Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

Deep in the mountains and hollows of Tennessee, something terrifying has stalked the forests for generations. From the rugged Cumberland Plateau to the shadowy foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, witnesses have described a massive, hair-covered creature known as the Tennessee Wildman—a mysterious figure whose legend stretches back to newspaper reports from the 1870s. In this chilling installme...

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads into South Dakota, where stories of a towering, faceless figure follow the roads through Pine Ridge and Rosebud after dark. He’s described as thin, seven feet tall or more, and sometimes wearing a hat. His name is Walking Sam. Brian follows accounts of a grandmother who spotted an enormous figure beyond her fence, a teenager who encounte...

Most encounters on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories involve something tall, hairy, and walking on two legs. This week, five listeners describe something else: unexplained lights, unfamiliar figures, and ordinary trips into the backcountry that took a disturbing turn. In Idaho’s Selway backcountry, an elk hunter alone at a spike camp watches a glowing object descend over a creek. Then he discovers a tall,...

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip heads deep into the South Carolina Lowcountry, where a terrifying encounter on a lonely stretch of road sparked one of the strangest cryptid mysteries in American history. On June 29, 1988, seventeen-year-old Christopher Davis was changing a flat tire near Scape Ore Swamp outside Bishopville, South Carolina, when he claimed a horrifying seven-foot-tall, green-skinne...

We’re pulling off the road trip for a pit stop this week, because the inbox filled back up and these five emails belong together. Nobody in them went looking for anything. They were at home, asleep or working or out checking stock, and something walked up to where they live and kept coming back. Oleta was the overnight donut maker at a shop in Pinetop, Arizona, in two thousand three, which meant s...

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Exeter, Rhode Island, where on the seventeenth of March in eighteen ninety-two a group of farmers opened the graves of three women from the same family and burned the heart of the youngest one on a rock behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. Her name was Mercy Lena Brown, she was nineteen years old, and she'd been dead for two months. Her n...

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway for a pit stop this week so Brian can open the mailbag. Most of the encounters that land in the inbox are straightforward: somebody sees something big and hairy walking on two legs, and it walks away. The five in this episode didn't go that way. In each of them, seeing a giant ape that isn't supposed to exist was only part of what happened. Cas...

The next stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is Pennsylvania, home of the most miserable monster in American folklore. The squonk comes out of the state's old lumber camps, where woodhicks and bark peelers told of a small, wart-covered animal with skin that didn't fit, so ashamed of its own looks that it hid in the hemlocks and cried all night. It reached print in 1910 in William T. Cox's Fear...

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway this week for a pit stop, and Brian opens the mailbag. These are five Sasquatch encounters sent in by listeners, covering 66 years and five states, and two of them were handed down inside a family before they ever reached the show. Cordell was 260 feet up a cell tower on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee in October 2019, alone, when something...

In March of 1934, the crew of the lightship Columbia and the supply tender Rose watched something come up out of the water near the mouth of the Columbia River. The men said it was about 40 feet long with an 8-foot neck, and the tender's captain told the Salem Capital Journal it opened its mouth and gaped at the lightship. The crew wanted to lower a boat and go after it, and the officers told them...

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 tim...

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...

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, loo...

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 potatoe...

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 e...

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...

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 befor...

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 welcom...

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 tre...

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 look...

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 communit...

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...

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 mil...

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 m...

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...