Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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

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

Within twenty-six hours it was seen twice more by three other teenagers who had never compared notes, and then it vanished forever, leaving behind matching sketches, a police chief who...

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

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

Now a scout named Raksha has vanished into the dark, with nothing left behind...

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

Within weeks, a small-town newspaper headline reading "Residents Fear Goatman Lives" had grown into Washington Post coverage of a six-foot hairy creature walking upright through the Prince George's County woods, and the Maryland Goatman was born. In this episode, I trace the legend all the way...

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

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

In this episode I've got six of those stories, from six different...

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

They call her Cassie, the Casco Bay Sea Serpent, and her paper trail runs deeper than you'd think. We trace New England's sea serpent tradition from John Josselyn's sixteen thirty-nine account at Cape Ann through young Edward Preble chasing a serpent by rowboat in Penobscot...

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

One night on Eagle Lake, they built a huge bonfire on the shore to guide themselves home, pushed their...

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

First up is the rougarou, the Cajun werewolf that crossed the Atlantic with exiled French farmers, survived the Acadian expulsion, and settled into the swamps of south Louisiana, where it's been enforcing Lent and scratching at shutters for two hundred and fifty years. We dig into the loup-garou's roots in the werewolf trials of medieval France, the Catholic morality machine that kept...

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

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

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

We start at a deer camp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where a hunter alone for the first time in his life hears wood knocks, finds a seventeen inch track, and spends a November night listening to something walk...

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

What happened over the next three hours is a story about labor, a washed-out culvert, a volunteer rescue man, and a baby born in a Baptist church parking lot under the last shells of the loudest...

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

And that's where the story starts, because the monster is almost beside the point. The real horror...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 s...

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...

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...

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...