Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world, and they've been collecting secrets for longer than human memory reaches. Tonight we go into the old green dark — the deep, cathedral-quiet forest of the Appalachian chain — and we don't come back out until we've walked through six of the most haunting, bone-deep stories this ancient landscape has ever produced.

We start in Hancock County, Tennessee, in 1923, where a sixty-one-year-old farmer named Elias Combs runs his trapline in the pre-dawn dark and comes face to face with the Wampus Cat — the Cherokee creature known as Ewah, a being caught forever between woman and beast, whose eyes burn yellow-green and whose stare can strip a man of his mind. Three shots from a Winchester.

Not even a flinch.From there we move to the ridgelines of Burke County, North Carolina, where the famous Brown Mountain Lights have been appearing above the Linville Gorge since before the Civil War, baffling scientists and federal investigators for over a century. But the lights aren't the thing to be afraid of. The lights are the distraction. What walks in the timber below them is another matter entirely — and the Perkins family found that out the hard way in the autumn of 1850.

Then we go deeper into the Cherokee homeland of western North Carolina, back to the violent winter of 1780, to meet the most feared figure in all of Cherokee supernatural tradition. The Raven Mocker doesn't look like a monster. It looks like an old person. It enters the homes of the dying, and it takes their remaining years — gently, quietly, without leaving a mark except for one: the missing heart. A healer named Ayita held the detection medicine alone in the dark against it. She survived.

Her hair went white that night. She was thirty-two years old.We move north to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and the story of a woman with no recorded name who died on fire on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks in October of 1833. She's been screaming on that rail corridor ever since — seen by railroad engineers, bridge tenders, night watchmen, park rangers, and anyone else unlucky or curious enough to be near the old right-of-way after dark. The cold she leaves behind lasts about three seconds. The sound she makes lasts a lifetime.

High on Grandfather Mountain in Avery County, North Carolina, four college students from Boone made camp in October of 1971 and were visited by something that came down off the upper ridgeline in silence, stood at the edge of their fire, and placed a warning directly into their minds without speaking a word. One of the four never recovered fully.

Robert, who eventually told the story, went back alone in November to stand on the trail where it had stood — and realized it had a clear view of their camp for a very long time before they ever looked up.And we end at the northern tip of the chain, on a seven-mile road in Warren County, New Jersey whose legal name is Shades of Death Road. 

For decades, drivers on the Ghost Lake stretch have seen a man walking along the road at night — keeping pace with moving vehicles, always in the same direction, always wearing old-fashioned dark clothing. Always visible in the rearview mirror. Never there when you turn your head and look directly at where he should be.

These are stories drawn from real places, real regional tradition, and real accounts passed down through the communities of the Appalachian Mountains.

 The land is older than our ability to explain it. And it's paying attention.

Submit your own encounter to [email protected]

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In October of 1955, a highway worker and experienced outdoorsman named William Roe climbed Mica Mountain in British Columbia on his own time, with no particular expectation of finding anything unusual. What he encountered near the summit that afternoon would stay with him for the rest of his life — and nearly two years later, he'd walk into a notary's office in Edmonton, Alberta, and swear a legal affidavit about it, making his account one of the first formally documented close-range Sasquatch encounters in North American history.

This episode tells Roe's story as close to his own experience as the historical record allows. Drawing entirely from his sworn affidavit and the subsequent research of John Green, Ivan T. Sanderson, and others who documented the case carefully in the years that followed, we walk through the encounter from the first glimpse through the brush to the moment she disappeared back into the timber — including the moment Roe raised his rifle, looked through the sight, and made a decision he'd spend the rest of his life thinking about.Roe wasn't a man who sought attention.

He was a trapper, a hunter, a working man who'd spent more time in serious wilderness than most people spend indoors, and who knew the difference between what belonged in a forest and what didn't. 

What he saw on Mica Mountain that October afternoon was a large, upright, bipedal creature — female, covered in dark silver-tipped brown hair, standing roughly six feet tall, with a face that he could only describe as more human-like than he'd expected or was prepared for. She was eating wild cherry leaves near an old abandoned cabin when he found her. She walked away on two feet when she was ready to go. And at the edge of the forest, she looked back.

We also dig into why this account has held up under decades of scrutiny, what the sworn affidavit represents as a piece of evidence, and how the anatomical and behavioral details Roe recorded in 1955 would later align, in striking ways, with what hundreds of independent witnesses would describe in the years that followed.

If you've had your own encounter and want to share it, reach out at [email protected]. We read everything.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In the fall of 1978, a thirty-one-year-old fur trapper named John flew his Piper Super Cub into a remote stretch of the Yukon Territory about a hundred and forty miles northeast of Dawson City to begin what he planned as a four-month trapping season. He had a solid cabin he'd built himself, a well-established trap line running forty-some miles through prime marten, lynx, beaver, and wolverine country, and enough experience in the northern bush to know that country about as well as any man alive.

What he didn't have was any way of knowing that something else was already out there, and that it had already been watching him. Within days of his arrival John began finding enormous bipedal tracks pressed into the creek gravel and early snow, measuring over twenty inches long and more than eight inches wide at the heel, with a stride that a tall man at a full trot couldn't match. The tracks were only the beginning.

