Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip leaves the highway behind and opens the mailbag for five listener encounters that have lingered for years—sometimes decades—after they happened.In Aroostook County, Maine, a seventeen-year-old working the 1959 potato harvest walks alone to the bottom of a frost-covered field and realizes something is already waiting in her row, crouched among the potatoes and feeding.

In the darkness of West Virginia’s New River Gorge, a railroad track inspector responds to a tripped slide fence and finds himself standing beside the rails as a ninety-four-car coal train roars past. On the other side of the tracks, something is standing there watching him.Before dawn in New Mexico’s Gila country, a wrangler rides into a frozen meadow to gather the camp horses.

Then something rises out of the frost directly in front of her. Deep inside the Boundary Waters, two college students watch a strange figure swim across a channel at dusk, crawl onto the far shore, and shake the water from its body like an animal. Hours later, with darkness surrounding their campsite, rocks begin splashing into the water nearby.

And in the tangled wilderness of the Big Thicket of East Texas, a man mowing a remote pipeline right-of-way stops his tractor when two figures step into the clearing ahead of him.

One of them is carrying the other on its back.

Five witnesses. Five places. Five encounters with things that should not have been there.
 

If you have an encounter of your own, send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

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 this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads into North Dakota and follows the Missouri River in search of one of the strangest creatures ever recorded in the folklore of the northern plains: the Miniwashitu.

More than a century ago, ethnologist Melvin Randolph Gilmore wrote of a mysterious being said to live beneath the Missouri. Covered in red hair like a buffalo, with a single eye, one horn, and a jagged backbone resembling the teeth of an enormous saw, the Miniwashitu was believed to swim upstream each spring as the river broke apart.

Witnesses were said to hear its terrible roar, see a strange redness trailing through the water, and know better than to look directly at it in daylight.According to the story Gilmore preserved, the last man who did was struck blind, lost his reason, and died soon afterward.

From that chilling piece of recorded folklore, Brian travels the Missouri and the reservoirs connected to it through five unsettling accounts involving something moving upstream beneath breaking ice. A nine-year-old girl watches a saw-toothed back rise from the river north of Washburn. A worker below Garrison Dam sees an enormous red-haired form tear through an ice jam. Teenagers on Standing Rock watch a red glow moving beneath frozen Lake Oahe. Kayakers encounter something impossibly large fighting the Missouri's current.

And an ice fisherman feels the frozen lake rise beneath his feet before hearing a roar coming through the ice.Then the episode leaves the water behind.North Dakota may be known for open prairie, but its river bottoms, wooded valleys, badlands, and scattered forests have produced another kind of report.

Brian heads into the Turtle Mountains, Pembina Gorge, Missouri River bottoms, Killdeer Mountains, and Sheyenne Valley for five accounts of enormous upright, hair-covered figures seen by hunters, riders, ranch hands, and families.

Along the way, Brian also reflects on the unexplained things he's encountered on his own property in the Appalachian woods—footprints, strange nighttime vocalizations, bent saplings, tree structures, and rock stacks—and why stories from people who encounter something impossible in familiar country hit differently once you've experienced something you can't easily explain yourself.

From something roaring beneath the Missouri River ice to massive figures watching from the timber, North Dakota may be one of the most unexpected—and unsettling—stops on the entire road trip.

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.

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip brings the journey home to North Carolina.

Brian and Dani have spent the last six years living on forty wooded acres in the foothills, and this episode begins on their own porch before traveling across the state and back to the winter of 1953–1954, when the small town of Bladenborowas gripped by fear.

Something was killing dogs.Using newspaper coverage from Wilmington, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Lumberton, Brian follows the story night by night: dogs found dead with almost no blood left in their bodies, terrified hounds refusing to follow the trail, eyewitness reports of a strange catlike creature, and the massive armed hunt that sent hundreds of people into the surrounding bay swamps searching for what the press had already dubbed the Beast of Bladenboro.

The episode also explores the theories that followed—from wolves and catamounts to bobcats and a mysterious dog called Big Boy—along with three chilling encounter accounts from the height of the panic.Then the story shifts from the Beast of Bladenboro to something even larger moving through the North Carolina woods.

Brian shares experiences from his own property before diving into Bigfoot encounters from Bladen Lakes, Badin Lake and the Uwharries, the South Mountains, Big Laurel, the Croatan National Forest, Wilkes County, Roan Mountain, and McDowell County.

From hounds hiding beneath a truck to towering figures seen beside roads, creeks, pastures, and mountain balds, this episode explores two of North Carolina’s most enduring mysteries: the creature that terrorized Bladenboro and the upright figures still reported across the state today.

Bladenboro still celebrates its strange history with Beast Fest every fall, but more than seventy years later, nobody can say for certain what was really stalking those streets.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.