Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Exeter, Rhode Island, where on the seventeenth of March in eighteen ninety-two a group of farmers opened the graves of three women from the same family and burned the heart of the youngest one on a rock behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church.

Her name was Mercy Lena Brown, she was nineteen years old, and she'd been dead for two months. Her neighbors believed she was feeding on her dying brother from the grave. The ashes of her heart were mixed into water and given to him to drink.

Brian tells the story of the Brown family from the beginning, starting with the death of Mary Eliza Brown in eighteen eighty-three and following consumption through the house as it took her daughter Mary Olive, then Lena, then Edwin. 

Along the way the episode covers the wider New England vampire panic, the century of tuberculosis outbreaks that drove it, and the earlier Rhode Island cases that Exeter already knew by heart, including Stephen Staples and his petition to the Cumberland town council in seventeen ninety-six, the dream of Stukeley Tillinghast and his dying orchard, Nancy Young of Foster, the Rose family of Peace Dale, the Ray brothers of Jewett City, and the Connecticut farmer whose coffin was marked J B fifty-five.

The episode also follows the story out of Exeter and into the Providence Journal, the papers of Bram Stoker, the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, and the research of folklorist Michael Bell.The cemetery has its own encounters. A teenager with a dying flashlight finds a girl standing over a headstone in nineteen seventy-nine. A groundskeeper's daughter watches a blue light travel along the back wall in nineteen fifty-seven. And a woman caring for her father in his last week walks into his bedroom at three in the morning and finds somebody sitting in the chair beside his bed.

Then the road turns west. Ten Rod Road runs from the cemetery straight into the Arcadia Management Area, fourteen thousand acres of forest grown up over the same farms that emptied out in Mercy Brown's lifetime, and it's the same road where the best-known Bigfoot video in Rhode Island was filmed. From there the episode moves through the state's Sasquatch encounters. A duck hunter on Worden Pond watches something pale wade across a frozen cove.

 A forestry worker sees a figure step over a stone wall during the gypsy moth summer of nineteen eighty-one. A beagle man at Big River has his whole pack go silent at once. A firewood cutter in Burrillville turns around to find something at his woodpile holding a piece of his oak.

And a rider at Escoheag sits on a mare that won't take another step.If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, you can reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

 
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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.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway for a pit stop this week so Brian can open the mailbag. Most of the encounters that land in the inbox are straightforward: somebody sees something big and hairy walking on two legs, and it walks away. The five in this episode didn't go that way. In each of them, seeing a giant ape that isn't supposed to exist was only part of what happened.

Casimir was a railroad signal maintainer called out after midnight in October 1993 to a siding in the northern Minnesota bog country. On the way in he watched 3 pale lights travel north over the tamaracks, and 25 minutes later something came walking down the middle of the track toward his floodlights, stepping on every third tie.

Odalys was running the instrument on a Florida survey crew in February 2008 when she followed a red-brown, mud-caked animal across an open cattle pasture through a 30-power telescope. She watched it walk behind a lone cabbage palm with a trunk 14 inches thick and never come out the other side.

Linnea was calling spotted owls from a log landing in California's Klamath Mountains in June 1997. Her data sheet shows a start time of 9:42 PM for station six and nothing after it, and the next thing she remembers is sitting on her tailgate at 1:51 AM with her boots full of water.

Verlene was alone in a Colorado elk camp in October 1986, 9 miles from the nearest road, when she heard what sounded like two people talking down at the creek and walked to the edge of the bench with a shotgun to see who was there.

And Rosalind writes on behalf of her late father, Evander, a pipeline patrol pilot who flew past something black and upright on a bare wheat stubble hill in eastern Washington in August 1974. He banked around for a second look and found the hill empty 15 seconds later.

There are no verdicts here and no explanations, only what five people saw and what happened around it that they've never been able to account for.

If you've had an encounter of your own, Brian wants to read it. Send it to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

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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.

The next stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is Pennsylvania, home of the most miserable monster in American folklore. The squonk comes out of the state's old lumber camps, where woodhicks and bark peelers told of a small, wart-covered animal with skin that didn't fit, so ashamed of its own looks that it hid in the hemlocks and cried all night. It reached print in 1910 in William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, along with the story of J. P. Wentling, a forester near Mont Alto who lured one into a sack and got home to find nothing inside but tears and bubbles.

