A podcast featuring an interview with Martin Stiltz and his experiences with Bigfoot in the Jim Edgar State Wildlife Refuge are of Illinois can be accessed above. Transcript with light editing below.
[Dr. Michael Lorenzen]
Okay, I’m recording. Go ahead.
[Martiz Stlitz]
Okay. Hi, my name is Martin Stiltz. I’m sixty years old.
I live in Havana, Illinois. Currently at my age, I’m pretty disabled right now, and I was when I was 33. I was sent over here from the federal government from the state of Indiana.
They retired me, and I stayed with some friends when I first come over, and I was down in Chandlerville. I was living down there right along an obituary of Panther Creek, and it’s right along 78. You go up 78, and there’s a little creek that follows that, and that’s a little Panther Creek, and before you get to the back of Chandlerville, I lived right in the center of all that between the city and the back road, which is Thin Lane, and I had a friend of mine that lived there, and I was staying with him, and we would always go mushrooming.
To our north is all flatlands, the Sangamon River, and to the south of that was all wooded areas, mainly the Jim Edgar State Wildlife Refuge. It’s pretty flat to the north, as you can expect, and that leads into the river bottoms when you follow the Sangamon River, and in the west side of that, as you follow Panther Creek, it goes straight west. It crosses the road of the last road, Thin Lane, and it goes past a farmer’s wood.
I would call him a farmer. His friend of mine did a little work for him, helped him out a little bit. He was a pretty old guy, and he had basically a ranch and a junkyard in the back, and he would let me mushroom on his property, and I would go up this Panther Creek until I got past his cow pasture and his horse pastures, and I’d follow that left, and I would go down to a center, and I would cross over a large fence right there, and the first obituary to the right of that, when you go down, that’s a road that runs right down that, and it’s a one-lane sand road, grass, and it seldom used, and when you get around to the end of that hill, going along the side of it, and there’s the water on the bottom of the creek, and that hill comes up, and off to the side of that hill would be… Let me see if I can…
Off to the side of that hill would be where I’d find all these mushrooms, and me and my friend would go there every year. We had a little incident one year when we had one in, and I believe this was several years before my main event that had happened, and we had found a deer laying right there where we have our mushrooms, and he had seen that, and he said, look at that deer. That thing is mutilated.
I said, I don’t think so. It looks to me like nature’s taken his course, and he said, well, I’ve been an avid hunter all my life with deer. He said, that thing’s got a hole in the side of its ribs, and it still had the rest of the hide covered on it.
He would have stuck his hands down in there and felt absolutely no ribs, but he could feel them in the hide around it, so something had hit it. I said, well, he’s got a horn gone, and he probably got into a fight, got stuck, and it broke. He said, no.
He said, well, maybe, and he started. We started walking off, and he said, wait a minute. He’s come back here.
He said, no, this thing is mutilated. He said, look at its neck, and the hide was off from the neck out, and the neck was broken, and it was split from the back of the spine up by the skull all the way down, and the whole neck was twisted over, and that lasted there for about three years before it was gone, so I thought that was kind of strange, and of course, back then, you know, that was 20 years ago. It was around 2001, 2003.
I got it written in my safe and didn’t have a camera or didn’t have cell phones back then, and after three years, them bones were gone. The following year after that, a friend of mine, my same buddy that was out there, we walked to the bottom of that hill in that same obituary in that creek, and there was a large flat that’s across it, and we stood on that looking for mushrooms, and when we got to that, I think when we got to that, we decided to take a break, and we’re just standing there. We was up alongside the bank, and the bank goes up about 15 feet, and we was standing there and talking and resting, and right up against that bank, he had his foot up against it, and I was standing up on it, and I said, did you hear that noise?
He said, no, he said, I don’t hear anything. I said, well, it sounds like footprints. I said, I think it’s the hermit that’s coming around here, because between that fence along that first hill and on that dirt road and turning into where we’re at, there’s an old hermit that lives there right alongside the creek, and so we thought it was him, and it kept getting louder and louder, and it pretty soon, it was thumping pretty large, and I said, you don’t hear that.
He said, I don’t hear anything, and of course, I was hard-hearing, so I could hear that low sound, and it kept getting closer. I said, it should be here by now, because it’s heading straight for us. I can hear it, and then he said, oh, you’re just hearing things.
All right, so he kept talking. Pretty soon, he said, he said, now I hear it. He said, you’re just, I said, you’re just now hearing it.
I said, it sounds like it’s right on top of us. I said, it should have been here by now, and we think, I think it’s sooner, and it just kept coming and coming, and thump, thump got louder and louder, and it just, he was like, that should have been here by now. He said, what could that be?
I said, I don’t know, but that’s pretty, you know, my chest was just thumping every step it took, and I was facing him, and he was facing the bank, and that thing walked up, and you could just feel the ground shaking, and it walked up, and it stopped at the top of the bank. We had our hats on. I just kept my head down.
