Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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.

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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.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into New York and follows the western shore of Lake Champlain, home to one of America's oldest and most enduring lake-monster legends.

Across the water, Vermont may have the famous photograph, but Port Henry, New York has spent generations embracing Champ. A hand-painted sightings board records reports dating back more than two centuries, a highway sign welcomes visitors to the "Home of Champ," and every August the town celebrates a creature no one has ever managed to catch. The journey begins on the lake with strange encounters reported from a Port Henry dock, Crown Point, Westport, the Valcour channel, and the ferry landing at Essex. 

From there, Brian digs into the history behind the legend—from Indigenous traditions and Samuel de Champlain's often-misquoted 1609 account to Captain Crum's enormous creature, the famous 1873 sightings, P. T. Barnum's reward, Sheriff Nathan Mooney's report, and the controversial 1977 Sandra Mansi photograph.

The episode also follows researcher Joseph Zarzynski's decades of investigation, the unusual laws passed by New York and Vermont to protect Champ, mass sightings, sonar contacts, recordings, and videos that have kept the mystery alive into the modern era.

Then the road turns south to Whitehall, New York, where a series of dramatic August 1976 sightings involving local residents and police became one of the most famous Bigfoot cases in the state.

From there, the trip pushes into the Adirondacks, the hills around Fort Ann, Allegany State Park, the Catskills, and the Tug Hill Plateau for frightening Sasquatch encounters involving hunters, hikers, fishermen, loggers, and families who found themselves face-to-face with something they never expected to see in the New York wilderness.

Lake monsters, Bigfoot, and more than two centuries of unexplained encounters—this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip belongs to New York.

Have a sighting of your own? Send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

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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 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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com,

Email Brian

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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 stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip follows the High Road out of Chimayó and deep into the old Spanish villages of northern New Mexico, where generations have warned their children about what can happen when you linger at a crossroads after dark.

Here, the thing on the road is known as La Mala Hora—the Bad Hour. It doesn’t chase you. It doesn’t attack. It simply appears. Sometimes it looks like a woman dressed in black. Sometimes it is nothing more than a shapeless mass of darkness standing where two roads meet.

Witnesses say it can grow larger as you watch it, and according to the old stories, seeing it is not the danger. The danger is what comes afterward. By morning, someone close to you may be dead. This episode traces the legend from one of its earliest written accounts, folklorist Aurelio Espinosa’s story of a strange ball of wool that grew at a crossroads, through tales of owl-witches and mysterious fireballs in the Río Puerco Valley, and eventually into the Four Corners, where Highway 550 cuts across Diné country and outsiders have spent decades trying to put familiar names on things they may not fully understand.

Along the way, we revisit a series of unsettling encounters: a woman driving to the airport in 1978, a produce hauler traveling the grade south of Cuba, a girl on a bridge in Mora County, and a man on Highway 54 who struck a cow just two miles after driving straight through something that seemed to be standing in the road—but wasn’t there.

Then comes the story of an oil-field pumper who found herself being paced at 75 miles per hour by something running on four legs beside her vehicle. Something that eventually stood upright and looked directly through her window.

From there, the road climbs higher into the mountains for five Bigfoot encounters from a state that rarely gets the attention it deserves. 

An elk hunter in the Jemez Mountains who lowered his rifle rather than pull the trigger. 

A night-shift dispatcher on the road to Sandia Crest. A 17-year-old fishing the Middle Fork of the Gila. A woman alone at a family cabin outside Cloudcroft who discovered that her grandfather had seen the same creature from the same porch years earlier.

 And finally, a sheep camp above Mora in 1962, on the only night one herder could remember seeing his dogs abandon the darkness and move behind the people for protection.Crossroads, mountain roads, old villages, and things that appear where nothing should be standing.

New Mexico has stories buried in its backcountry that go far beyond the legends most people know.

If you have a sighting, a story, or a stop you think belongs on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip map, email Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything else at our website paranormalworldproductions.com.

Email Brian

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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.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip crosses the Delaware River into the most densely populated state in America, then disappears into nearly a million acres of Pine Barrens.

This stop digs into the full story of the Jersey Devil, beginning with the real Leeds family of colonial Burlington County. We trace the strange history of Daniel Leeds, a printer condemned by members of his own religious community, and his son Titan Leeds, who became the target of one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous public feuds.

From there, the story evolves into the legend of Mother Leeds and the birth of her infamous thirteenth child in 1735.Then comes January 1909, when Jersey Devil hysteria exploded across the region. Mysterious hoofprints appeared on rooftops and through snow from Bristol to Camden, witnesses reported a winged creature moving through the night, police allegedly opened fire in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, schools and businesses temporarily closed, and the Philadelphia Zoo offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of the creature.

But the legend didn’t end there. The episode follows later encounters deep inside the Pine Barrens, including a chicken farmer in 1960, a frightened couple staying at a remote deer cabin, and two campers along the Mullica River who claimed something followed them through the darkness.And the Jersey Devil may not be the only unexplained creature roaming these woods.

The second half of the episode turns to New Jersey’s lesser-known Bigfoot history, including listener accounts of towering, hair-covered figures seen from a cranberry bog dike, beneath a hunter’s tree stand, and during a solitary night along the Batona Trail.It’s a journey through colonial history, newspaper panic, generations of folklore, and modern eyewitness encounters from one of the strangest stretches of wilderness on the East Coast.

Email Brian

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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.