Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

Fort Worth, Texas, July 1969. Six people parked in a car near Greer Island on Lake Worth drive to the police station at midnight and report that something came down out of a tree and landed on them, something with fur and scales and a face like a goat, and the next morning the Fort Worth Star-Telegram runs the headline that made the whole thing famous.

The night after that, a crowd of thirty or forty people watches the creature from the bottom of a bluff on the lake road until it throws a tire at them. For the...

This week on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, we're taking a break from the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip to open the listener mailbag—and this time, it's not Bigfoot lurking in the darkness. Six listeners. Six states. Six terrifying encounters with something that shouldn't exist.From the cornfields of Iowa to the remote hills of the Missouri Ozarks, listeners share chilling firsthand accounts of a mysterious, upright, wolf-like creature commonly known as the Dogman. 

Standing on two legs, possessing unnatural speed and strength, and displaying disturbingly human characteristics, these creatures left witnesses with experiences they still struggle to explain.

Deep in the mountains and hollows of Tennessee, something terrifying has stalked the forests for generations. From the rugged Cumberland Plateau to the shadowy foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, witnesses have described a massive, hair-covered creature known as the Tennessee Wildman—a mysterious figure whose legend stretches back to newspaper reports from the 1870s.

In this chilling installment of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian explores more than a century of Tennessee Wildman history, folklore, and frightening encounters.Two veteran hunters spot a towering figure outside a secluded rock shelter. A young couple camping along the Big So...

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads into South Dakota, where stories of a towering, faceless figure follow the roads through Pine Ridge and Rosebud after dark. He’s described as thin, seven feet tall or more, and sometimes wearing a hat. His name is Walking Sam.

Brian follows accounts of a grandmother who spotted an enormous figure beyond her fence, a teenager who encountered a stranger silhouetted against the stars, and a mother who heard something breathing outside her trailer for four consecutive nights. Other stories tell of children dreaming about the same ta...

Most encounters on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories involve something tall, hairy, and walking on two legs. This week, five listeners describe something else: unexplained lights, unfamiliar figures, and ordinary trips into the backcountry that took a disturbing turn.

In Idaho’s Selway backcountry, an elk hunter alone at a spike camp watches a glowing object descend over a creek. Then he discovers a tall, faceless figure standing across his campfire. When he wakes, his rifle has been unloaded, and the cartridges are standing in a neat row on a log.

On a Louisiana bayou in 1961, a trapper ru...

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip heads deep into the South Carolina Lowcountry, where a terrifying encounter on a lonely stretch of road sparked one of the strangest cryptid mysteries in American history. On June 29, 1988, seventeen-year-old Christopher Davis was changing a flat tire near Scape Ore Swamp outside Bishopville, South Carolina, when he claimed a horrifying seven-foot-tall, green-skinned creature with three fingers emerged from the darkness and charged straight at him. 

Davis barely escaped into his car, but according to his account, the creature grabbed his door, climbed onto the roof, and attacked the vehicle as he sped down B...

We’re pulling off the road trip for a pit stop this week, because the inbox filled back up and these five emails belong together. Nobody in them went looking for anything. They were at home, asleep or working or out checking stock, and something walked up to where they live and kept coming back.

Oleta was the overnight donut maker at a shop in Pinetop, Arizona, in two thousand three, which meant she went to bed at six in the evening and slept beside an upstairs window she kept cracked for air. The bottom of that window sa...

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Exeter, Rhode Island, where on the seventeenth of March in eighteen ninety-two a group of farmers opened the graves of three women from the same family and burned the heart of the youngest one on a rock behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church.

Her name was Mercy Lena Brown, she was nineteen years old, and she'd been dead for two months. Her neighbors believed she was feeding on her dying brother from the grave. The ashes of her heart were mixed into water and given to him to...

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway for a pit stop this week so Brian can open the mailbag. Most of the encounters that land in the inbox are straightforward: somebody sees something big and hairy walking on two legs, and it walks away. The five in this episode didn't go that way. In each of them, seeing a giant ape that isn't supposed to exist was only part of what happened.

Casimir was a railroad signal maintainer called out after midnight in October 1993 to a siding in the northern Minnesota bog country. On the way...

