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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 [email protected] 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 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 [email protected].
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 [email protected] 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. -
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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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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.
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 [email protected] 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'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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.
Email your encounter to [email protected] 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 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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. -
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 [email protected] 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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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. - Visa fler
