Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

In this episode, Brian shares an email from a military veteran who served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and wants the world to hear a story that's been buried for three decades. Matt, as he asks to be called, writes in about a confession made to him by a fellow soldier he calls Joe during a night of drinking while the two were stateside between deployments. Joe revealed that in the mid nine...

The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world, and they've been collecting secrets for longer than human memory reaches. Tonight we go into the old green dark — the deep, cathedral-quiet forest of the Appalachian chain — and we don't come back out until we've walked through six of the most haunting, bone-deep stories this ancient landscape has ever produced. We start in Hanc...

In October of 1955, a highway worker and experienced outdoorsman named William Roe climbed Mica Mountain in British Columbia on his own time, with no particular expectation of finding anything unusual. What he encountered near the summit that afternoon would stay with him for the rest of his life — and nearly two years later, he'd walk into a notary's office in Edmonton, Alberta, and swear a legal...

In the fall of 1978, a thirty-one-year-old fur trapper named John flew his Piper Super Cub into a remote stretch of the Yukon Territory about a hundred and forty miles northeast of Dawson City to begin what he planned as a four-month trapping season. He had a solid cabin he'd built himself, a well-established trap line running forty-some miles through prime marten, lynx, beaver, and wolverine coun...

In 1947, a Tennessee farmer named Robert Carter Senior found an injured young creature pinned beneath a fallen tree on his property in Monroe County. What he did next would set in motion one of the most extraordinary and controversial stories in the history of sasquatch research.  He nursed it back to health, named it Fox, and spent the next twenty-five years secretly building a relationship with...

Tonight we're stepping away from the deep woods and into something different. Something that's been keeping me up at night for the better part of two years as I've tracked down these accounts. This is a special episode exploring the Hitchhiker Effect — the terrifying phenomenon where people visit locations of high strangeness and something follows them home. We're not talking about a feeling or an...

In this episode, we share a listener's account that's been buried for over forty years. Sarah from Bowling Green, Kentucky reached out to us after listening to the show, and what she had to say stopped us in our tracks. In the fall of 1982, Sarah was just eight years old when her family — mom, dad, older brother, and their German Shepherd, Bear — packed up and headed deep into Land Between the Lak...

Tonight's episode is something different. Over the past several months, Brian's inbox has been filling up with emails from listeners and first-time visitors to the show, people who've been holding onto experiences they've never fully shared with anyone. This episode brings six of those accounts together in one sitting, read in the witnesses' own words, spanning six decades and six different region...

The documentary aired on a Tuesday night in October, and nothing was ever the same. Within hours it was trending worldwide. Scientists came forward. Former government employees reached out. And across the country, people started paying closer attention to the forests around them. This episode brings the first volume of Born Wild to a close — but not before we hear from some of the most compelling...

Part Nine brings Bigfoot Country to its climax, and it does so by circling back to where every great investigation begins — with the people who lived it. After years of building this platform, the floodgates finally opened. Witnesses who had been listening from the shadows for months, sometimes years, started stepping forward. People like Patricia Ann Holloway, a seventy-one-year-old retired libra...

A veteran park ranger with over two decades of service reaches out after years of listening to the show in silence. He's heard me share my own encounter and talk about experiences from other law enforcement and first responders, and he finally decided it was time to tell his story. He's never told anyone. Not his wife. Not his coworkers. No one. Kevin was assigned to a week-long solo backcountry b...

The odyssey reaches new heights as Brian Patterson shares some of the strangest and most profound encounters ever documented on the show. From a North Carolina camper who experienced unexplainable visions of an ancient forest to an Oregon mother whose lost daughter was safely returned by a gentle, hair-covered giant, these accounts push beyond simple sightings into territory that challenges everyt...

A former Marine infantry sergeant breaks twenty years of silence about what happened to him in the Trinity Alps Wilderness of Northern California in October 2003. He didn't want to write in. He's not a Bigfoot guy. But his teenage daughter listens to the show and finally wore him down. Mike and two lifelong hunting buddies were on a five-day backcountry elk hunt deep in the Trinity Wilderness, rou...

