Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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...

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 s...

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...

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 nigh...

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...

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...

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, seve...

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 f...

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...

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...

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 Odyss...

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 sh...

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...

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...

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...

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 int...

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...

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 kno...

Tonight we bring you six terrifying Sasquatch encounters from across America, spanning six decades and six different states. These are the stories that witnesses carried in silence for years, sometimes decades, before finally sharing what they experienced in the wilderness.

We begin in the redwood forests of Northern California in nineteen sixty-three, where a young logger named Harold Vance comes face to face with something that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

 From there we travel to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State in nineteen seventy-seven, where a family vacation turns into a n...

The years that followed Brian's childhood encounter in Lyerly weren't easy, but they were transformative. His mother beat cancer, earned her degree, and rebuilt their lives piece by piece. Brian found his footing too—working his way up from fast food to restaurant management, discovering he had a gift for handling people and solving problems.But something else was happening beneath the surface.

In rural Georgia during the early nineties, Brian came to terms with a truth he'd been running from—he was gay. A relationship with a coworker named Marcus brought clarity, but also consequences. Friends disappeared. Fami...

Over the next few weeks, I'm gonna be sharing my new book with you—start to finish. The whole thing. It's called Bigfoot Country. All told, it's around eight hours of narration. So, I'll be putting it out in multiple episodes. And honestly... I've been sitting on this for a long time. I'm excited—and a little nervous—to finally put it out there. But before we jump in, I wanna take a minute. Just you and me.

What you're about to hear is loosely based on my life. 

Some of it happened exactly the way I tell...

Every once in a while, a story comes across my desk that stops me cold. Not because it’s sensational, but because it’s precise, deeply personal, and impossible to dismiss. The account you’re about to hear is one of those. It arrived as a letter from a man I’m calling Tom, a seventeen-year park ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains who has spent his life dealing in facts, emergencies, and hard reality—not Bigfoot stories.

Tom was called to a remote homestead owned by an eighty-two-year-old woman named Mabel. Something had been raiding her property, tearing ap...

Tonight, we conclude The Bigfoot Journals. Seven men walked out of the hidden valley in November of seventeen ninety-nine. They carried knowledge that would haunt them for the rest of their lives... and a secret they swore never to reveal.In this final installment, we follow the Stone Expedition on their three-month winter journey home. We witness the debate that consumed them... publish or protect? We hear the oath sworn at Thornton's Tavern in Richmond, where seven survivors bound themselves to silence. And we learn what became of them all.

Thomas Mercer, the scientist who died bitter in...

On the evening of November fifth, nineteen seventy five, seven loggers were driving home through the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona when they witnessed something that would change their lives forever. A glowing disc hovered silently above a clearing, pulsing with an eerie golden light.

When twenty two year old Travis Walton approached the craft, a beam of blue green light shot out and struck him, lifting him off the ground before hurling him through the air. His terrified coworkers fled the scene, and when they returned minutes later, both the craft and Travis had vanished without...

Tonight we're venturing into territory that goes beyond our usual encounters with large, hairy, bipedal creatures. After nearly forty years of research in the deep woods, I've come to understand that not everything strange out there can be explained by Sasquatch. Sometimes the things people encounter are even more terrifying. More strange. More impossible.This episode brings you four accounts that have haunted me since the day I first heard them.

These stories came from witnesses who trusted me with experiences they'd kept buried for years, sometimes decades. Some made me promise not to share their accounts until...

There’s something out there in the most remote corners of the Appalachian Mountains. Not a creature from folklore, not a cryptid or ghost story. Something much closer to us—and somehow, much more terrifying because of it. In this episode, we go deep into the hills to explore the legend of the feral people of Appalachia—humans who turned their backs on civilization so long ago, they may have forgotten what it means to be part of it at all. It all starts near Whitetop Mountain, where a dying man named Mercer calls a few people together to share storie...

There's a corner of America where people vanish at a startling rate, where massive searches can turn up nothing, no trail, no remains, no answers. That place is Alaska.

 In this episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, we head into the shadowed heart of the Alaska Triangle, the vast wilderness between Anchorage, Juneau, and Utqiagvik, to explore why so many disappear and why indigenous stories have warned about forest-dwelling abductors for generations.In the summer of twenty twenty-two, sixty-nine-year-old Mary Dawn Wilson drove her Ford Focus nearly seven miles down the Stampede Trail near Healy, Alaska, a rugged route t...

In early September of 1799, the Stone Expedition reunited deep in the unmapped wilderness beyond the Ohio River. Nine men gathered at the designated rendezvous, carrying fresh provisions and renewed hope. They could not have known that within weeks, two of them would be dead, and the survivors would carry secrets that would haunt their bloodlines for generations.

This episode chronicles the expedition's darkest chapter as they pressed deeper into forbidden territory than any Europeans had ventured before. The creatures that had watched them for months began gathering in unprecedented numbers, converging from all directions toward something none of...

One shot in the darkness. One moment of fear-fueled panic. And everything the expedition had built with the creatures comes crashing down.

In Episode Three, we witness the consequences of Jim McAllister's breakdown. Haunted by war, drowning his demons in homemade whiskey, Jim opens fire on a creature standing at the edge of the firelight—and triggers a siege that will test every man's sanity. What follows is a night of absolute terror. Rocks and branches hurled from the darkness. Horses screaming as they break free and scatter. 

