Backwoods Horror Stories

Every lake in this episode was somebody's pasture once. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian King-Sharp drives into Oklahoma, where the three lakes said to hide the Oklahoma Octopus were all built by the government inside living memory.Lake Tenkiller, Lake Thunderbird, and Oologah Lake are reservoirs, not natural water, and under every one of them are drowned roads, standing timber, fence lines, and the foundations of houses that were dry ground three generations ago. That's the ground this legend grew on, and it's why this is a don't-swim-after-dark episode.The stories start on the Fourth of July, 1978, with a seventeen-year-old girl floating on her back off a houseboat on Tenkiller when something wraps her leg from ankle to knee and pulls her under. From there the episode follows a bass fisherman in the drowned timber at Thunderbird who watched an arm feel its way around a dead oak, a scuba diver who cut himself loose from something in the old river channel at thirty-five feet and came up with sucker marks pressed into his wetsuit, and a farm kid on Oologah who saw two arms come over the tops of his family's flooded fence posts and pull the wire down.Between the encounters, Brian traces the real paper trail behind the legend, which is thinner and stranger than the television version. It starts with a June 2, 1982 item in the Daily Oklahoman about two boys and a dead saltwater octopus found in the Verdigris River near Lock and Dam 18 on the barge canal, runs through a 1987 article by Kiowa writer Russell Bates about a horse-sized, reddish-brown creature said to drag people into sandstone caverns, and picks up again in 2007 with two cryptid books that named the three lakes without citing a source, a reporter at the Oklahoma Gazette who found that no park manager or diver on those lakes had ever heard of the thing, and Loren Coleman's guess that it all began with a planted carcass.Then in January 2009 Animal Planet's Lost Tapes turned it into a monster with a name. Along the way the episode looks at why man-made lakes breed this kind of story, from the cold water sitting in the old channel to the drownings that happen every summer in water nobody can see into.The second half leaves the water for the timber. It begins with the Noxie Monster of September 1975, when farmer Kenneth Tosh, Sheriff Robert Donald, researcher Hayden Hewes, and two dozen witnesses in Nowata County put a seven-foot hairy creature on the wire services and a Tulsa Tribune artist's drawing in front of the whole country.Then come the encounters that never made a newspaper: a noodler chest-deep in the Verdigris below Oologah dam watching something on the gravel bar bite the head off a fish, a deer hunter above a spring in the Kiamichi Mountains a few miles from where the Honobia Bigfoot Festival now stands, a nurse stopped on Highway 82 in the Cookson Hills above Tenkiller at 12:14 in the morning with a gray figure shading its eyes from her headlights, and a woman on a rock at Clear Bay on Lake Thunderbird who watched something wade out of the blackjack oak at dusk and come back with a fish held against its chest.The episode also covers the Siege at Honobia in 2000, the founding of the Honobia Bigfoot Festival in 2005, and how a valley in the Choctaw Nation turned its stories into college scholarships.If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Until the next stop, stay out of the water after dark, and keep your eyes on the tree line.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 week, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories pulls off the road for a special listener mailbag episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is taking a brief pause while Brian opens the inbox and shares six disturbing encounters sent in from six different states—each from someone who spent years wondering whether anyone would believe what they saw.In the Washington Cascades, Nathan and his cousin Pete watch something enormous cross a clearcut on two legs in October 2015. Two nights later, it appears again at the edge of their firelight. But what they discover while driving out of the mountains is enough to make one of them swear off the woods for good.In Michigan, Kelsey finishes a late bar shift in January 2022 and begins an eighteen-mile drive through state forest. Something running upright keeps pace with her truck along the tree line at nearly fifty miles an hour. She thinks she finally loses it—until she reaches home and sees something waiting near her mailbox.In northern Maine, veteran trapper Ray is checking a brook he has worked for thirty years when he hears his wife calling his name from downstream. The problem is that she is twenty miles away. Then Ray sees what is standing in the alders—and realizes its mouth never moves when it speaks.In North Carolina's Pisgah National Forest, Trisha encounters what at first appears to be a deer. Then it looks directly at her with both eyes, begins moving in ways no deer should, and eventually rises onto its hind legs miles deeper into the trail.In south Georgia, Marcus is sitting in a ladder stand when he spots a pale, hairless figure hanging by its arms from a longleaf pine forty yards away. Moments later, it begins moving through the canopy without ever touching the ground.And along Idaho's Lochsa River, Jeff drives Highway 12 late at night and passes the same walking figure on the shoulder six separate times. Each time it appears closer to the road. His dash cam should have captured everything—but when he reviews the footage, the highway is empty.If you've had an encounter of your own, send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into Loveland, Ohio, a quiet river town northeast of Cincinnati with one of the strangest creature legends in America.In March 1972, Loveland police officer Ray Shockey was patrolling an icy stretch of Riverside Drive near the old Totes factory when he spotted something crouched in the road. According to his account, the creature stood upright, looked directly at him, and moved over the guardrail toward the Little Miami River. Two weeks later, fellow officer Mark Matthews reported his own encounter on the same road and fired his revolver at what he saw. Decades later, Matthews would publicly offer a very different explanation for that night. But the Loveland Frog story may go back even further. The episode revisits a 1955 account recorded by investigator Leonard Stringfield, in which witness Robert Hunnicutt described three strange gray figures near a bridge, including one allegedly holding a wand-like object that gave off sparks. Then, in 2016, a photograph taken during the Pokémon Go craze pushed the Loveland Frog back into the national spotlight and once again raised the question of what people have really been seeing along the river.Brian also digs into lesser-known local reports involving a canoe livery, a late-night drive home, and a catfishing spot near Nisbet Park before heading east into the hills of Appalachian Ohio.From there, the road leads into some of the state's best-known Bigfoot country, including the 1978 Minerva Monster case, as well as reported Grassman encounters from East Fork, Vinton County, Wayne National Forest, Salt Fork State Park, Noble County, Shawnee State Forest, and Zaleski State Forest.From frogmen along the Little Miami to massive hairy figures in the Appalachian foothills, Ohio proves to be one of the strangest stops yet on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip.If you have an encounter or a stop Brian should add to the map, email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip leaves the highway behind and opens the mailbag for five listener encounters that have lingered for years—sometimes decades—after they happened.In Aroostook County, Maine, a seventeen-year-old working the 1959 potato harvest walks alone to the bottom of a frost-covered field and realizes something is already waiting in her row, crouched among the potatoes and feeding.In the darkness of West Virginia's New River Gorge, a railroad track inspector responds to a tripped slide fence and finds himself standing beside the rails as a ninety-four-car coal train roars past. On the other side of the tracks, something is standing there watching him.Before dawn in New Mexico's Gila country, a wrangler rides into a frozen meadow to gather the camp horses.Then something rises out of the frost directly in front of her. Deep inside the Boundary Waters, two college students watch a strange figure swim across a channel at dusk, crawl onto the far shore, and shake the water from its body like an animal. Hours later, with darkness surrounding their campsite, rocks begin splashing into the water nearby.And in the tangled wilderness of the Big Thicket of East Texas, a man mowing a remote pipeline right-of-way stops his tractor when two figures step into the clearing ahead of him.One of them is carrying the other on its back.Five witnesses. Five places. Five encounters with things that should not have been there. If you have an encounter of your own, send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads into North Dakota and follows the Missouri River in search of one of the strangest creatures ever recorded in the folklore of the northern plains: the Miniwashitu.More than a century ago, ethnologist Melvin Randolph Gilmore wrote of a mysterious being said to live beneath the Missouri. Covered in red hair like a buffalo, with a single eye, one horn, and a jagged backbone resembling the teeth of an enormous saw, the Miniwashitu was believed to swim upstream each spring as the river broke apart.Witnesses were said to hear its terrible roar, see a strange redness trailing through the water, and know better than to look directly at it in daylight.According to the story Gilmore preserved, the last man who did was struck blind, lost his reason, and died soon afterward.From that chilling piece of recorded folklore, Brian travels the Missouri and the reservoirs connected to it through five unsettling accounts involving something moving upstream beneath breaking ice. A nine-year-old girl watches a saw-toothed back rise from the river north of Washburn. A worker below Garrison Dam sees an enormous red-haired form tear through an ice jam. Teenagers on Standing Rock watch a red glow moving beneath frozen Lake Oahe. Kayakers encounter something impossibly large fighting the Missouri's current.And an ice fisherman feels the frozen lake rise beneath his feet before hearing a roar coming through the ice.Then the episode leaves the water behind.North Dakota may be known for open prairie, but its river bottoms, wooded valleys, badlands, and scattered forests have produced another kind of report.Brian heads into the Turtle Mountains, Pembina Gorge, Missouri River bottoms, Killdeer Mountains, and Sheyenne Valley for five accounts of enormous upright, hair-covered figures seen by hunters, riders, ranch hands, and families.Along the way, Brian also reflects on the unexplained things he's encountered on his own property in the Appalachian woods—footprints, strange nighttime vocalizations, bent saplings, tree structures, and rock stacks—and why stories from people who encounter something impossible in familiar country hit differently once you've experienced something you can't easily explain yourself.From something roaring beneath the Missouri River ice to massive figures watching from the timber, North Dakota may be one of the most unexpected—and unsettling—stops on the entire road trip.