Backwoods Horror Stories

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A listener named Caleb from Hazard, Kentucky shares the story his late grandfather Harold carried in silence for nearly sixty years. Harold was a tobacco farmer in Perry County who worked a piece of bottomland along Pigeon Roost Creek that had been in the family since before the Civil War.In the fall of 1962, at twenty-nine years old, he began noticing things he couldn't explain on the steep, heavily timbered ridge behind his property — fence posts yanked from the ground, his unflappable mule refusing to approach the tree line, and massive bare footprints pressed into the first frost of the season.On the evening of November 21, 1962, he saw a towering figure standing motionless between two cedars at the top of the ridge, backlit by the last light of the day. What followed was nearly a decade of escalating encounters that included rocks thrown onto the barn roof from over a hundred yards away, a gut-churning stench near the creek crossing, wood knocks echoing across the ridgeline at night, and vocalizations unlike anything he'd ever heard in a lifetime of hunting those mountains. One night in November 1963, something circled the farmhouse on two legs for close to forty-five minutes while the family slept and the dogs cowered in total silence beneath the porch.Harold saw the creatures up close on multiple occasions — once at roughly forty yards near the creek in 1966, where he described a reddish-brown, hair-covered figure standing over seven feet tall with unmistakably human hands and a flat, dark face that regarded him with what he called a look of consideration rather than aggression. In October 1968, he watched two of them walking single file through the timber, a large dark one and a smaller, lighter companion, and realized he wasn't dealing with a lone animal but a family that had been living on that ridge longer than his own people had been farming the valley below it. Harold never called them Bigfoot or Sasquatch.He used the old Appalachian word — boogers — and he framed the experience not as a monster story but as the unsettling reality of sharing a hollow with something intelligent that knew everything about his family while remaining almost entirely unseen. By 1970, after losing calves from the lower pasture and enduring years of nighttime activity, he made the painful decision to sell the back forty acres that had been in the family for over a century. He told his children the soil was played out. He told only his grandson and his brother the truth. Family lore traces the presence on Briar Ridge back even further, to Harold's great-uncle Fess in the 1870s and his grandfather Jeremiah, who homesteaded the property after the Civil War and warned his children about "the old ones" on the ridge.A local folk healer named Effie, whose grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, told Harold that her people had a name for the creatures that translated roughly to "the watchers" or "the ones who stay hidden," and that they'd been in those mountains since the beginning.Harold's last sighting came in 1982, when one crossed the gravel road in front of his truck at dawn without so much as a glance in his direction. He died on March 7, 2019, at eighty-six years old, in the same house where those footsteps had circled decades before. Caleb still visits the farm.The ridge still stands behind it, dense and dark and unchanged. And he's convinced that whatever his grandfather saw is still up there, watching with the same patient intelligence it always has.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.

Tonight, we head to the dark banks of the Pascagoula River and into one of the most chilling and enduring UFO cases in American history.On October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were just two working men from Mississippi trying to enjoy a quiet night of fishing after a long day at the shipyard. What happened next would change both of their lives forever. According to their account, a strange craft descended near the riverbank, three terrifying beings emerged, and the men were taken aboard and examined before being returned to shore.What could have been dismissed as just another unbelievable story took on a life of its own when deputies secretly recorded the two men alone in an interrogation room, expecting to catch them in a lie. Instead, what they captured was raw fear. Real fear. The kind you cannot fake.In this episode, we dig deep into the Pascagoula Incident from every angle. We explore who Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were before that night, why their backgrounds matter, and how the encounter unfolded on that warm October evening in southern Mississippi.We walk through the now-famous secret recording, the law enforcement response, military involvement at Keesler Air Force Base, the wave of regional UFO sightings surrounding the event, and the decades of scrutiny, pain, ridicule, and unanswered questions that followed both men for the rest of their lives.We also examine the parts of this story that continue to haunt researchers and skeptics alike: the bizarre and uniquely described entities, the consistency of the witnesses' core account, the later corroborating testimony from additional witnesses, and the emotional toll that never truly left either man. Charles Hickson spent the rest of his life speaking openly about what he believed happened. Calvin Parker spent much of his life trying to escape it, only later returning to tell the full story in his own words.More than fifty years later, the Pascagoula Incident still resists easy explanation. It remains one of the most talked-about and debated close encounter cases ever recorded, not because it offers neat answers, but because it leaves us with a deeper and more uncomfortable question: what if something truly unexplained happened on that riverbank that night?This is the story of two men, one impossible encounter, and the burden of being believed.If this episode grabs you, take time to listen to the original secret sheriff's department recording for yourself. It is one of the most unsettling pieces of audio in UFO history, and it may be the very thing that keeps this case alive all these years later.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 retired United States Forest Service firefighter is breaking thirty-five years of silence to share what he and his entire Helitack crew witnessed during the devastating California fires of 1987.Kyle— as he asks to be called— was a thirty-two-year-old veteran wildland firefighter when his nine-man crew was helicoptered into a remote drainage in the Mendocino National Forest ahead of an advancing fire front.Their mission was to cut a firebreak along an isolated ridge and spend three days in some of the most rugged terrain in Northern California.What they encountered there changed every one of them. It started with footprints in a creek bed—massive, clearly defined humanoid tracks in three distinct sizes, suggesting a group moving through the area.Then came the tree structures. Saplings twisted and snapped eight to ten feet off the ground with a force none of the men could replicate, arranged around flattened bedding areas saturated with an overwhelming musky odor.s darkness fell on their first night, the forest came alive.Bone-rattling howls echoed across the ridges. Rhythmic wood knocks circled their camp. Then came a rapid series of clicks and guttural chatter—two voices communicating with a cadence that sounded disturbingly like language. Rocks began landing in their camp from the darkness, thrown with precision but never striking anyone. And then the eyes appeared. Pale yellowish-white eyes glowing from the tree line… eight feet or more above the ground. On the second night, one of the creatures stepped fully into view.Every man on the crew saw it.A massive figure—eight and a half to nine feet tall—covered in dark hair, with enormous shoulders, long powerful arms, and a broad face dominated by intelligent eyes studying the firefighters with unmistakable awareness.Over the next three days, the crew found thirteen-inch handprints pressed into the dirt along their fire line. They watched juveniles observing them from the rocks above—only to be called back into the timber by deep, guttural parental warnings. What they were witnessing looked unmistakably like a family.When the helicopter arrived to extract them on the final morning, all six creatures stood openly on a distant ridge, silhouetted against the smoky sky. The large male stood in front.The female held a smaller one close.The juveniles stood beside them. A family… watching as the firefighters lifted away and the forest burned behind them.The crew made a pact that day to never speak about what they saw. And every one of them kept that promise. Until now. Kyle writes in at seventy-one years old because time is running out… and hearing other first responders share their encounters on this show finally gave him the courage to tell his story.He says he has always wondered if that family survived the fires. And he sincerely hopes they did.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.

In this episode, Brian shares an email from a military veteran who served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and wants the world to hear a story that's been buried for three decades. Matt, as he asks to be called, writes in about a confession made to him by a fellow soldier he calls Joe during a night of drinking while the two were stateside between deployments. Joe revealed that in the mid nineteen nineties, long before the war on terror, he was part of a small specialized team dispatched into an unnamed national park after two hikers went missing.The male hiker's body was found twenty five feet up in a tree with his neck broken. The female hiker was never found. What search teams did find were massive humanoid footprints ranging from sixteen inches to nearly twenty three inches long pressed deep into the soil along a remote creek drainage. Joe's team was briefed by an unnamed civilian and given a single objective: locate and eliminate the creatures responsible.What followed was a harrowing two day hunt through old growth forest that culminated in the killing of four creatures, including a female, a juvenile estimated at around five feet tall, and a massive adult male standing over eight feet tall that charged the team and injured two soldiers before being brought down. Within hours of the kills, an unmarked black helicopter arrived carrying a civilian recovery team that bagged the bodies and flew them out to an unknown location. The soldiers were debriefed, told the mission never happened, and ordered to never speak of it again. Matt believes every word Joe told him that night, and he wants you to hear 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.

The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world, and they've been collecting secrets for longer than human memory reaches. Tonight we go into the old green dark — the deep, cathedral-quiet forest of the Appalachian chain — and we don't come back out until we've walked through six of the most haunting, bone-deep stories this ancient landscape has ever produced.We start in Hancock County, Tennessee, in 1923, where a sixty-one-year-old farmer named Elias Combs runs his trapline in the pre-dawn dark and comes face to face with the Wampus Cat — the Cherokee creature known as Ewah, a being caught forever between woman and beast, whose eyes burn yellow-green and whose stare can strip a man of his mind. Three shots from a Winchester.Not even a flinch.From there we move to the ridgelines of Burke County, North Carolina, where the famous Brown Mountain Lights have been appearing above the Linville Gorge since before the Civil War, baffling scientists and federal investigators for over a century. But the lights aren't the thing to be afraid of. The lights are the distraction. What walks in the timber below them is another matter entirely — and the Perkins family found that out the hard way in the autumn of 1850.Then we go deeper into the Cherokee homeland of western North Carolina, back to the violent winter of 1780, to meet the most feared figure in all of Cherokee supernatural tradition. The Raven Mocker doesn't look like a monster. It looks like an old person. It enters the homes of the dying, and it takes their remaining years — gently, quietly, without leaving a mark except for one: the missing heart. A healer named Ayita held the detection medicine alone in the dark against it. She survived.Her hair went white that night. She was thirty-two years old.We move north to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and the story of a woman with no recorded name who died on fire on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks in October of 1833. She's been screaming on that rail corridor ever since — seen by railroad engineers, bridge tenders, night watchmen, park rangers, and anyone else unlucky or curious enough to be near the old right-of-way after dark. The cold she leaves behind lasts about three seconds. The sound she makes lasts a lifetime.High on Grandfather Mountain in Avery County, North Carolina, four college students from Boone made camp in October of 1971 and were visited by something that came down off the upper ridgeline in silence, stood at the edge of their fire, and placed a warning directly into their minds without speaking a word. One of the four never recovered fully.Robert, who eventually told the story, went back alone in November to stand on the trail where it had stood — and realized it had a clear view of their camp for a very long time before they ever looked up.And we end at the northern tip of the chain, on a seven-mile road in Warren County, New Jersey whose legal name is Shades of Death Road. For decades, drivers on the Ghost Lake stretch have seen a man walking along the road at night — keeping pace with moving vehicles, always in the same direction, always wearing old-fashioned dark clothing. Always visible in the rearview mirror. Never there when you turn your head and look directly at where he should be.These are stories drawn from real places, real regional tradition, and real accounts passed down through the communities of the Appalachian Mountains. The land is older than our ability to explain it. And it's paying attention.Submit your own encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.comHave 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.

