Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

Tonight we pull off the road trip for one episode and hand the microphone to five people who wrote in. Five first names, five parts of the country, five different jobs, and not one of them looking to be believed.

A long-haul driver in northwest Montana counts fourteen deer on a March night and then watches something cross the westbound lane in three strides at three-forty in the morning, and goes back sixteen days later to walk the ditch in daylight.

A twenty-three-year-old fire lookout in northern California puts eight-power binoculars on a salvage cut for twelve minutes, takes a bearing off the firefinder while she's watching, hits it with a bullhorn, and writes the whole thing into a government logbook in pencil.

A seventy-eight-year-old Wisconsin dairyman describes an October evening in nineteen seventy-three when thirty-one Holsteins wouldn't come up the hill and his stock dog got under the porch steps, and what his father pulled off the top wire the next morning and put in the kitchen stove that same night. An emergency room tech in Arkansas gets forty seconds at forty-one yards from a climbing stand, then sits in that tree for two hours and forty minutes because the ground between her and her truck runs the wrong direction.

And a West Virginia line crew, three nights into an ice storm restoration, has four of five men looking up the right-of-way at the edge of the light while the generator runs.

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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.

On the morning of December 20, 1879, a Cree trapper named Swift Runner stood on a scaffold in Alberta and waited in the cold, because the hangman had forgotten the straps and had to go back for them. He had already confessed.

 He had already walked the police out to a clearing in the bush and shown them what was left of his family, and his explanation never changed across four months in custody. Something came into him that winter, and it made him hungry in a way that food could not answer. The men who tried him did not believe in that thing and the men who guarded him did, and both groups agreed on the physical facts, which were a camp 25 miles from a post that was issuing rations, a cooking pot, bones cracked open at the ends, and one man who walked out of those woods in the spring heavier than he went in.The road trip turns north in January, and this stop is different from the others.

The wendigo is not a cryptid with a gift shop. It comes out of the traditions of living Algonquian-speaking peoples, and in northern Minnesota that means the Anishinaabe, whose seven nations in this state are governments with citizens, not historical footnotes. So we spend a few honest minutes on what the old accounts actually describe before we go anywhere near a sighting, and it turns out to be almost the opposite of what has been sold to you.

There are no antlers. The deer skull came out of concept art in the last 20 years. What the tradition describes is something starving, with the skin drawn tight over the bones and the eyes sunk back in the sockets, that grows in exact proportion to whatever it eats so that the arithmetic never breaks in its favor and it is never one bite closer to full than it was when it started. And it is not only something out in the timber.

It is something a person can become.Then we go into the woods, and we stay there. Ray heard his own name spoken through the spruce four miles from the nearest road on a trapline nobody ran but him, and he answered out loud and was walking toward it before he had decided to. Marlys followed a child crying in a tamarack swamp and covered 60 yards without the sound ever coming one foot closer. Dale and Ron met in the middle of the timber a quarter mile apart, each one having heard the other call his name, and looked down at four inches of fresh snow holding nothing but their own two trails. 

Faye was 11 years old when her mother's voice started calling her in from the yard of a cabin on the Bigfork River, and the fear did not arrive until about 30 years later. Wayne opened the door of a fish house on the ice at two in the morning after somebody outside politely said come here, and found open snow under a moon in every direction. Lonnie lay in a wheelhouse north of Deer River and counted the footsteps of whatever walked past him at 40 feet, and walked the interval out himself at first light.

Delores was taught as a small child on the Red Lake reservation not to look at the treeline, not to run, to hold her pace, and to say out loud to an adult what had happened, and the same instruction turns up from Manitoba to Michigan in communities that never compared notes. Gordon watched something stand past his woodpile at 35 yards in the gray before deer season light, went in for a rifle, and signed his share of that hunting camp over to his brother's boys without ever explaining why.

Kenny came through the door eight seconds behind his brother into an empty yard with fresh snow and no track under the window, and they sold the shack four years later. Verna gave up a bedroom after three February nights of something dragging along the outside wall at waist height, 20 seconds down and 20 seconds back, with a full minute of pause in between. 

Orval watched something cross a burn scar for two minutes through binoculars from a staffed fire tower in the Superior, called it in on the radio, and would not answer when the man on the other end asked him what it was.Sam and Wes heard a scream in the Boundary Waters at two in the morning that ran longer than a lung should allow and never broke for breath, and then heard it again from a different position. Andrea's whole body turned before her mind did on a February trail outside Ely, and she still snowshoes and no longer does that trail alone.

Tara has worked out how fast something would have to move to cover the ground it covered in 90 seconds, and she does not say the number out loud.The turn to sasquatch is a real one and the episode explains it rather than assuming it, because Anishinaabe tradition carries a separate word for the hairy man of the woods and he is not made by cannibalism and does not eat anybody. 

That opens up a Minnesota record almost nobody outside the state discusses. Remer in Cass County, where the town's founder described tracks much bigger than a man's and sunk deep into the earth, where the old accounts talk about whole families of them and a stretch of Big Sand Lake that people left alone out of courtesy, and where a trail camera caught something in October 2009. The Vergas Trails in Otter Tail County and the Hairy Man, running since the late 1960s, including two 12-year-old cousins on a snowmobile in 1972.

A researcher out of Moorhead who found nine published Minnesota sightings when he started looking and spent his life demonstrating how badly incomplete that number was. Tracks crossing a frozen lake in a single line with a stride over four feet. A bear bait barrel worked 40 yards off its tree with the chain still whole. A deer wedged nine feet up a maple with no claw marks on the bark and no blood in the leaves underneath.

And the report this state produces more than any other, which is not a monster standing in a road at all, but a line of tracks that came out of the treeline, crossed a yard, stopped 10 feet from the back window, and turned around, left for a woman who had been standing at that sink in the night with the kitchen light on.

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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.

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.

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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.

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. 

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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.

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

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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.