Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This week, the truck pulls off the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip for a pit stop, and the reason is six chilling emails from listeners who experienced something far more terrifying than a fleeting glimpse of Bigfoot in the woods.

Most of the encounters that come into Backwoods Bigfoot Stories involve something large and hairy crossing a lonely road, watching from the treeline, or disappearing into the forest. But these six stories are different. In every case, whatever was lurking in the darkness didn't just make an appearance. It deliberately approached, intimidated, threatened, or terrorized the people who crossed its path. And in some cases, it seemed determined to make sure they didn't leave.

Six encounters. Six different states. And six terrifying reminders that sometimes the most dangerous thing in the woods isn't afraid of you.Virginia – Something Outside the TentIn September 1991, Hesper, a sign painter from Staunton, Virginia, took her brother Lucan backpacking along Ramsey's Draft in the George Washington National Forest.

Their peaceful wilderness getaway turned into a nightmare when something approached their tent on the second night. One by one, three tent stakes were pulled from the ground. Then something massive began pressing against the nylon, slowly moving around them before attempting to unzip the tent fly. When Lucan switched on his flashlight, they saw an enormous hand gripping the zipper.

But the real terror came the following morning when they encountered the creature standing shin-deep in the creek at a trail crossing.Alabama – The Creature That Wouldn't Let Them LeaveIn the fall of 2012, Ambrose and his wife Imelda were camping at the end of a remote gravel road in Alabama's Bankhead National Forest. When Imelda became seriously ill during the night, Ambrose desperately tried to get her to a hospital.

Three times he attempted to drive out, and three times an enormous, upright creature taller than the cab of his one-ton truck blocked the only road to safety. At sunrise, they discovered a dead cedar deliberately laid across the road, a trail of enormous footprints, and a picnic table overturned with its securing chain still attached to a tree. Whatever had confronted them that night seemed determined to keep them trapped.

 Illinois – The Warning From the BluffIn July 1988, Royce, a longtime bricklayer from Carbondale, Illinois, took his fourteen-year-old son Dalton fishing beneath a sandstone bluff in the Shawnee National Forest. What began as a relaxing father-and-son outing quickly became a terrifying confrontation.

 First, a tiny rock landed nearby. Then another. Each rock grew progressively larger until the ninth was nearly the size of a cinder block. Before throwing it, a towering, hairy figure stepped from behind a white oak at the top of the bluff and deliberately raised the massive stone above its head, making sure the two frightened fishermen could see exactly what was coming.

Washington – The Thing in the ClearcutIn April 1999, Lyle was working on a tree-planting crew in a remote clearcut north of Lake Chelan, Washington. While making his way through the planting rows, he discovered five seedlings that had already been carefully planted by someone who clearly understood the work. Moments later, something huge came charging through the tangled logging debris at an impossible speed. It stopped on a stump just twenty feet above him, raised both arms, and slapped its thighs three times in an unmistakable display of aggression. 

His crewmates, Benicio and Odette, witnessed the creature retreat into the timber, leaving all three shaken by what they had just seen.

Iowa – The Predator Behind the OakReuben had spent thirty years bowhunting the Loess Hills of western Iowa, but nothing could have prepared him for what he encountered in November 2005. While leaving his hunting stand, he detected the unmistakable smell of fresh blood and followed a drag mark to a recently killed doe. The animal's neck had been violently twisted, its abdomen opened, and its heart and liver removed. 

Then Reuben realized he wasn't alone. Just six feet away, on the opposite side of an oak tree, sat an enormous, hairy figure with blood covering its hands to the wrists. When Reuben returned with his brother-in-law Sal the following morning, they discovered the deer's severed head had been placed directly in the trail.

Georgia – The Voices Across the SwampIn October 2017, Greer, a boat-rental operator and outboard mechanic living near Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, endured three nights of increasingly disturbing activity around her property. It began with a strange two-note whistle coming from across the canal. 

Then something began repeating her dog's name in an unnatural, slowed-down voice. Soon came bizarre chatter, yodeling, and a piercing scream powerful enough to make the windows vibrate. Eventually, two unseen creatures began calling back and forth across the dark water. When Greer finally swept her spotlight toward the corner of her shop, she caught sight of the creature responsible for the sounds.

