The Arrangement: Part One
In December of 2025, an email came into the Sasquatch Odyssey inbox from a man named Jimmy. He's in his seventies, he's fighting cancer, and he's the last living person who knows the whole story of an 80-acre piece of mountain ground in north Georgia that's been in his family since 1913.
He never married and never had children, and he doesn't know who'll own the property when he's gone. So over the past ten months, in more than fifty emails, he's been telling me what happened on that land across four generations, and this is the first of ten parts. Jimmy won't come on the show, won't give his last name, and won't name the county, because he still lives on the property and still says there's activity there.
I've never spoken to him. Everything you'll hear has been reorganized from his emails into a story I can narrate, with his details left exactly as he gave them. Part one begins with Jimmy's great-grandfather Will, a cotton-mill worker who bought cheap mountain land in the fall of 1913 and moved his wife and three children into a cabin the previous family had walked away from. Within weeks, food was disappearing, the dogs refused to cross the creek, and something was striking the cabin walls at night.
In April of 1914, after three days of rain, Will found a line of 17-inch barefoot tracks along his creek and wrote in a store ledger that somebody was on his place. A month later he stood across that creek with a rifle sighted on the chest of the thing that had made them, and he didn't fire.
What followed over the next four years, from Will's own notebook and from the stories his son Thomas told Jimmy decades later, is a cautious, dangerous, and mostly silent coexistence between one family in a cabin and another family on the mountain. There's food left on a rock above the spring and a white quartz stone that appeared in its place. There's a bluff charge on the north ridge that nearly ended everything.
There's a fence built along a creek for a reason nobody would say out loud, and a set of rules that were still being repeated in that family fifty years later, starting with five words Will wrote under a list of what he'd paid for nails.
They were here before me.
The first notebook ends in January of 1918 with one sentence on the inside of the back cover, and that sentence is where part two begins.
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