Report 24238: Man recalls multi-witness sighting in teen years near Manistique

We were walking facing west toward the sun. A loud guttural sound came from behind us. We had all grown up in and around the woods but this sound was louder and so unusual that we all turned around at the same time.  When we first saw it, behind us, at the same spot we had just come from a few minutes before.  It was walking up the hill to the top of the RR tracks. We were about 110 feet away. It had its head bent down and turned sideways toward us but never stopped walking straight across the tracks and down the other side. There was a well used trail along the creek south of the tracks but north of the tracks is all swamp and no trail at all. The North side is wet peat bogs, thick brush, cedar, spruce and balsam and poplar trees with small tag alders. We stood there for a minute or so and then ran back to where it went into the woods.  We couldn’t find the exact spot but the smell was still there.  It smelled like a wet decomposing animal mixed with rotten fish.  We couldn’t find any tracks but then the swamp is so thick and wet that we didn’t look very far into it – besides we were all a little stressed out and kept looking over our shoulders for more to come from where he came.  The trail south of the Tracks, where he came from, was too hard for tracks. We all agreed to never speak of it to anyone.  There were a few reasons for this; 1.	We new that everyone would laugh at us. 2.	This was something that only we new about and we named it “Marblehead Monster” 3.	Although we didn’t own this area or creek, it felt like we did, and we didn’t want a bunch of people stumbling around and messing everything up for us. 4.	This was a time BEFORE Bigfoot.  There were no Bigfoot sightings and he hadn’t even been named yet.  We had no information to compare with our sighting.  I didn’t know what we had seen for 15 years or so, until I saw pictures that looked like him on TV.