Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This is part one of a ten-part series from a single witness named Garrett, a residential contractor from Gastonia, North Carolina, who recounts a decade of escalating encounters on one remote mountain property in the southern Appalachians.

Garrett has been listening to Sasquatch Odyssey, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, Disturbing History, and The Guilty Files for over two years and asked that his experiences be shared in order. After losing his mother in February 2014, Garrett used his inheritance to purchase a forty-seven-acre property and hand-built cabin from an eighty-two-year-old man named Earl, whose wife Reba had passed the previous autumn after more than four decades together on the land. 

Garrett moved in during May 2014 with his red heeler mix, Bowie, and began renovating the cabin while settling into the quiet of mountain life. Within three weeks, he started hearing sharp wood knocks from the ridgeline northeast of the cabin each evening, arriving consistently within a twenty-minute window after sunset. 

He logged the sounds for weeks, tracking their timing, rhythm, and direction, and noted that they were occasionally answered from entirely different positions in the surrounding hollow. Bowie's behavior shifted noticeably during this stretch, refusing to cross the northern tree line and relocating his sleeping spot to a hallway position between the bedroom and the back door. In late July 2014, Garrett knocked back using a piece of oak firewood against a hickory tree and received matching patterns from the ridge within seconds.

 After a heavy rainstorm in early August, he found a line of seventeen-and-a-quarter-inch bipedal tracks pressed into clay along a game trail leading from the ridge toward his cabin, each showing five individually articulated toes and a defined arch at a depth suggesting several hundred pounds behind every step.

The story reaches its peak on the evening of September 27, 2014, when Garrett spotted a massive upright figure standing between two white oaks at the meadow's edge. He describes a broad, hair-covered form estimated between seven and eight feet tall with coloring close to dark walnut bark.

The figure watched him briefly, turned, and stepped into the forest with a single heavy footfall. Later that night, he heard a deep, sustained vocalization from the direction it had gone, unlike anything he had ever encountered in the woods.

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.

A listener named Caleb from Hazard, Kentucky shares the story his late grandfather Harold carried in silence for nearly sixty years. Harold was a tobacco farmer in Perry County who worked a piece of bottomland along Pigeon Roost Creek that had been in the family since before the Civil War.

In the fall of 1962, at twenty-nine years old, he began noticing things he couldn't explain on the steep, heavily timbered ridge behind his property — fence posts yanked from the ground, his unflappable mule refusing to approach the tree line, and massive bare footprints pressed into the first frost of the season.

On the evening of November 21, 1962, he saw a towering figure standing motionless between two cedars at the top of the ridge, backlit by the last light of the day. What followed was nearly a decade of escalating encounters that included rocks thrown onto the barn roof from over a hundred yards away, a gut-churning stench near the creek crossing, wood knocks echoing across the ridgeline at night, and vocalizations unlike anything he'd ever heard in a lifetime of hunting those mountains. One night in November 1963, something circled the farmhouse on two legs for close to forty-five minutes while the family slept and the dogs cowered in total silence beneath the porch.

Harold saw the creatures up close on multiple occasions — once at roughly forty yards near the creek in 1966, where he described a reddish-brown, hair-covered figure standing over seven feet tall with unmistakably human hands and a flat, dark face that regarded him with what he called a look of consideration rather than aggression. In October 1968, he watched two of them walking single file through the timber, a large dark one and a smaller, lighter companion, and realized he wasn't dealing with a lone animal but a family that had been living on that ridge longer than his own people had been farming the valley below it. Harold never called them Bigfoot or Sasquatch.

He used the old Appalachian word — boogers — and he framed the experience not as a monster story but as the unsettling reality of sharing a hollow with something intelligent that knew everything about his family while remaining almost entirely unseen. By 1970, after losing calves from the lower pasture and enduring years of nighttime activity, he made the painful decision to sell the back forty acres that had been in the family for over a century. He told his children the soil was played out. He told only his grandson and his brother the truth. Family lore traces the presence on Briar Ridge back even further, to Harold's great-uncle Fess in the 1870s and his grandfather Jeremiah, who homesteaded the property after the Civil War and warned his children about "the old ones" on the ridge.

A local folk healer named Effie, whose grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, told Harold that her people had a name for the creatures that translated roughly to "the watchers" or "the ones who stay hidden," and that they'd been in those mountains since the beginning.

Harold's last sighting came in 1982, when one crossed the gravel road in front of his truck at dawn without so much as a glance in his direction. He died on March 7, 2019, at eighty-six years old, in the same house where those footsteps had circled decades before. Caleb still visits the farm.

The ridge still stands behind it, dense and dark and unchanged. And he's convinced that whatever his grandfather saw is still up there, watching with the same patient intelligence it always has.

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 head to the dark banks of the Pascagoula River and into one of the most chilling and enduring UFO cases in American history.

On October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were just two working men from Mississippi trying to enjoy a quiet night of fishing after a long day at the shipyard. What happened next would change both of their lives forever. According to their account, a strange craft descended near the riverbank, three terrifying beings emerged, and the men were taken aboard and examined before being returned to shore.

