Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into New York and follows the western shore of Lake Champlain, home to one of America's oldest and most enduring lake-monster legends.

Across the water, Vermont may have the famous photograph, but Port Henry, New York has spent generations embracing Champ. A hand-painted sightings board records reports dating back more than two centuries, a highway sign welcomes visitors to the "Home of Champ," and every August the town celebrates a creature no one has ever managed to catch. The journey begins on the lake with strange encounters reported from a Port Henry dock, Crown Point, Westport, the Valcour channel, and the ferry landing at Essex. 

From there, Brian digs into the history behind the legend—from Indigenous traditions and Samuel de Champlain's often-misquoted 1609 account to Captain Crum's enormous creature, the famous 1873 sightings, P. T. Barnum's reward, Sheriff Nathan Mooney's report, and the controversial 1977 Sandra Mansi photograph.

The episode also follows researcher Joseph Zarzynski's decades of investigation, the unusual laws passed by New York and Vermont to protect Champ, mass sightings, sonar contacts, recordings, and videos that have kept the mystery alive into the modern era.

Then the road turns south to Whitehall, New York, where a series of dramatic August 1976 sightings involving local residents and police became one of the most famous Bigfoot cases in the state.

From there, the trip pushes into the Adirondacks, the hills around Fort Ann, Allegany State Park, the Catskills, and the Tug Hill Plateau for frightening Sasquatch encounters involving hunters, hikers, fishermen, loggers, and families who found themselves face-to-face with something they never expected to see in the New York wilderness.

Lake monsters, Bigfoot, and more than two centuries of unexplained encounters—this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip belongs to New York.

Have a sighting of your own? Send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This week the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway and Brian opens the mailbag. Five listeners wrote in about the day they saw something on two legs in a place they thought they knew. 

A coon hunter in the flatwoods east of the Okefenokee follows his dogs to a big cypress at the head of a slough in October of nineteen seventy-nine and finds them looking at the water instead of the tree.

A section hiker on Vermont's Long Trail wakes in a moonlit shelter to the sound of her bear hang being pulled, and watches something work the rope like a toy before it walks past the front of the lean-to and into the brook.

A timber cutter in the sandstone hollows of Winston County, Alabama, is left alone on a rained-out landing and watches something with a bad left knee come up the skid trail out of the fog to put its hand on the fresh-cut logs.

A mother camping with her family above Pagosa Springs walks back from the aspens at two in the morning and finds something old and silver-haired leaning on the tailgate of her truck with a piece of firewood in its hand.

And a young gas well tender in the Allegheny National Forest comes over a rise at daybreak to find something on its knees at the base of a brine tank, licking salt, with ice frozen into its hair. Every one of them saw it clearly enough to describe it.

Every one of them went home and back to work the next morning.

If you've seen something, Brian wants to hear about it at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com,


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip follows the High Road out of Chimayó and deep into the old Spanish villages of northern New Mexico, where generations have warned their children about what can happen when you linger at a crossroads after dark.

Here, the thing on the road is known as La Mala Hora—the Bad Hour. It doesn’t chase you. It doesn’t attack. It simply appears. Sometimes it looks like a woman dressed in black. Sometimes it is nothing more than a shapeless mass of darkness standing where two roads meet.

Witnesses say it can grow larger as you watch it, and according to the old stories, seeing it is not the danger. The danger is what comes afterward. By morning, someone close to you may be dead. This episode traces the legend from one of its earliest written accounts, folklorist Aurelio Espinosa’s story of a strange ball of wool that grew at a crossroads, through tales of owl-witches and mysterious fireballs in the Río Puerco Valley, and eventually into the Four Corners, where Highway 550 cuts across Diné country and outsiders have spent decades trying to put familiar names on things they may not fully understand.

Along the way, we revisit a series of unsettling encounters: a woman driving to the airport in 1978, a produce hauler traveling the grade south of Cuba, a girl on a bridge in Mora County, and a man on Highway 54 who struck a cow just two miles after driving straight through something that seemed to be standing in the road—but wasn’t there.

Then comes the story of an oil-field pumper who found herself being paced at 75 miles per hour by something running on four legs beside her vehicle. Something that eventually stood upright and looked directly through her window.

From there, the road climbs higher into the mountains for five Bigfoot encounters from a state that rarely gets the attention it deserves. 

An elk hunter in the Jemez Mountains who lowered his rifle rather than pull the trigger. 

A night-shift dispatcher on the road to Sandia Crest. A 17-year-old fishing the Middle Fork of the Gila. A woman alone at a family cabin outside Cloudcroft who discovered that her grandfather had seen the same creature from the same porch years earlier.

 And finally, a sheep camp above Mora in 1962, on the only night one herder could remember seeing his dogs abandon the darkness and move behind the people for protection.Crossroads, mountain roads, old villages, and things that appear where nothing should be standing.

New Mexico has stories buried in its backcountry that go far beyond the legends most people know.

If you have a sighting, a story, or a stop you think belongs on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip map, email Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything else at our website paranormalworldproductions.com.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring...

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip crosses the Delaware River into the most densely populated state in America, then disappears into nearly a million acres of Pine Barrens.

This stop digs into the full story of the Jersey Devil, beginning with the real Leeds family of colonial Burlington County. We trace the strange history of Daniel Leeds, a printer condemned by members of his own religious community, and his son Titan Leeds, who became the target of one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous public feuds.

From there, the story evolves into the legend of Mother Leeds and the birth of her infamous thirteenth child in 1735.Then comes January 1909, when Jersey Devil hysteria exploded across the region. Mysterious hoofprints appeared on rooftops and through snow from Bristol to Camden, witnesses reported a winged creature moving through the night, police allegedly opened fire in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, schools and businesses temporarily closed, and the Philadelphia Zoo offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of the creature.

But the legend didn’t end there. The episode follows later encounters deep inside the Pine Barrens, including a chicken farmer in 1960, a frightened couple staying at a remote deer cabin, and two campers along the Mullica River who claimed something followed them through the darkness.And the Jersey Devil may not be the only unexplained creature roaming these woods.

The second half of the episode turns to New Jersey’s lesser-known Bigfoot history, including listener accounts of towering, hair-covered figures seen from a cranberry bog dike, beneath a hunter’s tree stand, and during a solitary night along the Batona Trail.It’s a journey through colonial history, newspaper panic, generations of folklore, and modern eyewitness encounters from one of the strangest stretches of wilderness on the East Coast.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Part Seven brings Born Wild: Koda’s Odyssey, Volume Two to a close while quietly opening the door to everything that comes next.

The story returns to the clearing where so much of Koda and Eli’s journey began, the same place where a frightened human boy once left gifts for a curious young sasquatch.

One year later, the two sit together and look back on everything they have built: the alliance, the sacrifices, the dangers, and a friendship that should never have been possible in the first place. 

As Eli faces a choice between the life he has known and the one he is beginning to understand, the final chapter settles into a quieter, more reflective moment. It is an ending built around trust, connection, and the possibility that fear does not have to decide what happens when two very different worlds finally meet.

But Volume Two does not end there.

Once the main story closes, Part Seven shifts into an extended preview of Volume Three and reveals that someone believed to be dead is still alive. Far to the west, beneath the desert at a secret installation known as Site Seven, Adanowa has spent the last year imprisoned, cataloged, cut open, tested, and studied as if he were nothing more than a specimen.

Then, in the darkness beneath the facility, he finds something he never expected: an ally. Skull is a Dogman born in captivity, hardened by the only world he has ever known. Somehow, two creatures who should have every reason to distrust one another become the unlikeliest of friends.

Together, they find a way out.Their escape changes everything. Adanowa is now heading east, back toward the clans that once believed him lost, with Skull walking beside him. And that means he is returning home alongside the very kind of creature his people are already at war with.

The friendship forged beneath Site Seven is about to collide with old loyalties, old hatred, and a conflict that is far from over.

This is the end of Volume Two.It is also the beginning of the next chapter.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip heads to the northern edge of New England for a stop in Coös County, New Hampshire, where the forests stretch toward the Canadian border and generations of loggers, hunters, and woodsmen have carried strange stories out of the timber.

This has been logging country for more than 150 years, from the era of massive log drives down the Connecticut River to the paper mills of Berlin and Groveton. Every spring, men returned from isolated camps with stories about things they claimed to have seen deep in the North Country. One of the strangest was the Wood Devil.

Usually described as tall, unnaturally thin, and gray, the Wood Devil was said to stand edgewise against tree trunks, blending so completely into the forest that it could be mistaken for part of the tree itself. According to the old stories, if someone approached, the creature would quietly shift around to the opposite side of the trunk, staying just out of sight. When caught in the open, it was said to simply stand motionless and disappear into the landscape.

In this episode, Brian digs into the written history behind the Wood Devil legend and discovers that the documented record is far thinner than many modern retellings would have you believe. From there, the episode follows eight unsettling accounts from the forests and back roads of northern New Hampshire. There is a deer hunter near Nash Stream who watched what appeared to be a gray, broken tree trunk suddenly turn its head. 

A teenager on a burned-over hillside above Colebrook realizes there is one tamarack standing where no tree should be. A pulpwood scaler working along the Dead Diamond tries to circle a suspicious tree and learns why old logging camp bosses supposedly warned men never to do exactly that.

There is also a trucker traveling Route 3 around 4:00 a.m., a woodcutter salvaging spruce budworm-killed timber near Stewartstown, a woman and her dog on a snowmobile trail outside Errol, a hiker deep on the Cohos Trail, and two men camped above Perry Stream who hear heavy footsteps circling their tent before finally seeing an eye looking back at them through the darkness.

Deep in the forests of New Hampshire’s North Country, the Wood Devil may have left behind very little written history. But the stories from the people who claim to have encountered something tall, gray, and almost perfectly camouflaged among the trees are much harder to dismiss.



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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Part Six of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two settles into the hardest work in the whole story, and there isn't a single punch thrown in it.

The emergency council runs deep past midnight, and for the first time sasquatch, Dog men, and humans are all in the same clearing trying to build something instead of tearing it down.

The immediate crisis has passed. Dask's offer of cooperation has been met, cautiously, and now comes the part nobody's good at.

The details. Where the boundaries fall, what counts as a violation, who answers for it when someone crosses a line. None of these peoples has ever trusted the others, and every one of them has a reason not to start now.

Into that standoff steps an unlikely figure. Eli, the boy with no rank and no claws and no official standing, turns out to be the one voice all three sides can hear, precisely because he threatens none of them. What he offers isn't strength. It's a different way of looking at a problem the older ones have been too angry, or too proud, to solve.

This is the quiet center of the book, where the story stops asking who can win a fight and starts asking whether old enemies can actually choose something better.

The answer doesn't come easy, and it doesn't come clean, and the forest beyond the firelight hasn't stopped being dangerous just because a few of them decided to talk.

What gets built here is fragile. Whether it holds is a question for the road still ahead.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip crosses Spooner Summit and drops down to the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe, the second-deepest lake in the United States, to investigate one of the West’s most enduring lake monster legends: Tahoe Tessie.For generations, people have reported seeing long, dark shapes moving through Tahoe’s famously cold, deep water.

We look at the geography of the lake, its extreme depth, and the conditions that have helped fuel stories of something large living below the surface.

Along the way, we examine recorded Washoe traditions connected to Cave Rock, the 1897 newspaper account attributed to I. C. Coggin, and the surge of reports during the 1980s involving Reno police officers, hikers, an optician, and a local television station owner. 

We also dig into the University of California, Davis seminar that considered whether an unusually large sturgeon could explain some of the sightings, and separate fact from one of Tahoe Tessie’s most repeated legends: the supposed Jacques Cousteau expedition that never actually happened.Then the stories move from the archives to the water itself.

Listeners describe seeing a long shape passing beneath the clear water near Sand Harbor, feeling something massive roll beneath them while diving along the wall at Cave Rock, watching three distinct humps move across the north end of the lake against the chop, and having something large surface alongside a boat during a nighttime mackinaw fishing trip off Crystal Bay.

From Lake Tahoe, the road climbs into the Carson Range and continues east toward the Ruby Mountains for five Nevada Bigfoot encounters. The reports take us to Marlette Lake, the Mount Rose Highway during a storm, the aspen groves near Spooner Summit, a roadside pullout on Kingsbury Grade, and a remote talus slope above Lamoille Canyon.

If you’ve had a cryptid encounter, strange sighting, or unexplained experience you’d like to share for a future episode, send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.



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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This week we pull off the road for one episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip picks back up next time, but a stack of emails has been building from listeners who saw something they still can't explain, and five of them deserved a full hour.

A rancher in the Owyhee desert of Idaho comes over a rise in the middle of an August afternoon and finds something standing in his stock tank, drinking with both hands.

A nurse in the Ouachita National Forest of Arkansas, driving home from a night shift, watches something cross the road in two steps and climb a twelve-foot clay bank the way a person would, and she sees the bottoms of its feet.

 A snowmobiler in Michigan's Upper Peninsula stops in a cedar swamp at ten below and realizes the stump he's looking at has snow on its shoulders and is breathing. A daughter and her father, picking chanterelles in the Oregon Coast Range, come to the edge of a clearcut and find something sitting on a slash pile, looking out at the valley.

And a hog hunter on a dead-end channel off the Ocmulgee River in Georgia swings his spotlight onto a sow at the water's edge and sees the hand that's holding her there.Five states, five decades, five people who never met and never asked to be believed.

These are visual sightings only, told the way they were sent in, first names only, with what each person did afterward and what's still sitting in a drawer or on a laptop or on a tupelo trunk in a river bottom.

If you've had an encounter of your own, send it straight to Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Use your first name or none at all.

And if this episode was worth your hour, pass it along to your family, a friend, or the guy at work who's always bringing this stuff up at lunch. That's how the show grows.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This week the road trip leaves the timber and runs into the Nebraska Sandhills, where there's nothing to hide behind for 100 miles and the only thing you can't see into is the water.

A few miles southeast of Hay Springs sits a 50-acre lake the state renamed Walgren Lake decades ago and that nobody local has ever stopped calling Alkali Lake. In the early 1920s it produced one of the strangest monster stories in American newspapers, a 40-foot alligator-shaped animal with a single horn and a smell that could turn a man's stomach, reported in the Omaha World-Herald in 1923 under the initials J.A. Johnson and carried from there to Chicago, New York, and by some accounts London. 

Brian walks through the Hay Springs News items that started it, the wire-service telling that made it famous, and the Chadron newspaperman John G. Maher (1859–1939), a man Nebraska historians remember as the state's most accomplished hoaxer, whose fingerprints a lot of people see on the whole affair.

Then the episode goes to the people who lived on the lake and never went near a reporter, from a homesteader's daughter who found a calf torn up on the shore in 1922, to a county road worker on the dam in 1954, to a couple bank fishing for bullheads in 1979, a grain hauler on a wet road at midnight in 1986, two brothers on the ice in 2001, and a woman whose kayak came to a stop over 8 feet of water in 2014.

 From there the trip follows the rivers, because Nebraska's woods run in lines, and the second half of the episode is given over to people who saw something upright in the Pine Ridge in 1994, along the Niobrara in 2006, in the Missouri bottoms near Ponca in 1988, on the Dismal River below the hand-planted forest at Halsey in 1971, and on the frozen Platte south of Omaha in 2003.

A deer hunter on a rock, a woman driving home from her sister's, a farm wife waiting with supper, a 12-year-old with a fishing pole, and a rural mail carrier who still parks where he parked that day.


 If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything we do at paranormalworldproductions.com.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Part Five of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two begins with the mistake the clans always knew was coming. Summer settles over the forest and brings people with it. More hikers, more campers, more cameras scanning the ridgelines for a postcard moment to carry home.

The sasquatch do what they've always done when the world crowds in, pulling back into the heavy timber, moving only in the gray hours, eating less and resting less and watching more.

But discipline can only stretch so far, and out in a dense stretch of old growth four miles from the nearest trail, a wildlife photographer named David Reeves is about to point his lens at something no magazine will ever publish.

David isn't a weekend tourist. He's patient, serious, and good enough at reading the backcountry to go exactly where he shouldn't. That's the problem. One glimpse, one held breath, and suddenly the secret three years of caution were meant to protect is sitting exposed in the viewfinder of a man who knows what he's looking at.

What follows tests everything Koda and the clans have built. A single photograph in the wrong hands could bring the whole outside world down on them, and the choices the sasquatch make in the hours after that encounter carry a weight none of the earlier fights ever did.

This is the danger the clans have always feared most, and it doesn't come with claws or howls. It comes with a camera.



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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Montana is the only stop on this road trip where the animal is sitting in a display case. In 1886, in the Madison River Valley, a settler named Israel Ammon Hutchins killed something that had been coming into ranch yards after geese and dogs across fifteen miles of valley.

He gave the carcass to a grocer named Joseph Sherwood over at Henry Lake, Idaho, who mounted it, called it the Ringdocus for reasons nobody has ever explained, and put it in his store. It sat there into the 1980s and then it vanished. For two decades the only proof it had ever existed was a black-and-white photograph in a naturalist's 1977 autobiography. In 2007 a descendant named Jack Kirby tracked it to a storage room at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello and brought it home to Ennis, and before it went on display he drove it to the cemetery and parked it next to the old man's grave. It's still there, four feet long, dark, high in the shoulder and low in the hip, with the ghost of stripes on its sides. Nobody has ever run its DNA.

This episode covers where the name Shunka Warak'in actually comes from and why it doesn't belong to Montana at all, what Lance Foster told Loren Coleman in 1995, and what an earlier anthropologist recorded about the same word. It covers what a dog was worth on the northern plains and on a homestead, and why an animal that carries off dogs earns its own name. It covers the forty-year campaign that emptied Montana of wolves, including the 1905 state law that required the veterinarian to infect wolves and coyotes with mange and turn them loose, and what it does to a landscape when the main predator is removed and then put back.

And it covers the two modern cases everybody brings up, the Creature of McCone County that killed roughly 120 head of livestock in 2005 and 2006 before Wildlife Services shot it from an aircraft, and the strange short-legged animal a rancher killed near Denton in 2018 that had the whole country convinced for about a month.Then come the letters. Dale, losing three dogs in five weeks out of a lit yard and finding a collar in a hayfield the following spring. Jenny, walking through a sheep band counting the same wound on the same side of every animal.

Cal, watching one through a rifle scope for forty seconds and not being able to make himself shoot until it turned to leave. Owen, nineteen years old, finding a covered calf against a fence and then meeting the thing on a two-track at eighty yards. Marla, standing between her children and the kitchen door while something screamed in the cottonwoods a week after her dog died inside a closed gate. And Wendell, who backed a gravel truck up in the dark to put his headlights on a track line.

The second half of the episode changes animals entirely and moves into Montana's Sasquatch country, the Bitterroots and the Bob Marshall and the Yaak, with accounts from an elk hunter who hiked eleven miles out in the dark, a firewood cutter who came back three weeks later and found three lodgepoles twisted off above head height, a woman who spent eleven nights sleeping in a windowless hallway, and a thirty-year outfitter who counted eleven barefoot impressions in fresh snow and never told a single client.

 It also covers what happened on U.S. Highway 93 south of Kalispell on August 26, 2012, and the two teenage girls who have been carrying it ever since.


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We're pulling off the road again. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is still running state by state, but the mailbag keeps filling up with letters that don't have a state on them at all, so this week we're taking the detour overseas.

 Five encounters, five countries, all of them sent in by listeners, all of them set in places you can pull up on a map before you go to bed tonight.In England, a night shift warehouse worker named Neil walks his lurcher across Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, 26 square miles of pine plantation and heathland sitting in the middle of the country, laid over the buried remains of two First World War training camps.

 He has a two-note whistle he uses for the dog. In October something on the Chase starts using it back, right down to the crack in the middle of it. What follows includes a valley walk he now calls the stupidest decision of his life, a fallow deer wedged in the fork of a Scots pine at head height, and a single toed impression in the mud that he never cast and never photographed.In central China, a 26-year-old field assistant named Lin is running primate transects in the Shennongjia Forestry District in Hubei Province, the same mountains the Chinese Academy of Sciences flooded with more than 100 people in 1977 after a carload of officials reported a large reddish creature in their headlights in 1976.

Lin gets a rock thrown at her, a smell she compares to vinegar and wet fur, and a look at something standing in arrow bamboo 20 meters off the trail. Then something spends a good part of the night pushing on the shutters of her field station, and a camera trap 400 meters down the mountain fires 11 times between one and two in the morning with every single frame coming back black.In Queensland, Australia, a fencing contractor named Wade is camped at Booloumba Creek in the Conondale Range when a rock lands in his fire and a second one hits the roof of his truck. 

What comes off the slope after that scares every dog along the creek quiet. Fourteen months later, running a boundary fence near Jimna, his working dogs quit on him, he finds prints in creek clay with a stride of over a meter and a half, and something puts its weight on the side of his truck at two in the morning while he's lying in the tray.

He still has what he pulled off the top wire of that fence, in a coffee tin, in his shed.


In southern Siberia, a miner named Pavel rides a snowmobile up the Mrassu River in February to check his late uncle's hunting hut in Mountain Shoria, near Tashtagol. He crosses a line of tracks that covers 400 meters of open river ice in a perfectly even stride, finds a young elk cached uphill with its neck broken and almost nothing eaten, and then spends a night listening to something scatter his woodpile, stand over his stovepipe, and knock three times on his door.

He leaves bread on a stump now, every night he stays there, and he'll tell you he doesn't believe it does anything. And in eastern Bhutan, a trekking guide named Sonam takes a group through Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary between the villages of Merak and Sakteng, a protected area established in 2003 that lists the migoi in its founding purpose alongside the snow leopard and the red panda. 

He gets whistling above camp after two in the morning, a client who wakes to something standing outside her tent, a herder's mastiff that has to be dragged out from under a hut, and an argument in the mud with an older Brokpa man about which direction a set of footprints was actually facing.

A week later a healthy female yak turns up 30 meters above where she'd been grazing, on a shelf you have to scramble to reach, neck broken, untouched.

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Part Four of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two takes the alliance out of the meeting ground and into the dark, where good intentions stop counting for much and skill is the only thing that keeps you alive. It opens with Eli's first real night patrol, and the forest is not kind to him.

Where Koda moves through the black between the trees like water around stone, Eli crashes through it like a wounded elk, learning the hard way that eyes are almost useless out there and that everything he thought he knew about the woods was daylight knowledge.

