Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

A hunting guide reaches out to the show after thirty years of silence, asking for the story to be handled with care. He sends an email that opens with a few simple ground rules. Names are first names only, and none of them are real. The country where it happened is still out there, and the line that got crossed is still a line. He doesn't want a map made of it. He just wants the story told the way...

Three experienced cavers. One hand-drawn map. Two words written in pencil at the bottom of it. Don't go. This week's episode is a listener letter. Keith, a longtime friend of the show, finally put on paper what happened to him and his two closest friends almost a year ago, deep inside a cave on a ridge in eastern Kentucky that almost nobody knows is there.  Caleb's grandfather, Pap, had warned him...

A listener writes in after sitting on this story for three months, and what he sends is one of the most layered north Georgia encounter accounts we've had on the show. Four men, one of them a thirty-year researcher in his early sixties, hike a mile and a half off a forest service road into a drainage that looks promising on a map. By the second night, they're surrounded. Vocalizations from three d...

Five listener accounts. Five different parts of the country. Five different decades. And in every one of them, something out there showed an ordinary person, in no uncertain terms, that they were not at the top of the food chain. This episode isn't about quick glimpses through the trees. It's about the slow encounters. The ones where something took its time, where it watched, where it made a delib...

Brian sits down at the mic after wrapping a long-form interview for Sasquatch Odyssey with researcher Natalie Smearman, and what she shared in that recording was too good to keep on one show. This episode brings her story over to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories in full. Natalie grew up in West Virginia thinking the Bigfoot stories were just something parents told kids to keep them out of the woods, and...

Part Five of The Corridor series. The finale. If you haven't listened to Parts One through Four, stop here and go back. This one doesn't land the way it's supposed to without the stories that came before it. A retired land surveyor named Gene heard the first four episodes of this series and realized he'd walked the exact ground every witness was describing.  In the spring of nineteen eighty-seven,...

This is the fourth episode in the five-part series The Corridor, following five independent encounter accounts across five decades along the same north-south ridgeline running from the Cohutta Wilderness in northern Georgia into the mountains of eastern Tennessee. Part Four marks a sharp departure from the first three episodes. Where Herschel, Karen, and Marcus each experienced gradual encounters...

This is the third episode in the five-part series The Corridor, tracing five independent encounter accounts across five decades along the same ridgeline running from northern Georgia into eastern Tennessee. In Part Three, a competitive bowhunter named Marcus shares an account from late September of two thousand three. Marcus was scouting a clearcut in the Cherokee National Forest from a ridge sadd...

This is the second episode in a five-part series called The Corridor, following five separate encounter accounts submitted by five unconnected people across five different decades, all describing experiences along the same north-south ridgeline running from the Cohutta Wilderness in northern Georgia up through the mountains of eastern Tennessee. In Part Two, a woman named Karen shares an account f...

This is the first episode in a five-part series called The Corridor. Over the past eight months, five separate people submitted encounter stories to the show, each from a different decade, none of them connected to one another in any way. When their accounts were mapped, every one of them described experiences along the same north-south ridgeline running from the Cohutta Wilderness in northern Geo...

In the summer of 1985 a military family moved onto a hundred-acre farm in Dent County, Missouri, deep in the Ozarks, backed up against thousands of acres of national forest. Their twelve-year-old son spent the first weeks exploring the property and felt completely at home in the woods until the day something changed. A heavy sense of being watched. Massive canine tracks along the creek that dwarfe...

Five people. Five decades. Five different parts of the country. None of them know each other, and none of them were looking for what they found. What connects them isn't the details of their encounters. It's what happened afterward. Every one of them walked away from something they'd done their entire lives because of what they saw. Dale was twenty-three years old, hunting elk on the Olympic Penin...

This is the tenth and final part of the series from Garrett, a residential contractor who spent eight years on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. In spring 2021, while re-pointing the root cellar walls, Garrett discovers a hidden cavity Earl built into the original foundation in 1971. Inside is a sealed plastic bundle containing a leather-bou...

This is part nine of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. On September 21, 2019, Garrett and his longtime friend Cliff hike to a ridge shoulder above the property at dusk to deliberately attempt wood knocks and a call blast. Cliff brings a baseball bat for striking and Garrett brings a...

This is part eight of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. On the evening of November 9, 2018, a major storm system stalls over the mountains, producing over thirty hours of continuous heavy rain. The power goes out at 4:17 PM Saturday afternoon. With the generator dead from moisture i...

This is part seven of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. In late April 2018, an elderly woman named Opal crosses Bishop Creek and arrives at Garrett's cabin. She and her late husband Vernon lived on twenty acres across the creek for fifty-one years. Vernon spent thirty years with the...

This is part six of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. In the spring of 2017, Garrett adopted a young shepherd mix named Ruby from a gas station near Chimney Rock.  She bonded with Bowie within weeks and joined him on nightly dusk patrols of the meadow, adopting his boundary rules ar...

This is part five of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. During his first visit to the property in 2014, the previous owner Earl pointed out a rocky prominence on the ridgeline about half a mile northeast of the cabin and warned Garrett never to go there after dark, offering no explan...

This is part four of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. After the vocal mimicry encounter in October 2015, Garrett pulled back from the back acreage and spent the late fall and early winter in a contracted routine close to the cabin. The knocking went quiet by mid-December, and he as...

This is part three of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. Garrett introduces his brother Wade, a Marine veteran six years his senior, now living in Winston-Salem with his wife Colleen and two kids. He describes the bond they built during childhood cabin trips in the Blue Ridge, anchor...

This is part two of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor living on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. In Story One, Garrett described his first summer on the property, including months of wood knocking from the ridge, the discovery of seventeen-inch bipedal tracks, and a visual encounter with a massive upright figure at th...

This is part one of a ten-part series from a single witness named Garrett, a residential contractor from Gastonia, North Carolina, who recounts a decade of escalating encounters on one remote mountain property in the southern Appalachians. Garrett has been listening to Sasquatch Odyssey, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, Disturbing History, and The Guilty Files for over two years and asked that his exper...

A listener named Caleb from Hazard, Kentucky shares the story his late grandfather Harold carried in silence for nearly sixty years. Harold was a tobacco farmer in Perry County who worked a piece of bottomland along Pigeon Roost Creek that had been in the family since before the Civil War. In the fall of 1962, at twenty-nine years old, he began noticing things he couldn't explain on the steep, hea...

Tonight, we head to the dark banks of the Pascagoula River and into one of the most chilling and enduring UFO cases in American history. On October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were just two working men from Mississippi trying to enjoy a quiet night of fishing after a long day at the shipyard. What happened next would change both of their lives forever. According to their account, a...

A retired United States Forest Service firefighter is breaking thirty-five years of silence to share what he and his entire Helitack crew witnessed during the devastating California fires of 1987.Kyle— as he asks to be called— was a thirty-two-year-old veteran wildland firefighter when his nine-man crew was helicoptered into a remote drainage in the Mendocino National Forest ahead of an advancing...