Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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.

The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest mountain range in the world, and they've been collecting secrets for longer than human memory reaches. Tonight we go into the old green dark — the deep, cathedral-quiet forest of the Appalachian chain — and we don't come back out until we've walked through six of the most haunting, bone-deep stories this ancient landscape has ever produced.

We start in Hancock County, Tennessee, in 1923, where a sixty-one-year-old farmer named Elias Combs runs his trapline in the pre-dawn dark and comes face to face with the Wampus Cat — the Cherokee creature known as Ewah, a being caught forever between woman and beast, whose eyes burn yellow-green and whose stare can strip a man of his mind. Three shots from a Winchester.

Not even a flinch.From there we move to the ridgelines of Burke County, North Carolina, where the famous Brown Mountain Lights have been appearing above the Linville Gorge since before the Civil War, baffling scientists and federal investigators for over a century. But the lights aren't the thing to be afraid of. The lights are the distraction. What walks in the timber below them is another matter entirely — and the Perkins family found that out the hard way in the autumn of 1850.

Then we go deeper into the Cherokee homeland of western North Carolina, back to the violent winter of 1780, to meet the most feared figure in all of Cherokee supernatural tradition. The Raven Mocker doesn't look like a monster. It looks like an old person. It enters the homes of the dying, and it takes their remaining years — gently, quietly, without leaving a mark except for one: the missing heart. A healer named Ayita held the detection medicine alone in the dark against it. She survived.

Her hair went white that night. She was thirty-two years old.We move north to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and the story of a woman with no recorded name who died on fire on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks in October of 1833. She's been screaming on that rail corridor ever since — seen by railroad engineers, bridge tenders, night watchmen, park rangers, and anyone else unlucky or curious enough to be near the old right-of-way after dark. The cold she leaves behind lasts about three seconds. The sound she makes lasts a lifetime.

High on Grandfather Mountain in Avery County, North Carolina, four college students from Boone made camp in October of 1971 and were visited by something that came down off the upper ridgeline in silence, stood at the edge of their fire, and placed a warning directly into their minds without speaking a word. One of the four never recovered fully.

Robert, who eventually told the story, went back alone in November to stand on the trail where it had stood — and realized it had a clear view of their camp for a very long time before they ever looked up.And we end at the northern tip of the chain, on a seven-mile road in Warren County, New Jersey whose legal name is Shades of Death Road. 

For decades, drivers on the Ghost Lake stretch have seen a man walking along the road at night — keeping pace with moving vehicles, always in the same direction, always wearing old-fashioned dark clothing. Always visible in the rearview mirror. Never there when you turn your head and look directly at where he should be.

These are stories drawn from real places, real regional tradition, and real accounts passed down through the communities of the Appalachian Mountains.

 The land is older than our ability to explain it. And it's paying attention.

Submit your own encounter to [email protected]

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 October of 1955, a highway worker and experienced outdoorsman named William Roe climbed Mica Mountain in British Columbia on his own time, with no particular expectation of finding anything unusual. What he encountered near the summit that afternoon would stay with him for the rest of his life — and nearly two years later, he'd walk into a notary's office in Edmonton, Alberta, and swear a legal affidavit about it, making his account one of the first formally documented close-range Sasquatch encounters in North American history.

This episode tells Roe's story as close to his own experience as the historical record allows. Drawing entirely from his sworn affidavit and the subsequent research of John Green, Ivan T. Sanderson, and others who documented the case carefully in the years that followed, we walk through the encounter from the first glimpse through the brush to the moment she disappeared back into the timber — including the moment Roe raised his rifle, looked through the sight, and made a decision he'd spend the rest of his life thinking about.Roe wasn't a man who sought attention.

He was a trapper, a hunter, a working man who'd spent more time in serious wilderness than most people spend indoors, and who knew the difference between what belonged in a forest and what didn't. 

What he saw on Mica Mountain that October afternoon was a large, upright, bipedal creature — female, covered in dark silver-tipped brown hair, standing roughly six feet tall, with a face that he could only describe as more human-like than he'd expected or was prepared for. She was eating wild cherry leaves near an old abandoned cabin when he found her. She walked away on two feet when she was ready to go. And at the edge of the forest, she looked back.

We also dig into why this account has held up under decades of scrutiny, what the sworn affidavit represents as a piece of evidence, and how the anatomical and behavioral details Roe recorded in 1955 would later align, in striking ways, with what hundreds of independent witnesses would describe in the years that followed.

If you've had your own encounter and want to share it, reach out at [email protected]. We read everything.

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.