Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

He wasn’t inexperienced.He wasn’t impressionable.And he wasn’t looking for monsters.A t thirty-two years old, this machinist from Lufkin had spent nearly his entire life in the woods. Twenty-five years of hunting experience. Countless nights alone in East Texas backcountry. He’d tracked deer through tangled briar and swamp, crossed paths with black bears, mountain lions, and javelinas, and faced every known predator the region could throw at him.None of that prepared him for the Big Thicket.In November of 1994, a solo five-day deer hunt into one of the most remote and biologically diverse wilderness regions in North America became something else entirely. What began as a routine trip for solitude and game turned into three nights of escalating fear—an encounter that permanently altered his understanding of what the wild is capable of hiding. It began with a footprint.Sixteen inches long. Five clearly defined toes. Pressed deep into creek mud by something far heavier than any known animal in the region.Then came the sounds.Deep, resonant vocalizations that didn’t just echo through the trees—they vibrated through his chest. Low, rolling howls. Multiple voices calling back and forth in the darkness. Communicating. Coordinating. That first night, something circled his camp. By morning, tracks were everywhere. Whatever it was had walked within twenty feet of his tent while he sat by the fire, rifle across his lap, convinced he was prepared for anything. He wasn’t. When he killed an eight-point buck and hung it two hundred yards from camp, he thought he’d salvaged the trip. He was wrong. Whatever watched him from the tree line wanted that deer. The rope—rated for four hundred pounds—was snapped clean, as if it were thread.The final night brought rocks. Not random. Not accidental. Thrown with intent. Accurate. A clear warning delivered in stone.Then came the whispering. Multiple voices. Just below comprehension. Talking about him. Deciding something. And finally… he saw it. Eight feet tall. Possibly taller. Covered head to toe in reddish-brown hair. Shoulders nearly four feet wide. Arms hanging past its knees. Built like something out of a nightmare—thick through the chest, narrow at the waist, legs like tree trunks.But it was the eyes that stayed with him.Intelligent. Calculating. Eyes that were weighing a decision.It let him leave. But not before destroying his tent.Not before making the message unmistakably clear. This is our land.You don’t belong here.Don’t come back. He understood. He’s never returned to the Big Thicket.

After weeks of strange encounters and mounting dread, the group finds themselves surrounded by Lenape hunters deep in the wilderness. Rather than the violence they expect, they're taken to meet Gray Owl, an elder so ancient his face has become a map of wrinkles and his eyes have clouded with cataracts. Yet somehow, he sees everything. What he tells them about the Mesingw challenges everything they thought they knew. These creatures are not spirits or demons. They are simply old. Older than humanity itself. And they have been waiting.Gray Owl gives Elijah a stone pendant carved with symbols that shift in firelight, telling him it may buy time when the creatures finally decide what to do with them. The warning is clear. They have been marked. For good or ill, there is no turning back now. What follows is two weeks of psychological warfare that tests every man to his breaking point. The knocking escalates into something like war drums. Howls split the night, reaching into frequencies that touch something primal in the human mind. Equipment is moved while they sleep. Enormous footprints appear inches from where their heads rested. And then one of their horses is torn apart in a display of raw power that defies comprehension. The expedition pushes on into Shawnee territory, where Cornstalk's Son shares his own people's history with the Old Enemies. A war that lasted generations. Warriors who went into the mountains and came back broken, wearing the shapes of men but no longer truly human. An uneasy agreement that has held for longer than memory.Now that boundary has been crossed. And the creatures have followed.Part Two builds toward a reckoning that has been centuries in the making. The tests are not over. The judgment has not been rendered. And somewhere in the darkness, ancient eyes are still watching.

What would you do if everything you thought you knew about your father turned out to be wrong? What if his silence, his distance, his strange obsession with the mountains wasn't coldness at all, but something else entirely? What if he'd been guarding a secret so profound, so impossible, that it had consumed his entire life? That's the question facing Marcus Stone as he pulls up to a cabin he hasn't entered in twenty-three years. His father is dead. The funeral has already happened, and Marcus wasn't there. Twenty-three years of silence between them, hardened into something neither could break. And now it's too late.Or is it? Because Robert Stone left something behind. A trunk in the cellar. A note in his father's handwriting that speaks of burdens and secrets and an ancestor named Captain Elijah Stone.A note that hints at something that's been passed down through generations, waiting for someone brave enough to finally bring it into the light. What Marcus finds in that cellar will change everything he thinks he knows about his family, about history, and about what really walks in the deep places of the American wilderness. Seven leather-bound journals. Letters tied with twine that's gone black with age. A stone pendant carved with symbols that don't match any language Marcus has ever seen. And the words of a man who died two hundred years ago, preserved in ink that has faded from black to brown but remains perfectly legible.March fifteenth, seventeen ninety-nine.Captain Elijah Stone. Revolutionary War veteran. A man haunted by stories he heard during the brutal winter at Valley Forge. Stories told by Oneida scouts around dying fires. Stories of the elder brothers. The ones who were here before us. The ones who watch from the shadows of ancient forests.This is the beginning of an expedition into the unknown. Nine men riding west from Richmond, following legends and whispers toward something that might not exist. A hot-tempered Scottish soldier carrying grief like a loaded weapon. A Kentucky frontiersman who's been waiting twenty years for someone to go looking. A Philadelphia naturalist convinced that science can explain anything. A former minister searching for proof of God in a world that suddenly seems random and cruel.And leading them all, a captain who knows, somehow, that not all of them will return.The signs begin almost immediately. Footprints eighteen inches long, pressed deep into mud by something that weighs five hundred pounds. Wood knocking in the darkness, three sharp strikes echoing through the trees. Food stolen from bundles hung fifteen feet in the air. Structures built with purpose and intention, a language in the landscape that speaks of intelligence, of planning, of something that thinks. They know we're here, the frontiersman says. They've known since we crossed into the mountains. And then comes the story that changes everything. A blizzard twenty years ago. A young trapper who thought he was going to die. And something that carried him through the storm, examined him in a dark cave, and made a decision. They were deciding what to do with me.What walks in those mountains? What has been watching humanity since before we learned to walk upright? And what did Robert Stone spend his entire life guarding? The answers are waiting in the pages of those journals. And Marcus Stone is about to discover that some inheritances come with a price.This is The Bigfoot Journals, Part One.The expedition has begun.

