Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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 she went to bed at six in the evening and slept beside an upstairs window she kept cracked for air. The bottom of that window sat more than seven feet off the hillside behind the cabin, and on two nights that June something stood outside it and looked in.Lavelle was eleven years old in October of nineteen seventy-six, living in a house on brick piers in Franklin County, Mississippi, with a swept sand yard and a pear tree out back. For eleven nights in a row something heavy walked laps around that house with one hand dragging along the clapboards, and on the ninth night his daddy sat out front in the truck to wait for it.Orrin is a taxidermist outside Crystal Falls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and in the fall of twenty eleven something started raking the salt off the deer hides behind his shop. His twelve-year-old son was the one who worked out the timing. It only came on mornings his mother left to run her mail route, about twenty minutes after she pulled out of the driveway.Leander tunes pianos for a living, and in the summer of nineteen ninety-four he had a gutted church upright sitting under a tarp on the side porch of his farmhouse in Estill County, Kentucky. First the porch glider got moved. Then, at two in the morning, somebody started plucking one low string, over and over.Vesta ran a cow-calf outfit in Idaho County, Idaho, and her late husband had built a gate latch that took two hands, a shoulder and a knee to open. In the spring of nineteen eighty-five she kept finding that gate swung wide open with sixty pairs of cattle bunched in the far corner of the pasture, so one evening she parked the stock truck in the lane and watched to see who was opening it.If something has ever come up on your porch, looked in your window, or let itself into your pasture, send it to [email protected]. Next time we’re back on the road.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 [email protected] 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 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.Casimir was a railroad signal maintainer called out after midnight in October 1993 to a siding in the northern Minnesota bog country. On the way in he watched 3 pale lights travel north over the tamaracks, and 25 minutes later something came walking down the middle of the track toward his floodlights, stepping on every third tie.Odalys was running the instrument on a Florida survey crew in February 2008 when she followed a red-brown, mud-caked animal across an open cattle pasture through a 30-power telescope. She watched it walk behind a lone cabbage palm with a trunk 14 inches thick and never come out the other side.Linnea was calling spotted owls from a log landing in California's Klamath Mountains in June 1997. Her data sheet shows a start time of 9:42 PM for station six and nothing after it, and the next thing she remembers is sitting on her tailgate at 1:51 AM with her boots full of water.Verlene was alone in a Colorado elk camp in October 1986, 9 miles from the nearest road, when she heard what sounded like two people talking down at the creek and walked to the edge of the bench with a shotgun to see who was there.And Rosalind writes on behalf of her late father, Evander, a pipeline patrol pilot who flew past something black and upright on a bare wheat stubble hill in eastern Washington in August 1974. He banked around for a second look and found the hill empty 15 seconds later.There are no verdicts here and no explanations, only what five people saw and what happened around it that they've never been able to account for.If you've had an encounter of your own, Brian wants to read it. Send it to [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 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 walked out of the woods and into the compound below him. It stood beside his truck, took hold of his load line, and followed the rope up with its eyes until it found him.Philippa writes in with the story her father Emmett told for 40 years. In November 1964 he was hauling milk cans on a hill farm route in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom when his headlights caught something lifting a full 10-gallon can off a farmer's stand and carrying it up the pasture under one arm. The creamery docked him $11.40 for the can, and he never got over it.Marit was first out to the back beds on a Wisconsin cranberry marsh in October 1996 and found it standing in the flooded bed at daylight, scooping up berries with both hands. Her boss looked at the tracks on the dike and reached for a rake.Wrenna shares her grandmother Opal's diary from the summer of 1953, when Opal was a Forest Service fire lookout in the Yaak country of northwest Montana. For 11 days she took a compass bearing on something that crossed the same rock slide every evening. Then one night it didn't cross, and she heard her woodpile move.Ansel was 22 and picking oysters by lantern on Willapa Bay, Washington, in January 1982, with the tide out and no way off the bed for hours, when something came across the mud flats from Long Island, squatted 80 yards from the crew, and watched them work.If you've got an encounter of your own, or one that's been told at your family's supper table for years, Brian wants to hear it. Email [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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.

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected],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 [email protected] 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.