Koda becomes his teacher, and the lessons are patient but unforgiving, because both of them understand that a single mistake in the wrong moment could expose everything they've built. This is where the fragile alliance stops being an idea and starts becoming real work.

The humans have to earn their place, prove they can be an asset instead of a liability, and every close call out in the dark is a test of whether two species can truly watch each other's backs.

But the forest holds more than lessons, and the deeper Koda and Eli push into the night, the clearer it becomes that neither the Dogmen nor the humans at the tree line have gone anywhere. The quiet is only ever borrowed, and the price of protecting something wild keeps climbing.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In July of 1972, in the river town of Louisiana, Missouri, two little boys were playing in their backyard at the foot of Marzolf Hill when their older sister heard them start screaming.

 Fifteen-year-old Doris Harrison went to the bathroom window and saw something standing by a tree, six or seven feet tall, covered in black hair, with no face she could make out and something dead tucked under its arm. The town laughed at those kids for about a day and a half.

Then a Pentecostal congregation of roughly fifty people heard something come down off that hill, and nobody in Pike County thought it was funny for the rest of the month.This is stop number twenty-five on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the halfway point, and it's the story of Momo, the Missouri Monster.

We walk through the whole flap as it actually happened, from the picnic encounter on Highway 79 in 1971 to the Harrison sighting on July 11, 1972, to Edgar Harrison hanging bait on a tree behind his own house and sitting out in the dark waiting for whatever took his children's afternoon away from them. We cover the sick dog, the smell that runs through every account like a thread, the church meeting on the night of July 14, and Police Chief Shelby Ward putting two dozen armed men across Marzolf Hill three times and finding nothing at all.

We get into the plaster casts, the three-toed track that a zoo director in Oklahoma City looked at and called a hoax, and the out-of-state investigators who camped in a family's backyard and left with a theory about flying objects that did more damage to this case than any skeptic ever managed. And we talk about what happens to a town when the newspapers show up, name your monster for you, and turn one bad July into a festival.

The second half of the episode leaves Momo behind and gets into Missouri Sasquatch country, because strip the nickname and the novelty record off the Harrison case and what's left is an ordinary Sasquatch report. Missouri has produced roughly 147 catalogued encounters and has never stopped generating them.

We cover a farmer near Bowling Green who came around a creek bend on a four-wheeler and found something squatting in the water thirty feet in front of him, the ongoing reports out of Cuivre River State Park and Bowling Green Lake, the night four young men sat in a Jeep near Smithville Lake and listened to the woods go quieter than any of them had ever heard, and the men out of southeast Missouri who put their names to what they saw in the Mark Twain National Forest country.

Then we turn it over to the mail. Jenny was seven years old and bringing laundry off the line when the sheet in front of her moved the wrong way. Ray watched something cross a river road in front of his headlights and drove eleven miles out of his way for a year afterward without telling his wife why. Marla found tracks along a fence line and watched her husband go get a shovel and bury them.

Dean sat in a deer stand and listened to the silence travel toward him. Colleen's three children came across the yard at a dead run, and the middle one said the thing at the tree line had no face, which is exactly what a fifteen-year-old girl told a newspaper thirty years before.

And Wes put a light on something standing chest deep in the Mississippi at forty feet, and it didn't run.

The kids saw it first. Nobody ever believes the kids.

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We're pulling off the highway on this one. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip runs state by state, but the reports don't arrive that way, and this episode is for the five that have been sitting in the folder waiting for a place to land. Four decades, five states, and no connection between any of them except that the people involved all ended up carrying something they couldn't put down.

We start in the North Carolina mountains in the summer of 1985, where an eighteen-year-old alone in his mother's house spent three nights with a .357 in his lap. Something covered the window in his front door from top to bottom, worked the doorknob, screamed back when he threatened it, and knocked the porch off its pillars. By the third night it was breathing through his bedroom screen from less than two feet away, and it took a load of buckshot from his grandfather to end it.

From there we head to West Virginia, where a young man fishing a secluded spot before sunrise heard rocks landing in the water, watched an upright canine push the foliage apart, and fired five rounds on a trail while it circled around to get ahead of him. Then a quick stop in Calvert County, Maryland, in July of 1992, where a sixteen-year-old in the back seat of his family's car locked eyes with something seven feet tall standing braced between two trees with both arms spread, and spent the next thirty years being told he made it up.

The last two are Sasquatch.

 In the Kiamichi country of southeastern Oklahoma, a welder named Ray sat a ladder stand through rock clacking and two wood knocks before something walked across a creek bottom on two legs in gray light, and he went back the next day with flagging tape and a tape measure to find out how tall it really was.

And on an Ozark river in July of 1998, two brothers running a trotline heard a two-beat wading sound coming downstream at midnight, put a spotlight on it at forty yards, and came back at daylight with their father to find a fifteen-and-three-quarter-inch track with no claw marks in it and a fifty-two-inch stride between the prints. What they poured that afternoon sat in a shed for twenty-two years. Every one of these five people paid something for telling it. That's the part I keep coming back to, and it's the reason the offer at the end of this episode stays open.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

On the night of October 11, 1973, two shipyard workers drove into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told a story that neither of them expected anybody to believe. Charles Hickson spelled his name into a tape recorder and said that even if they laughed him out of the county he was going to tell it anyway.

Then he described a blue light coming down over the bayou, three figures floating out of an opening, and something that looked like a big eye moving over his body while he lay immobilized inside a machine. Calvin Parker, the younger of the two, said almost nothing about the inside of it, because by his own account he passed out at the beginning and didn't come around until it was over.What makes Pascagoula different from almost every case like it is what the sheriff did next.

Fred Diamond and Captain Glenn Ryder finished the interview around 11 p.m., walked out, and left the two men alone in a room with the recorder still running, expecting to catch a hoax. What they caught instead was a 42-year-old man trying to talk a terrified teenager down, and then, after Hickson stepped out for coffee, a young man from Jones County praying out loud to a machine he didn't know was there.This episode is the Mississippi stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, and it goes in deep. I work the case from the primary recording rather than the retellings, which means you get Hickson's actual answers to the deputies, including all the places he told them he didn't know.

I lay out the geography of the Pascagoula River, the Singing River legend and why I don't trust the version that got printed for a century, and the Phantom Barber summer of 1942, because this is not a town with no history of strange. I walk through the 1973 flap that was already in the local paper four days before any of this happened, including the service station operator who called in a light around 8 p.m., roughly two hours before Hickson ever knocked on a newspaper door.

I also deal with the part a lot of tellings skip, which is what Charles Hickson did with the next 20 years of his life, the ongoing contact claims, the television circuit that started with Dick Cavett on November 2, and the arrest in January 1974, and why none of that gets to reach backward and rewrite what's on that tape.

There's a witness who waited 45 years and came forward in 2019, eight years after the man who spent his life asking for her had already died. And there's a historical marker, unveiled June 22, 2019, standing today at the spot where Hickson was certain he'd be run out of town. The back half of the show goes into the woods, because that's the other reason we came.

I get into the Choctaw material collected by Henry Halbert in the 1800s, David Bushnell in 1910, and John Swanton after him, including Shampe and Nalusa Falaya, and I'm careful about what that material does and doesn't prove. 

Then I go county by county through Mississippi's actual documented Sasquatch record, including a very close encounter in the Homochitto National Forest on November 28 of either 1978 or 1979, with 14-inch three-toed tracks and corroborating witnesses, and a report from the Stennis Space Center buffer zone in Hancock County from January 18, 2025.


We finish with listener accounts out of the DeSoto, the Delta, the Pearl River, the Tombigbee, and Noxubee.

No body, no bone, no photograph worth arguing about. But there's a tape sitting in a county file that anybody can listen to, and I still can't tell you what came down over that bayou.

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Tonight we pull off the road trip for one episode and hand the microphone to five people who wrote in. Five first names, five parts of the country, five different jobs, and not one of them looking to be believed.

A long-haul driver in northwest Montana counts fourteen deer on a March night and then watches something cross the westbound lane in three strides at three-forty in the morning, and goes back sixteen days later to walk the ditch in daylight.

A twenty-three-year-old fire lookout in northern California puts eight-power binoculars on a salvage cut for twelve minutes, takes a bearing off the firefinder while she's watching, hits it with a bullhorn, and writes the whole thing into a government logbook in pencil.

A seventy-eight-year-old Wisconsin dairyman describes an October evening in nineteen seventy-three when thirty-one Holsteins wouldn't come up the hill and his stock dog got under the porch steps, and what his father pulled off the top wire the next morning and put in the kitchen stove that same night. An emergency room tech in Arkansas gets forty seconds at forty-one yards from a climbing stand, then sits in that tree for two hours and forty minutes because the ground between her and her truck runs the wrong direction.

And a West Virginia line crew, three nights into an ice storm restoration, has four of five men looking up the right-of-way at the edge of the light while the generator runs.

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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

On the morning of December 20, 1879, a Cree trapper named Swift Runner stood on a scaffold in Alberta and waited in the cold, because the hangman had forgotten the straps and had to go back for them. He had already confessed.

 He had already walked the police out to a clearing in the bush and shown them what was left of his family, and his explanation never changed across four months in custody. Something came into him that winter, and it made him hungry in a way that food could not answer. The men who tried him did not believe in that thing and the men who guarded him did, and both groups agreed on the physical facts, which were a camp 25 miles from a post that was issuing rations, a cooking pot, bones cracked open at the ends, and one man who walked out of those woods in the spring heavier than he went in.The road trip turns north in January, and this stop is different from the others.

The wendigo is not a cryptid with a gift shop. It comes out of the traditions of living Algonquian-speaking peoples, and in northern Minnesota that means the Anishinaabe, whose seven nations in this state are governments with citizens, not historical footnotes. So we spend a few honest minutes on what the old accounts actually describe before we go anywhere near a sighting, and it turns out to be almost the opposite of what has been sold to you.

There are no antlers. The deer skull came out of concept art in the last 20 years. What the tradition describes is something starving, with the skin drawn tight over the bones and the eyes sunk back in the sockets, that grows in exact proportion to whatever it eats so that the arithmetic never breaks in its favor and it is never one bite closer to full than it was when it started. And it is not only something out in the timber.

It is something a person can become.Then we go into the woods, and we stay there. Ray heard his own name spoken through the spruce four miles from the nearest road on a trapline nobody ran but him, and he answered out loud and was walking toward it before he had decided to. Marlys followed a child crying in a tamarack swamp and covered 60 yards without the sound ever coming one foot closer. Dale and Ron met in the middle of the timber a quarter mile apart, each one having heard the other call his name, and looked down at four inches of fresh snow holding nothing but their own two trails. 

Faye was 11 years old when her mother's voice started calling her in from the yard of a cabin on the Bigfork River, and the fear did not arrive until about 30 years later. Wayne opened the door of a fish house on the ice at two in the morning after somebody outside politely said come here, and found open snow under a moon in every direction. Lonnie lay in a wheelhouse north of Deer River and counted the footsteps of whatever walked past him at 40 feet, and walked the interval out himself at first light.

Delores was taught as a small child on the Red Lake reservation not to look at the treeline, not to run, to hold her pace, and to say out loud to an adult what had happened, and the same instruction turns up from Manitoba to Michigan in communities that never compared notes. Gordon watched something stand past his woodpile at 35 yards in the gray before deer season light, went in for a rifle, and signed his share of that hunting camp over to his brother's boys without ever explaining why.

Kenny came through the door eight seconds behind his brother into an empty yard with fresh snow and no track under the window, and they sold the shack four years later. Verna gave up a bedroom after three February nights of something dragging along the outside wall at waist height, 20 seconds down and 20 seconds back, with a full minute of pause in between. 

Orval watched something cross a burn scar for two minutes through binoculars from a staffed fire tower in the Superior, called it in on the radio, and would not...

Part Three of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two turns away from the battlefield and toward something far more dangerous. Trust.It starts with a note left under a stone. Eli's parents have learned the truth about Koda, and the boy who kept the secret for three years wants to arrange a meeting.

Mira begs Koda to walk away, to move deeper into the forest the way the clans always have when humans get too close. But Koda has just watched sasquatch die to defend this territory, and he's done running. If contact with the human world is coming either way, he'd rather it come on his own terms, with people who already understand.

So Koda makes a choice his father can barely stomach, and everything begins to change. What grows out of that first meeting is something no sasquatch alive has ever dared to build, a fragile alliance between two species who were never supposed to know each other, held together by a handful of humans willing to risk everything to protect something wild and hidden.

This is the quiet heart of the book, where the story stops being about who wins a fight and starts being about who's brave enough to cross a line. But an alliance this young is a fragile thing, and the forest has never cared about fragile things.

By the time this stretch of the road ends, a boy sits at his window looking out at the dark, and somewhere in that same darkness, Koda looks back.

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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

On April 1, 1987, a radio DJ named Steve Cook put a song on the air at WTCM in Traverse City about a creature with the head of a dog and the body of a man that walks the north woods of Michigan and comes back every 7 years.

He'd made up every piece of it over a single weekend as an April Fools joke, including the 7-year cycle and the 1887 origin date that people still repeat as history nearly 40 years later.

What came back wasn't a laugh. It was a flood of calls from people who wanted to tell him what they'd already seen out there and had never told anybody.This is the latest stop on the backwoods cryptid road trip, and Brian works the documented history first.

The 1887 lumberjack account that no newspaper from that year has ever been found to carry. Robert Fortney's 1937 encounter with 5 wild dogs on the Muskegon River, one of which stood up. The cabin door outside Luther that got clawed from top to bottom in 1987 and became the only physical artifact this legend has. And the Gable Film, the 8mm footage that surfaced in 2007, fooled a national television audience for 3 years, and was admitted as a hoax by a Michigan man named Mike Agrusa in 2010.Then the episode belongs to the encounters.

A truck driver comes out of a curve on M-55 at 3 a.m. in November 2014 and finds something roughly 7 feet tall standing on the centerline, and it turns its head toward him and then walks off on two legs. Three campers in the Manistee National Forest spend a night in September 2011 listening to something circle their clearing two steps at a time, and in the morning the one who slept through it asks a question nobody wants to answer.

Two cousins walking out of a Lake County hunting property in November 2021 realize something is matching their pace 40 yards off the two-track and stopping a beat late every time they stop. And on the morning of November 14, 2017, a retired tool and die man in a Missaukee County ladder stand picks up amber eyes 6 feet off the ground, chambers a round he never fires, and then sits up there another 20 minutes because climbing down feels worse.

The buildings are the part Brian didn't expect. A family near Luther listens to something scratch their front door in October 2019, first at waist height and then at eye level, and then hears what comes out of the dark on the north side of the cabin. A farm couple in Osceola County watches one standing at the corner of the machine shed inside the yard light in 2005, tall enough that its head clears an 8-foot gable trim. A nurse alone at her family's camp northwest of Baldwin in November 2013 wakes to a growl 4 feet from her head with one wall in between, calls 911, and waits 40 minutes for a deputy.

A county plow driver east of Lake City catches something with his wing blade in February 2012 and finds hair 4 feet up on the steel, and his foreman tells him it was a deer. A gas well operator pulls onto a pad in Antrim County at 2:30 a.m. in 2019 and watches something go over a 6-foot chain link fence with one hand on the top rail.

And a deer camp in Kalkaska County comes out at first light in 2008 to find one buck on the ground with the knot still tied and the other one 60 yards back in the pines with the hindquarters gone.Michigan's Bigfoot record gets its own stretch of the episode, from the circus at Sister Lakes in June 1964, when hundreds of armed strangers drove into a rural township to shoot a monster, to the August 1965 roadside incident near Monroe that left 17-year-old Christine Van Acker with a black eye that ran in the papers.

Brian also covers a Roscommon County hunter who watched something close to 7 feet tall walk away up a two-track on two legs during the 2016 firearm season, a fisherman standing on the Fox River before 5 a.m. in 1987, and a timber cruiser working a block in Menominee County in 1998 who had a rock come out of the canopy at him and found a track...

Part Two of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two opens in the strange quiet that follows a fight nobody really won.Kabota and his envoy come home from the clearing alive, and to the younger sasquatch that alone feels like a victory.

They faced the Dogmen, they drew blood, they sent the pack running. But Kabota has led long enough to know the difference between surviving a fight and winning a war, and he understands what the celebration in the caves does not.

The Dogmen will be back. Next time they'll be ready.So the war drums begin. Both sides retreat to lick their wounds and sharpen their strategy, and the forest that once felt like home to Koda hardens into something closer to a battlefield with borders. Patrols double. Boundaries are drawn. Every scent on the wind carries a new weight, and the elders find themselves split between the ones who counsel patience and the ones who can already taste the coming blood.

Caught in the middle of it is Koda, fifteen years old and carrying the memory of everything the last three years cost him, still hearing his father's warning that violence should be the last choice and never the first. He's beginning to see how thin the line is between defending a home and starting a war, and how few of the sasquatch around him seem willing to walk it.

And out past the tree line, the thing the humans are building keeps growing, indifferent to which side wins.


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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The road trip crosses into Massachusetts, and the Bay State delivers two of the strangest files in the entire eastern catalog.

It starts on a dark stretch of Farm Street in Dover in April of 1977, where a seventeen-year-old named Bill Bartlett watched something creep along a stone wall that no one has ever explained, a spindly, hairless creature with a huge watermelon head and glowing eyes.

Within twenty-six hours it was seen twice more by three other teenagers who had never compared notes, and then it vanished forever, leaving behind matching sketches, a police chief who vouched for every witness, and a case so stubborn it made a small New England town famous on the other side of the world. 

From there the episode heads forty miles south, where the manicured suburbs give way to the Hockomock Swamp, five thousand flooded acres the Wampanoag named the place where spirits dwell, and where the reports never stopped. An armed police search in 1970, a fur trapper stalked from the bank of a black waterway, Joseph DeAndrade's famous Clay Banks sighting, a kayaker who watched something rise out of a crouch on the Town River, footfalls booming across the frozen ice of Lake Nippenicket, and a farmer whose family spent sixty years sharing a fence line with something that never once introduced itself.

One state, two monsters, and a swamp with a middle no one has ever reached.


Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Volume Two of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey begins here, and it opens on the other side of the fight. A Dog man called Vorn moves his starving pack south out of the picked-over northern hunting grounds and straight into territory the sasquatch clans have held for generations.

The moment those two worlds catch each other's scent, the countdown starts.Three years have passed since the clans fled the Olympic Peninsula. Three years since Adanowa was taken and everything Koda knew came apart.

Now a scout named Raksha has vanished into the dark, with nothing left behind but blood and a stranger's smell.In this first stretch you'll meet both sides of the coming war, the pack and the clans alike, and watch Kabota gamble on words over teeth by sending an envoy to a creature who only respects strength. You already know how a gamble like that tends to end.

What you don't yet know is who pays for it. This is the world Koda came up in, changed and crowded and closing in, and it's only going to get darker from here.

Settle in, because we've got a long road ahead, and it starts with first blood.

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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

We're back on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, and tonight we're pulling into Maryland, home of one of the most famous roadside monsters in America. In November of 1971, a family in Old Bowie went searching for a missing puppy named Ginger and found her decapitated near the railroad tracks off Fletchertown Road.

Within weeks, a small-town newspaper headline reading "Residents Fear Goatman Lives" had grown into Washington Post coverage of a six-foot hairy creature walking upright through the Prince George's County woods, and the Maryland Goatman was born. In this episode, I trace the legend all the way back to its documented beginnings, from a 1971 college folklore project and the mad-scientist rumors surrounding the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center to the goat herder, the hermit, and the axe-wielding thing said to stalk lovers' lanes and Crybaby Bridge.

I walk through the classic encounters the way the county has told them for fifty years, hooves on the blacktop behind a parked car, an axe blade in a door panel, screams over the campsites, and then I put on my old badge and show you what the evidence actually supports. From there the road trip goes deeper into Maryland's monster file, because the witnesses in 1971 never described a goat at all.

They described a Bigfoot. We cover the Dwayyo attack outside Gambrill State Park in 1965, the Sykesville Monster flap of 1973 with its thirteen-inch footprint cast and Baltimore Zoo examination, a fisherman's daylight sighting on the Patapsco in 1981, the Harewood Park Monster, the Eastern Shore reports, and the giant that construction crews reported at the Arundel Mills site in 2000. It's a story about dark roads, headlights, bored teenagers, freight trains, and the one small casualty at the bottom of it all, and by the end you'll know exactly where the folklore stops and where the genuine mystery in the Maryland woods begins.

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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Tonight we're pulling off the road and opening the mailbag. Over the past few months the inbox has been filling up with encounter stories, and when I sat down to sort through them, one thing stood out: over and over again, they were coming from hunters.

That makes sense when you think about it. Hunters are in the woods before dawn and after dark, sitting still in country most people never see, and they know exactly what belongs in the timber and what doesn't.

In this episode I've got six of those stories, from six different men, in six different states, across six different decades. 

We start in western Montana in nineteen sixty-eight, where two elk hunters packed seven miles into a basin that something had already emptied.

From there it's the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas in nineteen seventy-seven, where a young deer hunter learned why the old-timers on his uncle's lease quietly hunted around forty acres of the best ground on the place. 

Then we go back to the oldest account in the bag, a logger on the west slope of the Washington Cascades in nineteen fifty-four, four years before America even had the word Bigfoot. After that it's Michigan's Upper Peninsula in nineteen eighty-nine, where a bear hunter's bait station started getting cleaned out by something that didn't leave bear tracks.

 Then down to a Georgia river bottom in nineteen ninety-six, where two cousins hunting hogs at night followed a hole in the frog sound and found out what had moved the hogs. And we close in the Colorado high country in two thousand eight, with a skeptic of an archery elk hunter, a wrong-sounding bugle in the dark, and a line of sixteen-inch tracks through an elk wallow.

Six men, most of whom never planned on telling anybody. The stories came to me, and now they've come to you. Keep your eyes on the tree line.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Maine, and this stop needs two maps, one for the water and one for the woods. We start on the granite edge of Casco Bay, where lobstermen, ferry crews, and one very unlucky kayaker have reported something long, dark, and fast moving through cold Atlantic water.

They call her Cassie, the Casco Bay Sea Serpent, and her paper trail runs deeper than you'd think. We trace New England's sea serpent tradition from John Josselyn's sixteen thirty-nine account at Cape Ann through young Edward Preble chasing a serpent by rowboat in Penobscot Bay during the Revolution, into the famous Gloucester sightings of eighteen seventeen, when the Linnaean Society of New England took sworn depositions from dozens of witnesses and then torched its own credibility with a deformed blacksnake.

