Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip crosses Spooner Summit and drops down to the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe, the second-deepest lake in the United States, to investigate one of the West’s most enduring lake monster legends: Tahoe Tessie.For generations, people have reported seeing long, dark shapes moving through Tahoe’s famously cold, deep water.

We look at the geography of the lake, its extreme depth, and the conditions that have helped fuel stories of something large living below the surface.

Along the way, we examine recorded Washoe traditions connected to Cave Rock, the 1897 newspaper account attributed to I. C. Coggin, and the surge of reports during the 1980s involving Reno police officers, hikers, an optician, and a local television station owner. 

We also dig into the University of California, Davis seminar that considered whether an unusually large sturgeon could explain some of the sightings, and separate fact from one of Tahoe Tessie’s most repeated legends: the supposed Jacques Cousteau expedition that never actually happened.Then the stories move from the archives to the water itself.

Listeners describe seeing a long shape passing beneath the clear water near Sand Harbor, feeling something massive roll beneath them while diving along the wall at Cave Rock, watching three distinct humps move across the north end of the lake against the chop, and having something large surface alongside a boat during a nighttime mackinaw fishing trip off Crystal Bay.

From Lake Tahoe, the road climbs into the Carson Range and continues east toward the Ruby Mountains for five Nevada Bigfoot encounters. The reports take us to Marlette Lake, the Mount Rose Highway during a storm, the aspen groves near Spooner Summit, a roadside pullout on Kingsbury Grade, and a remote talus slope above Lamoille Canyon.

If you’ve had a cryptid encounter, strange sighting, or unexplained experience you’d like to share for a future episode, send it to 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.

This week we pull off the road for one episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip picks back up next time, but a stack of emails has been building from listeners who saw something they still can't explain, and five of them deserved a full hour.

A rancher in the Owyhee desert of Idaho comes over a rise in the middle of an August afternoon and finds something standing in his stock tank, drinking with both hands.

A nurse in the Ouachita National Forest of Arkansas, driving home from a night shift, watches something cross the road in two steps and climb a twelve-foot clay bank the way a person would, and she sees the bottoms of its feet.

 A snowmobiler in Michigan's Upper Peninsula stops in a cedar swamp at ten below and realizes the stump he's looking at has snow on its shoulders and is breathing. A daughter and her father, picking chanterelles in the Oregon Coast Range, come to the edge of a clearcut and find something sitting on a slash pile, looking out at the valley.

And a hog hunter on a dead-end channel off the Ocmulgee River in Georgia swings his spotlight onto a sow at the water's edge and sees the hand that's holding her there.Five states, five decades, five people who never met and never asked to be believed.

These are visual sightings only, told the way they were sent in, first names only, with what each person did afterward and what's still sitting in a drawer or on a laptop or on a tupelo trunk in a river bottom.

If you've had an encounter of your own, send it straight to Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Use your first name or none at all.

And if this episode was worth your hour, pass it along to your family, a friend, or the guy at work who's always bringing this stuff up at lunch. That's how the show grows.

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 road trip leaves the timber and runs into the Nebraska Sandhills, where there's nothing to hide behind for 100 miles and the only thing you can't see into is the water.

A few miles southeast of Hay Springs sits a 50-acre lake the state renamed Walgren Lake decades ago and that nobody local has ever stopped calling Alkali Lake. In the early 1920s it produced one of the strangest monster stories in American newspapers, a 40-foot alligator-shaped animal with a single horn and a smell that could turn a man's stomach, reported in the Omaha World-Herald in 1923 under the initials J.A. Johnson and carried from there to Chicago, New York, and by some accounts London. 

Brian walks through the Hay Springs News items that started it, the wire-service telling that made it famous, and the Chadron newspaperman John G. Maher (1859–1939), a man Nebraska historians remember as the state's most accomplished hoaxer, whose fingerprints a lot of people see on the whole affair.

Then the episode goes to the people who lived on the lake and never went near a reporter, from a homesteader's daughter who found a calf torn up on the shore in 1922, to a county road worker on the dam in 1954, to a couple bank fishing for bullheads in 1979, a grain hauler on a wet road at midnight in 1986, two brothers on the ice in 2001, and a woman whose kayak came to a stop over 8 feet of water in 2014.

 From there the trip follows the rivers, because Nebraska's woods run in lines, and the second half of the episode is given over to people who saw something upright in the Pine Ridge in 1994, along the Niobrara in 2006, in the Missouri bottoms near Ponca in 1988, on the Dismal River below the hand-planted forest at Halsey in 1971, and on the frozen Platte south of Omaha in 2003.

A deer hunter on a rock, a woman driving home from her sister's, a farm wife waiting with supper, a 12-year-old with a fishing pole, and a rural mail carrier who still parks where he parked that day.

 If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything we do at 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.

Part Five of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two begins with the mistake the clans always knew was coming. Summer settles over the forest and brings people with it. More hikers, more campers, more cameras scanning the ridgelines for a postcard moment to carry home.

The sasquatch do what they've always done when the world crowds in, pulling back into the heavy timber, moving only in the gray hours, eating less and resting less and watching more.

But discipline can only stretch so far, and out in a dense stretch of old growth four miles from the nearest trail, a wildlife photographer named David Reeves is about to point his lens at something no magazine will ever publish.

David isn't a weekend tourist. He's patient, serious, and good enough at reading the backcountry to go exactly where he shouldn't. That's the problem. One glimpse, one held breath, and suddenly the secret three years of caution were meant to protect is sitting exposed in the viewfinder of a man who knows what he's looking at.

What follows tests everything Koda and the clans have built. A single photograph in the wrong hands could bring the whole outside world down on them, and the choices the sasquatch make in the hours after that encounter carry a weight none of the earlier fights ever did.

This is the danger the clans have always feared most, and it doesn't come with claws or howls. It comes with a camera.

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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.

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.

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.