Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Deep in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, there’s a quiet little valley where three creeks meet and cross like a natural X. Long before settlers built homes there, the Cherokee knew the place well—and they didn’t trust it after dark. They warned their people to stay away, calling it a place where something shadowy moved through the night.Later, missionaries arrived, saw the crossing waters as a holy sign, and named the area Valle Crucis: the Valley of the Cross. They built St. John’s Episcopal Church beside that old meeting of waters, never realizing what the land had already been known for.In this special episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, we step outside Sasquatch territory for something darker, older, and harder to shake. What you’re about to hear isn’t a Bigfoot encounter.It’s a story that’s been whispered around western North Carolina for generations—one that comes with a body count and a warning baked into the ground itself. The legend of the Demon Dog of Valle Crucis goes back at least to the mid-1800s, when a Methodist circuit rider claimed he saw a massive black hound standing among the cemetery stones. He wrote about its size, its unnatural stillness, and those eyes—glowing red like coals. Since then, the sightings have never really stopped. They just surface every so often, always describing the same impossible thing: a dog too big to be real, fur black enough to swallow moonlight, and a stare that feels human in the worst way. But it’s not the sightings that made this creature infamous. It’s what followed them. Hunting dogs found torn apart with wounds that didn’t match any known predator. Livestock killed in ways locals couldn’t explain. And nearly every time, the trail led back to the old cemetery—back to the crossing waters—back to the place people were told not to go.At the center of this episode is a listener account from Dale, now in his late fifties, who has carried what happened to him for more than forty years.In the fall of 1975, Dale and his best friend Curtis were fourteen—two mountain kids determined to prove they were grown enough to coon hunt on their own. They headed into the woods with three dogs, including Dale’s prized Bluetick, Jessie. They didn’t realize they were drifting toward Valle Crucis. They didn’t know what the old stories were really warning about.What happened that night near the cemetery changed Dale for good. He describes something huge stepping out of the darkness. Sounds no normal dog could make. A chase that didn’t feel like a chase—more like something playing with them. And a split-second sacrifice he still hasn’t forgiven himself for. Dale doesn’t try to sell you a theory. He doesn’t dress it up. He just tells you what he saw, what he heard, and what he lost. And the grief in his voice makes it clear: this isn’t a campfire tale.This is a scar. We’re honored that Dale trusted us with it. Some stories don’t fade with time—they just get heavier. And this one comes with a warning that’s echoed through generations: there are places in these mountains you don’t push your luck in. Not because you’re superstitious. Because sometimes the old folks were right.So settle in, keep your senses sharp, and walk with us into the Valley of the Cross—where the creek waters meet, the graveyard waits, and something out there still doesn’t want company after dark.

In this episode, we head deep into the Appalachian spine to uncover one of America’s most enduring mountain mysteries: the Wood Booger. Known across Southwest Virginia and neighboring highland communities, this legend reaches back long before European settlers ever set foot on these ridges.Indigenous nations carried generations of warnings about wild men in the forest—the Monacan and Mannahoac spoke of untamed beings in the woods, and Cherokee stories told of Tsul ‘Kalu, the slant-eyed giant who watched from the highest places. These accounts weren’t bedtime tales. They were cautionary history.We open with a startling story tied to the final chapter of Daniel Boone’s life. In his last year, Boone reportedly confided a secret he’d kept for decades: an encounter with a ten-foot-tall, hair-covered creature he called a “Yahoo.” We dig into the historical trail behind this claim, drawing from John Mack Faragher’s landmark Boone biography and Theodore Roosevelt’s writings on Boone’s Kentucky expeditions to weigh what’s legend, what’s record, and what still refuses to fit neatly into either. From there, we travel to Norton, Virginia—modern ground zero for Wood Booger research. This tiny mountain city, the smallest independent city in the state, has built a surprising identity around the creature. We explore the region’s coal-mining roots and the eerie stories miners carried out of the tunnels beneath these ancient mountains. We also visit nearby Saltville, where humans have mined salt for thousands of years—and where reports of something