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip brings the journey home to North Carolina.Brian and Dani have spent the last six years living on forty wooded acres in the foothills, and this episode begins on their own porch before traveling across the state and back to the winter of 1953–1954, when the small town of Bladenborowas gripped by fear.Something was killing dogs.Using newspaper coverage from Wilmington, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Lumberton, Brian follows the story night by night: dogs found dead with almost no blood left in their bodies, terrified hounds refusing to follow the trail, eyewitness reports of a strange catlike creature, and the massive armed hunt that sent hundreds of people into the surrounding bay swamps searching for what the press had already dubbed the Beast of Bladenboro.The episode also explores the theories that followed—from wolves and catamounts to bobcats and a mysterious dog called Big Boy—along with three chilling encounter accounts from the height of the panic.Then the story shifts from the Beast of Bladenboro to something even larger moving through the North Carolina woods.Brian shares experiences from his own property before diving into Bigfoot encounters from Bladen Lakes, Badin Lake and the Uwharries, the South Mountains, Big Laurel, the Croatan National Forest, Wilkes County, Roan Mountain, and McDowell County.From hounds hiding beneath a truck to towering figures seen beside roads, creeks, pastures, and mountain balds, this episode explores two of North Carolina's most enduring mysteries: the creature that terrorized Bladenboro and the upright figures still reported across the state today.Bladenboro still celebrates its strange history with Beast Fest every fall, but more than seventy years later, nobody can say for certain what was really stalking those streets.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 Backwoods Bigfoot Stories takes a break from the Cryptid Road Trip and heads home to the Appalachian Mountains for a night of old-fashioned mountain storytelling.Brian begins with the warnings and superstitions passed down through generations: three knocks in the night, covered mirrors, strange sounds outside the house, and the belief that the dogs often know something is there long before we do.Along the way, he separates genuine Appalachian traditions from the modern versions that have taken on a life of their own online. From there, the episode ventures into the darker corners of mountain folklore—haints, witches, the Wampus Cat, mysterious black panthers that people continue to report despite official skepticism, and the Not-Deer, a remarkably young legend that offers a rare look at folklore being created in real time.Then the trail leads toward something much larger. Brian digs into nineteenth-century accounts of Appalachian “wild men,” the famous Daniel Boone Yahoo story and its origins, and an 1877 newspaper report describing a strange wild man roaming Globe Valley near Blowing Rock, North Carolina. From the old mountain meaning of “booger” to Virginia's Woodbooger and North Carolina's legendary Knobby, the stories begin to sound increasingly familiar.The second half of the episode belongs to the encounters. From the remote backcountry of the Great Smoky Mountains to frightening road crossings across five states, hunters who watched enormous figures moving through the timber, terrified dogs, strange activity in the mountains of north Georgia, and unsettling reports from the hollows of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, the same description keeps appearing again and again.Different generations gave it different names: Wild Man. Yahoo. Booger. Woodbooger. Knobby. Today, most of us would simply call it Bigfoot. Have Appalachian families been describing the same creature all along?And one final, quiet encounter from a back porch in Johnson County, Tennessee, may leave you wondering just how old these stories really are.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into New York and follows the western shore of Lake Champlain, home to one of America's oldest and most enduring lake-monster legends.Across the water, Vermont may have the famous photograph, but Port Henry, New York has spent generations embracing Champ. A hand-painted sightings board records reports dating back more than two centuries, a highway sign welcomes visitors to the "Home of Champ," and every August the town celebrates a creature no one has ever managed to catch. The journey begins on the lake with strange encounters reported from a Port Henry dock, Crown Point, Westport, the Valcour channel, and the ferry landing at Essex. From there, Brian digs into the history behind the legend—from Indigenous traditions and Samuel de Champlain's often-misquoted 1609 account to Captain Crum's enormous creature, the famous 1873 sightings, P. T. Barnum's reward, Sheriff Nathan Mooney's report, and the controversial 1977 Sandra Mansi photograph.The episode also follows researcher Joseph Zarzynski's decades of investigation, the unusual laws passed by New York and Vermont to protect Champ, mass sightings, sonar contacts, recordings, and videos that have kept the mystery alive into the modern era.Then the road turns south to Whitehall, New York, where a series of dramatic August 1976 sightings involving local residents and police became one of the most famous Bigfoot cases in the state.From there, the trip pushes into the Adirondacks, the hills around Fort Ann, Allegany State Park, the Catskills, and the Tug Hill Plateau for frightening Sasquatch encounters involving hunters, hikers, fishermen, loggers, and families who found themselves face-to-face with something they never expected to see in the New York wilderness.Lake monsters, Bigfoot, and more than two centuries of unexplained encounters—this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip belongs to New York.Have a sighting of your own? Send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 week the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway and Brian opens the mailbag. Five listeners wrote in about the day they saw something on two legs in a place they thought they knew. A coon hunter in the flatwoods east of the Okefenokee follows his dogs to a big cypress at the head of a slough in October of nineteen seventy-nine and finds them looking at the water instead of the tree.A section hiker on Vermont's Long Trail wakes in a moonlit shelter to the sound of her bear hang being pulled, and watches something work the rope like a toy before it walks past the front of the lean-to and into the brook.A timber cutter in the sandstone hollows of Winston County, Alabama, is left alone on a rained-out landing and watches something with a bad left knee come up the skid trail out of the fog to put its hand on the fresh-cut logs.A mother camping with her family above Pagosa Springs walks back from the aspens at two in the morning and finds something old and silver-haired leaning on the tailgate of her truck with a piece of firewood in its hand.And a young gas well tender in the Allegheny National Forest comes over a rise at daybreak to find something on its knees at the base of a brine tank, licking salt, with ice frozen into its hair. Every one of them saw it clearly enough to describe it.Every one of them went home and back to work the next morning.If you've seen something, Brian wants to hear about it at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com,Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip follows the High Road out of Chimayó and deep into the old Spanish villages of northern New Mexico, where generations have warned their children about what can happen when you linger at a crossroads after dark.Here, the thing on the road is known as La Mala Hora—the Bad Hour. It doesn't chase you. It doesn't attack. It simply appears. Sometimes it looks like a woman dressed in black. Sometimes it is nothing more than a shapeless mass of darkness standing where two roads meet.Witnesses say it can grow larger as you watch it, and according to the old stories, seeing it is not the danger. The danger is what comes afterward. By morning, someone close to you may be dead. This episode traces the legend from one of its earliest written accounts, folklorist Aurelio Espinosa's story of a strange ball of wool that grew at a crossroads, through tales of owl-witches and mysterious fireballs in the Río Puerco Valley, and eventually into the Four Corners, where Highway 550 cuts across Diné country and outsiders have spent decades trying to put familiar names on things they may not fully understand.Along the way, we revisit a series of unsettling encounters: a woman driving to the airport in 1978, a produce hauler traveling the grade south of Cuba, a girl on a bridge in Mora County, and a man on Highway 54 who struck a cow just two miles after driving straight through something that seemed to be standing in the road—but wasn't there.Then comes the story of an oil-field pumper who found herself being paced at 75 miles per hour by something running on four legs beside her vehicle. Something that eventually stood upright and looked directly through her window.From there, the road climbs higher into the mountains for five Bigfoot encounters from a state that rarely gets the attention it deserves. An elk hunter in the Jemez Mountains who lowered his rifle rather than pull the trigger. A night-shift dispatcher on the road to Sandia Crest. A 17-year-old fishing the Middle Fork of the Gila. A woman alone at a family cabin outside Cloudcroft who discovered that her grandfather had seen the same creature from the same porch years earlier. And finally, a sheep camp above Mora in 1962, on the only night one herder could remember seeing his dogs abandon the darkness and move behind the people for protection.Crossroads, mountain roads, old villages, and things that appear where nothing should be standing.New Mexico has stories buried in its backcountry that go far beyond the legends most people know.If you have a sighting, a story, or a stop you think belongs on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip map, email Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything else at our website paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip crosses the Delaware River into the most densely populated state in America, then disappears into nearly a million acres of Pine Barrens.This stop digs into the full story of the Jersey Devil, beginning with the real Leeds family of colonial Burlington County. We trace the strange history of Daniel Leeds, a printer condemned by members of his own religious community, and his son Titan Leeds, who became the target of one of Benjamin Franklin's most famous public feuds.From there, the story evolves into the legend of Mother Leeds and the birth of her infamous thirteenth child in 1735.Then comes January 1909, when Jersey Devil hysteria exploded across the region. Mysterious hoofprints appeared on rooftops and through snow from Bristol to Camden, witnesses reported a winged creature moving through the night, police allegedly opened fire in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, schools and businesses temporarily closed, and the Philadelphia Zoo offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of the creature.But the legend didn't end there. The episode follows later encounters deep inside the Pine Barrens, including a chicken farmer in 1960, a frightened couple staying at a remote deer cabin, and two campers along the Mullica River who claimed something followed them through the darkness.And the Jersey Devil may not be the only unexplained creature roaming these woods.The second half of the episode turns to New Jersey's lesser-known Bigfoot history, including listener accounts of towering, hair-covered figures seen from a cranberry bog dike, beneath a hunter's tree stand, and during a solitary night along the Batona Trail.It's a journey through colonial history, newspaper panic, generations of folklore, and modern eyewitness encounters from one of the strangest stretches of wilderness on the East Coast.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

