August 13, 2025 • 43 mins
This episode contains one of the most haunting encounter stories we've ever featured on the show. Fair warning: this isn't your typical campfire tale about mysterious footprints or distant howls in the night. This is a confession, carried in silence for thirty-seven years by a man named Frank, about what really happened on a hunting trip in October 1988 that destroyed four lives and left a trail of tragedy that echoes to this day.Frank and his three lifelong friends—Earl, Tommy, and Roy—had been running coons together every Friday night for over twenty years in the ridges above Copper Creek, Tennessee.
They knew the local folklore, of course. Everyone did. Stories stretching back to the 1890s about hunting parties vanishing, about doors torn from cabins, about children glimpsing a "hairy man" by the water. The Carver family incident of 1952, where something too tall for the ceiling walked through their home. The two boys who disappeared in 1963, their trail going cold at the same clearing where searchers found bones arranged in patterns. Luther's claim that he'd shot one in 1985, only to watch it run away on two legs despite blood loss that should have killed anything.They knew these stories, laughed at them over beers, and kept hunting those ridges anyway. After all, they'd each had their own strange experiences up there—tracks that didn't make sense, deer cached impossibly high in trees, nests lined with pine branches and dark hair too long for any bear.
But talking about those things would make them real, and it was easier to look away.That October night started like hundreds before it. Six dogs eager to run, four men who'd known each other since grade school, and a perfect autumn evening for hunting. For two hours, everything was normal. Then the dogs' voices changed from the musical baying of a chase to something else entirely—confused yelps escalating to screams before cutting off one by one like someone pulling plugs.
What followed was an encounter that lasted perhaps ten minutes but destroyed four lives completely. Frank's account describes creatures that stood seven feet tall, covered in dark hair, with faces almost human but not quite. Hands with five fingers and opposable thumbs. Eyes that reflected yellow-green in the flashlight beams. And intelligence—clear, undeniable intelligence in how they moved, how they communicated with clicking sounds, how they herded the men toward a narrow trail where escape would be impossible.When the largest creature blocked their path—an old male with a twisted left leg from some ancient injury—Earl raised his rifle and fired.
The bullet struck, blood flowed, but the creature didn't fall. Instead, it crossed twenty feet in two strides and swept Earl off the trail with one arm. The sound of Earl hitting trees on his way down the slope, then silence.In the chaos that followed, Frank and Tommy shot both creatures—the injured male and a female who charged when she saw him fall. But the female, Frank realized too late, had been nursing. Somewhere in those dark woods was an orphaned infant.They buried the bodies deep, concocted a story about Earl slipping in the dark, and carried their friend's broken body out at dawn. The lie held. The funeral was well-attended.
Frank gave the eulogy, standing in his only suit and lying about how Earl died doing what he loved.But the real dying had just begun. Tommy crawled into a bottle and never climbed out, dead in a Memphis flophouse two years later at thirty-nine. Roy fell into religious mania, convinced they'd killed angels or demons, eventually disappearing into some compound in Idaho to wait for the end times.
And Frank? Frank spent thirty-seven years researching, mapping sightings, understanding too late that what they'd killed weren't monsters but something parallel to us—intelligent beings with their own culture, their own families, their own art. He still keeps a river stone he found clutched in the female's hand, marked with deliberate patterns. A mother carrying something beautiful she'd made, perhaps for the baby she'd never see again.
Frank's confession carries the weight of understanding that came too late. These creatures had names he'll never know, burial rituals that were interrupted, others who mourned them. The old male's sad eyes in that final moment before the killing shots—not angry anymore, just resigned to how it would always end between their kind and ours. Frank is seventy-nine now, hands too shaky for a rifle, knees too weak for mountain trails, but still hearing that roar of loss when the male saw his mate fall. Still knowing that somewhere out there, if it survived, is a creature his age who grew up without parents because of what happened that night on Copper Creek.The stories about that area have mostly stopped now. Development has pushed through with gas stations and subdivisions where ancient paths once ran. The young people
They knew the local folklore, of course. Everyone did. Stories stretching back to the 1890s about hunting parties vanishing, about doors torn from cabins, about children glimpsing a "hairy man" by the water. The Carver family incident of 1952, where something too tall for the ceiling walked through their home. The two boys who disappeared in 1963, their trail going cold at the same clearing where searchers found bones arranged in patterns. Luther's claim that he'd shot one in 1985, only to watch it run away on two legs despite blood loss that should have killed anything.They knew these stories, laughed at them over beers, and kept hunting those ridges anyway. After all, they'd each had their own strange experiences up there—tracks that didn't make sense, deer cached impossibly high in trees, nests lined with pine branches and dark hair too long for any bear.
But talking about those things would make them real, and it was easier to look away.That October night started like hundreds before it. Six dogs eager to run, four men who'd known each other since grade school, and a perfect autumn evening for hunting. For two hours, everything was normal. Then the dogs' voices changed from the musical baying of a chase to something else entirely—confused yelps escalating to screams before cutting off one by one like someone pulling plugs.
What followed was an encounter that lasted perhaps ten minutes but destroyed four lives completely. Frank's account describes creatures that stood seven feet tall, covered in dark hair, with faces almost human but not quite. Hands with five fingers and opposable thumbs. Eyes that reflected yellow-green in the flashlight beams. And intelligence—clear, undeniable intelligence in how they moved, how they communicated with clicking sounds, how they herded the men toward a narrow trail where escape would be impossible.When the largest creature blocked their path—an old male with a twisted left leg from some ancient injury—Earl raised his rifle and fired.
The bullet struck, blood flowed, but the creature didn't fall. Instead, it crossed twenty feet in two strides and swept Earl off the trail with one arm. The sound of Earl hitting trees on his way down the slope, then silence.In the chaos that followed, Frank and Tommy shot both creatures—the injured male and a female who charged when she saw him fall. But the female, Frank realized too late, had been nursing. Somewhere in those dark woods was an orphaned infant.They buried the bodies deep, concocted a story about Earl slipping in the dark, and carried their friend's broken body out at dawn. The lie held. The funeral was well-attended.
Frank gave the eulogy, standing in his only suit and lying about how Earl died doing what he loved.But the real dying had just begun. Tommy crawled into a bottle and never climbed out, dead in a Memphis flophouse two years later at thirty-nine. Roy fell into religious mania, convinced they'd killed angels or demons, eventually disappearing into some compound in Idaho to wait for the end times.