unexplainable have echoed just as long. The investigation then turns to one of the most talked-about pieces of evidence in recent memory: the 2009 Beast of Gum Hill video. When Chuck Newton captured footage of a massive biped stepping out of the Washington County treeline, the clip drew national attention—and eventually brought the Finding Bigfoot television crew to Southwest Virginia. We revisit the town hall they hosted at the Palmer Grist Mill in Saltville, where the turnout stunned everyone: hunters, hikers, families, and a teenager who described being struck by a rock moments after locking eyes with a dark figure on a hillside. We break down decades of witness descriptions to build a composite profile of the Wood Booger—its reported height and muscular build, the powerful odor so often mentioned in sightings, and the vocalizations that roll through hollows at night.You’ll hear accounts from hunters encountering something impossibly close in tree stands, truck drivers watching a hulking form cross Route 23 at three in the morning, and a woman outside Bristol who met the creature in her headlights on a quiet back road near Mendota. The scientific discussion brings us to the work of the late Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, who examined hundreds of footprint casts and argued that certain evidence was extraordinarily difficult to dismiss. We look at reported dermal ridges, the mid-tarsal break that doesn’t match human foot anatomy, and hair samples that have resisted definitive identification while showing traits consistent with primates.We also ask the bigger question: why Appalachia? With landscapes over 400 million years old, heavily forested terrain (West Virginia alone is nearly 80% woodland), and massive networks of caves and underground passages, this region offers remoteness in plain sight.Add abundant food sources, low population density, and a deep culture of silence, and you get a place where encounters could remain unreported for generations.Some of the most powerful moments come from childhood witnesses—people who saw something before they had words for fear or disbelief. One woman recounts being eight years old when she locked eyes with a creature across a creek behind her grandparents’ home. Instead of dismissing her, her grandmother sat her down and told her about the hairy man who had lived in these mountains longer than anyone could remember.We close in Norton, where the city has openly embraced its Wood Booger heritage: a council resolution declaring Norton a Wood Booger sanctuary, a seven-foot statue at Flag Rock Recreation Area, the Wood Booger Grill on Park Avenue, and an annual festival that brings visitors from across the country. What was once a struggling coal town has reinvented itself around a legend many locals never doubted was real.This episode is dedicated to the witnesses who carried their encounters in silence—afraid of ridicule, isolation, or being labeled crazy. The hunters who came home shaken and quiet. The hikers who saw something on the trail they could never unsee. The kids who weren’t believed when they tried to tell the truth. You’re not alone. You’re not imagining things. And your story matters.

In this episode, we travel to the remote Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah to investigate one of the most intensively studied paranormal locations on Earth: Skinwalker Ranch. This 512-acre property has been the site of documented UFO encounters, cattle mutilations, shapeshifting creatures, and phenomena so bizarre that even the United States government spent $22 million trying to understand it.Our story begins with the ancient warnings of the Ute tribe, who have forbidden their people from setting foot on this land for generations. We explore the legend of the Navajo skinwalkers—malevolent witches said to be capable of transforming into animals—and the territorial conflict that allegedly led to a curse being placed on this remote stretch of Utah high desert.At the heart of the narrative is the Sherman family, who purchased the ranch in 1994 expecting to build a quiet life raising cattle. What they found instead was eighteen months of relentless terror. We detail their first encounter with an enormous wolf that couldn’t be killed despite being shot multiple times at point-blank range. We examine the systematic mutilation of their cattle, animals discovered with surgical-precision wounds and not a single drop of blood. We recount the night their three dogs were incinerated by a glowing blue orb, reduced to greasy black lumps in seconds.The investigation deepens when billionaire Robert Bigelow buys the property in 1996 and deploys PhD-level scientists through the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS). A disturbing pattern emerges: the phenomena seem to anticipate the researchers’ movements and deliberately evade documentation. We describe the March 1997 encounter in which investigators witnessed a massive creature with glowing