From there it's old Maine newspaper accounts, Danish dragger captain Ole Mikkelsen's nineteen fifty-eight sighting off Cape Elizabeth, and a run of modern encounters from working boats, including a three-boat sighting on a flat calm August morning that nobody involved ever wanted to talk about again. Then we leave the coast and drive inland, because Maine is the most forested state in the country and the North Woods have their own resident.

We dig into Wabanaki traditions of forest giants, the Durham gorilla flap of nineteen seventy-three, and Sasquatch encounters from Aroostook County deer swamps, the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, a log landing north of Jackman, and a frozen pond in the Moosehead country where the snow kept a record two brothers wish it hadn't.

As always, the ordinary explanations get first crack, basking sharks and moose and the pattern-hungry human eye, and as always, there's a residue they can't quite eat. The ocean hides one monster and seventeen million acres of trees hide the other, and Maine never asks either of them for proof.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is pulling over for a week, because this time the thing in the wilderness didn't come out of the trees. It came down out of the sky. In August of 1976, four art students from Boston, twin brothers Jim and Jack Weiner, Navy veteran Charlie Foltz, and painter Chuck Rack, paddled into the Allagash Wilderness Waterway of northern Maine for two weeks of fishing in some of the deepest, darkest country east of the Mississippi.

One night on Eagle Lake, they built a huge bonfire on the shore to guide themselves home, pushed their canoe out into the black, and watched an enormous silent sphere of swirling light rise over the treeline. When Foltz flashed an SOS at it, a beam dropped to the water and came straight for them, and the next thing any of the four remembered was standing on the beach in a strange dead calm while their two-hour bonfire lay burned down to coals behind them.

Twelve years later, after a head injury, a seizure disorder, and a wave of nightmares that hit both Weiner twins in two separate households, the four men underwent fifteen hypnotic regression sessions with investigator Raymond Fowler's team, and what came off those tapes made them famous. Four separate accounts of a cold examination room, gray beings with glass-dark eyes, and procedures nobody wants to remember, all matching. They passed polygraphs, they passed psychiatric evaluations, and they carried the story through decades of ridicule, right up until 2016, when Chuck Rack picked up a phone in a Missouri motel room and tore the case in half.

In this episode, I take you from the floatplane landing on Telos Lake all the way through the encounter, the missing time, the years of silence, the hypnosis sessions, the memory science that dismantled recovered testimony in American courtrooms, and the recantation that ended four friendships. Because when everything else about this case gets argued away, one thing is still standing. Something was over Eagle Lake that night, all four men swore to it until the day it mattered most, and fifty years later, nobody has ever explained it.

The Road Trip will be back on the highway soon. Tonight, we go where the roads end.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Louisiana doesn't give you one monster. It gives you two.On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, we head into the bayous and river swamps of the Pelican State for a full double feature.

First up is the rougarou, the Cajun werewolf that crossed the Atlantic with exiled French farmers, survived the Acadian expulsion, and settled into the swamps of south Louisiana, where it's been enforcing Lent and scratching at shutters for two hundred and fifty years. We dig into the loup-garou's roots in the werewolf trials of medieval France, the Catholic morality machine that kept the legend alive, the strange rulebook of the curse itself, from the hundred and one days to the thirteen coins by the door, and the encounter stories that suggest people down the bayou are still seeing something.

A young woman paced for four miles by amber eyeshine on a dark bayou road. Three fearless hog dogs that refused one cut of swamp for two weeks straight. A calf struck on the highway that wasn't there when the driver walked back. Then we cross the Pearl River into seventy thousand acres of nowhere for the Honey Island Swamp Monster.

In August of nineteen sixty-three, an air traffic controller named Harlan Ford and his hunting partner Billy Mills watched a seven-foot, gray-haired figure stand up out of a clearing and look back at them, and the case that followed includes torn-out boar throats, disputed plaster casts, a missing fisherman, and a reel of Super Eight film that Ford's family didn't find until after he was gone.

From there we widen out to Louisiana's full Sasquatch record, including the Earl Whitstine logging case reported to the Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office in the year two thousand, the Kisatchie National Forest reports, and firsthand accounts from hunters, campers, and one duck hunter who sat in a pirogue until sunrise because something stood up out of the water ten yards away.

Two monsters. One silhouette. By the end of this episode, you may start to wonder, like I did, whether Cajun Louisiana has been describing the same flesh-and-blood animal all along, in whatever language the porch light allowed.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The road trip crosses the Ohio River into Kentucky, and this stop is unlike any other we've made, because this legend has a real body count. On the eastern edge of Louisville, a massive railroad trestle spans Pope Lick Creek, and for roughly eighty years locals have said something lives under it.

Half man, half goat, with short horns and a voice that isn't its own. The Pope Lick Monster doesn't chase you. He calls you, mimicking the voices of people you trust, luring trespassers out onto seven hundred and seventy feet of open steel with no walkway, no railing, and no escape when a freight train enters the span.

In this episode I dig into the trestle's history and the three competing origin stories, from the escaped circus freak to the goat-sacrificing farmer, and trace the goatman's much older family tree through Maryland, Texas, and all the way back to the goat-legged wild gods of the ancient world. I cover the 1988 short film that put the monster on the national map and the fight it started with the railroad, and I walk carefully through the real, documented deaths on that bridge, including the young woman killed there in 2016 while visiting Louisville for a haunted attraction tour.

You'll hear encounter accounts from the Floyds Fork bottoms, including teenagers who heard a voice calling one of them by name, a driver who watched a horned figure stand up on the rail at dusk, and a survivor who says she never decided to walk onto that trestle at all.

Then the episode takes a turn most people don't expect, because Kentucky is quietly one of the best Sasquatch states in the country. I cover the famous Spottsville Monster case of 1975, encounter reports from Land Between the Lakes and the Red River Gorge, and a recent sighting from the same watershed as the trestle itself, and I make the case that the oldest layer of the Goatman legend may have started with something much more familiar to this show.

I close with my verdict on what the Pope Lick Monster really is, whether it's supernatural, psychological, or the deadliest warning legend in America running in reverse.A serious note before you listen.

The Pope Lick trestle is private railroad property and an active freight line, and real people, including teenagers, have died on it.

Do not visit the trestle, do not climb the fence, and do not ever walk railroad tracks anywhere. This story works from the safe side of the fence, and that is the only place I want you enjoying it.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This week we pull off the highway. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip will pick back up next episode, but stories have been stacking up from listeners all over the country, and five of them earned a full telling. These are firsthand Sasquatch encounters from five states, told with first names only and every detail the witnesses were willing to share.

We start at a deer camp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where a hunter alone for the first time in his life hears wood knocks, finds a seventeen inch track, and spends a November night listening to something walk circles around his trailer, only to learn years later that his late father had left behind a rule and a plaster cast that suddenly made sense.

From there we head to southeastern Oklahoma, where a sixty year old bookkeeper and her husband endure eight months of stripped apple trees, peeled coop wire, and screams from the creek bottom before she comes face to face with the thing at her burn pile.

Then it's broad daylight in the timber country of Northern California, where a professional timber cruiser with eleven years in the woods watches something stand up from behind a root wad at seventy yards, and finds out his partner saw it too and said nothing.

The fourth account takes us back to nineteen sixty eight, to a West Virginia hill farm, a face at a bedroom window, shutters that went up overnight, and a deathbed confession about a place the family called the Yellow Gap.

We close on a sandbar in the Florida panhandle river swamps, where a fishing guide spends an entire night under siege by something wading the flooded timber, and finally understands why the old men on the river always left when the smell came.

Five strangers, fifty eight years, two thousand miles, and the same details over and over. As always, I hold my conclusions loose, but I'll tell you what four decades of listening has taught me about the difference between a story and a report. Keep your eyes on the treeline.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

On the night of the Fourth of July, a young couple nine miles up a dead-end mountain road in north Georgia found themselves cut off from the world at the worst possible moment. Her water had broken, the only crossing off the mountain had swallowed their truck, and the nearest phone signal was a mile and a half uphill through dark timber.

What happened over the next three hours is a story about labor, a washed-out culvert, a volunteer rescue man, and a baby born in a Baptist church parking lot under the last shells of the loudest Fourth the valley ever saw. It is also a story about something else that was on that mountain the same night, something that paced a running man through the switchbacks, stood in a flashlight beam for four long seconds with two rabbits in its fist, and later walked out of the treeline, put its hands on a stranded pickup, and lifted it off the pipe.

 Two babies came into the world on that mountain that night, and only one of them got a birth certificate. This is the story of both.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Everybody thinks Kansas is flat, empty, and solid. They're wrong on all three, and the wrongest one is solid. Underneath a lot of that state sits a bed of Permian salt a quarter of a billion years old, and groundwater has been eating it away in the dark for longer than anyone's been around to notice, leaving hollow rooms that one day drop their ceilings and swallow a circle of pasture whole. That's the ground we drive across in this one.

And that's where the story starts, because the monster is almost beside the point. The real horror here is the floor. Out past Inman, in McPherson County, there's a shallow drying pond the locals called the Big Sinkhole, and in the drought summer of nineteen fifty-two two young Mennonite fishermen watched something long and pale as thick around as an automobile tire come up out of water you could wade across. One of them put a twenty-two into it. It didn't care.

The papers named it Sinkhole Sam, a satirist named Ernest Dewey buried it under a punchline about a made-up creature called the foopengerkle, and the joke got so loud that seventy years later nobody remembers there was ever anything under it worth taking seriously. We strip the joke off. We look at the thirty years of fishermen who saw it before it was funny, the tribal serpent warnings older than the town, the cattle that won't drink, the mud pushed down where nothing should push it, and the calf that got dragged into a lake fifty miles south in nineteen sixty-seven and never seen again.

But the serpent isn't the only thing people meet out there, and the other thing doesn't stay in the water. It walks. It crosses roads, it stands at the tree line and watches, and it leaves the one thing Sam never has the decency to leave behind. Tracks. We follow the Kansas Bigfoot record from Old Sheff in eighteen sixty-nine, when sixty armed men chased a thing through Crawford County and couldn't bring themselves to shoot it because it looked too much like a man, all the way up to a seventeen-inch print pressed into a field north of Topeka last spring. Bowhunters, a retired cop, turkey hunters, a girl caught at dusk between the dark water on one side and the dark timber on the other, not sure to this day which one she was closer to, or whether they were ever really two separate things.

Nearly four decades in the field and sixteen years behind a badge tell me not to buy the thirty-foot worm. They also tell me something is wrong with that water, and that the cattle agree with me. Ride along, keep your eyes on the low places, and whatever you do, don't stop at the bridge.

Got a Kansas encounter of your own, at a sinkhole or in the timber? Write in. Every account we read on the show came from somebody who was tired of being laughed at.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Way back in episode 147 we spent a full night in Van Meter, Iowa, where in the autumn of 1903 a winged, horned, glowing thing walked the rooftops at 1 a.m., shrugged off the town doctor's 5 shots and the banker's buckshot, and finally backed a whole armed posse down into an abandoned coal mine before vanishing for good. If you never heard it, or you want the full nightmare start to finish, go back and pull up 147. It's one of the best-documented cryptid cases in America, and it deserves the whole hour.But the Visitor is the freak case. It's the outlier.

Tonight we park in the Hawkeye State for a different reason, because the thing Iowa actually reports, quietly, all over the map, for more than 100 years, isn't a winged devil. It's big and dark and covered in hair and it walks on 2 legs, and it's been hiding in the last place anybody'd think to look for it. We dig into the Lockridge Monster and the partially eaten turkeys that started it, the Skunk River Wildmen, a 13-year-old boy who watched one drink from the river with cupped hands, a turkey hunter who locked eyes with something in the morning fog, a bow hunter with 5 separate run-ins on his own land, a viral photo out of White Water Canyon, and a string of encounters from people who never told a soul, the mushroom hunters and the night fisherman and the farmer with a clump of coarse dark hair in his kitchen drawer.

Then we take the long way home through the rest of Iowa's strange country, the cursed Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery, the Fort Dodge house whose builders invited the dead in on purpose, and the phantom cougars the state swears are gone and people keep right on seeing. As always, your host walks it through an evidence-first, flesh-and-blood lens, with the eye of a former lawman who spent years learning the difference between a man telling a story and a man telling you what happened to him. 


Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In the summer of 1924, five gold prospectors working a remote claim on the southeastern shoulder of Mount St. Helens came down off that mountain with a story nobody wanted to believe and almost nobody could forget. They claimed that a group of 7-foot, hair-covered creatures had laid siege to their cabin through the night, hurling boulders against the walls, tearing at the chinking between the logs, and reaching a massive arm through a window before the men drove it back with an axe.

The men were Fred Beck, his son George, John Peterson, and 2 unrelated prospectors who shared the surname Smith, Marion and Roy. By the time they reached the little settlement of Cougar, the tale was already taking on a life of its own, and within days the Oregonian ran the headline that would echo for a century, "Ape Men Sought in Mt. St. Helens."

This episode walks the whole thing from the ground up. We lay out the verifiable history first, the daylight sighting across the canyon, the 3 rifle shots Fred Beck swore struck one of the creatures and sent it tumbling into an inaccessible ravine, and the long night that followed back at the cabin.

We cover the Forest Service investigation that came after, when rangers J. H. Huffman and William Welch hiked to the site, climbed down into that supposedly unreachable canyon, found no body and no blood, and then demonstrated how those 14-inch tracks could be faked by a man walking in his sock feet and twisting his heel in the soft dirt. Their conclusion was blunt. 

The men had probably spooked themselves, maybe seeded a few rocks near the cabin to dress up the tale, and let the dark and the isolation do the rest. And yet, as one writer put it decades later, people still wanted to believe, and the story refused to die.

From there we move past the record and into the cabin itself, into a long-form dramatization built entirely on the facts as the men reported them. We imagine the weight of that first footprint pressed into the earth at dusk, the bar dropping across the door, the first rock hitting the roof just after midnight, and the slow, sickening realization that whatever was outside was working together, testing the walls, learning where the men were weakest. It is a reconstruction, not a transcript, and we are honest about that line. 

But every beat of it sits on something Beck himself described.We also follow the story forward in time, through Beck's 1967 booklet "I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens," where an aging man added a strange spiritual dimension to the account, suggesting the creatures could come and go as they pleased and were never entirely of this world. We talk about how the 1924 incident got folded into the Bigfoot phenomenon decades later, after Bluff Creek and the coining of the name itself, and how a narrow gorge on the mountain came to be called Ape Canyon as a permanent marker of the legend.

And we close on the mountain as it stands now, its old cone blown open by the 1980 eruption that buried the cabin site forever, leaving the truth of that summer locked somewhere under the ash. You can take the rangers' side or you can take Beck's. What you cannot do, once you have heard it, is pretend the story doesn't get under your skin. As always, my read is a flesh-and-blood one. 

Whatever those men met on that mountain, I don't think it came from another dimension. I think it walked in on 2 legs, and I think it walked back out.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings,...

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway in Churubusco, Indiana, a tiny Whitley County farm town northwest of Fort Wayne that turned a giant snapping turtle into a national obsession and then into a permanent mascot. The legend opens in 1898 with farmer Oscar Fulk, who claimed a monstrous turtle lived in the seven-acre pond on his land and got laughed off so completely that the story died for half a century. It came roaring back in July 1948 when two known pranksters, Ora Blue and Charley Wilson, said they watched a turtle the size of their boat surface like a submarine while they were fishing.

The tale should have died at the barbershop again, until landowner Gale Harris saw it himself from his barn roof in March 1949 and, sick of being called a liar, vowed to drag the creature out even if he had to drain the entire lake.What followed was one of the most frantic monster hunts in American history.

We walk through the whole circus: the chicken-wire trap the turtle burst through, the crowds that swelled to five thousand people, the four hundred cars an hour rolling past the Harris farm, the professional trappers from Tennessee, the Fort Wayne diver and his leaking helmet, the two-hundred-pound female sea turtle released as bait in a doomed romance scheme, the 299 unusable photographs from a Life magazine photographer, the lost film, the harpoon, the seventeen-ton crane, and the months-long attempt to drain Fulk Lake dry.

It ends the way obsession usually ends: Harris hospitalized with appendicitis, the dam breaking and swallowing his equipment back into the lake, his money and health gone, and the family selling the farm in 1950 having proved nothing.Then comes the skeptical autopsy. We separate the native common snapping turtle (which tops out around seventy-five pounds) from the alligator snapping turtle (spike-shelled, much bigger, and not native to northern Indiana), make the case for a released exotic, and dig into why frightened people in dark water turn a seventy-pound animal into a four-hundred-pound beast.

 We cover the contested origin of the name Oscar, the wild theories about where the turtle went (an underground river, a muddy grave), and how a town that watched a man ruin himself over a creature he could never catch decided to honor him anyway.

Churubusco has thrown its Turtle Days festival every June since 1950, calls itself Turtle Town U.S.A., and keeps the spotlights, nets, and dive gear from the hunt on display at its History Center. The not-finding, as one local put it, is exactly what kept the story alive.  

An evidence-first, skeptic's-eye road trip through a small-town monster hunt with real obsession, real cost, and a surprisingly gentle ending.

Got a stop for the map? Reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Illinois, and this stop earns its keep. In the spring of 1973, in the little farm town of Enfield down in White County, a quiet, sober man named Henry McDaniel opened his front door and met something that stood about four and a half feet tall, walked on three legs, held up two stubby arms, and stared back at him with two pinkish-red eyes the size of flashlight lenses. He emptied four rounds from a .22 into it at close range, swore he hit it, and watched it hiss like a wildcat and leap fifty feet in three bounds toward the L and N railroad tracks. State troopers came out and documented claw marks gouged into his siding and a set of six-toed, dog-like tracks with a mismatched third print.

The Enfield Horror was loose, and a small Illinois town spent the next two weeks coming apart over it.This episode runs the whole case the way a former cop reads a file. We cover the boy next door, Greg Garrett, who reported being attacked half an hour before McDaniel and later told university researchers it had been a prank, and why that recantation gets weighed rather than buried. We get into McDaniel's second sighting along the tracks at three in the morning, the five armed monster hunters arrested by a fed-up deputy, the White County sheriff threatening to jail McDaniel for talking, the Indiana radio newsman Rick Rainbow who claimed to record the creature's screaming cry, and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, who investigated the case in person and walked away without an answer. We lay out every theory on the table, from escaped kangaroo to bottomland ape to mass hysteria to the saucer-and-demon crowd, and sort the evidence from the noise.

Then we open up the rest of Illinois, because Enfield didn't happen in a vacuum. The state caught a kind of monster fever in those years, and we trace it from the start. We head to Farmer City and Salt Creek, where a pale, yellow-eyed giant ran four campers out of their tents in 1970, walked across a police officer's headlights, and left tracks that the state's own game wardens couldn't name.

We go up to Pekin and East Peoria for the Cole Hollow Road Monster, Cohomo, the white-haired Bigfoot panic that flooded police lines with over 200 calls, pulled a hundred armed men into the woods, and turned out to have started as a teenager's hoax that still didn't explain everything that came after it. And we close on the Big Muddy, with the Murphysboro Mud Monster of 1973, the mud-caked, river-stinking, eight-foot creature that scared a Murphysboro officer into running, smeared slime on the trees that a cop touched with his own hand, walked into the middle of a carnival, and got tracked by a trained police dog to the door of an abandoned barn.

Three-legged terror, hairy giants, river bottoms, gunfire, K-9 units, and a state that never quite goes quiet. This is Illinois, and something is always walking at the edge of the tree line.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Three retired loggers, five encounters, and a run of deep timber none of them could ever explain. In this episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories I share firsthand Sasquatch accounts I gathered over the better part of two years from three men who spent their working lives cutting timber across the Pacific Northwest and the Mountain West in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

You'll meet them by first name only, the way they asked, as Earl, Roy, and Hollis, three plainspoken men with no books to sell and every reason to keep quiet, who finally set the weight of what they saw down in front of me.Earl was a young choker setter in the Oregon Coast Range in 1958 when something started emptying the crew's lunch buckets and turning up in head-high brush twenty feet away, and three years later, in 1961, he was pinned in a wall tent on a Cascade lake while a slow, heavy weight walked the gravel behind his head.

Roy was a redwood faller in Northern California in 1963 when he looked up a hillside gallery of old-growth and watched a near eight-foot figure lay its hand flat against a trunk and knock twice, and heard two knocks answer from across the canyon. Hollis worked the Idaho panhandle and western Montana, where eyeshine paced his truck on a one-lane logging road in 1971, and a scream came down off the slope above a river camp in 1974 that emptied that camp by first light. I came up a skeptic, and I went looking for the place each story breaks. 

These three didn't break the way a made-up story breaks. What surfaces in all of it, from men who never met and never compared notes, are the same small, specific things: the dog that walks backward into the tent, the smell that arrives a beat ahead of the sight, the wood knocks answered across open ground, and a thing that watched men work and chose, over and over, to let them walk away. Listen for the details, and decide for yourself what these old men carried out of the woods.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This week the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into McCall, Idaho, a logging-town-turned-resort wrapped around the south shore of Payette Lake, where the water drops three hundred and ninety-two feet into glacier-cut cold and the locals have been seeing something long move beneath the surface since before the town had paved roads.

We walk through the real history of Sharlie, from the railroad workers in nineteen twenty who watched a floating log come to life, to the summer of nineteen forty-four when thirty witnesses and a write-up in Time magazine turned "Slimy Slim" into an international story, to Dr. Taylor and his twenty fellow witnesses in nineteen forty-six, the nineteen fifty-four naming contest that gave her the name Sharlie, and the sightings that have trickled in right up to a piece of video in twenty twenty-three.

Then we get to the encounters that never made the papers: a boater chased across open water by a shape longer than his nineteen-foot hull, a couple lifted by a motorboat wake on a flat lake with no boat in sight, and a teenager who felt the whole lake shift under his body in deep water and ran out of it unable to speak. We give the giant-sturgeon explanation an honest hearing, and we explain where it holds up and where it doesn't.

And because the timber around Payette Lake is some of the most active Sasquatch country on the continent, we bring the woods into it too, from the goat hunters who watched a nine-foot figure boulder-hop up a cliff in nineteen seventy-three, to the federal officer who spotted two of them across the river while paddleboarding in twenty twenty-four, to the ten teenagers stalked and circled over a Memorial Day weekend in twenty twenty-six.

