Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

In this episode, we share a listener's account that's been buried for over forty years. Sarah from Bowling Green, Kentucky reached out to us after listening to the show, and what she had to say stopped us in our tracks. In the fall of 1982, Sarah was just eight years old when her family — mom, dad, older brother, and their German Shepherd, Bear — packed up and headed deep into Land Between the Lakes for a weekend camping trip.

What started as a perfect Friday night around the campfire turned into something none of them were prepared for.By Friday night, strange howls unlike anything the family had ever heard began echoing through the woods from multiple directions. Something large was circling their camp on two legs. Bear, their loyal protector, charged into the darkness after whatever was out there and never came back. Against her mother's wishes, Sarah's father made the decision to stay one more night.

That decision nearly cost them everything. On Saturday night, the creatures came in close. Multiple massive, upright beings — standing over seven feet tall with canine features, glowing amber eyes, and an intelligence that no ordinary animal possesses — stepped to the edge of the firelight and began closing in on the family. Just when it seemed like there was no way out, a deafening vocalization erupted from a nearby ridge. Something Sarah now believes was strikingly similar to the famous Ohio Howl Sasquatch recording from the 1990s. 

Whatever made that sound sent the creatures running, and the family was able to pack up and escape in the middle of the night.Sarah's story touches on the long and disturbing history of encounters at Land Between the Lakes, the lasting trauma these experiences leave on families, and the possibility that something else — something even more powerful than the creatures that terrorized them — may have stepped in to save their lives.

This is a raw, emotional, deeply personal account from a woman who's done keeping quiet. She wants people to know what's out there, and she wants them to be careful. This one's going to stay with you.

Tonight's episode is something different. Over the past several months, Brian's inbox has been filling up with emails from listeners and first-time visitors to the show, people who've been holding onto experiences they've never fully shared with anyone. This episode brings six of those accounts together in one sitting, read in the witnesses' own words, spanning six decades and six different regions of the country.

The collection opens with Danny, a lifelong hunter on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, who in 1978 came face to face with something standing motionless in the old growth timber during a solo elk hunt. From there we move to the swamps and spring runs of central Florida, where Rachel and her boyfriend encountered something massive outside their tent during an overnight canoe trip through the Ocala National Forest in 1996, and then saw it again on the river as they tried to escape.

Marcus takes us to the coal country of Mingo County, West Virginia, where a nineteen year old walking home from the mines on a frozen February night in 1983 realized that something on the hillside above him wasn't just following him but was flanking him in the dark. Linda's account pulls us north to Minnesota's Boundary Waters in 2004, where a veteran wilderness guide and her co-guide watched something wade across open water in the moonlight and come ashore on the small island where their clients were sleeping.

Travis writes from the Piney Woods of East Texas, where something took up residence on his forty acre property in 2017 and made its presence known through broken trees, massive tracks in creek mud, disturbing vocalizations, and two visual encounters that changed the way he and his wife think about the land they live on.

The episode closes with Gene, now eighty four years old, finally putting into writing what happened to him and his logging crew in the remote mountains of Siskiyou County, California in the summer of 1962, an experience he's carried in silence for over six decades.

The documentary aired on a Tuesday night in October, and nothing was ever the same. Within hours it was trending worldwide. Scientists came forward. Former government employees reached out. And across the country, people started paying closer attention to the forests around them.This episode brings the first volume of Born Wild to a close — but not before we hear from some of the most compelling voices in the archives. Russell Crawford, a Tennessee hunter with over fifty years in the Cherokee National Forest, describes the morning he had a clear shot at something massive and chose not to take it. 

Not because he couldn't — but because pulling that trigger would have felt like murder.Margaret White spent thirty years teaching biology in rural Washington and debunking every Sasquatch story her students brought to class. Then she came face to face with one on a trail in Olympic National Park, and every rational explanation she ever had turned to dust.

James Whitehorse carried his story for fifty-four years. He was eight years old, herding sheep near the Chuska Mountains on the Navajo reservation, when a towering figure stepped out of the junipers and raised its hand in greeting. His grandfather told him the white world would never understand. James kept quiet — until now. Maria Santos worked the graveyard shift at a gas station on the edge of the Gila Wilderness. 

One night at two in the morning, something eight feet tall walked up to the pumps and started examining them like a curious child discovering something new.Thomas Erikson came from four generations of Oregon loggers. They called them the Wood Apes, and every logger in the Pacific Northwest knew about them. Thomas shares three encounters spanning decades — including the day one of them spoke to him and pointed at the trees, at him, and at itself. Like it was saying they were all part of the same thing. Thomas passed away six months after this interview.

We hear from Eddie McGraw, a long-haul trucker who watched a creature stroll across a Montana rest area at two in the morning like it owned the place. From David Baker, a National Geographic photographer who captured three frames of the clearest Sasquatch image ever taken — then locked them in a safe for fifteen years. From Patricia Morgan, a Yellowstone ranger who reveals a secret file of sightings passed down from ranger to ranger since the 1950s. 