yellow eyes perched in a tree, and a dog-headed beast on the ground below—both vanishing after being fired upon. We revisit the August 1997 portal sighting, where a ring of orange light opened in midair and a dark humanoid figure stepped through before the doorway snapped shut.Perhaps most disturbing is our exploration of the Hitchhiker Effect, a phenomenon in which the horrors of Skinwalker Ranch appear to follow visitors home.Researchers, their family members, and even their neighbors reported identical paranormal events hundreds of miles from the property. We examine the physical toll linked to these experiences, including chronic blood diseases, neurological symptoms, and radiation exposure that left some investigators permanently harmed.From there, we move into the halls of government. Defense Intelligence Agency scientist James Lacatski’s visit to the ranch helped spark a $22 million Pentagon program known as AAWSAP.We reveal how U.S. Senator Harry Reid secured funding to study the unexplained, and how the 2017 New York Times exposé pushed UFOs into mainstream discourse.We conclude with the modern era under owner Brandon Fugal, whose History Channel series has documented six seasons of anomalies including UAP sightings, radiation spikes, GPS interference, and the discovery of a massive metallic anomaly buried deep beneath the ranch. We examine what investigators have found in the area known as the Triangle, where rockets are deflected by invisible forces and LIDAR imaging suggests structures that don’t appear in visible light.Throughout this episode, we stay committed to factual accuracy while delivering the high-strangeness our listeners expect. Every incident described has been reported by credible witnesses, and many were investigated by government-linked teams.We present skeptical perspectives alongside extraordinary claims, letting you decide what may be happening in that remote corner of Utah.This episode runs approximately one hour and draws from the original Deseret News reporting (1996), Hunt for the Skinwalker by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon by Kelleher, Knapp, and James Lacatski, interviews with Brandon Fugal and Dr. Travis Taylor, and documentation from the NIDS and AAWSAP investigations.Content Warning: This episode includes descriptions of animal deaths and mutilations, psychological distress, and unexplained medical phenomena. Listener discretion is advised.If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. Your support helps us keep bringing you the strange, the unexplained, and the terrifying stories that live just beyond the edge of what we think we know about our world.For more content from Paranormal World Productions, visit our website and follow us on social media. And remember: some places on this Earth are not meant for us. Some doors are not meant to be opened. And some lands watch back.

Have you ever wondered about the true story behind the first Thanksgiving?Happy Thanksgiving from the Backwoods Bigfoot Stories Family.  For this special holiday episode, the show steps away from its usual encounter reports and witness interviews to share something different: an original work of fiction that reimagines one of America’s most iconic moments.What if the first Thanksgiving wasn’t just a meeting between two peoples, but three? What if the Wampanoag arrived at the 1621 harvest celebration with a guest the colonists agreed to protect and keep hidden—an agreement passed quietly through generations for more than four hundred years? This episode tells the story of Yahyel, a Sasquatch elder who reveals himself to William Bradford and the Plymouth colonists, offering ancient wisdom, urgent warnings, and a promise that stretches across centuries.The narrative follows the descendants of that first feast as they safeguard the secret through revolution, expansion, war, and cultural change—carrying it from the earliest days of the colonies into the modern age of DNA databases, thermal drones, and digital discovery.Along the way, the story blends real historical touchstones with cryptid folklore, exploring themes of cooperation, respect for the land, and the responsibility to protect wild places that cannot protect themselves.To be clear: this is fiction. A holiday campfire story created to spark imagination, not to rewrite history. The episode makes no claim that these events occurred, and it is not presented as a factual account. But it invites a simple question: what if something like this could have been true?What if ancient promises still mattered, mysteries still lived in the deep forests, and beings older than human memory were quietly watching—waiting for the moment humanity was ready to meet them with respect instead of fear? Whether you’re a true believer or a friendly skeptic, this Thanksgiving episode is meant to bring a little wonder to your holiday. May your plates be full, your company be warm, and your sense of mystery never fade.Get Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteSupport Our Sponsors

