Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

Welcome to stop three on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip. Tonight we're climbing up onto one of the most overlooked Sasquatch landscapes in the country, the Mogollon Rim of central and eastern Arizona, a two-hundred-mile shelf of stone where the Colorado Plateau drops off into the Sonoran Desert and ponderosa pine country meets red rock canyon. It's a place most people don't picture when they hear the word Bigfoot, and that's exactly what makes it so interesting.

Because for as long as anyone in Arizona has been keeping records, witnesses have been coming down off that Rim with the same story. Something big up there. Something fast. Something that screams across whole canyons and watches camps from the tree line and throws rocks into fire rings in the middle of the night.

We open the episode the way the Rim opens most of its stories, with a quiet camp and four experienced campers who realize, all at once, that the forest around them has gone silent.

 From there we build the history of the country itself, how the Rim got its name, why the Apache-Sitgreaves and the Coconino and the Tonto national forests stack together to make one of the largest unbroken pieces of timber and wilderness in the lower forty-eight, and how the Mogollon Monster legend traces back well before statehood, into the oral traditions of the people who knew that country first. Then we get into the encounters.

A guide and his horseback hunters running into something on a ridge in the Apache-Sitgreaves that didn't react to them the way an animal is supposed to react. A family at an established campground hearing something walk a deliberate circle around their tent at one in the morning, twice, and finding a track in the duff at first light. A solo bow hunter sitting in a tree stand while something stands fifteen feet below him and breathes.

A five-man hunt camp that loses a night to rocks on the canvas, a dog that won't get off the floorboard for a week, and a track measurement that no one in the group has been able to explain since. A Forest Service employee with thirty years on the Apache-Sitgreaves who heard something one summer afternoon that nobody at the office wanted to write down.

And a couple driving home from Big Lake on State Route 260 who watched something step backward off the shoulder of the highway and clear a four-foot embankment in a single motion.We close with the question that always sits underneath these conversations. 

Why here. Why this country. Why does the Rim, of all the places in the American West, produce a Sasquatch tradition this dense and this consistent. The answer has to do with the geography itself, the food and the water and the cover and the canyons that no one has ever surveyed, and with the kind of witnesses this country produces, ranchers and hunters and Forest Service folks and law enforcement, people who know the difference between an elk and a bear and a man, and who keep telling the same story year after year.

So pour a cup of something warm, pull your fire up a little closer, and come ride with me up onto the Mogollon Rim. Just don't go off looking for whatever's screaming across the canyon.

It already knows where you are.If you've had your own encounter on the Rim, or anywhere in Arizona's high country, reach out. Every story matters, and this show runs on yours.

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 [email protected] 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.

Alaska doesn't just have Bigfoot. It has something older.This is the second stop on our cryptid road trip across America. Last time out, we worked the longleaf pine country of Alabama and the legend of the White Thang.

Tonight we head north to the rain coast of southeast Alaska, where the fog comes down low over the tideline and the spruce trees grow right to the water. This is the country of the Tlingit, a maritime people who have been reading these waters for somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years. And it is the country of the Kushtaka — the otter people, the shape-shifting beings who imitate the voices of the people you love and call you out into the dark.

We open in a fourteen-foot skiff outside Wrangell, with a fisherman in the fog and a child crying near the shore, and what his Tlingit grandmother told him to do if it ever happened.

From there we go deep. Into the ethnography of the Kushtaka, into the protections the old stories say can save your life — copper, dogs, and one other thing nobody likes to bring up — into three traditional accounts passed down through generations, and into two modern reports from a Forest Service ranger in the Tongass and a pair of kayakers on Admiralty Island. We close with a long, cinematic survival story from a cannery cove outside Hoonah in October of two thousand and eleven, and the one small tell that may be the only thing standing between you and what's on the other side of the door.Handle this one with respect.

The Kushtaka belong to a living tradition still carried by Tlingit families in southeast Alaska today. Listen with that in mind. And if you ever find yourself on a piece of Alaskan water you don't quite know, on a night when the fog has come down and the world has gone quiet, and you hear a voice you recognize calling your name from the trees, you already know what to do.

Put your back to it. Keep your hands on something made of copper. And don't look back.

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 [email protected] 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 America series kicks off in north Alabama with one of the strangest and most persistent cryptid legends in the American South. The Alabama White Thang.

A tall, pale, hair-covered creature that has walked the back roads and hollers of this state for more than a hundred years — screaming from two ridges over, standing in the middle of dark country roads, and sometimes, when it decides to, coming back the next night. This is the first stop on a fifty-state cryptid road trip.