In October of 1955, a highway worker and experienced outdoorsman named William Roe climbed Mica Mountain in British Columbia on his own time, with no particular expectation of finding anything unusual. What he encountered near the summit that afternoon would stay with him for the rest of his life — and nearly two years later, he'd walk into a notary's office in Edmonton, Alberta, and swear a legal affidavit about it, making his account one of the first formally documented close-range Sasquatch encounters in North American history.This episode tells Roe's story as close to his own experience as the historical record allows. Drawing entirely from his sworn affidavit and the subsequent research of John Green, Ivan T. Sanderson, and others who documented the case carefully in the years that followed, we walk through the encounter from the first glimpse through the brush to the moment she disappeared back into the timber — including the moment Roe raised his rifle, looked through the sight, and made a decision he'd spend the rest of his life thinking about.Roe wasn't a man who sought attention.He was a trapper, a hunter, a working man who'd spent more time in serious wilderness than most people spend indoors, and who knew the difference between what belonged in a forest and what didn't. What he saw on Mica Mountain that October afternoon was a large, upright, bipedal creature — female, covered in dark silver-tipped brown hair, standing roughly six feet tall, with a face that he could only describe as more human-like than he'd expected or was prepared for. She was eating wild cherry leaves near an old abandoned cabin when he found her. She walked away on two feet when she was ready to go. And at the edge of the forest, she looked back.We also dig into why this account has held up under decades of scrutiny, what the sworn affidavit represents as a piece of evidence, and how the anatomical and behavioral details Roe recorded in 1955 would later align, in striking ways, with what hundreds of independent witnesses would describe in the years that followed.If you've had your own encounter and want to share it, reach out at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. We read everything.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.

In the fall of 1978, a thirty-one-year-old fur trapper named John flew his Piper Super Cub into a remote stretch of the Yukon Territory about a hundred and forty miles northeast of Dawson City to begin what he planned as a four-month trapping season. He had a solid cabin he'd built himself, a well-established trap line running forty-some miles through prime marten, lynx, beaver, and wolverine country, and enough experience in the northern bush to know that country about as well as any man alive.What he didn't have was any way of knowing that something else was already out there, and that it had already been watching him. Within days of his arrival John began finding enormous bipedal tracks pressed into the creek gravel and early snow, measuring over twenty inches long and more than eight inches wide at the heel, with a stride that a tall man at a full trot couldn't match. The tracks were only the beginning. Something started systematically clearing his traps, not randomly, but with a working knowledge of his entire line, springing sets from above with deliberate downward pressure and removing the catch without a trace. Then came the vocalizations, deep and structured sounds in the dark timber that had a quality John had no name for at the time, sounds that decades later would stop him cold when he heard the Sierra Sounds recordings made by Ron Morehead and Al Berry in the Sierra Nevada. That same organized, back-and-forth exchange.That same sense of language underneath something no human throat is built to produce.Then the rocks started. And then one of them put John face-down in the snow with a three-inch gash in the side of his head that he had to stitch himself, alone, a hundred and forty miles from the nearest town.John stayed because his family needed what that trap line could produce. He stayed through the night visits, through the sound of something breathing against his door in the dark, through the feeling of large hands running slowly along his log walls. He stayed until the night something hit his cabin with enough force to crack the chinking and move a ten-inch spruce log in its notch.He went outside with his Marlin 45/70 rifle and he shot it, and he followed the blood trail the next morning until the ground went too hard to hold sign. And when he came back from that blood trail he found both tundra tires on his Super Cub torn apart by hand.That's when he called his friend Byron. What happened the night Byron arrived is the kind of account that's hard to sit with, a coordinated assault on that cabin from multiple directions that lasted for hours, with John and Byron shooting through the walls and ceiling while something worked at the logs from outside trying to find a way in. They made it to morning. They packed their gear. They flew out and John never went back.He sold the cabin, went to work on a crab boat in the Bering Sea, and spent eleven years deciding that thirty-foot seas and a crab pot winch were considerably safer than whatever was in that Yukon timber. He's probably right.John listens to this show and to my other podcast Sasquatch Odyssey, and he says that hearing Fred from Alaska talk about the temperament of these animals in the northern bush is the closest he's come to feeling like someone else understands what he encountered. He wants people to know that what's out there in the deep country doesn't match the friendly-giant narrative, and he wants them to be careful. After everything he went through to deliver that message, the least we can do is pass it along.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.

In 1947, a Tennessee farmer named Robert Carter Senior found an injured young creature pinned beneath a fallen tree on his property in Monroe County. What he did next would set in motion one of the most extraordinary and controversial stories in the history of sasquatch research. He nursed it back to health, named it Fox, and spent the next twenty-five years secretly building a relationship with it before his seven-year-old granddaughter Janice literally ran into the creature one afternoon and had her world turned upside down.Tonight Brian takes a deep dive into the Janice Carter story, the full account of what one woman claims was fifty years of co-existence between her family and a clan of sasquatch on their rural Tennessee farm. From her grandfather's secret act of mercy to the publication of the now-infamous book "50 Years with Bigfoot: Tennessee Chronicles of Co-Existence" in 2002, from the firestorm of controversy that nearly tore the Bigfoot community apart to the heartbreaking account of Fox's death decades later, this episode covers it all.Brian walks through the claims, the characters, the investigations by Jerry Coleman and Russian hominologist Igor Bourtsev, the public falling out between Janice and co-author Mary Green, and the questions that remain unanswered to this day. Whether you come away a believer or a skeptic, this is a story that demands to be heard on its own terms.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.

Tonight we're stepping away from the deep woods and into something different. Something that's been keeping me up at night for the better part of two years as I've tracked down these accounts. This is a special episode exploring the Hitchhiker Effect — the terrifying phenomenon where people visit locations of high strangeness and something follows them home.We're not talking about a feeling or an overactive imagination. We're talking about shadow figures at the foot of the bed, objects moving on their own, electronics going haywire, and entities that seem to feed on fear and attention for weeks or months before finally letting go. The term was coined by Dr. Colm Kelleher during his years as lead scientist on the Skinwalker Ranch project, but what most people don't realize is that this phenomenon extends far beyond one ranch in Utah. It's been documented at battlefields, swamps, mountain ridgelines, and remote valleys all across this country for decades.In this episode we cover six accounts spanning from 1978 to 2023. We start in the Uintah Basin with a cattle rancher who encountered a pulsating orange orb on a mesa and spent the next several months living with a shadow entity that terrorized his family and killed one of his horses. From there we head to Chickamauga Battlefield in northwest Georgia, where a veteran paranormal investigator and his team brought something back from one of the bloodiest pieces of ground in American history — something that filled their homes with the smell of decomposition and the sound of agonized moaning.We follow a pair of Oregon newlyweds who stumbled onto what the local Native American community called a spirit road and spent eight months being stalked by a shadow entity in their own apartment. A West Virginia sheriff's deputy walks into a sealed bunker in the Point Pleasant TNT area and encounters an orb containing dark humanoid figures, only to have his six-year-old daughter start seeing what she calls "the blue man" standing in her closet.A Boston documentary crew filming at Hockomock Swamp in the Bridgewater Triangle watches three synchronized orbs rise out of the water and spends the following months dealing with rearranged furniture, phantom knocking, and an intrusive voice whispering "come back."And finally, a podcaster and paranormal researcher visits the San Luis Valley in Colorado and learns the hard way that studying these phenomena from a safe distance is an illusion — because the distance can collapse at any moment.Six witnesses. Six decades. Six locations from coast to coast. All connected by a pattern so consistent it'll make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. They visited a place. They were noticed. And something came home with them.This is one of the most unsettling episodes we've ever produced. Settle in and keep the lights on.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.

In this episode, we share a listener's account that's been buried for over forty years. Sarah from Bowling Green, Kentucky reached out to us after listening to the show, and what she had to say stopped us in our tracks. In the fall of 1982, Sarah was just eight years old when her family — mom, dad, older brother, and their German Shepherd, Bear — packed up and headed deep into Land Between the Lakes for a weekend camping trip.What started as a perfect Friday night around the campfire turned into something none of them were prepared for.By Friday night, strange howls unlike anything the family had ever heard began echoing through the woods from multiple directions. Something large was circling their camp on two legs. Bear, their loyal protector, charged into the darkness after whatever was out there and never came back. Against her mother's wishes, Sarah's father made the decision to stay one more night.That decision nearly cost them everything. On Saturday night, the creatures came in close. Multiple massive, upright beings — standing over seven feet tall with canine features, glowing amber eyes, and an intelligence that no ordinary animal possesses — stepped to the edge of the firelight and began closing in on the family. Just when it seemed like there was no way out, a deafening vocalization erupted from a nearby ridge. Something Sarah now believes was strikingly similar to the famous Ohio Howl Sasquatch recording from the 1990s. Whatever made that sound sent the creatures running, and the family was able to pack up and escape in the middle of the night.Sarah's story touches on the long and disturbing history of encounters at Land Between the Lakes, the lasting trauma these experiences leave on families, and the possibility that something else — something even more powerful than the creatures that terrorized them — may have stepped in to save their lives.This is a raw, emotional, deeply personal account from a woman who's done keeping quiet. She wants people to know what's out there, and she wants them to be careful. This one's going to stay with you.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.