And Frank? Frank spent thirty-seven years researching, mapping sightings, understanding too late that what they'd killed weren't monsters but something parallel to us—intelligent beings with their own culture, their own families, their own art. He still keeps a river stone he found clutched in the female's hand, marked with deliberate patterns. A mother carrying something beautiful she'd made, perhaps for the baby she'd never see again.
Frank's confession carries the weight of understanding that came too late. These creatures had names he'll never know, burial rituals that were interrupted, others who mourned them. The old male's sad eyes in that final moment before the killing shots—not angry anymore, just resigned to how it would always end between their kind and ours. Frank is seventy-nine now, hands too shaky for a rifle, knees too weak for mountain trails, but still hearing that roar of loss when the male saw his mate fall. Still knowing that somewhere out there, if it survived, is a creature his age who grew up without parents because of what happened that night on Copper Creek.The stories about that area have mostly stopped now. Development has pushed through with gas stations and subdivisions where ancient paths once ran. The young people
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in, but those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness Bigfoot,
(00:23):
dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Hey, everybody,
before we get into today's show, I want to let
(01:06):
you know why this episode is a little late. Last
week I was up in Pennsylvania to speak at a conference.
While I was there, I had a medical emergency and
I ended up needing surgery. That meant my trip home
got delayed, and so did getting this episode out on time.
I'm back home now, I'm recovering, and I'm slowly getting
(01:27):
back on track. Thank you. Truly for your patience and
understanding while I've been dealing with this. If recovery keeps
going the way it's been going, we should be back
to our normal schedule this week. I also just want
to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart
to everyone who reached out, the messages, the check ins.
(01:49):
It all meant so much. I won't lie. This was
scary and painful, but I was surrounded by my Bigfoot family,
and I'm grateful for every single one of you. So
please follow the show, subscribe, turn on auto downloads wherever
you listen so you never miss an episode. All right,
(02:10):
let's get into today's chilling story. The story you're about
to hear is fantastic and hard to believe. Some would
say impossible, but I believe it deserves to be told.
Each one of these encounter stories holds pieces of a
larger puzzle. There's something to be gleaned from all of them,
patterns that emerge when you step back and look at
the whole picture. Unlike most of what you hear here,
(02:34):
this one comes with a warning. There are depictions of
violence and death that may not be suitable for younger
listeners or those with sensitivities to this type of subject matter.
This isn't a campfire story or a fun scare. If
the events described are real, they ended in tragedy for
everyone involved. Listener discretion is strongly advised. I've carried this
(02:57):
for thirty seven years, never told anyone, not even my wife.
But the weight of it gets heavier every year, and
I need to tell someone before it crushes me completely.
It was October nineteen eighty eight. I was forty two
then hunting with three men i'd known since grade school, Earl, Tommy,
and Roy. We ran coons every Friday night during season,
(03:19):
had been doing it for over twenty years. That night,
we were hunting the ridges above Copper Creek, about fifteen
miles from town. Before I tell you what happened, you
need to understand the history of that place. Copper Creek
had a reputation going back generations. My grandfather refused to
hunt certain hollows up there, said his father had warned
(03:40):
him about them when he was young. That would have
been what the eighteen nineties. The stories went back at
least that far. The first story I remember hearing was
from an old timer named Walter when I was maybe twelve.
This would have been nineteen fifty eight. Walter said that
back in the thirties, a whole hunting party had gone
miss up near Copper Creek. Six men with their dogs
(04:03):
just vanished. Search parties found their truck, their gear, even
found a few of the dogs alive, but so spooped
they never would hunt again, never found the men. The
official story was they got lost in a snowstorm, but
Walter said there wasn't any snow that week. Said his
brother was part of the search party and found something else.
(04:24):
Trees broken off ten feet up, like something big had
pushed through branches, twisted in ways that didn't make sense.
Walter told me something else that day, something that stuck
with me. He said. They found one of the men's
rifles bent nearly in half, like someone had grabbed both
ends and just folded it. No bear could do that,
no man either. Then there was the Carver family incident
(04:47):
in nineteen fifty two. They had a cabin up on
the ridge, used it for a summer place. One night
in July, something tore the door right off the hinges.
The family, parents and three kids uddled in the back
bedroom while something moved through their cabin the father, James Carver,
said it walked on two legs but was too tall
for the ceiling, had to stoop. Said it went through
(05:10):
their food, through furniture around, then left. They abandoned the
cabin that night, never went back. It's still up there,
what's left of it. We used to dare each other
to go inside when we were teenagers, but nobody ever
stayed long. My buddy Tommy knew more about that story.
His uncle was a deputy back then. First on the scene.
(05:32):
Tommy said his uncle told him things that never made
it into the report, like how they found handprints on
the walls, but the span from thumb to pinky was
nearly eighteen inches, or how every mirror in the place
was smashed, like whatever it was didn't like its own reflection.
The family's dog, a big German Shepherd, was found the
(05:52):
next day three miles away, alive but so traumatized it
would never go outside after dark again. Eighteen sixty three,
two boys went missing near Copper Creek, Bobby Hutchins and
David Price, both ten years old. They'd gone fishing and
never came home. The search went on for weeks. Dogs
kept losing the trail at the same spot a clearing
(06:14):
about halfway up the mountain. One searcher, a state trooper,
claimed he found tracks that didn't make sense, too big,
wrong shape, with what looked like toes. His report got
buried pretty quick. They never found those boys. Roy's dad
was part of that search party. Roy told us once,
after a few beers, that his dad came home different
(06:35):
after those weeks of searching. Said he'd found something at
that clearing where the dogs wouldn't track. A pile of
small bones, cleaned white, arranged in a pattern like something
had been playing with them. Could have been from animals,
but some of them looked different, although he never said
what that meant exactly. The search coordinator told him to
forget what he'd seen, and Roy's dad never talked about
(06:57):
it again, except that once to Roy, Luther was the
first person I knew personally who claimed to have shot one.
This was spring of nineteen eighty five. Luther was a
good hunter, level headed, not the type to make up stories.
He was tracking a wounded deer up near the creek
when something stood up from behind a dead fall. He
said it was covered in dark hair, maybe seven feet tall,
(07:20):
watching him. He fired his rifle out of pure reflex.
