An escaped gorilla in the NC mountains?
I grew up at the base of this mountain in Ashe county, NC. Mt jefferson has had some strange happenings in the past and there is a weird cave on the mountain I will tell you about in a later post.
One night in the late 70's, my aunt was returning from a date with her boyfriend. She lived just down the hill from me. Her boyfriend saw her into the house and was going back to his car when something happened that he talked about for the rest of his life. (They later married and I spent a lot of my younger years around him.)
He said as he was going to his car, a huge black gorilla came out of the woods that backed up to the mountain. I never heard the name "Bigfoot" mentioned. I don't think anyone at that time knew what a Bigfoot was. He always said it was a gorilla. He said it charged at him and the only thing that he could think to do was to jump on top of an old junk car that was sitting there in the yard. He had parked his own car further down from the house since it was so late and didn't want to wake up anybody. He was a heavy smoker all his life and always had a cigarette lighter with him. He said the gorilla circled the car a couple times, snorting at him and making strange noises before he got the lighter out of his pocket. He flicked the lighter at it several times and it ran back into the woods. Finally, he made a run for his car and left. The next day he came back and excitedly told this crazy story. Some people didn't believe him, but I did. I noticed how excited, then nervous he got when he told his story.
He always told the story the same way, never changing or leaving out any details until the day he died. I have no reason not to believe his story. I played in those woods and roamed that mountain growing up and didn't see the gorilla but we sure would get these strange musky smells occasionally. I now believe what he ran into was a bigfoot or sasquatch as there have been other sightings since then. We had some other strange things happen on that mountain such as The Buttermilk Road Incident that you will be reading about in future posts.
Swamp Stalker
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