Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

In March of 1934, the crew of the lightship Columbia and the supply tender Rose watched something come up out of the water near the mouth of the Columbia River. The men said it was about 40 feet long with an 8-foot neck, and the tender's captain told the Salem Capital Journal it opened its mouth and gaped at the lightship. The crew wanted to lower a boat and go after it, and the officers told them no.

Oregon would eventually give it a name, Colossal Claude.

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads to the Oregon coast and the Columbia River Bar, the stretch of water sailors call the Graveyard of the Pacific. 

The episode follows the sea serpent through the newspaper record, from the 1934 lightship sighting to Captain Charles Graham of the troller Viv in 1937, the couple who chased a 55-foot animal down the coast highway from Devil's Churn to Heceta Head, and Captain Chris Anderson of the halibut schooner Argo, who said in 1939 that it passed within 10 feet of his boat and ate a 20-pound halibut off his line.

Along the way there's the crowd of more than 30 people at Nelscott, the 1,000-pound carcass called Old Hairy that washed up at Delake in 1950, and Marvin the Monster, filmed by Shell Oil cameras in 1963.You'll also hear from the people who never called a reporter: a salmon troller crossing the bar in 1951, an assistant keeper on Tillamook Rock, a family at the Neahkahnie Mountain viewpoint, a crabber off Clatsop Spit who had something follow his boat for 40 minutes, and a fisherman on the South Jetty in 2012.Then the road turns inland.

Nearly half of Oregon is forest, and the reports of something upright in that timber go back to the wild man of the Sixes mining district in 1904.

Brian covers the 1971 sightings at The Dalles, where a music teacher put a rifle scope on a creature in his headlights and couldn't pull the trigger, along with Peter Byrne's Bigfoot Information Center and the Bigfoot trap that still stands in the Siskiyous. 

The episode closes with Sasquatch encounters from the Tillamook State Forest, the Clackamas River, the North Umpqua, Olallie Lake and Bear Camp Road.

If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, email 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.

Every lake in this episode was somebody's pasture once. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian King-Sharp drives into Oklahoma, where the three lakes said to hide the Oklahoma Octopus were all built by the government inside living memory.

Lake Tenkiller, Lake Thunderbird, and Oologah Lake are reservoirs, not natural water, and under every one of them are drowned roads, standing timber, fence lines, and the foundations of houses that were dry ground three generations ago. That's the ground this legend grew on, and it's why this is a don't-swim-after-dark episode.

The stories start on the Fourth of July, 1978, with a seventeen-year-old girl floating on her back off a houseboat on Tenkiller when something wraps her leg from ankle to knee and pulls her under. From there the episode follows a bass fisherman in the drowned timber at Thunderbird who watched an arm feel its way around a dead oak, a scuba diver who cut himself loose from something in the old river channel at thirty-five feet and came up with sucker marks pressed into his wetsuit, and a farm kid on Oologah who saw two arms come over the tops of his family's flooded fence posts and pull the wire down.

Between the encounters, Brian traces the real paper trail behind the legend, which is thinner and stranger than the television version. It starts with a June 2, 1982 item in the Daily Oklahoman about two boys and a dead saltwater octopus found in the Verdigris River near Lock and Dam 18 on the barge canal, runs through a 1987 article by Kiowa writer Russell Bates about a horse-sized, reddish-brown creature said to drag people into sandstone caverns, and picks up again in 2007 with two cryptid books that named the three lakes without citing a source, a reporter at the Oklahoma Gazette who found that no park manager or diver on those lakes had ever heard of the thing, and Loren Coleman's guess that it all began with a planted carcass.

Then in January 2009 Animal Planet's Lost Tapes turned it into a monster with a name. Along the way the episode looks at why man-made lakes breed this kind of story, from the cold water sitting in the old channel to the drownings that happen every summer in water nobody can see into.

The second half leaves the water for the timber. It begins with the Noxie Monster of September 1975, when farmer Kenneth Tosh, Sheriff Robert Donald, researcher Hayden Hewes, and two dozen witnesses in Nowata County put a seven-foot hairy creature on the wire services and a Tulsa Tribune artist's drawing in front of the whole country.

