Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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.

A listener writes in after sitting on this story for three months, and what he sends is one of the most layered north Georgia encounter accounts we've had on the show. Four men, one of them a thirty-year researcher in his early sixties, hike a mile and a half off a forest service road into a drainage that looks promising on a map. By the second night, they're surrounded.

Vocalizations from three directions. Heavy bipedal footsteps and breathing right outside a tent wall. A smell like ozone mixed with something animal. Rocks placed, not thrown, into camp as they tried to pack. A voice from the tree line calling one man's name in his wife's exact inflection. And a laugh that wasn't shaped right. Then it gets stranger. Glowing orbs moving silently through the canopy. Equipment behaving the way equipment isn't supposed to behave. Watches reading three different times in the same parking area.

 Eye shine pacing the truck on the drive out. And weeks later, a phone call that finally explains what the older researcher had walked up alone to see on Saturday afternoon, and why he'd kept it to himself until everyone was safely home.This one is told as the email arrived, lightly edited, names changed at the writer's request. It's a story about a corridor, about layered phenomena that don't fit in one frame, and about the moment a veteran researcher decides he's filled his box and won't be filling it anymore.

If you've had something happen to you out there that you've been carrying around alone, the email is [email protected]. The newsletter goes out free at paranormalworldproductions.com. Thank you for listening.

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.

Five listener accounts. Five different parts of the country. Five different decades. And in every one of them, something out there showed an ordinary person, in no uncertain terms, that they were not at the top of the food chain. This episode isn't about quick glimpses through the trees. It's about the slow encounters. The ones where something took its time, where it watched, where it made a deliberate decision about whether or not to let the witness walk away.

The first account comes from Dale, a lifelong hunter from Sequim, Washington, who was twenty-three years old in October of 1978 when he climbed into a drainage off the Dosewallips before first light and saw something standing in the fog at the base of the slope. Sixty yards away. Gray-skinned, slope-browed, motionless in a way that no living thing should be able to manage.

Dale walked out of those woods that morning and didn't return to any forest for twenty-six years.

From there we move to Karen, a young woman from Elkins, West Virginia, who was twenty-four years old in September of 1993 and out for a solo overnight on a loop she'd hiked many times before. At two in the morning, every insect in the Monongahela went silent, something pressed a hand the size of a dinner plate against the wall of her tent, and the heat of a living body radiated through the nylon inches from her face. The next morning she saw what had been standing over her.

Brent rides next, a heavy equipment operator out of Athens, Ohio, who was on the OHV trails in the Wayne National Forest with his buddy Cody on a clear October afternoon in 2019. They heard whoops trade across the saddle of a ridge. They turned around to leave. And on the way back down the trail they'd just ridden, they found a fourteen-inch oak laid across the two-track that had not been there forty minutes earlier, with no root ball, drag marks in the dirt, and something watching them from behind a white oak thirty yards uphill.

The fourth account is told secondhand by Katelyn, the granddaughter of a northern Wisconsin trapper named Cal, who walked his line on a state forest tract north of the Bois Brule River in October of 1972 and found his sets methodically disabled. A foothold trap hung ten feet up in a hemlock. A marten cubby pried off a maple, turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and re-nailed backwards. A young whitetail arranged on the moss above an otter set, legs folded, head balanced upright, like a chess piece placed for him to find. Then three wood knocks from three different directions.

Then a tall, lean, gray-haired figure standing between two pines in the dawn light, watching him with an expression Cal could only describe as tired.

The episode closes with Marisol, a freelance photographer who in late August of 2015 hiked into a small alpine lake in the Trinity Alps Wilderness of northern California to shoot the milky way. The wind shifted across the cirque, the smell of a wet animal carried over the water, and through her two-hundred-millimeter zoom she watched something kneel at the far shore, cup water in its palm, drink, and then turn its head and look directly into her lens. A face with a heavy brow, a square jaw, and a small but distinct chin. Eight feet tall when it stood. 

She broke camp in the fading light and hiked six miles back to the trailhead in the dark, and she has never reviewed the photographs she took that afternoon.What links these five accounts isn't the description of the creature. The descriptions vary. Reddish brown. Gray. Nearly black. Heavy jaw, no chin. Narrower jaw, slight chin. Lean and starved-looking. Massive and barrel-chested. What links them is the aftermath.

Every one of these people rearranged their lives around what happened. Hunting careers ended. Backpacking ended. Photography careers pivoted indoors. Decades of silence followed by a single attempt to put it down somewhere, with someone, before the memory had to go to the grave with them.If you've been carrying something of your own, the inbox is open.

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.