Burnt Corn hunter describes encounters with 'Bigfoot' creatures

Marcus Lee examines broken branch near Bigfoot sighting location.

This month marks three years since Burnt Corn native Marcus Lee had an unnerving encounter with a Bigfoot-type creature in a wooded area between Brantley Switch and Burnt Corn.

However, while this incident was unsettling, it wasn’t Lee’s first experience with this type of creature in that same neck of the woods. Lee, a 33-year-old graduate of Hillcrest High School in Evergreen who now lives in Clarksville, Tenn., had his first run-in with Bigfoot around Nov. 12, 2011 when he was out coon hunting one cold night with his two brothers and a cousin. The incident took place across from his grandmother’s home on Conecuh County Road 15, between Lett Hope Road and New Hope AME Zion Church, about three miles southeast of Burnt Corn.

The four young men entered the woods around 11 p.m., and Lee remembers a bright full moon being high in the sky. All of a sudden, the hunters noticed that their dogs – a male red nose Pitbull named “Cash” and a female Walker coonhound – were acting unusual. Both dogs stopped, got very quiet and seemed to be staring at something in the distance that the hunters couldn’t see, Lee said.

Suddenly and without warning, the hunters heard what Lee described as two loud “clacks” as if someone was banging two rocks together. Next, the ensuing silence was broken by what sounded like something stomping or hitting the ground twice in the woods ahead of the hunters.

Lee said that he and his companions didn’t know what to make of the noises, but it caused them and their dogs to freeze in their tracks, too shocked to move. Next, they heard something large circling through the woods around their group, smashing through the trees, which prompted the hunters to make their way out of the woods.

“What made it so bad, we had to walk in the direction of where the noise stopped, so it was like whatever made the noise was between us and my grandmother’s house,” Lee said, pointing out that they didn’t run away, but walked at a fast pace to get out of the woods. In all, the incident lasted about two minutes, Lee said. He noted that he was armed with a 12-gauge Smith & Wesson shotgun, but was so shocked by the unusual incident that he never once considered shooting whatever it was.

Up to that point, Lee and his relatives didn’t even think about the thing being a Bigfoot, but two days later, the thought first entered Lee’s mind when he returned to the woods. It was there, in an ant bed on the edge of a dim road through the property, that he found a large footprint made by something that apparently only had three large toes. Later, relatives saw an episode of the television show “Finding Bigfoot” in which witnesses claimed to have heard a Bigfoot-type creature making “clacking” type noises by banging two rocks together.

“That was when we really started to think that maybe it was a Bigfoot or Sasquatch that we’d run into that night while coon hunting,” Lee said. “I think it was actually the leader of their group, trying to lead us away from the rest of them.”

Fast-forward a little over three years to Feb. 2, 2015.

It was on that cold, rainy Monday around 9 a.m. that Lee entered that same patch of woods alone with a .22-rifle with an eye toward bagging a few rabbits. Lee, a lifelong hunter and outdoorsman, creeped through the woods for three or four minutes and found himself almost in the same location where the 2011 incident took place. Suddenly, he heard what sounded like cracking or falling trees coming from about 100 yards away.

At the time, the thought of Bigfoot never came to mind, Lee said. Instead, he thought it was a large buck moving through the woods and maybe that it had gotten its antlers tangled in the underbrush somehow. Eventually, the noises stopped and realizing that he couldn’t kill a deer with a small-caliber rifle, Lee pulled out his cell phone to video what he thought was a deer.

Instead of a deer, the footage, which was made available to The Courant for review, showed a large, dark humanoid creature standing behind a large tree. Squatting into a patch of broom sage, Lee continued to hold his phone in the air, and the footage shows something that apparently has a head and shoulders moving from one side of a tree to the other.

Lee said he became overcome with the feeling that “something bad was about to happen” and prepared to flee the area. When he stood, he saw a Bigfoot-type creature between him and the one behind the tree, crawling on the ground towards the woods. Lee said that this creature was smaller than the one in the video and that he made eye contact with the creature. At that point, Lee “struck out running.”

Lee said he got a good look at both creatures, the tallest of which was nine to 10 feet tall and weighed an estimated 800 pounds. He said that its hair was reddish-brown, but the hair around its face looked gray or white. He noted that the creature didn’t appear to have any hair on its chest and said that it had short hair on its arms and legs.

He described the head as cone-shaped and noted that while the eyes were hard to see, they were bigger than a man’s. Lee said he couldn’t see the creature’s ears, but said its nose and mouth were “gorilla-like.” He also couldn’t see its teeth or tell what color its eyes were.

He said that the hair over the creature’s mouth was thicker than elsewhere on its face, almost like a moustache, and it was grayish black. He noted that the creature’s neck appeared to be covered with hair so thick that it almost looked like a long beard. Overall, the creature was very muscular, and it had fat fingers with normal-looking fingernails. Lee said he couldn’t tell if the creature was male or female.

Lee said that since that day in 2015, he hasn’t seen the creatures again, but during the snowfall in January, one of his female cousins found some unusual footprints in her yard. The snow fell during the night and when she got up in the morning and walked to her car, she found some unusual tracks in her yard. When she followed them, they took her in a circle around her house and when she showed the footprints to Lee’s uncle, he pointed out that they were made by someone with large feet who was barefooted. This was about 50 yards from Lee’s grandmother’s residence on County Road 15 and a stone’s throw from where he had his two Bigfoot encounters.

In the end, Lee said he was accustomed to people not believing his stories about seeing Bigfoot in Burnt Corn. However, as more people in the area have come forward saying that they’ve seen these creatures in the Burnt Corn and Pine Orchard area, many have changed their tune, Lee said. “I probably wouldn’t believe it either, if I hadn’t seen what I’ve seen,” Lee said. “But believe me, there is something out there.”