Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

In this installment, Daniel finds something he never expected: normalcy. A job at a local pizza place, the simple rhythm of work and home, the blessed absence of danger. After everything they've survived, boring feels like a gift.Meanwhile, Brian's podcast has exploded beyond anything he imagined. Five million downloads.Tens of thousands of community members. Emails pouring in from witnesses who've carried their secrets for decades, finally finding a place where someone believes them. A seventy-eight-year-old woman writes to share an encounter she's hidden since 1952, and Brian remembers exactly why he does this work.But success brings complications. For every credible witness, there are a dozen others whose stories fall apart under scrutiny. A construction worker from British Columbia claims an intimate encounter with a female Sasquatch, and Brian is forced to draw hard lines about what belongs on the show.Then a retired nurse from New Mexico shares something different entirely: a story of a young Navajo man brought to her hospital in 1992, speaking of being taken by "the big people," and the federal agents who confiscated every piece of evidence before intimidating him into silence. The wheat and the chaff. Sorting one from the other becomes Brian's constant burden. Then the men in black return. Different faces, same cold authority. They come with an offer: classified documents revealing decades of suppressed research, interdimensional hypotheses, everything Brian has been searching for. The price? Stop pushing for official disclosure. Become a partner in managing the truth rather than forcing it into the light. Brian refuses.Eighteen months later, they burn his studio to the ground. But fire has a way of spreading what it's meant to destroy. The attack makes national news. Donations flood in. A major network offers a television deal with full editorial control. And soon Brian finds himself leading an expedition into the Pisgah with a full production crew, thermal cameras, and night vision equipment.On the eighth night, in a hollow near where Austin Mercer vanished, the forest comes alive with wood knocks and howls. The creatures stay just beyond the cameras, too smart to be caught clearly, but their presence is undeniable.It isn't definitive proof.But it's evidence the world will have to reckon with.And at a simple wooden cross marking where Austin was last seen, Brian says a quiet prayer for all those who've disappeared into these ancient mountains, and for the truth still waiting to be found.

In the spring of nineteen seventy-nine, a quiet cattle farmer in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Tennessee followed a strange sound into the timber beyond his fence line. What he found in a ravine that morning would change the course of his family's life for the next four decades and beyond.A young creature was caught in an illegal bear trap. Hurt. Terrified. Looking up at him with eyes that didn't belong to any animal he'd ever encountered.The farmer made a choice. He knelt down and set it free. No cameras. No witnesses. Just a simple act of kindness from a man who believed you help what's hurting, no matter what it is.What happened next is one of the most remarkable long-term sasquatch encounter accounts we've ever received on this show. The creature came back. Then others appeared. And when the farmer's young grandson arrived for his first summer on the property, a friendship began between the boy and that young sasquatch that would span decades.He watched them. They watched him. Trust was built in inches over years. And what started with one grandfather's mercy in a wooded ravine eventually came full circle in a way that none of us saw coming. This is a story about patience, trust, and the kind of quiet coexistence that most people would say is impossible. Thomas Pritchard says otherwise. And after you hear what he has to say, you might just agree with him.

Sheriff Brian Patterson steps away from the badge and into the microphone full time as Sasquatch Odyssey explodes beyond anything he ever imagined. Part Five picks up with the podcast in full swing, and the witnesses are lining up from every corner of the South and beyond to finally tell the stories they have been carrying in silence for decades.It starts in the mountains of northeast Georgia with a seventy-three-year-old retired logger named Earl Hutchins, a man who kept his mouth shut for forty-five years about what stepped out of the timber near Clayton in the fall of nineteen seventy-eight. His story breaks something open.The emails start flooding in from across the region, and Patterson finds himself recording encounter after encounter from witnesses who never had anyone willing to listen. A retired schoolteacher from Ellijay describes the thing that came screaming out of the Chattahoochee National Forest and changed the way she felt about the woods forever. A fishing guide from Everglades City recounts the night a pair of glowing eyes tracked him across the water in the Ten Thousand Islands. A teenage girl in Oconee County, South Carolina watched something unfold from a rhododendron thicket while her daddy's bluetick hound shook itself half to death against her leg.The stories stretch across state lines and keep coming. Arkansas. Tennessee. Virginia. A coon hunter and his cousin tree something in the Ouachitas that no lantern light should ever have revealed. A family of four flees a Cherokee National Forest campsite at three in the morning. A state trooper on Skyline Drive watches something cross a two-lane highway in three strides and never tells a soul.Then the podcast goes national and the picture gets bigger. A Lummi Nation elder speaks of the Ts'emekwes his people have known for thousands of years. A woman in the Hocking Hills of Ohio locks eyes with something standing between the trees in broad daylight and never hikes again. From Louisiana to Alaska to Hawaii, the encounters pile up, and Patterson starts to understand that this is not a regional phenomenon. It is everywhere. When the show crosses international borders, the scope becomes staggering. A First Nations man from British Columbia reminds the world that his people gave us the word Sasquatch in the first place. A Russian researcher describes a shape moving through snow in the Pamir Mountains. An Australian prospector watches something vanish from a waterhole in the outback. Sherpas in Nepal, scientists in China, guides in the Amazon — every culture, every continent, every corner of the wild world has a name for what lives in the places humans do not go. But it is the deep encounters that change everything. A hospice nurse in rural Kentucky describes the night something appeared at her dying husband's window and hummed him into his final moment of peace. A lost hiker in the Gila Wilderness receives images in her mind that lead her back to safety. A former Army Ranger wakes paralyzed in the Big Thicket while something rifles through his thoughts like pages in a book. These are the stories that keep Patterson up at night and force him to ask whether these creatures are something far stranger and far more profound than anyone has been willing to consider. By the end of Part Five, Patterson is two years into full-time podcasting with over three hundred interviews behind him and patterns emerging from the noise. The creatures follow corridors. They move with the seasons.They choose when to be seen. And a small but undeniable percentage of encounters suggest something beyond biology, beyond what any scientific framework can currently explain. The podcast has crossed a million downloads. The community is growing. The world is slowly waking up. And somewhere out in the deep woods, something is watching back.

