What Went Up the Tree? The Juárez Valley Creature and a Bigfoot Called Dack

What Went Up the Tree? The Juárez Valley Creature and a Bigfoot Called Dack

By Juniper Ravenwood | November 12, 2026 | Companion to The Shadow Frequency, Episode 373

🌳 The part Chris couldn’t get past

When I asked Chris what bothered him about the Juárez Valley story, he picked the tree. I’d spent the better part of my prep thinking about the creature. Chris was already working out where he’d have to look for it. I think he put his finger on why this particular account gets under the skin. You can go outside in slippers to see what’s bothering the chickens. By the time it occurs to you that the trouble might be overhead, you’re standing under the branches.

In the account Jaime Maussan relayed, a boy saw a creature take a chicken and climb a tree. I’d love to hear the boy describe those few seconds in his own words. Did he keep sight of the animal all the way up? At what point did it strike him as unfamiliar? Those are questions I’d ask before showing him a single photograph. Once somebody hands you a picture and asks whether that’s what you saw, it gets a little harder to describe what you remember on your own.

📷 Two descriptions on my desk

Matt had a printout of the October 12 Radio Net report in front of him when we opened the file. Maussan described a relatively small creature that could stand upright. Then came the material his team dated to October 14. Read the descriptions of those images and a long tail suddenly occupies a fair bit of your attention. Try sketching each account on its own slip of paper. On one, you might spend your time trying to get the posture right. On the other, you’d need to leave room at the edge of the page for that tail.

I’d keep both slips. Maybe two people saw different aspects of the same animal. Maybe the images will turn out to tell us very little about what happened to the chicken. The next thing I’d like to see is the full recording, including the stretch when the wall was empty. An ordinary minute of footage might give us a better sense of scale than the frame everybody keeps passing around.

🎟️ A stop at the horticulture building

There’s a detail in the Dack file that I find almost endearing. In 2025, if you wanted to see what Charles “Snake” Stuart was calling Bigfoot, the local fair coverage gave directions to the horticulture building. Imagine asking somebody at the New York State Fair how to get there. They might reasonably assume you’d come to admire the vegetables. I wonder how many conversations in that building began with someone trying to find the exhibit without quite saying aloud what they’d come to see.

Stuart says he recovered the remains in the Adirondacks in 2024. He gave the specimen a short, memorable name. Calling it Dack makes it easy to picture an individual that once got hungry, found shelter, and grew old enough to leave remains. That’s a powerful leap for a listener to make on the strength of four letters. I caught myself doing it before we’d even reached the page about DNA.

🧬 The space between a specimen and a number

Stuart’s website gives a figure of 58.5 percent for what he describes as a combined Neanderthal and Denisovan component. Cornell says it didn’t perform the testing for him or issue the report. Stuart stands by his account. What I want most at that point is a sample number. I’d like to follow it from the moment someone took material from the object, through the person who received it, all the way to the original result. If another lab took a fresh sample, we’d have something to compare. I’d be delighted to be surprised by what they found.

Until then, it’s that Indiana kitchen in our mailbag I keep coming back to. You’re at the sink after supper, the kitchen light is on, and the glass gives you a very good view of your own reflection. You know the tree is out there because you’ve looked at it a thousand times in daylight. Tonight you might take your hand off the light switch for a second and wonder which branch could hold the weight of a chicken and whatever carried it up.

Sleep well, my shadowy friends. 🌙
— Juniper Ravenwood, Producer of The Shadow Frequency