Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This week the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into McCall, Idaho, a logging-town-turned-resort wrapped around the south shore of Payette Lake, where the water drops three hundred and ninety-two feet into glacier-cut cold and the locals have been seeing something long move beneath the surface since before the town had paved roads.

We walk through the real history of Sharlie, from the railroad workers in nineteen twenty who watched a floating log come to life, to the summer of nineteen forty-four when thirty witnesses and a write-up in Time magazine turned "Slimy Slim" into an international story, to Dr. Taylor and his twenty fellow witnesses in nineteen forty-six, the nineteen fifty-four naming contest that gave her the name Sharlie, and the sightings that have trickled in right up to a piece of video in twenty twenty-three.

Then we get to the encounters that never made the papers: a boater chased across open water by a shape longer than his nineteen-foot hull, a couple lifted by a motorboat wake on a flat lake with no boat in sight, and a teenager who felt the whole lake shift under his body in deep water and ran out of it unable to speak. We give the giant-sturgeon explanation an honest hearing, and we explain where it holds up and where it doesn't.

And because the timber around Payette Lake is some of the most active Sasquatch country on the continent, we bring the woods into it too, from the goat hunters who watched a nine-foot figure boulder-hop up a cliff in nineteen seventy-three, to the federal officer who spotted two of them across the river while paddleboarding in twenty twenty-four, to the ten teenagers stalked and circled over a Memorial Day weekend in twenty twenty-six.

McCall sits in the seam between two kinds of deep, the cold water and the dark forest, and both of them have been quietly terrifying level-headed people for a hundred years. Pour something, lock the door, and come up into the high country with us.

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 fifty-state road trip leaves the asphalt behind for the first time and boards a plane bound for Honolulu, because the next stop sits twenty-five hundred miles out in the Pacific where the Trailhunter can't follow. Hawaii doesn't fit the usual formula of trail cameras and footprint casts, and this episode says so up front. The Menehune and the Night Marchers aren't cryptids in the Bigfoot sense.

They come out of a living Hawaiian religious and cultural tradition that was already ancient when Captain Cook arrived in seventeen seventy-eight, and for many island families they aren't folklore at all but family history. So the field-researcher hat comes off and the guest hat goes on, and the episode treats these islands the way a guest should.

he first half belongs to the Menehune, the small people of the valleys. We stand above the Alekoko Fishpond on Kauai, where a chief and his sister were turned to stone for spying on a night's construction they were forbidden to watch, and we walk the Menehune Ditch at Waimea, the cut-and-dressed stonework that genuinely puzzles archaeologists because it doesn't match anything else in the islands.

From there we weigh the anthropology honestly, including the Tahitian word manahune for a landless commoner and the theory that the legend preserves the memory of a displaced first-wave people pushed into the back valleys, alongside the competing view that the magical little-people version flowered after European contact. The file closes with the detail that stays with you: the eighteen-twenties census of Kauai that reportedly recorded sixty-five people in Wainiha Valley under the single word Menehune.

The second half turns to the huaka'i po, the Night Marchers, and the rules that island families hand down like instructions about riptides. The processions of the warrior dead follow the old paths and do not go around what gets built across them, which is why some homes were designed with an open breezeway from mountain side to ocean side.

If you hear the drums, you do not look, you get off the path and lie face down, and if your own blood marches in that column, a voice may call out Na'u — mine — and let you live. Six accounts carry the weight: forty schoolchildren at Waimea watching small powerful figures play in the trees in broad daylight; a nineteen-fifties road crew whose equipment refused to run until the cut was moved; two boys fishing Ka'ena Point who went down on the sand while a torchlit procession passed close enough to make the grains jump; a young couple stalled on the Old Pali Road, ground a battle in seventeen ninety-five turned into a mass grave that surfaced again as eight hundred skulls during road construction in eighteen ninety-eight; a Waianae grandmother who stood and chanted her family's names while the marchers came through the house; and a United States Army squad that lay face down in their own training area on the orders of a local platoon sergeant.

The episode lands on two stories with documentation behind them. Interstate H-three, roughly thirty-seven years and one point three billion dollars to push sixteen miles through Halawa Valley over disputed heiau sites, built only after an act of Congress exempted it from the preservation laws that govern every other road in America. And Honokahua on Maui, where excavation for a luxury hotel uncovered close to a thousand ancient burials, where the Hawaiian community rose up until the resort was moved inland and the ancestors reinterred, and where the outrage produced the burial-protection laws that govern every construction project in the state today.

The throughline holds both traditions together: some places don't want to be disturbed, and the islands aren't hostile so much as owned. Visit as a guest, stay on the trail, leave the stones where they sit, and if you ever hear a drum in the dark where no drum should be, you know the procedure.

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're pulling off the road. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip takes a short break so I can open the inbox and share five Sasquatch encounters sent to me by listeners from five different states, spanning more than twenty-five years.

A deer hunter in Michigan's Upper Peninsula gets paced through the dark in November of nineteen ninety-four by something that matches his footsteps and then corrects him with one extra step. A woman living alone in Oregon's Coast Range in two thousand eight tracks her dog's strange refusals on a kitchen calendar until the night something looks through the top of a seven-foot window.