The knocking—not the measured rhythm they'd grown accus...

Tonight we're doing something a little different here on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. We're setting aside the witness encounters, and instead we're gathering around the fire to tell a story the old fashioned way. This is a Christmas tale about a young Sasquatch named Thorn who has spent the autumn watching a human family from the treeline above their mountain cabin.

He's fascinated by their laughter, their warmth, their strange rituals of carving pumpkins and roasting marshmallows and dragging trees inside their homes to cover them with lights. His kind has always kept their distance from humans, but something...

I love a good Christmas story.
The kind where something strange and wonderful happens out in the wilderness. Where the magic of the season reaches places most people never go. Where even the darkest corners of the forest feel touched by something warm and old and meaningful.Over the years, I’ve told you stories like that.

Stories of Sasquatch sightings on snowy December mornings.
Of mysterious gifts left on remote cabin doorsteps.
Of unexplained tracks leading to and from places where no tracks should exist at all.But tonight, friends, I’m not here to w...

In this deeply unsettling episode, we bring you the testimony of Dale Raymond Sturgill, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who encountered the impossible not once, but twice in his lifetime. His story begins in the humid jungles of the Central Highlands in 1968, where a routine reconnaissance mission turned into a firefight against creatures that should not exist.

Dale and his squad came face to face with the legendary Nguoi Rung, known to American soldiers as the Rock Apes, and what followed was a brutal battle for survival that left one man dead and the survivors sworn to secrecy...

He wasn’t inexperienced.

He wasn’t impressionable.

And he wasn’t looking for monsters.A t thirty-two years old, this machinist from Lufkin had spent nearly his entire life in the woods. Twenty-five years of hunting experience. Countless nights alone in East Texas backcountry. He’d tracked deer through tangled briar and swamp, crossed paths with black bears, mountain lions, and javelinas, and faced every known predator the region could throw at him.None of that prepared him for the Big Thicket.

In November of 1994, a solo five-day deer hunt into one of the most...

After weeks of strange encounters and mounting dread, the group finds themselves surrounded by Lenape hunters deep in the wilderness. Rather than the violence they expect, they're taken to meet Gray Owl, an elder so ancient his face has become a map of wrinkles and his eyes have clouded with cataracts. Yet somehow, he sees everything. What he tells them about the Mesingw challenges everything they thought they knew. These creatures are not spirits or demons. They are simply old. Older than humanity itself. And they have been waiting.

Gray Owl gives Elijah a stone pendant carved with...

What would you do if everything you thought you knew about your father turned out to be wrong? What if his silence, his distance, his strange obsession with the mountains wasn't coldness at all, but something else entirely? What if he'd been guarding a secret so profound, so impossible, that it had consumed his entire life? That's the question facing Marcus Stone as he pulls up to a cabin he hasn't entered in twenty-three years. His father is dead. The funeral has already happened, and Marcus wasn't there. 

Twenty-three years of silence between them, hardened into something neither c...

In the mountains of western North Carolina, something ancient waits in the darkness. For over eight hundred years, mysterious lights have appeared above a low ridge called Brown Mountain, dancing across the sky in ways that science cannot explain and folklore cannot forget. Tonight, we journey into the heart of Appalachia's most enduring supernatural mystery.

This episode begins with the Cherokee legend of a great battle fought in 1200 A.D. between the Cherokee and Catawba Nations. When the fighting ended and hundreds of warriors lay dead across the mountain, the women from both tribes came searching with torches...

People say there's no way Sasquatch could exist in the Land Between the Lakes. They say it's too populated. Too well-traveled. Too thoroughly explored by hunters and hikers and campers over the decades.I disagree.  

And after you hear this encounter story, I'm confident you'll agree with me. In November of nineteen eighty-four, a father took his fourteen-year-old son into the backcountry of the Land Between the Lakes for a deer hunting trip. 

It was supposed to be a bonding experience. A chance for the boy to take his first buck. A weekend of camping and hu...

Deep in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, there’s a quiet little valley where three creeks meet and cross like a natural X. Long before settlers built homes there, the Cherokee knew the place well—and they didn’t trust it after dark. They warned their people to stay away, calling it a place where something shadowy moved through the night.

Later, missionaries arrived, saw the crossing waters as a holy sign, and named the area Valle Crucis: the Valley of the Cross. They built St. John’s Episcopal Church beside that old meeting of waters, never realizing...

In this episode, we head deep into the Appalachian spine to uncover one of America’s most enduring mountain mysteries: the Wood Booger. Known across Southwest Virginia and neighboring highland communities, this legend reaches back long before European settlers ever set foot on these ridges.

Indigenous nations carried generations of warnings about wild men in the forest—the Monacan and Mannahoac spoke of untamed beings in the woods, and Cherokee stories told of Tsul ‘Kalu, the slant-eyed giant who watched from the highest places. These accounts weren’t bedtime tales. They were cautionary history.We open with a startlin...

In this episode, we travel to the remote Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah to investigate one of the most intensively studied paranormal locations on Earth: Skinwalker Ranch. This 512-acre property has been the site of documented UFO encounters, cattle mutilations, shapeshifting creatures, and phenomena so bizarre that even the United States government spent $22 million trying to understand it.

Our story begins with the ancient warnings of the Ute tribe, who have forbidden their people from setting foot on this land for generations. 

We explore the legend of the Navajo skinwalkers—malevolent witches said to be capable of...