This episode covers the logging era that gave rise to the legend, from the Williamsport boom and the hemlock bark trade to life in the camps and the real dangers of the deep woods. It then follows the crying through the years in accounts from a Potter County bark camp in 1898, a Civilian Conservation Corps trail crew in 1934, a dairy farm springhouse in 1952, a deer camp above Pine Creek in 1967, a trout stream in the Loyalsock State Forest in 1979, and a gas well pad in Tioga County in 2011.

From the squonk, the trip moves on to Pennsylvania's long history with Bigfoot, starting with an 1830s account from Susquehanna County, an 1897 newspaper report from Potter County, the 1973 wave of sightings Stan Gordon investigated along Chestnut Ridge, and the 2007 trail camera photos from the Allegheny National Forest.

The encounters that follow take place on a strip mine haul road, a school bus route through the national forest, a maple sugarbush in Somerset County, a bow hunter's tree stand, a late-night wrecker call in elk country, and the Pine Creek Rail Trail.

If you enjoyed this stop, please leave the show a rating and a review, and tell your friends and family about it.

Send your own sightings, stories, and suggestions for future stops to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com

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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.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway this week for a pit stop, and Brian opens the mailbag. These are five Sasquatch encounters sent in by listeners, covering 66 years and five states, and two of them were handed down inside a family before they ever reached the show.

Cordell was 260 feet up a cell tower on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee in October 2019, alone, when something walked out of the woods and into the compound below him. It stood beside his truck, took hold of his load line, and followed the rope up with its eyes until it found him.

Philippa writes in with the story her father Emmett told for 40 years. In November 1964 he was hauling milk cans on a hill farm route in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom when his headlights caught something lifting a full 10-gallon can off a farmer's stand and carrying it up the pasture under one arm. The creamery docked him $11.40 for the can, and he never got over it.

Marit was first out to the back beds on a Wisconsin cranberry marsh in October 1996 and found it standing in the flooded bed at daylight, scooping up berries with both hands. Her boss looked at the tracks on the dike and reached for a rake.

Wrenna shares her grandmother Opal's diary from the summer of 1953, when Opal was a Forest Service fire lookout in the Yaak country of northwest Montana. For 11 days she took a compass bearing on something that crossed the same rock slide every evening. Then one night it didn't cross, and she heard her woodpile move.

Ansel was 22 and picking oysters by lantern on Willapa Bay, Washington, in January 1982, with the tide out and no way off the bed for hours, when something came across the mud flats from Long Island, squatted 80 yards from the crew, and watched them work.

If you've got an encounter of your own, or one that's been told at your family's supper table for years, Brian wants to hear it. Email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com

Email Brian

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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 March of 1934, the crew of the lightship Columbia and the supply tender Rose watched something come up out of the water near the mouth of the Columbia River. The men said it was about 40 feet long with an 8-foot neck, and the tender's captain told the Salem Capital Journal it opened its mouth and gaped at the lightship. The crew wanted to lower a boat and go after it, and the officers told them no.

Oregon would eventually give it a name, Colossal Claude.

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads to the Oregon coast and the Columbia River Bar, the stretch of water sailors call the Graveyard of the Pacific. 

The episode follows the sea serpent through the newspaper record, from the 1934 lightship sighting to Captain Charles Graham of the troller Viv in 1937, the couple who chased a 55-foot animal down the coast highway from Devil's Churn to Heceta Head, and Captain Chris Anderson of the halibut schooner Argo, who said in 1939 that it passed within 10 feet of his boat and ate a 20-pound halibut off his line.

Along the way there's the crowd of more than 30 people at Nelscott, the 1,000-pound carcass called Old Hairy that washed up at Delake in 1950, and Marvin the Monster, filmed by Shell Oil cameras in 1963.You'll also hear from the people who never called a reporter: a salmon troller crossing the bar in 1951, an assistant keeper on Tillamook Rock, a family at the Neahkahnie Mountain viewpoint, a crabber off Clatsop Spit who had something follow his boat for 40 minutes, and a fisherman on the South Jetty in 2012.Then the road turns inland.

Nearly half of Oregon is forest, and the reports of something upright in that timber go back to the wild man of the Sixes mining district in 1904.

Brian covers the 1971 sightings at The Dalles, where a music teacher put a rifle scope on a creature in his headlights and couldn't pull the trigger, along with Peter Byrne's Bigfoot Information Center and the Bigfoot trap that still stands in the Siskiyous. 

The episode closes with Sasquatch encounters from the Tillamook State Forest, the Clackamas River, the North Umpqua, Olallie Lake and Bear Camp Road.

If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

Email Brian

Join Our FREE Newsletter

Get Brian's Books

Leave Us A Voicemail

Visit Our Website

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.