What does it take to break a forty-year silence, and what does it cost to tell the truth when powerful forces have worked for decades to keep it buried?In Part Four of The Sheriff of Bigfoot Country, everything changes.An anonymous envelope left in the dead of night opens the door to a classified government operation tied to the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens. What was recovered in the chaos wasn’t human, and the documents reveal a truth far more disturbing than folklore ever suggested. Autopsies, survivor reports, and firsthand medical testimony point to intelligent beings hidden from the public under the cover of disaster response.As witnesses finally come forward—law enforcement, military pilots, medical professionals, and federal employees—the silence fractures.A documentary meant to expose the truth is shut down just weeks before release, confirming the reach of those determined to keep these secrets hidden. But the internet changes the rules, and once the story escapes, it can’t be contained. As the world begins to listen, new voices emerge, decades of fear dissolve, and a movement is born. What began as an investigation becomes a reckoning, and the path forward leads to something bigger than one man, one mountain, or one secret.This is the moment the dam breaks, the truth finds its voice, and the journey that becomes Sasquatch Odyssey truly begins.

Tonight we're going back to basics. Six encounter stories from six different states, told the way they were meant to be told. Around the fire. In the dark. The way witnesses have been sharing these experiences for generations.You'll hear from Daryl, a long haul trucker who watched something cross Interstate Ninety in Montana back in nineteen ninety-seven. Something that stepped over a guardrail like it was nothing and looked back at him with eyes that held more intelligence than any animal he'd ever seen.Wade was a deputy in rural Arkansas when he responded to a call about something stealing corn from an old farmer's field. What he saw standing at the tree line that September night in two thousand and twelve changed everything he thought he knew about the woods behind those farms.Colleen spent eleven years as a park ranger in the North Cascades before she got a frantic call from a family trapped in a rental cabin. Something was circling their cabin at night. Pounding on the walls. Screaming in the darkness. She thought it was a bear until she pressed her flashlight to that back window.Hank hunted the same Michigan property for thirty years. Opening day of rifle season in nineteen eighty-nine, something walked into his clearing. He had it in his scope. Finger on the trigger. And he couldn't pull it. He told me why, and his answer has stayed with me ever since.Terry was hiking solo on the Oregon coast when she realized something was following her through the old growth. For twenty minutes it kept pace with her through the trees before it finally let her see it. What happened next surprised even her. And Earl, an eighty-one-year-old Kentucky farmer who wrote me a series of letters in nineteen ninety-six about something that came around his hollow back in seventy-three.Something the old timers in those mountains had always known about but never talked about.Six witnesses. Six encounters. Six lives changed forever.

After the midnight visit from the men in black, Brian is left with a choice—back down, or push forward and risk everything. There’s no middle ground anymore. Daniel, uneasy but resolute, agrees to stand with him no matter what comes next. Every document is copied. Multiple backups are created and hidden in separate locations. If the evidence disappears, the truth won’t disappear with it. As the pressure mounts, Zach makes contact with an underground network of researchers who have been operating in the shadows for decades—people with their own stories of intimidation, silencing, and government interference. They know the rules of this world. They know how to survive it.Then an opportunity arrives they never anticipated. Documentary filmmaker Amanda steps forward, determined to tell the story. She’s meticulous, credible, and unafraid of the implications. Once she’s in, there’s no turning back. The crew arrives in November. Interviews begin. Physical evidence is examined and verified by independent experts. But it quickly becomes clear they’re not alone. A break-in at the rental house leaves one thing missing—documents. Nothing else is disturbed. Days later, a tracking device is discovered beneath a crew member’s car. The message is unmistakable: we see you, and we can reach you whenever we want.They keep filming anyway. Two weeks before Christmas, the phone rings. The same calm, practiced voice from that first encounter delivers a final warning. But this time, something slips—something unintended.“The creatures are just one piece of a much larger puzzle. ”Brian refuses to back down. On the other end of the line, the voice sounds almost regretful.“Then I’m sorry for what’s going to happen. ”As tensions rise, Zach uncovers the existence of Project Threshold—a classified Department of Defense operation launched in 1962. The revelation is staggering. The government hasn’t merely covered up the existence of these creatures. They’ve been managing them. Containing them. Controlling them. For decades—possibly since the 1940s. And buried even deeper is something else. Something far more dangerous. Something they fear more than the creatures themselves.Then, just before dawn, there’s a knock at the door. No one is there. Only a manila envelope resting on the doormat, stamped with a single word: TRUTH. Inside is a file marked Project Vulcan. Dated May 18, 1980—the day Mount St. Helens erupted.In the chaos following the eruption, military recovery teams entered the blast zone. What they retrieved was never meant to be known: seventeen dead specimens. Three critically injured. One survivor. The photographs are impossible to deny. A massive, seven-foot-tall creature lies strapped to a stretcher, its body scorched, its hair burned away, surrounded by men in hazmat suits. The conclusion is unavoidable. The United States government didn’t just know these beings existed.They’ve been studying them—for over forty years. Next episode: The truth comes out—and the consequences begin.

Tonight we bring you six terrifying Sasquatch encounters from across America, spanning six decades and six different states. These are the stories that witnesses carried in silence for years, sometimes decades, before finally sharing what they experienced in the wilderness.We begin in the redwood forests of Northern California in nineteen sixty-three, where a young logger named Harold Vance comes face to face with something that will haunt him for the rest of his life. From there we travel to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State in nineteen seventy-seven, where a family vacation turns into a nightmare that three children will never forget.The hills of eastern Kentucky provide the backdrop for our third encounter in nineteen eighty-four, when a veteran hunter with forty years of woods experience meets something that proves just how little he actually knew.We then head south to the swamps of central Florida in nineteen ninety-two, where a commercial fisherman discovers that alligators aren't the apex predators he thought they were.Our fifth story takes us to the farmland of southern Ohio in two thousand and five, where a third-generation farmer learns the truth behind his grandfather's warnings about the woodland at the edge of his property.And finally, we venture into the San Juan Mountains of Colorado in two thousand and sixteen, where a group of experienced hikers encounters not only a massive creature circling their camp in the darkness, but mysterious lights in the sky that seem somehow connected to what stalks them below.Six witnesses. Six encounters. Six lives changed forever. The wilderness keeps secrets, and tonight we're sharing some of them with you.

