said it stood up slow, straightening at the knees and then at the waist and then the head came up last. And standing it was taller than anything he'd ever seen on two legs. And it stood there on the far bank with the river between them and the water running off its hands. And then it turned and walked back up the side canyon. And it was gone in the cotton woods in about ten steps. He said he stood there until it was full dark.

46:24Then he reeled in and walked back to camp along the river with the rod in front of him like a stick. And his uncle was frying the fish he'd caught. He looked up at him and asked what was wrong. He told his uncle what he'd seen. His uncle listened to the whole thing, turned the fish in the pan and said they were up here and that was all. Tomas asked his uncle what he meant by that. His uncle said they've always been up here. Go wash your hands. They fished three more days. Tomas said he didn't go downstream alone again and his uncle didn't ask him to. He went back into the heela every summer for the rest of his uncle's life and after. And he's fished the middle fork forty times. And he's never seen it again and never seen a track. He said he's found things. A place on a bench above the river where the pine needles were pushed into a bed the size of a truck. A stick jammed sideways across a trail at head height, which could have been anything. He said he doesn't count those.

47:25He counts what he saw at the river in 1974. He said his uncle's answer is the one that still bothers him most because his uncle never explained it and he died in 1991. Kelly's family has had a cabin outside Cloudcroft since the 60s and in the summer of 2012 she was staying in it alone for the first time. The cabin is in the Sacramento mountains at about 8,000 feet on a dirt road that comes off the highway east of town and winds down into a canyon of fur and aspen with a creek at the bottom. It's a tourist mountain Cloudcroft. Texans come up to get out of the heat. Kelly was 24 and she'd been sent up by her parents to open the place for the season. Error it out, turn the water on and she'd been there three days. The third night she couldn't sleep and around midnight she went out on the porch to look at the stars because there's no light pollution to speak of in that canyon. And the sky is the reason people keep coming back. The porch faces the creek.

48:27There's a meadow between the cabin and the creek. Maybe 80 yards of grass and then the willows along the water and then the far slope going up into the trees. There was a half moon. She said the meadow was gray in it and the willows were black and she could hear the creek and nothing else. No wind, no cars, nothing. There was something in the meadow. She said it was standing about halfway between the porch and the willows in the open and she didn't see it walk there. It was just there when she looked and it was upright and it was facing the cabin. She said she thought at first it was a man and then she thought about how far away the willows were and how big the thing was against them and she said her body understood before she did because she'd stopped breathing. It was dark. She said the moon was behind her over the cabin so the front of it was lit a little and she could see it was covered in hair, dark. And the hair was longer on the head and shoulders and hung down.

49:28She said the shoulders were wide and sloped, no neck and the arms were long and hung straight down with the hands open. She said it was taller than the porch roof. The face was the only part she could see in any detail because of the moon. It was flat and dark and wide and there was a ridge over the eyes that put the eyes and shadow and the mouth was closed. She said it looked calm. That's her word. She said it looked like it had been standing there watching the cabin for a while and wasn't in any hurry about it. She didn't move. She said she was standing at the porch rail in a t-shirt and sweatpants, barefoot, with the screen door open behind her and she thought about the door and she thought about the meadow and she stayed where she was. She said she doesn't know how long. She said the thing just stood there and she stood there frozen. And at some point it turned its head slowly and looked up the canyon toward the road and then looked back at her. Then it walked away.

50:28She said it walked toward the creek across the rest of the meadow and its walk was long and smooth and the arm swung and it went into the willows and she heard it in the water. A few heavy steps splashing and then it was on the far bank and she could hear it going up the slope through the brush for a long time, getting farther away and higher until it was gone. She went inside and locked the door. She said she sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets and the lights off until it was light because she didn't want the lights on and didn't know why. In the morning she walked out into the meadow. She said the grass was pressed down in a patch where it had stood about the size of a car hood and the grass was wet from dew and the pressed part was drier which she took to mean it had stood there a good while before she came out. She followed the line it had walked to the willows and found where it had gone into the creek. A place where the bank was caved in and on the far side in the mud she found two prints,

51:30one clear and one half gone and she photographed both with her phone with her own foot beside them for scale. She still has the photos. The clear one shows a foot about 16 inches long by her estimate, wide across the front with the toes visible and her own foot next to it looks like a child's. She called her father that afternoon. She listened and asked her to send the photos and she did and he looked at them for a while on the phone and then said the things she's never forgotten which was your grandfather saw one in 1970. Nobody had ever told her that her grandfather had been dead for 10 years. She said her father told her the grandfather had seen it in the same meadow from the same porch and had told exactly one person and that was her father when her father was 12 and her father had never told anybody either. Her family still has the cabin. She said she goes up every summer and she sits on the porch at night and she's never seen it again. Her father won't sit on the porch after dark.