Said he saw it, flinch, saw blood spray. It ran
on two legs into the heavy timber. Luther followed the
blood trail for half a mile before it disappeared at
the creek. The amount of blood, he said, should have
killed anything, but the trail just stopped. Luther told me
(07:42):
something else months later, when he was deep in the bottle,
said that when he shot it, it made a sound
like a woman crying, not screaming, crying like it was
sad more than hurt. Said that sound followed him home,
lived in his head. That's why he started drinking. After that,
Luther changed, sold his rifles, quit hunting altogether, started drinking heavy.
(08:07):
His wife left him within a year. I saw him
once at the hardware store. Tried to ask him about it.
He grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise and said,
don't go up there, Frank, And if you do, don't
go alone, and don't go without plenty of ammunition. Earl
had his own story from nineteen seventy six. He'd been
hunting alone, stupid, but we all did it sometimes, said.
(08:31):
He dozed off in his tree stand and woke up
to find something watching him from another tree, maybe thirty
yards away, just to shape in the darkness, but the
eyes caught his flashlight when he moved yellow green, he said,
like a cat's, but sat facing forward like a person's.
They stared at each other for a few seconds. Then
(08:51):
it climbed down, not like a bare shemmi's down a tree,
but like a person using branches like ladder rungs, walked
away on two legs. Earl never hunted alone after that.
There were other stories. The Martinez girl in nineteen eighty
two found her dress hanging from a tree branch twenty
feet up, but never found her. The two Coleman brothers
(09:13):
in nineteen ninety, though that was after our encounter. Their
bodies were found, but the coroner's report was sealed. The
sheriff at the time retired right after that case, moved
to Florida and never came back. Tommy's grandfather had worked
at the lumber mill back in the forties, told Tommy
that they used to find trees up on Copper Creek
(09:34):
with marks on them, not claw marks like a bear makes,
but something deliberate symbols maybe, or territory markers, always up
high eight or ten feet off the ground. The lumber
company eventually stopped cutting in that area, said it wasn't profitable,
but the workers knew better. Too many accidents up there,
(09:54):
Too many men who went to check a tract and
came back different quit the next day. Hendrix, who'd been
the town doctor since the fifties, told me once that
he treated three different hunters over the years who'd come
down from Copper Creek with wounds they couldn't explain, deep
gouges that looked like claw marks but were too wide apart.
One man had bruising on his chest that looked like
(10:16):
a handprint, but the span was nearly twice the size
of a normal hand. All three men told the doctor
they'd fallen, got caught up in brambles, made excuses, but
Hendricks knew they were lying. Doctor Hendrix told me something else,
said that in nineteen seventy one they brought him a
body to examine. Unofficial like hunter found up near Copper Creek.
(10:38):
Looked like he'd been dead about a week. The thing
was the body was in a tree forty feet up,
wedged into a fork in the branches. Animals don't do that.
The man's neck was broken, but that's not what killed him.
Something had crushed his rib cage, just compressed it like
squeezing a beer can. Hendrix said the force required would
(10:59):
be annoy ormous. They listed cause of death as a fall.
There was also Mary Bennett, who lived alone in a
cabin at the base of the mountain. She used to
find her garbage scattered, her shed broken into. Started leaving
food out, bread, fruit, sometimes meat, said it kept whatever
it was from breaking things. She did that for years
(11:21):
until she died in nineteen eighty seven. After she passed,
her nephew found journals where she'd written about seeing it.
Described something tall and covered in hair that would stand
at the edge of her property at dusk. Said it
had eyes that reflected her porch light, like a cat's,
but yellow green instead of red. The nephew burned those journals,
(11:41):
said it was nonsense, but he sold that property quick
and cheap. Roy had talked to Mary once a couple
years before she died. She told him it had been
coming around for at least twenty years. Said she thought
it was old, moved like something with arthritis or old injuries.
Sometimes it would lean against trees when it was walked.
She'd seen it favoring its left leg. Dragging it slightly
(12:05):
made her think of her father in his last years,
the way old injuries catch up to you. The most
unsettling stories came from the kids. Every few years, children
would report seeing the hairy man near the creek. Parents
would dismiss it as imagination, but the descriptions were always similar,
very tall, covered in dark hair, walking upright. The kids
(12:28):
always mentioned the smell, not the rotten smell you hear
about in Bigfoot stories, but something else, like wet dog
mixed with pine sap, mixed with something medicinal. And they
all said the same thing about its face, that it
looked sad. We knew all these stories, heard them, laughed
at them, dismissed them as mountain folklore. Even Luther's story.
(12:51):
We figured he'd shot at a bear in bad light,
spooked himself. That's what we told ourselves. But here's the thing,
we'd all had our own experience is up there, that
we didn't talk about little things, finding tracks that didn't
make sense, hearing sounds that weren't quite right. I'd found
a deer carcass once back in eighty four that bothered me.
(13:13):
It was fresh killed, but cashed up in a tree
fifteen feet off the ground. The neck was broken clean
and something had eaten just the liver and heart left
the rest. I told myself a cat did it, But
no cat around here could haul a full grown dough
that high. Tommy had found what he called a nest
in eighty six, a depression and thick laurel lined with
(13:35):
pine branches, big enough for something large to curl up in.
There was hair caught on the branches, dark coarse, too
long for bear. He never reported it, never even took
a sample, just left and never went back to that spot.
That October night in nineteen eighty eight, the weather was
perfect for hunting, cold enough to make the dogs work well,
(13:57):
but not so cold as to be miserable. About thirty
five degrees, overcast with wet leaves from rain earlier in
the week. We met at the pull off where the
old logging road started, same as always. While we were
getting the dogs ready, Earle mentioned he'd heard something the
week before while squirrel hunting. A sound he couldn't identify.
(14:18):
Started low like a moan, rose to almost a shriek,
then cut off sharp, made his skin crawl. He said
he'd packed up and left, even though it was only noon.
Probably a barn owl, Tommy said, but he didn't sound convinced.
No owl. Earl insisted, I know owls. This was different.
(14:39):
I had my two best hounds, Duke and Sadie. Earle
brought his walker hound Ranger. Tommy had Blue, an old
blue tick that could cold trail better than any dog
i'd known. Roy had two young dogs he was training,
Rex and Blackie. We turned them loose around nine o'clock.