McCall sits in the seam between two kinds of deep, the cold water and the dark forest, and both of them have been quietly terrifying level-headed people for a hundred years. Pour something, lock the door, and come up into the high country with us.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The fifty-state road trip leaves the asphalt behind for the first time and boards a plane bound for Honolulu, because the next stop sits twenty-five hundred miles out in the Pacific where the Trailhunter can't follow. Hawaii doesn't fit the usual formula of trail cameras and footprint casts, and this episode says so up front. The Menehune and the Night Marchers aren't cryptids in the Bigfoot sense.

They come out of a living Hawaiian religious and cultural tradition that was already ancient when Captain Cook arrived in seventeen seventy-eight, and for many island families they aren't folklore at all but family history. So the field-researcher hat comes off and the guest hat goes on, and the episode treats these islands the way a guest should.

he first half belongs to the Menehune, the small people of the valleys. We stand above the Alekoko Fishpond on Kauai, where a chief and his sister were turned to stone for spying on a night's construction they were forbidden to watch, and we walk the Menehune Ditch at Waimea, the cut-and-dressed stonework that genuinely puzzles archaeologists because it doesn't match anything else in the islands.

From there we weigh the anthropology honestly, including the Tahitian word manahune for a landless commoner and the theory that the legend preserves the memory of a displaced first-wave people pushed into the back valleys, alongside the competing view that the magical little-people version flowered after European contact. The file closes with the detail that stays with you: the eighteen-twenties census of Kauai that reportedly recorded sixty-five people in Wainiha Valley under the single word Menehune.

The second half turns to the huaka'i po, the Night Marchers, and the rules that island families hand down like instructions about riptides. The processions of the warrior dead follow the old paths and do not go around what gets built across them, which is why some homes were designed with an open breezeway from mountain side to ocean side.

If you hear the drums, you do not look, you get off the path and lie face down, and if your own blood marches in that column, a voice may call out Na'u — mine — and let you live. Six accounts carry the weight: forty schoolchildren at Waimea watching small powerful figures play in the trees in broad daylight; a nineteen-fifties road crew whose equipment refused to run until the cut was moved; two boys fishing Ka'ena Point who went down on the sand while a torchlit procession passed close enough to make the grains jump; a young couple stalled on the Old Pali Road, ground a battle in seventeen ninety-five turned into a mass grave that surfaced again as eight hundred skulls during road construction in eighteen ninety-eight; a Waianae grandmother who stood and chanted her family's names while the marchers came through the house; and a United States Army squad that lay face down in their own training area on the orders of a local platoon sergeant.

The episode lands on two stories with documentation behind them. Interstate H-three, roughly thirty-seven years and one point three billion dollars to push sixteen miles through Halawa Valley over disputed heiau sites, built only after an act of Congress exempted it from the preservation laws that govern every other road in America. And Honokahua on Maui, where excavation for a luxury hotel uncovered close to a thousand ancient burials, where the Hawaiian community rose up until the resort was moved inland and the ancestors reinterred, and where the outrage produced the burial-protection laws that govern every construction project in the state today.

The throughline holds both traditions together: some places don't want to be disturbed, and the islands aren't hostile so much as owned. Visit as a guest, stay on the trail, leave the stones where they sit, and if you ever hear a drum in the dark where no drum should be, you know the procedure.

This week, we're pulling off the road. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip takes a short break so I can open the inbox and share five Sasquatch encounters sent to me by listeners from five different states, spanning more than twenty-five years.

A deer hunter in Michigan's Upper Peninsula gets paced through the dark in November of nineteen ninety-four by something that matches his footsteps and then corrects him with one extra step. A woman living alone in Oregon's Coast Range in two thousand eight tracks her dog's strange refusals on a kitchen calendar until the night something looks through the top of a seven-foot window.

Two brothers running trotlines on an Oklahoma river in nineteen eighty-seven watch something cross knee-deep through a hole they wade waist-deep, then hear a second scream answer from their own bank. A pipeline surveyor working alone in the West Virginia hollows in twenty fifteen finds his survey stakes extracted, his wooden lath twisted like a wrung-out rag, and finally locks eyes with what's been undoing his work.

And a father and son at a remote Maine ice fishing camp in February of two thousand one listen through one inch of spruce planking as something lifts the cinder block off their fish box and sets it down gently. Five witnesses who don't know each other, most of whom asked me to hide their names, all carrying stories they held onto for years before telling a stranger.


 If you have an encounter of your own, send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. I read every email. The Road Trip rolls again soon.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This week on Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the truck rolls into Georgia, and for Brian this stop is personal, because Georgia is home. Born and raised in the north Georgia mountains, Brian opens up about the afternoon when he was twelve years old that set the course of his entire life, when something heavy and bipedal paced him through a thicket of pine, charged out of the brush, and sent him running six hundred yards home so terrified he was sick in his own front yard.

From there he hands the mic to Mr. Brown, a Summerville carpenter and part-time ginseng hunter who, in August of 1986, came face to face with an eight-foot creature near a fire tower at Jenkins Gap. It had a withered left arm, fingernails grown so long they'd knotted, and a limp like a drunk old man, and Mr. Brown reported it to the sheriff, the newspaper, and Atlanta TV stations because he was afraid it might cross paths with a child.Brian then opens the wider file on Georgia, a state most people overlook for Bigfoot but which ranks among the most active in the country, with well over a hundred credible reports on record. He walks through the 1829 Okefenokee Swamp attack, one of the earliest written Sasquatch accounts in American history, complete with eighteen-inch tracks, a thirteen-foot creature, and a deadly battle reported in the Milledgeville Statesman.

He covers the much-argued 2009 Lumpkin County sheriff's dash cam footage, the 2000 Rood Creek camping scare on the Chattahoochee, the broad-daylight 2024 Fort Valley sighting near Macon, the Expedition Bigfoot museum up in Cherry Log, and the old Cherokee Tsul'kalu legend his father's friend Elijah used to tell around the fire.Then the road drops south, out of the mountains and across the fall line into the black-water country of the coast, to the town of Darien and the Altamaha River. Settled by Scottish Highlanders from the shores of Loch Ness itself, Darien has spent nearly two centuries telling stories about a thirty-foot river monster the locals call the Altamaha-ha, or Altie for short.

Brian traces the legend from its Muscogee Creek and Tama roots through the colonial timber rafts, then lays out the documented sightings, including Captain Delano's seventy-foot serpent off St. Simons Island in 1830, the timbermen and hunters of the early twentieth century, the 1969 brothers, the 1970s reports from Harvey Blackman and Frank Culpepper, the Butler Island sightings, the 1981 Larry Gwin and Steven Wilson encounter that put Altie on the national map, the 2010 video off Fort King George, and the strange remains that washed up at Wolf Island in 2018.

 He closes the river out with the encounters that never make the papers but never stop circulating, the fishermen watching humps roll through the channel, the boaters tracking something long swimming against the current, the night sounds that send grandmothers to latch the windows on the hottest nights, the shrimper whose new net got torn open by something he still calls a bull shark, the duck hunter whose old Lab climbed into his lap, and the dockside witnesses who watched a long head rise, look at them, and sink straight down into the dark. Brian weighs the sturgeon, manatee, and right whale explanations honestly, and lands where he always does, in the not-knowing, which he'll tell you is the most alive he ever feels.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on...

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls south out of the Delaware mud and doesn't stop until the asphalt runs out at the edge of the wet. This stop is Florida, and the thing waiting in the saw grass is the Skunk Ape, the South's swamp-bound cousin to Bigfoot, seven feet of reddish-brown hair that most witnesses say they smell long before they see.

Rotten eggs, wet dog, sulfur, a stink that hangs in the yard for an hour after the thing is gone. We get into the encounters fast and we get into a lot of them, because that's what you came for.A night fisherman who kills his lantern and still sees two eyes burning high over the reeds. A family watching something cross the road that stands taller than a six-foot-five inch man. Hunters who could taste the smell before anything stepped out of the palmetto.

 A scream out of the Big Cypress dark that froze a campsite, and the thing that came to a four-year-old's bedroom window and held her gaze through the glass. Along the way we work the documented record the way you work an open case, weighing a Vietnam vet and former cop named Charles Stoeckman who slept a month with a shotgun, a tour guide and thirty passengers who watched one rock back and forth for fifteen minutes, a fire chief and a real estate agent who saw the same creature minutes apart on the same road, and the 1977 wave that got loud enough that a Florida lawmaker actually tried to make it a crime to harm one.

We dig into the famous Myakka photographs, the two flash shots an anonymous grandmother mailed to the Sarasota sheriff asking if anyone was missing an orangutan, and why a quarter century later nobody's closed the case in either direction. We spend real time with Dave Shealy and his Skunk Ape Research Headquarters out on the Tamiami Trail, the man who's given fifty years and the most argued-over footage in the field to proving the thing is real.

Then we do the honest part, the bears and the panthers and the genuinely-real wild monkey colonies breeding in Florida's woods, the skeptics inside the research community who put the credible-sighting rate at maybe five out of a hundred and fifty, and the one detail none of the easy answers explains: the smell.

Roll the windows up for this one. Trust me. 

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The smaller the state, the closer the monster feels. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Roadtrip we drive all the way down to the bottom of Delaware, the second smallest state in the country, where there's nowhere for a monster to hide and so the monster lives right at the end of your road. Our destination is Selbyville and the Great Cypress Swamp, fifty square miles of black tannin water, standing cypress, and ground so confusing that people still go missing in it.

 We dig into the land that water made, the colonial isolation that let these stories concentrate and grow stranger with every telling, and the peat fires that burned underground for months and earned the place its other name, the Burnt Swamp.

Then we get to what people have actually seen. Hunters in the 1920's  who heard something scream and come at them through the dark water. A bowhunter who smelled it before the footsteps passed under his stand. Fishermen cutting their lines when the splashes coming down the gut were too heavy and too deliberate to be anything that's supposed to be out there. Kids chased off the wooded path. A tall, hairy figure stepping out of the cypress and crossing Route 54  in the headlights. We also tell the true part, because that's the deal on this show.

In 1964 a struggling newspaper editor named Ralph Grapperhaus lit a match under the old legend to sell papers, and a Selbyville man named Fred Stevens became the monster in his aunt's raccoon coat and a rubber mask, jumping out at cars until armed hunting parties made it too dangerous to keep going.

 A young reporter cracked the whole thing open in 1998. But the mask doesn't explain the sightings that came forty years before it, and it doesn't explain why the people who live at the edge of that swamp still won't rule it out.

The man in the mask was only the part we could catch.

 Keep your eyes on the tree line, and if something tall steps into your headlights down there in the dark, don't stop to feed it.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This week on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, we pull into Meriden, Connecticut, and climb into the Hanging Hills, a range of ancient volcanic cliffs where a small black dog has been haunting hikers for more than a hundred and thirty years.

He looks like an ordinary stray. Short hair, black coat, moderate size, nothing about him that should stop you in your tracks. But this dog never makes a sound, not even when you watch him bark, and he never leaves a footprint behind him in dust or snow. And the rule that's been passed down since the eighteen hundreds is simple and merciless. See him once for joy, twice for sorrow, and the third time, you don't come down off that mountain.

We trace the legend all the way back to its source, a story called The Black Dog published in The Connecticut Quarterly in the spring of 1898 by geology professor William Harry Chichele Pynchon, grandfather of the novelist Thomas Pynchon. It was printed as fiction, but it broke loose from its pages almost immediately and became something people swear is real.

We walk through the original three-act tale, the doomed winter climb of geologist Herbert Marshall, and the death that the legend later pinned on Pynchon himself, before separating what actually happened from the story that grew up around it.Then we get into the encounters, because that's where this thing lives. A lifelong hiker watching the dog bark in total silence before he vanishes off a bare ledge. A young man named Mike who photographed the dog at Castle Craig in 2004 while his own brother, standing ten feet away, saw nothing at all.

A nighttime sighting on the bridge over the highway. A skeptic named Christina stunned into belief on the trail below the tower. Prints in fresh snow that stop mid-stride, as if the animal that made them simply lifted off the ground. We lay these against the real and sobering history of the cliffs, including the fatal fall of Mark Valenti in 2015 and the woman who fell nearly two hundred feet in 2021, and we ask whether the legend is wrapping itself around a place that was always going to be dangerous, or whether something up there is doing the counting.

Before we leave the state, we take a side road into Connecticut's wider cryptid country, from the Winsted Wildman of 1895 to the silent eight-foot figure that teenager Karl S. watched cross the railroad tracks near Newtown in 1976, to the all-black upright shape a Bethel woman saw chasing thirty deer through her yard in 2022, to the lanky silhouette that stepped off Holbrook Road near Seymour in 2024. Twenty-some credible sightings, a Litchfield County hotspot, and a long traprock ridge that connects all of it.

Whatever the black dog is, the silence, the missing tracks, and the way it's simply there and then isn't, all of it belongs to the same family of things that walk just outside the edge of what we're willing to call real. Climb up to Castle Craig with us, watch your footing on the ridge, and if you see a small black dog on the trail, take a good long look at him. Because that one's your first.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Tonight we're pulling off the highway for this one. Somewhere between mile markers on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, an email came in that I couldn't drive past, so we're parking in the gravel for a while to hear it. A man who's listened to just about everything I've put out finally wrote down something he'd carried alone for forty years, and he sent it to me because he trusts how I handle a story.

He was nineteen, deep in the military in the mid-1980s, out on an extended field problem in mountain country so remote that help was a full day away if anything went wrong. His commanding officer briefed them on bears and big cats and told them to keep their heads on a swivel, that this wasn't the kind of country that announces itself. By the third day, his element of six men had found crude shelters built from bent saplings woven together with living vines, and the birds had gone silent across the whole drainage.

What happened that night is the reason he's telling it now. White points of light with no source to reflect them, hanging six feet off the ground in the dark. Vocalizations from opposite slopes that climbed past anything an animal should be able to make, answering each other across the men's position. A smell that came in waves as something circled them. Rocks the size you don't throw by hand, dropped inside their perimeter close enough to kick dirt in a man's face, placed like a warning rather than an attack.

One of them breaking branches at slow, even intervals as it walked right up to a soldier's position and just stood there, breathing. And in the gray light before dawn, through their night vision, three of them at the tree line. One very large, two smaller by a foot or two and skinnier, restless, hanging back.

The way the three of them moved off together didn't look like animals scattering. It looked like a family heading home.



Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This episode comes out of a recent conversation I had with author and researcher Norman Sollie, and it stopped me cold. Norman is the author of a brand-new book called Before Patty, Volume One: Patrick, the Sasquatch-Human Hybrid and Our Genetic Inheritance, and when we sat down to talk, he walked me through one of the most remarkable stories I've come across in close to forty years on this subject.

I knew I had to share it with you. This isn't the interview itself. This is me, sitting at the mic, telling you what I learned and why I think it matters.The story starts in the late summer of eighteen ninety-one, at a Sinixt fishing camp on the San Poil River in Eastern Washington. A young bride, newly married, went down to fetch water one evening and was taken from her own people by what the Lake Band called a Skanicum, their word for Sasquatch. She was held in the high country for two months. She escaped while her captor was sleeping in a wild potato patch. She came home pregnant. And nine months later she gave birth to a boy named Patrick.That's where most of us thought the story ended, because the original ethnographic record set down by Dr. Ed Fusch in nineteen ninety-two left Patrick dying young and most of the trail going cold.

What Norman did, working alongside genealogist Heather Moser of Small Town Monsters, was reopen the case. He surfaced a hundred and sixty historical documents that all point to the same man. Birth records. A land patent on a hundred and four acres of Colville Reservation ranch land, signed by President Woodrow Wilson in nineteen seventeen. Arrest reports. Court filings. Mugshots from the front and the side. And a careful ink signature, in Patrick's own hand, that now sits on the cover of Norman's book. In this episode I take you through everything Norman shared with me. The Russian hominologist whose self-published book first pointed Norman toward Patrick. The forty-eight hours it took Heather to find him. 

The physical features that mark Patrick as something other than fully human, including a steeply sloped forehead, ears rotated more than twenty degrees below the human norm, a short compressed neck that mirrors Neanderthal anatomy, and a missing chin. The strange brilliance of a man who somehow always knew what was in everybody else's hand at the card table. The eight children Patrick fathered. The slow decline through alcohol and Prohibition-era bootlegging. The death in a Seattle morning in nineteen sixty-two, on the same day Norman himself arrived in the United States as a child. And the forty-some living descendants still walking around right now, carrying Patrick's bloodline forward without most of them having any idea what their great-grandfather actually was.

This is the story the way Norman has reconstructed it, layered against the original Sinixt family memory that came down through Laura and Francis, two Lake Band women who knew Patrick personally and trusted Dr. Fusch enough to tell him the truth in nineteen eighty-five. It's the story of one young woman whose name has been lost, one boy who shouldn't have existed by any standard explanation of mammalian genetics, and one bloodline that's still moving forward in the Pacific Northwest while the rest of the world goes about its business none the wiser. I'll have Norman on the show in a future episode to go deeper with him directly. 

In the meantime, pick up his book. Before Patty, Volume One: Patrick, the Sasquatch-Human Hybrid and Our Genetic Inheritance is available at beforepatty.com, or through Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. Better yet, ask for it through your local independent bookseller or Barnes and Noble. Norman has volume two on the way, making the evolutionary case for Sasquatch, with volume three to follow on what he calls the weird stuff.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any...

This episode of The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Colorado, the highest state in the union, for a deep look at one of the strangest contrasts in American cryptid lore. We open with the Slide-Rock Bolter, an absurd creature from the lumber camp folklore of the early nineteen-hundreds, first documented by Minnesota state forester William T. Cox in his nineteen ten book Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods. We trace the Bolter back to its origins in the Fearsome Critters tradition, the body of tall tales that working men in American logging camps invented to entertain themselves, haze new arrivals, and put a face on the genuine dangers of life in the timber.

From there, we walk through the broader folklore of the Colorado high country, including the Cornish Tommyknockers brought to the silver camps by immigrant miners in the late eighteen-hundreds, and the older Indigenous traditions of giant or hairy beings in the mountains that predate any of the European arrivals. The second half of the episode shifts from folklore into testimony, exploring the long record of wild man and Sasquatch encounter reports that have come out of the Colorado backcountry from the late eighteen-hundreds to the present day.

We cover historical newspaper accounts from the central Rockies, the San Juans, Pikes Peak country, the Wet Mountains, and the Sangre de Cristos, and we move into the modern record with a series of encounter stories drawn from the broader Colorado field, including reports from the Weminuche Wilderness, the Flat Tops, the country around Mount Sopris, the Pagosa Springs area, the mining ghost towns of the San Juans, and the high passes above the San Luis Valley. 


The episode examines the recurring patterns that show up in the Colorado record, including elevation clusters, water corridors, the strange quality of silence that witnesses describe right before and after an encounter, the consistent pattern of avoidance behavior in the creatures themselves, and the credibility profile of the witnesses, who are overwhelmingly hunters, backpackers, rangers, ranchers, and other people with deep experience in the country they were standing in when the encounter occurred.

Along the way we discuss the cultural function of folklore in dangerous places, the ways that men in mining and lumber camps used invented monsters to talk about real risks like rockslides and cave-ins, and the long, often unspoken thread of testimony from people who have walked off the Colorado high country carrying something they were never quite able to put down.



Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Roadtrip, we drive into California and explore two of the most enduring cryptid traditions in North America. We begin in the Santa Lucia Mountains above Big Sur, where settlers, ranchers, schoolteachers, hikers, soldiers, and tourists have for centuries reported tall silent figures standing on the ridgelines.

Known as Los Vigilantes Oscuros, or the Dark Watchers, these silhouetted beings appear at dawn or dusk, wear what witnesses describe as long cloaks and broad-brimmed hats, and vanish the moment anyone tries to close the distance. We trace the history of these reports through Salinan, Esselen, and Chumash traditions, into the Spanish mission era beginning with Padre Junipero Serra in seventeen seventy-one, and forward into the published work of John Steinbeck, whose nineteen thirty-eight short story Flight placed the watchers into American literature, and the poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote of the same figures in his nineteen thirty-seven poem Such Counsels You Gave to Me.

Then we travel north into the redwood country, into the Six Rivers, the Klamath, the Trinity Alps, and the Marble Mountain Wilderness, where the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk peoples have spoken of Oh-Mah, the boss of the woods, for as long as their oral traditions reach back. We walk through the nineteen fifty-eight Bluff Creek story that gave the name Bigfoot to the world, beginning with bulldozer operator Jerry Crew, foreman Wilbur Wallace, and Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli, and we spend the bulk of the episode in encounter territory.

Hunters who watched a hair-covered figure ford a creek and turn to look back. Families who heard screams answer each other across redwood campgrounds at midnight. Backpackers who listened to rhythmic wood-knocking trade across a Marble Mountain lake.

 Truckers who saw something step a guardrail in one stride on Highway 96. River guides on the Klamath, forestry technicians in the Trinity Alps, fishermen on the Smith River, hunters on the Mendocino, residents of the Hoopa Valley who simply live alongside what their grandmothers told them was there.

This is a California most postcards never show. The watchers above, the giants below, and the question that connects them.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In May of 1971, a young couple named Bobby and Elizabeth Ford rented a small frame house outside the tiny town of Fouke, Arkansas. They'd been there less than a week when something reached through their front window in the middle of the night and changed their lives forever. By morning, Bobby Ford was in a Texarkana hospital being treated for shock and abrasions, the local constable and county sheriff were photographing three-toed tracks in the yard, and a story that had been quietly told around kitchen tables in Miller County for nearly a hundred years was about to spill out into the national press.

This episode walks through the full history of the Fouke Monster, from the 1908 Jonesville reports and the decades of quiet family stories that came before, through the Ford family attack on the night of 5/1/1971, and into the media wave that brought hunters, reporters, and a thousand and ninety dollar bounty to a town of a few hundred people.

 We dig into the work of Smokey Crabtree, the lifelong Fouke resident who became the unofficial chronicler of the case and wrote some of the most important primary-source books on the subject. We cover the production and release of Charles B. Pierce's 1972 docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek, a film made on a hundred thousand dollar loan from a Texarkana trucking company owner that went on to gross over twenty million dollars and quietly invent the modern American Bigfoot mythos. And we trace the encounter reports that kept rolling in long after the cameras packed up, from highway sightings in the late 1970s, to coon hunters in the bottoms in 1997, to trail camera images in 2008, all the way into recent reports along the Sulphur River and Mercer Bayou.