Two brothers running trotlines on an Oklahoma river in nineteen eighty-seven watch something cross knee-deep through a hole they wade waist-deep, then hear a second scream answer from their own bank. A pipeline surveyor working alone in the West Virginia hollows in twenty fifteen finds his survey stakes extracted, his wooden lath twisted like a wrung-out rag, and finally locks eyes with what's been undoing his work.

And a father and son at a remote Maine ice fishing camp in February of two thousand one listen through one inch of spruce planking as something lifts the cinder block off their fish box and sets it down gently. Five witnesses who don't know each other, most of whom asked me to hide their names, all carrying stories they held onto for years before telling a stranger.

 If you have an encounter of your own, send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. I read every email. The Road Trip rolls again soon.

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 on Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the truck rolls into Georgia, and for Brian this stop is personal, because Georgia is home. Born and raised in the north Georgia mountains, Brian opens up about the afternoon when he was twelve years old that set the course of his entire life, when something heavy and bipedal paced him through a thicket of pine, charged out of the brush, and sent him running six hundred yards home so terrified he was sick in his own front yard.

From there he hands the mic to Mr. Brown, a Summerville carpenter and part-time ginseng hunter who, in August of 1986, came face to face with an eight-foot creature near a fire tower at Jenkins Gap. It had a withered left arm, fingernails grown so long they'd knotted, and a limp like a drunk old man, and Mr. Brown reported it to the sheriff, the newspaper, and Atlanta TV stations because he was afraid it might cross paths with a child.Brian then opens the wider file on Georgia, a state most people overlook for Bigfoot but which ranks among the most active in the country, with well over a hundred credible reports on record. He walks through the 1829 Okefenokee Swamp attack, one of the earliest written Sasquatch accounts in American history, complete with eighteen-inch tracks, a thirteen-foot creature, and a deadly battle reported in the Milledgeville Statesman.

He covers the much-argued 2009 Lumpkin County sheriff's dash cam footage, the 2000 Rood Creek camping scare on the Chattahoochee, the broad-daylight 2024 Fort Valley sighting near Macon, the Expedition Bigfoot museum up in Cherry Log, and the old Cherokee Tsul'kalu legend his father's friend Elijah used to tell around the fire.Then the road drops south, out of the mountains and across the fall line into the black-water country of the coast, to the town of Darien and the Altamaha River. Settled by Scottish Highlanders from the shores of Loch Ness itself, Darien has spent nearly two centuries telling stories about a thirty-foot river monster the locals call the Altamaha-ha, or Altie for short.

Brian traces the legend from its Muscogee Creek and Tama roots through the colonial timber rafts, then lays out the documented sightings, including Captain Delano's seventy-foot serpent off St. Simons Island in 1830, the timbermen and hunters of the early twentieth century, the 1969 brothers, the 1970s reports from Harvey Blackman and Frank Culpepper, the Butler Island sightings, the 1981 Larry Gwin and Steven Wilson encounter that put Altie on the national map, the 2010 video off Fort King George, and the strange remains that washed up at Wolf Island in 2018.

 He closes the river out with the encounters that never make the papers but never stop circulating, the fishermen watching humps roll through the channel, the boaters tracking something long swimming against the current, the night sounds that send grandmothers to latch the windows on the hottest nights, the shrimper whose new net got torn open by something he still calls a bull shark, the duck hunter whose old Lab climbed into his lap, and the dockside witnesses who watched a long head rise, look at them, and sink straight down into the dark. Brian weighs the sturgeon, manatee, and right whale explanations honestly, and lands where he always does, in the not-knowing, which he'll tell you is the most alive he ever feels.

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 south out of the Delaware mud and doesn't stop until the asphalt runs out at the edge of the wet. This stop is Florida, and the thing waiting in the saw grass is the Skunk Ape, the South's swamp-bound cousin to Bigfoot, seven feet of reddish-brown hair that most witnesses say they smell long before they see.

Rotten eggs, wet dog, sulfur, a stink that hangs in the yard for an hour after the thing is gone. We get into the encounters fast and we get into a lot of them, because that's what you came for.A night fisherman who kills his lantern and still sees two eyes burning high over the reeds. A family watching something cross the road that stands taller than a six-foot-five inch man. Hunters who could taste the smell before anything stepped out of the palmetto.

 A scream out of the Big Cypress dark that froze a campsite, and the thing that came to a four-year-old's bedroom window and held her gaze through the glass. Along the way we work the documented record the way you work an open case, weighing a Vietnam vet and former cop named Charles Stoeckman who slept a month with a shotgun, a tour guide and thirty passengers who watched one rock back and forth for fifteen minutes, a fire chief and a real estate agent who saw the same creature minutes apart on the same road, and the 1977 wave that got loud enough that a Florida lawmaker actually tried to make it a crime to harm one.

We dig into the famous Myakka photographs, the two flash shots an anonymous grandmother mailed to the Sarasota sheriff asking if anyone was missing an orangutan, and why a quarter century later nobody's closed the case in either direction. We spend real time with Dave Shealy and his Skunk Ape Research Headquarters out on the Tamiami Trail, the man who's given fifty years and the most argued-over footage in the field to proving the thing is real.

Then we do the honest part, the bears and the panthers and the genuinely-real wild monkey colonies breeding in Florida's woods, the skeptics inside the research community who put the credible-sighting rate at maybe five out of a hundred and fifty, and the one detail none of the easy answers explains: the smell.

Roll the windows up for this one. Trust me. 

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.