 Something started systematically clearing his traps, not randomly, but with a working knowledge of his entire line, springing sets from above with deliberate downward pressure and removing the catch without a trace. Then came the vocalizations, deep and structured sounds in the dark timber that had a quality John had no name for at the time, sounds that decades later would stop him cold when he heard the Sierra Sounds recordings made by Ron Morehead and Al Berry in the Sierra Nevada. That same organized, back-and-forth exchange.

That same sense of language underneath something no human throat is built to produce.Then the rocks started. And then one of them put John face-down in the snow with a three-inch gash in the side of his head that he had to stitch himself, alone, a hundred and forty miles from the nearest town.John stayed because his family needed what that trap line could produce. He stayed through the night visits, through the sound of something breathing against his door in the dark, through the feeling of large hands running slowly along his log walls. He stayed until the night something hit his cabin with enough force to crack the chinking and move a ten-inch spruce log in its notch.

He went outside with his Marlin 45/70 rifle and he shot it, and he followed the blood trail the next morning until the ground went too hard to hold sign. And when he came back from that blood trail he found both tundra tires on his Super Cub torn apart by hand.

That's when he called his friend Byron. What happened the night Byron arrived is the kind of account that's hard to sit with, a coordinated assault on that cabin from multiple directions that lasted for hours, with John and Byron shooting through the walls and ceiling while something worked at the logs from outside trying to find a way in. They made it to morning. They packed their gear. They flew out and John never went back.

He sold the cabin, went to work on a crab boat in the Bering Sea, and spent eleven years deciding that thirty-foot seas and a crab pot winch were considerably safer than whatever was in that Yukon timber. He's probably right.

John listens to this show and to my other podcast Sasquatch Odyssey, and he says that hearing Fred from Alaska talk about the temperament of these animals in the northern bush is the closest he's come to feeling like someone else understands what he encountered. He wants people to know that what's out there in the deep country doesn't match the friendly-giant narrative, and he wants them to be careful. After everything he went through to deliver that message, the least we can do is pass it along.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In 1947, a Tennessee farmer named Robert Carter Senior found an injured young creature pinned beneath a fallen tree on his property in Monroe County. What he did next would set in motion one of the most extraordinary and controversial stories in the history of sasquatch research.

 He nursed it back to health, named it Fox, and spent the next twenty-five years secretly building a relationship with it before his seven-year-old granddaughter Janice literally ran into the creature one afternoon and had her world turned upside down.

Tonight Brian takes a deep dive into the Janice Carter story, the full account of what one woman claims was fifty years of co-existence between her family and a clan of sasquatch on their rural Tennessee farm. From her grandfather's secret act of mercy to the publication of the now-infamous book "50 Years with Bigfoot: Tennessee Chronicles of Co-Existence" in 2002, from the firestorm of controversy that nearly tore the Bigfoot community apart to the heartbreaking account of Fox's death decades later, this episode covers it all.

Brian walks through the claims, the characters, the investigations by Jerry Coleman and Russian hominologist Igor Bourtsev, the public falling out between Janice and co-author Mary Green, and the questions that remain unanswered to this day. Whether you come away a believer or a skeptic, this is a story that demands to be heard on its own terms.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Tonight we're stepping away from the deep woods and into something different. Something that's been keeping me up at night for the better part of two years as I've tracked down these accounts. This is a special episode exploring the Hitchhiker Effect — the terrifying phenomenon where people visit locations of high strangeness and something follows them home.

We're not talking about a feeling or an overactive imagination. We're talking about shadow figures at the foot of the bed, objects moving on their own, electronics going haywire, and entities that seem to feed on fear and attention for weeks or months before finally letting go. The term was coined by Dr. Colm Kelleher during his years as lead scientist on the Skinwalker Ranch project, but what most people don't realize is that this phenomenon extends far beyond one ranch in Utah. 

It's been documented at battlefields, swamps, mountain ridgelines, and remote valleys all across this country for decades.In this episode we cover six accounts spanning from 1978 to 2023. We start in the Uintah Basin with a cattle rancher who encountered a pulsating orange orb on a mesa and spent the next several months living with a shadow entity that terrorized his family and killed one of his horses. From there we head to Chickamauga Battlefield in northwest Georgia, where a veteran paranormal investigator and his team brought something back from one of the bloodiest pieces of ground in American history — something that filled their homes with the smell of decomposition and the sound of agonized moaning.

We follow a pair of Oregon newlyweds who stumbled onto what the local Native American community called a spirit road and spent eight months being stalked by a shadow entity in their own apartment. A West Virginia sheriff's deputy walks into a sealed bunker in the Point Pleasant TNT area and encounters an orb containing dark humanoid figures, only to have his six-year-old daughter start seeing what she calls "the blue man" standing in her closet.

A Boston documentary crew filming at Hockomock Swamp in the Bridgewater Triangle watches three synchronized orbs rise out of the water and spends the following months dealing with rearranged furniture, phantom knocking, and an intrusive voice whispering "come back."

And finally, a podcaster and paranormal researcher visits the San Luis Valley in Colorado and learns the hard way that studying these phenomena from a safe distance is an illusion — because the distance can collapse at any moment.

Six witnesses. Six decades. Six locations from coast to coast. All connected by a pattern so consistent it'll make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. They visited a place. They were noticed. And something came home with them.This is one of the most unsettling episodes we've ever produced. Settle in and keep the lights on.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.