The plan was to spread out along the ridge, each
(14:59):
man co a section. Stay tuned for more backwoods bigfoot stories.
We'll be back after these messages. We'd done it a
hundred times. The dogs would run the coon up a tree,
we'd converge on the sound, shoot the coon, move on
to the next one. Simple. For the first two hours,
(15:19):
everything was normal. The dogs ran two coons, we got both.
I remember joking with Roy about how his young dogs
were doing, giving him grief about Rex getting distracted by
a rabbit trail. Regular hunting talk. But something felt off.
The woods were too quiet between the dog's runs. Usually
you hear small stuff, mice in the leaves, owls calling
(15:42):
deer moving through. That night, nothing around eleven thirty. We
were working a thick stand of timber on the north
side of the ridge. The dogs had struck another trail
and were pushing hard toward the creek bottom. Their voices
echoed off the ridges. If you've never heard hounds in
full crow night, it's a beautiful sound, musical almost Then
(16:04):
their voices changed. It started with blue. That old dog
had never been afraid of anything in his life. But
suddenly his steady ball turned into something else. Confused yelps,
then a sound I'd never heard him make, almost like screaming.
The other dogs joined in, their voices going high and frantic.
(16:24):
What the hell, Earl's voice crackled through the radio. The
dog's voices were scattering, spreading across the hillside in different directions.
Then one by one they went silent, not the normal
quiet when they lose a trail, just cut off, like
turning off a radio. Duke's coming back, I radioed. My
(16:44):
male hound burst through the laurel, running flat out, tail
tucked so tight it was under his belly. He went
straight past me, heading for the truck. I'd never seen
him act like that. Ranger won't come, Earl called, He's
just standing here shaking. That's when we heard the first vocalization.
It came from the direction the dogs had been running,
(17:05):
maybe two hundred yards out. Started as a low hum,
almost below hearing something you felt in your chest more
than heard. Then it climbed, getting louder, higher, until it
was this wavering shriek that made my teeth hurt. Lasted
maybe ten seconds, then stopped. We stood frozen, waiting. The
(17:27):
silence was worse than the sound. Then it came again,
from a different direction, closer. Meet at the big oak.
I radioed now, but Roy was already calling. Blackie's up
a tree. I can see her with my light. She's
fifteen feet up. How'd she get up there? We converged
on Roy's position. Sure enough, his young female was high
(17:50):
in an oak, spread eagled on a branch, crying while
Roy tried to coax her down. I scanned the woods
with my light. That's when I noticed the saplings in
a rough circle around us. Young trees were bent over
their tops, twisted together like someone braiding hair. It wasn't
wine damage. These were deliberate knots. The hair on my
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neck stood up. We need to go, Tommy said his
voice was steady, but I could see his hands shaking.
Blackie lost her grip and fell. Roy caught her and
she immediately tried to burrow inside his jacket. That's when
we heard rex scream. It wasn't a yelp or a howl.
It was a high pitched scream. Then silence. Rex Roy
(18:34):
started toward the sound, but I grabbed his arm. No,
we need to stay together. Another sound came from the darkness, breathing, deep,
rhythmic breathing, too big, like bellows working. It circled us,
staying just outside the reach of our lights. Sometimes it
was on two feet, distinct bipedal steps. Sometimes it dropped
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to all fours. Could hear the different gait the hands
hitting the ground. There, Tommy said, his light caught eyes
shine in the brush, yellow green, about seven feet off
the ground. The eyes blinked slow and deliberate, then moved left, fast,
faster than anything that sighs should move. Earl's light swung
(19:20):
to follow Jesus Christ. For just a second we saw
it in profile. The head was wrong, not quite human,
not quite ape. The forehead sloped back, the jaw jutted forward,
but the nose was almost flat against the face. Dark
hair covered everything except parts of the face, and it
was looking right at us, evaluating. It made another sound then,
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not a roar or a howl. It was clicking its
tongue against its teeth, like you'd call a horse. Click, click, click, rhythmic, purposeful.
It's calling others, Earle said, from three different directions, we
heard answering, clicks, run, I said. We ran, not in panic,
(20:07):
but with purpose, making for the logging road behind us.
I could hear them moving. They weren't trying to catch us.
They were hurting us, pushing us toward the steep section
where the old road narrowed. We reached the bad stretch,
a game trail cut into the slope, maybe three feet wide,
steep drop on the left, rock face and thick rhododendron
(20:29):
on the right. No choice but single file. Earl led,
then Roy with Blackie, then Tommy, then me. My light
played across the trail behind us, watching. The breathing was
closer now, and that clicking sound came from multiple directions.
That's when the big one stepped onto the trail ahead
of Earl. My light hit it full on. It stood
(20:52):
maybe seven and a half feet covered in dark hair
that looked black but might have been dark brown. The
face was almost human, heavy brow ridge, deep set eyes
that caught the light and threw it back, yellow green,
nose flat but clearly a nose, mouth wider than ours,
but with lips. Its arms hung past its knees. The
(21:13):
hands were perfect five fingers, fingernails opposable, thumbs but huge,
and its left leg was wrong, twisted at the knee.
Foot turned slightly inward old injury. When it shifted weight,
I could see it favor that side. It tilted its head,
studying us like a predator calculating distance. Its lips pulled back,
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showing teeth that were two large, but disturbingly human like,
not a smile, but a threat display, like a dog
about to bite. Earl raised his thirty thirty get back.
It dropped into a slight crouch, muscles tensing. Then it
took a step forward, dragging that bad leg. Earl fired.
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The shot was deafening in the narrow space at twenty feet,
he couldn't miss. The bullet took it high in the
chest and it rocked backward but didn't fall. It made
a horrible sound, part cough, part sob, part something else.
Dark blood, almost black in our lights, ran from the wound.
(22:17):
Then it moved. God, it was fast, even with the
bad leg. It covered the distance to Earl and two strides.
One arm swept out, catching Earl in the chest. I
heard ribs break. Earl went sideways off the trail, his
light spinning through the air, illuminating everything in crazy flashes, trees, rocks.
