Backwoods Horror Stories

Follow Backwoods Horror Stories
Share on
Copy link to clipboard

Welcome to "Backwoods Horror Stories," the ultimate destination for thrilling tales of encounters with cryptids like Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Dogman, and other mysterious creatures lurking within the depths of the woods. Join us as we venture into the uncharted territories of the unknown, sharing spine-chilling stories of the strange and terrifying things that happen to people who dare to venture into the backwoods. From hair-raising encounters with Bigfoot to unexplainable encounters with UFO's, strange lights, and other elusive cryptid creatures, our channel is dedicated to sharing the secrets hidden within the dark forest's. Prepare to be captivated by firsthand accounts, and captivating storytelling that will leave you questioning what lies beyond the veil of the natural world. Subscribe now and embark on a journey into the heart of the unknown, where the woods hold secrets that are waiting to be revealed. But beware, you may need to sleep with the light on!

Backwoods Horror Stories-Bigfoot Encounters


    • Jul 19, 2026 LATEST EPISODE
    • weekdays NEW EPISODES
    • 54m AVG DURATION
    • 253 EPISODES


    Search for episodes from Backwoods Horror Stories with a specific topic:

    Latest episodes from Backwoods Horror Stories

    Maryland: Bigfoot & The Goatman

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2026 62:31 Transcription Available


    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 back to its documented beginnings, from a 1971 college folklore project and the mad-scientist rumors surrounding the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center to the goat herder, the hermit, and the axe-wielding thing said to stalk lovers' lanes and Crybaby Bridge.I walk through the classic encounters the way the county has told them for fifty years, hooves on the blacktop behind a parked car, an axe blade in a door panel, screams over the campsites, and then I put on my old badge and show you what the evidence actually supports. From there the road trip goes deeper into Maryland's monster file, because the witnesses in 1971 never described a goat at all.They described a Bigfoot. We cover the Dwayyo attack outside Gambrill State Park in 1965, the Sykesville Monster flap of 1973 with its thirteen-inch footprint cast and Baltimore Zoo examination, a fisherman's daylight sighting on the Patapsco in 1981, the Harewood Park Monster, the Eastern Shore reports, and the giant that construction crews reported at the Arundel Mills site in 2000. It's a story about dark roads, headlights, bored teenagers, freight trains, and the one small casualty at the bottom of it all, and by the end you'll know exactly where the folklore stops and where the genuine mystery in the Maryland woods begins.Leave Brian A Voicemail Email BrianListen To Disturbing History Podcast Listen To Sasquatch Odyssey Podcast Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot & The Hunters

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 17, 2026 82:51 Transcription Available


    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 men, in six different states, across six different decades. We start in western Montana in nineteen sixty-eight, where two elk hunters packed seven miles into a basin that something had already emptied.From there it's the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas in nineteen seventy-seven, where a young deer hunter learned why the old-timers on his uncle's lease quietly hunted around forty acres of the best ground on the place. Then we go back to the oldest account in the bag, a logger on the west slope of the Washington Cascades in nineteen fifty-four, four years before America even had the word Bigfoot. After that it's Michigan's Upper Peninsula in nineteen eighty-nine, where a bear hunter's bait station started getting cleaned out by something that didn't leave bear tracks. Then down to a Georgia river bottom in nineteen ninety-six, where two cousins hunting hogs at night followed a hole in the frog sound and found out what had moved the hogs. And we close in the Colorado high country in two thousand eight, with a skeptic of an archery elk hunter, a wrong-sounding bugle in the dark, and a line of sixteen-inch tracks through an elk wallow.Six men, most of whom never planned on telling anybody. The stories came to me, and now they've come to you. Keep your eyes on the tree line.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Maine: Cassie & Bigfoot

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2026 58:00 Transcription Available


    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 Bay during the Revolution, into the famous Gloucester sightings of eighteen seventeen, when the Linnaean Society of New England took sworn depositions from dozens of witnesses and then torched its own credibility with a deformed blacksnake.From there it's old Maine newspaper accounts, Danish dragger captain Ole Mikkelsen's nineteen fifty-eight sighting off Cape Elizabeth, and a run of modern encounters from working boats, including a three-boat sighting on a flat calm August morning that nobody involved ever wanted to talk about again. Then we leave the coast and drive inland, because Maine is the most forested state in the country and the North Woods have their own resident.We dig into Wabanaki traditions of forest giants, the Durham gorilla flap of nineteen seventy-three, and Sasquatch encounters from Aroostook County deer swamps, the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, a log landing north of Jackman, and a frozen pond in the Moosehead country where the snow kept a record two brothers wish it hadn't.As always, the ordinary explanations get first crack, basking sharks and moose and the pattern-hungry human eye, and as always, there's a residue they can't quite eat. The ocean hides one monster and seventeen million acres of trees hide the other, and Maine never asks either of them for proof.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Allagash Abductions

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2026 64:28 Transcription Available


    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 canoe out into the black, and watched an enormous silent sphere of swirling light rise over the treeline. When Foltz flashed an SOS at it, a beam dropped to the water and came straight for them, and the next thing any of the four remembered was standing on the beach in a strange dead calm while their two-hour bonfire lay burned down to coals behind them.Twelve years later, after a head injury, a seizure disorder, and a wave of nightmares that hit both Weiner twins in two separate households, the four men underwent fifteen hypnotic regression sessions with investigator Raymond Fowler's team, and what came off those tapes made them famous. Four separate accounts of a cold examination room, gray beings with glass-dark eyes, and procedures nobody wants to remember, all matching. They passed polygraphs, they passed psychiatric evaluations, and they carried the story through decades of ridicule, right up until 2016, when Chuck Rack picked up a phone in a Missouri motel room and tore the case in half.In this episode, I take you from the floatplane landing on Telos Lake all the way through the encounter, the missing time, the years of silence, the hypnosis sessions, the memory science that dismantled recovered testimony in American courtrooms, and the recantation that ended four friendships. Because when everything else about this case gets argued away, one thing is still standing. Something was over Eagle Lake that night, all four men swore to it until the day it mattered most, and fifty years later, nobody has ever explained it.The Road Trip will be back on the highway soon. Tonight, we go where the roads end.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Louisiana: The Rougarou & Bigfoot

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2026 58:30 Transcription Available


    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 legend alive, the strange rulebook of the curse itself, from the hundred and one days to the thirteen coins by the door, and the encounter stories that suggest people down the bayou are still seeing something.A young woman paced for four miles by amber eyeshine on a dark bayou road. Three fearless hog dogs that refused one cut of swamp for two weeks straight. A calf struck on the highway that wasn't there when the driver walked back. Then we cross the Pearl River into seventy thousand acres of nowhere for the Honey Island Swamp Monster.In August of nineteen sixty-three, an air traffic controller named Harlan Ford and his hunting partner Billy Mills watched a seven-foot, gray-haired figure stand up out of a clearing and look back at them, and the case that followed includes torn-out boar throats, disputed plaster casts, a missing fisherman, and a reel of Super Eight film that Ford's family didn't find until after he was gone.From there we widen out to Louisiana's full Sasquatch record, including the Earl Whitstine logging case reported to the Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office in the year two thousand, the Kisatchie National Forest reports, and firsthand accounts from hunters, campers, and one duck hunter who sat in a pirogue until sunrise because something stood up out of the water ten yards away.Two monsters. One silhouette. By the end of this episode, you may start to wonder, like I did, whether Cajun Louisiana has been describing the same flesh-and-blood animal all along, in whatever language the porch light allowed.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Kentucky: The Pope Lick Monster & Bigfoot

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 8, 2026 62:08 Transcription Available


    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, no railing, and no escape when a freight train enters the span.In this episode I dig into the trestle's history and the three competing origin stories, from the escaped circus freak to the goat-sacrificing farmer, and trace the goatman's much older family tree through Maryland, Texas, and all the way back to the goat-legged wild gods of the ancient world. I cover the 1988 short film that put the monster on the national map and the fight it started with the railroad, and I walk carefully through the real, documented deaths on that bridge, including the young woman killed there in 2016 while visiting Louisville for a haunted attraction tour.You'll hear encounter accounts from the Floyds Fork bottoms, including teenagers who heard a voice calling one of them by name, a driver who watched a horned figure stand up on the rail at dusk, and a survivor who says she never decided to walk onto that trestle at all.Then the episode takes a turn most people don't expect, because Kentucky is quietly one of the best Sasquatch states in the country. I cover the famous Spottsville Monster case of 1975, encounter reports from Land Between the Lakes and the Red River Gorge, and a recent sighting from the same watershed as the trestle itself, and I make the case that the oldest layer of the Goatman legend may have started with something much more familiar to this show.I close with my verdict on what the Pope Lick Monster really is, whether it's supernatural, psychological, or the deadliest warning legend in America running in reverse.A serious note before you listen.The Pope Lick trestle is private railroad property and an active freight line, and real people, including teenagers, have died on it.Do not visit the trestle, do not climb the fence, and do not ever walk railroad tracks anywhere. This story works from the safe side of the fence, and that is the only place I want you enjoying it.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot Stories From My Inbox

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2026 62:37 Transcription Available


    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 circles around his trailer, only to learn years later that his late father had left behind a rule and a plaster cast that suddenly made sense.From there we head to southeastern Oklahoma, where a sixty year old bookkeeper and her husband endure eight months of stripped apple trees, peeled coop wire, and screams from the creek bottom before she comes face to face with the thing at her burn pile.Then it's broad daylight in the timber country of Northern California, where a professional timber cruiser with eleven years in the woods watches something stand up from behind a root wad at seventy yards, and finds out his partner saw it too and said nothing.The fourth account takes us back to nineteen sixty eight, to a West Virginia hill farm, a face at a bedroom window, shutters that went up overnight, and a deathbed confession about a place the family called the Yellow Gap.We close on a sandbar in the Florida panhandle river swamps, where a fishing guide spends an entire night under siege by something wading the flooded timber, and finally understands why the old men on the river always left when the smell came.Five strangers, fifty eight years, two thousand miles, and the same details over and over. As always, I hold my conclusions loose, but I'll tell you what four decades of listening has taught me about the difference between a story and a report. Keep your eyes on the treeline.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot Born On The 4th Of July

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2026 75:18 Transcription Available


    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 Fourth the valley ever saw. It is also a story about something else that was on that mountain the same night, something that paced a running man through the switchbacks, stood in a flashlight beam for four long seconds with two rabbits in its fist, and later walked out of the treeline, put its hands on a stranded pickup, and lifted it off the pipe. Two babies came into the world on that mountain that night, and only one of them got a birth certificate. This is the story of both.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Kansas — Sinkhole Sam

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 3, 2026 57:35 Transcription Available