Part Seven brings Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two to a close while quietly opening the door to everything that comes next.The story returns to the clearing where so much of Koda and Eli's journey began, the same place where a frightened human boy once left gifts for a curious young sasquatch.One year later, the two sit together and look back on everything they have built: the alliance, the sacrifices, the dangers, and a friendship that should never have been possible in the first place. As Eli faces a choice between the life he has known and the one he is beginning to understand, the final chapter settles into a quieter, more reflective moment. It is an ending built around trust, connection, and the possibility that fear does not have to decide what happens when two very different worlds finally meet.But Volume Two does not end there.Once the main story closes, Part Seven shifts into an extended preview of Volume Three and reveals that someone believed to be dead is still alive. Far to the west, beneath the desert at a secret installation known as Site Seven, Adanowa has spent the last year imprisoned, cataloged, cut open, tested, and studied as if he were nothing more than a specimen.Then, in the darkness beneath the facility, he finds something he never expected: an ally. Skull is a Dogman born in captivity, hardened by the only world he has ever known. Somehow, two creatures who should have every reason to distrust one another become the unlikeliest of friends.Together, they find a way out.Their escape changes everything. Adanowa is now heading east, back toward the clans that once believed him lost, with Skull walking beside him. And that means he is returning home alongside the very kind of creature his people are already at war with.The friendship forged beneath Site Seven is about to collide with old loyalties, old hatred, and a conflict that is far from over.This is the end of Volume Two.It is also the beginning of the next chapter.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip heads to the northern edge of New England for a stop in Coös County, New Hampshire, where the forests stretch toward the Canadian border and generations of loggers, hunters, and woodsmen have carried strange stories out of the timber.This has been logging country for more than 150 years, from the era of massive log drives down the Connecticut River to the paper mills of Berlin and Groveton. Every spring, men returned from isolated camps with stories about things they claimed to have seen deep in the North Country. One of the strangest was the Wood Devil.Usually described as tall, unnaturally thin, and gray, the Wood Devil was said to stand edgewise against tree trunks, blending so completely into the forest that it could be mistaken for part of the tree itself. According to the old stories, if someone approached, the creature would quietly shift around to the opposite side of the trunk, staying just out of sight. When caught in the open, it was said to simply stand motionless and disappear into the landscape.In this episode, Brian digs into the written history behind the Wood Devil legend and discovers that the documented record is far thinner than many modern retellings would have you believe. From there, the episode follows eight unsettling accounts from the forests and back roads of northern New Hampshire. There is a deer hunter near Nash Stream who watched what appeared to be a gray, broken tree trunk suddenly turn its head. A teenager on a burned-over hillside above Colebrook realizes there is one tamarack standing where no tree should be. A pulpwood scaler working along the Dead Diamond tries to circle a suspicious tree and learns why old logging camp bosses supposedly warned men never to do exactly that.There is also a trucker traveling Route 3 around 4:00 a.m., a woodcutter salvaging spruce budworm-killed timber near Stewartstown, a woman and her dog on a snowmobile trail outside Errol, a hiker deep on the Cohos Trail, and two men camped above Perry Stream who hear heavy footsteps circling their tent before finally seeing an eye looking back at them through the darkness.Deep in the forests of New Hampshire's North Country, the Wood Devil may have left behind very little written history. But the stories from the people who claim to have encountered something tall, gray, and almost perfectly camouflaged among the trees are much harder to dismiss.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