Drawing on nearly four decades of personal Sasquatch research and sixteen years in law enforcement, Brian unpacks the evidence with a careful eye on what the witnesses actually said, how investigators actually responded, and what holds up when you set the famous movie to one side and look at the record on its own terms.

The episode closes with an honest weighing of the major theories, black bear misidentification, hoaxing, regional folklore, and the case for a possible undocumented hominid population in the connected swamps that run from southwest Arkansas down into Louisiana and east Texas. The witnesses in Fouke didn't ask for any of this. They saw what they saw. And the bottoms keep their secrets the way they always have.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Welcome to stop three on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip. Tonight we're climbing up onto one of the most overlooked Sasquatch landscapes in the country, the Mogollon Rim of central and eastern Arizona, a two-hundred-mile shelf of stone where the Colorado Plateau drops off into the Sonoran Desert and ponderosa pine country meets red rock canyon. It's a place most people don't picture when they hear the word Bigfoot, and that's exactly what makes it so interesting.

Because for as long as anyone in Arizona has been keeping records, witnesses have been coming down off that Rim with the same story. Something big up there. Something fast. Something that screams across whole canyons and watches camps from the tree line and throws rocks into fire rings in the middle of the night.

We open the episode the way the Rim opens most of its stories, with a quiet camp and four experienced campers who realize, all at once, that the forest around them has gone silent.

 From there we build the history of the country itself, how the Rim got its name, why the Apache-Sitgreaves and the Coconino and the Tonto national forests stack together to make one of the largest unbroken pieces of timber and wilderness in the lower forty-eight, and how the Mogollon Monster legend traces back well before statehood, into the oral traditions of the people who knew that country first. Then we get into the encounters.

A guide and his horseback hunters running into something on a ridge in the Apache-Sitgreaves that didn't react to them the way an animal is supposed to react. A family at an established campground hearing something walk a deliberate circle around their tent at one in the morning, twice, and finding a track in the duff at first light. A solo bow hunter sitting in a tree stand while something stands fifteen feet below him and breathes.

A five-man hunt camp that loses a night to rocks on the canvas, a dog that won't get off the floorboard for a week, and a track measurement that no one in the group has been able to explain since. A Forest Service employee with thirty years on the Apache-Sitgreaves who heard something one summer afternoon that nobody at the office wanted to write down.

And a couple driving home from Big Lake on State Route 260 who watched something step backward off the shoulder of the highway and clear a four-foot embankment in a single motion.We close with the question that always sits underneath these conversations. 

Why here. Why this country. Why does the Rim, of all the places in the American West, produce a Sasquatch tradition this dense and this consistent. The answer has to do with the geography itself, the food and the water and the cover and the canyons that no one has ever surveyed, and with the kind of witnesses this country produces, ranchers and hunters and Forest Service folks and law enforcement, people who know the difference between an elk and a bear and a man, and who keep telling the same story year after year.

So pour a cup of something warm, pull your fire up a little closer, and come ride with me up onto the Mogollon Rim. Just don't go off looking for whatever's screaming across the canyon.

It already knows where you are.If you've had your own encounter on the Rim, or anywhere in Arizona's high country, reach out. Every story matters, and this show runs on yours.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Alaska doesn't just have Bigfoot. It has something older.This is the second stop on our cryptid road trip across America. Last time out, we worked the longleaf pine country of Alabama and the legend of the White Thang.

Tonight we head north to the rain coast of southeast Alaska, where the fog comes down low over the tideline and the spruce trees grow right to the water. This is the country of the Tlingit, a maritime people who have been reading these waters for somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years. And it is the country of the Kushtaka — the otter people, the shape-shifting beings who imitate the voices of the people you love and call you out into the dark.

We open in a fourteen-foot skiff outside Wrangell, with a fisherman in the fog and a child crying near the shore, and what his Tlingit grandmother told him to do if it ever happened.

From there we go deep. Into the ethnography of the Kushtaka, into the protections the old stories say can save your life — copper, dogs, and one other thing nobody likes to bring up — into three traditional accounts passed down through generations, and into two modern reports from a Forest Service ranger in the Tongass and a pair of kayakers on Admiralty Island. We close with a long, cinematic survival story from a cannery cove outside Hoonah in October of two thousand and eleven, and the one small tell that may be the only thing standing between you and what's on the other side of the door.Handle this one with respect.

The Kushtaka belong to a living tradition still carried by Tlingit families in southeast Alaska today. Listen with that in mind. And if you ever find yourself on a piece of Alaskan water you don't quite know, on a night when the fog has come down and the world has gone quiet, and you hear a voice you recognize calling your name from the trees, you already know what to do.

Put your back to it. Keep your hands on something made of copper. And don't look back.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Backwoods America series kicks off in north Alabama with one of the strangest and most persistent cryptid legends in the American South. The Alabama White Thang.

A tall, pale, hair-covered creature that has walked the back roads and hollers of this state for more than a hundred years — screaming from two ridges over, standing in the middle of dark country roads, and sometimes, when it decides to, coming back the next night. This is the first stop on a fifty-state cryptid road trip.

Over the coming months we're going coast to coast, every two-lane highway and dirt cut and red clay holler we can find, documenting the creatures that local people have been talking about for generations. Some of these episodes will land on names you already know. Most won't. The goal is to surface the stories that have stayed local for a century — the ones the farmers and hunters and night-shift workers only let out when they've decided you might believe them.

In this premiere we cover the historical roots of the White Thang, going back through Cherokee folklore and the figure of Tsul'kalu, the Scots-Irish settler tradition that fed Southern wild-man legends, and the earliest written references to the creature in north Alabama newspapers in the early-to-middle twentieth century. We dig into the geography that has let the legend last — the Bankhead National Forest, the Sipsey Wilderness, and the kind of broken Appalachian foothill country where a small persistent population of something could hide indefinitely. Then we work through encounter accounts spanning four counties and four decades. 

A man named Daryl, who came up out of a bridge in Morgan County after the late shift at a parts plant outside Decatur and saw something standing in his headlights that he could not explain away. A bow hunter named Tommy, who watched it duck through the brush in Walker County and made a deliberate choice not to draw his bow. The Whitlock family, who endured a multi-week stalking case at their property in Marshall County in 2003 that ended with pressure against the back door and three trail camera photographs of something that should not exist.

 A woman named Rebecca, who saw it standing in the woods behind her grandmother's grave in a small family cemetery in rural Jefferson County. A turkey hunter named Daniel, who held a shotgun on it across a clearing in the Sipsey and walked out knowing he was not supposed to run. And a young couple named Lauren and Jacob, who saw it on a back road in Walker County and then, two nights later, looked out their back window and realized it had come with them.

If you have a story of your own — something that happened to you, or to somebody in your family, or to somebody you trust — send it in to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Every email gets read. Names stay out of it on request.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

A hunting guide reaches out to the show after thirty years of silence, asking for the story to be handled with care. He sends an email that opens with a few simple ground rules. Names are first names only, and none of them are real. The country where it happened is still out there, and the line that got crossed is still a line. He doesn't want a map made of it.

He just wants the story told the way it actually happened.Tim was guiding hunters in the northern Idaho high country in the fall of nineteen ninety-five. He was young, broke, and raising a family. When a wealthy trophy hunter showed up at his kitchen table with aerial photographs, a printed file of old hunter reports, and twelve thousand dollars in cash, Tim took the job he knew he shouldn't have taken.

The hunter wanted a Sasquatch. He had a custom three seventy-five H and H Magnum, an early defense-grade thermal optic, and a young assistant carrying three cases of camera gear. He didn't want to glass from a ridge. He wanted to cross the creek that the old men of that country had been telling boys not to cross for as long as anybody had been giving the warning.What followed unfolded across three days and two nights on the wrong side of that line. Twisted saplings. Wet river stones balanced on stumps where no water ran. A single rifle shot at a shape on a ridge, a smear of something the wrong color for blood, and one footprint in soft duff.

A circle of six animals laid around the camp at dawn, every one of them broken by hand and none of them eaten. A barricade across the trail built in absolute silence. Ammunition lifted out of a buckled pack still riding on its owner's back. A voice in the trees that wasn't a voice in the trees, and a handprint on canvas left as a quiet courtesy.

And finally, a clearing at first light, a hunter on his knees, and a creature on a downed log that watched him the way a judge watches a defendant.This is a story about class, about land, about the difference between being a guest and being an owner, and about an old country that still knows the difference. It's also a story about a man who had a clean shot, lowered his rifle, and chose to let something finish what it had come there to do.

Tim has kept what he carried out of those mountains in a closet for thirty years. He's letting it go now because his daughter handed him an earbud one Christmas, and because some stories belong in hands that will treat them right.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

A listener writes in after sitting on this story for three months, and what he sends is one of the most layered north Georgia encounter accounts we've had on the show. Four men, one of them a thirty-year researcher in his early sixties, hike a mile and a half off a forest service road into a drainage that looks promising on a map. By the second night, they're surrounded.

Vocalizations from three directions. Heavy bipedal footsteps and breathing right outside a tent wall. A smell like ozone mixed with something animal. Rocks placed, not thrown, into camp as they tried to pack. A voice from the tree line calling one man's name in his wife's exact inflection. And a laugh that wasn't shaped right. Then it gets stranger. Glowing orbs moving silently through the canopy. Equipment behaving the way equipment isn't supposed to behave. Watches reading three different times in the same parking area.

 Eye shine pacing the truck on the drive out. And weeks later, a phone call that finally explains what the older researcher had walked up alone to see on Saturday afternoon, and why he'd kept it to himself until everyone was safely home.This one is told as the email arrived, lightly edited, names changed at the writer's request. It's a story about a corridor, about layered phenomena that don't fit in one frame, and about the moment a veteran researcher decides he's filled his box and won't be filling it anymore.


If you've had something happen to you out there that you've been carrying around alone, the email is brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. The newsletter goes out free at paranormalworldproductions.com. Thank you for listening.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Five listener accounts. Five different parts of the country. Five different decades. And in every one of them, something out there showed an ordinary person, in no uncertain terms, that they were not at the top of the food chain. This episode isn't about quick glimpses through the trees. It's about the slow encounters. The ones where something took its time, where it watched, where it made a deliberate decision about whether or not to let the witness walk away.

The first account comes from Dale, a lifelong hunter from Sequim, Washington, who was twenty-three years old in October of 1978 when he climbed into a drainage off the Dosewallips before first light and saw something standing in the fog at the base of the slope. Sixty yards away. Gray-skinned, slope-browed, motionless in a way that no living thing should be able to manage.

Dale walked out of those woods that morning and didn't return to any forest for twenty-six years.

From there we move to Karen, a young woman from Elkins, West Virginia, who was twenty-four years old in September of 1993 and out for a solo overnight on a loop she'd hiked many times before. At two in the morning, every insect in the Monongahela went silent, something pressed a hand the size of a dinner plate against the wall of her tent, and the heat of a living body radiated through the nylon inches from her face. The next morning she saw what had been standing over her.

Brent rides next, a heavy equipment operator out of Athens, Ohio, who was on the OHV trails in the Wayne National Forest with his buddy Cody on a clear October afternoon in 2019. They heard whoops trade across the saddle of a ridge. They turned around to leave. And on the way back down the trail they'd just ridden, they found a fourteen-inch oak laid across the two-track that had not been there forty minutes earlier, with no root ball, drag marks in the dirt, and something watching them from behind a white oak thirty yards uphill.

The fourth account is told secondhand by Katelyn, the granddaughter of a northern Wisconsin trapper named Cal, who walked his line on a state forest tract north of the Bois Brule River in October of 1972 and found his sets methodically disabled. A foothold trap hung ten feet up in a hemlock. A marten cubby pried off a maple, turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and re-nailed backwards. A young whitetail arranged on the moss above an otter set, legs folded, head balanced upright, like a chess piece placed for him to find. Then three wood knocks from three different directions.

Then a tall, lean, gray-haired figure standing between two pines in the dawn light, watching him with an expression Cal could only describe as tired.

The episode closes with Marisol, a freelance photographer who in late August of 2015 hiked into a small alpine lake in the Trinity Alps Wilderness of northern California to shoot the milky way. The wind shifted across the cirque, the smell of a wet animal carried over the water, and through her two-hundred-millimeter zoom she watched something kneel at the far shore, cup water in its palm, drink, and then turn its head and look directly into her lens. A face with a heavy brow, a square jaw, and a small but distinct chin. Eight feet tall when it stood. 

She broke camp in the fading light and hiked six miles back to the trailhead in the dark, and she has never reviewed the photographs she took that afternoon.What links these five accounts isn't the description of the creature. The descriptions vary. Reddish brown. Gray. Nearly black. Heavy jaw, no chin. Narrower jaw, slight chin. Lean and starved-looking. Massive and barrel-chested. What links them is the aftermath.

Every one of these people rearranged their lives around what happened. Hunting careers ended. Backpacking ended. Photography careers pivoted indoors. Decades of silence followed by a single attempt to put it down somewhere, with...

Brian sits down at the mic after wrapping a long-form interview for Sasquatch Odyssey with researcher Natalie Smearman, and what she shared in that recording was too good to keep on one show. This episode brings her story over to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories in full. Natalie grew up in West Virginia thinking the Bigfoot stories were just something parents told kids to keep them out of the woods, and a local news report out of central Florida about a sighting in the Ocala National Forest cracked that assumption open. From there she spent years reading everything she could get her hands on, eventually buying herself a VIP ticket to the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference as a birthday gift to herself in the middle of a divorce.

That weekend put her in front of Adam Davis, R.P.G., and Ken Gerhard, and from that point forward she stopped being a hobbyist and started becoming a field researcher.The bulk of this episode covers the November twenty twenty-five expedition Natalie took with Relic Films into Land Between the Lakes, the one hundred and seventy thousand acre stretch of Kentucky and Tennessee forest that has a documented reputation for high strangeness. 

Brian walks listeners through Natalie's pheromone bait experiment with Obsession for Men and dollar store dog toys, the singing in the cemetery that calmed down whatever was watching them, the bathroom growl that started a quiet truce in the dark, and the encounter on the second night that broke open everything. Three crawler creatures emerging from a bluish-white oval of light on the ridge line. A charge stopped by bear spray. Cameras and phones and thermals all dying at once.

A massive Bigfoot walking out from behind Natalie's truck and disappearing into thin air, witnessed only by her. Martin Groves driving two squatches out of base camp with a stick. Jim hunkered down in his tent the next night while these things pushed in on the hard campers and left the soft tents alone.Brian also covers Natalie's work at the Emmaus Asylum in Missouri and the perfect track she found there, her experience at the Ocala postage stamp where the government bought up land next to a river that whoops and screams across at night, the filming work in the Smokies that turned into the documentary The Vanished with Adam Davis, and a long discussion of the rake creatures that came out of that ridge line at LBL.

Natalie's view on these creatures has shifted dramatically over the last year of fieldwork, and Brian asks her directly whether what she's seen has changed how she thinks about the subject. Her answer is honest, and it's the kind of answer that ought to give every flesh and blood researcher something to chew on.Find Natalie on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube under Natalie S. Smearman. Relic Films Media is on the same platforms.

Their talk show Beyond the Ordinary is on YouTube. Natalie will be at the Townsend Bigfoot Festival on May first and second, the Ocala Bigfoot Conference on June thirteenth, and the Gatlinburg Bigfoot Conference on July twenty-fifth. The Vanished will be streaming on Tubi, Roku, and Amazon. Brian's full long-form interview with Natalie is available on Sasquatch Odyssey.

You can reach Brian directly at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the...

Part Five of The Corridor series. The finale. If you haven't listened to Parts One through Four, stop here and go back. This one doesn't land the way it's supposed to without the stories that came before it.A retired land surveyor named Gene heard the first four episodes of this series and realized he'd walked the exact ground every witness was describing.

 In the spring of nineteen eighty-seven, Gene and his partner Bill spent three and a half weeks surveying an eight-thousand-acre tract spanning the Georgia-Tennessee line for a timber company. That tract contains every encounter location from the previous four episodes.

 Every single one. Gene's field notes document tree breaks along the ridgeline with spiral fractures at six to nine feet, barefoot impressions measuring sixteen to seventeen inches in creek mud, an unusual sound-dampening effect on the valley floor that both surveyors noticed independently, and three limestone cave openings along the western face of the ridge producing airflow consistent with a significant underground passage system.

The timber company ordered those caves excluded from the survey without legal explanation. Gene also recorded an unidentified nighttime vocalization on a microcassette tape that he dismissed as a coyote for thirty-seven years until he heard witnesses in this series describe nearly identical sounds. When Gene overlaid his nineteen eighty-seven plat maps with the encounter locations from all four previous episodes, everything fell inside his survey boundary, and the three cave exclusions sat along the ridge between them like stations on a line.

Gene calls this his confession because he had the map, the data, and the physical evidence sitting in a cardboard box in his closet for nearly four decades and never showed it to anyone.



Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is the fourth episode in the five-part series The Corridor, following five independent encounter accounts across five decades along the same north-south ridgeline running from the Cohutta Wilderness in northern Georgia into the mountains of eastern Tennessee.Part Four marks a sharp departure from the first three episodes. Where Herschel, Karen, and Marcus each experienced gradual encounters that unfolded over days or weeks in remote backcountry settings, this story happens in a matter of seconds on a public road with a van full of witnesses.In the summer of twenty-eleven, a youth pastor named David was driving a fifteen-passenger church van loaded with teenagers home from a summer retreat on a two-lane highway that cuts through the valley at the heart of the corridor.

It was late and most of the kids were asleep. Something stepped out of the tree line and into the road directly in the path of the van. It was not a deer and it was not a bear. The van's headlights struck it at mid-torso, meaning whatever walked onto that road was tall enough that a beam mounted two and a half feet off the ground was hitting it at the chest. The van made impact hard enough to spin the vehicle off the road and into a ditch. Airbags deployed. When David climbed out to assess the damage, the thing was standing at the edge of the tree line watching the van. It did not appear injured. It did not flee. It stood there, then withdrew into the timber on its own terms.The episode is built around multiple perspectives.

David provides the primary account, describing the seconds before and after the impact and what he saw at the tree line. Two of the teenagers who were in the van that night, now adults in their late twenties, independently corroborated his description of the figure's size, posture, and behavior. A local tow truck driver who responded to the call adds a detail none of the others knew — he had pulled three other vehicles out of the same quarter-mile stretch of highway within the previous year, each with similar front-end damage consistent with striking something large and upright at road level.The episode connects back to the series through geography and behavior.

The highway where the impact occurred crosses through the same valley described by Herschel in Part One, overlooked by the fire road Karen maintained in Part Two, and visible from the ridge saddle where Marcus observed the clearcut in Part Three.

Despite the sudden and violent nature of this encounter compared to the slow escalations in earlier episodes, the behavioral pattern holds — the thing did not panic, did not run, and appeared to control the moment of withdrawal the same way it controlled the moment of contact in every previous story.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is the third episode in the five-part series The Corridor, tracing five independent encounter accounts across five decades along the same ridgeline running from northern Georgia into eastern Tennessee.

In Part Three, a competitive bowhunter named Marcus shares an account from late September of two thousand three. Marcus was scouting a clearcut in the Cherokee National Forest from a ridge saddle at about thirty-two hundred feet when he observed something step off a stump at the far end of the clearing and walk upright through waist-high brush for over two hundred yards. He watched through a Swarovski ATS 80 spotting scope at approximately four hundred yards for nearly four and a half minutes, timing the observation at three minutes and forty-seven seconds on his watch.

He documented the subject's estimated height at seven to seven and a half feet based on vegetation reference, a stride of four and a half to five feet, uniformly dark brown coloring, disproportionately long arms ending near mid-thigh, a barrel-shaped torso with no visible neck, and a sustained bipedal gait with coordinated arm swing and no loss of balance. A group of whitetail does in the clearcut reacted to the subject before Marcus noticed it, freezing and orienting north simultaneously.

Three days later Marcus returned and mounted a Moultrie trail camera on a tree at the edge of the clearcut. After seven days he retrieved the SD card and found two hundred and nineteen images. Among them were two sequences showing an upright figure in the clearcut at night, with infrared eyeshine visible in the frames. One sequence showed the subject covering an estimated twenty to twenty-five feet between two frames taken one second apart.

The episode follows Marcus through twenty years of attempting to explain what he observed and what the camera captured, including his systematic elimination of bear, person, hallucination, and hoax as explanations, and the responses he received when he eventually shared the evidence with his wife and his brother, a state wildlife biologist who told him he could not identify what was in the images.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is the second episode in a five-part series called The Corridor, following five separate encounter accounts submitted by five unconnected people across five different decades, all describing experiences along the same north-south ridgeline running from the Cohutta Wilderness in northern Georgia up through the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

In Part Two, a woman named Karen shares an account from the summer of nineteen ninety-four. Karen was a seasonal employee with the United States Forest Service, assigned to maintain a decommissioned fire road along a ridgeline in the eastern part of Polk County, Tennessee. The road had been built decades earlier for timber access and fire suppression but had fallen into disuse, and Karen's job was to keep it from washing out entirely — clearing drains, cutting brush, removing blowdowns. She worked alone, driving a Forest Service pickup to the ridge each morning and spending six to eight hours on the road before heading home.

 The nearest paved road was about seven miles out by dirt track, and radio reception on the ridge was unreliable at best.Over the course of three weeks, Karen documented a series of findings that she logged in a field notebook with times, coordinates, and measurements. During her first week she discovered multiple hardwood trees snapped between six and nine feet above the ground, some with tops wedged into adjacent trees and at least one with a spiral fracture indicating the trunk had been twisted rather than broken by wind or ice. In her second week she began encountering a powerful organic smell at the same GPS coordinates on the road every afternoon, arriving consistently around four o'clock and dissipating within ten to fifteen minutes.

At a creek crossing near the smell location she found bipedal tracks in soft mud measuring nineteen inches from heel to toe and roughly seven inches across the ball, with visible toe impressions and no claw marks, spaced in a walking pattern with an estimated stride of four and a half feet. In her third week she discovered handprints pressed into a clay bank alongside the road — large, with long fingers and a clear opposing thumb, significantly bigger than her own hand.The episode builds to the night Karen got a flat tire on the road after dark during her final week on the assignment. Alone, seven miles from pavement, with no cell phone and no radio reception, she knelt beside the truck with a lug wrench and a headlamp to change the tire.