The years that followed Brian's childhood encounter in Lyerly weren't easy, but they were transformative. His mother beat cancer, earned her degree, and rebuilt their lives piece by piece. Brian found his footing too—working his way up from fast food to restaurant management, discovering he had a gift for handling people and solving problems.But something else was happening beneath the surface.In rural Georgia during the early nineties, Brian came to terms with a truth he'd been running from—he was gay. A relationship with a coworker named Marcus brought clarity, but also consequences. Friends disappeared. Family members stopped calling. The people who stayed proved who really mattered. A career in juvenile corrections followed—seven years working with teenagers society had written off. Then came the badge he'd always wanted, a posting in the remote mountain town of Suches Georgia, and a chance meeting with a sheriff's deputy named Daniel that would change everything. Together, they bought forty acres in the North Carolina mountains backing up to the Pisgah National Forest.And almost immediately, the strangeness began. Howls in the night. Rocks appearing in impossible places. Lights with no source. Something was out there, watching their new home. Brian's unexpected run for Caldwell County Sheriff opened doors he never anticipated—including a partnership with a forest ranger named Zach who'd been quietly documenting the truth for years. Dozens of people had vanished in the Pisgah. The evidence pointed to something the government was desperate to hide. Then a college student named Austin Mercer disappeared, and the trail camera footage he left behind changed everything.Now Brian faces an impossible choice. Men in black suits have delivered a clear message—back off or lose everything. But walking away means more people die in the darkness of those ancient woods.Part Two of Bigfoot Country is the story of a man finding his identity, his purpose, and his courage—and discovering that sometimes the monsters in the forest are easier to face than the ones who want to keep them secret.

Over the next few weeks, I'm gonna be sharing my new book with you—start to finish. The whole thing. It's called Bigfoot Country. All told, it's around eight hours of narration. So, I'll be putting it out in multiple episodes. And honestly... I've been sitting on this for a long time. I'm excited—and a little nervous—to finally put it out there. But before we jump in, I wanna take a minute. Just you and me.What you're about to hear is loosely based on my life. Some of it happened exactly the way I tell it. No embellishment, no polish. Other parts are rooted in real experiences—real people, real moments, real emotions—but maybe stretched a bit, or reimagined, to help the story breathe. And then there are parts where… well, you get to decide what you believe.I also wanna be upfront about something. Early on, you might find yourself wondering where this is all headed. There's a lot of groundwork—family, childhood, personal history. Just know this: it's going somewhere. This book is about Bigfoot. That's the destination. I promise. Just trust me long enough to get there. At its heart, this is a story about my earliest experiences with the strange and unexplained. It starts with something that happened to me when I was twelve years old—an encounter with what I believe was a Sasquatch. That moment stayed with me. It shaped a lot of who I became. And for years, I struggled with how—or even if—I should ever tell that story. Because how do you talk about something the world insists isn't real? How do you open yourself up like that, knowing people are gonna judge you, doubt you, or dismiss you entirely?But these stories have always mattered to me. This book has always mattered. And at some point, I realized I was done keeping it all tucked away.Here's the thing, though—I didn't just write about Bigfoot. I wrote about me. All of me. My childhood. My parents. My failures. My struggles. And yeah… Dani.I know that part isn't gonna sit well with everyone. I get that. Some folks are gonna have opinions, and that's their right. But for me, leaving any of that out would've been dishonest. I can't ask you to trust me with these experiences and then hide pieces of who I am. I can't tell my story without including the person who stood beside me through the hardest parts of it. That's just not how I live, and it's not how this book was written.Believe me, I thought about sanding down the rough edges. Making it cleaner. Safer. Easier to swallow. Cutting out the parts that might make people uncomfortable. But I couldn't do it. I've spent too much of my life holding back, and I'm done with that.So this is me. This is my story. All of it. Some of what you'll hear happened exactly as I describe it. Some of it is how I imagine things might have gone—if the timing had been different, if I'd pushed harder, if the world worked the way I think it sometimes should.And one last thing before we start—this is Book One. There's more coming. A lot more. This is just the beginning. I hope you enjoy Bigfoot Country... as much as I did writing it. Part One is called The Hollow, and it begins in September of 1984. I was eleven years old, just a few months shy of twelve, and my family had just moved to a place called Lyerly, Georgia. Population next to nothing. No stoplight. One gas station. The kind of town where everybody knew everybody's business before you even finished doing it. We moved into an old house at the end of a dirt road—a house that looked like something had crawled there to die. White paint gone gray. Porch sagging in the middle. Eighty acres of woods stretching out behind it like a wall. My father, Jerry Patterson, was a drinker. A man whose silence usually meant a storm was building. My mother, Jean, was small but fierce in the ways that mattered—even if she couldn't fix the things that were broken in our family. She stayed. She always stayed. The woods became my escape. I spent those early weeks mapping the land, building forts out of fallen branches and rotting tarps, disappearing into the trees whenever the tension at home got too thick. I learned every trail, every landmark, every corner of that property. All except one. There was a section way back at the far edge, where our land butted up against the national forest, that I couldn't bring myself to enter. Every time I got close, something pushed me back. A wrongness I couldn't name. A feeling like walking into a cold spot in a warm room.One day in late October, I decided I'd had enough of being scared. I was almost twelve years old. Too old for this. So I grabbed my BB gun and headed out to prove to myself there was nothing back there worth fearing. I was wrong. What I found was a clearing with a depression in the ground where something big had been bedding down. The smell hit me first—wet dog mixed with a dumpster behind a butcher shop. And then the sounds. Heavy footsteps. Bipedal. Something walking on two legs that weighed more than any man. Huffing. Growling. Sounds that rose and fell in patterns that almost seemed like language. It charged at me through the underbrush, stopped maybe twenty feet away, and just... breathed. Watched. Decided. It let me go.I ran home faster than I'd ever run in my life. And I never told a soul.But that wasn't the only strangeness that followed us to that house. At night, I started hearing voices in the walls—whispery, indistinct, speaking in languages I couldn't understand. A dark figure began appearing at the foot of my bed, a void shaped like a man, watching me while I lay frozen and unable to scream. Scratching moved through the walls like something was circling me. Three heavy knocks shook my bedroom door one night, and when I opened it, no one was there—but downstairs, a fire was burning in a fireplace we never used, in a chimney my father said was blocked.Something was in that house. Something that had been there before us and didn't want us there.And then, in January, everything changed. My mother got sick. Skin Cancer. The doctors gave her six months, maybe a year. And my father—the man who was supposed to hold us together—disappeared. Shacked up with some woman in another town, drowning himself in pills and booze while his wife was dying and his son was alone.I ended up staying with my best friend Brad Henderson's family. They took me in without question, gave me a bed and a place at their table. And every weekend, someone drove me to Atlanta so I could watch my mother fade away in a hospital room. She lost her hair. Lost her weight. Lost everything except her will to fight.Against all odds, she won. Almost a year to the day after her diagnosis, the doctors told us her cancer was in remission. She came home for Christmas, weighing maybe eighty pounds, wrapped in a scarf my friend's mother had knitted for her. And the first thing she did was look at my father's empty chair and say the words I'd been waiting to hear my whole life. We're leaving. But leaving wasn't simple. My father showed up one last time, took my mother's pain medication right out of the medicine cabinet, and vanished. He started selling those pills around town—the same town that had taken up a collection to help us, the same community that had rallied around my dying mother while he was nowhere to be found People got angry. The wrong kind of people. One night in January, I woke up to the sound of voices and vehicles in the yard. I looked out my window and saw twenty figures in white robes standing around a burning cross. The Klan had come to our house. Not because of us—because of him. Because of the shame he'd brought on his family in a place that took such things seriously.We left Lyerly two weeks later. My mother divorced my father, took back her maiden name, and we started over in a tiny apartment in Summerville. Two bedrooms. Thin walls. Stained carpet. But it was ours. And it was safe.I got a job at Dairy Queen. Went to school. Helped my mother however I could. The nightmares followed me—the dark figure, the dreams of something chasing me through endless woods—but I buried it all. Pushed it down. Told myself it didn't matter anymore.But I never forgot what I heard in those woods. Never forgot that huffing, that growling, those footsteps too heavy to be human. I knew it was real. I knew it was out there. And someday, I was going to find it again.But first, I had to grow up. First, I had to survive. That's Part One of Bigfoot Country.

