Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

In this episode, the journey takes a dramatic turn as Brian's podcasting career reaches new heights and dangerous new lows.

 What begins as a powerful collection of witness encounters from across the country — a conservation officer in Minnesota's Boundary Waters, a Mississippi fisherman on the Big Black River, a West Virginia coal miner who found something living deep underground, and a Cajun folk healer who speaks of the loup-garou with reverence rather than fear — quickly evolves into something far more consequential.

A television producer named Amanda from Meridian Productions returns with an offer to bring Sasquatch Odyssey to the screen as a legitimate documentary series. Brian agrees, but only on his terms: editorial control, no sensationalism, and absolute respect for the witnesses. The production takes the team from the Olympic Peninsula to the Ozarks and back to the Pisgah National Forest, where the mystery of Austin Reeves still lingers in every shadow and hollow.

But the closer Brian gets to the truth, the harder certain forces push back. A devastating act of arson destroys his home, his studio, and nearly everything he and Daniel have built together. 

The local investigation is a sham, but an ATF agent named Sarah Brown finds evidence of professional-grade incendiary devices and a cover-up that reaches far above her pay grade.

Rather than retreat, Brian and Daniel rebuild — bigger, stronger, and more determined than ever.The episode also explores the emotional toll of this work through quieter moments: the frustration of sorting genuine encounters from fabrications, the patience required to find voices like eighty-two-year-old Lucille Marsh from rural Georgia, and the steady, grounding presence of Daniel through it all.

From Wisconsin dairy farms to Nebraska sandhills, witnesses from the American heartland reveal that these creatures aren't just hiding in remote wilderness — they've adapted to live alongside us in the margins, watching from the edges of our everyday world.

The documentary airs, reaches millions, and ignites a national conversation. The community grows. The threats continue. And the odyssey pushes forward, one story at a time.

For twenty-six years, Dale wore the badge—and kept a secret he couldn’t afford to share.Now retired after nearly three decades as a deputy sheriff in a rural southeastern county bordering a vast national forest, Dale finally breaks his silence. During his career, he experienced six separate Sasquatch encounters—stories he kept buried until turning in his badge in late 2025.His experiences span decades and defy easy explanation.

In 1994, Dale witnessed a massive, upright creature cross a two-lane highway directly in front of his patrol car. Years later, a night spent at a remote campground left him shaken after hearing unmistakable wood knocks and a distant, haunting howl—one he now recognizes as identical to the infamous Ohio Howl recording.

But Dale’s story doesn’t end with his own encounters.As a trusted figure in his community, people came to him when they had nowhere else to turn. An elderly cattle farmer who carried the memory of a face-to-face encounter for more than forty years. 

The sister of a logger who finally revealed her brother’s terrifying experience on a remote timber road in the 1980s.

 And two chilling accounts from one of Dale’s closest friends—a Forest Service law enforcement ranger who discovered massive footprints and complex tree structures deep in the backcountry, and who later endured a harrowing night as something circled his tent for twenty minutes before sitting down forty feet away, silently watching him in the darkness.

In this installment, Daniel finds something he never expected: normalcy. A job at a local pizza place, the simple rhythm of work and home, the blessed absence of danger. After everything they've survived, boring feels like a gift.Meanwhile, Brian's podcast has exploded beyond anything he imagined. Five million downloads.

Tens of thousands of community members. Emails pouring in from witnesses who've carried their secrets for decades, finally finding a place where someone believes them. A seventy-eight-year-old woman writes to share an encounter she's hidden since 1952, and Brian remembers exactly why he does this work.But success brings complications. For every credible witness, there are a dozen others whose stories fall apart under scrutiny. A construction worker from British Columbia claims an intimate encounter with a female Sasquatch, and Brian is forced to draw hard lines about what belongs on the show.

Then a retired nurse from New Mexico shares something different entirely: a story of a young Navajo man brought to her hospital in 1992, speaking of being taken by "the big people," and the federal agents who confiscated every piece of evidence before intimidating him into silence. The wheat and the chaff. Sorting one from the other becomes Brian's constant burden. Then the men in black return. Different faces, same cold authority. 

They come with an offer: classified documents revealing decades of suppressed research, interdimensional hypotheses, everything Brian has been searching for. The price? Stop pushing for official disclosure. Become a partner in managing the truth rather than forcing it into the light. Brian refuses

.Eighteen months later, they burn his studio to the ground. But fire has a way of spreading what it's meant to destroy. The attack makes national news. Donations flood in. A major network offers a television deal with full editorial control. And soon Brian finds himself leading an expedition into the Pisgah with a full production crew, thermal cameras, and night vision equipment.