While she was working, she heard bipedal footsteps approaching on the gravel road from the north — steady, heavy, two-legged. The footsteps stopped approximately forty feet away and then began pacing back and forth across the road for roughly ten minutes. When Karen stood up, the footsteps stopped. Moments later she heard a single long exhale from the timber on the uphill side of the road, originating from above her own head height and close enough to hear clearly. She got in the truck and drove out on the spare without looking back.

he episode also covers Karen's thirty years of silence about the experience, her decision to finally share her account after hearing similar stories on the show, and the behavioral parallels between her encounter and Herschel's account from Part One — including the gradual escalation over days rather than a single sudden event, the feeling of being watched before anything overt occurred, the biological silence that accompanied the closest contact, and the sense that whatever was present controlled the terms and timing of the encounter.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot...

This is the first episode in a five-part series called The Corridor. Over the past eight months, five separate people submitted encounter stories to the show, each from a different decade, none of them connected to one another in any way. When their accounts were mapped, every one of them described experiences along the same north-south ridgeline running from the Cohutta Wilderness in northern Georgia up through the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

A narrow valley cuts between two parallel ridges through the heart of this stretch, and every submitter described it independently — the terrain, the quiet, the feeling that something about the place isn't right. This series lays out their stories in chronological order, beginning in nineteen seventy-eight and ending in the present day, and lets the overlapping details speak for themselves.

In Part One, a retired carpet millworker named Herschel shares an account he kept private for forty-six years. 

In the fall of nineteen seventy-eight, Herschel and three hunting buddies leased a parcel in the southern Cohutta through a timber company and set up a deer camp on a bench overlooking the valley at about twenty-eight hundred feet. The first two nights were uneventful. On the third morning, Herschel woke to find the camp rearranged overnight — both Coleman coolers relocated without damage, and a field-dressed doe removed from the hanging pole and placed carefully in the center of the fire ring, untouched and unharmed.

Over the following nights, the encounters escalated. Wood-on-wood knocking echoed from the valley below, answered by identical knocking from the ridge above in a coordinated call-and-response pattern. Bipedal footsteps passed through camp close enough for one of the men to feel the ground vibration through his boots and camp chair. 

On the final night, Herschel aimed his flashlight into the hemlocks at the edge of camp and was met with reddish eyeshine at approximately seven and a half to eight feet, while a deep vocalization from the ridge behind him produced a sound he felt physically in his chest.

On the morning they broke camp, Herschel discovered a line of creek stones arranged at the camp's edge, evenly spaced and pointing due north along the ridgeline. The episode introduces the four men who were present — Herschel, Dale, Pete, and Jimbo — and provides context for their backgrounds, their familiarity with the woods, and their complete lack of interest in or knowledge of the paranormal prior to this experience.

It also details Herschel's solo return to the site in nineteen eighty, where he found additional tree breaks extending north along the ridge in a line, and stood on the crest looking into a corridor of unbroken forest stretching as far as he could see. 

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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In the summer of 1985 a military family moved onto a hundred-acre farm in Dent County, Missouri, deep in the Ozarks, backed up against thousands of acres of national forest. Their twelve-year-old son spent the first weeks exploring the property and felt completely at home in the woods until the day something changed.

A heavy sense of being watched. Massive canine tracks along the creek that dwarfed anything he'd ever seen. Vocalizations at night that carried across the valley and sounded like nothing he could identify. His father dismissed it at first, but when the family's goats started disappearing and the evidence pointed to a large, aggressive predator tearing through fencing and dragging animals into the timber, he couldn't ignore it anymore.

The situation escalated through the summer until one September night, under the glare of floodlights, the entire family stood at their living room window and watched something step out of the tree line that none of them have ever been able to explain.

This is Kevin's story, told for the first time in forty years.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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Five people. Five decades. Five different parts of the country. None of them know each other, and none of them were looking for what they found. What connects them isn't the details of their encounters. It's what happened afterward. Every one of them walked away from something they'd done their entire lives because of what they saw.

Dale was twenty-three years old, hunting elk on the Olympic Peninsula in the fall of nineteen seventy-eight, when something stepped out of the fog below him that he couldn't explain. He put his rifle in the safe that day and didn't go back to the woods for twenty-six years.

Karen was solo camping in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia in ninety-three when something visited her tent in the middle of the night and then watched her from the ridge the next morning. She hasn't camped or hiked alone since.

Marcus and his buddy Travis were on a canoe trip in Minnesota's Boundary Waters in two thousand four when something circled their camp in the dark for ten minutes and then showed itself on a rock shelf the following morning in full daylight. 

Two witnesses. Same thing. Neither of them does overnights anymore.The fourth account is different. It comes from a man named Michael, telling the story his Uncle Jesse shared with him at a kitchen table on Thanksgiving in two thousand one. Jesse was a logger in southern Oregon in eighty-five who showed up early to a job site and found four-hundred-pound logs scattered like kindling, a ten-inch hemlock snapped in half, and something standing at the edge of his flashlight beam that looked annoyed he was there.

Jesse carried a forty-four magnum in the woods for the rest of his life. He never told more than three people what happened, and Michael is the last one alive who heard it.The final account comes from Tamara, a trail runner in Arkansas who was training for a hundred-mile ultra in twenty-sixteen when she saw something walking upright through the timber along the Buffalo River.

She describes the most expressive face of all five encounters, and the look it gave her, brief and dismissive, changed her relationship with the outdoors permanently. She hasn't run a trail since.These are the stories that stay with you. Not because they're dramatic, but because the people who lived them are still carrying the weight.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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This is the tenth and final part of the series from Garrett, a residential contractor who spent eight years on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina.In spring 2021, while re-pointing the root cellar walls, Garrett discovers a hidden cavity Earl built into the original foundation in 1971. Inside is a sealed plastic bundle containing a leather-bound journal, a hand-drawn map, and a letter addressed to Garrett by name.

The letter explains that Earl believed the creatures could hear spoken conversations and that sealing the information in stone was the only way to pass it along without violating the silence he'd maintained for over four decades.Earl's journal covers 1972 through 1981. The critical entries describe two visits to a ravine roughly a quarter mile northeast of the cabin in the national forest.

In fall 1972, Earl followed a track line into a narrow slot canyon and found three worn sleeping depressions, organized bone piles, and evidence of long-term habitation. In January 1973, he returned and discovered the beds had been recently used, with melted snow and shed hair. Deeper in the ravine, under a natural rock overhang, he found a curated collection of polished creek stones arranged by size, bundled stripped sticks, and mineral specimens including a standing quartz crystal point. Earl never returned and never told Vernon, Reba, or anyone. Following Earl's map on January 15, 2022, Garrett hikes to the ravine and confirms every detail. 

The beds are still in use with recently melted snow. The bone pile persists. The collection on the shelf has grown over fifty years to include more stones, sticks, and additional mineral specimens. On his way out, Garrett finds one of the creatures standing at the ravine entrance. It watches him approach from a hundred and fifty yards, and at twenty yards he stops.

 The creature shifts to the side, pressing against the rock wall to clear the passage. Garrett walks past at four feet, the closest encounter of the series, and exits the ravine. He connects the river stone left on the bluff sitting slab in 2016 to the collection, understanding it as a deliberate gift.Garrett sold the cabin in 2023 after Bowie's death at age thirteen and moved to Asheville with Ruby.

He sold to a young couple from Boone without disclosing what lives on the ridge. This final episode closes the ten-part series.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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This is part nine of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina.On September 21, 2019, Garrett and his longtime friend Cliff hike to a ridge shoulder above the property at dusk to deliberately attempt wood knocks and a call blast. Cliff brings a baseball bat for striking and Garrett brings an audio recorder with a directional microphone.

They set up about two hundred yards south of the bluff where Garrett had previously observed three creatures on the talus slope.Cliff's first three bat strikes on a dead oak produce a response within two minutes. A single heavy knock from the north, toward the bluff, at roughly a hundred and fifty yards. A second round of knocking draws two responses from the north and a third from the east, down the Bishop Creek drainage, confirming at least two separate individuals bracketing their position. Cliff identifies the two sources by their different acoustic signatures.Garrett then plays a Sierra Sounds vocalization through a Bluetooth speaker.

After nearly four minutes of silence, the ridge produces three simultaneous responses. A sustained rising vocalization from the north at close range. A rapid series of barking tonal bursts from the east, closer than the previous knock. And a massive tree strike from the south, directly on their primary exit route back to the cabin.

With three sides covered and only the western downslope open, Garrett directs their descent through trailless hardwood forest toward the meadow. Something parallels them on the north side, tapping position knocks coordinated with answering taps from the ridge behind them. Halfway down, both men experience strong infrasound, a subsonic vibration felt in the chest, teeth, and inner ear that produces disorientation and acute anxiety. A heavy branch snap from forty yards confirms proximity. At the tree line, all sounds and the infrasound cease simultaneously, and Garrett and Cliff cross the meadow to the cabin.

Cliff tells Garrett he won't return to the property after dark and drives home the next morning. Garrett retrieves the recorder the following day and finds seven hours of post-encounter audio including knocking at 11:42 PM, a low vocalization at 1:15 AM, and clear heavy footsteps passing within ten feet of the recorder at 3:27 AM.

The series concludes with Story Ten, in which Garrett discovers what Earl left behind and finally understands why the creatures have allowed him to stay.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part eight of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. On the evening of November 9, 2018, a major storm system stalls over the mountains, producing over thirty hours of continuous heavy rain. The power goes out at 4:17 PM Saturday afternoon.

With the generator dead from moisture in the magneto, Garrett settles in for a night of oil lamps and firelight. Both dogs have been agitated since the barometric pressure began dropping, with Ruby pacing a tight patrol route between the windows and back door. At 9:14 PM, both dogs snap to alert facing the front wall in complete silence. Garrett hears the porch planks creak in sequence as something crosses the porch and leans against the front wall. For forty-two minutes, he listens to deep, rhythmic breathing transmitted through the poplar logs. At 9:56, the creature walks back across the porch and descends the steps.

Twenty-six minutes of silence follow before footsteps approach the back of the cabin from the ridge side. The creature takes up a second position against the back wall, directly behind the bedroom. When Garrett investigates with a lamp, he finds two massive wet handprints pressed flat against the bedroom window glass from the outside. A low chuffing sound accompanies the breathing from the back wall. At 10:41, the front doorknob turns approximately fifteen degrees and holds before slowly returning to position, indicating a second individual at the front door while the first remains at the bedroom window. The cabin fills with a heavy musk odor penetrating through the rain-soaked logs.At 11:20, a small impact sounds on the front porch.

All activity ceases at 11:34, and Garrett hears footsteps receding toward the ridge. The following morning he documents compression marks on the porch, a clear track line in the mud behind the cabin with prints measuring sixteen to seventeen inches, handprint photographs on the window glass, and a smooth creek stone placed on the porch directly in front of the door.

The series continues with Story Nine, in which Garrett and Cliff deliberately attempt contact from the ridge

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part seven of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina.In late April 2018, an elderly woman named Opal crosses Bishop Creek and arrives at Garrett's cabin. She and her late husband Vernon lived on twenty acres across the creek for fifty-one years.

Vernon spent thirty years with the Forest Service and documented the creatures along the Bishop Creek corridor from 1963 until shortly before his death in 2004. He and Earl were friends who compared notes for years.Opal shares her own mimicry encounter from October 1974. Alone with her two young sons while Vernon was away, she heard his voice calling from the tree line, then heard her own voice calling the boys' names from the opposite direction. Her six-year-old grabbed her hand and broke the spell.

Vernon and Earl later concluded the mimicry was a standardized assessment the creatures ran on every new resident of the corridor. Earl got his in 1971. Garrett got his in 2015. Same test. Same playbook. Fifty years apart.She recounts Vernon's close encounter from February 1976, when he surprised one of the creatures drinking from Bishop Creek at twenty feet. It stood to over eight feet, screamed at a volume that shook snow from the branches, then snapped an eight-inch hemlock clean through at chest height.

The broken tree fell across the trail between them. Vernon ran. The creature watched him go.Opal gives Garrett seven boxes of Vernon's field records spanning 1963 to 2003, including an annotated USGS topo map showing the full four-mile creek corridor, knock zones, structure sites, den areas, and a four-thousand-acre circuit the creatures orbit seasonally. Vernon's notes document a juvenile sighting in 1991 and conclude with a final entry expressing his belief that the creatures assess humans individually and choose restraint based on decades of observation.

Opal explains that Earl kept silent because he believed the creatures listened to conversations and that talking about them openly would break the arrangement. She warns that the generational credit from Earl's silence is running out as newer individuals write their own terms. After Opal moves to Morganton in June, Garrett finds her abandoned property still being visited — worn trails, folded chicken wire, removed tomato plants, and handprints on the window ledge. The series continues with Story Eight, in which Garrett and Cliff deliberately try to make contact from the ridge.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part six of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. In the spring of 2017, Garrett adopted a young shepherd mix named Ruby from a gas station near Chimney Rock. 

She bonded with Bowie within weeks and joined him on nightly dusk patrols of the meadow, adopting his boundary rules around the property without being taught. On October 14, 2017, both dogs froze mid-patrol, then bolted into the eastern tree line in pursuit of something Garrett couldn't see. 

He followed with a flashlight as something paralleled him through the trees, matching his pace at a fixed distance. He found Bowie wedged under a fallen tree in a blowdown clearing, trembling and unresponsive. Ruby was forty yards further upslope, frozen in front of four stick structures built in a depression between two beech trees, including a conical teepee of stripped branches and a cluster of living saplings braided together and secured with bark-strip knots.

While Garrett stood with Ruby, branch snaps began from three positions behind them, closing in a coordinated circle. He walked south through the formation, and the snapping stopped simultaneously. The circle opened. He retrieved Bowie and descended with both dogs pressed against his legs. During the walk out, Ruby stopped once, turned east, and delivered a single recognition bark into the darkness. The following sounds stopped.

Both dogs recovered within days but permanently changed their patrol, stopping at the tree line every evening and refusing to enter the forest again.

The series continues with Story Seven, in which a woman from across the creek arrives at the property with information connecting Earl, Reba, and the reason the creatures have never harmed Garrett.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part five of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. During his first visit to the property in 2014, the previous owner Earl pointed out a rocky prominence on the ridgeline about half a mile northeast of the cabin and warned Garrett never to go there after dark, offering no explanation.

By the spring of 2016, with two years of escalating encounters behind him and the nightly knocking returning from that same direction, Garrett decided to hike to the bluff at dusk to understand the terrain the creatures were using as a corridor.On the evening of June 18, 2016, Garrett climbed to the overlook alone. He found a granite shelf with a commanding view of three counties and a direct sightline to his cabin below.

The margins of the bluff held overlapping tracks in the soil from numerous visits across an extended period. Stone arrangements along the eastern edge, including stacked rocks and a semicircle around a flat sitting slab, indicated habitual occupation rather than a casual stopover.As the sun set, Garrett heard stone-on-stone clacking from the talus slope below the cliff. A large upright creature stepped from behind a boulder about forty feet below him. He describes a conical head with a sagittal crest, a massively built torso, and a complete absence of fear as it looked straight up at him.

A second, smaller creature appeared on a ledge fifty yards along the cliff face, striking a stone against the rock wall. A third was heard but never seen, producing a sustained vocalization from the tree line that the other two turned toward simultaneously.Garrett retreated from the bluff in near-dark, fell once on the descent, and returned to the cabin shaken but with a new clarity about the scale of what he was dealing with.

Over three subsequent visits that summer, he found the stone arrangements rearranged each time and eventually discovered a smooth, water-polished creek stone placed on the exact slab where he'd been sitting, carried from Bishop Creek half a mile below.Earl passed away in September 2016.

Standing at his grave on the property, Garrett reflected on the half-truths and coded warnings Earl had offered across two years and wished the old man had simply said what he knew. The series continues with Story Six, in which Garrett's dogs chase something into the woods and don't come back.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part four of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina.After the vocal mimicry encounter in October 2015, Garrett pulled back from the back acreage and spent the late fall and early winter in a contracted routine close to the cabin. The knocking went quiet by mid-December, and he assumed the creature had withdrawn deeper into the national forest for the cold months.

On the night of January 8, 2016, a storm dropped nine inches of fresh snow. Garrett woke the next morning to a pristine landscape and discovered a line of enormous bipedal tracks leading from the northeast tree line to the cabin in a straight, undeviating path. The tracks circled the full perimeter of the structure, pausing at the southwest corner directly outside his bedroom window and again at the back door, where handprints in the snow on the log wall indicated something had leaned against the cabin with both palms splayed.

The trail then crossed the meadow to Bishop Creek, where the thing entered the water and vanished without leaving an exit trail on either bank.Garrett called his friend Cliff, who drove up from Gastonia and spent the afternoon examining and measuring the evidence. Individual prints measured seventeen inches long and punched through the full snowpack into frozen ground.

Handprints beside the back door extended beyond the span of Cliff's outstretched hand. The stride averaged fifty-four inches at a walking pace.That evening, after Cliff left, Garrett went out to recheck the tracks and discovered a second set of prints paralleling his own bootprints from that morning. Something had returned and retraced his exact route around the cabin. At the bedroom window, the new tracks stepped even closer than the overnight set, and knuckle impressions on the windowsill indicated something had leaned forward to look inside. After midnight, Garrett heard four sequential wood strikes descending from the ridge toward the cabin, each closer and louder than the last. The final strike, from roughly thirty-five yards away, rattled the window glass. 

At dawn, he found a fresh trail ending at a massive red oak near the cabin, its bark shattered at eight feet by a single blow.Garrett reflects on the realization that the winter visits had likely been occurring all along, invisible without snow, and that the creature's nightly routine included circling the cabin and observing him while he slept.

The series continues with Story Five, in which Garrett hikes to a bluff overlook that Earl warned him never to visit after dark.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part three of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina.Garrett introduces his brother Wade, a Marine veteran six years his senior, now living in Winston-Salem with his wife Colleen and two kids.

He describes the bond they built during childhood cabin trips in the Blue Ridge, anchored by a pivotal hike near Blowing Rock that cemented Wade's voice as one of the most emotionally significant sounds in Garrett's life.On October 11, 2015, while resting at the bottom of a ravine during a routine boundary walk, Garrett hears Wade's voice call his name from upslope. The voice is a perfect acoustic match.

His dog Bowie reacts with immediate fear. A second call follows, and when Garrett turns south to leave, his name is called from in front of him while "Over here" comes simultaneously from behind, boxing him in from two directions within seconds of each other. Garrett scrambles up the western ravine wall as the voice follows, closer and more insistent each time. After reaching the ridgetop, he experiences a sudden total loss of spatial orientation on land he has walked dozens of times.

 He reorients only by listening for the sound of Bishop Creek and following it back to the cabin. At the cabin, he finds a single sixteen-and-three-quarter-inch footprint pressed into damp clay beside his back door, facing the threshold, left while he was in the ravine. He photographs it from seventeen angles and documents the measurements.

Garrett reflects on the emotional precision of the mimicry, the sustained close-range observation required to replicate a specific human voice, and what appears to be a coordinated event — a luring attempt in the ravine happening while something else visited the cabin.

The series continues with Story Four, in which tracks in fresh snow reveal how often the creature visits when Garrett believes it is gone.



Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part two of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor living on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. In Story One, Garrett described his first summer on the property, including months of wood knocking from the ridge, the discovery of seventeen-inch bipedal tracks, and a visual encounter with a massive upright figure at the edge of his meadow on September 27, 2014.

Story Two picks up in the spring of 2015 after a quiet winter during which the knocking went silent. During a visit to the property's previous owner, Earl, at an assisted living facility in Marion, Garrett mentions his plans to put in a garden. Earl's reaction is subdued, noting only that his late wife Reba had tried a garden on the same ground in 1978 and hadn't kept it long because it "wasn't worth the trouble." Garrett breaks a thirty-by-forty-foot plot between the cabin and the workshop and plants tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, squash, sweet corn, and sweet potatoes. 

By early June, the garden is thriving. Then produce begins disappearing overnight. Only ripe fruit and vegetables are taken, cleanly separated from the vine or stalk with no mess, no tracks, and no damage to the surrounding plants. Green and immature produce is left untouched every time.  Garrett's countermeasures fail one by one. Motion-activated floodlights are avoided entirely. A battery-powered radio left playing all night is found turned off in the morning, its power switch deliberately slid to the off position. 

A trail camera repositioned three times produces only one significant image: a close-up infrared photograph of a large, dark-skinned, hair-covered hand pressed against the lens at 3:17 AM.In late June, Garrett observes the visitor directly from a workshop window. He watches a tall, upright figure enter the garden from the eastern tree line, move between the rows without disturbing anything, and harvest tomatoes, corn, and green beans with practiced, selective precision over the course of about seven minutes before retreating into the forest.

The story culminates in mid-August when Garrett is awakened at 3:30 AM by something breathing against the back wall of his cabin. 

He listens as it moves along the wall, stops outside the kitchen window, taps the glass three times at different heights, then scratches four parallel lines into the logs at the northeast corner before departing toward the ridge. In the morning, he photographs fingertip smudges on the window and fresh claw marks scored into the aged hardwood. Garrett decides not to plant a garden the following year, recognizing that the garden collapsed the distance between himself and the creature and brought it directly to his cabin walls. 

The series continues with Story Three, in which something in the woods mimics his brother's voice and calls his name from two directions at once.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part one of a ten-part series from a single witness named Garrett, a residential contractor from Gastonia, North Carolina, who recounts a decade of escalating encounters on one remote mountain property in the southern Appalachians.

Garrett has been listening to Sasquatch Odyssey, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, Disturbing History, and The Guilty Files for over two years and asked that his experiences be shared in order. After losing his mother in February 2014, Garrett used his inheritance to purchase a forty-seven-acre property and hand-built cabin from an eighty-two-year-old man named Earl, whose wife Reba had passed the previous autumn after more than four decades together on the land. 

Garrett moved in during May 2014 with his red heeler mix, Bowie, and began renovating the cabin while settling into the quiet of mountain life. Within three weeks, he started hearing sharp wood knocks from the ridgeline northeast of the cabin each evening, arriving consistently within a twenty-minute window after sunset. 

He logged the sounds for weeks, tracking their timing, rhythm, and direction, and noted that they were occasionally answered from entirely different positions in the surrounding hollow. Bowie's behavior shifted noticeably during this stretch, refusing to cross the northern tree line and relocating his sleeping spot to a hallway position between the bedroom and the back door. In late July 2014, Garrett knocked back using a piece of oak firewood against a hickory tree and received matching patterns from the ridge within seconds.