Tonight’s episode takes us deep into the backwoods of northern Alabama, into a summer that officially never happened. In 1983, something came out of the forests around Piney Creek that permanently scarred a rural community and left behind a story still spoken only in whispers. It began with routine livestock killings that didn’t stay routine for long. A prize bull was found torn apart in ways that made no sense, surrounded by tracks that seemed to shift between animal and human. Within weeks, farms across miles of countryside were hit, and the sightings followed. Locals described a towering figure that moved upright like a man, covered in thick fur, with a wolfish head and eyes that looked disturbingly human. Fear spread fast, especially after the creature was seen at a nursery window, staring in at an eighteen-month-old child.That moment sparked a hunt that would become one of the most controversial in Alabama history.Dozens of armed men flooded the woods at dawn, determined to stop whatever was stalking their families and livestock. What they discovered in an abandoned storm cellar wasn’t the simple monster they expected. The creature they cornered was wounded, terrified, and shockingly aware. It spoke. It pleaded. And beneath the blood and matted fur, a silver cross hung around its neck. When the truth finally surfaced, it wasn’t a beast at all, but a missing college student who had been investigating local legends and never made it home. The government arrived within hours. Evidence vanished, threats were made, and everyone involved was forced into silence. The official explanation blamed wild dogs and mass hysteria, but years later a different account emerged from someone who claimed to have seen the real file. According to that testimony, the military had been running biological enhancement experiments in underground facilities throughout rural Alabama since the early 1970s. Deep in limestone caves, they discovered a parasitic organism capable of rewriting human DNA and triggering violent, rapid transformations. A containment breach released infected subjects into the woods, and the organism kept spreading.The most horrifying detail is that victims were said to remain conscious during the change, trapped inside bodies they couldn’t control, forced to witness the violence their transformed selves carried out. The missing student was one of those victims, infected during his research and turned into something caught between man and beast.And the story doesn’t end there. Similar incidents reportedly surfaced later in nearby counties, and patterns like this have been whispered about across the country under different names. Even now, the abandoned farm where it ended remains sealed, the storm cellar periodically covered in fresh concrete by unknown hands. Locals still report strange howls, impossible tracks, and the kind of disappearances nobody wants to talk about too loudly. This episode pieces together a chain of witnesses who risked everything to break decades of silence, revealing a picture far darker than folklore. The suggestion is simple and terrifying: this wasn’t supernatural at all, but human experimentation gone catastrophically wrong, a Cold War nightmare walking loose in the woods.As you listen, remember that officially none of this happened. No documents exist, no agency acknowledges it, and the story is buried under denial. But in backwoods communities across the South, doors still get locked at sundown, livestock still vanish to something that tears through fencing like paper, and on quiet nights near Piney Creek, people still swear they hear the howls. Not quite wolf, not quite human, but something terrible living in the space between.

Welcome to this special collection episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, a journey across sixty years of encounters from the deep woods of the Southeastern United States. In this episode, I share six of the most compelling accounts I’ve documented over the past five years—stories that take us from the riverbanks of Alabama to the swamps of South Carolina and reveal just how many secrets the South still keeps hidden.Our journey begins in Alabama in 1967, where a power company lineman discovered enormous handprints embedded in a utility pole along the Cahaba River. His face-to-face encounter with a towering creature challenged everything he believed about the world and set the tone for the stories that followed: intelligent beings that choose their moments carefully and always remain in control. From there, we move into the mountains of North Georgia in 1973, where four seasoned hunters found themselves under siege near Blue Ridge. A night of rock throwing, violent tree shaking, and dozens of stick figures arranged in a perfect warning circle around their camp left them shattered and unwilling to ever return to the woods.In Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains in 1985, a park