Then come the encounters that never made a newspaper: a noodler chest-deep in the Verdigris below Oologah dam watching something on the gravel bar bite the head off a fish, a deer hunter above a spring in the Kiamichi Mountains a few miles from where the Honobia Bigfoot Festival now stands, a nurse stopped on Highway 82 in the Cookson Hills above Tenkiller at 12:14 in the morning with a gray figure shading its eyes from her headlights, and a woman on a rock at Clear Bay on Lake Thunderbird who watched something wade out of the blackjack oak at dusk and come back with a fish held against its chest.

The episode also covers the Siege at Honobia in 2000, the founding of the Honobia Bigfoot Festival in 2005, and how a valley in the Choctaw Nation turned its stories into college scholarships.

If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

Until the next stop, stay out of the water after dark, and keep your eyes on the tree line.

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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, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories pulls off the road for a special listener mailbag episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is taking a brief pause while Brian opens the inbox and shares six disturbing encounters sent in from six different states—each from someone who spent years wondering whether anyone would believe what they saw.

In the Washington Cascades, Nathan and his cousin Pete watch something enormous cross a clearcut on two legs in October 2015. Two nights later, it appears again at the edge of their firelight. But what they discover while driving out of the mountains is enough to make one of them swear off the woods for good.

In Michigan, Kelsey finishes a late bar shift in January 2022 and begins an eighteen-mile drive through state forest. Something running upright keeps pace with her truck along the tree line at nearly fifty miles an hour. She thinks she finally loses it—until she reaches home and sees something waiting near her mailbox.

In northern Maine, veteran trapper Ray is checking a brook he has worked for thirty years when he hears his wife calling his name from downstream. The problem is that she is twenty miles away. Then Ray sees what is standing in the alders—and realizes its mouth never moves when it speaks.

In North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, Trisha encounters what at first appears to be a deer. Then it looks directly at her with both eyes, begins moving in ways no deer should, and eventually rises onto its hind legs miles deeper into the trail.

In south Georgia, Marcus is sitting in a ladder stand when he spots a pale, hairless figure hanging by its arms from a longleaf pine forty yards away. Moments later, it begins moving through the canopy without ever touching the ground.

And along Idaho’s Lochsa River, Jeff drives Highway 12 late at night and passes the same walking figure on the shoulder six separate times. Each time it appears closer to the road. His dash cam should have captured everything—but when he reviews the footage, the highway is empty.

If you’ve had an encounter of your own, send it to 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 week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into Loveland, Ohio, a quiet river town northeast of Cincinnati with one of the strangest creature legends in America.

In March 1972, Loveland police officer Ray Shockey was patrolling an icy stretch of Riverside Drive near the old Totes factory when he spotted something crouched in the road. According to his account, the creature stood upright, looked directly at him, and moved over the guardrail toward the Little Miami River. 

Two weeks later, fellow officer Mark Matthews reported his own encounter on the same road and fired his revolver at what he saw. Decades later, Matthews would publicly offer a very different explanation for that night. But the Loveland Frog story may go back even further. The episode revisits a 1955 account recorded by investigator Leonard Stringfield, in which witness Robert Hunnicutt described three strange gray figures near a bridge, including one allegedly holding a wand-like object that gave off sparks. 

Then, in 2016, a photograph taken during the Pokémon Go craze pushed the Loveland Frog back into the national spotlight and once again raised the question of what people have really been seeing along the river.

Brian also digs into lesser-known local reports involving a canoe livery, a late-night drive home, and a catfishing spot near Nisbet Park before heading east into the hills of Appalachian Ohio.

From there, the road leads into some of the state’s best-known Bigfoot country, including the 1978 Minerva Monster case, as well as reported Grassman encounters from East Fork, Vinton County, Wayne National Forest, Salt Fork State Park, Noble County, Shawnee State Forest, and Zaleski State Forest.

From frogmen along the Little Miami to massive hairy figures in the Appalachian foothills, Ohio proves to be one of the strangest stops yet on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip.

If you have an encounter or a stop Brian should add to the map, email 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 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.