 After a heavy rainstorm in early August, he found a line of seventeen-and-a-quarter-inch bipedal tracks pressed into clay along a game trail leading from the ridge toward his cabin, each showing five individually articulated toes and a defined arch at a depth suggesting several hundred pounds behind every step.

The story reaches its peak on the evening of September 27, 2014, when Garrett spotted a massive upright figure standing between two white oaks at the meadow's edge. He describes a broad, hair-covered form estimated between seven and eight feet tall with coloring close to dark walnut bark.

The figure watched him briefly, turned, and stepped into the forest with a single heavy footfall. Later that night, he heard a deep, sustained vocalization from the direction it had gone, unlike anything he had ever encountered in the woods.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

A listener named Caleb from Hazard, Kentucky shares the story his late grandfather Harold carried in silence for nearly sixty years. Harold was a tobacco farmer in Perry County who worked a piece of bottomland along Pigeon Roost Creek that had been in the family since before the Civil War.

In the fall of 1962, at twenty-nine years old, he began noticing things he couldn't explain on the steep, heavily timbered ridge behind his property — fence posts yanked from the ground, his unflappable mule refusing to approach the tree line, and massive bare footprints pressed into the first frost of the season.

On the evening of November 21, 1962, he saw a towering figure standing motionless between two cedars at the top of the ridge, backlit by the last light of the day. What followed was nearly a decade of escalating encounters that included rocks thrown onto the barn roof from over a hundred yards away, a gut-churning stench near the creek crossing, wood knocks echoing across the ridgeline at night, and vocalizations unlike anything he'd ever heard in a lifetime of hunting those mountains. One night in November 1963, something circled the farmhouse on two legs for close to forty-five minutes while the family slept and the dogs cowered in total silence beneath the porch.

Harold saw the creatures up close on multiple occasions — once at roughly forty yards near the creek in 1966, where he described a reddish-brown, hair-covered figure standing over seven feet tall with unmistakably human hands and a flat, dark face that regarded him with what he called a look of consideration rather than aggression. In October 1968, he watched two of them walking single file through the timber, a large dark one and a smaller, lighter companion, and realized he wasn't dealing with a lone animal but a family that had been living on that ridge longer than his own people had been farming the valley below it. Harold never called them Bigfoot or Sasquatch.

He used the old Appalachian word — boogers — and he framed the experience not as a monster story but as the unsettling reality of sharing a hollow with something intelligent that knew everything about his family while remaining almost entirely unseen. By 1970, after losing calves from the lower pasture and enduring years of nighttime activity, he made the painful decision to sell the back forty acres that had been in the family for over a century. He told his children the soil was played out. He told only his grandson and his brother the truth. Family lore traces the presence on Briar Ridge back even further, to Harold's great-uncle Fess in the 1870s and his grandfather Jeremiah, who homesteaded the property after the Civil War and warned his children about "the old ones" on the ridge.

A local folk healer named Effie, whose grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, told Harold that her people had a name for the creatures that translated roughly to "the watchers" or "the ones who stay hidden," and that they'd been in those mountains since the beginning.

Harold's last sighting came in 1982, when one crossed the gravel road in front of his truck at dawn without so much as a glance in his direction. He died on March 7, 2019, at eighty-six years old, in the same house where those footsteps had circled decades before. Caleb still visits the farm.

The ridge still stands behind it, dense and dark and unchanged. And he's convinced that whatever his grandfather saw is still up there, watching with the same patient intelligence it always has.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal...

Tonight, we head to the dark banks of the Pascagoula River and into one of the most chilling and enduring UFO cases in American history.

On October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were just two working men from Mississippi trying to enjoy a quiet night of fishing after a long day at the shipyard. What happened next would change both of their lives forever. According to their account, a strange craft descended near the riverbank, three terrifying beings emerged, and the men were taken aboard and examined before being returned to shore.

What could have been dismissed as just another unbelievable story took on a life of its own when deputies secretly recorded the two men alone in an interrogation room, expecting to catch them in a lie. Instead, what they captured was raw fear. Real fear. The kind you cannot fake.In this episode, we dig deep into the Pascagoula Incident from every angle. We explore who Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were before that night, why their backgrounds matter, and how the encounter unfolded on that warm October evening in southern Mississippi.

We walk through the now-famous secret recording, the law enforcement response, military involvement at Keesler Air Force Base, the wave of regional UFO sightings surrounding the event, and the decades of scrutiny, pain, ridicule, and unanswered questions that followed both men for the rest of their lives.We also examine the parts of this story that continue to haunt researchers and skeptics alike: the bizarre and uniquely described entities, the consistency of the witnesses’ core account, the later corroborating testimony from additional witnesses, and the emotional toll that never truly left either man. Charles Hickson spent the rest of his life speaking openly about what he believed happened. Calvin Parker spent much of his life trying to escape it, only later returning to tell the full story in his own words.

More than fifty years later, the Pascagoula Incident still resists easy explanation. It remains one of the most talked-about and debated close encounter cases ever recorded, not because it offers neat answers, but because it leaves us with a deeper and more uncomfortable question: what if something truly unexplained happened on that riverbank that night?This is the story of two men, one impossible encounter, and the burden of being believed.

If this episode grabs you, take time to listen to the original secret sheriff’s department recording for yourself. It is one of the most unsettling pieces of audio in UFO history, and it may be the very thing that keeps this case alive all these years later.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

A retired United States Forest Service firefighter is breaking thirty-five years of silence to share what he and his entire Helitack crew witnessed during the devastating California fires of 1987.Kyle— as he asks to be called— was a thirty-two-year-old veteran wildland firefighter when his nine-man crew was helicoptered into a remote drainage in the Mendocino National Forest ahead of an advancing fire front.

Their mission was to cut a firebreak along an isolated ridge and spend three days in some of the most rugged terrain in Northern California.What they encountered there changed every one of them. It started with footprints in a creek bed—massive, clearly defined humanoid tracks in three distinct sizes, suggesting a group moving through the area.

Then came the tree structures. Saplings twisted and snapped eight to ten feet off the ground with a force none of the men could replicate, arranged around flattened bedding areas saturated with an overwhelming musky odor.

s darkness fell on their first night, the forest came alive.Bone-rattling howls echoed across the ridges. Rhythmic wood knocks circled their camp. Then came a rapid series of clicks and guttural chatter—two voices communicating with a cadence that sounded disturbingly like language. Rocks began landing in their camp from the darkness, thrown with precision but never striking anyone. And then the eyes appeared. Pale yellowish-white eyes glowing from the tree line… eight feet or more above the ground. On the second night, one of the creatures stepped fully into view.

Every man on the crew saw it.A massive figure—eight and a half to nine feet tall—covered in dark hair, with enormous shoulders, long powerful arms, and a broad face dominated by intelligent eyes studying the firefighters with unmistakable awareness.

Over the next three days, the crew found thirteen-inch handprints pressed into the dirt along their fire line. They watched juveniles observing them from the rocks above—only to be called back into the timber by deep, guttural parental warnings. What they were witnessing looked unmistakably like a family.

When the helicopter arrived to extract them on the final morning, all six creatures stood openly on a distant ridge, silhouetted against the smoky sky. The large male stood in front.
The female held a smaller one close.

The juveniles stood beside them. A family… watching as the firefighters lifted away and the forest burned behind them.The crew made a pact that day to never speak about what they saw. And every one of them kept that promise. Until now. 

Kyle writes in at seventy-one years old because time is running out… and hearing other first responders share their encounters on this show finally gave him the courage to tell his story.He says he has always wondered if that family survived the fires. And he sincerely hopes they did.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In this episode, Brian shares an email from a military veteran who served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and wants the world to hear a story that's been buried for three decades. Matt, as he asks to be called, writes in about a confession made to him by a fellow soldier he calls Joe during a night of drinking while the two were stateside between deployments. Joe revealed that in the mid nineteen nineties, long before the war on terror, he was part of a small specialized team dispatched into an unnamed national park after two hikers went missing.

The male hiker's body was found twenty five feet up in a tree with his neck broken. The female hiker was never found. What search teams did find were massive humanoid footprints ranging from sixteen inches to nearly twenty three inches long pressed deep into the soil along a remote creek drainage. Joe's team was briefed by an unnamed civilian and given a single objective: locate and eliminate the creatures responsible.

What followed was a harrowing two day hunt through old growth forest that culminated in the killing of four creatures, including a female, a juvenile estimated at around five feet tall, and a massive adult male standing over eight feet tall that charged the team and injured two soldiers before being brought down. Within hours of the kills, an unmarked black helicopter arrived carrying a civilian recovery team that bagged the bodies and flew them out to an unknown location. The soldiers were debriefed, told the mission never happened, and ordered to never speak of it again. Matt believes every word Joe told him that night, and he wants you to hear it.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world, and they've been collecting secrets for longer than human memory reaches. Tonight we go into the old green dark — the deep, cathedral-quiet forest of the Appalachian chain — and we don't come back out until we've walked through six of the most haunting, bone-deep stories this ancient landscape has ever produced.

We start in Hancock County, Tennessee, in 1923, where a sixty-one-year-old farmer named Elias Combs runs his trapline in the pre-dawn dark and comes face to face with the Wampus Cat — the Cherokee creature known as Ewah, a being caught forever between woman and beast, whose eyes burn yellow-green and whose stare can strip a man of his mind. Three shots from a Winchester.

Not even a flinch.From there we move to the ridgelines of Burke County, North Carolina, where the famous Brown Mountain Lights have been appearing above the Linville Gorge since before the Civil War, baffling scientists and federal investigators for over a century. But the lights aren't the thing to be afraid of. The lights are the distraction. What walks in the timber below them is another matter entirely — and the Perkins family found that out the hard way in the autumn of 1850.

Then we go deeper into the Cherokee homeland of western North Carolina, back to the violent winter of 1780, to meet the most feared figure in all of Cherokee supernatural tradition. The Raven Mocker doesn't look like a monster. It looks like an old person. It enters the homes of the dying, and it takes their remaining years — gently, quietly, without leaving a mark except for one: the missing heart. A healer named Ayita held the detection medicine alone in the dark against it. She survived.

Her hair went white that night. She was thirty-two years old.We move north to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and the story of a woman with no recorded name who died on fire on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks in October of 1833. She's been screaming on that rail corridor ever since — seen by railroad engineers, bridge tenders, night watchmen, park rangers, and anyone else unlucky or curious enough to be near the old right-of-way after dark. The cold she leaves behind lasts about three seconds. The sound she makes lasts a lifetime.

High on Grandfather Mountain in Avery County, North Carolina, four college students from Boone made camp in October of 1971 and were visited by something that came down off the upper ridgeline in silence, stood at the edge of their fire, and placed a warning directly into their minds without speaking a word. One of the four never recovered fully.

Robert, who eventually told the story, went back alone in November to stand on the trail where it had stood — and realized it had a clear view of their camp for a very long time before they ever looked up.And we end at the northern tip of the chain, on a seven-mile road in Warren County, New Jersey whose legal name is Shades of Death Road. 

For decades, drivers on the Ghost Lake stretch have seen a man walking along the road at night — keeping pace with moving vehicles, always in the same direction, always wearing old-fashioned dark clothing. Always visible in the rearview mirror. Never there when you turn your head and look directly at where he should be.

These are stories drawn from real places, real regional tradition, and real accounts passed down through the communities of the Appalachian Mountains.

 The land is older than our ability to explain it. And it's paying attention.

Submit your own encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be...

In October of 1955, a highway worker and experienced outdoorsman named William Roe climbed Mica Mountain in British Columbia on his own time, with no particular expectation of finding anything unusual. What he encountered near the summit that afternoon would stay with him for the rest of his life — and nearly two years later, he'd walk into a notary's office in Edmonton, Alberta, and swear a legal affidavit about it, making his account one of the first formally documented close-range Sasquatch encounters in North American history.

This episode tells Roe's story as close to his own experience as the historical record allows. Drawing entirely from his sworn affidavit and the subsequent research of John Green, Ivan T. Sanderson, and others who documented the case carefully in the years that followed, we walk through the encounter from the first glimpse through the brush to the moment she disappeared back into the timber — including the moment Roe raised his rifle, looked through the sight, and made a decision he'd spend the rest of his life thinking about.Roe wasn't a man who sought attention.

He was a trapper, a hunter, a working man who'd spent more time in serious wilderness than most people spend indoors, and who knew the difference between what belonged in a forest and what didn't. 

What he saw on Mica Mountain that October afternoon was a large, upright, bipedal creature — female, covered in dark silver-tipped brown hair, standing roughly six feet tall, with a face that he could only describe as more human-like than he'd expected or was prepared for. She was eating wild cherry leaves near an old abandoned cabin when he found her. She walked away on two feet when she was ready to go. And at the edge of the forest, she looked back.

We also dig into why this account has held up under decades of scrutiny, what the sworn affidavit represents as a piece of evidence, and how the anatomical and behavioral details Roe recorded in 1955 would later align, in striking ways, with what hundreds of independent witnesses would describe in the years that followed.

If you've had your own encounter and want to share it, reach out at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. We read everything.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In the fall of 1978, a thirty-one-year-old fur trapper named John flew his Piper Super Cub into a remote stretch of the Yukon Territory about a hundred and forty miles northeast of Dawson City to begin what he planned as a four-month trapping season. He had a solid cabin he'd built himself, a well-established trap line running forty-some miles through prime marten, lynx, beaver, and wolverine country, and enough experience in the northern bush to know that country about as well as any man alive.

What he didn't have was any way of knowing that something else was already out there, and that it had already been watching him. Within days of his arrival John began finding enormous bipedal tracks pressed into the creek gravel and early snow, measuring over twenty inches long and more than eight inches wide at the heel, with a stride that a tall man at a full trot couldn't match. The tracks were only the beginning.

 Something started systematically clearing his traps, not randomly, but with a working knowledge of his entire line, springing sets from above with deliberate downward pressure and removing the catch without a trace. Then came the vocalizations, deep and structured sounds in the dark timber that had a quality John had no name for at the time, sounds that decades later would stop him cold when he heard the Sierra Sounds recordings made by Ron Morehead and Al Berry in the Sierra Nevada. That same organized, back-and-forth exchange.

That same sense of language underneath something no human throat is built to produce.Then the rocks started. And then one of them put John face-down in the snow with a three-inch gash in the side of his head that he had to stitch himself, alone, a hundred and forty miles from the nearest town.John stayed because his family needed what that trap line could produce. He stayed through the night visits, through the sound of something breathing against his door in the dark, through the feeling of large hands running slowly along his log walls. He stayed until the night something hit his cabin with enough force to crack the chinking and move a ten-inch spruce log in its notch.

He went outside with his Marlin 45/70 rifle and he shot it, and he followed the blood trail the next morning until the ground went too hard to hold sign. And when he came back from that blood trail he found both tundra tires on his Super Cub torn apart by hand.

That's when he called his friend Byron. What happened the night Byron arrived is the kind of account that's hard to sit with, a coordinated assault on that cabin from multiple directions that lasted for hours, with John and Byron shooting through the walls and ceiling while something worked at the logs from outside trying to find a way in. They made it to morning. They packed their gear. They flew out and John never went back.

He sold the cabin, went to work on a crab boat in the Bering Sea, and spent eleven years deciding that thirty-foot seas and a crab pot winch were considerably safer than whatever was in that Yukon timber. He's probably right.

John listens to this show and to my other podcast Sasquatch Odyssey, and he says that hearing Fred from Alaska talk about the temperament of these animals in the northern bush is the closest he's come to feeling like someone else understands what he encountered. He wants people to know that what's out there in the deep country doesn't match the friendly-giant narrative, and he wants them to be careful. After everything he went through to deliver that message, the least we can do is pass it along.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

In 1947, a Tennessee farmer named Robert Carter Senior found an injured young creature pinned beneath a fallen tree on his property in Monroe County. What he did next would set in motion one of the most extraordinary and controversial stories in the history of sasquatch research.

 He nursed it back to health, named it Fox, and spent the next twenty-five years secretly building a relationship with it before his seven-year-old granddaughter Janice literally ran into the creature one afternoon and had her world turned upside down.

Tonight Brian takes a deep dive into the Janice Carter story, the full account of what one woman claims was fifty years of co-existence between her family and a clan of sasquatch on their rural Tennessee farm. From her grandfather's secret act of mercy to the publication of the now-infamous book "50 Years with Bigfoot: Tennessee Chronicles of Co-Existence" in 2002, from the firestorm of controversy that nearly tore the Bigfoot community apart to the heartbreaking account of Fox's death decades later, this episode covers it all.

Brian walks through the claims, the characters, the investigations by Jerry Coleman and Russian hominologist Igor Bourtsev, the public falling out between Janice and co-author Mary Green, and the questions that remain unanswered to this day. Whether you come away a believer or a skeptic, this is a story that demands to be heard on its own terms.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Tonight we're stepping away from the deep woods and into something different. Something that's been keeping me up at night for the better part of two years as I've tracked down these accounts. This is a special episode exploring the Hitchhiker Effect — the terrifying phenomenon where people visit locations of high strangeness and something follows them home.

We're not talking about a feeling or an overactive imagination. We're talking about shadow figures at the foot of the bed, objects moving on their own, electronics going haywire, and entities that seem to feed on fear and attention for weeks or months before finally letting go. The term was coined by Dr. Colm Kelleher during his years as lead scientist on the Skinwalker Ranch project, but what most people don't realize is that this phenomenon extends far beyond one ranch in Utah. 

It's been documented at battlefields, swamps, mountain ridgelines, and remote valleys all across this country for decades.In this episode we cover six accounts spanning from 1978 to 2023. We start in the Uintah Basin with a cattle rancher who encountered a pulsating orange orb on a mesa and spent the next several months living with a shadow entity that terrorized his family and killed one of his horses. From there we head to Chickamauga Battlefield in northwest Georgia, where a veteran paranormal investigator and his team brought something back from one of the bloodiest pieces of ground in American history — something that filled their homes with the smell of decomposition and the sound of agonized moaning.

We follow a pair of Oregon newlyweds who stumbled onto what the local Native American community called a spirit road and spent eight months being stalked by a shadow entity in their own apartment. A West Virginia sheriff's deputy walks into a sealed bunker in the Point Pleasant TNT area and encounters an orb containing dark humanoid figures, only to have his six-year-old daughter start seeing what she calls "the blue man" standing in her closet.

A Boston documentary crew filming at Hockomock Swamp in the Bridgewater Triangle watches three synchronized orbs rise out of the water and spends the following months dealing with rearranged furniture, phantom knocking, and an intrusive voice whispering "come back."

And finally, a podcaster and paranormal researcher visits the San Luis Valley in Colorado and learns the hard way that studying these phenomena from a safe distance is an illusion — because the distance can collapse at any moment.

Six witnesses. Six decades. Six locations from coast to coast. All connected by a pattern so consistent it'll make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. They visited a place. They were noticed. And something came home with them.This is one of the most unsettling episodes we've ever produced. Settle in and keep the lights on.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In this episode, we share a listener's account that's been buried for over forty years. Sarah from Bowling Green, Kentucky reached out to us after listening to the show, and what she had to say stopped us in our tracks. In the fall of 1982, Sarah was just eight years old when her family — mom, dad, older brother, and their German Shepherd, Bear — packed up and headed deep into Land Between the Lakes for a weekend camping trip.

What started as a perfect Friday night around the campfire turned into something none of them were prepared for.By Friday night, strange howls unlike anything the family had ever heard began echoing through the woods from multiple directions. Something large was circling their camp on two legs. Bear, their loyal protector, charged into the darkness after whatever was out there and never came back. Against her mother's wishes, Sarah's father made the decision to stay one more night.

That decision nearly cost them everything. On Saturday night, the creatures came in close. Multiple massive, upright beings — standing over seven feet tall with canine features, glowing amber eyes, and an intelligence that no ordinary animal possesses — stepped to the edge of the firelight and began closing in on the family. Just when it seemed like there was no way out, a deafening vocalization erupted from a nearby ridge. Something Sarah now believes was strikingly similar to the famous Ohio Howl Sasquatch recording from the 1990s. 

Whatever made that sound sent the creatures running, and the family was able to pack up and escape in the middle of the night.Sarah's story touches on the long and disturbing history of encounters at Land Between the Lakes, the lasting trauma these experiences leave on families, and the possibility that something else — something even more powerful than the creatures that terrorized them — may have stepped in to save their lives.

This is a raw, emotional, deeply personal account from a woman who's done keeping quiet. She wants people to know what's out there, and she wants them to be careful. This one's going to stay with you.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Tonight's episode is something different. Over the past several months, Brian's inbox has been filling up with emails from listeners and first-time visitors to the show, people who've been holding onto experiences they've never fully shared with anyone. This episode brings six of those accounts together in one sitting, read in the witnesses' own words, spanning six decades and six different regions of the country.

The collection opens with Danny, a lifelong hunter on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, who in 1978 came face to face with something standing motionless in the old growth timber during a solo elk hunt. From there we move to the swamps and spring runs of central Florida, where Rachel and her boyfriend encountered something massive outside their tent during an overnight canoe trip through the Ocala National Forest in 1996, and then saw it again on the river as they tried to escape.

Marcus takes us to the coal country of Mingo County, West Virginia, where a nineteen year old walking home from the mines on a frozen February night in 1983 realized that something on the hillside above him wasn't just following him but was flanking him in the dark. Linda's account pulls us north to Minnesota's Boundary Waters in 2004, where a veteran wilderness guide and her co-guide watched something wade across open water in the moonlight and come ashore on the small island where their clients were sleeping.

Travis writes from the Piney Woods of East Texas, where something took up residence on his forty acre property in 2017 and made its presence known through broken trees, massive tracks in creek mud, disturbing vocalizations, and two visual encounters that changed the way he and his wife think about the land they live on.

The episode closes with Gene, now eighty four years old, finally putting into writing what happened to him and his logging crew in the remote mountains of Siskiyou County, California in the summer of 1962, an experience he's carried in silence for over six decades.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The documentary aired on a Tuesday night in October, and nothing was ever the same. Within hours it was trending worldwide. Scientists came forward. Former government employees reached out. And across the country, people started paying closer attention to the forests around them.This episode brings the first volume of Born Wild to a close — but not before we hear from some of the most compelling voices in the archives. Russell Crawford, a Tennessee hunter with over fifty years in the Cherokee National Forest, describes the morning he had a clear shot at something massive and chose not to take it. 