Tonight's episode is something different. Over the past several months, Brian's inbox has been filling up with emails from listeners and first-time visitors to the show, people who've been holding onto experiences they've never fully shared with anyone. This episode brings six of those accounts together in one sitting, read in the witnesses' own words, spanning six decades and six different regions of the country.The collection opens with Danny, a lifelong hunter on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, who in 1978 came face to face with something standing motionless in the old growth timber during a solo elk hunt. From there we move to the swamps and spring runs of central Florida, where Rachel and her boyfriend encountered something massive outside their tent during an overnight canoe trip through the Ocala National Forest in 1996, and then saw it again on the river as they tried to escape.Marcus takes us to the coal country of Mingo County, West Virginia, where a nineteen year old walking home from the mines on a frozen February night in 1983 realized that something on the hillside above him wasn't just following him but was flanking him in the dark. Linda's account pulls us north to Minnesota's Boundary Waters in 2004, where a veteran wilderness guide and her co-guide watched something wade across open water in the moonlight and come ashore on the small island where their clients were sleeping.Travis writes from the Piney Woods of East Texas, where something took up residence on his forty acre property in 2017 and made its presence known through broken trees, massive tracks in creek mud, disturbing vocalizations, and two visual encounters that changed the way he and his wife think about the land they live on.The episode closes with Gene, now eighty four years old, finally putting into writing what happened to him and his logging crew in the remote mountains of Siskiyou County, California in the summer of 1962, an experience he's carried in silence for over six decades.

The documentary aired on a Tuesday night in October, and nothing was ever the same. Within hours it was trending worldwide. Scientists came forward. Former government employees reached out. And across the country, people started paying closer attention to the forests around them.This episode brings the first volume of Born Wild to a close — but not before we hear from some of the most compelling voices in the archives. Russell Crawford, a Tennessee hunter with over fifty years in the Cherokee National Forest, describes the morning he had a clear shot at something massive and chose not to take it. Not because he couldn't — but because pulling that trigger would have felt like murder.Margaret White spent thirty years teaching biology in rural Washington and debunking every Sasquatch story her students brought to class. Then she came face to face with one on a trail in Olympic National Park, and every rational explanation she ever had turned to dust.James Whitehorse carried his story for fifty-four years. He was eight years old, herding sheep near the Chuska Mountains on the Navajo reservation, when a towering figure stepped out of the junipers and raised its hand in greeting. His grandfather told him the white world would never understand. James kept quiet — until now. Maria Santos worked the graveyard shift at a gas station on the edge of the Gila Wilderness. One night at two in the morning, something eight feet tall walked up to the pumps and started examining them like a curious child discovering something new.Thomas Erikson came from four generations of Oregon loggers. They called them the Wood Apes, and every logger in the Pacific Northwest knew about them. Thomas shares three encounters spanning decades — including the day one of them spoke to him and pointed at the trees, at him, and at itself. Like it was saying they were all part of the same thing. Thomas passed away six months after this interview.We hear from Eddie McGraw, a long-haul trucker who watched a creature stroll across a Montana rest area at two in the morning like it owned the place. From David Baker, a National Geographic photographer who captured three frames of the clearest Sasquatch image ever taken — then locked them in a safe for fifteen years. From Patricia Morgan, a Yellowstone ranger who reveals a secret file of sightings passed down from ranger to ranger since the 1950s. And from Dr. Michael Brooks, a primatologist who spent fifteen years hiding evidence that would have validated everything. Then comes the revelation no one expected. Brian's own mother, Jean Patterson, finally shares a secret she kept for decades — she saw one of the creatures on the Lyerly property a full year before Brian ever did. She stayed silent to protect him. To give him the choice to walk away.He couldn't walk away. He never could. The episode closes on the eve of the final expedition. The witnesses gather at the mountain house. The sun sets over the Appalachians. And deep in the forest, the creatures begin to sing.Tomorrow, everything changes.This is the end of Book One. The odyssey continues.

Part Nine brings Bigfoot Country to its climax, and it does so by circling back to where every great investigation begins — with the people who lived it.After years of building this platform, the floodgates finally opened. Witnesses who had been listening from the shadows for months, sometimes years, started stepping forward. People like Patricia Ann Holloway, a seventy-one-year-old retired librarian from Pennsylvania who had carried a secret since 1973 — the summer she was nineteen years old and working at a Baptist church camp in the Allegheny National Forest.What she saw standing at the tree line that night, seven feet tall with eyes reflecting her flashlight beam, changed her forever. She kept quiet for nearly fifty years. When the only other witness — a twelve-year-old camper named Susan — passed away from cancer, Patricia decided she wasn't going to take that secret to her grave too.Her story opened the door for dozens more. A ninety-year-old former logger from Vermont who remembered the creatures the old timers simply called the Wild Men. A woman from Mississippi passing down her grandmother's encounter from the nineteen twenties. A retired park ranger from California who had spent forty years documenting things he could never put in an official report.But the witnesses were only half the story. Researchers started coming forward too — scientists and academics who had sacrificed careers and reputations to study something the mainstream refused to acknowledge. A primatologist who recognized authentic dermal ridges on a footprint cast. A geneticist with hair samples that matched no known species. An anthropologist who had collected indigenous oral histories from around the world and found an undeniable pattern running through all of them.Then came the most dangerous interview of all.A former military intelligence officer, speaking through an encrypted line, revealed the existence of government programs spanning six decades. Programs designed not just to suppress evidence, but to study these creatures — and exploit them. He couldn't say everything. He said enough.The tension ratcheted up from there. Physical confrontations on mountain roads.Men in dark suits offering deals and making threats. And a manila folder full of classified documents that blew the lid off everything — project names like Titan Watch, Forest Shadow, and Mind Bridge, detailing decades of monitoring, containment, and experimentation on captured creatures.Through all of it, Brian wrestled with the personal weight of the mission. Late night conversations with his mother, who carried her own encounters with the unexplainable. Quiet moments on the porch with Daniel.A faith that had evolved far beyond the Baptist church of his childhood into something broader and harder to name — a belief that the universe held mysteries worth chasing, no matter the cost.The final expedition into the Pisgah wilderness brought everything full circle. Days of waiting. Thermal signatures circling in the dark. Vocalizations echoing through old-growth timber. And on the last night, alone at the edge of camp under a full moon, a moment of silent recognition between two species that have shared this land far longer than anyone wants to admit.Part Nine is about what happens when the dam finally cracks. When the witnesses refuse to stay silent. When the researchers stop protecting their careers and start protecting the truth. And when one man, standing on a dark porch in the Appalachian Mountains, hears a chorus of howls rising from the forest and knows the world is about to change.

A veteran park ranger with over two decades of service reaches out after years of listening to the show in silence. He's heard me share my own encounter and talk about experiences from other law enforcement and first responders, and he finally decided it was time to tell his story. He's never told anyone. Not his wife. Not his coworkers. No one. Kevin was assigned to a week-long solo backcountry bear survey deep in the Pacific Northwest. Six miles from the nearest road, surrounded by old growth timber and some of the most remote wilderness in the lower forty-eight. He was experienced. He was prepared. He had no idea what was waiting for him.It started on day one with a cluster of trees twisted and broken at eight feet. By day two he'd found a massive bare footprint next to a structure that had no business being there. That night, sounds he couldn't identify echoed across the ridgeline and something started working its way toward his camp.By day three, rocks from the creek were being placed near his tent while he was away. And then on night four, everything escalated to a point where Kevin had to make a split-second decision that's haunted him for almost nine years. This is one of the most detailed and credible accounts I've ever received. Kevin asked me to keep his full identity and exact location confidential, and I'm honoring that. What I'm not keeping confidential is what happened to him out there, because this story needs to be heard.If you're in law enforcement, park service, military, or any first responder role and you've been carrying something like this, my inbox is open. You're not alone.

The odyssey reaches new heights as Brian Patterson shares some of the strangest and most profound encounters ever documented on the show. From a North Carolina camper who experienced unexplainable visions of an ancient forest to an Oregon mother whose lost daughter was safely returned by a gentle, hair-covered giant, these accounts push beyond simple sightings into territory that challenges everything we think we know about these creatures. The podcast also faces its greatest crisis when a retired biology professor's elaborate hoax nearly destroys everything Brian has built.The fallout is devastating, but with Daniel's unwavering support, Brian rebuilds stronger than ever with rigorous new verification procedures that earn the community's trust back.The story goes global as witnesses from Tibet, the Congo Basin, Papua New Guinea, and Siberia share encounters that mirror North American reports in stunning detail. A Lakota elder speaks of the Big Man as ancient guardians of the wild places. A Stanford primatologist risks her career to validate the evidence.And the Sasquatch Odyssey community grows into a worldwide network of researchers, witnesses, and believers united by shared experience.As the show hits its five hundredth episode, Brian finally tells his own story in full for the first time. But there's no time to rest. New thermal evidence and a late-night expedition deep into the backcountry deliver the most compelling footage yet captured. The men in black are watching again, the truth is spreading faster than anyone can contain it, and the odyssey is far from over.

A former Marine infantry sergeant breaks twenty years of silence about what happened to him in the Trinity Alps Wilderness of Northern California in October 2003. He didn't want to write in. He's not a Bigfoot guy. But his teenage daughter listens to the show and finally wore him down.Mike and two lifelong hunting buddies were on a five-day backcountry elk hunt deep in the Trinity Wilderness, roughly fourteen miles from the nearest trailhead.On the third day, he picked up on something most people would've missed — the gut-level feeling of being watched and paced. Instead of panicking, he ran deliberate route changes and counter-surveillance techniques to confirm what his instincts were telling him. Something large and bipedal was tracking them from two to three hundred yards back, using terrain and timber for concealment with a discipline he'd later associate with trained military scouts.On the fourth night, it closed the distance to forty yards and stood at the edge of their camp. His buddy nearly fired. Mike stopped him — not out of compassion, but out of a cold tactical calculation that still resonates twenty years later. They packed out at first light and covered fourteen miles in a single push.Mike went on to enlist in the Marines, served two combat tours in Iraq including Fallujah, and earned a Purple Heart. He says what he experienced in the Trinity Alps scared him worse than anything he faced overseas.This episode explores why, and what his story tells us about the intelligence, patience, and capabilities of whatever's living in those mountains.This is one of the most detailed and tactically sophisticated encounter reports we've ever received on this show. You don't want to miss it.