Part Six of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two settles into the hardest work in the whole story, and there isn't a single punch thrown in it.The emergency council runs deep past midnight, and for the first time sasquatch, Dog men, and humans are all in the same clearing trying to build something instead of tearing it down.The immediate crisis has passed. Dask's offer of cooperation has been met, cautiously, and now comes the part nobody's good at.The details. Where the boundaries fall, what counts as a violation, who answers for it when someone crosses a line. None of these peoples has ever trusted the others, and every one of them has a reason not to start now.Into that standoff steps an unlikely figure. Eli, the boy with no rank and no claws and no official standing, turns out to be the one voice all three sides can hear, precisely because he threatens none of them. What he offers isn't strength. It's a different way of looking at a problem the older ones have been too angry, or too proud, to solve.This is the quiet center of the book, where the story stops asking who can win a fight and starts asking whether old enemies can actually choose something better.The answer doesn't come easy, and it doesn't come clean, and the forest beyond the firelight hasn't stopped being dangerous just because a few of them decided to talk.What gets built here is fragile. Whether it holds is a question for the road still ahead.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip crosses Spooner Summit and drops down to the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe, the second-deepest lake in the United States, to investigate one of the West's most enduring lake monster legends: Tahoe Tessie.For generations, people have reported seeing long, dark shapes moving through Tahoe's famously cold, deep water.We look at the geography of the lake, its extreme depth, and the conditions that have helped fuel stories of something large living below the surface.Along the way, we examine recorded Washoe traditions connected to Cave Rock, the 1897 newspaper account attributed to I. C. Coggin, and the surge of reports during the 1980s involving Reno police officers, hikers, an optician, and a local television station owner. We also dig into the University of California, Davis seminar that considered whether an unusually large sturgeon could explain some of the sightings, and separate fact from one of Tahoe Tessie's most repeated legends: the supposed Jacques Cousteau expedition that never actually happened.Then the stories move from the archives to the water itself.Listeners describe seeing a long shape passing beneath the clear water near Sand Harbor, feeling something massive roll beneath them while diving along the wall at Cave Rock, watching three distinct humps move across the north end of the lake against the chop, and having something large surface alongside a boat during a nighttime mackinaw fishing trip off Crystal Bay.From Lake Tahoe, the road climbs into the Carson Range and continues east toward the Ruby Mountains for five Nevada Bigfoot encounters. The reports take us to Marlette Lake, the Mount Rose Highway during a storm, the aspen groves near Spooner Summit, a roadside pullout on Kingsbury Grade, and a remote talus slope above Lamoille Canyon.If you've had a cryptid encounter, strange sighting, or unexplained experience you'd like to share for a future episode, send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 week we pull off the road for one episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip picks back up next time, but a stack of emails has been building from listeners who saw something they still can't explain, and five of them deserved a full hour.A rancher in the Owyhee desert of Idaho comes over a rise in the middle of an August afternoon and finds something standing in his stock tank, drinking with both hands.A nurse in the Ouachita National Forest of Arkansas, driving home from a night shift, watches something cross the road in two steps and climb a twelve-foot clay bank the way a person would, and she sees the bottoms of its feet. A snowmobiler in Michigan's Upper Peninsula stops in a cedar swamp at ten below and realizes the stump he's looking at has snow on its shoulders and is breathing. A daughter and her father, picking chanterelles in the Oregon Coast Range, come to the edge of a clearcut and find something sitting on a slash pile, looking out at the valley.And a hog hunter on a dead-end channel off the Ocmulgee River in Georgia swings his spotlight onto a sow at the water's edge and sees the hand that's holding her there.Five states, five decades, five people who never met and never asked to be believed.These are visual sightings only, told the way they were sent in, first names only, with what each person did afterward and what's still sitting in a drawer or on a laptop or on a tupelo trunk in a river bottom.If you've had an encounter of your own, send it straight to Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Use your first name or none at all.And if this episode was worth your hour, pass it along to your family, a friend, or the guy at work who's always bringing this stuff up at lunch. That's how the show grows.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 week the road trip leaves the timber and runs into the Nebraska Sandhills, where there's nothing to hide behind for 100 miles and the only thing you can't see into is the water.A few miles southeast of Hay Springs sits a 50-acre lake the state renamed Walgren Lake decades ago and that nobody local has ever stopped calling Alkali Lake. In the early 1920s it produced one of the strangest monster stories in American newspapers, a 40-foot alligator-shaped animal with a single horn and a smell that could turn a man's stomach, reported in the Omaha World-Herald in 1923 under the initials J.A. Johnson and carried from there to Chicago, New York, and by some accounts London. Brian walks through the Hay Springs News items that started it, the wire-service telling that made it famous, and the Chadron newspaperman John G. Maher (1859–1939), a man Nebraska historians remember as the state's most accomplished hoaxer, whose fingerprints a lot of people see on the whole affair.Then the episode goes to the people who lived on the lake and never went near a reporter, from a homesteader's daughter who found a calf torn up on the shore in 1922, to a county road worker on the dam in 1954, to a couple bank fishing for bullheads in 1979, a grain hauler on a wet road at midnight in 1986, two brothers on the ice in 2001, and a woman whose kayak came to a stop over 8 feet of water in 2014. From there the trip follows the rivers, because Nebraska's woods run in lines, and the second half of the episode is given over to people who saw something upright in the Pine Ridge in 1994, along the Niobrara in 2006, in the Missouri bottoms near Ponca in 1988, on the Dismal River below the hand-planted forest at Halsey in 1971, and on the frozen Platte south of Omaha in 2003.A deer hunter on a rock, a woman driving home from her sister's, a farm wife waiting with supper, a 12-year-old with a fishing pole, and a rural mail carrier who still parks where he parked that day. If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything we do at paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

Part Five of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two begins with the mistake the clans always knew was coming. Summer settles over the forest and brings people with it. More hikers, more campers, more cameras scanning the ridgelines for a postcard moment to carry home.The sasquatch do what they've always done when the world crowds in, pulling back into the heavy timber, moving only in the gray hours, eating less and resting less and watching more.But discipline can only stretch so far, and out in a dense stretch of old growth four miles from the nearest trail, a wildlife photographer named David Reeves is about to point his lens at something no magazine will ever publish.David isn't a weekend tourist. He's patient, serious, and good enough at reading the backcountry to go exactly where he shouldn't. That's the problem. One glimpse, one held breath, and suddenly the secret three years of caution were meant to protect is sitting exposed in the viewfinder of a man who knows what he's looking at.What follows tests everything Koda and the clans have built. A single photograph in the wrong hands could bring the whole outside world down on them, and the choices the sasquatch make in the hours after that encounter carry a weight none of the earlier fights ever did.This is the danger the clans have always feared most, and it doesn't come with claws or howls. It comes with a camera.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

Montana is the only stop on this road trip where the animal is sitting in a display case. In 1886, in the Madison River Valley, a settler named Israel Ammon Hutchins killed something that had been coming into ranch yards after geese and dogs across fifteen miles of valley.He gave the carcass to a grocer named Joseph Sherwood over at Henry Lake, Idaho, who mounted it, called it the Ringdocus for reasons nobody has ever explained, and put it in his store. It sat there into the 1980s and then it vanished. For two decades the only proof it had ever existed was a black-and-white photograph in a naturalist's 1977 autobiography. In 2007 a descendant named Jack Kirby tracked it to a storage room at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello and brought it home to Ennis, and before it went on display he drove it to the cemetery and parked it next to the old man's grave. It's still there, four feet long, dark, high in the shoulder and low in the hip, with the ghost of stripes on its sides. Nobody has ever run its DNA.This episode covers where the name Shunka Warak'in actually comes from and why it doesn't belong to Montana at all, what Lance Foster told Loren Coleman in 1995, and what an earlier anthropologist recorded about the same word. It covers what a dog was worth on the northern plains and on a homestead, and why an animal that carries off dogs earns its own name. It covers the forty-year campaign that emptied Montana of wolves, including the 1905 state law that required the veterinarian to infect wolves and coyotes with mange and turn them loose, and what it does to a landscape when the main predator is removed and then put back.And it covers the two modern cases everybody brings up, the Creature of McCone County that killed roughly 120 head of livestock in 2005 and 2006 before Wildlife Services shot it from an aircraft, and the strange short-legged animal a rancher killed near Denton in 2018 that had the whole country convinced for about a month.Then come the letters. Dale, losing three dogs in five weeks out of a lit yard and finding a collar in a hayfield the following spring. Jenny, walking through a sheep band counting the same wound on the same side of every animal.Cal, watching one through a rifle scope for forty seconds and not being able to make himself shoot until it turned to leave. Owen, nineteen years old, finding a covered calf against a fence and then meeting the thing on a two-track at eighty yards. Marla, standing between her children and the kitchen door while something screamed in the cottonwoods a week after her dog died inside a closed gate. And Wendell, who backed a gravel truck up in the dark to put his headlights on a track line.The second half of the episode changes animals entirely and moves into Montana's Sasquatch country, the Bitterroots and the Bob Marshall and the Yaak, with accounts from an elk hunter who hiked eleven miles out in the dark, a firewood cutter who came back three weeks later and found three lodgepoles twisted off above head height, a woman who spent eleven nights sleeping in a windowless hallway, and a thirty-year outfitter who counted eleven barefoot impressions in fresh snow and never told a single client. It also covers what happened on U.S. Highway 93 south of Kalispell on August 26, 2012, and the two teenage girls who have been carrying it ever since.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