Not because he couldn't — but because pulling that trigger would have felt like murder.Margaret White spent thirty years teaching biology in rural Washington and debunking every Sasquatch story her students brought to class. Then she came face to face with one on a trail in Olympic National Park, and every rational explanation she ever had turned to dust.

James Whitehorse carried his story for fifty-four years. He was eight years old, herding sheep near the Chuska Mountains on the Navajo reservation, when a towering figure stepped out of the junipers and raised its hand in greeting. His grandfather told him the white world would never understand. James kept quiet — until now. Maria Santos worked the graveyard shift at a gas station on the edge of the Gila Wilderness. 

One night at two in the morning, something eight feet tall walked up to the pumps and started examining them like a curious child discovering something new.Thomas Erikson came from four generations of Oregon loggers. They called them the Wood Apes, and every logger in the Pacific Northwest knew about them. Thomas shares three encounters spanning decades — including the day one of them spoke to him and pointed at the trees, at him, and at itself. Like it was saying they were all part of the same thing. Thomas passed away six months after this interview.

We hear from Eddie McGraw, a long-haul trucker who watched a creature stroll across a Montana rest area at two in the morning like it owned the place. From David Baker, a National Geographic photographer who captured three frames of the clearest Sasquatch image ever taken — then locked them in a safe for fifteen years. From Patricia Morgan, a Yellowstone ranger who reveals a secret file of sightings passed down from ranger to ranger since the 1950s. 

And from Dr. Michael Brooks, a primatologist who spent fifteen years hiding evidence that would have validated everything. Then comes the revelation no one expected. Brian's own mother, Jean Patterson, finally shares a secret she kept for decades — she saw one of the creatures on the Lyerly property a full year before Brian ever did. She stayed silent to protect him. To give him the choice to walk away.He couldn't walk away. He never could. 

The episode closes on the eve of the final expedition. The witnesses gather at the mountain house. The sun sets over the Appalachians. And deep in the forest, the creatures begin to sing.Tomorrow, everything changes.This is the end of Book One. The odyssey continues.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Part Nine brings Bigfoot Country to its climax, and it does so by circling back to where every great investigation begins — with the people who lived it.After years of building this platform, the floodgates finally opened. Witnesses who had been listening from the shadows for months, sometimes years, started stepping forward. People like Patricia Ann Holloway, a seventy-one-year-old retired librarian from Pennsylvania who had carried a secret since 1973 — the summer she was nineteen years old and working at a Baptist church camp in the Allegheny National Forest.

What she saw standing at the tree line that night, seven feet tall with eyes reflecting her flashlight beam, changed her forever. She kept quiet for nearly fifty years. When the only other witness — a twelve-year-old camper named Susan — passed away from cancer, Patricia decided she wasn't going to take that secret to her grave too.Her story opened the door for dozens more. A ninety-year-old former logger from Vermont who remembered the creatures the old timers simply called the Wild Men. A woman from Mississippi passing down her grandmother's encounter from the nineteen twenties. A retired park ranger from California who had spent forty years documenting things he could never put in an official report.

But the witnesses were only half the story. Researchers started coming forward too — scientists and academics who had sacrificed careers and reputations to study something the mainstream refused to acknowledge. A primatologist who recognized authentic dermal ridges on a footprint cast. A geneticist with hair samples that matched no known species. An anthropologist who had collected indigenous oral histories from around the world and found an undeniable pattern running through all of them.Then came the most dangerous interview of all.

A former military intelligence officer, speaking through an encrypted line, revealed the existence of government programs spanning six decades. Programs designed not just to suppress evidence, but to study these creatures — and exploit them. He couldn't say everything. He said enough.The tension ratcheted up from there. Physical confrontations on mountain roads.

Men in dark suits offering deals and making threats. And a manila folder full of classified documents that blew the lid off everything — project names like Titan Watch, Forest Shadow, and Mind Bridge, detailing decades of monitoring, containment, and experimentation on captured creatures.Through all of it, Brian wrestled with the personal weight of the mission. Late night conversations with his mother, who carried her own encounters with the unexplainable. Quiet moments on the porch with Daniel.

A faith that had evolved far beyond the Baptist church of his childhood into something broader and harder to name — a belief that the universe held mysteries worth chasing, no matter the cost.

The final expedition into the Pisgah wilderness brought everything full circle. Days of waiting. Thermal signatures circling in the dark. Vocalizations echoing through old-growth timber. And on the last night, alone at the edge of camp under a full moon, a moment of silent recognition between two species that have shared this land far longer than anyone wants to admit.

Part Nine is about what happens when the dam finally cracks. When the witnesses refuse to stay silent. When the researchers stop protecting their careers and start protecting the truth. And when one man, standing on a dark porch in the Appalachian Mountains, hears a chorus of howls rising from the forest and knows the world is about to change.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode...

A veteran park ranger with over two decades of service reaches out after years of listening to the show in silence. He's heard me share my own encounter and talk about experiences from other law enforcement and first responders, and he finally decided it was time to tell his story. He's never told anyone. Not his wife. Not his coworkers. No one. Kevin was assigned to a week-long solo backcountry bear survey deep in the Pacific Northwest. 

Six miles from the nearest road, surrounded by old growth timber and some of the most remote wilderness in the lower forty-eight. He was experienced. He was prepared. He had no idea what was waiting for him.It started on day one with a cluster of trees twisted and broken at eight feet. By day two he'd found a massive bare footprint next to a structure that had no business being there. That night, sounds he couldn't identify echoed across the ridgeline and something started working its way toward his camp.

By day three, rocks from the creek were being placed near his tent while he was away. And then on night four, everything escalated to a point where Kevin had to make a split-second decision that's haunted him for almost nine years. This is one of the most detailed and credible accounts I've ever received. 

Kevin asked me to keep his full identity and exact location confidential, and I'm honoring that. What I'm not keeping confidential is what happened to him out there, because this story needs to be heard.

If you're in law enforcement, park service, military, or any first responder role and you've been carrying something like this, my inbox is open. You're not alone.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The odyssey reaches new heights as Brian Patterson shares some of the strangest and most profound encounters ever documented on the show. From a North Carolina camper who experienced unexplainable visions of an ancient forest to an Oregon mother whose lost daughter was safely returned by a gentle, hair-covered giant, these accounts push beyond simple sightings into territory that challenges everything we think we know about these creatures. The podcast also faces its greatest crisis when a retired biology professor's elaborate hoax nearly destroys everything Brian has built.

The fallout is devastating, but with Daniel's unwavering support, Brian rebuilds stronger than ever with rigorous new verification procedures that earn the community's trust back.The story goes global as witnesses from Tibet, the Congo Basin, Papua New Guinea, and Siberia share encounters that mirror North American reports in stunning detail. A Lakota elder speaks of the Big Man as ancient guardians of the wild places. A Stanford primatologist risks her career to validate the evidence.

And the Sasquatch Odyssey community grows into a worldwide network of researchers, witnesses, and believers united by shared experience.As the show hits its five hundredth episode, Brian finally tells his own story in full for the first time. But there's no time to rest. New thermal evidence and a late-night expedition deep into the backcountry deliver the most compelling footage yet captured. The men in black are watching again, the truth is spreading faster than anyone can contain it, and the odyssey is far from over.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

A former Marine infantry sergeant breaks twenty years of silence about what happened to him in the Trinity Alps Wilderness of Northern California in October 2003. He didn't want to write in. He's not a Bigfoot guy. But his teenage daughter listens to the show and finally wore him down.Mike and two lifelong hunting buddies were on a five-day backcountry elk hunt deep in the Trinity Wilderness, roughly fourteen miles from the nearest trailhead.

On the third day, he picked up on something most people would've missed — the gut-level feeling of being watched and paced. Instead of panicking, he ran deliberate route changes and counter-surveillance techniques to confirm what his instincts were telling him. Something large and bipedal was tracking them from two to three hundred yards back, using terrain and timber for concealment with a discipline he'd later associate with trained military scouts.

On the fourth night, it closed the distance to forty yards and stood at the edge of their camp. His buddy nearly fired. Mike stopped him — not out of compassion, but out of a cold tactical calculation that still resonates twenty years later. They packed out at first light and covered fourteen miles in a single push.Mike went on to enlist in the Marines, served two combat tours in Iraq including Fallujah, and earned a Purple Heart. He says what he experienced in the Trinity Alps scared him worse than anything he faced overseas.

This episode explores why, and what his story tells us about the intelligence, patience, and capabilities of whatever's living in those mountains.This is one of the most detailed and tactically sophisticated encounter reports we've ever received on this show. You don't want to miss it.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In this episode, the journey takes a dramatic turn as Brian's podcasting career reaches new heights and dangerous new lows.

 What begins as a powerful collection of witness encounters from across the country — a conservation officer in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, a Mississippi fisherman on the Big Black River, a West Virginia coal miner who found something living deep underground, and a Cajun folk healer who speaks of the loup-garou with reverence rather than fear — quickly evolves into something far more consequential.

A television producer named Amanda from Meridian Productions returns with an offer to bring Sasquatch Odyssey to the screen as a legitimate documentary series. Brian agrees, but only on his terms: editorial control, no sensationalism, and absolute respect for the witnesses. The production takes the team from the Olympic Peninsula to the Ozarks and back to the Pisgah National Forest, where the mystery of Austin Reeves still lingers in every shadow and hollow.

But the closer Brian gets to the truth, the harder certain forces push back. A devastating act of arson destroys his home, his studio, and nearly everything he and Daniel have built together. 

The local investigation is a sham, but an ATF agent named Sarah Brown finds evidence of professional-grade incendiary devices and a cover-up that reaches far above her pay grade.

Rather than retreat, Brian and Daniel rebuild — bigger, stronger, and more determined than ever.The episode also explores the emotional toll of this work through quieter moments: the frustration of sorting genuine encounters from fabrications, the patience required to find voices like eighty-two-year-old Lucille Marsh from rural Georgia, and the steady, grounding presence of Daniel through it all.

From Wisconsin dairy farms to Nebraska sandhills, witnesses from the American heartland reveal that these creatures aren't just hiding in remote wilderness — they've adapted to live alongside us in the margins, watching from the edges of our everyday world.

The documentary airs, reaches millions, and ignites a national conversation. The community grows. The threats continue. And the odyssey pushes forward, one story at a time.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

For twenty-six years, Dale wore the badge—and kept a secret he couldn’t afford to share.Now retired after nearly three decades as a deputy sheriff in a rural southeastern county bordering a vast national forest, Dale finally breaks his silence. During his career, he experienced six separate Sasquatch encounters—stories he kept buried until turning in his badge in late 2025.His experiences span decades and defy easy explanation.

In 1994, Dale witnessed a massive, upright creature cross a two-lane highway directly in front of his patrol car. Years later, a night spent at a remote campground left him shaken after hearing unmistakable wood knocks and a distant, haunting howl—one he now recognizes as identical to the infamous Ohio Howl recording.

But Dale’s story doesn’t end with his own encounters.As a trusted figure in his community, people came to him when they had nowhere else to turn. An elderly cattle farmer who carried the memory of a face-to-face encounter for more than forty years. 

The sister of a logger who finally revealed her brother’s terrifying experience on a remote timber road in the 1980s.

 And two chilling accounts from one of Dale’s closest friends—a Forest Service law enforcement ranger who discovered massive footprints and complex tree structures deep in the backcountry, and who later endured a harrowing night as something circled his tent for twenty minutes before sitting down forty feet away, silently watching him in the darkness.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In this installment, Daniel finds something he never expected: normalcy. A job at a local pizza place, the simple rhythm of work and home, the blessed absence of danger. After everything they've survived, boring feels like a gift.Meanwhile, Brian's podcast has exploded beyond anything he imagined. Five million downloads.

Tens of thousands of community members. Emails pouring in from witnesses who've carried their secrets for decades, finally finding a place where someone believes them. A seventy-eight-year-old woman writes to share an encounter she's hidden since 1952, and Brian remembers exactly why he does this work.But success brings complications. For every credible witness, there are a dozen others whose stories fall apart under scrutiny. A construction worker from British Columbia claims an intimate encounter with a female Sasquatch, and Brian is forced to draw hard lines about what belongs on the show.

Then a retired nurse from New Mexico shares something different entirely: a story of a young Navajo man brought to her hospital in 1992, speaking of being taken by "the big people," and the federal agents who confiscated every piece of evidence before intimidating him into silence. The wheat and the chaff. Sorting one from the other becomes Brian's constant burden. Then the men in black return. Different faces, same cold authority. 

They come with an offer: classified documents revealing decades of suppressed research, interdimensional hypotheses, everything Brian has been searching for. The price? Stop pushing for official disclosure. Become a partner in managing the truth rather than forcing it into the light. Brian refuses

.Eighteen months later, they burn his studio to the ground. But fire has a way of spreading what it's meant to destroy. The attack makes national news. Donations flood in. A major network offers a television deal with full editorial control. And soon Brian finds himself leading an expedition into the Pisgah with a full production crew, thermal cameras, and night vision equipment.

On the eighth night, in a hollow near where Austin Mercer vanished, the forest comes alive with wood knocks and howls. The creatures stay just beyond the cameras, too smart to be caught clearly, but their presence is undeniable.It isn't definitive proof.

But it's evidence the world will have to reckon with.And at a simple wooden cross marking where Austin was last seen, Brian says a quiet prayer for all those who've disappeared into these ancient mountains, and for the truth still waiting to be found.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In the spring of nineteen seventy-nine, a quiet cattle farmer in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Tennessee followed a strange sound into the timber beyond his fence line. What he found in a ravine that morning would change the course of his family's life for the next four decades and beyond.A young creature was caught in an illegal bear trap. Hurt. Terrified. Looking up at him with eyes that didn't belong to any animal he'd ever encountered.

The farmer made a choice. He knelt down and set it free. No cameras. No witnesses. Just a simple act of kindness from a man who believed you help what's hurting, no matter what it is.

What happened next is one of the most remarkable long-term sasquatch encounter accounts we've ever received on this show. The creature came back. Then others appeared. And when the farmer's young grandson arrived for his first summer on the property, a friendship began between the boy and that young sasquatch that would span decades.

He watched them. They watched him. Trust was built in inches over years. And what started with one grandfather's mercy in a wooded ravine eventually came full circle in a way that none of us saw coming. This is a story about patience, trust, and the kind of quiet coexistence that most people would say is impossible. Thomas Pritchard says otherwise. And after you hear what he has to say, you might just agree with him.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Sheriff Brian Patterson steps away from the badge and into the microphone full time as Sasquatch Odyssey explodes beyond anything he ever imagined. Part Five picks up with the podcast in full swing, and the witnesses are lining up from every corner of the South and beyond to finally tell the stories they have been carrying in silence for decades.It starts in the mountains of northeast Georgia with a seventy-three-year-old retired logger named Earl Hutchins, a man who kept his mouth shut for forty-five years about what stepped out of the timber near Clayton in the fall of nineteen seventy-eight. His story breaks something open.

The emails start flooding in from across the region, and Patterson finds himself recording encounter after encounter from witnesses who never had anyone willing to listen. A retired schoolteacher from Ellijay describes the thing that came screaming out of the Chattahoochee National Forest and changed the way she felt about the woods forever. A fishing guide from Everglades City recounts the night a pair of glowing eyes tracked him across the water in the Ten Thousand Islands. A teenage girl in Oconee County, South Carolina watched something unfold from a rhododendron thicket while her daddy's bluetick hound shook itself half to death against her leg.

The stories stretch across state lines and keep coming. Arkansas. Tennessee. Virginia. A coon hunter and his cousin tree something in the Ouachitas that no lantern light should ever have revealed. A family of four flees a Cherokee National Forest campsite at three in the morning. A state trooper on Skyline Drive watches something cross a two-lane highway in three strides and never tells a soul.

Then the podcast goes national and the picture gets bigger. A Lummi Nation elder speaks of the Ts'emekwes his people have known for thousands of years. 

A woman in the Hocking Hills of Ohio locks eyes with something standing between the trees in broad daylight and never hikes again. From Louisiana to Alaska to Hawaii, the encounters pile up, and Patterson starts to understand that this is not a regional phenomenon. It is everywhere. When the show crosses international borders, the scope becomes staggering. A First Nations man from British Columbia reminds the world that his people gave us the word Sasquatch in the first place. A Russian researcher describes a shape moving through snow in the Pamir Mountains. An Australian prospector watches something vanish from a waterhole in the outback. Sherpas in Nepal, scientists in China, guides in the Amazon — every culture, every continent, every corner of the wild world has a name for what lives in the places humans do not go. But it is the deep encounters that change everything. 

A hospice nurse in rural Kentucky describes the night something appeared at her dying husband's window and hummed him into his final moment of peace. A lost hiker in the Gila Wilderness receives images in her mind that lead her back to safety. A former Army Ranger wakes paralyzed in the Big Thicket while something rifles through his thoughts like pages in a book.

 These are the stories that keep Patterson up at night and force him to ask whether these creatures are something far stranger and far more profound than anyone has been willing to consider. By the end of Part Five, Patterson is two years into full-time podcasting with over three hundred interviews behind him and patterns emerging from the noise. The creatures follow corridors. They move with the seasons.

They choose when to be seen. And a small but undeniable percentage of encounters suggest something beyond biology, beyond what any scientific framework can currently explain. The podcast has crossed a million downloads. The community is growing. The world is slowly waking up. And somewhere out in the deep woods, something is watching back.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch...

What does it take to break a forty-year silence, and what does it cost to tell the truth when powerful forces have worked for decades to keep it buried?

In Part Four of The Sheriff of Bigfoot Country, everything changes.An anonymous envelope left in the dead of night opens the door to a classified government operation tied to the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens. 

What was recovered in the chaos wasn’t human, and the documents reveal a truth far more disturbing than folklore ever suggested. Autopsies, survivor reports, and firsthand medical testimony point to intelligent beings hidden from the public under the cover of disaster response.As witnesses finally come forward—law enforcement, military pilots, medical professionals, and federal employees—the silence fractures.

A documentary meant to expose the truth is shut down just weeks before release, confirming the reach of those determined to keep these secrets hidden. But the internet changes the rules, and once the story escapes, it can’t be contained. As the world begins to listen, new voices emerge, decades of fear dissolve, and a movement is born. 

What began as an investigation becomes a reckoning, and the path forward leads to something bigger than one man, one mountain, or one secret.

This is the moment the dam breaks, the truth finds its voice, and the journey that becomes Sasquatch Odyssey truly begins.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Tonight we're going back to basics. Six encounter stories from six different states, told the way they were meant to be told. Around the fire. In the dark. The way witnesses have been sharing these experiences for generations.

You'll hear from Daryl, a long haul trucker who watched something cross Interstate Ninety in Montana back in nineteen ninety-seven. Something that stepped over a guardrail like it was nothing and looked back at him with eyes that held more intelligence than any animal he'd ever seen.

Wade was a deputy in rural Arkansas when he responded to a call about something stealing corn from an old farmer's field. What he saw standing at the tree line that September night in two thousand and twelve changed everything he thought he knew about the woods behind those farms.

Colleen spent eleven years as a park ranger in the North Cascades before she got a frantic call from a family trapped in a rental cabin. Something was circling their cabin at night. Pounding on the walls. Screaming in the darkness. She thought it was a bear until she pressed her flashlight to that back window.

Hank hunted the same Michigan property for thirty years. Opening day of rifle season in nineteen eighty-nine, something walked into his clearing. He had it in his scope. Finger on the trigger. And he couldn't pull it. He told me why, and his answer has stayed with me ever since.

Terry was hiking solo on the Oregon coast when she realized something was following her through the old growth. For twenty minutes it kept pace with her through the trees before it finally let her see it.

 What happened next surprised even her. And Earl, an eighty-one-year-old Kentucky farmer who wrote me a series of letters in nineteen ninety-six about something that came around his hollow back in seventy-three.

Something the old timers in those mountains had always known about but never talked about.

Six witnesses. Six encounters. Six lives changed forever.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

After the midnight visit from the men in black, Brian is left with a choice—back down, or push forward and risk everything. There’s no middle ground anymore. Daniel, uneasy but resolute, agrees to stand with him no matter what comes next. Every document is copied. Multiple backups are created and hidden in separate locations. If the evidence disappears, the truth won’t disappear with it. As the pressure mounts, Zach makes contact with an underground network of researchers who have been operating in the shadows for decades—people with their own stories of intimidation, silencing, and government interference. They know the rules of this world. They know how to survive it.

Then an opportunity arrives they never anticipated. Documentary filmmaker Amanda steps forward, determined to tell the story. She’s meticulous, credible, and unafraid of the implications. Once she’s in, there’s no turning back. The crew arrives in November. Interviews begin. Physical evidence is examined and verified by independent experts. But it quickly becomes clear they’re not alone. A break-in at the rental house leaves one thing missing—documents. Nothing else is disturbed. Days later, a tracking device is discovered beneath a crew member’s car. 

The message is unmistakable: we see you, and we can reach you whenever we want.They keep filming anyway. Two weeks before Christmas, the phone rings. The same calm, practiced voice from that first encounter delivers a final warning. But this time, something slips—something unintended.
“The creatures are just one piece of a much larger puzzle. ”Brian refuses to back down. On the other end of the line, the voice sounds almost regretful.

“Then I’m sorry for what’s going to happen. ”As tensions rise, Zach uncovers the existence of Project Threshold—a classified Department of Defense operation launched in 1962. The revelation is staggering. The government hasn’t merely covered up the existence of these creatures. They’ve been managing them. Containing them. Controlling them. For decades—possibly since the 1940s. And buried even deeper is something else. Something far more dangerous. Something they fear more than the creatures themselves.

Then, just before dawn, there’s a knock at the door. No one is there. Only a manila envelope resting on the doormat, stamped with a single word: TRUTH. Inside is a file marked Project Vulcan. Dated May 18, 1980—the day Mount St. Helens erupted.In the chaos following the eruption, military recovery teams entered the blast zone. What they retrieved was never meant to be known: seventeen dead specimens. Three critically injured. One survivor. The photographs are impossible to deny. A massive, seven-foot-tall creature lies strapped to a stretcher, its body scorched, its hair burned away, surrounded by men in hazmat suits. The conclusion is unavoidable. The United States government didn’t just know these beings existed.

They’ve been studying them—for over forty years. Next episode: The truth comes out—and the consequences begin.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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