In this episode, the journey takes a dramatic turn as Brian's podcasting career reaches new heights and dangerous new lows. What begins as a powerful collection of witness encounters from across the country — a conservation officer in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, a Mississippi fisherman on the Big Black River, a West Virginia coal miner who found something living deep underground, and a Cajun folk healer who speaks of the loup-garou with reverence rather than fear — quickly evolves into something far more consequential.A television producer named Amanda from Meridian Productions returns with an offer to bring Sasquatch Odyssey to the screen as a legitimate documentary series. Brian agrees, but only on his terms: editorial control, no sensationalism, and absolute respect for the witnesses. The production takes the team from the Olympic Peninsula to the Ozarks and back to the Pisgah National Forest, where the mystery of Austin Reeves still lingers in every shadow and hollow.But the closer Brian gets to the truth, the harder certain forces push back. A devastating act of arson destroys his home, his studio, and nearly everything he and Daniel have built together. The local investigation is a sham, but an ATF agent named Sarah Brown finds evidence of professional-grade incendiary devices and a cover-up that reaches far above her pay grade.Rather than retreat, Brian and Daniel rebuild — bigger, stronger, and more determined than ever.The episode also explores the emotional toll of this work through quieter moments: the frustration of sorting genuine encounters from fabrications, the patience required to find voices like eighty-two-year-old Lucille Marsh from rural Georgia, and the steady, grounding presence of Daniel through it all.From Wisconsin dairy farms to Nebraska sandhills, witnesses from the American heartland reveal that these creatures aren't just hiding in remote wilderness — they've adapted to live alongside us in the margins, watching from the edges of our everyday world.The documentary airs, reaches millions, and ignites a national conversation. The community grows. The threats continue. And the odyssey pushes forward, one story at a time.

For twenty-six years, Dale wore the badge—and kept a secret he couldn't afford to share.Now retired after nearly three decades as a deputy sheriff in a rural southeastern county bordering a vast national forest, Dale finally breaks his silence. During his career, he experienced six separate Sasquatch encounters—stories he kept buried until turning in his badge in late 2025.His experiences span decades and defy easy explanation.In 1994, Dale witnessed a massive, upright creature cross a two-lane highway directly in front of his patrol car. Years later, a night spent at a remote campground left him shaken after hearing unmistakable wood knocks and a distant, haunting howl—one he now recognizes as identical to the infamous Ohio Howl recording.But Dale's story doesn't end with his own encounters.As a trusted figure in his community, people came to him when they had nowhere else to turn. An elderly cattle farmer who carried the memory of a face-to-face encounter for more than forty years. The sister of a logger who finally revealed her brother's terrifying experience on a remote timber road in the 1980s. And two chilling accounts from one of Dale's closest friends—a Forest Service law enforcement ranger who discovered massive footprints and complex tree structures deep in the backcountry, and who later endured a harrowing night as something circled his tent for twenty minutes before sitting down forty feet away, silently watching him in the darkness.

In this installment, Daniel finds something he never expected: normalcy. A job at a local pizza place, the simple rhythm of work and home, the blessed absence of danger. After everything they've survived, boring feels like a gift.Meanwhile, Brian's podcast has exploded beyond anything he imagined. Five million downloads.Tens of thousands of community members. Emails pouring in from witnesses who've carried their secrets for decades, finally finding a place where someone believes them. A seventy-eight-year-old woman writes to share an encounter she's hidden since 1952, and Brian remembers exactly why he does this work.But success brings complications. For every credible witness, there are a dozen others whose stories fall apart under scrutiny. A construction worker from British Columbia claims an intimate encounter with a female Sasquatch, and Brian is forced to draw hard lines about what belongs on the show.Then a retired nurse from New Mexico shares something different entirely: a story of a young Navajo man brought to her hospital in 1992, speaking of being taken by "the big people," and the federal agents who confiscated every piece of evidence before intimidating him into silence. The wheat and the chaff. Sorting one from the other becomes Brian's constant burden. Then the men in black return. Different faces, same cold authority. They come with an offer: classified documents revealing decades of suppressed research, interdimensional hypotheses, everything Brian has been searching for. The price? Stop pushing for official disclosure. Become a partner in managing the truth rather than forcing it into the light. Brian refuses.Eighteen months later, they burn his studio to the ground. But fire has a way of spreading what it's meant to destroy. The attack makes national news. Donations flood in. A major network offers a television deal with full editorial control. And soon Brian finds himself leading an expedition into the Pisgah with a full production crew, thermal cameras, and night vision equipment.On the eighth night, in a hollow near where Austin Mercer vanished, the forest comes alive with wood knocks and howls. The creatures stay just beyond the cameras, too smart to be caught clearly, but their presence is undeniable.It isn't definitive proof.But it's evidence the world will have to reckon with.And at a simple wooden cross marking where Austin was last seen, Brian says a quiet prayer for all those who've disappeared into these ancient mountains, and for the truth still waiting to be found.

In the spring of nineteen seventy-nine, a quiet cattle farmer in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Tennessee followed a strange sound into the timber beyond his fence line. What he found in a ravine that morning would change the course of his family's life for the next four decades and beyond.A young creature was caught in an illegal bear trap. Hurt. Terrified. Looking up at him with eyes that didn't belong to any animal he'd ever encountered.The farmer made a choice. He knelt down and set it free. No cameras. No witnesses. Just a simple act of kindness from a man who believed you help what's hurting, no matter what it is.What happened next is one of the most remarkable long-term sasquatch encounter accounts we've ever received on this show. The creature came back. Then others appeared. And when the farmer's young grandson arrived for his first summer on the property, a friendship began between the boy and that young sasquatch that would span decades.He watched them. They watched him. Trust was built in inches over years. And what started with one grandfather's mercy in a wooded ravine eventually came full circle in a way that none of us saw coming. This is a story about patience, trust, and the kind of quiet coexistence that most people would say is impossible. Thomas Pritchard says otherwise. And after you hear what he has to say, you might just agree with him.

Sheriff Brian Patterson steps away from the badge and into the microphone full time as Sasquatch Odyssey explodes beyond anything he ever imagined. Part Five picks up with the podcast in full swing, and the witnesses are lining up from every corner of the South and beyond to finally tell the stories they have been carrying in silence for decades.It starts in the mountains of northeast Georgia with a seventy-three-year-old retired logger named Earl Hutchins, a man who kept his mouth shut for forty-five years about what stepped out of the timber near Clayton in the fall of nineteen seventy-eight. His story breaks something open.The emails start flooding in from across the region, and Patterson finds himself recording encounter after encounter from witnesses who never had anyone willing to listen. A retired schoolteacher from Ellijay describes the thing that came screaming out of the Chattahoochee National Forest and changed the way she felt about the woods forever. A fishing guide from Everglades City recounts the night a pair of glowing eyes tracked him across the water in the Ten Thousand Islands. A teenage girl in Oconee County, South Carolina watched something unfold from a rhododendron thicket while her daddy's bluetick hound shook itself half to death against her leg.The stories stretch across state lines and keep coming. Arkansas. Tennessee. Virginia. A coon hunter and his cousin tree something in the Ouachitas that no lantern light should ever have revealed. A family of four flees a Cherokee National Forest campsite at three in the morning. A state trooper on Skyline Drive watches something cross a two-lane highway in three strides and never tells a soul.Then the podcast goes national and the picture gets bigger. A Lummi Nation elder speaks of the Ts'emekwes his people have known for thousands of years. A woman in the Hocking Hills of Ohio locks eyes with something standing between the trees in broad daylight and never hikes again. From Louisiana to Alaska to Hawaii, the encounters pile up, and Patterson starts to understand that this is not a regional phenomenon. It is everywhere. When the show crosses international borders, the scope becomes staggering. A First Nations man from British Columbia reminds the world that his people gave us the word Sasquatch in the first place. A Russian researcher describes a shape moving through snow in the Pamir Mountains. An Australian prospector watches something vanish from a waterhole in the outback. Sherpas in Nepal, scientists in China, guides in the Amazon — every culture, every continent, every corner of the wild world has a name for what lives in the places humans do not go. But it is the deep encounters that change everything. A hospice nurse in rural Kentucky describes the night something appeared at her dying husband's window and hummed him into his final moment of peace. A lost hiker in the Gila Wilderness receives images in her mind that lead her back to safety. A former Army Ranger wakes paralyzed in the Big Thicket while something rifles through his thoughts like pages in a book. These are the stories that keep Patterson up at night and force him to ask whether these creatures are something far stranger and far more profound than anyone has been willing to consider. By the end of Part Five, Patterson is two years into full-time podcasting with over three hundred interviews behind him and patterns emerging from the noise. The creatures follow corridors. They move with the seasons.They choose when to be seen. And a small but undeniable percentage of encounters suggest something beyond biology, beyond what any scientific framework can currently explain. The podcast has crossed a million downloads. The community is growing. The world is slowly waking up. And somewhere out in the deep woods, something is watching back.

What does it take to break a forty-year silence, and what does it cost to tell the truth when powerful forces have worked for decades to keep it buried?In Part Four of The Sheriff of Bigfoot Country, everything changes.An anonymous envelope left in the dead of night opens the door to a classified government operation tied to the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens. What was recovered in the chaos wasn't human, and the documents reveal a truth far more disturbing than folklore ever suggested. Autopsies, survivor reports, and firsthand medical testimony point to intelligent beings hidden from the public under the cover of disaster response.As witnesses finally come forward—law enforcement, military pilots, medical professionals, and federal employees—the silence fractures.A documentary meant to expose the truth is shut down just weeks before release, confirming the reach of those determined to keep these secrets hidden. But the internet changes the rules, and once the story escapes, it can't be contained. As the world begins to listen, new voices emerge, decades of fear dissolve, and a movement is born. What began as an investigation becomes a reckoning, and the path forward leads to something bigger than one man, one mountain, or one secret.This is the moment the dam breaks, the truth finds its voice, and the journey that becomes Sasquatch Odyssey truly begins.

Tonight we're going back to basics. Six encounter stories from six different states, told the way they were meant to be told. Around the fire. In the dark. The way witnesses have been sharing these experiences for generations.You'll hear from Daryl, a long haul trucker who watched something cross Interstate Ninety in Montana back in nineteen ninety-seven. Something that stepped over a guardrail like it was nothing and looked back at him with eyes that held more intelligence than any animal he'd ever seen.Wade was a deputy in rural Arkansas when he responded to a call about something stealing corn from an old farmer's field. What he saw standing at the tree line that September night in two thousand and twelve changed everything he thought he knew about the woods behind those farms.Colleen spent eleven years as a park ranger in the North Cascades before she got a frantic call from a family trapped in a rental cabin. Something was circling their cabin at night. Pounding on the walls. Screaming in the darkness. She thought it was a bear until she pressed her flashlight to that back window.Hank hunted the same Michigan property for thirty years. Opening day of rifle season in nineteen eighty-nine, something walked into his clearing. He had it in his scope. Finger on the trigger. And he couldn't pull it. He told me why, and his answer has stayed with me ever since.Terry was hiking solo on the Oregon coast when she realized something was following her through the old growth. For twenty minutes it kept pace with her through the trees before it finally let her see it. What happened next surprised even her. And Earl, an eighty-one-year-old Kentucky farmer who wrote me a series of letters in nineteen ninety-six about something that came around his hollow back in seventy-three.Something the old timers in those mountains had always known about but never talked about.Six witnesses. Six encounters. Six lives changed forever.