What could have been dismissed as just another unbelievable story took on a life of its own when deputies secretly recorded the two men alone in an interrogation room, expecting to catch them in a lie. Instead, what they captured was raw fear. Real fear. The kind you cannot fake.In this episode, we dig deep into the Pascagoula Incident from every angle. We explore who Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were before that night, why their backgrounds matter, and how the encounter unfolded on that warm October evening in southern Mississippi.

We walk through the now-famous secret recording, the law enforcement response, military involvement at Keesler Air Force Base, the wave of regional UFO sightings surrounding the event, and the decades of scrutiny, pain, ridicule, and unanswered questions that followed both men for the rest of their lives.We also examine the parts of this story that continue to haunt researchers and skeptics alike: the bizarre and uniquely described entities, the consistency of the witnesses’ core account, the later corroborating testimony from additional witnesses, and the emotional toll that never truly left either man. Charles Hickson spent the rest of his life speaking openly about what he believed happened. Calvin Parker spent much of his life trying to escape it, only later returning to tell the full story in his own words.

More than fifty years later, the Pascagoula Incident still resists easy explanation. It remains one of the most talked-about and debated close encounter cases ever recorded, not because it offers neat answers, but because it leaves us with a deeper and more uncomfortable question: what if something truly unexplained happened on that riverbank that night?This is the story of two men, one impossible encounter, and the burden of being believed.

If this episode grabs you, take time to listen to the original secret sheriff’s department recording for yourself. It is one of the most unsettling pieces of audio in UFO history, and it may be the very thing that keeps this case alive all these years later.

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.

A retired United States Forest Service firefighter is breaking thirty-five years of silence to share what he and his entire Helitack crew witnessed during the devastating California fires of 1987.Kyle— as he asks to be called— was a thirty-two-year-old veteran wildland firefighter when his nine-man crew was helicoptered into a remote drainage in the Mendocino National Forest ahead of an advancing fire front.

Their mission was to cut a firebreak along an isolated ridge and spend three days in some of the most rugged terrain in Northern California.What they encountered there changed every one of them. It started with footprints in a creek bed—massive, clearly defined humanoid tracks in three distinct sizes, suggesting a group moving through the area.

Then came the tree structures. Saplings twisted and snapped eight to ten feet off the ground with a force none of the men could replicate, arranged around flattened bedding areas saturated with an overwhelming musky odor.

s darkness fell on their first night, the forest came alive.Bone-rattling howls echoed across the ridges. Rhythmic wood knocks circled their camp. Then came a rapid series of clicks and guttural chatter—two voices communicating with a cadence that sounded disturbingly like language. Rocks began landing in their camp from the darkness, thrown with precision but never striking anyone. And then the eyes appeared. Pale yellowish-white eyes glowing from the tree line… eight feet or more above the ground. On the second night, one of the creatures stepped fully into view.

Every man on the crew saw it.A massive figure—eight and a half to nine feet tall—covered in dark hair, with enormous shoulders, long powerful arms, and a broad face dominated by intelligent eyes studying the firefighters with unmistakable awareness.

Over the next three days, the crew found thirteen-inch handprints pressed into the dirt along their fire line. They watched juveniles observing them from the rocks above—only to be called back into the timber by deep, guttural parental warnings. What they were witnessing looked unmistakably like a family.

When the helicopter arrived to extract them on the final morning, all six creatures stood openly on a distant ridge, silhouetted against the smoky sky. The large male stood in front.
The female held a smaller one close.

The juveniles stood beside them. A family… watching as the firefighters lifted away and the forest burned behind them.The crew made a pact that day to never speak about what they saw. And every one of them kept that promise. Until now. 

Kyle writes in at seventy-one years old because time is running out… and hearing other first responders share their encounters on this show finally gave him the courage to tell his story.He says he has always wondered if that family survived the fires. And he sincerely hopes they did.

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

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

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

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

In this episode, Brian shares an email from a military veteran who served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and wants the world to hear a story that's been buried for three decades. Matt, as he asks to be called, writes in about a confession made to him by a fellow soldier he calls Joe during a night of drinking while the two were stateside between deployments. Joe revealed that in the mid nineteen nineties, long before the war on terror, he was part of a small specialized team dispatched into an unnamed national park after two hikers went missing.

The male hiker's body was found twenty five feet up in a tree with his neck broken. The female hiker was never found. What search teams did find were massive humanoid footprints ranging from sixteen inches to nearly twenty three inches long pressed deep into the soil along a remote creek drainage. Joe's team was briefed by an unnamed civilian and given a single objective: locate and eliminate the creatures responsible.

What followed was a harrowing two day hunt through old growth forest that culminated in the killing of four creatures, including a female, a juvenile estimated at around five feet tall, and a massive adult male standing over eight feet tall that charged the team and injured two soldiers before being brought down. Within hours of the kills, an unmarked black helicopter arrived carrying a civilian recovery team that bagged the bodies and flew them out to an unknown location. The soldiers were debriefed, told the mission never happened, and ordered to never speak of it again. Matt believes every word Joe told him that night, and he wants you to hear it.

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.