"I heard this ungodly sound coming from the woods". In 1979 a family in Kinderhook, NY began having strange encounters with unknown creatures. The Hallenbecks stated that over three years, there were several instances where they have been visited, virtually terrorized, by a creature they claim to be Bigfoot. Three generations had terrifying run-ins with a large hairy beast in the woods around their home. "It just seemed like whatever this was, just kind of showed up here" stated Bruce Hallenbeck. Mysterious occurrences that all point to one outrageous explanation. "I didn't really expect that a Bigfoot-type creature would show up literally in my backyard," said Hallenbeck.

Kinderhook is a small town in New York's Hudson Valley. It's where Washington Irving wrote the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It is also the home to some strange occurrences over the years, including the Hallenbeck family's encounters with the Kinderhook Creature. According to Bruce Hallenbeck, it all began in late 1979 about a mile from his Grandparents' house in an area known as Cushing's Hill.

"My cousin first saw some creatures down there in the swamp, and he said he saw three of them. This was in the daytime", said Bruce. Bruce's cousin was out trapping muskrats, near a stream at the bottom of the hill. "He said these three creatures were crossing the stream. He said they had reddish-brown hair all over their bodies and they were walking upright, and they were making grunting and clacking sounds he said. He ran up to my grandparent's house afterwards, his face was as white as a sheet, and he told us what he'd seen. That was a first for us, but it was not the last." Stated Bruce.

    

After Bruce's cousin recounted what he saw, his grandmother shared an encounter she had with one of these strange creatures the year before. "My grandmother, who lived in this house, got up early one morning, as she usually did she happened to look out the kitchen window and she saw something curled up in the yard down there, like it was sleeping", stated Bruce.

Bruce's Grandmother said in an interview. "The first time I saw it was when it was down in the lower part of the lawn. I got up really early in the morning, and I saw this big black thing curled up there. Well, it was really huge and it was very hairy. It had long hair, I could tell that. Long black hair." 

"She went away from the window for a minute for something, and when she came back it was gone. She didn't tell anybody at the time because she was afraid people would think she was losing her marbles", stated Bruce.

    

    

After seeing the strange creature lying in the yard, Bruce's grandmother began to suspect it was responsible for some unexplained events around the house. Something had been taking her trash, her trash bags, which used to be on the porch. Something would take the lid off the trash can, take the trash bag down into the middle of the yard, open it up, not tear it apart, but untie it, and go through the trash and leave it all over the place. That happened several times, and she thought there was some connection between that and whatever she saw. There was also a neighbor lady who lived across the woods here, who had the same experience, except her trash bag she found up in a tree one day.

    

    

A few months after Bruce learned about the encounters his grandmother and cousin had, he had his own strange experience. "Back in the summer of 1980, I think it was July, I heard this ungodly sound coming from the woods. It started out like a shriek or a howl, kind of went into a series of guttural noises, and then kind of died down in a very low moan. And the volume of it was so powerful. I mean you could tell it was a good-sized creature. It wasn't some bird or something, you know? It was just a weird howl, moan, all these sounds mixed in together." Bruce stated. When asked if it could have been a coyote or anything like that?  He said, "No, we have a lot of coyotes around, and I know what coyotes sound like. It was nothing like that at all."

    

    

Just a few months later Bruce and his family would have their most harrowing experience with the unknown creature.  Bruce relived that night by saying, "September 24, 1980. I remember there was a huge full moon. My grandmother had been visiting my aunt's house, and my aunt brought her back, and as soon as my grandmother got out of the car they heard this horrible sound coming from around that root cellar." His Grandmother stated, "When I got out of the car, I got on the back porch and I heard this terrible noise, and I said, what was that?"

"They said it like a man in terrible pain like he was moaning. Although, my cousin Sherry who was sitting in the back of the car, said she thought it sounded ape-like.    

So what happened, ultimately was, my grandmother went in the house. Locked the door. My aunt Barbara went up to her house to get my cousin Barry, and his shotgun.", added Bruce. 

"I didn't want to leave my mother alone, but I had no choice because she wanted to stay here", Barbara said. Brue's Grandmother added, "I sat in the living room with a hammer. I was watching all of the windows, and I thought, If that thing ever peaks in one of the windows I'm going to just faint." "She said that before she came in the house she could see a shadow of something very large with very long arms, and it had almost a conically shaped head", Bruce stated.

    

   

A short time later Bruce's cousin arrived at his grandmother's house. "So I came over with my shotgun, and I had a couple of shells. I thought maybe it was a burglar at first," he said. So he shot his shotgun, just in the air. "Pretty soon I heard crackling of leaves, and I fired one more time and I heard a scream. It sounded just like a girl". So, he fired the gun again, and this time he said flame came out of the barrel. And the thing screamed and ran off, and he thinks maybe it was the flame of the barrel that made it run. By the time Bruce got home this had all been over for a few minutes. There was pandemonium going on. His cousin had his shotgun with him because he had brought it over to scare the thing away. Everybody was talking about this thing that had been terrorizing them for the last hour or so. Bruce just walked around thinking "I can't believe this is happening."

    

    

Bruce's grandmother filled him in on the details later. The main thing to her was the noise it was making. She just said it was horrible, "it was like a person in terrible agony," as she put it. "So that indicates to me, that she probably heard the same sound that I had heard a couple of months before. When my cousin shot off his shotgun, I think he kind of made the thing think twice about coming back, unfortunately. I wish he hadn't done that in a way, because after that, it kind of died down. At least as far as our backyard experience was concerned. It was one of the strangest times, probably the strangest time I've ever experienced, back in the early eighties. Something I'll never forget." Stated Bruce Hallenbeck. What Bruce and his family experienced is sensational, and certainly left a lasting impression on all of them.

Bruce wrote a book about these experiences titled The Kinderhook Creature and Beyond: A Personal Reminiscence, it is available on Amazon, click here. 

    

    

While that night in 1980 was the climax of their Bigfoot encounters, they did have other experiences over the next few years. Who knows, perhaps the Kinderhook creatures or creatures, still roam those woods at night.