Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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

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

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

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

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