In the mountains of western North Carolina, something ancient waits in the darkness. For over eight hundred years, mysterious lights have appeared above a low ridge called Brown Mountain, dancing across the sky in ways that science cannot explain and folklore cannot forget. Tonight, we journey into the heart of Appalachia's most enduring supernatural mystery.This episode begins with the Cherokee legend of a great battle fought in 1200 A.D. between the Cherokee and Catawba Nations. When the fighting ended and hundreds of warriors lay dead across the mountain, the women from both tribes came searching with torches held high, calling out for husbands and sons who would never answer. According to the legend, some of those women never stopped searching.Eight centuries later, their torches still burn on the ridgeline.We explore the first documented white witness to the phenomenon, a German cartographer named John William Gerard de Brahm who observed the lights in seventeen seventy one and tried to explain them as nitrous vapors catching fire. We follow the story of Fate Wiseman, whose family legend about a faithful servant searching for his lost master became the famous bluegrass song that made the Brown Mountain Lights a household name across America.The episode delves into darker territory with the murder of Belinda, a young healer whose abusive husband killed her and her newborn child sometime before the Civil War. According to local legend, the mysterious lights led searchers to her hidden grave, and they still appear above that ravine to this day.We examine the government investigations of nineteen thirteen and nineteen twenty two, when scientists declared the mystery solved by attributing the lights to train headlights and automobiles. We reveal how the devastating flood of nineteen sixteen destroyed that explanation entirely when the lights continued appearing even after all the trains stopped running and the roads washed away. The narrative takes us through the strange case of Ralph Lael, a furniture salesman who claimed to have followed one of the lights into a cave where he made contact with beings from Venus. We hear about Tommie Hunter, who actually touched one of the lights in nineteen eighty two and felt an electric shock surge through his body while six witnesses watched. We follow TV journalist John Carter into the woods after midnight, where he watched a glowing orb approach his group in a zig-zag pattern before making a dramatic turn and vanishing into nothing. Modern investigations receive thorough coverage, including the work of Dr. Daniel Caton at Appalachian State University, whose team accumulated over six thousand hours of camera footage and still couldn't explain everything they recorded. We explore the theories of paranormal researcher Joshua Warren, who believes the unique geology of Brown Mountain creates conditions for ball lightning and who successfully recreated similar phenomena in his laboratory. Throughout the episode, we encounter the many legends that have accumulated over the centuries. The lover's light, where a young woman still holds her torch waiting for a groom who never arrived on their wedding night. The Civil War ghosts, soldiers in blue and gray still searching for fallen comrades. The Revolutionary War patriots, still carrying the flame of liberty through the eternal darkness.This is a story about mystery and meaning. About the places where our certainty breaks down and the universe reminds us that it still contains secrets. About love so powerful it became visible, and grief so profound it became eternal. Whether you believe the lights are spirits of the dead, ball lightning generated by geological forces, or something we haven't discovered yet, one thing is certain. The Brown Mountain Lights are real. They've been appearing for eight hundred years. And somewhere in the darkness of Linville Gorge, the search continues.

People say there's no way Sasquatch could exist in the Land Between the Lakes. They say it's too populated. Too well-traveled. Too thoroughly explored by hunters and hikers and campers over the decades.I disagree.  And after you hear this encounter story, I'm confident you'll agree with me. In November of nineteen eighty-four, a father took his fourteen-year-old son into the backcountry of the Land Between the Lakes for a deer hunting trip. It was supposed to be a bonding experience. A chance for the boy to take his first buck. A weekend of camping and hunting in a remote stretch of wilderness that most visitors never see. What they encountered out there changed both of them forever. It started with strange sounds. Heavy footsteps in the darkness. Rocks thrown from unseen hands. Then came the screaming. Inhuman vocalizations that echoed through the forest from multiple directions at once. Wood knocks that circled their camp throughout the night. The unmistakable signs of something intelligent, something powerful, something that wanted them to know they weren't alone.On the final morning, the boy made a clean shot on a beautiful ten-point buck. But before he could reach his kill, something emerged from the undergrowth. Something massive. Something that walked on two legs and stood over eight feet tall. Something that looked at him with eyes that held unmistakable intelligence.And then it took his deer.The father passed away in March of twenty twenty-four. Now his son is the only living witness to what happened during that terrifying weekend forty years ago. He made a promise to his father in that hospital room. A promise to finally tell the full story.This is that story. One hundred and seventy thousand acres of uninterrupted forest. Two hunters who ventured too deep into the backcountry. And the creatures that let them leave alive.Some places in this world belong to something other than us. The Land Between the Lakes might be one of them.