52:32He never has, she said, as long as she can remember and she'd always thought that was because of the cold. Menwell hurt her to cheap for his father in the mountains east of Mora in the summers of the early 1960s and when he was 14 he saw it at the camp. The family ran a few hundred head on grazing allotments in the song grade decreased dose above the valley in the high meadows at 10 and 11,000 feet where the snow doesn't go off until June. Menwell and his father would take the sheep up in late June and stay with them until September. Moving camp every couple of weeks is the grass got eaten down with a burrow to carry the tent and the food and two dogs to work the sheep. It was the way his family had done it since the land grant. The summer he was 14, 1962. They were camped at the edge of a big meadow near Timberline with a stand of spruce behind the tent and a snow field still lying in the shade on the north slope above them. He said the dogs were the start of it. Sheep dogs sleep with the flock and their steady dogs and for three nights running they

53:36left the flock and came and lay at the tent flap and his father kicked them back out and they came back. On the third night they wouldn't go at all. His father left them stay. He woke up because the sheep were moving. He said a bedded flock at night makes a sound, a kind of breathing and when it changes you know it in your sleep. The sheep were on their feet and bunching, pushing together and one of the dogs was growling low with its head down. His father was already sitting up. He had a rifle and he took it and went out of the tent and he went after him. There was a moon. He said the meadow was bright with it, bright enough to see the sheep bunched in a tight ball at the far edge and the snow field wide on the slope above them and standing at the edge of the spruce between the tent and the flock, there was a man. He said his father said, who is it? And the man didn't answer. And his father said it again louder and raised the rifle. And the man took a step out of the shadow of the spruce into the moonlight and it wasn't a man at all.

54:37He said it was taller than the tent and the tent was a wall tent with a ridge pole at seven feet. It was covered in hair, black or close to it and the moon made a shine on the top of the shoulders and the head. The head was round and low. The arms hung past where a man's knees would be. He said it was standing between them and the sheep and it wasn't looking at the sheep. It was looking at his father. His father didn't shoot. His father stood there with the rifle up and it stood there in the moon and the dogs were behind the two of them, not in front. She said it was the only time in his life he saw a sheep dog get behind a person. Then it turned its head and looked at Manuel. He said it looked at him for a second or two. And he could see the face. And the face was black and had no expression that he could read. And the eyes caught the moon and went bright and then dim as it turned back. Then it walked into the spruce. He said it walked. It didn't run. And the last thing he saw was the shine of the moon on its back going between two trees.

55:40And then the spruce was just spruce. His father lowered the rifle. He said his father stood there for a long time and then went and put wood on the fire and sat by it with the rifle across his knees. And Manuel sat by him and they didn't say anything. And at first light his father said we're moving camp and they packed the burrow and moved the sheep five miles down the mountain to a meadow they'd already grazed. And stayed there the rest of the summer on poor grass. He said his father never talked about it. Not once. Not that summer or any summer after. But his father never took the sheep back to that upper meadow. And when he asked about it two years later, his father said the grass was better lower down, which it wasn't. Manuel hurt with his father until 1968 and then went into the army and then to Denver and he came back to Mora when he retired. The family doesn't run sheep anymore. He said he drove up the forest road to that meadow in 2006 as far as a truck can go and

56:41walk the last mile and it's the same. The spruce is there. The snow field was there in July. He said he stood at the edge of the meadow for a while and then walked back to the truck and that was enough. We end where we started on the road. Highway 76 comes down out of the mountains at Pinyasco and if you keep going it takes you to Tows. And if you turn around, it takes you back through the crossroads, past the culvert, past the place where the dirt track goes off into the Pinyong on both sides. In daylight there's nothing there. There's never been anything there in daylight. There's a cattle guard and a mailbox and a view of the mountains that people drive up from Santa Fe to photograph. The families in those villages still tell their kids not to stop. They tell them the way Lupé's grandmother told her. The way Teresa's grandmother told her and the kids laugh, some of them. And some of them don't. And the ones who don't are the ones who've been on the road late enough to see the crossroads with the headlights on it and nothing standing there and to feel how much they didn't want

57:44to look. Raised retired. Marcos keeps it at 60. Danielle lives in Albuquerque and doesn't drive 550 for any reason. Lupé's daughter lives in the valley and she has the same bridge and the same warning. And the guard rail the county put on it in the 90s. And up in the mountains above them, in the hay mess, and the sangries, and the heala, and the sacramentos. Ernie's notebook is in a drawer with a drawing in it and Kelly's photos are on a phone. And Tomas still fishes the middle fork. And Manuel's father's meadow is still growing the best grass on the mountain with no sheep on it. Nobody in this episode got a festival. Nobody got a statue. New Mexico doesn't do that with these things. The people who see something here go home and lock the door and mostly don't say anything. And the country goes on being as empty as it was. And the road goes on being the only thing between one porch light and the next.