We're pulling off the road again. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is still running state by state, but the mailbag keeps filling up with letters that don't have a state on them at all, so this week we're taking the detour overseas. Five encounters, five countries, all of them sent in by listeners, all of them set in places you can pull up on a map before you go to bed tonight.In England, a night shift warehouse worker named Neil walks his lurcher across Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, 26 square miles of pine plantation and heathland sitting in the middle of the country, laid over the buried remains of two First World War training camps. He has a two-note whistle he uses for the dog. In October something on the Chase starts using it back, right down to the crack in the middle of it. What follows includes a valley walk he now calls the stupidest decision of his life, a fallow deer wedged in the fork of a Scots pine at head height, and a single toed impression in the mud that he never cast and never photographed.In central China, a 26-year-old field assistant named Lin is running primate transects in the Shennongjia Forestry District in Hubei Province, the same mountains the Chinese Academy of Sciences flooded with more than 100 people in 1977 after a carload of officials reported a large reddish creature in their headlights in 1976.Lin gets a rock thrown at her, a smell she compares to vinegar and wet fur, and a look at something standing in arrow bamboo 20 meters off the trail. Then something spends a good part of the night pushing on the shutters of her field station, and a camera trap 400 meters down the mountain fires 11 times between one and two in the morning with every single frame coming back black.In Queensland, Australia, a fencing contractor named Wade is camped at Booloumba Creek in the Conondale Range when a rock lands in his fire and a second one hits the roof of his truck. What comes off the slope after that scares every dog along the creek quiet. Fourteen months later, running a boundary fence near Jimna, his working dogs quit on him, he finds prints in creek clay with a stride of over a meter and a half, and something puts its weight on the side of his truck at two in the morning while he's lying in the tray.He still has what he pulled off the top wire of that fence, in a coffee tin, in his shed.In southern Siberia, a miner named Pavel rides a snowmobile up the Mrassu River in February to check his late uncle's hunting hut in Mountain Shoria, near Tashtagol. He crosses a line of tracks that covers 400 meters of open river ice in a perfectly even stride, finds a young elk cached uphill with its neck broken and almost nothing eaten, and then spends a night listening to something scatter his woodpile, stand over his stovepipe, and knock three times on his door.He leaves bread on a stump now, every night he stays there, and he'll tell you he doesn't believe it does anything. And in eastern Bhutan, a trekking guide named Sonam takes a group through Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary between the villages of Merak and Sakteng, a protected area established in 2003 that lists the migoi in its founding purpose alongside the snow leopard and the red panda. He gets whistling above camp after two in the morning, a client who wakes to something standing outside her tent, a herder's mastiff that has to be dragged out from under a hut, and an argument in the mud with an older Brokpa man about which direction a set of footprints was actually facing.A week later a healthy female yak turns up 30 meters above where she'd been grazing, on a shelf you have to scramble to reach, neck broken, untouched.Email BrianMail Letters to PWP P.O. Box 2316 Lenoir, NC 28645Join Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

Part Four of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two takes the alliance out of the meeting ground and into the dark, where good intentions stop counting for much and skill is the only thing that keeps you alive. It opens with Eli's first real night patrol, and the forest is not kind to him.Where Koda moves through the black between the trees like water around stone, Eli crashes through it like a wounded elk, learning the hard way that eyes are almost useless out there and that everything he thought he knew about the woods was daylight knowledge.Koda becomes his teacher, and the lessons are patient but unforgiving, because both of them understand that a single mistake in the wrong moment could expose everything they've built. This is where the fragile alliance stops being an idea and starts becoming real work.The humans have to earn their place, prove they can be an asset instead of a liability, and every close call out in the dark is a test of whether two species can truly watch each other's backs.But the forest holds more than lessons, and the deeper Koda and Eli push into the night, the clearer it becomes that neither the Dogmen nor the humans at the tree line have gone anywhere. The quiet is only ever borrowed, and the price of protecting something wild keeps climbing.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 July of 1972, in the river town of Louisiana, Missouri, two little boys were playing in their backyard at the foot of Marzolf Hill when their older sister heard them start screaming. Fifteen-year-old Doris Harrison went to the bathroom window and saw something standing by a tree, six or seven feet tall, covered in black hair, with no face she could make out and something dead tucked under its arm. The town laughed at those kids for about a day and a half.Then a Pentecostal congregation of roughly fifty people heard something come down off that hill, and nobody in Pike County thought it was funny for the rest of the month.This is stop number twenty-five on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the halfway point, and it's the story of Momo, the Missouri Monster.We walk through the whole flap as it actually happened, from the picnic encounter on Highway 79 in 1971 to the Harrison sighting on July 11, 1972, to Edgar Harrison hanging bait on a tree behind his own house and sitting out in the dark waiting for whatever took his children's afternoon away from them. We cover the sick dog, the smell that runs through every account like a thread, the church meeting on the night of July 14, and Police Chief Shelby Ward putting two dozen armed men across Marzolf Hill three times and finding nothing at all.We get into the plaster casts, the three-toed track that a zoo director in Oklahoma City looked at and called a hoax, and the out-of-state investigators who camped in a family's backyard and left with a theory about flying objects that did more damage to this case than any skeptic ever managed. And we talk about what happens to a town when the newspapers show up, name your monster for you, and turn one bad July into a festival.The second half of the episode leaves Momo behind and gets into Missouri Sasquatch country, because strip the nickname and the novelty record off the Harrison case and what's left is an ordinary Sasquatch report. Missouri has produced roughly 147 catalogued encounters and has never stopped generating them.We cover a farmer near Bowling Green who came around a creek bend on a four-wheeler and found something squatting in the water thirty feet in front of him, the ongoing reports out of Cuivre River State Park and Bowling Green Lake, the night four young men sat in a Jeep near Smithville Lake and listened to the woods go quieter than any of them had ever heard, and the men out of southeast Missouri who put their names to what they saw in the Mark Twain National Forest country.Then we turn it over to the mail. Jenny was seven years old and bringing laundry off the line when the sheet in front of her moved the wrong way. Ray watched something cross a river road in front of his headlights and drove eleven miles out of his way for a year afterward without telling his wife why. Marla found tracks along a fence line and watched her husband go get a shovel and bury them.Dean sat in a deer stand and listened to the silence travel toward him. Colleen's three children came across the yard at a dead run, and the middle one said the thing at the tree line had no face, which is exactly what a fifteen-year-old girl told a newspaper thirty years before.And Wes put a light on something standing chest deep in the Mississippi at forty feet, and it didn't run.The kids saw it first. Nobody ever believes the kids.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

We're pulling off the highway on this one. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip runs state by state, but the reports don't arrive that way, and this episode is for the five that have been sitting in the folder waiting for a place to land. Four decades, five states, and no connection between any of them except that the people involved all ended up carrying something they couldn't put down.We start in the North Carolina mountains in the summer of 1985, where an eighteen-year-old alone in his mother's house spent three nights with a .357 in his lap. Something covered the window in his front door from top to bottom, worked the doorknob, screamed back when he threatened it, and knocked the porch off its pillars. By the third night it was breathing through his bedroom screen from less than two feet away, and it took a load of buckshot from his grandfather to end it.From there we head to West Virginia, where a young man fishing a secluded spot before sunrise heard rocks landing in the water, watched an upright canine push the foliage apart, and fired five rounds on a trail while it circled around to get ahead of him. Then a quick stop in Calvert County, Maryland, in July of 1992, where a sixteen-year-old in the back seat of his family's car locked eyes with something seven feet tall standing braced between two trees with both arms spread, and spent the next thirty years being told he made it up.The last two are Sasquatch. In the Kiamichi country of southeastern Oklahoma, a welder named Ray sat a ladder stand through rock clacking and two wood knocks before something walked across a creek bottom on two legs in gray light, and he went back the next day with flagging tape and a tape measure to find out how tall it really was.And on an Ozark river in July of 1998, two brothers running a trotline heard a two-beat wading sound coming downstream at midnight, put a spotlight on it at forty yards, and came back at daylight with their father to find a fifteen-and-three-quarter-inch track with no claw marks in it and a fifty-two-inch stride between the prints. What they poured that afternoon sat in a shed for twenty-two years. Every one of these five people paid something for telling it. That's the part I keep coming back to, and it's the reason the offer at the end of this episode stays open.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

