Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This episode of The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Colorado, the highest state in the union, for a deep look at one of the strangest contrasts in American cryptid lore. We open with the Slide-Rock Bolter, an absurd creature from the lumber camp folklore of the early nineteen-hundreds, first documented by Minnesota state forester William T. Cox in his nineteen ten book Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods. We trace the Bolter back to its origins in the Fearsome Critters tradition, the body of tall tales that working men in American logging camps invented to entertain themselves, haze new arrivals, and put a face on the genuine dangers of life in the timber.

From there, we walk through the broader folklore of the Colorado high country, including the Cornish Tommyknockers brought to the silver camps by immigrant miners in the late eighteen-hundreds, and the older Indigenous traditions of giant or hairy beings in the mountains that predate any of the European arrivals. The second half of the episode shifts from folklore into testimony, exploring the long record of wild man and Sasquatch encounter reports that have come out of the Colorado backcountry from the late eighteen-hundreds to the present day.

We cover historical newspaper accounts from the central Rockies, the San Juans, Pikes Peak country, the Wet Mountains, and the Sangre de Cristos, and we move into the modern record with a series of encounter stories drawn from the broader Colorado field, including reports from the Weminuche Wilderness, the Flat Tops, the country around Mount Sopris, the Pagosa Springs area, the mining ghost towns of the San Juans, and the high passes above the San Luis Valley. 

The episode examines the recurring patterns that show up in the Colorado record, including elevation clusters, water corridors, the strange quality of silence that witnesses describe right before and after an encounter, the consistent pattern of avoidance behavior in the creatures themselves, and the credibility profile of the witnesses, who are overwhelmingly hunters, backpackers, rangers, ranchers, and other people with deep experience in the country they were standing in when the encounter occurred.

Along the way we discuss the cultural function of folklore in dangerous places, the ways that men in mining and lumber camps used invented monsters to talk about real risks like rockslides and cave-ins, and the long, often unspoken thread of testimony from people who have walked off the Colorado high country carrying something they were never quite able to put down.

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.

In this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Roadtrip, we drive into California and explore two of the most enduring cryptid traditions in North America. We begin in the Santa Lucia Mountains above Big Sur, where settlers, ranchers, schoolteachers, hikers, soldiers, and tourists have for centuries reported tall silent figures standing on the ridgelines.

Known as Los Vigilantes Oscuros, or the Dark Watchers, these silhouetted beings appear at dawn or dusk, wear what witnesses describe as long cloaks and broad-brimmed hats, and vanish the moment anyone tries to close the distance. We trace the history of these reports through Salinan, Esselen, and Chumash traditions, into the Spanish mission era beginning with Padre Junipero Serra in seventeen seventy-one, and forward into the published work of John Steinbeck, whose nineteen thirty-eight short story Flight placed the watchers into American literature, and the poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote of the same figures in his nineteen thirty-seven poem Such Counsels You Gave to Me.

Then we travel north into the redwood country, into the Six Rivers, the Klamath, the Trinity Alps, and the Marble Mountain Wilderness, where the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk peoples have spoken of Oh-Mah, the boss of the woods, for as long as their oral traditions reach back. We walk through the nineteen fifty-eight Bluff Creek story that gave the name Bigfoot to the world, beginning with bulldozer operator Jerry Crew, foreman Wilbur Wallace, and Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli, and we spend the bulk of the episode in encounter territory.

Hunters who watched a hair-covered figure ford a creek and turn to look back. Families who heard screams answer each other across redwood campgrounds at midnight. Backpackers who listened to rhythmic wood-knocking trade across a Marble Mountain lake.

 Truckers who saw something step a guardrail in one stride on Highway 96. River guides on the Klamath, forestry technicians in the Trinity Alps, fishermen on the Smith River, hunters on the Mendocino, residents of the Hoopa Valley who simply live alongside what their grandmothers told them was there.

This is a California most postcards never show. The watchers above, the giants below, and the question that connects them.

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.

In May of 1971, a young couple named Bobby and Elizabeth Ford rented a small frame house outside the tiny town of Fouke, Arkansas. They'd been there less than a week when something reached through their front window in the middle of the night and changed their lives forever. By morning, Bobby Ford was in a Texarkana hospital being treated for shock and abrasions, the local constable and county sheriff were photographing three-toed tracks in the yard, and a story that had been quietly told around kitchen tables in Miller County for nearly a hundred years was about to spill out into the national press.

This episode walks through the full history of the Fouke Monster, from the 1908 Jonesville reports and the decades of quiet family stories that came before, through the Ford family attack on the night of 5/1/1971, and into the media wave that brought hunters, reporters, and a thousand and ninety dollar bounty to a town of a few hundred people.

 We dig into the work of Smokey Crabtree, the lifelong Fouke resident who became the unofficial chronicler of the case and wrote some of the most important primary-source books on the subject. We cover the production and release of Charles B. Pierce's 1972 docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek, a film made on a hundred thousand dollar loan from a Texarkana trucking company owner that went on to gross over twenty million dollars and quietly invent the modern American Bigfoot mythos. And we trace the encounter reports that kept rolling in long after the cameras packed up, from highway sightings in the late 1970s, to coon hunters in the bottoms in 1997, to trail camera images in 2008, all the way into recent reports along the Sulphur River and Mercer Bayou.

Drawing on nearly four decades of personal Sasquatch research and sixteen years in law enforcement, Brian unpacks the evidence with a careful eye on what the witnesses actually said, how investigators actually responded, and what holds up when you set the famous movie to one side and look at the record on its own terms.

The episode closes with an honest weighing of the major theories, black bear misidentification, hoaxing, regional folklore, and the case for a possible undocumented hominid population in the connected swamps that run from southwest Arkansas down into Louisiana and east Texas. The witnesses in Fouke didn't ask for any of this. They saw what they saw. And the bottoms keep their secrets the way they always have.

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.

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.