Before disappearing into the canal at the end of her dock, it repeated her own familiar two-note whistle right back at her.From the remote forests of Virginia and Alabama to the rugged mountains of Washington, the hunting grounds of Iowa, and the dark waterways of the Okefenokee, these six chilling listener submissions share one unsettling detail: the creatures didn't simply stumble across people. 

They appeared to know exactly what they were doing.Were these territorial displays? Attempts to drive people away? Predatory behavior? Or something even more disturbing?

Join us for another terrifying mailbag episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, featuring six intense Sasquatch encounters that suggest some of these creatures aren't content to remain hidden in the shadows.

And next week, the truck fires back up as we return to the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip and head toward the next mysterious creature waiting somewhere on the map.

Turn down the lights, settle in, and remember: Just because you can't see what's watching you doesn't mean it isn't already closer than you think.

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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.

Deep beneath the turquoise waters of Bear Lake, a mysterious creature has reportedly lurked for more than 150 years. Stretching across the Utah–Idaho border, this beautiful mountain lake is home to one of America's oldest and most fascinating lake monster legends. But the terrifying encounters don't end at the shoreline. Beyond the water, Utah's rugged mountains hold their own secrets, including decades of chilling Sasquatch sightings.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip heads to Utah, where we investigate the legendary Bear Lake Monster and a collection of frightening Bigfoot encounters from across the Beehive State. Our journey begins in 1868, when Joseph C. Rich published sensational eyewitness accounts of an enormous serpent-like creature swimming through Bear Lake. Witnesses described a monster nearly 90 feet long, moving faster than a galloping horse. 

The reports ignited a nationwide fascination, but in 1894, Rich admitted the original story was a fabrication. That should have ended the legend. Instead, reports of something unexplained in the lake continued for generations.

We explore a series of eerie accounts spanning more than a century, including a terrified wagon driver whose horses refused to approach the shoreline, a family watching an enormous dark shape cut through the water in 1974, fishermen witnessing bizarre disturbances during the winter cisco run, and a sailboat encounter involving a mysterious wake with no visible source.

We also examine tour boat operator Brian Hirschi's reported close encounter in 2002 and investigate possible explanations ranging from unusual wave activity to enormous fish and misidentified wildlife. Then we leave Bear Lake behind and venture deep into Utah's Sasquatch country, where the Bear River Range, Wasatch Mountains, and Uinta wilderness have produced some truly unsettling encounter stories.

A young sheepherder watches 1,500 frightened sheep bunch together as an enormous upright figure emerges from the trees. A teenager in North Ogden sees something massive moving along a fence line before it turns toward a floodlight. An elk hunter spots an unidentified creature stalking a herd through the remote Uintas. And a mountain biker encounters something standing just below a mountain road, close enough to see its hand resting against the pavement.

From a twelve-year-old girl's terrifying encounter on Boulder Mountain to an unexpected face-to-face sighting near Tony Grove Lake, these stories take us into some of Utah's most remote and beautiful wilderness. Is the Bear Lake Monster simply a pioneer-era hoax that evolved into enduring folklore? 

And what explains the generations of reported Sasquatch encounters in Utah's mountains?

Join us for another journey into the unexplained as the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip explores the legends, eyewitness stories, and mysteries of Utah.

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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.

Fort Worth, Texas, July 1969. Six people parked in a car near Greer Island on Lake Worth drive to the police station at midnight and report that something came down out of a tree and landed on them, something with fur and scales and a face like a goat, and the next morning the Fort Worth Star-Telegram runs the headline that made the whole thing famous.

The night after that, a crowd of thirty or forty people watches the creature from the bottom of a bluff on the lake road until it throws a tire at them. For the rest of that summer the lake road filled up every night with teenagers, families, deputies, and men with deer rifles, while the newspaper that was covering it was also covering the moon landing.

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip we leave the Nebraska Sandhills behind and come south into Texas for the Lake Worth Monster. We go through the documented record of July 1969, the Reichart sighting, Jack Harris and the tire on the bluff, the sixteen-inch tracks, the dead livestock, the police explanations, Sallie Ann Clarke’s book, Allen Plaster’s photograph, and the anonymous letter that showed up at the Fort Worth Nature Center in 2005.