ranger and wildlife biologist had her scientific worldview upended when a massive creature climbed her fire tower and examined her equipment with deliberate intelligence. Her experience led her to discover that the Park Service had quietly documented similar incidents for decades.The most tragic encounter comes from the Ozark Mountains in 1991, where a family camping trip spiraled into terror. A young girl watched as towering beings demonstrated their strength by crushing rocks with their bare hands. The emotional and psychological fallout broke her family apart, leaving scars that never healed. In 2002, the forests of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest became the setting for an encounter unlike any before it. An experienced hiker spent three days in what he described as captivity with a family group of these beings, observing their social dynamics, tool use, and an unmistakable curiosity about human objects—suggesting a species far more complex than previously imagined.Our final story takes us to South Carolina in 2014, where two college biology students captured over forty minutes of high-definition footage showing a creature examining their research equipment with clear understanding of its purpose. The immediate government intervention and enforced silence that followed hinted at a much larger effort to conceal the truth. Across all six encounters, the patterns are unmistakable: the heavy musky odor that announces their presence, the massive handprints, the intelligent eyes studying and evaluating, and the sense that these beings could harm us—but choose not to. Together, these stories paint the American South as a hidden refuge for an undiscovered species, or perhaps a separate branch of human evolution that has mastered the art of staying unseen. This episode serves as both a warning and an invitation. The woods are not empty. Something ancient and intelligent is out there, watching from the edges of our world. As you listen, consider how these beings’ behavior has evolved over the decades, how closely they seem to be studying us, and what it means that evidence is so quickly suppressed. These are not campfire tales—they are the testimonies of people whose lives were forever changed by what they saw. And sometimes, in the quiet space between dusk and dawn, the South’s best-kept secrets step out of the darkness and make themselves known.

In this powerful and haunting episode, we share the life-changing testimony of Mary, a ninety-two-year-old Yup'ik woman who survived one of the most frightening Sasquatch encounters ever recorded. This isn’t a tale of footprints or shadows in the trees—this is the story of what happened when an Alaskan village along the Copper River faced something ancient, intelligent, and deadly during the summer of 1962. Mary was only eight when her peaceful village became a hunting ground.What began with one trapper disappearing quickly turned into a terrifying ordeal that claimed several lives, including two of Mary’s closest childhood friends. Through her memories, we experience the fear that grew as massive footprints appeared around homes, red eyes watched from the twilight, and the villagers realized this was no bear.Her account connects deeply to Yup'ik traditions and the old stories of the kushta’ka—the hairymen who walked the land long before outsiders arrived.Mary’s grandmother recognized the danger immediately, explaining that sometimes one of these beings “goes bad,” much like a rabid wolf, and develops a deadly hunger for humans. As children vanished and attacks intensified, twelve villages came together in a desperate attempt to fight back. Forty-three hunters formed a war party armed with everything from WWII rifles to a centuries-old Russian bear spear blessed by a shaman. Their battle in the deep forest was brutal, courageous, and left lasting scars on everyone involved.But Mary’s story goes far beyond violence. Sixty years later, she revealed a secret second encounter—this time with a female Sasquatch who returned something precious to Mary. Whether it was grief, remorse, or understanding, the moment changed how Mary saw these beings forever. Throughout her life, Mary witnessed other encounters that suggested a fragile, uneasy coexistence.The female that fought so fiercely was defending her mate, just as the villagers were defending their families. As Mary reached ninety-three, she shared her final thoughts about the visits she believed she still received from the surviving creature—now old, quiet, and watchful. She spoke of dreams where she saw the story through the creature’s eyes and understood that what happened wasn’t evil—it was two worlds colliding in a place both called home.Her final message is a warning: as the wilderness shrinks, the fragile peace between humans and these ancient beings may not hold. She shares this story not to encourage people to seek Sasquatch, but to remind us of the respect and boundaries forged at such a terrible cost.

