Terror in the Woods

- There we go. Come on, baby. -

You always think, "ah, there's a answer for everything."

Not for this.

It was like a freaking volcano just erupted.

Get that light going, man.

It infests my days sometimes.

Is it something that's escaped from hell?

It's like he wanted your soul.

- No, no, no. - Come on, baby.

Start.

Chaos.

I got it. I got it. Let's go! Come on. Push us off.

You know you're not getting out of there.

There's another one!

Hey, guys, quick!

Immediately, it was obvious that these were not human tracks.

I got this overwhelming feeling that something was watching me.

I just started shaking.

Then suddenly there was a loud crack behind me,

The sound of a limb cracking.

Where are you?

And it's getting closer and closer.

What the heck is this?

I could feel the warmth air of this whatever.

It huffed on the side of my face.

He's looking right at us.

We need to get off the mountain.

Larry: My name is larry thibodaux.

Gonna be kind of weird.

I never really sat down and told anybody the whole thing.

This whole thing started in lake texoma, north texas.

We have a lake house up there.

So we're there July 4th, big weekend.

Have a wife, three kids.

Where's the guys?

I figured they'd be here by now.

Our family is big into the woods, big into outdoors.

We love to fish, love to hunt.

On one side of the lake, there's houses,

Everybody goes out, hang out at the boat dock.

The family is there making sandwiches, making burgers.

Kids are filling up water balloons,

Throwing them at each other, having a good time.

But the other side of the bank,

That's completely different.

These woods,

They go on forever.

It's thousands of acres.

I used to go in there at night.

I'd go in there and walk around.

There's no trace of human sign.

Loved the quietness. I loved hearing the coyotes.

I loved just the serenity of it.

I don't do that anymore.

I don't know if I'll ever do that again.

- Hey, there! - Geez!

you nearly gave me a heart attack.

Happy 4th of July.

How you doing, baby brother?

My name is buster thibodaux.

- Good to see you. - We're just about ready here.

My brother keeps his boats on lake texoma.

When we come back, we'd planned on having, you know, a fish fry.

Danny!

Danny, him and his family would be up there

Just about every weekend.

I've only talked to him once since then.

How are you doing, big fella?

I think, to him, whenever he is up there,

He has to relive what happened.

- You got the beers? - Of course I brought the beer.

It's a fishing trip, ain't it?

We were just kind of wondering

If we were gonna catch enough fish to feed everybody.

All right, let's get this show on the road, shall we?

Good luck.

You got a lot of mouths to feed tomorrow.

Thank you, baby. I know.

Don't drink too much.

I never do.

We took the smaller boat that day.

We had a 25-horsepower motor on it.

Of course, we have a spotlight.

We knew that day we were gonna be fishing at dark, for sure.

We always like to go where no one else goes...

Cheers.

Whoo!

...Kind of stay out of people's way.

We got almost 700 pounds of dudes in this boat

And not going real fast.

So two, three hours out in the middle of nowhere,

We stop.

This looks like a good spot.

Some places for catfish to hide.

We do a lot of -- in texas we call it jugging.

You have these gallon jugs.

They got string on them. You put these hooks on them.

You bait them up, and you go put them on the creek channel.

We got a late start.

It was already after 9:00,

And the good thing about when you go jugging,

You can catch a large amount of fish, you know,

In a short amount of time using that,

So that's why we did that.

And we knew we had about 15 more minutes of sunlight.

Hey, danny, you want to get that light fired up?

Yep.

The cables that you put on the battery,

We've used them for so long.

They're all taped together,

And they came unconnected three or four times.

But he finally gets the lights going.

Oh, hey, got one.

- All right! - There we go. Come on, baby.

And as I'm pulling it...

- All right. Hey. - High five.

- Good job. - Oh.

...Lights go out.

Get that off that hook. Put that baby in the cooler.

That's when all of this started.

Your teen is not gonna be happy.

Shh.

- What? - Shh, shh.

Y'all hear that?

I start hearing growling.

Buster: This thing is, like, breathing harder

Like, growling harder.

Sounds like we got company.

We didn't know until later, but it wasn't just a big old animal

That's just out there walking around.

It was something else.

You always think, "ah, there's an answer for everything."

Not for this.

We're 20 yards away, maybe 25.

You could hear it.

Danny, go get that light going again.

At that point, all I was doing

Was just trying to figure out what it was.

Danny puts the light on there.

Then it just stops.

Let's get back while that spotlight is still working.

Yeah.

It felt like an automobile just fell right next

To the boat from the sky.

What the hell was that?

It was like a freaking volcano just erupted.

Whatever threw that had to have a massive amount

Of just brute strength.

I feared for my life. I didn't know what was going on.

I thought -- I didn't know if whatever threw

That was gonna come after us or what.

Everybody eyes are following the light.

And we're trained always to find animals' eyes at night.

You look.

The lights keep coming off.

And I'm cussing, "get the damn light.

Get the light on. Get the light on."

When it hit him, it's...

You don't -- you never -- you don't ever forget it.