In this episode, the journey takes a dramatic turn as Brian's podcasting career reaches new heights and dangerous new lows.  What begins as a powerful collection of witness encounters from across the country — a conservation officer in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, a Mississippi fisherman on the Big Black River, a West Virginia coal miner who found something living deep underground, and a Cajun fol...

For twenty-six years, Dale wore the badge—and kept a secret he couldn’t afford to share. Now retired after nearly three decades as a deputy sheriff in a rural southeastern county bordering a vast national forest, Dale finally breaks his silence. During his career, he experienced six separate Sasquatch encounters—stories he kept buried until turning in his badge in late 2025.His experiences span de...

In this installment, Daniel finds something he never expected: normalcy. A job at a local pizza place, the simple rhythm of work and home, the blessed absence of danger. After everything they've survived, boring feels like a gift. Meanwhile, Brian's podcast has exploded beyond anything he imagined. Five million downloads. Tens of thousands of community members. Emails pouring in from witnesses who...

In the spring of nineteen seventy-nine, a quiet cattle farmer in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Tennessee followed a strange sound into the timber beyond his fence line. What he found in a ravine that morning would change the course of his family's life for the next four decades and beyond. A young creature was caught in an illegal bear trap. Hurt. Terrified. Looking up at him with eyes that...

Sheriff Brian Patterson steps away from the badge and into the microphone full time as Sasquatch Odyssey explodes beyond anything he ever imagined. Part Five picks up with the podcast in full swing, and the witnesses are lining up from every corner of the South and beyond to finally tell the stories they have been carrying in silence for decades. It starts in the mountains of northeast Georgia wit...

What does it take to break a forty-year silence, and what does it cost to tell the truth when powerful forces have worked for decades to keep it buried? In Part Four of The Sheriff of Bigfoot Country, everything changes. An anonymous envelope left in the dead of night opens the door to a classified government operation tied to the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens.  What was recovered in the cha...

Tonight we're going back to basics. Six encounter stories from six different states, told the way they were meant to be told. Around the fire. In the dark. The way witnesses have been sharing these experiences for generations. You'll hear from Daryl, a long haul trucker who watched something cross Interstate Ninety in Montana back in nineteen ninety-seven. Something that stepped over a guardrail l...

After the midnight visit from the men in black, Brian is left with a choice—back down, or push forward and risk everything. There’s no middle ground anymore. Daniel, uneasy but resolute, agrees to stand with him no matter what comes next. Every document is copied. Multiple backups are created and hidden in separate locations. If the evidence disappears, the truth won’t disappear with it. As the pr...

Tonight we bring you six terrifying Sasquatch encounters from across America, spanning six decades and six different states. These are the stories that witnesses carried in silence for years, sometimes decades, before finally sharing what they experienced in the wilderness. We begin in the redwood forests of Northern California in nineteen sixty-three, where a young logger named Harold Vance comes...

The years that followed Brian's childhood encounter in Lyerly weren't easy, but they were transformative. His mother beat cancer, earned her degree, and rebuilt their lives piece by piece. Brian found his footing too—working his way up from fast food to restaurant management, discovering he had a gift for handling people and solving problems. But something else was happening beneath the surface. I...

Over the next few weeks, I'm gonna be sharing my new book with you—start to finish. The whole thing. It's called Bigfoot Country. All told, it's around eight hours of narration. So, I'll be putting it out in multiple episodes. And honestly... I've been sitting on this for a long time. I'm excited—and a little nervous—to finally put it out there. But before we jump in, I wanna take a minute. Just y...

Every once in a while, a story comes across my desk that stops me cold. Not because it’s sensational, but because it’s precise, deeply personal, and impossible to dismiss. The account you’re about to hear is one of those. It arrived as a letter from a man I’m calling Tom, a seventeen-year park ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains who has spent his life dealing in facts, emergencies, and hard realit...