Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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.

On the evening of November fifth, nineteen seventy five, seven loggers were driving home through the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona when they witnessed something that would change their lives forever. A glowing disc hovered silently above a clearing, pulsing with an eerie golden light.When twenty two year old Travis Walton approached the craft, a beam of blue green light shot out and struck him, lifting him off the ground before hurling him through the air. His terrified coworkers fled the scene, and when they returned minutes later, both the craft and Travis had vanished without a trace. For five days, search parties combed hundreds of square miles of rugged wilderness. Helicopters scanned from above. Tracking dogs followed trails that led nowhere. The six witnesses found themselves suspected of murder as Sheriff Marlin Gillespie struggled to believe their impossible story. Then, just hours after the men passed polygraph examinations confirming they had not harmed their friend, Travis Walton reappeared on a highway outside Heber, Arizona, disoriented, terrified, and carrying memories of an experience that defied all rational explanation.In this episode, we explore every detail of what has become one of the most thoroughly investigated and hotly debated alien abduction cases in history.We travel to the small Mormon community of Snowflake, Arizona, where Travis and his stepbrother Mike Rogers grew up, and we examine the bonds of friendship and family that would be tested by the events of that November night. We follow the massive search operation that turned up nothing, and we sit with the witnesses as suspicion fell upon them and their community began to turn against them. Most importantly, we go inside the craft itself, following Travis through his fragmented memories of waking on an examination table surrounded by creatures with enormous black eyes and pale, hairless skin. We walk with him through curved corridors that seemed to defy normal architecture, into a room where the walls came alive with stars and a single chair offered control over what appeared to be a planetarium display of the cosmos. We meet the tall, human looking beings in blue uniforms who led him through a hangar filled with disc shaped craft before sedating him and returning him to Earth.We also examine the aftermath that followed Travis home. The media circus that descended on Snowflake. The National Enquirer's controversial involvement. The first polygraph test that Travis failed while still traumatized, and the multiple subsequent tests he passed over the following decades. The relentless attacks from skeptics like Philip Klass, who devoted years to proving the case was an elaborate hoax. And the personal toll on the witnesses, from Mike Rogers' crushing guilt over leaving his best friend behind to Travis's years of nightmares, failed relationships, and the struggle to rebuild a normal life after experiencing something so profoundly abnormal. We trace the cultural legacy of the case, from Travis's nineteen seventy eight book The Walton Experience to the nineteen ninety three Paramount film Fire in the Sky, which introduced his story to millions while taking dramatic liberties with what actually happened aboard the craft. We explore how the case influenced UFO research and established a template for evaluating abduction claims, and we consider how the recent shift in government attitudes toward unidentified aerial phenomena has given cases like Travis Walton's new significance in the ongoing search for answers about what else might be sharing our universe. This is a story about the unknown, but it is also a story about very human things. Friendship and loyalty. Fear and courage. The weight of telling a truth that nobody wants to believe. Nearly fifty years after that night in the Arizona forest, every surviving witness has maintained that they saw what they say they saw. The mystery remains unsolved. The questions remain unanswered. And somewhere in the vast darkness between the stars, something may still be watching.

Tonight we're venturing into territory that goes beyond our usual encounters with large, hairy, bipedal creatures. After nearly forty years of research in the deep woods, I've come to understand that not everything strange out there can be explained by Sasquatch. Sometimes the things people encounter are even more terrifying. More strange. More impossible.This episode brings you four accounts that have haunted me since the day I first heard them.These stories came from witnesses who trusted me with experiences they'd kept buried for years, sometimes decades. Some made me promise not to share their accounts until after they'd passed on. Others simply needed to unburden themselves of secrets too heavy to carry alone. Our journey begins with a Vietnam veteran named David Hollister who ventured into the Cherokee National Forest in the summer of nineteen seventy-one and found himself trapped in an impossible loop. No matter which direction he walked, no matter how carefully he tracked his course with map and compass, he kept arriving at the same abandoned cabin. Inside that cabin was a journal filled with entries in his own handwriting, describing events that hadn't happened yet. David's account of escaping that gray, fog-shrouded nightmare raises questions about time and place that I still can't answer.From there we move to the mountains of western North Carolina where a competitive ultra-marathoner I'm calling Michelle had an encounter that ended her trail running career forever. During a routine training run, she noticed a shadow keeping pace with her through the trees. A human-shaped shadow with no source. Nothing casting it. Just darkness given form, matching her speed mile after mile through the forest. What happened during those ten miles of terror left a permanent mark on Michelle, one that's still visible today in the white hair at her temples.The third account takes us to Colorado and a story that defies everything we think we know about physics. A retired electrical engineer named Harold Price was scanning old radio frequencies late one night when he picked up an emergency transmission from a forest ranger named William Morrison. The ranger was terrified, describing something circling his remote station in the darkness. The problem was that Morrison was broadcasting from nineteen sixty-three, more than fifty years in the past. Harold spent seven hours on the radio with a man from another era, listening helplessly as something found its way inside that station.What Harold discovered when he researched the incident afterward confirmed his worst fears about what he'd witnessed.Our final story comes from a father named Robert who took his family camping in the Allegheny National Forest in the summer of eighty-nine. What began as a perfect evening around the campfire turned into a night of primal terror when the family woke to discover that every sound in the forest had stopped. No crickets. No owls. No wind. Just absolute, suffocating silence. And something was circling their tent. Something they could feel but not hear. Something that carried the silence with it like an aura. These four accounts share something in common. They all involve encounters with things that shouldn't exist. Things that operate outside the rules we think govern our world. Time loops. Sourceless shadows. Transmissions across decades. Silence that walks like a creature.I believe these witnesses. I've heard the recordings. I've seen the evidence. I've looked into the eyes of people forever changed by what they experienced in the deep woods. Whether you believe them is up to you. But I'd encourage you to listen with an open mind. Because our forests hold secrets we're only beginning to understand. And some of those secrets are darker and stranger than anything we've imagined. The woods have secrets. And some secrets don't want to be found.