In a YouTube video published on October 17, 2013, Louise Albright talked about her encounter with a Bigfoot 60 years ago while picking berries:
“This happened many years ago when I was a little girl in southern Illinois. I was approximately 12 years old. It was about 60 years ago. It was the end of the summer months when the berries got ripe. There was always blackberries that grew wild in southern Illinois and my mom always canned and made pies. So she asked us to go berry picking with her and I was the only one that said I would go with her. We got our buckets and we started outside, not too far from the house which was, to start with, the place was probably 2 and a half to 3 miles off the main highway back into the woods towards the timber, down a gravel road and down a gravel lane. There was only our house and one other house that sat up probably half a mile from us, away from all the trees. We sat next to the trees. At one time, there had been loggers back there and they left equipment sitting up and down the little dirt lane.
Anyway, we went berry picking and we started up pretty close to the house and we started picking berries, and the further we went, the farther we got up towards this bluff where all the trees and everything was at. And, not even thinking, we just kept picking berries and having fun being with my mom. So we kept picking berries. On up the hill we went. Slowly up the hill. Berries. Berries. I said, Mom, do you think we got enough berries? She said, Let's get a few more. So we got a few more berries. By then, we were like up this bluff, at the top of the hill where the trees and all that started. Really deep into the woods. So we quit picking berries. So we got up there, I said, Momma? Because she started to turn around and go back. She said, We got enough berries. I didn't know it, but Mom had already saw it before I saw it.
We started walking and every time we took a step, I would hear this crunch in the leaves. And I'd stop. It would stop. I said, Mom, do you hear that? She said, Oh, it's just the rabbits and the squirrels and stuff making the noise. Don't be worried about it. Turn around and keep going. Don't look back. Let's get home. So we started. I took a few steps. I could hear this crunch. Crunch. I'd stop. It would stop. She said, Don't stop. Just keep going. Of course, I didn't listen to my mother. I turned and I looked back and I could see, down at the bottom from the opposite way we got to the hill, and I could see this thing walking along there and it's huge and it's furry. It had to have been at least 6 foot tall or 7 foot tall because we were standing up and it still looked huge. So, anyway, I said, Momma, do you see that? She said, Don't worry about it. Keep going! And don't look back! I said, Momma, let's run. She said, No, don't run! She said, Just keep walking slowly. Just keep going back towards the house I did until we got to the very bottom of that hill. When we got to very bottom of that hill, I said, Can we run now, mom? She said, Yes, you can run if you want to. So we ran home.
We told my dad about what we saw on our berry picking route. And dad said, If that's what you actually saw, he said, There are no bears that are that huge down here, so, we don't have anything like that. He said, What you saw was a Bigfoot. And so we went on and forgot about Bigfoot after that because he wasn't in our house. He didn't scare us or anything anymore.
Anyway, it got colder and it was like, we had one big empty room that we didn't use and we had it closed off but my mom had taken a clothesline and tied it from corner to corner in the room so she could use it to hang her clothes in there in the winter because she scrubbed our clothes on the board. We lived in southern Illinois. We didn't have a washing machine. We had a scrub board. You have to remember, that was like 60 years ago. A lot of people down in the southern hills didn't have a washing machine. A few had old wringer washers but my mom had a tub. So, anyway, she had went in there. She had hung her clothes up. She had went in there to get a dress she had planned on ironing for the next day. And all of a sudden we heard my mom scream just as loud as she could scream and we heard her feet hit the floor as she come bouncing through the door into the other room. We wanted to know what was going on. My dad said, Jane, what in the world is going on. Why are you screaming like that? She said, Well, Wade, as I went to reach to get my dress off the line, she said, I saw this great big huge thing standing there, tall as the windowsill, stooped over, bent, with his hands up to the window, looking at me. He was big and hairy. And, so, dad, of course, went out but to check nothing there. He didn't find it, of course. But after that we were very very... We didn't go out at night and play in the yard like we had before.”
Source: “Bigfoot interview with grandma” Liz Imhoff, Published on 17 Oct 2013
JLB - Beyond Creepy
NOTE: I have little doubt about the sighting, but I do have some doubt that her father called it 'Bigfoot.' The term did not appear until October 5, 1958 in the Humboldt Times, as a headline to an article written by the paper's editor Andrew Genzoli on a local man named Jerry Crew who had shown up at the paper's office with a plaster cast of a footprint found in Bluff Creek Valley. I don't know exactly when the story was first told or if it had occurred 60 years prior...nonetheless, it's an interesting encounter. Lon
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