The next stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is Pennsylvania, home of the most miserable monster in American folklore. The squonk comes out of the state's old lumber camps, where woodhicks and bark peelers told of a small, wart-covered animal with skin that didn't fit, so ashamed of its own looks that it hid in the hemlocks and cried all night. It reached print in 1910 in William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, along with the story of J. P. Wentling, a forester near Mont Alto who lured one into a sack and got home to find nothing...

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway this week for a pit stop, and Brian opens the mailbag. These are five Sasquatch encounters sent in by listeners, covering 66 years and five states, and two of them were handed down inside a family before they ever reached the show.

Cordell was 260 feet up a cell tower on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee in October 2019, alone, when something walked out of the woods and into the compound below him. It stood beside his truck, took hold of his load line, and followed the rope up with its eyes...

In March of 1934, the crew of the lightship Columbia and the supply tender Rose watched something come up out of the water near the mouth of the Columbia River. The men said it was about 40 feet long with an 8-foot neck, and the tender's captain told the Salem Capital Journal it opened its mouth and gaped at the lightship. The crew wanted to lower a boat and go after it, and the officers told them no.

Oregon would eventually give it a name, Colossal Claude.

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads...

Every lake in this episode was somebody's pasture once. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian King-Sharp drives into Oklahoma, where the three lakes said to hide the Oklahoma Octopus were all built by the government inside living memory.

Lake Tenkiller, Lake Thunderbird, and Oologah Lake are reservoirs, not natural water, and under every one of them are drowned roads, standing timber, fence lines, and the foundations of houses that were dry ground three generations ago. That's the ground this legend grew on, and it's why this is a don't-swim-after-dark episode.

The stories...

This week, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories pulls off the road for a special listener mailbag episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is taking a brief pause while Brian opens the inbox and shares six disturbing encounters sent in from six different states—each from someone who spent years wondering whether anyone would believe what they saw.

In the Washington Cascades, Nathan and his cousin Pete watch something enormous cross a clearcut on two legs in October 2015. Two nights later, it appears again at the edge of their firelight. But what they discover while driving out of the mountains is en...

This week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into Loveland, Ohio, a quiet river town northeast of Cincinnati with one of the strangest creature legends in America.

In March 1972, Loveland police officer Ray Shockey was patrolling an icy stretch of Riverside Drive near the old Totes factory when he spotted something crouched in the road. According to his account, the creature stood upright, looked directly at him, and moved over the guardrail toward the Little Miami River. 

Two weeks later, fellow officer Mark Matthews reported his own encounter on the same road and fired his revolver a...

This week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip leaves the highway behind and opens the mailbag for five listener encounters that have lingered for years—sometimes decades—after they happened.In Aroostook County, Maine, a seventeen-year-old working the 1959 potato harvest walks alone to the bottom of a frost-covered field and realizes something is already waiting in her row, crouched among the potatoes and feeding.

In the darkness of West Virginia’s New River Gorge, a railroad track inspector responds to a tripped slide fence and finds himself standing beside the rails as a ninety-four-car coal train roars past. On the ot...

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads into North Dakota and follows the Missouri River in search of one of the strangest creatures ever recorded in the folklore of the northern plains: the Miniwashitu.

More than a century ago, ethnologist Melvin Randolph Gilmore wrote of a mysterious being said to live beneath the Missouri. Covered in red hair like a buffalo, with a single eye, one horn, and a jagged backbone resembling the teeth of an enormous saw, the Miniwashitu was believed to swim upstream each...

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip brings the journey home to North Carolina.

Brian and Dani have spent the last six years living on forty wooded acres in the foothills, and this episode begins on their own porch before traveling across the state and back to the winter of 1953–1954, when the small town of Bladenborowas gripped by fear.

Something was killing dogs.Using newspaper coverage from Wilmington, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Lumberton, Brian follows the story night by night: dogs found dead with almost no blood left in their bodies, terrified hounds refusing to follow th...

Tonight Backwoods Bigfoot Stories takes a break from the Cryptid Road Trip and heads home to the Appalachian Mountains for a night of old-fashioned mountain storytelling.

Brian begins with the warnings and superstitions passed down through generations: three knocks in the night, covered mirrors, strange sounds outside the house, and the belief that the dogs often know something is there long before we do.

Along the way, he separates genuine Appalachian traditions from the modern versions that have taken on a life of their own online. From there, the episode ventures into the darker corners of...

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...

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, a...

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.

Witness...

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 an...

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 betwe...

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 w...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 t...

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...

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...

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...

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 b...

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...

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...