    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 here is the floor. Out past Inman, in McPherson County, there's a shallow drying pond the locals called the Big Sinkhole, and in the drought summer of nineteen fifty-two two young Mennonite fishermen watched something long and pale as thick around as an automobile tire come up out of water you could wade across. One of them put a twenty-two into it. It didn't care.The papers named it Sinkhole Sam, a satirist named Ernest Dewey buried it under a punchline about a made-up creature called the foopengerkle, and the joke got so loud that seventy years later nobody remembers there was ever anything under it worth taking seriously. We strip the joke off. We look at the thirty years of fishermen who saw it before it was funny, the tribal serpent warnings older than the town, the cattle that won't drink, the mud pushed down where nothing should push it, and the calf that got dragged into a lake fifty miles south in nineteen sixty-seven and never seen again.But the serpent isn't the only thing people meet out there, and the other thing doesn't stay in the water. It walks. It crosses roads, it stands at the tree line and watches, and it leaves the one thing Sam never has the decency to leave behind. Tracks. We follow the Kansas Bigfoot record from Old Sheff in eighteen sixty-nine, when sixty armed men chased a thing through Crawford County and couldn't bring themselves to shoot it because it looked too much like a man, all the way up to a seventeen-inch print pressed into a field north of Topeka last spring. Bowhunters, a retired cop, turkey hunters, a girl caught at dusk between the dark water on one side and the dark timber on the other, not sure to this day which one she was closer to, or whether they were ever really two separate things.Nearly four decades in the field and sixteen years behind a badge tell me not to buy the thirty-foot worm. They also tell me something is wrong with that water, and that the cattle agree with me. Ride along, keep your eyes on the low places, and whatever you do, don't stop at the bridge.Got a Kansas encounter of your own, at a sinkhole or in the timber? Write in. Every account we read on the show came from somebody who was tired of being laughed at.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Iowa: Bigfoot & The Van Meter Visitor

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 1, 2026 49:20 Transcription Available


    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.Tonight we park in the Hawkeye State for a different reason, because the thing Iowa actually reports, quietly, all over the map, for more than 100 years, isn't a winged devil. It's big and dark and covered in hair and it walks on 2 legs, and it's been hiding in the last place anybody'd think to look for it. We dig into the Lockridge Monster and the partially eaten turkeys that started it, the Skunk River Wildmen, a 13-year-old boy who watched one drink from the river with cupped hands, a turkey hunter who locked eyes with something in the morning fog, a bow hunter with 5 separate run-ins on his own land, a viral photo out of White Water Canyon, and a string of encounters from people who never told a soul, the mushroom hunters and the night fisherman and the farmer with a clump of coarse dark hair in his kitchen drawer.Then we take the long way home through the rest of Iowa's strange country, the cursed Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery, the Fort Dodge house whose builders invited the dead in on purpose, and the phantom cougars the state swears are gone and people keep right on seeing. As always, your host walks it through an evidence-first, flesh-and-blood lens, with the eye of a former lawman who spent years learning the difference between a man telling a story and a man telling you what happened to him. Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Ape Canyon

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 28, 2026 58:44 Transcription Available


    In the summer of 1924, five gold prospectors working a remote claim on the southeastern shoulder of Mount St. Helens came down off that mountain with a story nobody wanted to believe and almost nobody could forget. They claimed that a group of 7-foot, hair-covered creatures had laid siege to their cabin through the night, hurling boulders against the walls, tearing at the chinking between the logs, and reaching a massive arm through a window before the men drove it back with an axe.The men were Fred Beck, his son George, John Peterson, and 2 unrelated prospectors who shared the surname Smith, Marion and Roy. By the time they reached the little settlement of Cougar, the tale was already taking on a life of its own, and within days the Oregonian ran the headline that would echo for a century, "Ape Men Sought in Mt. St. Helens."This episode walks the whole thing from the ground up. We lay out the verifiable history first, the daylight sighting across the canyon, the 3 rifle shots Fred Beck swore struck one of the creatures and sent it tumbling into an inaccessible ravine, and the long night that followed back at the cabin.We cover the Forest Service investigation that came after, when rangers J. H. Huffman and William Welch hiked to the site, climbed down into that supposedly unreachable canyon, found no body and no blood, and then demonstrated how those 14-inch tracks could be faked by a man walking in his sock feet and twisting his heel in the soft dirt. Their conclusion was blunt. The men had probably spooked themselves, maybe seeded a few rocks near the cabin to dress up the tale, and let the dark and the isolation do the rest. And yet, as one writer put it decades later, people still wanted to believe, and the story refused to die.From there we move past the record and into the cabin itself, into a long-form dramatization built entirely on the facts as the men reported them. We imagine the weight of that first footprint pressed into the earth at dusk, the bar dropping across the door, the first rock hitting the roof just after midnight, and the slow, sickening realization that whatever was outside was working together, testing the walls, learning where the men were weakest. It is a reconstruction, not a transcript, and we are honest about that line. But every beat of it sits on something Beck himself described.We also follow the story forward in time, through Beck's 1967 booklet "I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens," where an aging man added a strange spiritual dimension to the account, suggesting the creatures could come and go as they pleased and were never entirely of this world. We talk about how the 1924 incident got folded into the Bigfoot phenomenon decades later, after Bluff Creek and the coining of the name itself, and how a narrow gorge on the mountain came to be called Ape Canyon as a permanent marker of the legend.And we close on the mountain as it stands now, its old cone blown open by the 1980 eruption that buried the cabin site forever, leaving the truth of that summer locked somewhere under the ash. You can take the rangers' side or you can take Beck's. What you cannot do, once you have heard it, is pretend the story doesn't get under your skin. As always, my read is a flesh-and-blood one. Whatever those men met on that mountain, I don't think it came from another dimension. I think it walked in on 2 legs, and I think it walked back out.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Indiana: The Beast of Busco

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 26, 2026 59:43 Transcription Available


    This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway in Churubusco, Indiana, a tiny Whitley County farm town northwest of Fort Wayne that turned a giant snapping turtle into a national obsession and then into a permanent mascot. The legend opens in 1898 with farmer Oscar Fulk, who claimed a monstrous turtle lived in the seven-acre pond on his land and got laughed off so completely that the story died for half a century. It came roaring back in July 1948 when two known pranksters, Ora Blue and Charley Wilson, said they watched a turtle the size of their boat surface like a submarine while they were fishing.The tale should have died at the barbershop again, until landowner Gale Harris saw it himself from his barn roof in March 1949 and, sick of being called a liar, vowed to drag the creature out even if he had to drain the entire lake.What followed was one of the most frantic monster hunts in American history.We walk through the whole circus: the chicken-wire trap the turtle burst through, the crowds that swelled to five thousand people, the four hundred cars an hour rolling past the Harris farm, the professional trappers from Tennessee, the Fort Wayne diver and his leaking helmet, the two-hundred-pound female sea turtle released as bait in a doomed romance scheme, the 299 unusable photographs from a Life magazine photographer, the lost film, the harpoon, the seventeen-ton crane, and the months-long attempt to drain Fulk Lake dry.It ends the way obsession usually ends: Harris hospitalized with appendicitis, the dam breaking and swallowing his equipment back into the lake, his money and health gone, and the family selling the farm in 1950 having proved nothing.Then comes the skeptical autopsy. We separate the native common snapping turtle (which tops out around seventy-five pounds) from the alligator snapping turtle (spike-shelled, much bigger, and not native to northern Indiana), make the case for a released exotic, and dig into why frightened people in dark water turn a seventy-pound animal into a four-hundred-pound beast. We cover the contested origin of the name Oscar, the wild theories about where the turtle went (an underground river, a muddy grave), and how a town that watched a man ruin himself over a creature he could never catch decided to honor him anyway.Churubusco has thrown its Turtle Days festival every June since 1950, calls itself Turtle Town U.S.A., and keeps the spotlights, nets, and dive gear from the hunt on display at its History Center. The not-finding, as one local put it, is exactly what kept the story alive.  An evidence-first, skeptic's-eye road trip through a small-town monster hunt with real obsession, real cost, and a surprisingly gentle ending.Got a stop for the map? Reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Illinois: The Enfield Monster

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2026 58:42 Transcription Available


    The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Illinois, and this stop earns its keep. In the spring of 1973, in the little farm town of Enfield down in White County, a quiet, sober man named Henry McDaniel opened his front door and met something that stood about four and a half feet tall, walked on three legs, held up two stubby arms, and stared back at him with two pinkish-red eyes the size of flashlight lenses. He emptied four rounds from a .22 into it at close range, swore he hit it, and watched it hiss like a wildcat and leap fifty feet in three bounds toward the L and N railroad tracks. State troopers came out and documented claw marks gouged into his siding and a set of six-toed, dog-like tracks with a mismatched third print.The Enfield Horror was loose, and a small Illinois town spent the next two weeks coming apart over it.This episode runs the whole case the way a former cop reads a file. We cover the boy next door, Greg Garrett, who reported being attacked half an hour before McDaniel and later told university researchers it had been a prank, and why that recantation gets weighed rather than buried. We get into McDaniel's second sighting along the tracks at three in the morning, the five armed monster hunters arrested by a fed-up deputy, the White County sheriff threatening to jail McDaniel for talking, the Indiana radio newsman Rick Rainbow who claimed to record the creature's screaming cry, and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, who investigated the case in person and walked away without an answer. We lay out every theory on the table, from escaped kangaroo to bottomland ape to mass hysteria to the saucer-and-demon crowd, and sort the evidence from the noise.Then we open up the rest of Illinois, because Enfield didn't happen in a vacuum. The state caught a kind of monster fever in those years, and we trace it from the start. We head to Farmer City and Salt Creek, where a pale, yellow-eyed giant ran four campers out of their tents in 1970, walked across a police officer's headlights, and left tracks that the state's own game wardens couldn't name.We go up to Pekin and East Peoria for the Cole Hollow Road Monster, Cohomo, the white-haired Bigfoot panic that flooded police lines with over 200 calls, pulled a hundred armed men into the woods, and turned out to have started as a teenager's hoax that still didn't explain everything that came after it. And we close on the Big Muddy, with the Murphysboro Mud Monster of 1973, the mud-caked, river-stinking, eight-foot creature that scared a Murphysboro officer into running, smeared slime on the trees that a cop touched with his own hand, walked into the middle of a carnival, and got tracked by a trained police dog to the door of an abandoned barn.Three-legged terror, hairy giants, river bottoms, gunfire, K-9 units, and a state that never quite goes quiet. This is Illinois, and something is always walking at the edge of the tree line.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot In The Logging Camp

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2026 57:52 Transcription Available