After the midnight visit from the men in black, Brian is left with a choice—back down, or push forward and risk everything. There's no middle ground anymore. Daniel, uneasy but resolute, agrees to stand with him no matter what comes next. Every document is copied. Multiple backups are created and hidden in separate locations. If the evidence disappears, the truth won't disappear with it. As the pressure mounts, Zach makes contact with an underground network of researchers who have been operating in the shadows for decades—people with their own stories of intimidation, silencing, and government interference. They know the rules of this world. They know how to survive it.Then an opportunity arrives they never anticipated. Documentary filmmaker Amanda steps forward, determined to tell the story. She's meticulous, credible, and unafraid of the implications. Once she's in, there's no turning back. The crew arrives in November. Interviews begin. Physical evidence is examined and verified by independent experts. But it quickly becomes clear they're not alone. A break-in at the rental house leaves one thing missing—documents. Nothing else is disturbed. Days later, a tracking device is discovered beneath a crew member's car. The message is unmistakable: we see you, and we can reach you whenever we want.They keep filming anyway. Two weeks before Christmas, the phone rings. The same calm, practiced voice from that first encounter delivers a final warning. But this time, something slips—something unintended.“The creatures are just one piece of a much larger puzzle. ”Brian refuses to back down. On the other end of the line, the voice sounds almost regretful.“Then I'm sorry for what's going to happen. ”As tensions rise, Zach uncovers the existence of Project Threshold—a classified Department of Defense operation launched in 1962. The revelation is staggering. The government hasn't merely covered up the existence of these creatures. They've been managing them. Containing them. Controlling them. For decades—possibly since the 1940s. And buried even deeper is something else. Something far more dangerous. Something they fear more than the creatures themselves.Then, just before dawn, there's a knock at the door. No one is there. Only a manila envelope resting on the doormat, stamped with a single word: TRUTH. Inside is a file marked Project Vulcan. Dated May 18, 1980—the day Mount St. Helens erupted.In the chaos following the eruption, military recovery teams entered the blast zone. What they retrieved was never meant to be known: seventeen dead specimens. Three critically injured. One survivor. The photographs are impossible to deny. A massive, seven-foot-tall creature lies strapped to a stretcher, its body scorched, its hair burned away, surrounded by men in hazmat suits. The conclusion is unavoidable. The United States government didn't just know these beings existed.They've been studying them—for over forty years. Next episode: The truth comes out—and the consequences begin.

Tonight we bring you six terrifying Sasquatch encounters from across America, spanning six decades and six different states. These are the stories that witnesses carried in silence for years, sometimes decades, before finally sharing what they experienced in the wilderness.We begin in the redwood forests of Northern California in nineteen sixty-three, where a young logger named Harold Vance comes face to face with something that will haunt him for the rest of his life. From there we travel to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State in nineteen seventy-seven, where a family vacation turns into a nightmare that three children will never forget.The hills of eastern Kentucky provide the backdrop for our third encounter in nineteen eighty-four, when a veteran hunter with forty years of woods experience meets something that proves just how little he actually knew.We then head south to the swamps of central Florida in nineteen ninety-two, where a commercial fisherman discovers that alligators aren't the apex predators he thought they were.Our fifth story takes us to the farmland of southern Ohio in two thousand and five, where a third-generation farmer learns the truth behind his grandfather's warnings about the woodland at the edge of his property.And finally, we venture into the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in two thousand and sixteen, where a group of experienced hikers encounters not only a massive creature circling their camp in the darkness, but mysterious lights in the sky that seem somehow connected to what stalks them below.Six witnesses. Six encounters. Six lives changed forever. The wilderness keeps secrets, and tonight we're sharing some of them with you.

The years that followed Brian's childhood encounter in Lyerly weren't easy, but they were transformative. His mother beat cancer, earned her degree, and rebuilt their lives piece by piece. Brian found his footing too—working his way up from fast food to restaurant management, discovering he had a gift for handling people and solving problems.But something else was happening beneath the surface.In rural Georgia during the early nineties, Brian came to terms with a truth he'd been running from—he was gay. A relationship with a coworker named Marcus brought clarity, but also consequences. Friends disappeared. Family members stopped calling. The people who stayed proved who really mattered. A career in juvenile corrections followed—seven years working with teenagers society had written off. Then came the badge he'd always wanted, a posting in the remote mountain town of Suches Georgia, and a chance meeting with a sheriff's deputy named Daniel that would change everything. Together, they bought forty acres in the North Carolina mountains backing up to the Pisgah National Forest.And almost immediately, the strangeness began. Howls in the night. Rocks appearing in impossible places. Lights with no source. Something was out there, watching their new home. Brian's unexpected run for Caldwell County Sheriff opened doors he never anticipated—including a partnership with a forest ranger named Zach who'd been quietly documenting the truth for years. Dozens of people had vanished in the Pisgah. The evidence pointed to something the government was desperate to hide. Then a college student named Austin Mercer disappeared, and the trail camera footage he left behind changed everything.Now Brian faces an impossible choice. Men in black suits have delivered a clear message—back off or lose everything. But walking away means more people die in the darkness of those ancient woods.Part Two of Bigfoot Country is the story of a man finding his identity, his purpose, and his courage—and discovering that sometimes the monsters in the forest are easier to face than the ones who want to keep them secret.

Over the next few weeks, I'm gonna be sharing my new book with you—start to finish. The whole thing. It's called Bigfoot Country. All told, it's around eight hours of narration. So, I'll be putting it out in multiple episodes. And honestly... I've been sitting on this for a long time. I'm excited—and a little nervous—to finally put it out there. But before we jump in, I wanna take a minute. Just you and me.What you're about to hear is loosely based on my life. Some of it happened exactly the way I tell it. No embellishment, no polish. Other parts are rooted in real experiences—real people, real moments, real emotions—but maybe stretched a bit, or reimagined, to help the story breathe. And then there are parts where… well, you get to decide what you believe.I also wanna be upfront about something. Early on, you might find yourself wondering where this is all headed. There's a lot of groundwork—family, childhood, personal history. Just know this: it's going somewhere. This book is about Bigfoot. That's the destination. I promise. Just trust me long enough to get there. At its heart, this is a story about my earliest experiences with the strange and unexplained. It starts with something that happened to me when I was twelve years old—an encounter with what I believe was a Sasquatch. That moment stayed with me. It shaped a lot of who I became. And for years, I struggled with how—or even if—I should ever tell that story. Because how do you talk about something the world insists isn't real? How do you open yourself up like that, knowing people are gonna judge you, doubt you, or dismiss you entirely?But these stories have always mattered to me. This book has always mattered. And at some point, I realized I was done keeping it all tucked away. Here's the thing, though—I didn't just write about Bigfoot. I wrote about me. All of me. My childhood. My parents. My failures. My struggles. And yeah… Dani.I know that part isn't gonna sit well with everyone. I get that. Some folks are gonna have opinions, and that's their right. But for me, leaving any of that out would've been dishonest. I can't ask you to trust me with these experiences and then hide pieces of who I am. I can't tell my story without including the person who stood beside me through the hardest parts of it. That's just not how I live, and it's not how this book was written.Believe me, I thought about sanding down the rough edges. Making it cleaner. Safer. Easier to swallow. Cutting out the parts that might make people uncomfortable. But I couldn't do it. I've spent too much of my life holding back, and I'm done with that.So this is me. This is my story. All of it. Some of what you'll hear happened exactly as I describe it. Some of it is how I imagine things might have gone—if the timing had been different, if I'd pushed harder, if the world worked the way I think it sometimes should.And one last thing before we start—this is Book One. There's more coming. A lot more. This is just the beginning. I hope you enjoy Bigfoot Country... as much as I did writing it. Part One is called The Hollow, and it begins in September of 1984. I was eleven years old, just a few months shy of twelve, and my family had just moved to a place called Lyerly, Georgia. Population next to nothing. No stoplight. One gas station. The kind of town where everybody knew everybody's business before you even finished doing it. We moved into an old house at the end of a dirt road—a house that looked like something had crawled there to die. White paint gone gray. Porch sagging in the middle. Eighty acres of woods stretching out behind it like a wall. My father, Jerry Patterson, was a drinker. A man whose silence usually meant a storm was building. My mother, Jean, was small but fierce in the ways that mattered—even if she couldn't fix the things that were broken in our family. She stayed. She always stayed. The woods became my escape. I spent those early weeks mapping the land, building forts out of fallen branches and rotting tarps, disappearing into the trees whenever the tension at home got too thick. I learned every trail, every landmark, every corner of that property. All except one. There was a section way back at the far edge, where our land butted up against the national forest, that I couldn't bring myself to enter. Every time I got close, something pushed me back. A wrongness I couldn't name. A feeling like walking into a cold spot in a warm room.One day in late October, I decided I'd had enough of being scared. I was almost twelve years old. Too old for this. So I grabbed my BB gun and headed out to prove to myself there was nothing back there worth fearing. I was wrong. What I found was a clearing with a depression in the ground where something big had been bedding down. The smell hit me first—wet dog mixed with a dumpster behind a butcher shop. And then the sounds. Heavy footsteps. Bipedal. Something walking on two legs that weighed more than any man. Huffing. Growling. Sounds that rose and fell in patterns that almost seemed like language. It charged at me through the underbrush, stopped maybe twenty feet away, and just... breathed. Watched. Decided. It let me go.I ran home faster than I'd ever run in my life. And I never told a soul.But that wasn't the only strangeness that followed us to that house. At night, I started hearing voices in the walls—whispery, indistinct, speaking in languages I couldn't understand. A dark figure began appearing at the foot of my bed, a void shaped like a man, watching me while I lay frozen and unable to scream. Scratching moved through the walls like something was circling me. Three heavy knocks shook my bedroom door one night, and when I opened it, no one was there—but downstairs, a fire was burning in a fireplace we never used, in a chimney my father said was blocked.Something was in that house. Something that had been there before us and didn't want us there. And then, in January, everything changed. My mother got sick. Skin Cancer. The doctors gave her six months, maybe a year. And my father—the man who was supposed to hold us together—disappeared. Shacked up with some woman in another town, drowning himself in pills and booze while his wife was dying and his son was alone. I ended up staying with my best friend Brad Henderson's family. They took me in without question, gave me a bed and a place at their table. And every weekend, someone drove me to Atlanta so I could watch my mother fade away in a hospital room. She lost her hair. Lost her weight. Lost everything except her will to fight.Against all odds, she won. Almost a year to the day after her diagnosis, the doctors told us her cancer was in remission. She came home for Christmas, weighing maybe eighty pounds, wrapped in a scarf my friend's mother had knitted for her. And the first thing she did was look at my father's empty chair and say the words I'd been waiting to hear my whole life. We're leaving. But leaving wasn't simple. My father showed up one last time, took my mother's pain medication right out of the medicine cabinet, and vanished. He started selling those pills around town—the same town that had taken up a collection to help us, the same community that had rallied around my dying mother while he was nowhere to be found People got angry. The wrong kind of people. One night in January, I woke up to the sound of voices and vehicles in the yard. I looked out my window and saw twenty figures in white robes standing around a burning cross. The Klan had come to our house. Not because of us—because of him. Because of the shame he'd brought on his family in a place that took such things seriously.We left Lyerly two weeks later. My mother divorced my father, took back her maiden name, and we started over in a tiny apartment in Summerville. Two bedrooms. Thin walls. Stained carpet. But it was ours. And it was safe. I got a job at Dairy Queen. Went to school. Helped my mother however I could. The nightmares followed me—the dark figure, the dreams of something chasing me through endless woods—but I buried it all. Pushed it down. Told myself it didn't matter anymore.But I never forgot what I heard in those woods. Never forgot that huffing, that growling, those footsteps too heavy to be human. I knew it was real. I knew it was out there. And someday, I was going to find it again.But first, I had to grow up. First, I had to survive. That's Part One of Bigfoot Country.