I didn’t want to look up, and he didn’t want to look up either, and he just kind of looked up to see if he could see who was standing there, you know, just barely looking up above the bank, hiding under his bill, and suddenly we heard some steps, and it was right behind me, and it come right down the bank. It walked right across the flat, and it went right up to the water, but when I heard this, I turned around. Look, there was nothing there.
There was, I mean, there was absolutely nothing there. I was looking for footprints because the leaves were wet, but it was making a current sound as it walked. My buddy, he heard it at the same time, and when he was looking up, he kind of looked over at me, and he says, and we was just standing there, just frozen, and he said, there’s nothing there.
I said, I don’t know. He said, no, behind you. I said, I know.
I looked, and pretty soon steps went down along across the creek or on the top of the bank. It went on down. I said, come on.
Let’s go up and look, and he said, no. He said, he said, that’s just, you know, old junior hermit going home. He always walks this way coming back up from Beardstown.
I said, through the woods, and I said, come on. Let’s just go up and look, so I grabbed hold of him and started going up, and he grabbed me and pulled me down. I said, let’s just go look, and he said, he said, tell you the truth.
He said, I don’t want to look. He said, I don’t want to know what it is. He said, I think we better get out of here.
I said, okay. He said, but we better make a plan. I said, why’s that?
He says, well, we heard footsteps come up here and go across the river, and I said, well, I didn’t hear them go across the stream. I didn’t hear them go across the stream. I heard it stop there.
He said, no, I heard a splash. He said, you’re hard of hearing. I said, okay, and I said, you know, I don’t understand what it is, and I went over to where the footprints were, because we got in a little argument, and where the prints came down right behind, you know, walk to the creek.
I said, could you hear me walking? I said, no. He said, no, and I stopped.
He said, can you hear me? I said, can you hear me walking now? He said, no.
I said, because the ground’s wet. There’s some leaves that be making leaf sounds, and even on the other side, all the way up here, the sun was shining over there, and he said, well, so let’s get out of here, and he said, let’s go up the creek a little bit, cross over where the rocks are, and he said, let’s go up and follow right on top of the hill, the way we came in. I said, that’s the way the footprints went.
The footprint sounds echoed in the air as he spoke, reflecting on the moment. He shared how, at that time, both of us had the same thought: “This is it, buddy. We’re going to fight till death.” I could feel that determination in my own mind as well. Whatever threat might be lurking, we were committed to staying together; we wouldn’t leave each other’s side. We crossed the river with purpose, making a beeline for our destination.
He explained that he was an avid hunter, often going out to his mother’s home to hunt. During his childhood, other hunters would invade the forest, capturing him and making fun of him. However, he learned to outsmart them, confronting them one at a time. When it was just one hunter, they wouldn’t say anything. Then, suddenly, he mentioned hearing something moving in the woods, a musical sound that seemed to be thrown out to distract us. He didn’t know what it was, but it intrigued him. He insisted we follow that sound, cautioning that we should avoid getting caught between whatever was out there, as it could ambush us.
Despite our fear, I agreed to move forward. We crossed the bridge, and he urged me not to stop. I felt the need to check the tall grass for signs of anything that might have crossed the river, but he insisted we keep going. When he asked what I saw, I told him there were no footprints or signs of anything. He seemed spooked and suggested we continue up the hill. As we reached the top, I began to feel uneasy. I warned him that if he felt anything touch him without seeing it, he should just start swinging—better to act than to be caught off guard.
As we made our way up, he began swinging his arms wildly. I asked him what he was doing and if he felt something. He just kept scurrying, elbowing the air, and I had to run to keep up. He reassured me that he wasn’t feeling anything but was just being cautious. I advised him to save his energy; if something did come after us, we would need it.
Finally, we made it back to his house, both of us shaken yet curious about what we had experienced. At the time, I didn’t have any thoughts about hominids, Sasquatch, or Bigfoot. I had recently gotten internet access, but it was still that old dial-up connection, which made searching for information difficult. About 22 years ago, during our conversation, he mentioned that someone had jokingly suggested it was an “invisible cow.” I was incredulous; there had been nothing visible there, just the sound of something moving in the distance.
Even in broad daylight, I could see nothing behind me, despite him facing it. We heard noises walking away, but the big steps that would indicate something large were absent. I couldn’t convince him to go back with me to investigate further, leaving us both with more questions than answers.
[Dr. Michael Lorenzen]
So, other than invisible cows, which probably weren’t there, but could there be another animal that could have done that, could have been like coyotes running around, or?
[Martiz Stlitz]
Um, well, the large footsteps were so large, I mean, his chest was even beaten, it was stumping his chest, and it was stumping mine, you could feel the ground just moving, I, coyote couldn’t do that 15 feet up, it’s that, if it jumped out of a tree, if it could get in, maybe.
[Dr. Michael Lorenzen]
I’m just asking, I mean, just thinking, yeah, I could have explained it, that’s really coyote.
[Martiz Stlitz]
Well, I don’t know, that’s somebody else’s guess, I have no clue, but that particular area is quite strange.
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