(22:39):
The thing's face twisted in rage or pain. We heard
Earl hit the slope, bouncing off trees, then a final
heavy thud, then nothing. Roy tried to bring his twelve
gage up, but the creature grabbed the barrel, twisted. The
gun broke like a toy, and Roy fell backward into
the rhododendron. Blackie still clutched against his chin. Tommy and
(23:01):
I were already firing. My first shot hid it in
the shoulder, spinning it partially around Tommy's two seventy caught
it in the side. More of that black blood, and
it dropped to one knee behind us. Something else stepped
onto the trail, smaller than the first, maybe six feet,
but built heavier. Female. I realized the proportions were different,
(23:23):
and there were visible breasts beneath the hair. She It
made a keening sound, looking at the wounded male. Then
she charged. I spun fired without aiming. The bullet caught
her in the hip and she stumbled but kept coming.
Tommy turned to worked his bolt with shaking hands. His
(23:44):
shot went wide, sparked off the rock face. The big
male was getting up again. I could hear it breathing,
wet and labored. Blood ran from its mouth, but it
was moving toward us. The head, Tommy gasped, got to
be the head. The female was almost on us. I
put the crosshairs between her eyes and squeezed. The rifle bucked,
(24:06):
and she went down hard, twitching. The male roared then,
not like an animal, like a man in agony. It
lurched toward us, and Tommy and I fired together. Both
shots hit the head. It stood for a moment, swaying,
then toppled backward. The clicking sounds from the wood stopped.
The breathing faded as whatever else was out there retreated.
(24:29):
We stood in the sudden silence, guns ready waiting. Earl
Roy croaked from the rhododendron. We need to find Earle.
We found him forty feet down, wrapped around a pine tree,
his neck was bent at an impossible angle, eyes open
and staring. He'd probably died when he hit the first tree.
(24:49):
Maybe felt a second or two of falling, better than
what might have happened. Roy was crying, trying to shake
Earl awake. Tommy threw up, then sat down hard, wouldn't
get back up. I felt empty, hollow, like someone had
scooped out my insides. We'd known Earl for thirty six years,
played Little League together, been in each other's weddings. His
(25:12):
daughter called me Uncle Frank. Now he was cooling meat
on a mountain side, killed by something that shouldn't exist.
What do we do? Roy asked. I looked back up
the trail. Even dead, they looked too human, especially the female, smaller,
more delicate features. The male's face, relaxed in death, looked
almost peaceful despite the wounds. If someone found them, did
(25:37):
DNA tests, We bury them deep. Then we get Earl
out and never speak of this again. What about Betty?
The kids? He fell chasing a coon, slipped in the dark.
Happens every season to someone. We wrapped the bodies in
tarps from the trucks, dragged them away from the trail.
(25:58):
The ground was rocky, to dig, but fear gave us strength.
As we worked, I got a better look at them.
The male's left leg had been broken and healed wrong,
probably years ago, maybe Luther's thirty ought six, maybe something else.
There were other scars what looked like old bullet wounds,
(26:18):
claw marks from fights, gray mixed with the dark hair
around the face. This thing was old. The female was younger,
fewer scars, Her hands were smaller, more delicate. There was
dried milk on her breasts. Oh God, Roy said she
had a baby somewhere out in those woods. There was
(26:38):
an infant orphaned now because of us. We dug until
we hit solid rock about four feet, rolled them in,
covered them with dirt and stones. It was nearly dawn
when we finished. My hands were raw and bleeding. We
all were. Then we went back for Earl. Carrying his
body out was the hardest thing I've ever done. He
(27:00):
was stiff by then, stuck in that broken position. We
took turns two carrying while one walked ahead with a light.
At the trucks, Tommy found Earl's thirty thirty, the barrel
slightly bent from the impact. We threw it in the creek.
The story came together on the drive out. Earl had
been moving too fast in the dark, following a coon,
(27:22):
stepped wrong, went over the edge. We'd heard him fall
found him at first light. Simple, tragic, believable. Betty never
questioned it, neither did the sheriff. The corner noted the
broken neck, the crushed ribs, consistent with a fall. Earle
was buried three days later. Half the town came to
(27:43):
the funeral. I gave the eulogy, stood up there in
my only suit, and lied about how Earle died doing
what he loved, how it was quick, how he didn't suffer.
Betty squeezed my hand after thanked me for being such
a good friend. I wanted to die. The money trouble
started right away. Earl didn't have life insurance, none of
(28:04):
us did back then, couldn't afford it with kids to raise.
Betty worked part time at the school, not nearly enough
to cover the mortgage and bills. We took up a
collection at the plant where Earle had worked, guys who
barely knew him through in twenties fifties. The church's helped too.
Tommy Roy and I emptied our savings. Told Betty it
(28:25):
was from Earl's hunting club emergency fund that didn't exist.
We made sure she could keep the house, made sure
the kids stayed in school, but money wasn't the real cost.
Tommy started drinking the day after the funeral and didn't stop.
His wife, Sandra, tried to help him, but he'd just
stare through her like she wasn't there. He'd call me
(28:45):
at three in the morning, drunk, crying about the baby
we'd orphaned. What if it's still out there, Frank, what
if it's starving. He lost his job within six months.
Sandra took the kids and moved in with her mother.
Tommy lived in his truck for a while, then disappeared.
They found him two years later in Memphis, dead in
a flophouse overdose. The report said he was thirty nine
(29:10):
years old. Roy lasted longer, but fell apart differently. He
became obsessed with religion, joined one of those extreme churches.
Said we were damned for what we'd done, that we'd
killed angels or demons or nephelon. The story changed depending
on how worked up he was. His wife left him
when he started talking about going back to find the
(29:30):
bodies to prove they were real. Last I heard, Roy
was living in some compound in Idaho, waiting for the end. Times.
Sends me letters, sometimes pages of Bible verses and drawings
of what he remembers. I burned them unopen now me.
I threw myself into research, started hitting libraries, reading every
(29:51):
account I could find. Learned there were hundreds of sightings,
thousands maybe learned about footprint casts, hair samples that came
back un known primate. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
We'll be back after these messages, recordings of sounds, just
like what we heard that night. I mapped out disappearances
(30:13):
in our area going back a century. The pattern was
clear if you looked, always near water sources, always in
remote areas, clusters every few decades, than nothing for years,
like something was passing through following ancient roots. I found
a professor at the State University who studied this stuff.
Showed him my research without telling him why I was interested.
(30:36):
He had theories about relic populations, about parallel evolution, about
things that were almost human but took a different path.
