Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

Part Four of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two takes the alliance out of the meeting ground and into the dark, where good intentions stop counting for much and skill is the only thing that keeps you alive. It opens with Eli's first real night patrol, and the forest is not kind to him.

Where Koda moves through the black between the trees like water around stone, Eli crashes through it like a wounded elk, learning the hard way that eyes are almost useless out there and that everything he thought he knew about the woods was daylight knowledge.

Koda becomes his teacher, and the lessons are patient but unforgiving, because both of them understand that a single mistake in the wrong moment could expose everything they've built. This is where the fragile alliance stops being an idea and starts becoming real work.

The humans have to earn their place, prove they can be an asset instead of a liability, and every close call out in the dark is a test of whether two species can truly watch each other's backs.

But the forest holds more than lessons, and the deeper Koda and Eli push into the night, the clearer it becomes that neither the Dogmen nor the humans at the tree line have gone anywhere. The quiet is only ever borrowed, and the price of protecting something wild keeps climbing.

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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.

In July of 1972, in the river town of Louisiana, Missouri, two little boys were playing in their backyard at the foot of Marzolf Hill when their older sister heard them start screaming.

 Fifteen-year-old Doris Harrison went to the bathroom window and saw something standing by a tree, six or seven feet tall, covered in black hair, with no face she could make out and something dead tucked under its arm. The town laughed at those kids for about a day and a half.

Then a Pentecostal congregation of roughly fifty people heard something come down off that hill, and nobody in Pike County thought it was funny for the rest of the month.This is stop number twenty-five on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the halfway point, and it's the story of Momo, the Missouri Monster.

We walk through the whole flap as it actually happened, from the picnic encounter on Highway 79 in 1971 to the Harrison sighting on July 11, 1972, to Edgar Harrison hanging bait on a tree behind his own house and sitting out in the dark waiting for whatever took his children's afternoon away from them. We cover the sick dog, the smell that runs through every account like a thread, the church meeting on the night of July 14, and Police Chief Shelby Ward putting two dozen armed men across Marzolf Hill three times and finding nothing at all.

We get into the plaster casts, the three-toed track that a zoo director in Oklahoma City looked at and called a hoax, and the out-of-state investigators who camped in a family's backyard and left with a theory about flying objects that did more damage to this case than any skeptic ever managed. And we talk about what happens to a town when the newspapers show up, name your monster for you, and turn one bad July into a festival.

The second half of the episode leaves Momo behind and gets into Missouri Sasquatch country, because strip the nickname and the novelty record off the Harrison case and what's left is an ordinary Sasquatch report. Missouri has produced roughly 147 catalogued encounters and has never stopped generating them.

We cover a farmer near Bowling Green who came around a creek bend on a four-wheeler and found something squatting in the water thirty feet in front of him, the ongoing reports out of Cuivre River State Park and Bowling Green Lake, the night four young men sat in a Jeep near Smithville Lake and listened to the woods go quieter than any of them had ever heard, and the men out of southeast Missouri who put their names to what they saw in the Mark Twain National Forest country.

Then we turn it over to the mail. Jenny was seven years old and bringing laundry off the line when the sheet in front of her moved the wrong way. Ray watched something cross a river road in front of his headlights and drove eleven miles out of his way for a year afterward without telling his wife why. Marla found tracks along a fence line and watched her husband go get a shovel and bury them.

Dean sat in a deer stand and listened to the silence travel toward him. Colleen's three children came across the yard at a dead run, and the middle one said the thing at the tree line had no face, which is exactly what a fifteen-year-old girl told a newspaper thirty years before.

And Wes put a light on something standing chest deep in the Mississippi at forty feet, and it didn't run.

The kids saw it first. Nobody ever believes the kids.

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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 pulling off the highway on this one. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip runs state by state, but the reports don't arrive that way, and this episode is for the five that have been sitting in the folder waiting for a place to land. Four decades, five states, and no connection between any of them except that the people involved all ended up carrying something they couldn't put down.

We start in the North Carolina mountains in the summer of 1985, where an eighteen-year-old alone in his mother's house spent three nights with a .357 in his lap. Something covered the window in his front door from top to bottom, worked the doorknob, screamed back when he threatened it, and knocked the porch off its pillars. By the third night it was breathing through his bedroom screen from less than two feet away, and it took a load of buckshot from his grandfather to end it.

From there we head to West Virginia, where a young man fishing a secluded spot before sunrise heard rocks landing in the water, watched an upright canine push the foliage apart, and fired five rounds on a trail while it circled around to get ahead of him. Then a quick stop in Calvert County, Maryland, in July of 1992, where a sixteen-year-old in the back seat of his family's car locked eyes with something seven feet tall standing braced between two trees with both arms spread, and spent the next thirty years being told he made it up.

