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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman experiences, and terrifying cryptid stories from deep in the wilderness.If you love true scary stories, campfire tales, and firsthand accounts of unexplained encounters in the woods, you’re in the right place. Each episode dives into chilling eyewitness reports of: Bigfoot and Sasquatch encounters Dogman sightings Cryptid attacks and mysterious creatures UFO encounters and strange lights in the forest Paranormal experiences in remote backwoods locations These are immersive, atmospheric stories pulled from people who claim to have come face-to-face with something they can’t explain. From eerie sounds in the treeline to shadowy figures moving just beyond the campfire glow, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories explores what happens when ordinary people venture too far into the unknown. Whether you’re a believer, a skeptic, or simply fascinated by the unexplained, this podcast delivers gripping storytelling that blurs the line between folklore and reality. Turn down the lights, step into the forest, and listen closely…Because something might be watching. Follow and subscribe to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories for weekly Bigfoot encounters, cryptid stories, and paranormal experiences from the depths of the wilderness.
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 Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website 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 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 Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website 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.
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 Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website 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 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 Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website 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.
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 Brian Listen 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.
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