Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

Montana is the only stop on this road trip where the animal is sitting in a display case. In 1886, in the Madison River Valley, a settler named Israel Ammon Hutchins killed something that had been coming into ranch yards after geese and dogs across fifteen miles of valley.

He gave the carcass to a grocer named Joseph Sherwood over at Henry Lake, Idaho, who mounted it, called it the Ringdocus for reasons nobody has ever explained, and put it in his store. It sat there into the 1980s and then it vanished. For two decades the only proof it had ever existed was a black-and-white photograph in a naturalist's 1977 autobiography. In 2007 a descendant named Jack Kirby tracked it to a storage room at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello and brought it home to Ennis, and before it went on display he drove it to the cemetery and parked it next to the old man's grave. It's still there, four feet long, dark, high in the shoulder and low in the hip, with the ghost of stripes on its sides. Nobody has ever run its DNA.

This episode covers where the name Shunka Warak'in actually comes from and why it doesn't belong to Montana at all, what Lance Foster told Loren Coleman in 1995, and what an earlier anthropologist recorded about the same word. It covers what a dog was worth on the northern plains and on a homestead, and why an animal that carries off dogs earns its own name. It covers the forty-year campaign that emptied Montana of wolves, including the 1905 state law that required the veterinarian to infect wolves and coyotes with mange and turn them loose, and what it does to a landscape when the main predator is removed and then put back.

And it covers the two modern cases everybody brings up, the Creature of McCone County that killed roughly 120 head of livestock in 2005 and 2006 before Wildlife Services shot it from an aircraft, and the strange short-legged animal a rancher killed near Denton in 2018 that had the whole country convinced for about a month.Then come the letters. Dale, losing three dogs in five weeks out of a lit yard and finding a collar in a hayfield the following spring. Jenny, walking through a sheep band counting the same wound on the same side of every animal.

Cal, watching one through a rifle scope for forty seconds and not being able to make himself shoot until it turned to leave. Owen, nineteen years old, finding a covered calf against a fence and then meeting the thing on a two-track at eighty yards. Marla, standing between her children and the kitchen door while something screamed in the cottonwoods a week after her dog died inside a closed gate. And Wendell, who backed a gravel truck up in the dark to put his headlights on a track line.

The second half of the episode changes animals entirely and moves into Montana's Sasquatch country, the Bitterroots and the Bob Marshall and the Yaak, with accounts from an elk hunter who hiked eleven miles out in the dark, a firewood cutter who came back three weeks later and found three lodgepoles twisted off above head height, a woman who spent eleven nights sleeping in a windowless hallway, and a thirty-year outfitter who counted eleven barefoot impressions in fresh snow and never told a single client.

 It also covers what happened on U.S. Highway 93 south of Kalispell on August 26, 2012, and the two teenage girls who have been carrying it ever since.

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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.

We're pulling off the road again. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is still running state by state, but the mailbag keeps filling up with letters that don't have a state on them at all, so this week we're taking the detour overseas.

 Five encounters, five countries, all of them sent in by listeners, all of them set in places you can pull up on a map before you go to bed tonight.In England, a night shift warehouse worker named Neil walks his lurcher across Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, 26 square miles of pine plantation and heathland sitting in the middle of the country, laid over the buried remains of two First World War training camps.

 He has a two-note whistle he uses for the dog. In October something on the Chase starts using it back, right down to the crack in the middle of it. What follows includes a valley walk he now calls the stupidest decision of his life, a fallow deer wedged in the fork of a Scots pine at head height, and a single toed impression in the mud that he never cast and never photographed.In central China, a 26-year-old field assistant named Lin is running primate transects in the Shennongjia Forestry District in Hubei Province, the same mountains the Chinese Academy of Sciences flooded with more than 100 people in 1977 after a carload of officials reported a large reddish creature in their headlights in 1976.

Lin gets a rock thrown at her, a smell she compares to vinegar and wet fur, and a look at something standing in arrow bamboo 20 meters off the trail. Then something spends a good part of the night pushing on the shutters of her field station, and a camera trap 400 meters down the mountain fires 11 times between one and two in the morning with every single frame coming back black.In Queensland, Australia, a fencing contractor named Wade is camped at Booloumba Creek in the Conondale Range when a rock lands in his fire and a second one hits the roof of his truck. 

What comes off the slope after that scares every dog along the creek quiet. Fourteen months later, running a boundary fence near Jimna, his working dogs quit on him, he finds prints in creek clay with a stride of over a meter and a half, and something puts its weight on the side of his truck at two in the morning while he's lying in the tray.

He still has what he pulled off the top wire of that fence, in a coffee tin, in his shed.

In southern Siberia, a miner named Pavel rides a snowmobile up the Mrassu River in February to check his late uncle's hunting hut in Mountain Shoria, near Tashtagol. He crosses a line of tracks that covers 400 meters of open river ice in a perfectly even stride, finds a young elk cached uphill with its neck broken and almost nothing eaten, and then spends a night listening to something scatter his woodpile, stand over his stovepipe, and knock three times on his door.

He leaves bread on a stump now, every night he stays there, and he'll tell you he doesn't believe it does anything. And in eastern Bhutan, a trekking guide named Sonam takes a group through Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary between the villages of Merak and Sakteng, a protected area established in 2003 that lists the migoi in its founding purpose alongside the snow leopard and the red panda. 

He gets whistling above camp after two in the morning, a client who wakes to something standing outside her tent, a herder's mastiff that has to be dragged out from under a hut, and an argument in the mud with an older Brokpa man about which direction a set of footprints was actually facing.