    Three retired loggers, five encounters, and a run of deep timber none of them could ever explain. In this episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories I share firsthand Sasquatch accounts I gathered over the better part of two years from three men who spent their working lives cutting timber across the Pacific Northwest and the Mountain West in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.You'll meet them by first name only, the way they asked, as Earl, Roy, and Hollis, three plainspoken men with no books to sell and every reason to keep quiet, who finally set the weight of what they saw down in front of me.Earl was a young choker setter in the Oregon Coast Range in 1958 when something started emptying the crew's lunch buckets and turning up in head-high brush twenty feet away, and three years later, in 1961, he was pinned in a wall tent on a Cascade lake while a slow, heavy weight walked the gravel behind his head.Roy was a redwood faller in Northern California in 1963 when he looked up a hillside gallery of old-growth and watched a near eight-foot figure lay its hand flat against a trunk and knock twice, and heard two knocks answer from across the canyon. Hollis worked the Idaho panhandle and western Montana, where eyeshine paced his truck on a one-lane logging road in 1971, and a scream came down off the slope above a river camp in 1974 that emptied that camp by first light. I came up a skeptic, and I went looking for the place each story breaks. These three didn't break the way a made-up story breaks. What surfaces in all of it, from men who never met and never compared notes, are the same small, specific things: the dog that walks backward into the tent, the smell that arrives a beat ahead of the sight, the wood knocks answered across open ground, and a thing that watched men work and chose, over and over, to let them walk away. Listen for the details, and decide for yourself what these old men carried out of the woods.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Idaho: Sharlie & Bigfoot

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2026 56:09 Transcription Available


    This week the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into McCall, Idaho, a logging-town-turned-resort wrapped around the south shore of Payette Lake, where the water drops three hundred and ninety-two feet into glacier-cut cold and the locals have been seeing something long move beneath the surface since before the town had paved roads.We walk through the real history of Sharlie, from the railroad workers in nineteen twenty who watched a floating log come to life, to the summer of nineteen forty-four when thirty witnesses and a write-up in Time magazine turned "Slimy Slim" into an international story, to Dr. Taylor and his twenty fellow witnesses in nineteen forty-six, the nineteen fifty-four naming contest that gave her the name Sharlie, and the sightings that have trickled in right up to a piece of video in twenty twenty-three.Then we get to the encounters that never made the papers: a boater chased across open water by a shape longer than his nineteen-foot hull, a couple lifted by a motorboat wake on a flat lake with no boat in sight, and a teenager who felt the whole lake shift under his body in deep water and ran out of it unable to speak. We give the giant-sturgeon explanation an honest hearing, and we explain where it holds up and where it doesn't.And because the timber around Payette Lake is some of the most active Sasquatch country on the continent, we bring the woods into it too, from the goat hunters who watched a nine-foot figure boulder-hop up a cliff in nineteen seventy-three, to the federal officer who spotted two of them across the river while paddleboarding in twenty twenty-four, to the ten teenagers stalked and circled over a Memorial Day weekend in twenty twenty-six.McCall sits in the seam between two kinds of deep, the cold water and the dark forest, and both of them have been quietly terrifying level-headed people for a hundred years. Pour something, lock the door, and come up into the high country with us.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Hawaii: The Menehune and the Night Marchers

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 14, 2026 68:26 Transcription Available


    The fifty-state road trip leaves the asphalt behind for the first time and boards a plane bound for Honolulu, because the next stop sits twenty-five hundred miles out in the Pacific where the Trailhunter can't follow. Hawaii doesn't fit the usual formula of trail cameras and footprint casts, and this episode says so up front. The Menehune and the Night Marchers aren't cryptids in the Bigfoot sense.They come out of a living Hawaiian religious and cultural tradition that was already ancient when Captain Cook arrived in seventeen seventy-eight, and for many island families they aren't folklore at all but family history. So the field-researcher hat comes off and the guest hat goes on, and the episode treats these islands the way a guest should.he first half belongs to the Menehune, the small people of the valleys. We stand above the Alekoko Fishpond on Kauai, where a chief and his sister were turned to stone for spying on a night's construction they were forbidden to watch, and we walk the Menehune Ditch at Waimea, the cut-and-dressed stonework that genuinely puzzles archaeologists because it doesn't match anything else in the islands.From there we weigh the anthropology honestly, including the Tahitian word manahune for a landless commoner and the theory that the legend preserves the memory of a displaced first-wave people pushed into the back valleys, alongside the competing view that the magical little-people version flowered after European contact. The file closes with the detail that stays with you: the eighteen-twenties census of Kauai that reportedly recorded sixty-five people in Wainiha Valley under the single word Menehune.The second half turns to the huaka'i po, the Night Marchers, and the rules that island families hand down like instructions about riptides. The processions of the warrior dead follow the old paths and do not go around what gets built across them, which is why some homes were designed with an open breezeway from mountain side to ocean side.If you hear the drums, you do not look, you get off the path and lie face down, and if your own blood marches in that column, a voice may call out Na'u — mine — and let you live. Six accounts carry the weight: forty schoolchildren at Waimea watching small powerful figures play in the trees in broad daylight; a nineteen-fifties road crew whose equipment refused to run until the cut was moved; two boys fishing Ka'ena Point who went down on the sand while a torchlit procession passed close enough to make the grains jump; a young couple stalled on the Old Pali Road, ground a battle in seventeen ninety-five turned into a mass grave that surfaced again as eight hundred skulls during road construction in eighteen ninety-eight; a Waianae grandmother who stood and chanted her family's names while the marchers came through the house; and a United States Army squad that lay face down in their own training area on the orders of a local platoon sergeant.The episode lands on two stories with documentation behind them. Interstate H-three, roughly thirty-seven years and one point three billion dollars to push sixteen miles through Halawa Valley over disputed heiau sites, built only after an act of Congress exempted it from the preservation laws that govern every other road in America. And Honokahua on Maui, where excavation for a luxury hotel uncovered close to a thousand ancient burials, where the Hawaiian community rose up until the resort was moved inland and the ancestors reinterred, and where the outrage produced the burial-protection laws that govern every construction project in the state today.The throughline holds both traditions together: some places don't want to be disturbed, and the islands aren't hostile so much as owned. Visit as a guest, stay on the trail, leave the stones where they sit, and if you ever hear a drum in the dark where no drum should be, you know the procedure.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Five Bigfoot Encounters

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 12, 2026 66:00 Transcription Available


    This week, we're pulling off the road. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip takes a short break so I can open the inbox and share five Sasquatch encounters sent to me by listeners from five different states, spanning more than twenty-five years.A deer hunter in Michigan's Upper Peninsula gets paced through the dark in November of nineteen ninety-four by something that matches his footsteps and then corrects him with one extra step. A woman living alone in Oregon's Coast Range in two thousand eight tracks her dog's strange refusals on a kitchen calendar until the night something looks through the top of a seven-foot window.Two brothers running trotlines on an Oklahoma river in nineteen eighty-seven watch something cross knee-deep through a hole they wade waist-deep, then hear a second scream answer from their own bank. A pipeline surveyor working alone in the West Virginia hollows in twenty fifteen finds his survey stakes extracted, his wooden lath twisted like a wrung-out rag, and finally locks eyes with what's been undoing his work.And a father and son at a remote Maine ice fishing camp in February of two thousand one listen through one inch of spruce planking as something lifts the cinder block off their fish box and sets it down gently. Five witnesses who don't know each other, most of whom asked me to hide their names, all carrying stories they held onto for years before telling a stranger. If you have an encounter of your own, send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. I read every email. The Road Trip rolls again soon.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Georgia: Bigfoot & River Monsters

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2026 57:17 Transcription Available


    This week on Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the truck rolls into Georgia, and for Brian this stop is personal, because Georgia is home. Born and raised in the north Georgia mountains, Brian opens up about the afternoon when he was twelve years old that set the course of his entire life, when something heavy and bipedal paced him through a thicket of pine, charged out of the brush, and sent him running six hundred yards home so terrified he was sick in his own front yard.From there he hands the mic to Mr. Brown, a Summerville carpenter and part-time ginseng hunter who, in August of 1986, came face to face with an eight-foot creature near a fire tower at Jenkins Gap. It had a withered left arm, fingernails grown so long they'd knotted, and a limp like a drunk old man, and Mr. Brown reported it to the sheriff, the newspaper, and Atlanta TV stations because he was afraid it might cross paths with a child.Brian then opens the wider file on Georgia, a state most people overlook for Bigfoot but which ranks among the most active in the country, with well over a hundred credible reports on record. He walks through the 1829 Okefenokee Swamp attack, one of the earliest written Sasquatch accounts in American history, complete with eighteen-inch tracks, a thirteen-foot creature, and a deadly battle reported in the Milledgeville Statesman.He covers the much-argued 2009 Lumpkin County sheriff's dash cam footage, the 2000 Rood Creek camping scare on the Chattahoochee, the broad-daylight 2024 Fort Valley sighting near Macon, the Expedition Bigfoot museum up in Cherry Log, and the old Cherokee Tsul'kalu legend his father's friend Elijah used to tell around the fire.Then the road drops south, out of the mountains and across the fall line into the black-water country of the coast, to the town of Darien and the Altamaha River. Settled by Scottish Highlanders from the shores of Loch Ness itself, Darien has spent nearly two centuries telling stories about a thirty-foot river monster the locals call the Altamaha-ha, or Altie for short.Brian traces the legend from its Muscogee Creek and Tama roots through the colonial timber rafts, then lays out the documented sightings, including Captain Delano's seventy-foot serpent off St. Simons Island in 1830, the timbermen and hunters of the early twentieth century, the 1969 brothers, the 1970s reports from Harvey Blackman and Frank Culpepper, the Butler Island sightings, the 1981 Larry Gwin and Steven Wilson encounter that put Altie on the national map, the 2010 video off Fort King George, and the strange remains that washed up at Wolf Island in 2018. He closes the river out with the encounters that never make the papers but never stop circulating, the fishermen watching humps roll through the channel, the boaters tracking something long swimming against the current, the night sounds that send grandmothers to latch the windows on the hottest nights, the shrimper whose new net got torn open by something he still calls a bull shark, the duck hunter whose old Lab climbed into his lap, and the dockside witnesses who watched a long head rise, look at them, and sink straight down into the dark. Brian weighs the sturgeon, manatee, and right whale explanations honestly, and lands where he always does, in the not-knowing, which he'll tell you is the most alive he ever feels.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Florida: The Skunk Ape

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2026 59:00 Transcription Available


    The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls south out of the Delaware mud and doesn't stop until the asphalt runs out at the edge of the wet. This stop is Florida, and the thing waiting in the saw grass is the Skunk Ape, the South's swamp-bound cousin to Bigfoot, seven feet of reddish-brown hair that most witnesses say they smell long before they see.Rotten eggs, wet dog, sulfur, a stink that hangs in the yard for an hour after the thing is gone. We get into the encounters fast and we get into a lot of them, because that's what you came for.A night fisherman who kills his lantern and still sees two eyes burning high over the reeds. A family watching something cross the road that stands taller than a six-foot-five inch man. Hunters who could taste the smell before anything stepped out of the palmetto. A scream out of the Big Cypress dark that froze a campsite, and the thing that came to a four-year-old's bedroom window and held her gaze through the glass. Along the way we work the documented record the way you work an open case, weighing a Vietnam vet and former cop named Charles Stoeckman who slept a month with a shotgun, a tour guide and thirty passengers who watched one rock back and forth for fifteen minutes, a fire chief and a real estate agent who saw the same creature minutes apart on the same road, and the 1977 wave that got loud enough that a Florida lawmaker actually tried to make it a crime to harm one.We dig into the famous Myakka photographs, the two flash shots an anonymous grandmother mailed to the Sarasota sheriff asking if anyone was missing an orangutan, and why a quarter century later nobody's closed the case in either direction. We spend real time with Dave Shealy and his Skunk Ape Research Headquarters out on the Tamiami Trail, the man who's given fifty years and the most argued-over footage in the field to proving the thing is real.Then we do the honest part, the bears and the panthers and the genuinely-real wild monkey colonies breeding in Florida's woods, the skeptics inside the research community who put the credible-sighting rate at maybe five out of a hundred and fifty, and the one detail none of the easy answers explains: the smell.Roll the windows up for this one. Trust me. Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Delaware: The Selbyville Swamp Monster