If they exist, he told me, they're probably as intelligent
as us, just different. They'd have language, culture, family bonds,
killing one would be like killing a person from an
undiscovered tribe. I never went back to see him. The
(31:00):
nightmare started right away, always the same. I'm back on
that trail, raising my rifle, but when I look through
the scope, it's Earl's face looking back at me, or
Betty's or sometimes my own. I wake up tasting copper,
smelling blood and cordite. My wife knows something happened that night,
(31:20):
not the truth, but she knows Earle didn't fall. She's
caught me talking in my sleep, calling out warnings, apologizing
to something. She doesn't ask anymore, just holds me until
the shaking stops. I went back once in twenty ten,
had to see the areas all developed now, gas stations, subdivisions,
(31:42):
a walmart. They built a road right through where we
buried them. When they were doing the construction. I watched
the news obsessively, waiting for reports of strange remains. Nothing
ever came up. Maybe the bodies were scattered by equipment,
maybe they're under tons of concrete. Maybe they're still there waiting.
I've seen three more over the years, never up close,
(32:05):
never for long, but I know what I'm looking at now.
Once on a fishing trip in Oregon, just a glimpse
through trees, but the size, the way it moved. Once,
driving through Colorado at dusk, a figure at the tree
line that stood too tall turned to watch my car pass.
Once right here in Tennessee, not fifty miles from Copper Creek,
(32:26):
I shine from a ridge too high to be a
bear that blinked and turned away when I stopped the car.
They're out there, not many, maybe, but some living in
the spaces we haven't ruined yet, avoiding us when they can,
having families raising their young, trying to survive in a
world that's running out of room for them. I think
(32:48):
about that baby we orphaned. If it lived, it would
be thirty seven. Now. Does it remember its parents? Does
it know what happened to them? Does it hate us?
Or does it just try to avoid humans like were
a natural disaster, something to survive. I think about Earl
every day. His kids grew up without him, his grandson
(33:08):
born five years after he died. We'll never know what
kind of man he was. All because we went into
woods we'd been warned about, laughed off stories we should
have heeded. But mostly I think about those two creatures
we buried. They had hands like ours. They had faces
that showed emotion. The male tried to gesture, tried to
communicate before earl shot. The female was a mother, protecting
(33:32):
her territory, her family. We killed them for being in
the way, for being different, for frightening us. Some nights
I wake up wondering if they had names, if others
mourned them, if there were burial rituals. We interrupted grieving.
We caused beyond our understanding. We acted out of fear
and left three bodies on that mountain, earls and theirs.
(33:55):
I'm seventy nine now, My hands shaked too much to
hold a rifle, knees were don't carry me up mountain trails.
But I still hear that sound the male made when
the female went down, that roar of loss that was
too human to be animal, too animal to be human.
I still see its eyes in that moment before we
fired the last shots. Not angry anymore, just sad, like
(34:19):
it knew this was how it would always end between us.
The stories about Copper Creek have mostly stopped. Every now
and then someone reports something, but it's dismissed as bears
or imagination. The young people don't know the history. The
old timers who remembered are mostly gone, but they're still
out there. I know it, keeping to the deep woods,
(34:41):
the places we haven't reached yet, teaching their young to
fear us, to run rather than stand their ground. We
won that night on the trail, But what did we
really win? The right to pretend we're alone, the comfort
of not sharing the world with something that shows us
what we might have been. I don't ask for forgiveness.
What we did is unforgivable. I just needed someone to
(35:04):
know the truth. Earl didn't die in a hunting accident.
Tommy didn't become a drunk for no reason. Roy didn't
lose his mind from nothing. We killed two beings that
might have been the last of their kind in our area,
orphaned a baby, and covered it all up with lies.
If you're ever in the woods at night and you
hear something that's not quite animal, not quite human, just leave,
(35:28):
don't investigate, don't be heroes. They've learned to fear us now,
and that's probably for the best for them and for us.
Some things can't be undone, Some guilt can't be absolved.
Some secrets eat you alive, whether you tell them or not.
But now you know, do with it what you will.
(35:49):
I found a track and made a plaster cast back
in nineteen ninety five up near the Oregon border, seventeen
inches long, eight inches wide, clear tow impressions. I had
a didiatrists look at it unofficially. He said whatever made
it walked upright, had a compliant gait, but carried probably
four hundred pounds. Said the bone structure would be fascinating
(36:10):
to study. I've never shown it to anyone else, never
reported it. What would be the point to help prove
they exist? So we can hunt them to extinction, to
satisfy scientific curiosity at the cost of their survival. They've
survived this long by staying hidden. Let them stay that way.
We've taken enough from them already. Earl would have been
(36:33):
ninety this year. I think about what kind of old
man he would have been. Probably would have spoilt his
grandkid's rotten told the same hunting stories over and over.
Would have given me grief about my bad knees, challenged
me to checkers at the diner every morning. Instead. He's
been in the ground for thirty seven years, and his
death started a chain of destruction that took Tommy broke
(36:55):
Roy and left me carrying this weight, all because we
thought we were the only things in those woods that mattered.
We were wrong about so many things, but mostly we
were wrong to pull those triggers. There's one more thing
I've never told anyone. When we were burying them, I
found something clutched in the female's hand, A riverstone, smooth
(37:17):
and round, with marks on it, deliberate marks, not writing exactly,
but patterns, art maybe, or just doodling, something made when
she had quiet moments, something she carried with her. I
kept it. God helped me. I kept it. It sits
on my desk where I can see it every day.
(37:38):
Proof that they were more than animals, Proof that we
killed something that could create, that could find beauty in
simple things. Sometimes I hold it and wonder if she
made it for her baby, a toy, a lesson, a
gift we made sure would never be given. That's the
worst part, not the killing, not the lies, not even
(37:59):
Earl's death. It's knowing they were people in every way
that matters, and we killed them anyway. Wow, what a story.
I struggled with whether to share this one, not just
because it's so fantastical, but because of the raw emotions
throughout the death of those creatures, the tragedy of Earl's death,
(38:20):
and the complete destruction it brought to the lives of
those men who survived. This isn't like other encounter stories.
There's no sense of adventure or excitement here, just guilt, loss,
and lives torn apart by a single night of violence.
