Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 an...

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...

Three experienced cavers. One hand-drawn map. Two words written in pencil at the bottom of it. Don't go.

This week's episode is a listener letter. Keith, a longtime friend of the show, finally put on paper what happened to him and his two closest friends almost a year ago, deep inside a cave on a ridge in eastern Kentucky that almost nobody knows is there. 

Caleb's grandfather, Pap, had warned him off that ridge for as long as Caleb had been alive. He never said why. After Pap passed, Caleb found a folded piece o...

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

Vocalizations from three directions. Heavy bipedal footsteps and breathing right outside a tent wall. A smell like ozone mixed with something animal. Rocks placed, not thrown, into camp as...

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

The first account comes from Dale, a lifelong hunter from Sequim, Washington, who was twenty-three years old in...

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

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

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

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

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

In Part Three, a competitive bowhunter named Marcus shares an account from late September of two thousand three. Marcus was scouting a clearcut in the Cherokee National Forest from a ridge saddle at about thirty-two hundred feet when he observed something step off a stump at the far end of the clearing and walk upright through waist-high brush for over two hundred yards. He watched through a Swarovski...

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

In Part Two, a woman named Karen shares an account from the summer of nineteen ninety-four. Karen was a seasonal employee with the United States Forest Service, assigned to maintain a decommissioned fire road along a ridgeline in the eastern part of Polk County, Tennessee. The road had been...

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

A narrow valley cuts between two parallel ridges through the heart of this stretch, and every submitter described it independently — the terrain, the quiet, the feeling th...

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

A heavy sense of being watched. Massive canine tracks along the creek that dwarfed anything he'd ever seen. Vocalizations at night that carried across the valley and sounded like nothing he could identify. His father dismissed it at first, but when the family's goats started disappearing...

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

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

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

The letter explains that Earl believed the creatures could hear spoken conversations and that sealing the information in stone was the only way to pass...

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

They set up about two hundred yards south of the bluff where Garrett had previously observed three creatures on the talus slope.Cliff's first three bat strikes on...

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

With the generator dead from moisture in the magneto, Garrett settles in for a night of oil lamps and firelight. Both dogs have been agitated since the barometric pressure began dropping, with Ruby pacing a tight patrol route between the windows and back...

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

Vernon spent thirty years with the Forest Service and documented the creatures along the Bishop Creek corridor from 1963 until shortly before his death in 2004. He and Earl were friends who compared notes for years.Opal shares her own mimicry encounter...

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

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

He followed with a flashlight as...

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

By the spring of 2016, with two years of escalating encounters behind him and the nightly knocking returning from that same direction, Garrett decided to hike to the bluff at dusk to understand...

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

On the night of January 8, 2016, a storm dropped nine inches of fresh snow. Garrett woke the next morning to a...

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

He describes the bond they built during childhood cabin trips in the Blue Ridge, anchored by a pivotal hike near Blowing Rock that cemented Wade's voice as one of the most emotionally significant sounds in Garrett's life.On October 11, 2015, while resting at the bottom of a ravine during a...

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

Story Two picks up in the spring of 2015 after a quiet winter during which the knocking went silent. During a visit to the property's previous owner, Earl, at an...

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

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

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

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

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

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

What could have been...

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

Their mission was to cut a firebreak along an isolated ridge and spend three days in some of the most rugged terrain in Northern California.What they encountered there changed every one of them. It star...

In this episode, Brian shares an email from a military veteran who served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and wants the world to hear a story that's been buried for three decades. Matt, as he asks to be called, writes in about a confession made to him by a fellow soldier he calls Joe during a night of drinking while the two were stateside between deployments. Joe revealed that in the mid nineteen nineties, long before the war on terror, he was part of a small specialized team dispatched into an unnamed national park after two hikers went missing.
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The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world, and they've been collecting secrets for longer than human memory reaches. Tonight we go into the old green dark — the deep, cathedral-quiet forest of the Appalachian chain — and we don't come back out until we've walked through six of the most haunting, bone-deep stories this ancient landscape has ever produced.

We start in Hancock County, Tennessee, in 1923, where a sixty-one-year-old farmer named Elias Combs runs his trapline in the pre-dawn dark and comes face to face with the Wampus Cat — the Cherokee creature known as Ewah, a being...

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

This episode tells Roe's story as close to his own experience as the hi...

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...