In the summer of 1987, sixteen-year-old Theresa Ann Bier vanished in the remote Sierra Nevada mountains—one of the strangest and most unsettling disappearances in California history. She had gone camping near Shuteye Peak with forty-three-year-old Russell “Skip” Welch, a man who claimed to be a Bigfoot "exper"t and promised to show her proof of the creatures he insisted were real.When Welch returned alone, the explanation he offered investigators became infamous: he said Bigfoot had taken her. This episode examines the real facts behind Theresa’s disappearance, cutting through decades of rumor, folklore, and speculation. We explore who Theresa was, the troubled circumstances that made her vulnerable, and Welch’s disturbing behavior leading up to the trip. His story shifted repeatedly—wild tales that obscured the truth and frustrated investigators—but nothing he said ever led to a single piece of evidence.Search teams combed hundreds of square miles with helicopters, dogs, and volunteers. Two separate campsite locations, drug paraphernalia, and threatening phone calls to Theresa’s family painted a picture far darker than anything involving legendary creatures. Yet without a body or physical evidence, prosecutors dropped the case just days before trial, fearing they would lose their only chance to seek justice.Decades later, Theresa remains missing. Welch died in 1998, never revealing more, never abandoning his story. The mountains around Shuteye Peak have kept their secrets, and the truth about what happened to Theresa remains hidden somewhere in that vast wilderness.This episode confronts the real events behind a case where myth became a shield, where a vulnerable teenager slipped through every system meant to protect her, and where the most terrifying part of the story has nothing to do with Bigfoot.It’s a journey into the Sierra Nevada, into the shadowed intersection of human deception and wilderness mystery, and into a tragedy that still echoes nearly forty years later.

Tonight’s episode shares one of the most detailed and disturbing alien abduction accounts ever recorded — the story of Marcus, a man forever changed by a childhood encounter in rural Minnesota in 1994. What began as a single night of terror evolved into decades of systematic visitation and transformation, revealing an agenda that challenges everything we know about the UFO phenomenon.Marcus’s experiences defy explanation. From paralysis and levitation into a silent craft hovering above the pines to his eventual role as an “interface” between human and post-human consciousness, his testimony offers unprecedented insight into the purpose behind abductions.A trained electrical engineer, Marcus spent years trying to rationalize his encounters, documenting physical evidence including an unexplained implant and altered biological markers.He describes a vast hybrid program, introducing beings engineered to bridge humanity and something beyond — entities that may already walk among us, preparing for what they call The Convergence. His accounts of knowledge downloads, advanced mathematics, and shared memories suggest a disturbing truth: these visitors may not be extraterrestrials at all, but evolved humans ensuring their own survival through time. Whether you believe his story or not, Marcus’s account forces us to confront profound questions about consciousness, evolution, and the future of our species.Listener discretion is advised. This is not just an abduction story — it’s a revelation that blurs the line between horror, prophecy, and human destiny.

Tonight’s episode takes us deep into the heart of Appalachia, where ancient mountains remember everything—and some doors, once opened, can never be closed again. This is the chilling account of Michael, a man forever marked by his family’s terrifying encounter with beings that shouldn’t exist, but do. In the summer of 1995, fourteen-year-old Michael and his family left suburban Cleveland for a decaying farmhouse in rural West Virginia, hoping for a fresh start. What they found at Black Hollow Farm defied reason. The forest seemed alive with intent, and pale figures with glowing eyes watched from the shadows. What began as strange sounds and footprints soon spiraled into a nightmare of ancestral debt and otherworldly bargaining. Michael’s first encounter with the Little People—the beings known to the Cherokee as the Yunwi Tsunsdi and to early settlers as the Moon-Eyed People—set in motion a chain of events that would unravel his family. These ancient, subterranean entities fed not on flesh but on human potential, their hunger stretching back thousands of years. As Michael uncovered his family’s dark history—tied to a century-old massacre—he realized the debt could only be paid through sacrifice. His search for answers led to an isolated library, an old librarian guarding forbidden knowledge, and a final descent into the caverns beneath the mountains. There, Michael made a desperate bargain: seven years of his life, scattered across his remaining decades, in exchange for his family’s safety. The cost bought their freedom—but bound him forever to the watchers in the dark. Today, Black Hollow Farm still stands, waiting for its next tenants, its next chapter.Michael’s story is more than a haunting; it’s a warning about the thin places in our world where realities blur, and ancient intelligences wait for us to forget the old protections.Because once you know the Little People are real—once you’ve seen their glowing eyes peering from the forest—you’ll never walk through the Appalachians the same way again.

