There’s a lot of activity in the woods this time of year. With so many people in camo staying still and trying not to smell like a human, you’d think sightings of oddities like a Bigfoot sort of thing might be prevalent.

Well, maybe they are, but maybe those people in camo don’t really want to talk about it. Or, maybe the Bigfoot themselves are smart enough to stay out of the woods during busy times. Who knows? Nobody for sure.

“It’s probably something like a Jungian archetype—wherever there’s a human population there’s a [story about] wild man,” says Timothy Renner, a York County (PA) resident, author of Bigfoot in Pennsylvania, and a believer that there is something else out there. What it is, or could be, is kind of muddled, though.

“There’s something about the phenomenon that doesn’t want to give a clear picture,” he says. His book, published in 2017, gives, in his words, “a statewide survey of historical sightings starting with the earliest reference I could find [1838-1847] and ending in the 1920s.” And, he’s right. There isn’t a clear picture. He has his own theories about what Bigfoot and other cryptid-type creatures may or may not be, but he doesn’t know for sure, any more than anybody else does.

The newspaper accounts Timothy collected include sightings all over the Keystone State, including Tioga and Potter counties. “Some of the reports are scary; some are matter-of-fact, while others are quite strange,” he writes. The things people reported seeing ranged from “a wild woman, half naked, very dirty, brown colored”, to a creature “walking sometimes upright like a man, or else running along at race horse speed on all fours…”, to “gorilla not exactly seen, but shots are fired.”

“I don’t blame people for saying what they see,” Timothy says.

Patrick Kovchok, aka JP, loves mountain biking. Until a stroke this past spring, JP had spent a lot of time over the last fifteen years or so in the woods of Tioga County, riding and clearing trails, often alone. He recalls a couple of odd happenings that he attributes to Bigfoot.

The first was in 2008 or 2009. He was riding on Silver Run, off of Landrus Road (between Arnot and Morris), going slow, he says, and not making a lot of noise.

“All of a sudden, it was like I woke something up—something was talking in a language I’d never heard before.” He says he has relatives who spoke languages other than English, including Slovak and Japanese, and this “wasn’t a language I recognized.” He didn’t see anything, and continued riding down the trail.

In 2012, JP was using a chainsaw to clear a section of Deadman Hollow trail near Colton Point, when a tree fell right next to the trail, lined up with one he had just cut.

“I thought to myself, ‘This is strange.’” Then, he describes having what was “a second person’s voice come into my head,” saying “You’re not welcome here.”

“I didn’t feel the chainsaw was enough protection,” he muses, twelve years later.

He says he went back a few days after that and got within about 100 yards of where he had been. He saw that another big tree had come down, and suddenly another fell. There was no wind.

“I said, ‘There’s something wrong here.’”

“Were you afraid?” I asked him of his two “incidents.”

“Yeah, I was.”

My own Bigfoot story goes like this. It was over forty years ago (Forty! How that happened I can’t say, but I don’t think it had anything to do with Bigfoot.), and we were on a bare bones, not-too-far-from-home overnighter in an area known as Lost Trail, which is between County Bridge State Park and Armenia Mountain. My companion was David, the future father of my children, but it was just the two of us on this little adventure (or was it?). David remembers being up there with a bunch of pals back in their high school days, and says they all felt “creepy”—not something teenage boys used to hunting and camping are prone to admit to.

“Maybe that put me in a specific frame of mind,” he said during a recent phone conversation when I asked him what he could recall from that night. He acknowledged that the place had a bit of a reputation, as “weird things have happened up there,” maybe even some murders back in the 1940s.

Whatever may have gone on in the past, there wasn’t much up there when we arrived—no camps, no real campsites, just a flat place where somebody else had had a fire ring and probably partied. So we pitched our tent, got a fire going, and settled in. Until we both started feeling uneasy, creepy.

“I remember we both looked at each other and thought we should leave,” David said. As we gathered up some things, I saw something, something just outside of the fire ring, before the light of the flames was lost in the darkness beyond. It was a leg—a striding leg—very long and covered in hair.

We wasted no time piling into our Toyota Land Cruiser—never mind the gear and the food, just go!! Not far down the road, we stopped to catch our breath and ask each other what just happened. Then something hit our vehicle, hard, and we took that as a sign to, as they say, get the hell out of Dodge.

We went back the next day to collect the rest of our camp stuff. Nothing had been bothered—I don’t think the pack of hot dogs had even been touched—but there was this other thing—there was a board, that hadn’t been there the night before, with something tacked to it. David said he thought it was a flower I had found. “It was a little bit disturbing,” he said.

I don’t remember that part of it, he doesn’t remember seeing the leg in the light of the fire ring.

Maybe there are cryptids—Bigfoot, Yetis, Loch Ness monsters (watch The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, for a good take on that one), the Jersey Devil, ghosts in the attic, or beings from some other planet, time, or space hanging about our own planet, time, and space. Maybe there aren’t. It’s hard to prove they exist. But nobody can prove they don’t. I know what I saw that night on Lost Trail. I just don’t know what it was.