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2026 55:31 Transcription Available


    The smaller the state, the closer the monster feels. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Roadtrip we drive all the way down to the bottom of Delaware, the second smallest state in the country, where there's nowhere for a monster to hide and so the monster lives right at the end of your road. Our destination is Selbyville and the Great Cypress Swamp, fifty square miles of black tannin water, standing cypress, and ground so confusing that people still go missing in it. We dig into the land that water made, the colonial isolation that let these stories concentrate and grow stranger with every telling, and the peat fires that burned underground for months and earned the place its other name, the Burnt Swamp.Then we get to what people have actually seen. Hunters in the 1920's  who heard something scream and come at them through the dark water. A bowhunter who smelled it before the footsteps passed under his stand. Fishermen cutting their lines when the splashes coming down the gut were too heavy and too deliberate to be anything that's supposed to be out there. Kids chased off the wooded path. A tall, hairy figure stepping out of the cypress and crossing Route 54  in the headlights. We also tell the true part, because that's the deal on this show.In 1964 a struggling newspaper editor named Ralph Grapperhaus lit a match under the old legend to sell papers, and a Selbyville man named Fred Stevens became the monster in his aunt's raccoon coat and a rubber mask, jumping out at cars until armed hunting parties made it too dangerous to keep going. A young reporter cracked the whole thing open in 1998. But the mask doesn't explain the sightings that came forty years before it, and it doesn't explain why the people who live at the edge of that swamp still won't rule it out.The man in the mask was only the part we could catch. Keep your eyes on the tree line, and if something tall steps into your headlights down there in the dark, don't stop to feed it.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Connecticut: The Black Dog

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2026 70:39 Transcription Available


    This week on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, we pull into Meriden, Connecticut, and climb into the Hanging Hills, a range of ancient volcanic cliffs where a small black dog has been haunting hikers for more than a hundred and thirty years.He looks like an ordinary stray. Short hair, black coat, moderate size, nothing about him that should stop you in your tracks. But this dog never makes a sound, not even when you watch him bark, and he never leaves a footprint behind him in dust or snow. And the rule that's been passed down since the eighteen hundreds is simple and merciless. See him once for joy, twice for sorrow, and the third time, you don't come down off that mountain.We trace the legend all the way back to its source, a story called The Black Dog published in The Connecticut Quarterly in the spring of 1898 by geology professor William Harry Chichele Pynchon, grandfather of the novelist Thomas Pynchon. It was printed as fiction, but it broke loose from its pages almost immediately and became something people swear is real.We walk through the original three-act tale, the doomed winter climb of geologist Herbert Marshall, and the death that the legend later pinned on Pynchon himself, before separating what actually happened from the story that grew up around it.Then we get into the encounters, because that's where this thing lives. A lifelong hiker watching the dog bark in total silence before he vanishes off a bare ledge. A young man named Mike who photographed the dog at Castle Craig in 2004 while his own brother, standing ten feet away, saw nothing at all.A nighttime sighting on the bridge over the highway. A skeptic named Christina stunned into belief on the trail below the tower. Prints in fresh snow that stop mid-stride, as if the animal that made them simply lifted off the ground. We lay these against the real and sobering history of the cliffs, including the fatal fall of Mark Valenti in 2015 and the woman who fell nearly two hundred feet in 2021, and we ask whether the legend is wrapping itself around a place that was always going to be dangerous, or whether something up there is doing the counting.Before we leave the state, we take a side road into Connecticut's wider cryptid country, from the Winsted Wildman of 1895 to the silent eight-foot figure that teenager Karl S. watched cross the railroad tracks near Newtown in 1976, to the all-black upright shape a Bethel woman saw chasing thirty deer through her yard in 2022, to the lanky silhouette that stepped off Holbrook Road near Seymour in 2024. Twenty-some credible sightings, a Litchfield County hotspot, and a long traprock ridge that connects all of it.Whatever the black dog is, the silence, the missing tracks, and the way it's simply there and then isn't, all of it belongs to the same family of things that walk just outside the edge of what we're willing to call real. Climb up to Castle Craig with us, watch your footing on the ridge, and if you see a small black dog on the trail, take a good long look at him. Because that one's your first.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot On Maneuvers

    Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2026 57:45 Transcription Available


    Tonight we're pulling off the highway for this one. Somewhere between mile markers on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, an email came in that I couldn't drive past, so we're parking in the gravel for a while to hear it. A man who's listened to just about everything I've put out finally wrote down something he'd carried alone for forty years, and he sent it to me because he trusts how I handle a story.He was nineteen, deep in the military in the mid-1980s, out on an extended field problem in mountain country so remote that help was a full day away if anything went wrong. His commanding officer briefed them on bears and big cats and told them to keep their heads on a swivel, that this wasn't the kind of country that announces itself. By the third day, his element of six men had found crude shelters built from bent saplings woven together with living vines, and the birds had gone silent across the whole drainage.What happened that night is the reason he's telling it now. White points of light with no source to reflect them, hanging six feet off the ground in the dark. Vocalizations from opposite slopes that climbed past anything an animal should be able to make, answering each other across the men's position. A smell that came in waves as something circled them. Rocks the size you don't throw by hand, dropped inside their perimeter close enough to kick dirt in a man's face, placed like a warning rather than an attack.One of them breaking branches at slow, even intervals as it walked right up to a soldier's position and just stood there, breathing. And in the gray light before dawn, through their night vision, three of them at the tree line. One very large, two smaller by a foot or two and skinnier, restless, hanging back.The way the three of them moved off together didn't look like animals scattering. It looked like a family heading home.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Patrick: The Sasquatch Hybrid

    Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2026 63:03 Transcription Available


    This episode comes out of a recent conversation I had with author and researcher Norman Sollie, and it stopped me cold. Norman is the author of a brand-new book called Before Patty, Volume One: Patrick, the Sasquatch-Human Hybrid and Our Genetic Inheritance, and when we sat down to talk, he walked me through one of the most remarkable stories I've come across in close to forty years on this subject.I knew I had to share it with you. This isn't the interview itself. This is me, sitting at the mic, telling you what I learned and why I think it matters.The story starts in the late summer of eighteen ninety-one, at a Sinixt fishing camp on the San Poil River in Eastern Washington. A young bride, newly married, went down to fetch water one evening and was taken from her own people by what the Lake Band called a Skanicum, their word for Sasquatch. She was held in the high country for two months. She escaped while her captor was sleeping in a wild potato patch. She came home pregnant. And nine months later she gave birth to a boy named Patrick.That's where most of us thought the story ended, because the original ethnographic record set down by Dr. Ed Fusch in nineteen ninety-two left Patrick dying young and most of the trail going cold.What Norman did, working alongside genealogist Heather Moser of Small Town Monsters, was reopen the case. He surfaced a hundred and sixty historical documents that all point to the same man. Birth records. A land patent on a hundred and four acres of Colville Reservation ranch land, signed by President Woodrow Wilson in nineteen seventeen. Arrest reports. Court filings. Mugshots from the front and the side. And a careful ink signature, in Patrick's own hand, that now sits on the cover of Norman's book. In this episode I take you through everything Norman shared with me. The Russian hominologist whose self-published book first pointed Norman toward Patrick. The forty-eight hours it took Heather to find him. The physical features that mark Patrick as something other than fully human, including a steeply sloped forehead, ears rotated more than twenty degrees below the human norm, a short compressed neck that mirrors Neanderthal anatomy, and a missing chin. The strange brilliance of a man who somehow always knew what was in everybody else's hand at the card table. The eight children Patrick fathered. The slow decline through alcohol and Prohibition-era bootlegging. The death in a Seattle morning in nineteen sixty-two, on the same day Norman himself arrived in the United States as a child. And the forty-some living descendants still walking around right now, carrying Patrick's bloodline forward without most of them having any idea what their great-grandfather actually was.This is the story the way Norman has reconstructed it, layered against the original Sinixt family memory that came down through Laura and Francis, two Lake Band women who knew Patrick personally and trusted Dr. Fusch enough to tell him the truth in nineteen eighty-five. It's the story of one young woman whose name has been lost, one boy who shouldn't have existed by any standard explanation of mammalian genetics, and one bloodline that's still moving forward in the Pacific Northwest while the rest of the world goes about its business none the wiser. I'll have Norman on the show in a future episode to go deeper with him directly. In the meantime, pick up his book. Before Patty, Volume One: Patrick, the Sasquatch-Human Hybrid and Our Genetic Inheritance is available at beforepatty.com, or through Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. Better yet, ask for it through your local independent bookseller or Barnes and Noble. Norman has volume two on the way, making the evolutionary case for Sasquatch, with volume three to follow on what he calls the weird stuff.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Colorado: Rocky Mountain Bigfoot

    Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2026 65:42 Transcription Available


    This episode of The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Colorado, the highest state in the union, for a deep look at one of the strangest contrasts in American cryptid lore. We open with the Slide-Rock Bolter, an absurd creature from the lumber camp folklore of the early nineteen-hundreds, first documented by Minnesota state forester William T. Cox in his nineteen ten book Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods. We trace the Bolter back to its origins in the Fearsome Critters tradition, the body of tall tales that working men in American logging camps invented to entertain themselves, haze new arrivals, and put a face on the genuine dangers of life in the timber.From there, we walk through the broader folklore of the Colorado high country, including the Cornish Tommyknockers brought to the silver camps by immigrant miners in the late eighteen-hundreds, and the older Indigenous traditions of giant or hairy beings in the mountains that predate any of the European arrivals. The second half of the episode shifts from folklore into testimony, exploring the long record of wild man and Sasquatch encounter reports that have come out of the Colorado backcountry from the late eighteen-hundreds to the present day.We cover historical newspaper accounts from the central Rockies, the San Juans, Pikes Peak country, the Wet Mountains, and the Sangre de Cristos, and we move into the modern record with a series of encounter stories drawn from the broader Colorado field, including reports from the Weminuche Wilderness, the Flat Tops, the country around Mount Sopris, the Pagosa Springs area, the mining ghost towns of the San Juans, and the high passes above the San Luis Valley. The episode examines the recurring patterns that show up in the Colorado record, including elevation clusters, water corridors, the strange quality of silence that witnesses describe right before and after an encounter, the consistent pattern of avoidance behavior in the creatures themselves, and the credibility profile of the witnesses, who are overwhelmingly hunters, backpackers, rangers, ranchers, and other people with deep experience in the country they were standing in when the encounter occurred.Along the way we discuss the cultural function of folklore in dangerous places, the ways that men in mining and lumber camps used invented monsters to talk about real risks like rockslides and cave-ins, and the long, often unspoken thread of testimony from people who have walked off the Colorado high country carrying something they were never quite able to put down.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    California: The Dark Watchers

    Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2026 66:20 Transcription Available


    In this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Roadtrip, we drive into California and explore two of the most enduring cryptid traditions in North America. We begin in the Santa Lucia Mountains above Big Sur, where settlers, ranchers, schoolteachers, hikers, soldiers, and tourists have for centuries reported tall silent figures standing on the ridgelines.Known as Los Vigilantes Oscuros, or the Dark Watchers, these silhouetted beings appear at dawn or dusk, wear what witnesses describe as long cloaks and broad-brimmed hats, and vanish the moment anyone tries to close the distance. We trace the history of these reports through Salinan, Esselen, and Chumash traditions, into the Spanish mission era beginning with Padre Junipero Serra in seventeen seventy-one, and forward into the published work of John Steinbeck, whose nineteen thirty-eight short story Flight placed the watchers into American literature, and the poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote of the same figures in his nineteen thirty-seven poem Such Counsels You Gave to Me.Then we travel north into the redwood country, into the Six Rivers, the Klamath, the Trinity Alps, and the Marble Mountain Wilderness, where the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk peoples have spoken of Oh-Mah, the boss of the woods, for as long as their oral traditions reach back. We walk through the nineteen fifty-eight Bluff Creek story that gave the name Bigfoot to the world, beginning with bulldozer operator Jerry Crew, foreman Wilbur Wallace, and Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli, and we spend the bulk of the episode in encounter territory.Hunters who watched a hair-covered figure ford a creek and turn to look back. Families who heard screams answer each other across redwood campgrounds at midnight. Backpackers who listened to rhythmic wood-knocking trade across a Marble Mountain lake. Truckers who saw something step a guardrail in one stride on Highway 96. River guides on the Klamath, forestry technicians in the Trinity Alps, fishermen on the Smith River, hunters on the Mendocino, residents of the Hoopa Valley who simply live alongside what their grandmothers told them was there.This is a California most postcards never show. The watchers above, the giants below, and the question that connects them.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Arkansas: The Fouke Monster

    Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2026 60:22 Transcription Available


    In May of 1971, a young couple named Bobby and Elizabeth Ford rented a small frame house outside the tiny town of Fouke, Arkansas. They'd been there less than a week when something reached through their front window in the middle of the night and changed their lives forever. By morning, Bobby Ford was in a Texarkana hospital being treated for shock and abrasions, the local constable and county sheriff were photographing three-toed tracks in the yard, and a story that had been quietly told around kitchen tables in Miller County for nearly a hundred years was about to spill out into the national press.This episode walks through the full history of the Fouke Monster, from the 1908 Jonesville reports and the decades of quiet family stories that came before, through the Ford family attack on the night of 5/1/1971, and into the media wave that brought hunters, reporters, and a thousand and ninety dollar bounty to a town of a few hundred people. We dig into the work of Smokey Crabtree, the lifelong Fouke resident who became the unofficial chronicler of the case and wrote some of the most important primary-source books on the subject. We cover the production and release of Charles B. Pierce's 1972 docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek, a film made on a hundred thousand dollar loan from a Texarkana trucking company owner that went on to gross over twenty million dollars and quietly invent the modern American Bigfoot mythos. And we trace the encounter reports that kept rolling in long after the cameras packed up, from highway sightings in the late 1970s, to coon hunters in the bottoms in 1997, to trail camera images in 2008, all the way into recent reports along the Sulphur River and Mercer Bayou.Drawing on nearly four decades of personal Sasquatch research and sixteen years in law enforcement, Brian unpacks the evidence with a careful eye on what the witnesses actually said, how investigators actually responded, and what holds up when you set the famous movie to one side and look at the record on its own terms.The episode closes with an honest weighing of the major theories, black bear misidentification, hoaxing, regional folklore, and the case for a possible undocumented hominid population in the connected swamps that run from southwest Arkansas down into Louisiana and east Texas. The witnesses in Fouke didn't ask for any of this. They saw what they saw. And the bottoms keep their secrets the way they always have.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Arizona — The Mogollon Monster

    Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2026 62:32 Transcription Available


    Welcome to stop three on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip. Tonight we're climbing up onto one of the most overlooked Sasquatch landscapes in the country, the Mogollon Rim of central and eastern Arizona, a two-hundred-mile shelf of stone where the Colorado Plateau drops off into the Sonoran Desert and ponderosa pine country meets red rock canyon. It's a place most people don't picture when they hear the word Bigfoot, and that's exactly what makes it so interesting.Because for as long as anyone in Arizona has been keeping records, witnesses have been coming down off that Rim with the same story. Something big up there. Something fast. Something that screams across whole canyons and watches camps from the tree line and throws rocks into fire rings in the middle of the night.We open the episode the way the Rim opens most of its stories, with a quiet camp and four experienced campers who realize, all at once, that the forest around them has gone silent. From there we build the history of the country itself, how the Rim got its name, why the Apache-Sitgreaves and the Coconino and the Tonto national forests stack together to make one of the largest unbroken pieces of timber and wilderness in the lower forty-eight, and how the Mogollon Monster legend traces back well before statehood, into the oral traditions of the people who knew that country first. Then we get into the encounters.A guide and his horseback hunters running into something on a ridge in the Apache-Sitgreaves that didn't react to them the way an animal is supposed to react. A family at an established campground hearing something walk a deliberate circle around their tent at one in the morning, twice, and finding a track in the duff at first light. A solo bow hunter sitting in a tree stand while something stands fifteen feet below him and breathes.A five-man hunt camp that loses a night to rocks on the canvas, a dog that won't get off the floorboard for a week, and a track measurement that no one in the group has been able to explain since. A Forest Service employee with thirty years on the Apache-Sitgreaves who heard something one summer afternoon that nobody at the office wanted to write down.And a couple driving home from Big Lake on State Route 260 who watched something step backward off the shoulder of the highway and clear a four-foot embankment in a single motion.We close with the question that always sits underneath these conversations. Why here. Why this country. Why does the Rim, of all the places in the American West, produce a Sasquatch tradition this dense and this consistent. The answer has to do with the geography itself, the food and the water and the cover and the canyons that no one has ever surveyed, and with the kind of witnesses this country produces, ranchers and hunters and Forest Service folks and law enforcement, people who know the difference between an elk and a bear and a man, and who keep telling the same story year after year.So pour a cup of something warm, pull your fire up a little closer, and come ride with me up onto the Mogollon Rim. Just don't go off looking for whatever's screaming across the canyon.It already knows where you are.If you've had your own encounter on the Rim, or anywhere in Arizona's high country, reach out. Every story matters, and this show runs on yours.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Alaska — The Kushtaka

    Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2026 58:32 Transcription Available


    Alaska doesn't just have Bigfoot. It has something older.This is the second stop on our cryptid road trip across America. Last time out, we worked the longleaf pine country of Alabama and the legend of the White Thang.Tonight we head north to the rain coast of southeast Alaska, where the fog comes down low over the tideline and the spruce trees grow right to the water. This is the country of the Tlingit, a maritime people who have been reading these waters for somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years. And it is the country of the Kushtaka — the otter people, the shape-shifting beings who imitate the voices of the people you love and call you out into the dark.We open in a fourteen-foot skiff outside Wrangell, with a fisherman in the fog and a child crying near the shore, and what his Tlingit grandmother told him to do if it ever happened.From there we go deep. Into the ethnography of the Kushtaka, into the protections the old stories say can save your life — copper, dogs, and one other thing nobody likes to bring up — into three traditional accounts passed down through generations, and into two modern reports from a Forest Service ranger in the Tongass and a pair of kayakers on Admiralty Island. We close with a long, cinematic survival story from a cannery cove outside Hoonah in October of two thousand and eleven, and the one small tell that may be the only thing standing between you and what's on the other side of the door.Handle this one with respect.The Kushtaka belong to a living tradition still carried by Tlingit families in southeast Alaska today. Listen with that in mind. And if you ever find yourself on a piece of Alaskan water you don't quite know, on a night when the fog has come down and the world has gone quiet, and you hear a voice you recognize calling your name from the trees, you already know what to do.Put your back to it. Keep your hands on something made of copper. And don't look back.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Alabama White Thang

    Play Episode Listen Later May 15, 2026 61:19 Transcription Available


    The Backwoods America series kicks off in north Alabama with one of the strangest and most persistent cryptid legends in the American South. The Alabama White Thang.A tall, pale, hair-covered creature that has walked the back roads and hollers of this state for more than a hundred years — screaming from two ridges over, standing in the middle of dark country roads, and sometimes, when it decides to, coming back the next night. This is the first stop on a fifty-state cryptid road trip.Over the coming months we're going coast to coast, every two-lane highway and dirt cut and red clay holler we can find, documenting the creatures that local people have been talking about for generations. Some of these episodes will land on names you already know. Most won't. The goal is to surface the stories that have stayed local for a century — the ones the farmers and hunters and night-shift workers only let out when they've decided you might believe them.In this premiere we cover the historical roots of the White Thang, going back through Cherokee folklore and the figure of Tsul'kalu, the Scots-Irish settler tradition that fed Southern wild-man legends, and the earliest written references to the creature in north Alabama newspapers in the early-to-middle twentieth century. We dig into the geography that has let the legend last — the Bankhead National Forest, the Sipsey Wilderness, and the kind of broken Appalachian foothill country where a small persistent population of something could hide indefinitely. Then we work through encounter accounts spanning four counties and four decades. A man named Daryl, who came up out of a bridge in Morgan County after the late shift at a parts plant outside Decatur and saw something standing in his headlights that he could not explain away. A bow hunter named Tommy, who watched it duck through the brush in Walker County and made a deliberate choice not to draw his bow. The Whitlock family, who endured a multi-week stalking case at their property in Marshall County in 2003 that ended with pressure against the back door and three trail camera photographs of something that should not exist. A woman named Rebecca, who saw it standing in the woods behind her grandmother's grave in a small family cemetery in rural Jefferson County. A turkey hunter named Daniel, who held a shotgun on it across a clearing in the Sipsey and walked out knowing he was not supposed to run. And a young couple named Lauren and Jacob, who saw it on a back road in Walker County and then, two nights later, looked out their back window and realized it had come with them.If you have a story of your own — something that happened to you, or to somebody in your family, or to somebody you trust — send it in to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Every email gets read. Names stay out of it on request.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Big Game Hunter Shoots Bigfoot!

    Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2026 68:10 Transcription Available


    A hunting guide reaches out to the show after thirty years of silence, asking for the story to be handled with care. He sends an email that opens with a few simple ground rules. Names are first names only, and none of them are real. The country where it happened is still out there, and the line that got crossed is still a line. He doesn't want a map made of it.He just wants the story told the way it actually happened.Tim was guiding hunters in the northern Idaho high country in the fall of nineteen ninety-five. He was young, broke, and raising a family. When a wealthy trophy hunter showed up at his kitchen table with aerial photographs, a printed file of old hunter reports, and twelve thousand dollars in cash, Tim took the job he knew he shouldn't have taken.The hunter wanted a Sasquatch. He had a custom three seventy-five H and H Magnum, an early defense-grade thermal optic, and a young assistant carrying three cases of camera gear. He didn't want to glass from a ridge. He wanted to cross the creek that the old men of that country had been telling boys not to cross for as long as anybody had been giving the warning.What followed unfolded across three days and two nights on the wrong side of that line. Twisted saplings. Wet river stones balanced on stumps where no water ran. A single rifle shot at a shape on a ridge, a smear of something the wrong color for blood, and one footprint in soft duff.A circle of six animals laid around the camp at dawn, every one of them broken by hand and none of them eaten. A barricade across the trail built in absolute silence. Ammunition lifted out of a buckled pack still riding on its owner's back. A voice in the trees that wasn't a voice in the trees, and a handprint on canvas left as a quiet courtesy.And finally, a clearing at first light, a hunter on his knees, and a creature on a downed log that watched him the way a judge watches a defendant.This is a story about class, about land, about the difference between being a guest and being an owner, and about an old country that still knows the difference. It's also a story about a man who had a clean shot, lowered his rifle, and chose to let something finish what it had come there to do.Tim has kept what he carried out of those mountains in a closet for thirty years. He's letting it go now because his daughter handed him an earbud one Christmas, and because some stories belong in hands that will treat them right.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot In The Cave

    Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2026 55:22 Transcription Available


    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 of graph paper in the back of a kitchen drawer. A road, a creek, a contour line, and a small black circle on the north face of a ridge. Underneath it, in Pap's tight square handwriting, the only two words he ever needed.Three months later, Keith, Caleb, and Josh hiked in to find that cave for themselves.What waited for them, miles into the dark, was older than the warning. Older than the country.And it had been there a very long time.This one is told the way Keith wrote it, in his own voice, slow and careful and honest, with a prologue from me up front. It runs long. It earns the run time.If you've been carrying a story of your own and you're ready to put it down, you can send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. I read every one.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot Scares Researchers In Georgia

    Play Episode Listen Later May 8, 2026 60:15 Transcription Available


    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 they tried to pack. A voice from the tree line calling one man's name in his wife's exact inflection. And a laugh that wasn't shaped right. Then it gets stranger. Glowing orbs moving silently through the canopy. Equipment behaving the way equipment isn't supposed to behave. Watches reading three different times in the same parking area. Eye shine pacing the truck on the drive out. And weeks later, a phone call that finally explains what the older researcher had walked up alone to see on Saturday afternoon, and why he'd kept it to himself until everyone was safely home.This one is told as the email arrived, lightly edited, names changed at the writer's request. It's a story about a corridor, about layered phenomena that don't fit in one frame, and about the moment a veteran researcher decides he's filled his box and won't be filling it anymore.If you've had something happen to you out there that you've been carrying around alone, the email is brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. The newsletter goes out free at paranormalworldproductions.com. Thank you for listening.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot Let Them Walk Away

    Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2026 81:28 Transcription Available


    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 October of 1978 when he climbed into a drainage off the Dosewallips before first light and saw something standing in the fog at the base of the slope. Sixty yards away. Gray-skinned, slope-browed, motionless in a way that no living thing should be able to manage.Dale walked out of those woods that morning and didn't return to any forest for twenty-six years.From there we move to Karen, a young woman from Elkins, West Virginia, who was twenty-four years old in September of 1993 and out for a solo overnight on a loop she'd hiked many times before. At two in the morning, every insect in the Monongahela went silent, something pressed a hand the size of a dinner plate against the wall of her tent, and the heat of a living body radiated through the nylon inches from her face. The next morning she saw what had been standing over her.Brent rides next, a heavy equipment operator out of Athens, Ohio, who was on the OHV trails in the Wayne National Forest with his buddy Cody on a clear October afternoon in 2019. They heard whoops trade across the saddle of a ridge. They turned around to leave. And on the way back down the trail they'd just ridden, they found a fourteen-inch oak laid across the two-track that had not been there forty minutes earlier, with no root ball, drag marks in the dirt, and something watching them from behind a white oak thirty yards uphill.The fourth account is told secondhand by Katelyn, the granddaughter of a northern Wisconsin trapper named Cal, who walked his line on a state forest tract north of the Bois Brule River in October of 1972 and found his sets methodically disabled. A foothold trap hung ten feet up in a hemlock. A marten cubby pried off a maple, turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and re-nailed backwards. A young whitetail arranged on the moss above an otter set, legs folded, head balanced upright, like a chess piece placed for him to find. Then three wood knocks from three different directions.Then a tall, lean, gray-haired figure standing between two pines in the dawn light, watching him with an expression Cal could only describe as tired.The episode closes with Marisol, a freelance photographer who in late August of 2015 hiked into a small alpine lake in the Trinity Alps Wilderness of northern California to shoot the milky way. The wind shifted across the cirque, the smell of a wet animal carried over the water, and through her two-hundred-millimeter zoom she watched something kneel at the far shore, cup water in its palm, drink, and then turn its head and look directly into her lens. A face with a heavy brow, a square jaw, and a small but distinct chin. Eight feet tall when it stood. She broke camp in the fading light and hiked six miles back to the trailhead in the dark, and she has never reviewed the photographs she took that afternoon.What links these five accounts isn't the description of the creature. The descriptions vary. Reddish brown. Gray. Nearly black. Heavy jaw, no chin. Narrower jaw, slight chin. Lean and starved-looking. Massive and barrel-chested. What links them is the aftermath.Every one of these people rearranged their lives around what happened. Hunting careers ended. Backpacking ended. Photography careers pivoted indoors. Decades of silence followed by a single attempt to put it down somewhere, with someone, before the memory had to go to the grave with them.If you've been carrying something of your own, the inbox is open.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    It Could Have Killed Us

    Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2026 64:48 Transcription Available


    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 hands on, eventually buying herself a VIP ticket to the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference as a birthday gift to herself in the middle of a divorce.That weekend put her in front of Adam Davis, R.P.G., and Ken Gerhard, and from that point forward she stopped being a hobbyist and started becoming a field researcher.The bulk of this episode covers the November twenty twenty-five expedition Natalie took with Relic Films into Land Between the Lakes, the one hundred and seventy thousand acre stretch of Kentucky and Tennessee forest that has a documented reputation for high strangeness. Brian walks listeners through Natalie's pheromone bait experiment with Obsession for Men and dollar store dog toys, the singing in the cemetery that calmed down whatever was watching them, the bathroom growl that started a quiet truce in the dark, and the encounter on the second night that broke open everything. Three crawler creatures emerging from a bluish-white oval of light on the ridge line. A charge stopped by bear spray. Cameras and phones and thermals all dying at once.A massive Bigfoot walking out from behind Natalie's truck and disappearing into thin air, witnessed only by her. Martin Groves driving two squatches out of base camp with a stick. Jim hunkered down in his tent the next night while these things pushed in on the hard campers and left the soft tents alone.Brian also covers Natalie's work at the Emmaus Asylum in Missouri and the perfect track she found there, her experience at the Ocala postage stamp where the government bought up land next to a river that whoops and screams across at night, the filming work in the Smokies that turned into the documentary The Vanished with Adam Davis, and a long discussion of the rake creatures that came out of that ridge line at LBL.Natalie's view on these creatures has shifted dramatically over the last year of fieldwork, and Brian asks her directly whether what she's seen has changed how she thinks about the subject. Her answer is honest, and it's the kind of answer that ought to give every flesh and blood researcher something to chew on.Find Natalie on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube under Natalie S. Smearman. Relic Films Media is on the same platforms.Their talk show Beyond the Ordinary is on YouTube. Natalie will be at the Townsend Bigfoot Festival on May first and second, the Ocala Bigfoot Conference on June thirteenth, and the Gatlinburg Bigfoot Conference on July twenty-fifth. The Vanished will be streaming on Tubi, Roku, and Amazon. Brian's full long-form interview with Natalie is available on Sasquatch Odyssey.You can reach Brian directly at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Surveyor's Confession

    Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2026 63:18 Transcription Available


    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 from the previous four episodes. Every single one. Gene's field notes document tree breaks along the ridgeline with spiral fractures at six to nine feet, barefoot impressions measuring sixteen to seventeen inches in creek mud, an unusual sound-dampening effect on the valley floor that both surveyors noticed independently, and three limestone cave openings along the western face of the ridge producing airflow consistent with a significant underground passage system.The timber company ordered those caves excluded from the survey without legal explanation. Gene also recorded an unidentified nighttime vocalization on a microcassette tape that he dismissed as a coyote for thirty-seven years until he heard witnesses in this series describe nearly identical sounds. When Gene overlaid his nineteen eighty-seven plat maps with the encounter locations from all four previous episodes, everything fell inside his survey boundary, and the three cave exclusions sat along the ridge between them like stations on a line.Gene calls this his confession because he had the map, the data, and the physical evidence sitting in a cardboard box in his closet for nearly four decades and never showed it to anyone.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot Hit By A Church Van

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 29, 2026 57:01 Transcription Available


    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 church van loaded with teenagers home from a summer retreat on a two-lane highway that cuts through the valley at the heart of the corridor.It was late and most of the kids were asleep. Something stepped out of the tree line and into the road directly in the path of the van. It was not a deer and it was not a bear. The van's headlights struck it at mid-torso, meaning whatever walked onto that road was tall enough that a beam mounted two and a half feet off the ground was hitting it at the chest. The van made impact hard enough to spin the vehicle off the road and into a ditch. Airbags deployed. When David climbed out to assess the damage, the thing was standing at the edge of the tree line watching the van. It did not appear injured. It did not flee. It stood there, then withdrew into the timber on its own terms.The episode is built around multiple perspectives.David provides the primary account, describing the seconds before and after the impact and what he saw at the tree line. Two of the teenagers who were in the van that night, now adults in their late twenties, independently corroborated his description of the figure's size, posture, and behavior. A local tow truck driver who responded to the call adds a detail none of the others knew — he had pulled three other vehicles out of the same quarter-mile stretch of highway within the previous year, each with similar front-end damage consistent with striking something large and upright at road level.The episode connects back to the series through geography and behavior.The highway where the impact occurred crosses through the same valley described by Herschel in Part One, overlooked by the fire road Karen maintained in Part Two, and visible from the ridge saddle where Marcus observed the clearcut in Part Three.Despite the sudden and violent nature of this encounter compared to the slow escalations in earlier episodes, the behavioral pattern holds — the thing did not panic, did not run, and appeared to control the moment of withdrawal the same way it controlled the moment of contact in every previous story.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    A Bow Hunter Finds Bigfoot