On the night of October 11, 1973, two shipyard workers drove into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told a story that neither of them expected anybody to believe. Charles Hickson spelled his name into a tape recorder and said that even if they laughed him out of the county he was going to tell it anyway.Then he described a blue light coming down over the bayou, three figures floating out of an opening, and something that looked like a big eye moving over his body while he lay immobilized inside a machine. Calvin Parker, the younger of the two, said almost nothing about the inside of it, because by his own account he passed out at the beginning and didn't come around until it was over.What makes Pascagoula different from almost every case like it is what the sheriff did next.Fred Diamond and Captain Glenn Ryder finished the interview around 11 p.m., walked out, and left the two men alone in a room with the recorder still running, expecting to catch a hoax. What they caught instead was a 42-year-old man trying to talk a terrified teenager down, and then, after Hickson stepped out for coffee, a young man from Jones County praying out loud to a machine he didn't know was there.This episode is the Mississippi stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, and it goes in deep. I work the case from the primary recording rather than the retellings, which means you get Hickson's actual answers to the deputies, including all the places he told them he didn't know.I lay out the geography of the Pascagoula River, the Singing River legend and why I don't trust the version that got printed for a century, and the Phantom Barber summer of 1942, because this is not a town with no history of strange. I walk through the 1973 flap that was already in the local paper four days before any of this happened, including the service station operator who called in a light around 8 p.m., roughly two hours before Hickson ever knocked on a newspaper door.I also deal with the part a lot of tellings skip, which is what Charles Hickson did with the next 20 years of his life, the ongoing contact claims, the television circuit that started with Dick Cavett on November 2, and the arrest in January 1974, and why none of that gets to reach backward and rewrite what's on that tape.There's a witness who waited 45 years and came forward in 2019, eight years after the man who spent his life asking for her had already died. And there's a historical marker, unveiled June 22, 2019, standing today at the spot where Hickson was certain he'd be run out of town. The back half of the show goes into the woods, because that's the other reason we came.I get into the Choctaw material collected by Henry Halbert in the 1800s, David Bushnell in 1910, and John Swanton after him, including Shampe and Nalusa Falaya, and I'm careful about what that material does and doesn't prove. Then I go county by county through Mississippi's actual documented Sasquatch record, including a very close encounter in the Homochitto National Forest on November 28 of either 1978 or 1979, with 14-inch three-toed tracks and corroborating witnesses, and a report from the Stennis Space Center buffer zone in Hancock County from January 18, 2025.We finish with listener accounts out of the DeSoto, the Delta, the Pearl River, the Tombigbee, and Noxubee.No body, no bone, no photograph worth arguing about. But there's a tape sitting in a county file that anybody can listen to, and I still can't tell you what came down over that bayou.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 pull off the road trip for one episode and hand the microphone to five people who wrote in. Five first names, five parts of the country, five different jobs, and not one of them looking to be believed.A long-haul driver in northwest Montana counts fourteen deer on a March night and then watches something cross the westbound lane in three strides at three-forty in the morning, and goes back sixteen days later to walk the ditch in daylight.A twenty-three-year-old fire lookout in northern California puts eight-power binoculars on a salvage cut for twelve minutes, takes a bearing off the firefinder while she's watching, hits it with a bullhorn, and writes the whole thing into a government logbook in pencil.A seventy-eight-year-old Wisconsin dairyman describes an October evening in nineteen seventy-three when thirty-one Holsteins wouldn't come up the hill and his stock dog got under the porch steps, and what his father pulled off the top wire the next morning and put in the kitchen stove that same night. An emergency room tech in Arkansas gets forty seconds at forty-one yards from a climbing stand, then sits in that tree for two hours and forty minutes because the ground between her and her truck runs the wrong direction.And a West Virginia line crew, three nights into an ice storm restoration, has four of five men looking up the right-of-way at the edge of the light while the generator runs.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

On the morning of December 20, 1879, a Cree trapper named Swift Runner stood on a scaffold in Alberta and waited in the cold, because the hangman had forgotten the straps and had to go back for them. He had already confessed. He had already walked the police out to a clearing in the bush and shown them what was left of his family, and his explanation never changed across four months in custody. Something came into him that winter, and it made him hungry in a way that food could not answer. The men who tried him did not believe in that thing and the men who guarded him did, and both groups agreed on the physical facts, which were a camp 25 miles from a post that was issuing rations, a cooking pot, bones cracked open at the ends, and one man who walked out of those woods in the spring heavier than he went in.The road trip turns north in January, and this stop is different from the others.The wendigo is not a cryptid with a gift shop. It comes out of the traditions of living Algonquian-speaking peoples, and in northern Minnesota that means the Anishinaabe, whose seven nations in this state are governments with citizens, not historical footnotes. So we spend a few honest minutes on what the old accounts actually describe before we go anywhere near a sighting, and it turns out to be almost the opposite of what has been sold to you.There are no antlers. The deer skull came out of concept art in the last 20 years. What the tradition describes is something starving, with the skin drawn tight over the bones and the eyes sunk back in the sockets, that grows in exact proportion to whatever it eats so that the arithmetic never breaks in its favor and it is never one bite closer to full than it was when it started. And it is not only something out in the timber.It is something a person can become.Then we go into the woods, and we stay there. Ray heard his own name spoken through the spruce four miles from the nearest road on a trapline nobody ran but him, and he answered out loud and was walking toward it before he had decided to. Marlys followed a child crying in a tamarack swamp and covered 60 yards without the sound ever coming one foot closer. Dale and Ron met in the middle of the timber a quarter mile apart, each one having heard the other call his name, and looked down at four inches of fresh snow holding nothing but their own two trails. Faye was 11 years old when her mother's voice started calling her in from the yard of a cabin on the Bigfork River, and the fear did not arrive until about 30 years later. Wayne opened the door of a fish house on the ice at two in the morning after somebody outside politely said come here, and found open snow under a moon in every direction. Lonnie lay in a wheelhouse north of Deer River and counted the footsteps of whatever walked past him at 40 feet, and walked the interval out himself at first light.Delores was taught as a small child on the Red Lake reservation not to look at the treeline, not to run, to hold her pace, and to say out loud to an adult what had happened, and the same instruction turns up from Manitoba to Michigan in communities that never compared notes. Gordon watched something stand past his woodpile at 35 yards in the gray before deer season light, went in for a rifle, and signed his share of that hunting camp over to his brother's boys without ever explaining why.Kenny came through the door eight seconds behind his brother into an empty yard with fresh snow and no track under the window, and they sold the shack four years later. Verna gave up a bedroom after three February nights of something dragging along the outside wall at waist height, 20 seconds down and 20 seconds back, with a full minute of pause in between. Orval watched something cross a burn scar for two minutes through binoculars from a staffed fire tower in the Superior, called it in on the radio, and would not answer when the man on the other end asked him what it was.Sam and Wes heard a scream in the Boundary Waters at two in the morning that ran longer than a lung should allow and never broke for breath, and then heard it again from a different position. Andrea's whole body turned before her mind did on a February trail outside Ely, and she still snowshoes and no longer does that trail alone.Tara has worked out how fast something would have to move to cover the ground it covered in 90 seconds, and she does not say the number out loud.The turn to sasquatch is a real one and the episode explains it rather than assuming it, because Anishinaabe tradition carries a separate word for the hairy man of the woods and he is not made by cannibalism and does not eat anybody. That opens up a Minnesota record almost nobody outside the state discusses. Remer in Cass County, where the town's founder described tracks much bigger than a man's and sunk deep into the earth, where the old accounts talk about whole families of them and a stretch of Big Sand Lake that people left alone out of courtesy, and where a trail camera caught something in October 2009. The Vergas Trails in Otter Tail County and the Hairy Man, running since the late 1960s, including two 12-year-old cousins on a snowmobile in 1972.A researcher out of Moorhead who found nine published Minnesota sightings when he started looking and spent his life demonstrating how badly incomplete that number was. Tracks crossing a frozen lake in a single line with a stride over four feet. A bear bait barrel worked 40 yards off its tree with the chain still whole. A deer wedged nine feet up a maple with no claw marks on the bark and no blood in the leaves underneath.And the report this state produces more than any other, which is not a monster standing in a road at all, but a line of tracks that came out of the treeline, crossed a yard, stopped 10 feet from the back window, and turned around, left for a woman who had been standing at that sink in the night with the kitchen light on.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