Every once in a while, a story comes across my desk that stops me cold. Not because it’s sensational, but because it’s precise, deeply personal, and impossible to dismiss. The account you’re about to hear is one of those. It arrived as a letter from a man I’m calling Tom, a seventeen-year park ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains who has spent his life dealing in facts, emergencies, and hard reality—not Bigfoot stories.Tom was called to a remote homestead owned by an eighty-two-year-old woman named Mabel. Something had been raiding her property, tearing apart her barn, stealing dog food and chickens, and—most unsettling of all—unlatching doors and closing them behind itself. Bears don’t do that. What Tom found near the coop were sixteen-inch footprints with five toes, unmistakably primate, and impossible by any known standard.What followed changed everything he thought he knew about those mountains. Mabel told him she had lived alongside these creatures her entire life. Her mother, her grandmother, and even her great-grandmother had known about them since settling that hollow in the 1840s. There had always been rules, boundaries, and even communication. But a new presence had arrived—larger, gray-furred, aggressive—and for the first time in eighty years, Mabel was afraid. Tom chose to stay. Over the next two weeks, he documented wood knocks, vocalizations unlike any known animal, tree breaks forming deliberate perimeters, rocks thrown with intent, and images from trail cameras that still haunt him. With help from a trusted wildlife officer, he gathered casts, recordings, and photographs that defy easy explanation. And on the eleventh night, he had an encounter that permanently altered his understanding of reality. This story doesn’t end with proof or confrontation. It ends with something far rarer: understanding.Tom wrestled with whether to share this, knowing the cost of speaking out. But he thought of Mabel, of his friend who’d carried his own encounter in silence, and of everyone who’s seen something in these woods and been told they imagined it. I believe him.What you’re about to hear is exactly as Tom wrote it, in his own words. It’s long. It’s detailed. And it’s one of the most moving accounts I’ve ever received.So settle in. From an eighty-acre homestead at the edge of the Smoky Mountains, this is the letter from Ranger Tom.

Tonight, we conclude The Bigfoot Journals. Seven men walked out of the hidden valley in November of seventeen ninety-nine. They carried knowledge that would haunt them for the rest of their lives... and a secret they swore never to reveal.In this final installment, we follow the Stone Expedition on their three-month winter journey home. We witness the debate that consumed them... publish or protect? We hear the oath sworn at Thornton's Tavern in Richmond, where seven survivors bound themselves to silence. And we learn what became of them all.Thomas Mercer, the scientist who died bitter in eighteen twenty-six, still regretting the discovery he could never publish. Sam Walker, who returned to the mountains he loved and passed peacefully in eighteen twenty-three. Josiah Whitfield, who found peace somewhere beyond the Mississippi. Solomon Reed, who carried his grandmother's wisdom north. Jim Sutton, whose last words were about the creatures.Young Zeke Stone, forever changed by his connection with the juvenile, gone by eighteen twenty. And Elijah Stone himself... who built a cabin in the Virginia mountains and watched the forest every night for twenty-seven years. We'll read his final journal entry, written on July fourth, eighteen twenty-six. The fiftieth anniversary of American independence. The day he passed the burden to his son. The chain of keepers had begun.Then we jump forward. Two centuries forward. To Marcus Stone, a history professor who inherits his estranged father's cabin... and discovers a trunk in the cellar that changes everything. The journals. The pendant. The truth.And finally, we witness what happens when Marcus leads a small expedition into the mountains. When the creatures reveal themselves once more. When the gesture of peace is given... and returned.This is the story of secrets that span generations. Of truths too dangerous to share. Of a family that watched and waited, keeper after keeper, century after century. And somewhere in those mountains... the creatures are still watching.They've always been watching. They always will be.