Every once in a while, a story comes across my desk that stops me cold. Not because it's sensational, but because it's precise, deeply personal, and impossible to dismiss. The account you're about to hear is one of those. It arrived as a letter from a man I'm calling Tom, a seventeen-year park ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains who has spent his life dealing in facts, emergencies, and hard reality—not Bigfoot stories.Tom was called to a remote homestead owned by an eighty-two-year-old woman named Mabel. Something had been raiding her property, tearing apart her barn, stealing dog food and chickens, and—most unsettling of all—unlatching doors and closing them behind itself. Bears don't do that. What Tom found near the coop were sixteen-inch footprints with five toes, unmistakably primate, and impossible by any known standard.What followed changed everything he thought he knew about those mountains. Mabel told him she had lived alongside these creatures her entire life. Her mother, her grandmother, and even her great-grandmother had known about them since settling that hollow in the 1840s. There had always been rules, boundaries, and even communication. But a new presence had arrived—larger, gray-furred, aggressive—and for the first time in eighty years, Mabel was afraid. Tom chose to stay. Over the next two weeks, he documented wood knocks, vocalizations unlike any known animal, tree breaks forming deliberate perimeters, rocks thrown with intent, and images from trail cameras that still haunt him. With help from a trusted wildlife officer, he gathered casts, recordings, and photographs that defy easy explanation. And on the eleventh night, he had an encounter that permanently altered his understanding of reality. This story doesn't end with proof or confrontation. It ends with something far rarer: understanding.Tom wrestled with whether to share this, knowing the cost of speaking out. But he thought of Mabel, of his friend who'd carried his own encounter in silence, and of everyone who's seen something in these woods and been told they imagined it. I believe him.What you're about to hear is exactly as Tom wrote it, in his own words. It's long. It's detailed. And it's one of the most moving accounts I've ever received.So settle in. From an eighty-acre homestead at the edge of the Smoky Mountains, this is the letter from Ranger Tom.

Tonight, we conclude The Bigfoot Journals. Seven men walked out of the hidden valley in November of seventeen ninety-nine. They carried knowledge that would haunt them for the rest of their lives... and a secret they swore never to reveal.In this final installment, we follow the Stone Expedition on their three-month winter journey home. We witness the debate that consumed them... publish or protect? We hear the oath sworn at Thornton's Tavern in Richmond, where seven survivors bound themselves to silence. And we learn what became of them all.Thomas Mercer, the scientist who died bitter in eighteen twenty-six, still regretting the discovery he could never publish. Sam Walker, who returned to the mountains he loved and passed peacefully in eighteen twenty-three. Josiah Whitfield, who found peace somewhere beyond the Mississippi. Solomon Reed, who carried his grandmother's wisdom north. Jim Sutton, whose last words were about the creatures.Young Zeke Stone, forever changed by his connection with the juvenile, gone by eighteen twenty. And Elijah Stone himself... who built a cabin in the Virginia mountains and watched the forest every night for twenty-seven years. We'll read his final journal entry, written on July fourth, eighteen twenty-six. The fiftieth anniversary of American independence. The day he passed the burden to his son. The chain of keepers had begun.Then we jump forward. Two centuries forward. To Marcus Stone, a history professor who inherits his estranged father's cabin... and discovers a trunk in the cellar that changes everything. The journals. The pendant. The truth.And finally, we witness what happens when Marcus leads a small expedition into the mountains. When the creatures reveal themselves once more. When the gesture of peace is given... and returned.This is the story of secrets that span generations. Of truths too dangerous to share. Of a family that watched and waited, keeper after keeper, century after century. And somewhere in those mountains... the creatures are still watching.They've always been watching. They always will be.

On the evening of November fifth, nineteen seventy five, seven loggers were driving home through the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona when they witnessed something that would change their lives forever. A glowing disc hovered silently above a clearing, pulsing with an eerie golden light.When twenty two year old Travis Walton approached the craft, a beam of blue green light shot out and struck him, lifting him off the ground before hurling him through the air. His terrified coworkers fled the scene, and when they returned minutes later, both the craft and Travis had vanished without a trace. For five days, search parties combed hundreds of square miles of rugged wilderness. Helicopters scanned from above. Tracking dogs followed trails that led nowhere. The six witnesses found themselves suspected of murder as Sheriff Marlin Gillespie struggled to believe their impossible story. Then, just hours after the men passed polygraph examinations confirming they had not harmed their friend, Travis Walton reappeared on a highway outside Heber, Arizona, disoriented, terrified, and carrying memories of an experience that defied all rational explanation.In this episode, we explore every detail of what has become one of the most thoroughly investigated and hotly debated alien abduction cases in history.We travel to the small Mormon community of Snowflake, Arizona, where Travis and his stepbrother Mike Rogers grew up, and we examine the bonds of friendship and family that would be tested by the events of that November night. We follow the massive search operation that turned up nothing, and we sit with the witnesses as suspicion fell upon them and their community began to turn against them. Most importantly, we go inside the craft itself, following Travis through his fragmented memories of waking on an examination table surrounded by creatures with enormous black eyes and pale, hairless skin. We walk with him through curved corridors that seemed to defy normal architecture, into a room where the walls came alive with stars and a single chair offered control over what appeared to be a planetarium display of the cosmos. We meet the tall, human looking beings in blue uniforms who led him through a hangar filled with disc shaped craft before sedating him and returning him to Earth.We also examine the aftermath that followed Travis home. The media circus that descended on Snowflake. The National Enquirer's controversial involvement. The first polygraph test that Travis failed while still traumatized, and the multiple subsequent tests he passed over the following decades. The relentless attacks from skeptics like Philip Klass, who devoted years to proving the case was an elaborate hoax. And the personal toll on the witnesses, from Mike Rogers' crushing guilt over leaving his best friend behind to Travis's years of nightmares, failed relationships, and the struggle to rebuild a normal life after experiencing something so profoundly abnormal. We trace the cultural legacy of the case, from Travis's nineteen seventy eight book The Walton Experience to the nineteen ninety three Paramount film Fire in the Sky, which introduced his story to millions while taking dramatic liberties with what actually happened aboard the craft. We explore how the case influenced UFO research and established a template for evaluating abduction claims, and we consider how the recent shift in government attitudes toward unidentified aerial phenomena has given cases like Travis Walton's new significance in the ongoing search for answers about what else might be sharing our universe. This is a story about the unknown, but it is also a story about very human things. Friendship and loyalty. Fear and courage. The weight of telling a truth that nobody wants to believe. Nearly fifty years after that night in the Arizona forest, every surviving witness has maintained that they saw what they say they saw. The mystery remains unsolved. The questions remain unanswered. And somewhere in the vast darkness between the stars, something may still be watching.

