Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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.