Over the coming months we're going coast to coast, every two-lane highway and dirt cut and red clay holler we can find, documenting the creatures that local people have been talking about for generations. Some of these episodes will land on names you already know. Most won't. The goal is to surface the stories that have stayed local for a century — the ones the farmers and hunters and night-shift workers only let out when they've decided you might believe them.

In this premiere we cover the historical roots of the White Thang, going back through Cherokee folklore and the figure of Tsul'kalu, the Scots-Irish settler tradition that fed Southern wild-man legends, and the earliest written references to the creature in north Alabama newspapers in the early-to-middle twentieth century. We dig into the geography that has let the legend last — the Bankhead National Forest, the Sipsey Wilderness, and the kind of broken Appalachian foothill country where a small persistent population of something could hide indefinitely. Then we work through encounter accounts spanning four counties and four decades. 

A man named Daryl, who came up out of a bridge in Morgan County after the late shift at a parts plant outside Decatur and saw something standing in his headlights that he could not explain away. A bow hunter named Tommy, who watched it duck through the brush in Walker County and made a deliberate choice not to draw his bow. The Whitlock family, who endured a multi-week stalking case at their property in Marshall County in 2003 that ended with pressure against the back door and three trail camera photographs of something that should not exist.

 A woman named Rebecca, who saw it standing in the woods behind her grandmother's grave in a small family cemetery in rural Jefferson County. A turkey hunter named Daniel, who held a shotgun on it across a clearing in the Sipsey and walked out knowing he was not supposed to run. And a young couple named Lauren and Jacob, who saw it on a back road in Walker County and then, two nights later, looked out their back window and realized it had come with them.

If you have a story of your own — something that happened to you, or to somebody in your family, or to somebody you trust — send it in to [email protected]. Every email gets read. Names stay out of it on request.

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 [email protected] 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.

A hunting guide reaches out to the show after thirty years of silence, asking for the story to be handled with care. He sends an email that opens with a few simple ground rules. Names are first names only, and none of them are real. The country where it happened is still out there, and the line that got crossed is still a line. He doesn't want a map made of it.

He just wants the story told the way it actually happened.Tim was guiding hunters in the northern Idaho high country in the fall of nineteen ninety-five. He was young, broke, and raising a family. When a wealthy trophy hunter showed up at his kitchen table with aerial photographs, a printed file of old hunter reports, and twelve thousand dollars in cash, Tim took the job he knew he shouldn't have taken.

The hunter wanted a Sasquatch. He had a custom three seventy-five H and H Magnum, an early defense-grade thermal optic, and a young assistant carrying three cases of camera gear. He didn't want to glass from a ridge. He wanted to cross the creek that the old men of that country had been telling boys not to cross for as long as anybody had been giving the warning.What followed unfolded across three days and two nights on the wrong side of that line. Twisted saplings. Wet river stones balanced on stumps where no water ran. A single rifle shot at a shape on a ridge, a smear of something the wrong color for blood, and one footprint in soft duff.

A circle of six animals laid around the camp at dawn, every one of them broken by hand and none of them eaten. A barricade across the trail built in absolute silence. Ammunition lifted out of a buckled pack still riding on its owner's back. A voice in the trees that wasn't a voice in the trees, and a handprint on canvas left as a quiet courtesy.

And finally, a clearing at first light, a hunter on his knees, and a creature on a downed log that watched him the way a judge watches a defendant.This is a story about class, about land, about the difference between being a guest and being an owner, and about an old country that still knows the difference. It's also a story about a man who had a clean shot, lowered his rifle, and chose to let something finish what it had come there to do.

Tim has kept what he carried out of those mountains in a closet for thirty years. He's letting it go now because his daughter handed him an earbud one Christmas, and because some stories belong in hands that will treat them right.

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 [email protected] 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.

Three experienced cavers. One hand-drawn map. Two words written in pencil at the bottom of it. Don't go.

This week's episode is a listener letter. Keith, a longtime friend of the show, finally put on paper what happened to him and his two closest friends almost a year ago, deep inside a cave on a ridge in eastern Kentucky that almost nobody knows is there. 

Caleb's grandfather, Pap, had warned him off that ridge for as long as Caleb had been alive. He never said why. After Pap passed, Caleb found a folded piece of graph paper in the back of a kitchen drawer. A road, a creek, a contour line, and a small black circle on the north face of a ridge. Underneath it, in Pap's tight square handwriting, the only two words he ever needed.

Three months later, Keith, Caleb, and Josh hiked in to find that cave for themselves.What waited for them, miles into the dark, was older than the warning. Older than the country.

And it had been there a very long time.This one is told the way Keith wrote it, in his own voice, slow and careful and honest, with a prologue from me up front. It runs long. It earns the run time.

If you've been carrying a story of your own and you're ready to put it down, you can send it to [email protected]. I read every one.

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 [email protected] 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.