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2026 63:52 Transcription Available


    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 ATS 80 spotting scope at approximately four hundred yards for nearly four and a half minutes, timing the observation at three minutes and forty-seven seconds on his watch.He documented the subject's estimated height at seven to seven and a half feet based on vegetation reference, a stride of four and a half to five feet, uniformly dark brown coloring, disproportionately long arms ending near mid-thigh, a barrel-shaped torso with no visible neck, and a sustained bipedal gait with coordinated arm swing and no loss of balance. A group of whitetail does in the clearcut reacted to the subject before Marcus noticed it, freezing and orienting north simultaneously.Three days later Marcus returned and mounted a Moultrie trail camera on a tree at the edge of the clearcut. After seven days he retrieved the SD card and found two hundred and nineteen images. Among them were two sequences showing an upright figure in the clearcut at night, with infrared eyeshine visible in the frames. One sequence showed the subject covering an estimated twenty to twenty-five feet between two frames taken one second apart.The episode follows Marcus through twenty years of attempting to explain what he observed and what the camera captured, including his systematic elimination of bear, person, hallucination, and hoax as explanations, and the responses he received when he eventually shared the evidence with his wife and his brother, a state wildlife biologist who told him he could not identify what was in the images.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot Service Road

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 25, 2026 61:06 Transcription Available


    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 built decades earlier for timber access and fire suppression but had fallen into disuse, and Karen's job was to keep it from washing out entirely — clearing drains, cutting brush, removing blowdowns. She worked alone, driving a Forest Service pickup to the ridge each morning and spending six to eight hours on the road before heading home. The nearest paved road was about seven miles out by dirt track, and radio reception on the ridge was unreliable at best.Over the course of three weeks, Karen documented a series of findings that she logged in a field notebook with times, coordinates, and measurements. During her first week she discovered multiple hardwood trees snapped between six and nine feet above the ground, some with tops wedged into adjacent trees and at least one with a spiral fracture indicating the trunk had been twisted rather than broken by wind or ice. In her second week she began encountering a powerful organic smell at the same GPS coordinates on the road every afternoon, arriving consistently around four o'clock and dissipating within ten to fifteen minutes.At a creek crossing near the smell location she found bipedal tracks in soft mud measuring nineteen inches from heel to toe and roughly seven inches across the ball, with visible toe impressions and no claw marks, spaced in a walking pattern with an estimated stride of four and a half feet. In her third week she discovered handprints pressed into a clay bank alongside the road — large, with long fingers and a clear opposing thumb, significantly bigger than her own hand.The episode builds to the night Karen got a flat tire on the road after dark during her final week on the assignment. Alone, seven miles from pavement, with no cell phone and no radio reception, she knelt beside the truck with a lug wrench and a headlamp to change the tire.While she was working, she heard bipedal footsteps approaching on the gravel road from the north — steady, heavy, two-legged. The footsteps stopped approximately forty feet away and then began pacing back and forth across the road for roughly ten minutes. When Karen stood up, the footsteps stopped. Moments later she heard a single long exhale from the timber on the uphill side of the road, originating from above her own head height and close enough to hear clearly. She got in the truck and drove out on the spare without looking back.he episode also covers Karen's thirty years of silence about the experience, her decision to finally share her account after hearing similar stories on the show, and the behavioral parallels between her encounter and Herschel's account from Part One — including the gradual escalation over days rather than a single sudden event, the feeling of being watched before anything overt occurred, the biological silence that accompanied the closest contact, and the sense that whatever was present controlled the terms and timing of the encounter.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Bigfoot Corridor

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2026 67:26 Transcription Available


    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 that something about the place isn't right. This series lays out their stories in chronological order, beginning in nineteen seventy-eight and ending in the present day, and lets the overlapping details speak for themselves.In Part One, a retired carpet millworker named Herschel shares an account he kept private for forty-six years. In the fall of nineteen seventy-eight, Herschel and three hunting buddies leased a parcel in the southern Cohutta through a timber company and set up a deer camp on a bench overlooking the valley at about twenty-eight hundred feet. The first two nights were uneventful. On the third morning, Herschel woke to find the camp rearranged overnight — both Coleman coolers relocated without damage, and a field-dressed doe removed from the hanging pole and placed carefully in the center of the fire ring, untouched and unharmed.Over the following nights, the encounters escalated. Wood-on-wood knocking echoed from the valley below, answered by identical knocking from the ridge above in a coordinated call-and-response pattern. Bipedal footsteps passed through camp close enough for one of the men to feel the ground vibration through his boots and camp chair. On the final night, Herschel aimed his flashlight into the hemlocks at the edge of camp and was met with reddish eyeshine at approximately seven and a half to eight feet, while a deep vocalization from the ridge behind him produced a sound he felt physically in his chest.On the morning they broke camp, Herschel discovered a line of creek stones arranged at the camp's edge, evenly spaced and pointing due north along the ridgeline. The episode introduces the four men who were present — Herschel, Dale, Pete, and Jimbo — and provides context for their backgrounds, their familiarity with the woods, and their complete lack of interest in or knowledge of the paranormal prior to this experience.It also details Herschel's solo return to the site in nineteen eighty, where he found additional tree breaks extending north along the ridge in a line, and stood on the crest looking into a corridor of unbroken forest stretching as far as he could see. Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Dogman On The Farm

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 19, 2026 59:26 Transcription Available


    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 and the evidence pointed to a large, aggressive predator tearing through fencing and dragging animals into the timber, he couldn't ignore it anymore.The situation escalated through the summer until one September night, under the glare of floodlights, the entire family stood at their living room window and watched something step out of the tree line that none of them have ever been able to explain.This is Kevin's story, told for the first time in forty years.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot Changed Everything

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 17, 2026 71:11 Transcription Available


    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 go back to the woods for twenty-six years.Karen was solo camping in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia in ninety-three when something visited her tent in the middle of the night and then watched her from the ridge the next morning. She hasn't camped or hiked alone since.Marcus and his buddy Travis were on a canoe trip in Minnesota's Boundary Waters in two thousand four when something circled their camp in the dark for ten minutes and then showed itself on a rock shelf the following morning in full daylight. Two witnesses. Same thing. Neither of them does overnights anymore.The fourth account is different. It comes from a man named Michael, telling the story his Uncle Jesse shared with him at a kitchen table on Thanksgiving in two thousand one. Jesse was a logger in southern Oregon in eighty-five who showed up early to a job site and found four-hundred-pound logs scattered like kindling, a ten-inch hemlock snapped in half, and something standing at the edge of his flashlight beam that looked annoyed he was there.Jesse carried a forty-four magnum in the woods for the rest of his life. He never told more than three people what happened, and Michael is the last one alive who heard it.The final account comes from Tamara, a trail runner in Arkansas who was training for a hundred-mile ultra in twenty-sixteen when she saw something walking upright through the timber along the Buffalo River.She describes the most expressive face of all five encounters, and the look it gave her, brief and dismissive, changed her relationship with the outdoors permanently. She hasn't run a trail since.These are the stories that stay with you. Not because they're dramatic, but because the people who lived them are still carrying the weight.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    What Earl Buried

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2026 74:25 Transcription Available


    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 it along without violating the silence he'd maintained for over four decades.Earl's journal covers 1972 through 1981. The critical entries describe two visits to a ravine roughly a quarter mile northeast of the cabin in the national forest.In fall 1972, Earl followed a track line into a narrow slot canyon and found three worn sleeping depressions, organized bone piles, and evidence of long-term habitation. In January 1973, he returned and discovered the beds had been recently used, with melted snow and shed hair. Deeper in the ravine, under a natural rock overhang, he found a curated collection of polished creek stones arranged by size, bundled stripped sticks, and mineral specimens including a standing quartz crystal point. Earl never returned and never told Vernon, Reba, or anyone. Following Earl's map on January 15, 2022, Garrett hikes to the ravine and confirms every detail. The beds are still in use with recently melted snow. The bone pile persists. The collection on the shelf has grown over fifty years to include more stones, sticks, and additional mineral specimens. On his way out, Garrett finds one of the creatures standing at the ravine entrance. It watches him approach from a hundred and fifty yards, and at twenty yards he stops. The creature shifts to the side, pressing against the rock wall to clear the passage. Garrett walks past at four feet, the closest encounter of the series, and exits the ravine. He connects the river stone left on the bluff sitting slab in 2016 to the collection, understanding it as a deliberate gift.Garrett sold the cabin in 2023 after Bowie's death at age thirteen and moved to Asheville with Ruby.He sold to a young couple from Boone without disclosing what lives on the ridge. This final episode closes the ten-part series.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Ridge That Answered Back

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2026 73:36 Transcription Available


    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 a dead oak produce a response within two minutes. A single heavy knock from the north, toward the bluff, at roughly a hundred and fifty yards. A second round of knocking draws two responses from the north and a third from the east, down the Bishop Creek drainage, confirming at least two separate individuals bracketing their position. Cliff identifies the two sources by their different acoustic signatures.Garrett then plays a Sierra Sounds vocalization through a Bluetooth speaker.After nearly four minutes of silence, the ridge produces three simultaneous responses. A sustained rising vocalization from the north at close range. A rapid series of barking tonal bursts from the east, closer than the previous knock. And a massive tree strike from the south, directly on their primary exit route back to the cabin.With three sides covered and only the western downslope open, Garrett directs their descent through trailless hardwood forest toward the meadow. Something parallels them on the north side, tapping position knocks coordinated with answering taps from the ridge behind them. Halfway down, both men experience strong infrasound, a subsonic vibration felt in the chest, teeth, and inner ear that produces disorientation and acute anxiety. A heavy branch snap from forty yards confirms proximity. At the tree line, all sounds and the infrasound cease simultaneously, and Garrett and Cliff cross the meadow to the cabin.Cliff tells Garrett he won't return to the property after dark and drives home the next morning. Garrett retrieves the recorder the following day and finds seven hours of post-encounter audio including knocking at 11:42 PM, a low vocalization at 1:15 AM, and clear heavy footsteps passing within ten feet of the recorder at 3:27 AM.The series concludes with Story Ten, in which Garrett discovers what Earl left behind and finally understands why the creatures have allowed him to stay.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Cabin Visitor

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2026 72:52 Transcription Available


    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 door. At 9:14 PM, both dogs snap to alert facing the front wall in complete silence. Garrett hears the porch planks creak in sequence as something crosses the porch and leans against the front wall. For forty-two minutes, he listens to deep, rhythmic breathing transmitted through the poplar logs. At 9:56, the creature walks back across the porch and descends the steps.Twenty-six minutes of silence follow before footsteps approach the back of the cabin from the ridge side. The creature takes up a second position against the back wall, directly behind the bedroom. When Garrett investigates with a lamp, he finds two massive wet handprints pressed flat against the bedroom window glass from the outside. A low chuffing sound accompanies the breathing from the back wall. At 10:41, the front doorknob turns approximately fifteen degrees and holds before slowly returning to position, indicating a second individual at the front door while the first remains at the bedroom window. The cabin fills with a heavy musk odor penetrating through the rain-soaked logs.At 11:20, a small impact sounds on the front porch.All activity ceases at 11:34, and Garrett hears footsteps receding toward the ridge. The following morning he documents compression marks on the porch, a clear track line in the mud behind the cabin with prints measuring sixteen to seventeen inches, handprint photographs on the window glass, and a smooth creek stone placed on the porch directly in front of the door.The series continues with Story Nine, in which Garrett and Cliff deliberately attempt contact from the ridgeHave you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Residents