On the eighth night, in a hollow near where Austin Mercer vanished, the forest comes alive with wood knocks and howls. The creatures stay just beyond the cameras, too smart to be caught clearly, but their presence is undeniable.It isn't definitive proof.

But it's evidence the world will have to reckon with.And at a simple wooden cross marking where Austin was last seen, Brian says a quiet prayer for all those who've disappeared into these ancient mountains, and for the truth still waiting to be found.

In the spring of nineteen seventy-nine, a quiet cattle farmer in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Tennessee followed a strange sound into the timber beyond his fence line. What he found in a ravine that morning would change the course of his family's life for the next four decades and beyond.A young creature was caught in an illegal bear trap. Hurt. Terrified. Looking up at him with eyes that didn't belong to any animal he'd ever encountered.

The farmer made a choice. He knelt down and set it free. No cameras. No witnesses. Just a simple act of kindness from a man who believed you help what's hurting, no matter what it is.

What happened next is one of the most remarkable long-term sasquatch encounter accounts we've ever received on this show. The creature came back. Then others appeared. And when the farmer's young grandson arrived for his first summer on the property, a friendship began between the boy and that young sasquatch that would span decades.

He watched them. They watched him. Trust was built in inches over years. And what started with one grandfather's mercy in a wooded ravine eventually came full circle in a way that none of us saw coming. This is a story about patience, trust, and the kind of quiet coexistence that most people would say is impossible. Thomas Pritchard says otherwise. And after you hear what he has to say, you might just agree with him.

Sheriff Brian Patterson steps away from the badge and into the microphone full time as Sasquatch Odyssey explodes beyond anything he ever imagined. Part Five picks up with the podcast in full swing, and the witnesses are lining up from every corner of the South and beyond to finally tell the stories they have been carrying in silence for decades.It starts in the mountains of northeast Georgia with a seventy-three-year-old retired logger named Earl Hutchins, a man who kept his mouth shut for forty-five years about what stepped out of the timber near Clayton in the fall of nineteen seventy-eight. His story breaks something open.

The emails start flooding in from across the region, and Patterson finds himself recording encounter after encounter from witnesses who never had anyone willing to listen. A retired schoolteacher from Ellijay describes the thing that came screaming out of the Chattahoochee National Forest and changed the way she felt about the woods forever. A fishing guide from Everglades City recounts the night a pair of glowing eyes tracked him across the water in the Ten Thousand Islands. A teenage girl in Oconee County, South Carolina watched something unfold from a rhododendron thicket while her daddy's bluetick hound shook itself half to death against her leg.

The stories stretch across state lines and keep coming. Arkansas. Tennessee. Virginia. A coon hunter and his cousin tree something in the Ouachitas that no lantern light should ever have revealed. A family of four flees a Cherokee National Forest campsite at three in the morning. A state trooper on Skyline Drive watches something cross a two-lane highway in three strides and never tells a soul.

Then the podcast goes national and the picture gets bigger. A Lummi Nation elder speaks of the Ts'emekwes his people have known for thousands of years. 

A woman in the Hocking Hills of Ohio locks eyes with something standing between the trees in broad daylight and never hikes again. From Louisiana to Alaska to Hawaii, the encounters pile up, and Patterson starts to understand that this is not a regional phenomenon. It is everywhere. When the show crosses international borders, the scope becomes staggering. A First Nations man from British Columbia reminds the world that his people gave us the word Sasquatch in the first place. A Russian researcher describes a shape moving through snow in the Pamir Mountains. An Australian prospector watches something vanish from a waterhole in the outback. Sherpas in Nepal, scientists in China, guides in the Amazon — every culture, every continent, every corner of the wild world has a name for what lives in the places humans do not go. But it is the deep encounters that change everything. 

A hospice nurse in rural Kentucky describes the night something appeared at her dying husband's window and hummed him into his final moment of peace. A lost hiker in the Gila Wilderness receives images in her mind that lead her back to safety. A former Army Ranger wakes paralyzed in the Big Thicket while something rifles through his thoughts like pages in a book.

 These are the stories that keep Patterson up at night and force him to ask whether these creatures are something far stranger and far more profound than anyone has been willing to consider. By the end of Part Five, Patterson is two years into full-time podcasting with over three hundred interviews behind him and patterns emerging from the noise. The creatures follow corridors. They move with the seasons.

They choose when to be seen. And a small but undeniable percentage of encounters suggest something beyond biology, beyond what any scientific framework can currently explain. The podcast has crossed a million downloads. The community is growing. The world is slowly waking up. And somewhere out in the deep woods, something is watching back.