Then we hear from people who were out there that summer. A sixteen-year-old girl in the back seat of an Impala who saw it leaning on a cottonwood. A young veteran with his grandfather’s rifle who caught it in a spotlight at the causeway. A newlywed couple fishing for catfish off a point south of the island. A fourteen-year-old boy who was close enough to the bluff to see its mouth.

From there we move east into the Trinity River bottoms, the Sabine, the Sam Houston National Forest, the Red River, and Caddo Lake for a run of Texas Sasquatch encounters, a game warden watching something dig for mussels across an oxbow, a nine-year-old on a screened porch watching something work her grandfather’s trotline, a dozer operator with something standing on his slash pile, a rancher whose horse wouldn’t move, and a kid in a kayak lost in the cypress at night.

Greer Island is a hiking trail inside the Fort Worth Nature Center now, and the bluff has a subdivision on top of it, and people still call the Nature Center every year or two about something they saw along the water.

If you’ve got a sighting or a stop you want added to the map, email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

Email Brian

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Leave Us A Voicemail

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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 on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, we're taking a break from the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip to open the listener mailbag—and this time, it's not Bigfoot lurking in the darkness. Six listeners. Six states. Six terrifying encounters with something that shouldn't exist.From the cornfields of Iowa to the remote hills of the Missouri Ozarks, listeners share chilling firsthand accounts of a mysterious, upright, wolf-like creature commonly known as the Dogman. 

Standing on two legs, possessing unnatural speed and strength, and displaying disturbingly human characteristics, these creatures left witnesses with experiences they still struggle to explain.

In Iowa, a farmer harvesting corn after midnight encounters a towering, dog-headed figure pacing his combine through the fields. In Michigan, a woman walking her beagle discovers something monstrous lurking beneath a suburban streetlight. 

On a deserted Kentucky back road, three teenagers come face-to-face with a creature so enormous it towers over their vehicle. A Pennsylvania bowhunter finds himself trapped high in a tree stand as something begins climbing toward him. 

In Wisconsin, a woman driving home from work is pursued by a creature capable of keeping pace with her truck at seventy miles per hour.

And deep in the Missouri Ozarks, a man recalls a terrifying childhood encounter involving his grandfather, missing livestock, and a mysterious predator that changed their family farm forever.

But what makes these Dogman sightings especially unsettling isn't just what the witnesses claim to have seen. It's what they say was left behind: deep claw marks, damaged steel, unexplained hair, and physical traces of encounters they can never forget.

Are these sightings evidence of an undiscovered predator, misidentified wildlife, or something far stranger hiding in America's forests and rural communities?

Turn down the lights, settle in, and prepare for six unforgettable Dogman encounter stories that will make you think twice about what might be watching from the darkness.

If you enjoy terrifying cryptid encounters, eyewitness Dogman sightings, Sasquatch stories, mysterious creatures, and unexplained wilderness encounters, subscribe to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories for more chilling tales from the places where the pavement ends and the unknown begins.

Email Brian

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Get Brian's Books

Leave Us A Voicemail

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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.

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

In this chilling installment of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian explores more than a century of Tennessee Wildman history, folklore, and frightening encounters.Two veteran hunters spot a towering figure outside a secluded rock shelter. A young couple camping along the Big South Fork discovers enormous footprints before coming face-to-face with something watching from across a creek.

A lone hunter awakens to a terrifying face staring through his cabin window. Deep in the Smokies, experienced hunting dogs abandon a trail in fear. And inside a remote McNairy County cave, a farmer carrying a lantern discovers something unimaginable waiting in the darkness.

Along the way, Brian investigates the historical accounts that helped create the Tennessee Wildman legend, including the mysterious Wild Man of Chilhowee, strange baboon-like creatures reported near South Pittsburg in 1934, and the infamous 1976 Flintville Monster sightings, which reportedly sent armed residents searching the forests of Lincoln County.

From forgotten newspaper reports to terrifying backwoods encounters, this episode explores one disturbing possibility: Has something been hiding in Tennessee's mountains, caves, and forests for more than 150 years?

Turn down the lights and join us for another unforgettable journey into the unknown on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

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.