Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Near the Virginia-Kentucky state line, 23-year-old Harley Owens encountered a creature that would change his life forever. He grew up hunting and fishing, activities that had him out and about in nature quite often. However, he never considered Bigfoot to be a real possibility.

According to Harley, who visited the All Things Unexplained podcast:

I was working up in Virginia, in a little town called Pound, probably about 15 to 20 minutes from the Kentucky line, right up in Southwest Virginia. A couple of other guys and me were there about a week before the encounter, organizing stuff and getting it ready for this auction that we were having. These auctions were the first thing that we had when we got to a work site, and we asked the owner how he wanted everything listed and sold. So, we would go through everything and organize it all, just to get it ready to be catalogued and shipped out.

One day, a coworker and I were talking to the owner, and he told us to keep an eye out for a bear that had been rummaging around through the dumpsters down at the sawmill. A bit concerned, we asked him about the size of the bear. He told us that it was a decent size bear, but don’t worry about it.

There are far worse things in these mountains that a bear, he told us.

When he said that, my mind went to a black panther because we had always heard stories of black panthers growing up.

Legends of large cats such as black panthers abound in many Eastern States, but their official existence has never been proven. Harley continued,

The rest of that week there was nothing really in particular that happened. We had the auction Saturday, and on Sunday, my boss came up to me and asked if I wanted to stay and help people load some stuff because he was getting ready to send the other guys to prepare a different auction. I decided to take him up on his offer, and Monday morning, I went to work organizing around the area.

On my walk around the edge of the woodline, I came across tracks, footprints in a muddy grassy field area. I instantly knew, those were most definitely not bear tracks. Out of the best few prints, you could see the toes and the heel. They looked rather similar to the tracks of a giant person’s bare feet. It occurred to me: these are Bigfoot tracks, but doubt did set in. Maybe someone was playing a joke on me?

A couple of days went by with no incidents. The rest of Monday went by with no further signs, and Tuesday was just a normal work day. That all changed on Wednesday. After a morning of routine work chores, it was finally time for lunch. I went to the service truck and grabbed my cooler, and I got out my sandwich and Coke. Suddenly, I heard something make a garish grunt unlike anything I’d ever heard.

I thought what in the word, looked over toward the woodline, and I didn’t see anything. I was just about to go back to my lunch, when I heard it again. I looked up at the cliff at the top of the sawmill ridge, and I caught a glimpse of something black moving through the tree line. At first I thought it was a bear, so I just sat there and tried watching it. I briefly glanced down at my sandwich, and by the time I glanced back up, it was leaning out of the brush. As if it could sense my gaze, it leaned back into the brush, and I thought to myself, what in the world is that.

I sat there and watched it lean out and back again again. This second time is when I saw its arm hangin out.

I thought to myself, “My God, that’s a Bigfoot.”

Suddenly a rush of overwhelming emotions hit me. Fear of ridicule: people are going to think I am crazy. Fear of the unknown: I should probably get out of here. It isn’t safe. Will it come after me?

I noticed I was shaking. I am not sure how to describe the feeling that came over me, but I froze in my spot and didn’t want to move. To this day, it is traumatizing for me to think about.

However, some sort of primordial flight or fight instinct kicked in for Harley. He went on:

The only thing I could think to do was to take a picture. If I didn’t have a picture, no one would believe me. So I mustered up enough courage to snag one picture with my cell phone. The weird thing was, right after I took the picture, the battery of my brand-new phone rapidly drained. It went from around 70% charged to dead in an instant. So, I just sat back and watched it go back up the ridge and disappear. I never saw it again.

After his encounter, Harley went through a period where he stopped everything that had to do with the outdoors. This traumatizing side-effect of Bigfoot encounters is not uncommon, but Harley has since been able to recover. He has even started his own Bigfoot research group, the Bigfoot Reports and Data Facebook group. Harley's pictures, videos, and audio recordings from his Bigfoot encounter are featured in his interview with All Things Unexplained, offering a glimpse into his experience.