In the spring of 1972, a man chasing gold and glory ventured deep into the Yukon wilderness, dreaming of striking it rich. But what began as a hopeful mining expedition soon unraveled into a two-month nightmare that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Fresh from Vietnam and toughened by work on the Alaska Pipeline, he believed no wilderness could break him. When he purchased the mineral rights to an abandoned 1950s claim—once owned by a prospector named Dutch Hanson who mysteriously vanished after a promising start—he ignored every red flag. Gold fever clouded his judgment, and soon he would realize the true cost of his ambition. After flying into a remote valley with a bush pilot, he built a cabin and began working his sluice box along a promising creek bend. The gold was there—steady and consistent, just as Hanson’s notes promised. But something was wrong. The forest was unnaturally quiet. No birds. No bears. No life at all.Then came the night screams. Unnatural wails echoed through the valley, rising and falling with a haunting, almost human cadence. The sounds were answered from multiple directions, as though the darkness itself were alive. He tried to rationalize it—wolves, perhaps—but deep down he knew better. Soon, massive spruce trees began snapping eight feet above the ground, sheared off with tremendous force. Then came the knocks—sharp, rhythmic wood-on-wood impacts echoing through the valley, back and forth, as if some unknown intelligence were communicating.One afternoon, while working the creek, he heard a rapid series of popping sounds surrounding him—mouth clicks, moving in a circle, coordinated and deliberate. Something was out there. Watching. Stalking. Thinking. The proof came in the form of tracks—eighteen inches long, five toes, a five-foot stride. Too human to be a bear, too large to belong to any known species. And then, the unthinkable: he turned at the water’s edge to find an eight-foot creature watching him from the treeline. Covered in dark, shaggy hair with a conical head and intelligent eyes, it showed no fear—only dominance. When it struck a nearby tree with a thunderous slap, others answered from the forest. He was surrounded. That night, the creatures attacked. Rocks rained down on his cabin for hours, splintering wood and shaking the structure. Multiple voices filled the night—the deep, resonant roar of the alpha male, the shrill screams of the female, and the higher-pitched cries of a juvenile.They circled his camp, making it clear he was not welcome. By dawn, his camp was destroyed. Tools twisted, the sluice box shattered, and every ounce of gold gone. The message was unmistakable: leave.He fled the valley, trailed by the creatures’ heavy knocks and distant cries. At the final creek crossing, the massive male appeared once more—silent, watchful, ensuring he never returned.He never did.Because some places aren’t meant for humans, some fortunes aren’t worth the price, and some legends should remain undisturbed in the wild.This is the story of one man’s hunt for Yukon gold… and the terrifying encounter that made him believe in something that shouldn’t exist.

Everyone who knows about the Van Meter Visitor knows about the five nights of terror in October 1903 when a winged creature with a light-emitting horn terrorized the small Iowa town. Credible witnesses. Contemporary documentation. Physical evidence. The whole town saw it, shot at it, and eventually sealed it in an abandoned coal mine. The story became legend.But what almost nobody knows is that the Van Meter Visitor came back.Eighty years later, in October 1983, a fifteen year old boy and his father went coon hunting in the woods near Van Meter and had an encounter that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. An encounter they never reported. An encounter they swore to keep secret. An encounter that proved the creature was never really trapped at all. This is the story of that night, told in the words of the man who lived through it. Now fifty-five years old and finally breaking his silence after his father's death, he recounts in terrifying detail what happened when they encountered something in those dark Iowa woods that shouldn't exist. Something that matched every description from 1903. Something that took their dog Buck and nearly killed their other dog Belle.Something that couldn't be stopped with bullets or courage or anything else they had. This isn't a vague sighting or a distant glimpse. This is a close encounter with one of America's most documented cryptids, told by someone who was there, who saw it clearly, who watched it fly away with his dog clutched in its talons. It's a story about the things that hunt in the darkness. About the creatures that exist outside our understanding of the natural world.About the price of seeing something impossible and having to carry that knowledge for forty years.The Van Meter Visitor is real. It never left. And this is the encounter that proves it.