Tonight we're venturing into territory that goes beyond our usual encounters with large, hairy, bipedal creatures. After nearly forty years of research in the deep woods, I've come to understand that not everything strange out there can be explained by Sasquatch. Sometimes the things people encounter are even more terrifying. More strange. More impossible.This episode brings you four accounts that have haunted me since the day I first heard them.These stories came from witnesses who trusted me with experiences they'd kept buried for years, sometimes decades. Some made me promise not to share their accounts until after they'd passed on. Others simply needed to unburden themselves of secrets too heavy to carry alone. Our journey begins with a Vietnam veteran named David Hollister who ventured into the Cherokee National Forest in the summer of nineteen seventy-one and found himself trapped in an impossible loop. No matter which direction he walked, no matter how carefully he tracked his course with map and compass, he kept arriving at the same abandoned cabin. Inside that cabin was a journal filled with entries in his own handwriting, describing events that hadn't happened yet. David's account of escaping that gray, fog-shrouded nightmare raises questions about time and place that I still can't answer.From there we move to the mountains of western North Carolina where a competitive ultra-marathoner I'm calling Michelle had an encounter that ended her trail running career forever. During a routine training run, she noticed a shadow keeping pace with her through the trees. A human-shaped shadow with no source. Nothing casting it. Just darkness given form, matching her speed mile after mile through the forest. What happened during those ten miles of terror left a permanent mark on Michelle, one that's still visible today in the white hair at her temples.The third account takes us to Colorado and a story that defies everything we think we know about physics. A retired electrical engineer named Harold Price was scanning old radio frequencies late one night when he picked up an emergency transmission from a forest ranger named William Morrison. The ranger was terrified, describing something circling his remote station in the darkness. The problem was that Morrison was broadcasting from nineteen sixty-three, more than fifty years in the past. Harold spent seven hours on the radio with a man from another era, listening helplessly as something found its way inside that station.What Harold discovered when he researched the incident afterward confirmed his worst fears about what he'd witnessed.Our final story comes from a father named Robert who took his family camping in the Allegheny National Forest in the summer of eighty-nine. What began as a perfect evening around the campfire turned into a night of primal terror when the family woke to discover that every sound in the forest had stopped. No crickets. No owls. No wind. Just absolute, suffocating silence. And something was circling their tent. Something they could feel but not hear. Something that carried the silence with it like an aura. These four accounts share something in common. They all involve encounters with things that shouldn't exist. Things that operate outside the rules we think govern our world. Time loops. Sourceless shadows. Transmissions across decades. Silence that walks like a creature.I believe these witnesses. I've heard the recordings. I've seen the evidence. I've looked into the eyes of people forever changed by what they experienced in the deep woods. Whether you believe them is up to you. But I'd encourage you to listen with an open mind. Because our forests hold secrets we're only beginning to understand. And some of those secrets are darker and stranger than anything we've imagined. The woods have secrets. And some secrets don't want to be found.

There's something out there in the most remote corners of the Appalachian Mountains. Not a creature from folklore, not a cryptid or ghost story. Something much closer to us—and somehow, much more terrifying because of it. In this episode, we go deep into the hills to explore the legend of the feral people of Appalachia—humans who turned their backs on civilization so long ago, they may have forgotten what it means to be part of it at all. It all starts near Whitetop Mountain, where a dying man named Mercer calls a few people together to share stories passed down through mountain families for nearly two centuries. These aren't the kind of tales you'll read in a book or hear from a park ranger. These are the stories folks only tell in quiet voices, far away from outsiders.We follow one of those stories back to 1978 in Mullins Hollow, Kentucky. A little boy named Thomas vanished from his yard in the middle of the day—his mother just a few steps away. Three days later, his father says a woman stepped out of the woods, filthy and wild-eyed, holding something small in her arms. She smiled, put a finger to her lips, and disappeared into the trees.Then there's Ronald Clayton, a game warden who thought he'd seen everything—until a search for a missing boy in 2013 led him to a hidden settlement deep in the forest. He found the child, painted with strange symbols, surrounded by makeshift shelters and a smoldering fire. When he tried to escape, he realized they weren't just following him—they were herding him. Letting him wear himself out before they made their move. He got lucky that day. Most people wouldn't. Back in 1963, a geology professor and his team stumbled onto something sealed deep underground. A hidden chamber the size of a football field—stone shelters, fire pits, carved beds, and bones. So many bones. In one corner, seventeen pairs of children's shoes. Different sizes. Different decades. He never put any of it in his official report.And in 1972, the Hensley family in Virginia lived through something they still won't talk about without a shake in their voice. It started with missing tools, then livestock, then faces at the windows. One foggy morning, a gray-haired woman came out of the woods and said, “Give us the girl child, and we'll leave you in peace.” The farmer opened fire. A week later, every animal on their farm was dead. One word was written in blood on the side of their barn: OWED.Throughout the episode, we talk about the signs—the silence in the woods when the birds stop singing, the strange stick figures and markings left at the edge of the forest, the voices that call your name in the dark. These people don't attack groups. They prefer the ones who are alone. They prefer children.This isn't a story about monsters. It's about what happens when people cut all ties to the world and build their own. A world where different rules apply. A world where survival is everything. They've been here for generations. And they're very good at staying hidden. Unless, of course, they want to be found.

There's a corner of America where people vanish at a startling rate, where massive searches can turn up nothing, no trail, no remains, no answers. That place is Alaska. In this episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, we head into the shadowed heart of the Alaska Triangle, the vast wilderness between Anchorage, Juneau, and Utqiagvik, to explore why so many disappear and why indigenous stories have warned about forest-dwelling abductors for generations.In the summer of twenty twenty-two, sixty-nine-year-old Mary Dawn Wilson drove her Ford Focus nearly seven miles down the Stampede Trail near Healy, Alaska, a rugged route tied to the Into the Wild legend and notorious for swallowing travelers. With a two-year-old child in the back seat, Wilson pushed her vehicle far beyond where it reasonably could go.When the car became stuck in mud, she made a decision no one can explain. She locked the toddler inside the vehicle and walked deeper into the wilderness, away from the highway and toward the interior.Search teams deployed helicopters, thermal imaging, drones, ATVs, and trained dogs. They located Wilson's personal belongings about a mile beyond the stuck car, proof she kept going. After that, the trail went cold. No footprints. No sign. Nothing. After three days, the active search was suspended. Mary Dawn Wilson has never been found.We zoom out to examine the bigger pattern, thousands of disappearances across Alaska over the decades, many ending in complete erasure. We revisit chilling cases tied to the Alaska Triangle, including the nineteen seventy-two disappearance of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Alaska Congressman Nick Begich, whose plane was never recovered despite one of the largest search operations in American history. We examine the case of Gary Frank Sotherden, whose skull was found years later with bear tooth marks but little else, no clothing, no gear, no explanation for how he ended up so far from where he was supposed to be.We consider Thomas Anthony Nuzzi, the traveling nurse last seen with an unidentified woman who has never been located, both of them vanishing into the Alaskan night without a trace. And we look at Michael LeMaitre, a marathon runner who vanished during a major, heavily monitored event on a mountainside crowded with other competitors and spectators, disappearing in broad daylight despite sophisticated search technology that should have been able to locate any warm body on that mountain. Alaska Native traditions carry their own explanations for these disappearances, stories of entities that mimic, lure, and take. The Tlingit speak of the Kushtaka, the land otter man, a shapeshifter said to imitate voices and faces to draw victims away from safety. The Yup'ik tell of the Hairy Man they call Miluquyuliq, a powerful forest presence that watches travelers from the treeline with an intensity that goes beyond mere animal curiosity. And the descendants of Portlock speak of the Nantinaq, a predatory figure so feared that locals ultimately abandoned their entire town rather than remain in its territory. By nineteen fifty, every resident had fled, leaving behind homes and livelihoods, choosing displacement over whatever stalked them from the surrounding forest. We also touch on modern reports, including sightings documented by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization across Alaska, encounters with massive bipedal creatures covered in dark fur that emit strange vocalizations and watch humans with unsettling intelligence. These accounts span decades and come from experienced outdoorsmen, truckers, hunters, and others who know the difference between known wildlife and something else entirely.At the center of this episode lies an unsettling question that may never be answered. What made Mary Dawn Wilson walk the wrong way, into the deep, after leaving a child behind? She was no naive tourist. She knew the Alaskan wilderness, had lived in remote areas, understood the dangers. Yet something compelled her to drive down that haunted trail, to keep going when any sensible person would turn back, and finally to walk away from her stuck vehicle in the opposite direction of safety. Did she experience a medical crisis that impaired her judgment? Did the wilderness itself disorient her?Or did she see something, hear something, follow something that called to her from the trees?The Tlingit have always warned their children about the Kushtaka's ability to mimic familiar voices, to appear as loved ones, to promise help while leading victims to their doom. The people of Portlock knew something was hunting them long before they abandoned their homes. And Mary Dawn Wilson, walking deeper into the Alaskan interior on that July afternoon, may have encountered whatever it is that has been taking people from this land for longer than anyone can remember.Mary Dawn Wilson was four feet ten inches tall, weighed one hundred sixty pounds, and had gray hair and blue eyes with a small scar on her left ear. She was wearing a floral dress and a cream-colored kuspuk with green flowers when she disappeared. Her case remains open. Tips can be submitted to the Alaska State Troopers at nine oh seven, four five one, five one oh oh, or anonymously through the AK Tips smartphone app. If you know anything about what happened on the Stampede Trail in July of twenty twenty-two, please reach out. Somewhere in that vast and silent wilderness, the answers are waiting to be found.Thank you for joining us on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. The forest is always watching. And sometimes, it takes.

In early September of 1799, the Stone Expedition reunited deep in the unmapped wilderness beyond the Ohio River. Nine men gathered at the designated rendezvous, carrying fresh provisions and renewed hope. They could not have known that within weeks, two of them would be dead, and the survivors would carry secrets that would haunt their bloodlines for generations.This episode chronicles the expedition's darkest chapter as they pressed deeper into forbidden territory than any Europeans had ventured before. The creatures that had watched them for months began gathering in unprecedented numbers, converging from all directions toward something none of the men could see but all could feel drawing them forward. When the expedition crossed into hostile territory without realizing it, the fragile peace they had built shattered in a single night of violence that left Henri Beaumont scattered across a forest clearing in pieces too small to bury. But the horror of that night was only the beginning. Guided by creatures whose motives remained unknowable, the surviving members discovered a hidden valley—a vast sanctuary concealed between mountain walls where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these beings had lived in complete isolation since before human civilization began.What they found in the caves of that valley would challenge everything they believed about the natural world and reveal a relationship between humans and these ancient creatures far more terrible than any of them had imagined. The bones told the story. Scattered. Broken. Some fossilized with the weight of millennia, others bearing traces of recent flesh. Teeth marks near the joints. Evidence of breaking for marrow. The native warnings had not been exaggeration. They had been truth. This episode also documents the final descent of Will Harper, the expedition's artist, whose mind had been unraveling since his first encounter with the creatures months before. His death in a forest clearing—surrounded by silent witnesses, his heart simply stopped, his face frozen in an expression of terrible transcendence—remains one of the most haunting passages in the Stone journals.Two men entered that valley who would never leave it. The seven who survived would carry the weight of what they witnessed for the rest of their lives, bound by an oath of secrecy that would echo through their descendants for two hundred years.Some knowledge demands a price. Some truths are paid for in blood.