On the evening of November fifth, nineteen seventy five, seven loggers were driving home through the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona when they witnessed something that would change their lives forever. A glowing disc hovered silently above a clearing, pulsing with an eerie golden light.When twenty two year old Travis Walton approached the craft, a beam of blue green light shot out and struck him, lifting him off the ground before hurling him through the air. His terrified coworkers fled the scene, and when they returned minutes later, both the craft and Travis had vanished without a trace. For five days, search parties combed hundreds of square miles of rugged wilderness. Helicopters scanned from above. Tracking dogs followed trails that led nowhere. The six witnesses found themselves suspected of murder as Sheriff Marlin Gillespie struggled to believe their impossible story. Then, just hours after the men passed polygraph examinations confirming they had not harmed their friend, Travis Walton reappeared on a highway outside Heber, Arizona, disoriented, terrified, and carrying memories of an experience that defied all rational explanation.In this episode, we explore every detail of what has become one of the most thoroughly investigated and hotly debated alien abduction cases in history.We travel to the small Mormon community of Snowflake, Arizona, where Travis and his stepbrother Mike Rogers grew up, and we examine the bonds of friendship and family that would be tested by the events of that November night. We follow the massive search operation that turned up nothing, and we sit with the witnesses as suspicion fell upon them and their community began to turn against them. Most importantly, we go inside the craft itself, following Travis through his fragmented memories of waking on an examination table surrounded by creatures with enormous black eyes and pale, hairless skin. We walk with him through curved corridors that seemed to defy normal architecture, into a room where the walls came alive with stars and a single chair offered control over what appeared to be a planetarium display of the cosmos. We meet the tall, human looking beings in blue uniforms who led him through a hangar filled with disc shaped craft before sedating him and returning him to Earth.We also examine the aftermath that followed Travis home. The media circus that descended on Snowflake. The National Enquirer's controversial involvement. The first polygraph test that Travis failed while still traumatized, and the multiple subsequent tests he passed over the following decades. The relentless attacks from skeptics like Philip Klass, who devoted years to proving the case was an elaborate hoax. And the personal toll on the witnesses, from Mike Rogers' crushing guilt over leaving his best friend behind to Travis's years of nightmares, failed relationships, and the struggle to rebuild a normal life after experiencing something so profoundly abnormal. We trace the cultural legacy of the case, from Travis's nineteen seventy eight book The Walton Experience to the nineteen ninety three Paramount film Fire in the Sky, which introduced his story to millions while taking dramatic liberties with what actually happened aboard the craft. We explore how the case influenced UFO research and established a template for evaluating abduction claims, and we consider how the recent shift in government attitudes toward unidentified aerial phenomena has given cases like Travis Walton's new significance in the ongoing search for answers about what else might be sharing our universe. This is a story about the unknown, but it is also a story about very human things. Friendship and loyalty. Fear and courage. The weight of telling a truth that nobody wants to believe. Nearly fifty years after that night in the Arizona forest, every surviving witness has maintained that they saw what they say they saw. The mystery remains unsolved. The questions remain unanswered. And somewhere in the vast darkness between the stars, something may still be watching.

Tonight we're venturing into territory that goes beyond our usual encounters with large, hairy, bipedal creatures. After nearly forty years of research in the deep woods, I've come to understand that not everything strange out there can be explained by Sasquatch. Sometimes the things people encounter are even more terrifying. More strange. More impossible.This episode brings you four accounts that have haunted me since the day I first heard them.These stories came from witnesses who trusted me with experiences they'd kept buried for years, sometimes decades. Some made me promise not to share their accounts until after they'd passed on. Others simply needed to unburden themselves of secrets too heavy to carry alone. Our journey begins with a Vietnam veteran named David Hollister who ventured into the Cherokee National Forest in the summer of nineteen seventy-one and found himself trapped in an impossible loop. No matter which direction he walked, no matter how carefully he tracked his course with map and compass, he kept arriving at the same abandoned cabin. Inside that cabin was a journal filled with entries in his own handwriting, describing events that hadn't happened yet. David's account of escaping that gray, fog-shrouded nightmare raises questions about time and place that I still can't answer.From there we move to the mountains of western North Carolina where a competitive ultra-marathoner I'm calling Michelle had an encounter that ended her trail running career forever. During a routine training run, she noticed a shadow keeping pace with her through the trees. A human-shaped shadow with no source. Nothing casting it. Just darkness given form, matching her speed mile after mile through the forest. What happened during those ten miles of terror left a permanent mark on Michelle, one that's still visible today in the white hair at her temples.The third account takes us to Colorado and a story that defies everything we think we know about physics. A retired electrical engineer named Harold Price was scanning old radio frequencies late one night when he picked up an emergency transmission from a forest ranger named William Morrison. The ranger was terrified, describing something circling his remote station in the darkness. The problem was that Morrison was broadcasting from nineteen sixty-three, more than fifty years in the past. Harold spent seven hours on the radio with a man from another era, listening helplessly as something found its way inside that station.What Harold discovered when he researched the incident afterward confirmed his worst fears about what he'd witnessed.Our final story comes from a father named Robert who took his family camping in the Allegheny National Forest in the summer of eighty-nine. What began as a perfect evening around the campfire turned into a night of primal terror when the family woke to discover that every sound in the forest had stopped. No crickets. No owls. No wind. Just absolute, suffocating silence. And something was circling their tent. Something they could feel but not hear. Something that carried the silence with it like an aura. These four accounts share something in common. They all involve encounters with things that shouldn't exist. Things that operate outside the rules we think govern our world. Time loops. Sourceless shadows. Transmissions across decades. Silence that walks like a creature.I believe these witnesses. I've heard the recordings. I've seen the evidence. I've looked into the eyes of people forever changed by what they experienced in the deep woods. Whether you believe them is up to you. But I'd encourage you to listen with an open mind. Because our forests hold secrets we're only beginning to understand. And some of those secrets are darker and stranger than anything we've imagined. The woods have secrets. And some secrets don't want to be found.