What strikes me most about this story is the human
tragedy at its core. Four friends went honey, One died
(38:42):
that night, another drank himself to death within two years,
the third descended into religious mania, and Frank spent thirty
seven years carrying a weight that crushed him slowly day
by day. The toll it took on these men was complete.
Earl's children grew up without a father, Tommy lost his family,
his job, his life, Roy lost his mind searching for
(39:05):
meaning in what they'd done, and Frank lived with nightmares
and guilt that never faded. So many unanswered questions remain.
Was it real or was it the result of over
active imaginations on a dark mountain night group hysteria brought
on by fear and adrenaline. We may never know, but
if it is real, it's a tragic story on every level.
(39:28):
The death of a friend, the killing of creatures that
may have been the last of their kind in those mountains,
an orphaned infant left to survive alone, lives destroyed by
a single night of fear and violence. Is it real
or imagination? At the end of the day, as always,
it's up to you to decide what you believe. If
(39:49):
you have an encounter story that you'd like to share
on the show, I want to hear from you. Whether
it's something you've carried for years, like Frank, or a
recent experience that left you with questions, Glory deserves to
be heard. Email me at Brian at Paranormalworldproductions dot com.
Every encounter adds another piece to the puzzle. Your experience
(40:09):
might be the one that helps someone else make sense
of what they've seen. It might be the story that
changes how we understand these mysteries. Don't let your story
go untold. B
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in, but those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness Bigfoot,
(00:23):
dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Hey, everybody,
before we get into today's show, I want to let
(01:06):
you know why this episode is a little late. Last
week I was up in Pennsylvania to speak at a conference.
While I was there, I had a medical emergency and
I ended up needing surgery. That meant my trip home
got delayed, and so did getting this episode out on time.
I'm back home now, I'm recovering, and I'm slowly getting
(01:27):
back on track. Thank you. Truly for your patience and
understanding while I've been dealing with this. If recovery keeps
going the way it's been going, we should be back
to our normal schedule this week. I also just want
to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart
to everyone who reached out, the messages, the check ins.
(01:49):
It all meant so much. I won't lie. This was
scary and painful, but I was surrounded by my Bigfoot family,
and I'm grateful for every single one of you. So
please follow the show, subscribe, turn on auto downloads wherever
you listen so you never miss an episode. All right,
(02:10):
let's get into today's chilling story. The story you're about
to hear is fantastic and hard to believe. Some would
say impossible, but I believe it deserves to be told.
Each one of these encounter stories holds pieces of a
larger puzzle. There's something to be gleaned from all of them,
patterns that emerge when you step back and look at
the whole picture. Unlike most of what you hear here,
(02:34):
this one comes with a warning. There are depictions of
violence and death that may not be suitable for younger
listeners or those with sensitivities to this type of subject matter.
This isn't a campfire story or a fun scare. If
the events described are real, they ended in tragedy for
everyone involved. Listener discretion is strongly advised. I've carried this
(02:57):
for thirty seven years, never told anyone, not even my wife.
But the weight of it gets heavier every year, and
I need to tell someone before it crushes me completely.
It was October nineteen eighty eight. I was forty two
then hunting with three men i'd known since grade school, Earl, Tommy,
and Roy. We ran coons every Friday night during season,
(03:19):
had been doing it for over twenty years. That night,
we were hunting the ridges above Copper Creek, about fifteen
miles from town. Before I tell you what happened, you
need to understand the history of that place. Copper Creek
had a reputation going back generations. My grandfather refused to
hunt certain hollows up there, said his father had warned
(03:40):
him about them when he was young. That would have
been what the eighteen nineties. The stories went back at
least that far. The first story I remember hearing was
from an old timer named Walter when I was maybe twelve.
This would have been nineteen fifty eight. Walter said that
back in the thirties, a whole hunting party had gone
miss up near Copper Creek. Six men with their dogs
(04:03):
just vanished. Search parties found their truck, their gear, even
found a few of the dogs alive, but so spooped
they never would hunt again, never found the men. The
official story was they got lost in a snowstorm, but
Walter said there wasn't any snow that week. Said his
brother was part of the search party and found something else.
(04:24):
Trees broken off ten feet up, like something big had
pushed through branches, twisted in ways that didn't make sense.
Walter told me something else that day, something that stuck
with me. He said. They found one of the men's
rifles bent nearly in half, like someone had grabbed both
ends and just folded it. No bear could do that,
no man either. Then there was the Carver family incident
(04:47):
in nineteen fifty two. They had a cabin up on
the ridge, used it for a summer place. One night
in July, something tore the door right off the hinges.
The family, parents and three kids uddled in the back
bedroom while something moved through their cabin the father, James Carver,
said it walked on two legs but was too tall
for the ceiling, had to stoop. Said it went through
(05:10):
their food, through furniture around, then left. They abandoned the
cabin that night, never went back. It's still up there,
what's left of it. We used to dare each other
to go inside when we were teenagers, but nobody ever
stayed long. My buddy Tommy knew more about that story.
His uncle was a deputy back then. First on the scene.
(05:32):
Tommy said his uncle told him things that never made
it into the report, like how they found handprints on
the walls, but the span from thumb to pinky was
nearly eighteen inches, or how every mirror in the place
was smashed, like whatever it was didn't like its own reflection.
The family's dog, a big German Shepherd, was found the
(05:52):
next day three miles away, alive but so traumatized it
would never go outside after dark again. Eighteen sixty three,
two boys went missing near Copper Creek, Bobby Hutchins and
David Price, both ten years old. They'd gone fishing and
never came home. The search went on for weeks. Dogs
kept losing the trail at the same spot a clearing
(06:14):
about halfway up the mountain. One searcher, a state trooper,
claimed he found tracks that didn't make sense, too big,
wrong shape, with what looked like toes. His report got
buried pretty quick. They never found those boys. Roy's dad
was part of that search party. Roy told us once,
after a few beers, that his dad came home different
(06:35):
after those weeks of searching. Said he'd found something at
that clearing where the dogs wouldn't track. A pile of
small bones, cleaned white, arranged in a pattern like something
had been playing with them. Could have been from animals,
but some of them looked different, although he never said
what that meant exactly. The search coordinator told him to
forget what he'd seen, and Roy's dad never talked about
(06:57):
it again, except that once to Roy, Luther was the
first person I knew personally who claimed to have shot one.
