John Beri Shares Lifetime of Sasquatch Encounters in Massachusetts

There's something about interviews that stick with you long after you've finished watching them, and this one from the Bigfoot Society channel is definitely one of those. Jeremiah Byron sits down with John Beri, a guy whose life story reads like a roadmap of unexplained encounters stretching from the wooded hills of western Massachusetts all the way to the base of Mount Adams in Washington. John grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts, right near the Taconic Crest Trail. If you've never been to that part of the country, it's wild. The Green Mountains roll through there, and the trail itself passes through a spot where New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont all meet at this stone obelisk in the woods. Pretty cool place, honestly. But for John, it was also a place that always felt... watched. He describes this grassy hill on the way up, dotted with boulders and white birch trees, where he got an overwhelming sense that something was observing him. His mother and sisters never picked up on it, but John did. Every single time. And it wasn't just a feeling. He talks about hearing what sounded like small groups of people talking, a kind of chatter he couldn't quite understand. This wasn't something he told his family about either. When you're a kid experiencing things nobody else seems to notice, you learn pretty fast to keep your mouth shut. Especially when the adults around you start suggesting maybe something's wrong with you. What really got me was his description of a winter evening when he was still in single digits, playing in a snowbank behind his house. He suddenly got hit with this intense, overwhelming feeling of being watched from a little patch of woods nearby. It scared him. And that feeling never left him. Through years of meditation, he came to believe that whatever was watching him in that snowbank was the same presence he felt up on the Taconic Trail. As a teenager, John started skipping school and heading up into Hopkins Forest, which sits on the lower east side of that same mountain range. There's an old homestead site up there from the early 1900s, just old pots, pans, and porcelain items scattered around where a building used to be. And every time he got near that spot, the chatter would start up again. Sounded like a mix of male and female voices, like a group of them just hanging out. Here's where things get really interesting. John doesn't subscribe to the popular image of these beings as some kind of primitive forest dweller. He's pretty clear about that. In his view, they're a type of people, extremely intelligent, extremely old, with abilities that go way beyond what most humans can do. He talks about their communication being more empathic than verbal, something felt rather than heard. And honestly, that lines up with a lot of what other researchers and witnesses have described over the years. The historical context he brings up is worth paying attention to too. Williamstown has a documented history of "wild man" sightings going back to the 1800s. There were newspaper articles about it. And in 2016, the BFRO had a report on Route 7 in Williamstown, a woman saw one in a field, and that was less than a mile and a half from where John grew up. His brother-in-law, who has since passed, used to be a supervisor at October Mountain State Forest, and he told John he'd sensed them around him more than once while working up there. John spent eight months living at East Si Ranch at the base of Mount Adams, and the activity followed him there. Things got closer to his tent. At one point, he heard three loud footsteps, boom, boom, boom, right next to him. He turned. Nothing there. The whole interview is worth your time. John comes across as someone who's spent a lifetime processing these experiences, and his perspective on the intelligence and ancient nature of these beings adds a lot to the conversation. Definitely check it out when you get a chance.