There’s something out there in the most remote corners of the Appalachian Mountains. Not a creature from folklore, not a cryptid or ghost story. Something much closer to us—and somehow, much more terrifying because of it. In this episode, we go deep into the hills to explore the legend of the feral people of Appalachia—humans who turned their backs on civilization so long ago, they may have forgotten what it means to be part of it at all. It all starts near Whitetop Mountain, where a dying man named Mercer calls a few people together to share stories passed down through mountain families for nearly two centuries. These aren’t the kind of tales you’ll read in a book or hear from a park ranger. These are the stories folks only tell in quiet voices, far away from outsiders.We follow one of those stories back to 1978 in Mullins Hollow, Kentucky. A little boy named Thomas vanished from his yard in the middle of the day—his mother just a few steps away. Three days later, his father says a woman stepped out of the woods, filthy and wild-eyed, holding something small in her arms. She smiled, put a finger to her lips, and disappeared into the trees.Then there’s Ronald Clayton, a game warden who thought he’d seen everything—until a search for a missing boy in 2013 led him to a hidden settlement deep in the forest. He found the child, painted with strange symbols, surrounded by makeshift shelters and a smoldering fire. When he tried to escape, he realized they weren’t just following him—they were herding him. Letting him wear himself out before they made their move. He got lucky that day. Most people wouldn’t. Back in 1963, a geology professor and his team stumbled onto something sealed deep underground. A hidden chamber the size of a football field—stone shelters, fire pits, carved beds, and bones. So many bones. In one corner, seventeen pairs of children’s shoes. Different sizes. Different decades. He never put any of it in his official report.And in 1972, the Hensley family in Virginia lived through something they still won’t talk about without a shake in their voice. It started with missing tools, then livestock, then faces at the windows. One foggy morning, a gray-haired woman came out of the woods and said, “Give us the girl child, and we’ll leave you in peace.” The farmer opened fire. A week later, every animal on their farm was dead. One word was written in blood on the side of their barn: OWED.Throughout the episode, we talk about the signs—the silence in the woods when the birds stop singing, the strange stick figures and markings left at the edge of the forest, the voices that call your name in the dark. These people don’t attack groups. They prefer the ones who are alone. They prefer children.This isn’t a story about monsters. It’s about what happens when people cut all ties to the world and build their own. A world where different rules apply. A world where survival is everything. They’ve been here for generations. And they’re very good at staying hidden. Unless, of course, they want to be found.

There's a corner of America where people vanish at a startling rate, where massive searches can turn up nothing, no trail, no remains, no answers. That place is Alaska. In this episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, we head into the shadowed heart of the Alaska Triangle, the vast wilderness between Anchorage, Juneau, and Utqiagvik, to explore why so many disappear and why indigenous stories have warned about forest-dwelling abductors for generations.In the summer of twenty twenty-two, sixty-nine-year-old Mary Dawn Wilson drove her Ford Focus nearly seven miles down the Stampede Trail near Healy, Alaska, a rugged route tied to the Into the Wild legend and notorious for swallowing travelers. With a two-year-old child in the back seat, Wilson pushed her vehicle far beyond where it reasonably could go.When the car became stuck in mud, she made a decision no one can explain. She locked the toddler inside the vehicle and walked deeper into the wilderness, away from the highway and toward the interior.Search teams deployed helicopters, thermal imaging, drones, ATVs, and trained dogs. They located Wilson's personal belongings about a mile beyond the stuck car, proof she kept going. After that, the trail went cold. No footprints. No sign. Nothing. After three days, the active search was suspended. Mary Dawn Wilson has never been found.We zoom out to examine the bigger pattern, thousands of disappearances across Alaska over the decades, many ending in complete erasure. We revisit chilling cases tied to the Alaska Triangle, including the nineteen seventy-two disappearance of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Alaska Congressman Nick Begich, whose plane was never recovered despite one of the largest search operations in American history. We examine the case of Gary Frank Sotherden, whose skull was found years later with bear tooth marks but little else, no clothing, no gear, no explanation for how he ended up so far from where he was supposed to be.We consider Thomas Anthony Nuzzi, the traveling nurse last seen with an unidentified woman who has never been located, both of them vanishing into the Alaskan night without a trace. And we look at Michael LeMaitre, a marathon runner who vanished during a major, heavily monitored event on a mountainside crowded with other competitors and spectators, disappearing in broad daylight despite sophisticated search technology that should have been able to locate any warm body on that mountain. Alaska Native traditions carry their own explanations for these disappearances, stories of entities that mimic, lure, and take. The Tlingit speak of the Kushtaka, the land otter man, a shapeshifter said to imitate voices and faces to draw victims away from safety. The Yup'ik tell of the Hairy Man they call Miluquyuliq, a powerful forest presence that watches travelers from the treeline with an intensity that goes beyond mere animal curiosity. And the descendants of Portlock speak of the Nantinaq, a predatory figure so feared that locals ultimately abandoned their entire town rather than remain in its territory. By nineteen fifty, every resident had fled, leaving behind homes and livelihoods, choosing displacement over whatever stalked them from the surrounding forest. We also touch on modern reports, including sightings documented by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization across Alaska, encounters with massive bipedal creatures covered in dark fur that emit strange vocalizations and watch humans with unsettling intelligence. These accounts span decades and come from experienced outdoorsmen, truckers, hunters, and others who know the difference between known wildlife and something else entirely.At the center of this episode lies an unsettling question that may never be answered. What made Mary Dawn Wilson walk the wrong way, into the deep, after leaving a child behind? She was no naive tourist. She knew the Alaskan wilderness, had lived in remote areas, understood the dangers. Yet something compelled her to drive down that haunted trail, to keep going when any sensible person would turn back, and finally to walk away from her stuck vehicle in the opposite direction of safety. Did she experience a medical crisis that impaired her judgment? Did the wilderness itself disorient her?Or did she see something, hear something, follow something that called to her from the trees?The Tlingit have always warned their children about the Kushtaka's ability to mimic familiar voices, to appear as loved ones, to promise help while leading victims to their doom. The people of Portlock knew something was hunting them long before they abandoned their homes. And Mary Dawn Wilson, walking deeper into the Alaskan interior on that July afternoon, may have encountered whatever it is that has been taking people from this land for longer than anyone can remember.Mary Dawn Wilson was four feet ten inches tall, weighed one hundred sixty pounds, and had gray hair and blue eyes with a small scar on her left ear. She was wearing a floral dress and a cream-colored kuspuk with green flowers when she disappeared. Her case remains open. Tips can be submitted to the Alaska State Troopers at nine oh seven, four five one, five one oh oh, or anonymously through the AK Tips smartphone app. If you know anything about what happened on the Stampede Trail in July of twenty twenty-two, please reach out. Somewhere in that vast and silent wilderness, the answers are waiting to be found.Thank you for joining us on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. The forest is always watching. And sometimes, it takes.