One shot in the darkness. One moment of fear-fueled panic. And everything the expedition had built with the creatures comes crashing down.In Episode Three, we witness the consequences of Jim McAllister's breakdown. Haunted by war, drowning his demons in homemade whiskey, Jim opens fire on a creature standing at the edge of the firelight—and triggers a siege that will test every man's sanity. What follows is a night of absolute terror. Rocks and branches hurled from the darkness. Horses screaming as they break free and scatter. The knocking—not the measured rhythm they'd grown accustomed to, but rapid, frantic, like a thousand hammers striking in unison. And underneath it all, a sound that cuts deeper than any threat: the unmistakable cry of grief.But the creatures don't attack. They could have. They demonstrate exactly what they're capable of—and then they wait.Sam insists there's only one path forward: atonement. Each man must sacrifice something precious. Something that matters. What unfolds is a ritual of exchange that will determine whether the expedition lives or dies.The episode follows the group as they split—some returning east with the journals, others pressing deeper into territory no white man has ever seen.Ancient forests where the trees are older than memory. Creatures walking openly beside them now, no longer hiding. And a meeting with the Wyandot tribe's keeper of history—She-Who-Remembers—who delivers a warning that chills to the bone: "No one who has entered that place has returned. Not because they kill everyone who enters. But because those who enter... change."

Tonight we're doing something a little different here on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. We're setting aside the witness encounters, and instead we're gathering around the fire to tell a story the old fashioned way. This is a Christmas tale about a young Sasquatch named Thorn who has spent the autumn watching a human family from the treeline above their mountain cabin.He's fascinated by their laughter, their warmth, their strange rituals of carving pumpkins and roasting marshmallows and dragging trees inside their homes to cover them with lights. His kind has always kept their distance from humans, but something about this family calls to him in ways he doesn't quite understand. On Christmas Eve, when the teenage daughter Emma leaves a plate of cookies on the porch railing and looks up toward the treeline with a knowing smile, everything changes. Thorn makes a decision that will alter the course of his life and theirs. What follows is a journey through a blizzard, an impossible winter rose, a lost little boy named Jacob who followed what he thought were Santa's footprints into the storm, and a rescue that bridges the vast distance between two worlds that were never supposed to meet. Pour yourself something warm, dim the lights, and let the snow fall as we journey deep into the ancient Appalachian hills for a Christmas Eve you won't soon forget. It' s suitable for listeners of all ages and makes for perfect holiday listening with the whole family gathered close. From all of us here at Paranormnal World Productions, we wish you a Christmas filled with magic, kindness, and the reminder that you are never truly alone. Keep your eyes on the treeline, friends. And maybe leave a little something on the porch tonight, just in case.

I love a good Christmas story.The kind where something strange and wonderful happens out in the wilderness. Where the magic of the season reaches places most people never go. Where even the darkest corners of the forest feel touched by something warm and old and meaningful.Over the years, I've told you stories like that.Stories of Sasquatch sightings on snowy December mornings.Of mysterious gifts left on remote cabin doorsteps.Of unexplained tracks leading to and from places where no tracks should exist at all.But tonight, friends, I'm not here to warm your heart.Tonight, I'm here to freeze your blood.South Carolina. 1985.A young insurance adjuster named Gerald Hutchins inherits a remote cabin deep in the forest from his great-uncle Amos. The old man had lived alone out there for more than twenty years, and the family whispered that he came back from the war… changed. Haunted. Given to muttering in languages no one recognized. Drawing strange symbols he would immediately burn in the fireplace.Gerald decides the cabin would be the perfect place to spend Christmas with his wife, Ellen, and their thirteen-year-old son, Marcus.A real holiday, he tells them. The kind they used to have before television and convenience took over. Just a family, a fire, and the quiet peace of the winter woods.What Gerald doesn't tell them is what he found when he first visited the cabin alone.The chains hanging above the fireplace.The birch switches stained dark with something he didn't want to examine too closely.And the mask. A horrible wooden mask with hollow eyes and a grin carved with far too many teeth.He doesn't tell them about the sound he heard coming from the second floor.The sound of hooves on hardwood. As Christmas Eve settles in, the temperature drops and the snow begins to fall. And the Hutchins family will learn that some traditions are older than Christianity. Some punishments are older than coal in a stocking. And some things that were meant to stay in the old country followed our ancestors across the ocean—hiding in the shadows of their ships, waiting patiently for the right moment to remind us that the old ways never truly died.They just learned how to wait.Long before Santa Claus became the jolly gift-giver we know today, the winter solstice was a time of fear as much as celebration in the Alpine regions of Europe. While Saint Nicholas rewarded good children, his dark companion dealt with the rest.Krampus. Half-goat. Half-demon. All nightmare. A creature with curved horns, a serpentine tongue, chains forged in hellfire, and birch switches for the wicked. A basket on its back to carry its prizes away—down to whatever hell it called home.Krampusnacht, celebrated on December fifth, saw young men dress as the creature and roam the streets, terrorizing towns. But the oldest stories—the ones whispered long before costumes—spoke of something far older than men in masks. A being that existed before Christianity tried to tame it. A being that still walks the winter forests when nights grow long and the barriers between worlds wear thin.A being that always comes back.Content Warning:This episode contains intense horror imagery, supernatural violence, and themes involving harm to a family, including a child. Listener discretion is strongly advised.  This one is not for the faint of heart—and absolutely not for little ones. I've spent a long time telling stories about strange things in the woods. Bigfoot encounters. Unexplained phenomena. Creatures that linger just beyond the firelight. Even the scariest of those stories often carry a strange warmth—a sense that whatever's out there might be mysterious, might be frightening, but isn't necessarily evil.This story is different. This story is about something very evil.Something that has been doing terrible things to humanity for a very long time.Something that doesn't care about your Christmas spirit, your good intentions, or your prayers.I wanted to tell this story because I think we've sanitized our holidays. We've forgotten that our ancestors celebrated the winter solstice not just with feasts and gifts—but with rituals meant to protect them from the darkness. They understood something we've chosen to forget.The longest night of the year is the longest for a reason.So as you listen, maybe keep a candle burning.Maybe check the locks on your doors.And if you hear something on the roof that sounds a little too heavy to be reindeer…Well. You know what to do..Until next time…Sweet dreams.And Merry Christmas.

In this deeply unsettling episode, we bring you the testimony of Dale Raymond Sturgill, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who encountered the impossible not once, but twice in his lifetime. His story begins in the humid jungles of the Central Highlands in 1968, where a routine reconnaissance mission turned into a firefight against creatures that should not exist.Dale and his squad came face to face with the legendary Nguoi Rung, known to American soldiers as the Rock Apes, and what followed was a brutal battle for survival that left one man dead and the survivors sworn to secrecy by military intelligence. Dale believed he had seen the worst the world had to offer. He thought the horrors of Vietnam would remain the darkest chapter of his life. He was wrong.Nearly twenty years later, in the remote mountains of Breathitt County, Kentucky, Dale went hunting for deer and found something else entirely. What began as a peaceful week in the wilderness quickly devolved into a waking nightmare when he discovered mutilated animal carcasses, enormous footprints circling his campsite, and heard howls in the night that belonged to no known animal. On his fourth night in the mountains, two creatures emerged from the darkness—beings that walked upright like men but bore the heads and features of monstrous canines. They were hunting him. They were coordinating their attack. And Dale was completely alone.This episode contains Dale's complete account of both encounters, told in his own words as he approaches the end of his life and finally breaks decades of silence. He describes in vivid detail the appearance of the Rock Apes, their almost human eyes, and their terrifying aggression. He recounts the moment he first saw a Dogman step into his firelight—the intelligence and malice burning in its yellow eyes—and the brutal fight that followed when the creatures attacked. His escape through the pitch-black forest, wounded and weaponless, is a harrowing tale of survival against predators that seemed almost supernatural in their abilities. Dale's story forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about what may be lurking in the wild places of our world. From the jungles of Southeast Asia to the hollows of Appalachia, his experiences suggest that humanity shares this planet with creatures we have never classified, never studied, and barely survived encountering. His testimony joins a growing body of accounts from hunters, hikers, and rural residents who have seen things in the woods that defy explanation. This is not a story for the faint of heart. Dale  carried these memories for more than forty years, and now, at the end of his journey, he has chosen to share them with the world. Listen with the lights on, and remember his warning the next time you venture into the deep wilderness. Out there, in the dark places, we are not the apex predators we believe ourselves to be. We are prey.

He wasn't inexperienced.He wasn't impressionable.And he wasn't looking for monsters.A t thirty-two years old, this machinist from Lufkin had spent nearly his entire life in the woods. Twenty-five years of hunting experience. Countless nights alone in East Texas backcountry. He'd tracked deer through tangled briar and swamp, crossed paths with black bears, mountain lions, and javelinas, and faced every known predator the region could throw at him.None of that prepared him for the Big Thicket.In November of 1994, a solo five-day deer hunt into one of the most remote and biologically diverse wilderness regions in North America became something else entirely. What began as a routine trip for solitude and game turned into three nights of escalating fear—an encounter that permanently altered his understanding of what the wild is capable of hiding. It began with a footprint.Sixteen inches long. Five clearly defined toes. Pressed deep into creek mud by something far heavier than any known animal in the region.Then came the sounds.Deep, resonant vocalizations that didn't just echo through the trees—they vibrated through his chest. Low, rolling howls. Multiple voices calling back and forth in the darkness. Communicating. Coordinating. That first night, something circled his camp. By morning, tracks were everywhere. Whatever it was had walked within twenty feet of his tent while he sat by the fire, rifle across his lap, convinced he was prepared for anything. He wasn't. When he killed an eight-point buck and hung it two hundred yards from camp, he thought he'd salvaged the trip. He was wrong. Whatever watched him from the tree line wanted that deer. The rope—rated for four hundred pounds—was snapped clean, as if it were thread.The final night brought rocks. Not random. Not accidental. Thrown with intent. Accurate. A clear warning delivered in stone.Then came the whispering. Multiple voices. Just below comprehension. Talking about him. Deciding something. And finally… he saw it. Eight feet tall. Possibly taller. Covered head to toe in reddish-brown hair. Shoulders nearly four feet wide. Arms hanging past its knees. Built like something out of a nightmare—thick through the chest, narrow at the waist, legs like tree trunks.But it was the eyes that stayed with him.Intelligent. Calculating. Eyes that were weighing a decision.It let him leave. But not before destroying his tent.Not before making the message unmistakably clear. This is our land.You don't belong here.Don't come back. He understood. He's never returned to the Big Thicket.