And from Dr. Michael Brooks, a primatologist who spent fifteen years hiding evidence that would have validated everything. Then comes the revelation no one expected. Brian's own mother, Jean Patterson, finally shares a secret she kept for decades — she saw one of the creatures on the Lyerly property a full year before Brian ever did. She stayed silent to protect him. To give him the choice to walk away.He couldn't walk away. He never could. 

The episode closes on the eve of the final expedition. The witnesses gather at the mountain house. The sun sets over the Appalachians. And deep in the forest, the creatures begin to sing.Tomorrow, everything changes.This is the end of Book One. The odyssey continues.

Part Nine brings Bigfoot Country to its climax, and it does so by circling back to where every great investigation begins — with the people who lived it.After years of building this platform, the floodgates finally opened. Witnesses who had been listening from the shadows for months, sometimes years, started stepping forward. People like Patricia Ann Holloway, a seventy-one-year-old retired librarian from Pennsylvania who had carried a secret since 1973 — the summer she was nineteen years old and working at a Baptist church camp in the Allegheny National Forest.

What she saw standing at the tree line that night, seven feet tall with eyes reflecting her flashlight beam, changed her forever. She kept quiet for nearly fifty years. When the only other witness — a twelve-year-old camper named Susan — passed away from cancer, Patricia decided she wasn't going to take that secret to her grave too.Her story opened the door for dozens more. A ninety-year-old former logger from Vermont who remembered the creatures the old timers simply called the Wild Men. A woman from Mississippi passing down her grandmother's encounter from the nineteen twenties. A retired park ranger from California who had spent forty years documenting things he could never put in an official report.

But the witnesses were only half the story. Researchers started coming forward too — scientists and academics who had sacrificed careers and reputations to study something the mainstream refused to acknowledge. A primatologist who recognized authentic dermal ridges on a footprint cast. A geneticist with hair samples that matched no known species. An anthropologist who had collected indigenous oral histories from around the world and found an undeniable pattern running through all of them.Then came the most dangerous interview of all.

A former military intelligence officer, speaking through an encrypted line, revealed the existence of government programs spanning six decades. Programs designed not just to suppress evidence, but to study these creatures — and exploit them. He couldn't say everything. He said enough.The tension ratcheted up from there. Physical confrontations on mountain roads.

Men in dark suits offering deals and making threats. And a manila folder full of classified documents that blew the lid off everything — project names like Titan Watch, Forest Shadow, and Mind Bridge, detailing decades of monitoring, containment, and experimentation on captured creatures.Through all of it, Brian wrestled with the personal weight of the mission. Late night conversations with his mother, who carried her own encounters with the unexplainable. Quiet moments on the porch with Daniel.

A faith that had evolved far beyond the Baptist church of his childhood into something broader and harder to name — a belief that the universe held mysteries worth chasing, no matter the cost.

The final expedition into the Pisgah wilderness brought everything full circle. Days of waiting. Thermal signatures circling in the dark. Vocalizations echoing through old-growth timber. And on the last night, alone at the edge of camp under a full moon, a moment of silent recognition between two species that have shared this land far longer than anyone wants to admit.

Part Nine is about what happens when the dam finally cracks. When the witnesses refuse to stay silent. When the researchers stop protecting their careers and start protecting the truth. And when one man, standing on a dark porch in the Appalachian Mountains, hears a chorus of howls rising from the forest and knows the world is about to change.

A veteran park ranger with over two decades of service reaches out after years of listening to the show in silence. He's heard me share my own encounter and talk about experiences from other law enforcement and first responders, and he finally decided it was time to tell his story. He's never told anyone. Not his wife. Not his coworkers. No one. Kevin was assigned to a week-long solo backcountry bear survey deep in the Pacific Northwest. 

Six miles from the nearest road, surrounded by old growth timber and some of the most remote wilderness in the lower forty-eight. He was experienced. He was prepared. He had no idea what was waiting for him.It started on day one with a cluster of trees twisted and broken at eight feet. By day two he'd found a massive bare footprint next to a structure that had no business being there. That night, sounds he couldn't identify echoed across the ridgeline and something started working its way toward his camp.

By day three, rocks from the creek were being placed near his tent while he was away. And then on night four, everything escalated to a point where Kevin had to make a split-second decision that's haunted him for almost nine years. This is one of the most detailed and credible accounts I've ever received. 

Kevin asked me to keep his full identity and exact location confidential, and I'm honoring that. What I'm not keeping confidential is what happened to him out there, because this story needs to be heard.

If you're in law enforcement, park service, military, or any first responder role and you've been carrying something like this, my inbox is open. You're not alone.