In early September of 1799, the Stone Expedition reunited deep in the unmapped wilderness beyond the Ohio River. Nine men gathered at the designated rendezvous, carrying fresh provisions and renewed hope. They could not have known that within weeks, two of them would be dead, and the survivors would carry secrets that would haunt their bloodlines for generations.This episode chronicles the expedition's darkest chapter as they pressed deeper into forbidden territory than any Europeans had ventured before. The creatures that had watched them for months began gathering in unprecedented numbers, converging from all directions toward something none of the men could see but all could feel drawing them forward. When the expedition crossed into hostile territory without realizing it, the fragile peace they had built shattered in a single night of violence that left Henri Beaumont scattered across a forest clearing in pieces too small to bury. But the horror of that night was only the beginning. Guided by creatures whose motives remained unknowable, the surviving members discovered a hidden valley—a vast sanctuary concealed between mountain walls where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these beings had lived in complete isolation since before human civilization began.What they found in the caves of that valley would challenge everything they believed about the natural world and reveal a relationship between humans and these ancient creatures far more terrible than any of them had imagined. The bones told the story. Scattered. Broken. Some fossilized with the weight of millennia, others bearing traces of recent flesh. Teeth marks near the joints. Evidence of breaking for marrow. The native warnings had not been exaggeration. They had been truth. This episode also documents the final descent of Will Harper, the expedition's artist, whose mind had been unraveling since his first encounter with the creatures months before. His death in a forest clearing—surrounded by silent witnesses, his heart simply stopped, his face frozen in an expression of terrible transcendence—remains one of the most haunting passages in the Stone journals.Two men entered that valley who would never leave it. The seven who survived would carry the weight of what they witnessed for the rest of their lives, bound by an oath of secrecy that would echo through their descendants for two hundred years.Some knowledge demands a price. Some truths are paid for in blood.

One shot in the darkness. One moment of fear-fueled panic. And everything the expedition had built with the creatures comes crashing down.In Episode Three, we witness the consequences of Jim McAllister's breakdown. Haunted by war, drowning his demons in homemade whiskey, Jim opens fire on a creature standing at the edge of the firelight—and triggers a siege that will test every man's sanity. What follows is a night of absolute terror. Rocks and branches hurled from the darkness. Horses screaming as they break free and scatter. The knocking—not the measured rhythm they'd grown accustomed to, but rapid, frantic, like a thousand hammers striking in unison. And underneath it all, a sound that cuts deeper than any threat: the unmistakable cry of grief.But the creatures don't attack. They could have. They demonstrate exactly what they're capable of—and then they wait.Sam insists there's only one path forward: atonement. Each man must sacrifice something precious. Something that matters. What unfolds is a ritual of exchange that will determine whether the expedition lives or dies.The episode follows the group as they split—some returning east with the journals, others pressing deeper into territory no white man has ever seen.Ancient forests where the trees are older than memory. Creatures walking openly beside them now, no longer hiding. And a meeting with the Wyandot tribe's keeper of history—She-Who-Remembers—who delivers a warning that chills to the bone: "No one who has entered that place has returned. Not because they kill everyone who enters. But because those who enter... change."

Tonight we're doing something a little different here on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. We're setting aside the witness encounters, and instead we're gathering around the fire to tell a story the old fashioned way. This is a Christmas tale about a young Sasquatch named Thorn who has spent the autumn watching a human family from the treeline above their mountain cabin.He's fascinated by their laughter, their warmth, their strange rituals of carving pumpkins and roasting marshmallows and dragging trees inside their homes to cover them with lights. His kind has always kept their distance from humans, but something about this family calls to him in ways he doesn't quite understand. On Christmas Eve, when the teenage daughter Emma leaves a plate of cookies on the porch railing and looks up toward the treeline with a knowing smile, everything changes. Thorn makes a decision that will alter the course of his life and theirs. What follows is a journey through a blizzard, an impossible winter rose, a lost little boy named Jacob who followed what he thought were Santa's footprints into the storm, and a rescue that bridges the vast distance between two worlds that were never supposed to meet. Pour yourself something warm, dim the lights, and let the snow fall as we journey deep into the ancient Appalachian hills for a Christmas Eve you won't soon forget. It' s suitable for listeners of all ages and makes for perfect holiday listening with the whole family gathered close. From all of us here at Paranormnal World Productions, we wish you a Christmas filled with magic, kindness, and the reminder that you are never truly alone. Keep your eyes on the treeline, friends. And maybe leave a little something on the porch tonight, just in case.

