Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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.

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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 road trip crosses into Massachusetts, and the Bay State delivers two of the strangest files in the entire eastern catalog.

It starts on a dark stretch of Farm Street in Dover in April of 1977, where a seventeen-year-old named Bill Bartlett watched something creep along a stone wall that no one has ever explained, a spindly, hairless creature with a huge watermelon head and glowing eyes.

Within twenty-six hours it was seen twice more by three other teenagers who had never compared notes, and then it vanished forever, leaving behind matching sketches, a police chief who vouched for every witness, and a case so stubborn it made a small New England town famous on the other side of the world. 

From there the episode heads forty miles south, where the manicured suburbs give way to the Hockomock Swamp, five thousand flooded acres the Wampanoag named the place where spirits dwell, and where the reports never stopped. An armed police search in 1970, a fur trapper stalked from the bank of a black waterway, Joseph DeAndrade's famous Clay Banks sighting, a kayaker who watched something rise out of a crouch on the Town River, footfalls booming across the frozen ice of Lake Nippenicket, and a farmer whose family spent sixty years sharing a fence line with something that never once introduced itself.

One state, two monsters, and a swamp with a middle no one has ever reached.

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.

Volume Two of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey begins here, and it opens on the other side of the fight.A Dog man called Vorn moves his starving pack south out of the picked-over northern hunting grounds and straight into territory the sasquatch clans have held for generations.

The moment those two worlds catch each other's scent, the countdown starts.Three years have passed since the clans fled the Olympic Peninsula. Three years since Adanowa was taken and everything Koda knew came apart.

Now a scout named Raksha has vanished into the dark, with nothing left behind but blood and a stranger's smell.In this first stretch you'll meet both sides of the coming war, the pack and the clans alike, and watch Kabota gamble on words over teeth by sending an envoy to a creature who only respects strength. You already know how a gamble like that tends to end.

What you don't yet know is who pays for it.This is the world Koda came up in, changed and crowded and closing in, and it's only going to get darker from here.

Settle in, because we've got a long road ahead, and it starts with first blood.

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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 back on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, and tonight we're pulling into Maryland, home of one of the most famous roadside monsters in America. In November of 1971, a family in Old Bowie went searching for a missing puppy named Ginger and found her decapitated near the railroad tracks off Fletchertown Road.

Within weeks, a small-town newspaper headline reading "Residents Fear Goatman Lives" had grown into Washington Post coverage of a six-foot hairy creature walking upright through the Prince George's County woods, and the Maryland Goatman was born. In this episode, I trace the legend all the way back to its documented beginnings, from a 1971 college folklore project and the mad-scientist rumors surrounding the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center to the goat herder, the hermit, and the axe-wielding thing said to stalk lovers' lanes and Crybaby Bridge.

I walk through the classic encounters the way the county has told them for fifty years, hooves on the blacktop behind a parked car, an axe blade in a door panel, screams over the campsites, and then I put on my old badge and show you what the evidence actually supports. From there the road trip goes deeper into Maryland's monster file, because the witnesses in 1971 never described a goat at all.

They described a Bigfoot. We cover the Dwayyo attack outside Gambrill State Park in 1965, the Sykesville Monster flap of 1973 with its thirteen-inch footprint cast and Baltimore Zoo examination, a fisherman's daylight sighting on the Patapsco in 1981, the Harewood Park Monster, the Eastern Shore reports, and the giant that construction crews reported at the Arundel Mills site in 2000. It's a story about dark roads, headlights, bored teenagers, freight trains, and the one small casualty at the bottom of it all, and by the end you'll know exactly where the folklore stops and where the genuine mystery in the Maryland woods begins.

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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.