Part Three of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two turns away from the battlefield and toward something far more dangerous. Trust.It starts with a note left under a stone. Eli's parents have learned the truth about Koda, and the boy who kept the secret for three years wants to arrange a meeting.Mira begs Koda to walk away, to move deeper into the forest the way the clans always have when humans get too close. But Koda has just watched sasquatch die to defend this territory, and he's done running. If contact with the human world is coming either way, he'd rather it come on his own terms, with people who already understand.So Koda makes a choice his father can barely stomach, and everything begins to change. What grows out of that first meeting is something no sasquatch alive has ever dared to build, a fragile alliance between two species who were never supposed to know each other, held together by a handful of humans willing to risk everything to protect something wild and hidden.This is the quiet heart of the book, where the story stops being about who wins a fight and starts being about who's brave enough to cross a line. But an alliance this young is a fragile thing, and the forest has never cared about fragile things.By the time this stretch of the road ends, a boy sits at his window looking out at the dark, and somewhere in that same darkness, Koda looks back.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

On April 1, 1987, a radio DJ named Steve Cook put a song on the air at WTCM in Traverse City about a creature with the head of a dog and the body of a man that walks the north woods of Michigan and comes back every 7 years.He'd made up every piece of it over a single weekend as an April Fools joke, including the 7-year cycle and the 1887 origin date that people still repeat as history nearly 40 years later.What came back wasn't a laugh. It was a flood of calls from people who wanted to tell him what they'd already seen out there and had never told anybody.This is the latest stop on the backwoods cryptid road trip, and Brian works the documented history first.The 1887 lumberjack account that no newspaper from that year has ever been found to carry. Robert Fortney's 1937 encounter with 5 wild dogs on the Muskegon River, one of which stood up. The cabin door outside Luther that got clawed from top to bottom in 1987 and became the only physical artifact this legend has. And the Gable Film, the 8mm footage that surfaced in 2007, fooled a national television audience for 3 years, and was admitted as a hoax by a Michigan man named Mike Agrusa in 2010.Then the episode belongs to the encounters.A truck driver comes out of a curve on M-55 at 3 a.m. in November 2014 and finds something roughly 7 feet tall standing on the centerline, and it turns its head toward him and then walks off on two legs. Three campers in the Manistee National Forest spend a night in September 2011 listening to something circle their clearing two steps at a time, and in the morning the one who slept through it asks a question nobody wants to answer.Two cousins walking out of a Lake County hunting property in November 2021 realize something is matching their pace 40 yards off the two-track and stopping a beat late every time they stop. And on the morning of November 14, 2017, a retired tool and die man in a Missaukee County ladder stand picks up amber eyes 6 feet off the ground, chambers a round he never fires, and then sits up there another 20 minutes because climbing down feels worse.The buildings are the part Brian didn't expect. A family near Luther listens to something scratch their front door in October 2019, first at waist height and then at eye level, and then hears what comes out of the dark on the north side of the cabin. A farm couple in Osceola County watches one standing at the corner of the machine shed inside the yard light in 2005, tall enough that its head clears an 8-foot gable trim. A nurse alone at her family's camp northwest of Baldwin in November 2013 wakes to a growl 4 feet from her head with one wall in between, calls 911, and waits 40 minutes for a deputy.A county plow driver east of Lake City catches something with his wing blade in February 2012 and finds hair 4 feet up on the steel, and his foreman tells him it was a deer. A gas well operator pulls onto a pad in Antrim County at 2:30 a.m. in 2019 and watches something go over a 6-foot chain link fence with one hand on the top rail.And a deer camp in Kalkaska County comes out at first light in 2008 to find one buck on the ground with the knot still tied and the other one 60 yards back in the pines with the hindquarters gone.Michigan's Bigfoot record gets its own stretch of the episode, from the circus at Sister Lakes in June 1964, when hundreds of armed strangers drove into a rural township to shoot a monster, to the August 1965 roadside incident near Monroe that left 17-year-old Christine Van Acker with a black eye that ran in the papers.Brian also covers a Roscommon County hunter who watched something close to 7 feet tall walk away up a two-track on two legs during the 2016 firearm season, a fisherman standing on the Fox River before 5 a.m. in 1987, and a timber cruiser working a block in Menominee County in 1998 who had a rock come out of the canopy at him and found a track in a skid trail the next morning that he never photographed.Brian lays out what the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has said about all of this for decades, what Steve Cook has said about his own song for almost 40 years, and what two nights of driving the Baldwin and Luther corridor in the dark actually produced. Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

Part Two of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two opens in the strange quiet that follows a fight nobody really won.Kabota and his envoy come home from the clearing alive, and to the younger sasquatch that alone feels like a victory.They faced the Dogmen, they drew blood, they sent the pack running. But Kabota has led long enough to know the difference between surviving a fight and winning a war, and he understands what the celebration in the caves does not.The Dogmen will be back. Next time they'll be ready.So the war drums begin. Both sides retreat to lick their wounds and sharpen their strategy, and the forest that once felt like home to Koda hardens into something closer to a battlefield with borders. Patrols double. Boundaries are drawn. Every scent on the wind carries a new weight, and the elders find themselves split between the ones who counsel patience and the ones who can already taste the coming blood.Caught in the middle of it is Koda, fifteen years old and carrying the memory of everything the last three years cost him, still hearing his father's warning that violence should be the last choice and never the first. He's beginning to see how thin the line is between defending a home and starting a war, and how few of the sasquatch around him seem willing to walk it.And out past the tree line, the thing the humans are building keeps growing, indifferent to which side wins.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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 road trip crosses into Massachusetts, and the Bay State delivers two of the strangest files in the entire eastern catalog.It starts on a dark stretch of Farm Street in Dover in April of 1977, where a seventeen-year-old named Bill Bartlett watched something creep along a stone wall that no one has ever explained, a spindly, hairless creature with a huge watermelon head and glowing eyes.Within twenty-six hours it was seen twice more by three other teenagers who had never compared notes, and then it vanished forever, leaving behind matching sketches, a police chief who vouched for every witness, and a case so stubborn it made a small New England town famous on the other side of the world. From there the episode heads forty miles south, where the manicured suburbs give way to the Hockomock Swamp, five thousand flooded acres the Wampanoag named the place where spirits dwell, and where the reports never stopped. An armed police search in 1970, a fur trapper stalked from the bank of a black waterway, Joseph DeAndrade's famous Clay Banks sighting, a kayaker who watched something rise out of a crouch on the Town River, footfalls booming across the frozen ice of Lake Nippenicket, and a farmer whose family spent sixty years sharing a fence line with something that never once introduced itself.One state, two monsters, and a swamp with a middle no one has ever reached.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.