I love a good Christmas story.The kind where something strange and wonderful happens out in the wilderness. Where the magic of the season reaches places most people never go. Where even the darkest corners of the forest feel touched by something warm and old and meaningful.Over the years, I’ve told you stories like that.Stories of Sasquatch sightings on snowy December mornings.Of mysterious gifts left on remote cabin doorsteps.Of unexplained tracks leading to and from places where no tracks should exist at all.But tonight, friends, I’m not here to warm your heart.Tonight, I’m here to freeze your blood.South Carolina. 1985.A young insurance adjuster named Gerald Hutchins inherits a remote cabin deep in the forest from his great-uncle Amos. The old man had lived alone out there for more than twenty years, and the family whispered that he came back from the war… changed. Haunted. Given to muttering in languages no one recognized. Drawing strange symbols he would immediately burn in the fireplace.Gerald decides the cabin would be the perfect place to spend Christmas with his wife, Ellen, and their thirteen-year-old son, Marcus.A real holiday, he tells them. The kind they used to have before television and convenience took over. Just a family, a fire, and the quiet peace of the winter woods.What Gerald doesn’t tell them is what he found when he first visited the cabin alone.The chains hanging above the fireplace.The birch switches stained dark with something he didn’t want to examine too closely.And the mask. A horrible wooden mask with hollow eyes and a grin carved with far too many teeth.He doesn’t tell them about the sound he heard coming from the second floor.The sound of hooves on hardwood. As Christmas Eve settles in, the temperature drops and the snow begins to fall. And the Hutchins family will learn that some traditions are older than Christianity. Some punishments are older than coal in a stocking. And some things that were meant to stay in the old country followed our ancestors across the ocean—hiding in the shadows of their ships, waiting patiently for the right moment to remind us that the old ways never truly died.They just learned how to wait.Long before Santa Claus became the jolly gift-giver we know today, the winter solstice was a time of fear as much as celebration in the Alpine regions of Europe. While Saint Nicholas rewarded good children, his dark companion dealt with the rest.Krampus. Half-goat. Half-demon. All nightmare. A creature with curved horns, a serpentine tongue, chains forged in hellfire, and birch switches for the wicked. A basket on its back to carry its prizes away—down to whatever hell it called home.Krampusnacht, celebrated on December fifth, saw young men dress as the creature and roam the streets, terrorizing towns. But the oldest stories—the ones whispered long before costumes—spoke of something far older than men in masks. A being that existed before Christianity tried to tame it. A being that still walks the winter forests when nights grow long and the barriers between worlds wear thin.A being that always comes back.Content Warning:This episode contains intense horror imagery, supernatural violence, and themes involving harm to a family, including a child. Listener discretion is strongly advised.  This one is not for the faint of heart—and absolutely not for little ones. I’ve spent a long time telling stories about strange things in the woods. Bigfoot encounters. Unexplained phenomena. Creatures that linger just beyond the firelight. Even the scariest of those stories often carry a strange warmth—a sense that whatever’s out there might be mysterious, might be frightening, but isn’t necessarily evil.This story is different. This story is about something very evil.Something that has been doing terrible things to humanity for a very long time.Something that doesn’t care about your Christmas spirit, your good intentions, or your prayers.I wanted to tell this story because I think we’ve sanitized our holidays. We’ve forgotten that our ancestors celebrated the winter solstice not just with feasts and gifts—but with rituals meant to protect them from the darkness. They understood something we’ve chosen to forget.The longest night of the year is the longest for a reason.So as you listen, maybe keep a candle burning.Maybe check the locks on your doors.And if you hear something on the roof that sounds a little too heavy to be reindeer…Well. You know what to do..Until next time…Sweet dreams.And Merry Christmas. 🎄

In this deeply unsettling episode, we bring you the testimony of Dale Raymond Sturgill, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who encountered the impossible not once, but twice in his lifetime. His story begins in the humid jungles of the Central Highlands in 1968, where a routine reconnaissance mission turned into a firefight against creatures that should not exist.Dale and his squad came face to face with the legendary Nguoi Rung, known to American soldiers as the Rock Apes, and what followed was a brutal battle for survival that left one man dead and the survivors sworn to secrecy by military intelligence. Dale believed he had seen the worst the world had to offer. He thought the horrors of Vietnam would remain the darkest chapter of his life. He was wrong.Nearly twenty years later, in the remote mountains of Breathitt County, Kentucky, Dale went hunting for deer and found something else entirely. What began as a peaceful week in the wilderness quickly devolved into a waking nightmare when he discovered mutilated animal carcasses, enormous footprints circling his campsite, and heard howls in the night that belonged to no known animal. On his fourth night in the mountains, two creatures emerged from the darkness—beings that walked upright like men but bore the heads and features of monstrous canines. They were hunting him. They were coordinating their attack. And Dale was completely alone.This episode contains Dale’s complete account of both encounters, told in his own words as he approaches the end of his life and finally breaks decades of silence. He describes in vivid detail the appearance of the Rock Apes, their almost human eyes, and their terrifying aggression. He recounts the moment he first saw a Dogman step into his firelight—the intelligence and malice burning in its yellow eyes—and the brutal fight that followed when the creatures attacked. His escape through the pitch-black forest, wounded and weaponless, is a harrowing tale of survival against predators that seemed almost supernatural in their abilities. Dale’s story forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about what may be lurking in the wild places of our world. From the jungles of Southeast Asia to the hollows of Appalachia, his experiences suggest that humanity shares this planet with creatures we have never classified, never studied, and barely survived encountering. His testimony joins a growing body of accounts from hunters, hikers, and rural residents who have seen things in the woods that defy explanation. This is not a story for the faint of heart. Dale  carried these memories for more than forty years, and now, at the end of his journey, he has chosen to share them with the world. Listen with the lights on, and remember his warning the next time you venture into the deep wilderness. Out there, in the dark places, we are not the apex predators we believe ourselves to be. We are prey.