A week later a healthy female yak turns up 30 meters above where she'd been grazing, on a shelf you have to scramble to reach, neck broken, untouched.

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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 Four of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two takes the alliance out of the meeting ground and into the dark, where good intentions stop counting for much and skill is the only thing that keeps you alive. It opens with Eli's first real night patrol, and the forest is not kind to him.

Where Koda moves through the black between the trees like water around stone, Eli crashes through it like a wounded elk, learning the hard way that eyes are almost useless out there and that everything he thought he knew about the woods was daylight knowledge.

Koda becomes his teacher, and the lessons are patient but unforgiving, because both of them understand that a single mistake in the wrong moment could expose everything they've built. This is where the fragile alliance stops being an idea and starts becoming real work.

The humans have to earn their place, prove they can be an asset instead of a liability, and every close call out in the dark is a test of whether two species can truly watch each other's backs.

But the forest holds more than lessons, and the deeper Koda and Eli push into the night, the clearer it becomes that neither the Dogmen nor the humans at the tree line have gone anywhere. The quiet is only ever borrowed, and the price of protecting something wild keeps climbing.

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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.

In July of 1972, in the river town of Louisiana, Missouri, two little boys were playing in their backyard at the foot of Marzolf Hill when their older sister heard them start screaming.

 Fifteen-year-old Doris Harrison went to the bathroom window and saw something standing by a tree, six or seven feet tall, covered in black hair, with no face she could make out and something dead tucked under its arm. The town laughed at those kids for about a day and a half.

Then a Pentecostal congregation of roughly fifty people heard something come down off that hill, and nobody in Pike County thought it was funny for the rest of the month.This is stop number twenty-five on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the halfway point, and it's the story of Momo, the Missouri Monster.

We walk through the whole flap as it actually happened, from the picnic encounter on Highway 79 in 1971 to the Harrison sighting on July 11, 1972, to Edgar Harrison hanging bait on a tree behind his own house and sitting out in the dark waiting for whatever took his children's afternoon away from them. We cover the sick dog, the smell that runs through every account like a thread, the church meeting on the night of July 14, and Police Chief Shelby Ward putting two dozen armed men across Marzolf Hill three times and finding nothing at all.

We get into the plaster casts, the three-toed track that a zoo director in Oklahoma City looked at and called a hoax, and the out-of-state investigators who camped in a family's backyard and left with a theory about flying objects that did more damage to this case than any skeptic ever managed. And we talk about what happens to a town when the newspapers show up, name your monster for you, and turn one bad July into a festival.

The second half of the episode leaves Momo behind and gets into Missouri Sasquatch country, because strip the nickname and the novelty record off the Harrison case and what's left is an ordinary Sasquatch report. Missouri has produced roughly 147 catalogued encounters and has never stopped generating them.

We cover a farmer near Bowling Green who came around a creek bend on a four-wheeler and found something squatting in the water thirty feet in front of him, the ongoing reports out of Cuivre River State Park and Bowling Green Lake, the night four young men sat in a Jeep near Smithville Lake and listened to the woods go quieter than any of them had ever heard, and the men out of southeast Missouri who put their names to what they saw in the Mark Twain National Forest country.

Then we turn it over to the mail. Jenny was seven years old and bringing laundry off the line when the sheet in front of her moved the wrong way. Ray watched something cross a river road in front of his headlights and drove eleven miles out of his way for a year afterward without telling his wife why. Marla found tracks along a fence line and watched her husband go get a shovel and bury them.

Dean sat in a deer stand and listened to the silence travel toward him. Colleen's three children came across the yard at a dead run, and the middle one said the thing at the tree line had no face, which is exactly what a fifteen-year-old girl told a newspaper thirty years before.

And Wes put a light on something standing chest deep in the Mississippi at forty feet, and it didn't run.

The kids saw it first. Nobody ever believes the kids.

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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.

We're pulling off the highway on this one. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip runs state by state, but the reports don't arrive that way, and this episode is for the five that have been sitting in the folder waiting for a place to land. Four decades, five states, and no connection between any of them except that the people involved all ended up carrying something they couldn't put down.

We start in the North Carolina mountains in the summer of 1985, where an eighteen-year-old alone in his mother's house spent three nights with a .357 in his lap. Something covered the window in his front door from top to bottom, worked the doorknob, screamed back when he threatened it, and knocked the porch off its pillars. By the third night it was breathing through his bedroom screen from less than two feet away, and it took a load of buckshot from his grandfather to end it.

From there we head to West Virginia, where a young man fishing a secluded spot before sunrise heard rocks landing in the water, watched an upright canine push the foliage apart, and fired five rounds on a trail while it circled around to get ahead of him. Then a quick stop in Calvert County, Maryland, in July of 1992, where a sixteen-year-old in the back seat of his family's car locked eyes with something seven feet tall standing braced between two trees with both arms spread, and spent the next thirty years being told he made it up.

The last two are Sasquatch.

 In the Kiamichi country of southeastern Oklahoma, a welder named Ray sat a ladder stand through rock clacking and two wood knocks before something walked across a creek bottom on two legs in gray light, and he went back the next day with flagging tape and a tape measure to find out how tall it really was.

And on an Ozark river in July of 1998, two brothers running a trotline heard a two-beat wading sound coming downstream at midnight, put a spotlight on it at forty yards, and came back at daylight with their father to find a fifteen-and-three-quarter-inch track with no claw marks in it and a fifty-two-inch stride between the prints. What they poured that afternoon sat in a shed for twenty-two years. Every one of these five people paid something for telling it. That's the part I keep coming back to, and it's the reason the offer at the end of this episode stays open.

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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.