The last two are Sasquatch.

 In the Kiamichi country of southeastern Oklahoma, a welder named Ray sat a ladder stand through rock clacking and two wood knocks before something walked across a creek bottom on two legs in gray light, and he went back the next day with flagging tape and a tape measure to find out how tall it really was.

And on an Ozark river in July of 1998, two brothers running a trotline heard a two-beat wading sound coming downstream at midnight, put a spotlight on it at forty yards, and came back at daylight with their father to find a fifteen-and-three-quarter-inch track with no claw marks in it and a fifty-two-inch stride between the prints. What they poured that afternoon sat in a shed for twenty-two years. Every one of these five people paid something for telling it. That's the part I keep coming back to, and it's the reason the offer at the end of this episode stays open.

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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.

On the night of October 11, 1973, two shipyard workers drove into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told a story that neither of them expected anybody to believe. Charles Hickson spelled his name into a tape recorder and said that even if they laughed him out of the county he was going to tell it anyway.

Then he described a blue light coming down over the bayou, three figures floating out of an opening, and something that looked like a big eye moving over his body while he lay immobilized inside a machine. Calvin Parker, the younger of the two, said almost nothing about the inside of it, because by his own account he passed out at the beginning and didn't come around until it was over.What makes Pascagoula different from almost every case like it is what the sheriff did next.

Fred Diamond and Captain Glenn Ryder finished the interview around 11 p.m., walked out, and left the two men alone in a room with the recorder still running, expecting to catch a hoax. What they caught instead was a 42-year-old man trying to talk a terrified teenager down, and then, after Hickson stepped out for coffee, a young man from Jones County praying out loud to a machine he didn't know was there.This episode is the Mississippi stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, and it goes in deep. I work the case from the primary recording rather than the retellings, which means you get Hickson's actual answers to the deputies, including all the places he told them he didn't know.

I lay out the geography of the Pascagoula River, the Singing River legend and why I don't trust the version that got printed for a century, and the Phantom Barber summer of 1942, because this is not a town with no history of strange. I walk through the 1973 flap that was already in the local paper four days before any of this happened, including the service station operator who called in a light around 8 p.m., roughly two hours before Hickson ever knocked on a newspaper door.

I also deal with the part a lot of tellings skip, which is what Charles Hickson did with the next 20 years of his life, the ongoing contact claims, the television circuit that started with Dick Cavett on November 2, and the arrest in January 1974, and why none of that gets to reach backward and rewrite what's on that tape.

There's a witness who waited 45 years and came forward in 2019, eight years after the man who spent his life asking for her had already died. And there's a historical marker, unveiled June 22, 2019, standing today at the spot where Hickson was certain he'd be run out of town. The back half of the show goes into the woods, because that's the other reason we came.

I get into the Choctaw material collected by Henry Halbert in the 1800s, David Bushnell in 1910, and John Swanton after him, including Shampe and Nalusa Falaya, and I'm careful about what that material does and doesn't prove. 

Then I go county by county through Mississippi's actual documented Sasquatch record, including a very close encounter in the Homochitto National Forest on November 28 of either 1978 or 1979, with 14-inch three-toed tracks and corroborating witnesses, and a report from the Stennis Space Center buffer zone in Hancock County from January 18, 2025.

We finish with listener accounts out of the DeSoto, the Delta, the Pearl River, the Tombigbee, and Noxubee.

No body, no bone, no photograph worth arguing about. But there's a tape sitting in a county file that anybody can listen to, and I still can't tell you what came down over that bayou.

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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.

Tonight we pull off the road trip for one episode and hand the microphone to five people who wrote in. Five first names, five parts of the country, five different jobs, and not one of them looking to be believed.

A long-haul driver in northwest Montana counts fourteen deer on a March night and then watches something cross the westbound lane in three strides at three-forty in the morning, and goes back sixteen days later to walk the ditch in daylight.

A twenty-three-year-old fire lookout in northern California puts eight-power binoculars on a salvage cut for twelve minutes, takes a bearing off the firefinder while she's watching, hits it with a bullhorn, and writes the whole thing into a government logbook in pencil.

A seventy-eight-year-old Wisconsin dairyman describes an October evening in nineteen seventy-three when thirty-one Holsteins wouldn't come up the hill and his stock dog got under the porch steps, and what his father pulled off the top wire the next morning and put in the kitchen stove that same night. An emergency room tech in Arkansas gets forty seconds at forty-one yards from a climbing stand, then sits in that tree for two hours and forty minutes because the ground between her and her truck runs the wrong direction.

And a West Virginia line crew, three nights into an ice storm restoration, has four of five men looking up the right-of-way at the edge of the light while the generator runs.

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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.