Volume Two of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey begins here, and it opens on the other side of the fight. A Dog man called Vorn moves his starving pack south out of the picked-over northern hunting grounds and straight into territory the sasquatch clans have held for generations.The moment those two worlds catch each other's scent, the countdown starts.Three years have passed since the clans fled the Olympic Peninsula. Three years since Adanowa was taken and everything Koda knew came apart.Now a scout named Raksha has vanished into the dark, with nothing left behind but blood and a stranger's smell.In this first stretch you'll meet both sides of the coming war, the pack and the clans alike, and watch Kabota gamble on words over teeth by sending an envoy to a creature who only respects strength. You already know how a gamble like that tends to end.What you don't yet know is who pays for it. This is the world Koda came up in, changed and crowded and closing in, and it's only going to get darker from here.Settle in, because we've got a long road ahead, and it starts with first blood.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.

We're back on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, and tonight we're pulling into Maryland, home of one of the most famous roadside monsters in America. In November of 1971, a family in Old Bowie went searching for a missing puppy named Ginger and found her decapitated near the railroad tracks off Fletchertown Road.Within weeks, a small-town newspaper headline reading "Residents Fear Goatman Lives" had grown into Washington Post coverage of a six-foot hairy creature walking upright through the Prince George's County woods, and the Maryland Goatman was born. In this episode, I trace the legend all the way back to its documented beginnings, from a 1971 college folklore project and the mad-scientist rumors surrounding the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center to the goat herder, the hermit, and the axe-wielding thing said to stalk lovers' lanes and Crybaby Bridge.I walk through the classic encounters the way the county has told them for fifty years, hooves on the blacktop behind a parked car, an axe blade in a door panel, screams over the campsites, and then I put on my old badge and show you what the evidence actually supports. From there the road trip goes deeper into Maryland's monster file, because the witnesses in 1971 never described a goat at all.They described a Bigfoot. We cover the Dwayyo attack outside Gambrill State Park in 1965, the Sykesville Monster flap of 1973 with its thirteen-inch footprint cast and Baltimore Zoo examination, a fisherman's daylight sighting on the Patapsco in 1981, the Harewood Park Monster, the Eastern Shore reports, and the giant that construction crews reported at the Arundel Mills site in 2000. It's a story about dark roads, headlights, bored teenagers, freight trains, and the one small casualty at the bottom of it all, and by the end you'll know exactly where the folklore stops and where the genuine mystery in the Maryland woods begins.Leave Brian A Voicemail Email BrianListen To Disturbing History Podcast Listen To Sasquatch Odyssey Podcast Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

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

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Maine, and this stop needs two maps, one for the water and one for the woods. We start on the granite edge of Casco Bay, where lobstermen, ferry crews, and one very unlucky kayaker have reported something long, dark, and fast moving through cold Atlantic water.They call her Cassie, the Casco Bay Sea Serpent, and her paper trail runs deeper than you'd think. We trace New England's sea serpent tradition from John Josselyn's sixteen thirty-nine account at Cape Ann through young Edward Preble chasing a serpent by rowboat in Penobscot Bay during the Revolution, into the famous Gloucester sightings of eighteen seventeen, when the Linnaean Society of New England took sworn depositions from dozens of witnesses and then torched its own credibility with a deformed blacksnake.From there it's old Maine newspaper accounts, Danish dragger captain Ole Mikkelsen's nineteen fifty-eight sighting off Cape Elizabeth, and a run of modern encounters from working boats, including a three-boat sighting on a flat calm August morning that nobody involved ever wanted to talk about again. Then we leave the coast and drive inland, because Maine is the most forested state in the country and the North Woods have their own resident.We dig into Wabanaki traditions of forest giants, the Durham gorilla flap of nineteen seventy-three, and Sasquatch encounters from Aroostook County deer swamps, the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, a log landing north of Jackman, and a frozen pond in the Moosehead country where the snow kept a record two brothers wish it hadn't.As always, the ordinary explanations get first crack, basking sharks and moose and the pattern-hungry human eye, and as always, there's a residue they can't quite eat. The ocean hides one monster and seventeen million acres of trees hide the other, and Maine never asks either of them for proof.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is pulling over for a week, because this time the thing in the wilderness didn't come out of the trees. It came down out of the sky. In August of 1976, four art students from Boston, twin brothers Jim and Jack Weiner, Navy veteran Charlie Foltz, and painter Chuck Rack, paddled into the Allagash Wilderness Waterway of northern Maine for two weeks of fishing in some of the deepest, darkest country east of the Mississippi.One night on Eagle Lake, they built a huge bonfire on the shore to guide themselves home, pushed their canoe out into the black, and watched an enormous silent sphere of swirling light rise over the treeline. When Foltz flashed an SOS at it, a beam dropped to the water and came straight for them, and the next thing any of the four remembered was standing on the beach in a strange dead calm while their two-hour bonfire lay burned down to coals behind them.Twelve years later, after a head injury, a seizure disorder, and a wave of nightmares that hit both Weiner twins in two separate households, the four men underwent fifteen hypnotic regression sessions with investigator Raymond Fowler's team, and what came off those tapes made them famous. Four separate accounts of a cold examination room, gray beings with glass-dark eyes, and procedures nobody wants to remember, all matching. They passed polygraphs, they passed psychiatric evaluations, and they carried the story through decades of ridicule, right up until 2016, when Chuck Rack picked up a phone in a Missouri motel room and tore the case in half.In this episode, I take you from the floatplane landing on Telos Lake all the way through the encounter, the missing time, the years of silence, the hypnosis sessions, the memory science that dismantled recovered testimony in American courtrooms, and the recantation that ended four friendships. Because when everything else about this case gets argued away, one thing is still standing. Something was over Eagle Lake that night, all four men swore to it until the day it mattered most, and fifty years later, nobody has ever explained it.The Road Trip will be back on the highway soon. Tonight, we go where the roads end.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

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

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

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

On the night of the Fourth of July, a young couple nine miles up a dead-end mountain road in north Georgia found themselves cut off from the world at the worst possible moment. Her water had broken, the only crossing off the mountain had swallowed their truck, and the nearest phone signal was a mile and a half uphill through dark timber.What happened over the next three hours is a story about labor, a washed-out culvert, a volunteer rescue man, and a baby born in a Baptist church parking lot under the last shells of the loudest Fourth the valley ever saw. It is also a story about something else that was on that mountain the same night, something that paced a running man through the switchbacks, stood in a flashlight beam for four long seconds with two rabbits in its fist, and later walked out of the treeline, put its hands on a stranded pickup, and lifted it off the pipe. Two babies came into the world on that mountain that night, and only one of them got a birth certificate. This is the story of both.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

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

Way back in episode 147 we spent a full night in Van Meter, Iowa, where in the autumn of 1903 a winged, horned, glowing thing walked the rooftops at 1 a.m., shrugged off the town doctor's 5 shots and the banker's buckshot, and finally backed a whole armed posse down into an abandoned coal mine before vanishing for good. If you never heard it, or you want the full nightmare start to finish, go back and pull up 147. It's one of the best-documented cryptid cases in America, and it deserves the whole hour.But the Visitor is the freak case. It's the outlier.Tonight we park in the Hawkeye State for a different reason, because the thing Iowa actually reports, quietly, all over the map, for more than 100 years, isn't a winged devil. It's big and dark and covered in hair and it walks on 2 legs, and it's been hiding in the last place anybody'd think to look for it. We dig into the Lockridge Monster and the partially eaten turkeys that started it, the Skunk River Wildmen, a 13-year-old boy who watched one drink from the river with cupped hands, a turkey hunter who locked eyes with something in the morning fog, a bow hunter with 5 separate run-ins on his own land, a viral photo out of White Water Canyon, and a string of encounters from people who never told a soul, the mushroom hunters and the night fisherman and the farmer with a clump of coarse dark hair in his kitchen drawer.Then we take the long way home through the rest of Iowa's strange country, the cursed Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery, the Fort Dodge house whose builders invited the dead in on purpose, and the phantom cougars the state swears are gone and people keep right on seeing. As always, your host walks it through an evidence-first, flesh-and-blood lens, with the eye of a former lawman who spent years learning the difference between a man telling a story and a man telling you what happened to him. Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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