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2026 70:50 Transcription Available


    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 from October 1974. Alone with her two young sons while Vernon was away, she heard his voice calling from the tree line, then heard her own voice calling the boys' names from the opposite direction. Her six-year-old grabbed her hand and broke the spell.Vernon and Earl later concluded the mimicry was a standardized assessment the creatures ran on every new resident of the corridor. Earl got his in 1971. Garrett got his in 2015. Same test. Same playbook. Fifty years apart.She recounts Vernon's close encounter from February 1976, when he surprised one of the creatures drinking from Bishop Creek at twenty feet. It stood to over eight feet, screamed at a volume that shook snow from the branches, then snapped an eight-inch hemlock clean through at chest height.The broken tree fell across the trail between them. Vernon ran. The creature watched him go.Opal gives Garrett seven boxes of Vernon's field records spanning 1963 to 2003, including an annotated USGS topo map showing the full four-mile creek corridor, knock zones, structure sites, den areas, and a four-thousand-acre circuit the creatures orbit seasonally. Vernon's notes document a juvenile sighting in 1991 and conclude with a final entry expressing his belief that the creatures assess humans individually and choose restraint based on decades of observation.Opal explains that Earl kept silent because he believed the creatures listened to conversations and that talking about them openly would break the arrangement. She warns that the generational credit from Earl's silence is running out as newer individuals write their own terms. After Opal moves to Morganton in June, Garrett finds her abandoned property still being visited — worn trails, folded chicken wire, removed tomato plants, and handprints on the window ledge. The series continues with Story Eight, in which Garrett and Cliff deliberately try to make contact from the ridge.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Dogs Didn't Come Back

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 3, 2026 75:21 Transcription Available


    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 something paralleled him through the trees, matching his pace at a fixed distance. He found Bowie wedged under a fallen tree in a blowdown clearing, trembling and unresponsive. Ruby was forty yards further upslope, frozen in front of four stick structures built in a depression between two beech trees, including a conical teepee of stripped branches and a cluster of living saplings braided together and secured with bark-strip knots.While Garrett stood with Ruby, branch snaps began from three positions behind them, closing in a coordinated circle. He walked south through the formation, and the snapping stopped simultaneously. The circle opened. He retrieved Bowie and descended with both dogs pressed against his legs. During the walk out, Ruby stopped once, turned east, and delivered a single recognition bark into the darkness. The following sounds stopped.Both dogs recovered within days but permanently changed their patrol, stopping at the tree line every evening and refusing to enter the forest again.The series continues with Story Seven, in which a woman from across the creek arrives at the property with information connecting Earl, Reba, and the reason the creatures have never harmed Garrett.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Bluff Overlook

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2026 74:19 Transcription Available


    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 the terrain the creatures were using as a corridor.On the evening of June 18, 2016, Garrett climbed to the overlook alone. He found a granite shelf with a commanding view of three counties and a direct sightline to his cabin below.The margins of the bluff held overlapping tracks in the soil from numerous visits across an extended period. Stone arrangements along the eastern edge, including stacked rocks and a semicircle around a flat sitting slab, indicated habitual occupation rather than a casual stopover.As the sun set, Garrett heard stone-on-stone clacking from the talus slope below the cliff. A large upright creature stepped from behind a boulder about forty feet below him. He describes a conical head with a sagittal crest, a massively built torso, and a complete absence of fear as it looked straight up at him.A second, smaller creature appeared on a ledge fifty yards along the cliff face, striking a stone against the rock wall. A third was heard but never seen, producing a sustained vocalization from the tree line that the other two turned toward simultaneously.Garrett retreated from the bluff in near-dark, fell once on the descent, and returned to the cabin shaken but with a new clarity about the scale of what he was dealing with.Over three subsequent visits that summer, he found the stone arrangements rearranged each time and eventually discovered a smooth, water-polished creek stone placed on the exact slab where he'd been sitting, carried from Bishop Creek half a mile below.Earl passed away in September 2016.Standing at his grave on the property, Garrett reflected on the half-truths and coded warnings Earl had offered across two years and wished the old man had simply said what he knew. The series continues with Story Six, in which Garrett's dogs chase something into the woods and don't come back.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Footprints in the Snow

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 29, 2026 73:27 Transcription Available


    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 pristine landscape and discovered a line of enormous bipedal tracks leading from the northeast tree line to the cabin in a straight, undeviating path. The tracks circled the full perimeter of the structure, pausing at the southwest corner directly outside his bedroom window and again at the back door, where handprints in the snow on the log wall indicated something had leaned against the cabin with both palms splayed.The trail then crossed the meadow to Bishop Creek, where the thing entered the water and vanished without leaving an exit trail on either bank.Garrett called his friend Cliff, who drove up from Gastonia and spent the afternoon examining and measuring the evidence. Individual prints measured seventeen inches long and punched through the full snowpack into frozen ground.Handprints beside the back door extended beyond the span of Cliff's outstretched hand. The stride averaged fifty-four inches at a walking pace.That evening, after Cliff left, Garrett went out to recheck the tracks and discovered a second set of prints paralleling his own bootprints from that morning. Something had returned and retraced his exact route around the cabin. At the bedroom window, the new tracks stepped even closer than the overnight set, and knuckle impressions on the windowsill indicated something had leaned forward to look inside. After midnight, Garrett heard four sequential wood strikes descending from the ridge toward the cabin, each closer and louder than the last. The final strike, from roughly thirty-five yards away, rattled the window glass. At dawn, he found a fresh trail ending at a massive red oak near the cabin, its bark shattered at eight feet by a single blow.Garrett reflects on the realization that the winter visits had likely been occurring all along, invisible without snow, and that the creature's nightly routine included circling the cabin and observing him while he slept.The series continues with Story Five, in which Garrett hikes to a bluff overlook that Earl warned him never to visit after dark.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    It Called My Name

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2026 74:43 Transcription Available


    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 routine boundary walk, Garrett hears Wade's voice call his name from upslope. The voice is a perfect acoustic match.His dog Bowie reacts with immediate fear. A second call follows, and when Garrett turns south to leave, his name is called from in front of him while "Over here" comes simultaneously from behind, boxing him in from two directions within seconds of each other. Garrett scrambles up the western ravine wall as the voice follows, closer and more insistent each time. After reaching the ridgetop, he experiences a sudden total loss of spatial orientation on land he has walked dozens of times. He reorients only by listening for the sound of Bishop Creek and following it back to the cabin. At the cabin, he finds a single sixteen-and-three-quarter-inch footprint pressed into damp clay beside his back door, facing the threshold, left while he was in the ravine. He photographs it from seventeen angles and documents the measurements.Garrett reflects on the emotional precision of the mimicry, the sustained close-range observation required to replicate a specific human voice, and what appears to be a coordinated event — a luring attempt in the ravine happening while something else visited the cabin.The series continues with Story Four, in which tracks in fresh snow reveal how often the creature visits when Garrett believes it is gone.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Bigfoot In The Garden

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2026 74:03 Transcription Available


    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 assisted living facility in Marion, Garrett mentions his plans to put in a garden. Earl's reaction is subdued, noting only that his late wife Reba had tried a garden on the same ground in 1978 and hadn't kept it long because it "wasn't worth the trouble." Garrett breaks a thirty-by-forty-foot plot between the cabin and the workshop and plants tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, squash, sweet corn, and sweet potatoes. By early June, the garden is thriving. Then produce begins disappearing overnight. Only ripe fruit and vegetables are taken, cleanly separated from the vine or stalk with no mess, no tracks, and no damage to the surrounding plants. Green and immature produce is left untouched every time.  Garrett's countermeasures fail one by one. Motion-activated floodlights are avoided entirely. A battery-powered radio left playing all night is found turned off in the morning, its power switch deliberately slid to the off position. A trail camera repositioned three times produces only one significant image: a close-up infrared photograph of a large, dark-skinned, hair-covered hand pressed against the lens at 3:17 AM.In late June, Garrett observes the visitor directly from a workshop window. He watches a tall, upright figure enter the garden from the eastern tree line, move between the rows without disturbing anything, and harvest tomatoes, corn, and green beans with practiced, selective precision over the course of about seven minutes before retreating into the forest.The story culminates in mid-August when Garrett is awakened at 3:30 AM by something breathing against the back wall of his cabin. He listens as it moves along the wall, stops outside the kitchen window, taps the glass three times at different heights, then scratches four parallel lines into the logs at the northeast corner before departing toward the ridge. In the morning, he photographs fingertip smudges on the window and fresh claw marks scored into the aged hardwood. Garrett decides not to plant a garden the following year, recognizing that the garden collapsed the distance between himself and the creature and brought it directly to his cabin walls. The series continues with Story Three, in which something in the woods mimics his brother's voice and calls his name from two directions at once.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    The Knock Behind The Cabin

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2026 72:54 Transcription Available


    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 after more than four decades together on the land. Garrett moved in during May 2014 with his red heeler mix, Bowie, and began renovating the cabin while settling into the quiet of mountain life. Within three weeks, he started hearing sharp wood knocks from the ridgeline northeast of the cabin each evening, arriving consistently within a twenty-minute window after sunset. He logged the sounds for weeks, tracking their timing, rhythm, and direction, and noted that they were occasionally answered from entirely different positions in the surrounding hollow. Bowie's behavior shifted noticeably during this stretch, refusing to cross the northern tree line and relocating his sleeping spot to a hallway position between the bedroom and the back door. In late July 2014, Garrett knocked back using a piece of oak firewood against a hickory tree and received matching patterns from the ridge within seconds. After a heavy rainstorm in early August, he found a line of seventeen-and-a-quarter-inch bipedal tracks pressed into clay along a game trail leading from the ridge toward his cabin, each showing five individually articulated toes and a defined arch at a depth suggesting several hundred pounds behind every step.The story reaches its peak on the evening of September 27, 2014, when Garrett spotted a massive upright figure standing between two white oaks at the meadow's edge. He describes a broad, hair-covered form estimated between seven and eight feet tall with coloring close to dark walnut bark.The figure watched him briefly, turned, and stepped into the forest with a single heavy footfall. Later that night, he heard a deep, sustained vocalization from the direction it had gone, unlike anything he had ever encountered in the woods.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

    Claim Backwoods Horror Stories

    In order to claim this podcast we'll send an email to with a verification link. Simply click the link and you will be able to edit tags, request a refresh, and other features to take control of your podcast page!

    Claim Cancel