Waist-Deep in an I-94 Pond: A Michigan Highway Giant on the Bigfoot Society

HARTFORD, Mich. (episode Oct. 25, 2026): The figure, as the witness tells it, was standing in water deep enough that a depth gauge put the surface near six feet at its waist. It was reddish brown. Its arms moved under the surface. And when the car came back for a second look, there was only a wake through duckweed toward the trees.

That account aired Saturday, Oct. 25, 2026, on The Bigfoot Society, in an episode titled “He Saw a Hairy Giant in a Pond Beside Michigan’s I-94.” Host Jeremiah Byron interviews a guest who goes by “Big Dog,” described in the show notes as someone with a law-enforcement and corporate-security background. The pond encounter itself is an older roadside memory. The witness does not pin a calendar day in the materials Scout opened. A second encounter, on Silver Lake Drive near Colon / Vicksburg, is told in the same episode.

There is no X thread that opened cleanly for this episode in our pass, and the podcast site is not a social embed platform we can put in a “Where it started” panel. The primary source is the show page itself.

✓ What we know

On the record: documents, statements, dates and places. Sources below.

• Episode date. Oct. 25, 2026, Bigfoot Society.
• Place (pond). Beside I-94 near Hartford, Michigan, during a westbound traffic jam, per show notes.
• Witness frame. “Big Dog,” law-enforcement and corporate-security background (self-described on the show).
• Physical details in the notes. Reddish-brown mass in a flooded farm pond; depth gauge implying water near six feet at the figure’s waist; arms moving under the surface; an illegal emergency-turnaround second look that found a wake through duckweed or lichen toward the treeline.
• Second sighting in the same interview. Immense black biped at a tree line on Silver Lake Drive near Colon / Vicksburg, estimated well over seven feet, gone on a U-turn.
• Media. No photo or video attached to the show notes Scout opened.

? What’s claimed

Accounts, testimony and theories, as told by the people who tell them.

The witness does not hang a “Bigfoot” label on the pond figure in the framing Scout summarized. The line that travels is closer to: “I saw something and it wasn’t human.” That is a claim of anomaly, not a species ID. The second sighting is claimed as an immense black biped that did not wait for a return pass.

How to hear a podcast witness

Podcast interviews are edited, hospitable, and years removed from the asphalt. A named background (LE / security) raises the cost of an obvious joke. It does not freeze memory. Traffic-jam stress, dusk or night lighting, and a flooded pond full of debris can build a biped out of a bear, a stump, or a person. The wake detail is the kind of concrete afterimage investigators like. It is still one person’s afterimage.

Michigan has a long BFRO and folklore shelf of upright hairy figures. Cross-checking this specific pond against those catalogs was not completed in Scout’s pass. We are not inventing a match.

Why it fits the week

Highway-adjacent cryptid stories travel because everyone has driven past a dark pond at 70 mph and wondered what the shape was. Hartford is a real interchange geography. I-94 is a real corridor. The episode gives the Dispatch a clean Michigan prime without asking readers to trust a blurry Facebook still. The tradeoff is the opposite problem: pure testimony.

What’s next

If Big Dog goes on another show with a date, a mile marker, or a sketch, we will update. If a second occupant of that car speaks on the record, that matters more than any host reaction. Until then, the pond stays a story told into a microphone in October 2026 about a night that still has no calendar page.