This was spring of nineteen eighty five. Luther was a
good hunter, level headed, not the type to make up stories.
He was tracking a wounded deer up near the creek
when something stood up from behind a dead fall. He
said it was covered in dark hair, maybe seven feet tall,
(07:20):
watching him. He fired his rifle out of pure reflex.
Said he saw it, flinch, saw blood spray. It ran
on two legs into the heavy timber. Luther followed the
blood trail for half a mile before it disappeared at
the creek. The amount of blood, he said, should have
killed anything, but the trail just stopped. Luther told me
(07:42):
something else months later, when he was deep in the bottle,
said that when he shot it, it made a sound
like a woman crying, not screaming, crying like it was
sad more than hurt. Said that sound followed him home,
lived in his head. That's why he started drinking. After that,
Luther changed, sold his rifles, quit hunting altogether, started drinking heavy.
(08:07):
His wife left him within a year. I saw him
once at the hardware store. Tried to ask him about it.
He grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise and said,
don't go up there, Frank, And if you do, don't
go alone, and don't go without plenty of ammunition. Earl
had his own story from nineteen seventy six. He'd been
hunting alone, stupid, but we all did it sometimes, said.
(08:31):
He dozed off in his tree stand and woke up
to find something watching him from another tree, maybe thirty
yards away, just to shape in the darkness, but the
eyes caught his flashlight when he moved yellow green, he said,
like a cat's, but sat facing forward like a person's.
They stared at each other for a few seconds. Then
(08:51):
it climbed down, not like a bare shemmi's down a tree,
but like a person using branches like ladder rungs, walked
away on two legs. Earl never hunted alone after that.
There were other stories. The Martinez girl in nineteen eighty
two found her dress hanging from a tree branch twenty
feet up, but never found her. The two Coleman brothers
(09:13):
in nineteen ninety, though that was after our encounter. Their
bodies were found, but the coroner's report was sealed. The
sheriff at the time retired right after that case, moved
to Florida and never came back. Tommy's grandfather had worked
at the lumber mill back in the forties, told Tommy
that they used to find trees up on Copper Creek
(09:34):
with marks on them, not claw marks like a bear makes,
but something deliberate symbols maybe, or territory markers, always up
high eight or ten feet off the ground. The lumber
company eventually stopped cutting in that area, said it wasn't profitable,
but the workers knew better. Too many accidents up there,
(09:54):
Too many men who went to check a tract and
came back different quit the next day. Hendrix, who'd been
the town doctor since the fifties, told me once that
he treated three different hunters over the years who'd come
down from Copper Creek with wounds they couldn't explain, deep
gouges that looked like claw marks but were too wide apart.
One man had bruising on his chest that looked like
(10:16):
a handprint, but the span was nearly twice the size
of a normal hand. All three men told the doctor
they'd fallen, got caught up in brambles, made excuses, but
Hendricks knew they were lying. Doctor Hendrix told me something else,
said that in nineteen seventy one they brought him a
body to examine. Unofficial like hunter found up near Copper Creek.
(10:38):
Looked like he'd been dead about a week. The thing
was the body was in a tree forty feet up,
wedged into a fork in the branches. Animals don't do that.
The man's neck was broken, but that's not what killed him.
Something had crushed his rib cage, just compressed it like
squeezing a beer can. Hendrix said the force required would
(10:59):
be annoy ormous. They listed cause of death as a fall.
There was also Mary Bennett, who lived alone in a
cabin at the base of the mountain. She used to
find her garbage scattered, her shed broken into. Started leaving
food out, bread, fruit, sometimes meat, said it kept whatever
it was from breaking things. She did that for years
(11:21):
until she died in nineteen eighty seven. After she passed,
her nephew found journals where she'd written about seeing it.
Described something tall and covered in hair that would stand
at the edge of her property at dusk. Said it
had eyes that reflected her porch light, like a cat's,
but yellow green instead of red. The nephew burned those journals,
(11:41):
said it was nonsense, but he sold that property quick
and cheap. Roy had talked to Mary once a couple
years before she died. She told him it had been
coming around for at least twenty years. Said she thought
it was old, moved like something with arthritis or old injuries.
Sometimes it would lean against trees when it was walked.
She'd seen it favoring its left leg. Dragging it slightly
(12:05):
made her think of her father in his last years,
the way old injuries catch up to you. The most
unsettling stories came from the kids. Every few years, children
would report seeing the hairy man near the creek. Parents
would dismiss it as imagination, but the descriptions were always similar,
very tall, covered in dark hair, walking upright. The kids
(12:28):
always mentioned the smell, not the rotten smell you hear
about in Bigfoot stories, but something else, like wet dog
mixed with pine sap, mixed with something medicinal. And they
all said the same thing about its face, that it
looked sad. We knew all these stories, heard them, laughed
at them, dismissed them as mountain folklore. Even Luther's story.
(12:51):
We figured he'd shot at a bear in bad light,
spooked himself. That's what we told ourselves. But here's the thing,
we'd all had our own experience is up there, that
we didn't talk about little things, finding tracks that didn't
make sense, hearing sounds that weren't quite right. I'd found
a deer carcass once back in eighty four that bothered me.
(13:13):
It was fresh killed, but cashed up in a tree
fifteen feet off the ground. The neck was broken clean
and something had eaten just the liver and heart left
the rest. I told myself a cat did it, But
no cat around here could haul a full grown dough
that high. Tommy had found what he called a nest
in eighty six, a depression and thick laurel lined with
(13:35):
pine branches, big enough for something large to curl up in.
There was hair caught on the branches, dark coarse, too
long for bear. He never reported it, never even took
a sample, just left and never went back to that spot.
That October night in nineteen eighty eight, the weather was
perfect for hunting, cold enough to make the dogs work well,
(13:57):
but not so cold as to be miserable. About thirty
five degrees, overcast with wet leaves from rain earlier in
the week. We met at the pull off where the
old logging road started, same as always. While we were
getting the dogs ready, Earle mentioned he'd heard something the
week before while squirrel hunting. A sound he couldn't identify.
(14:18):
Started low like a moan, rose to almost a shriek,
then cut off sharp, made his skin crawl. He said
he'd packed up and left, even though it was only noon.
Probably a barn owl, Tommy said, but he didn't sound convinced.
No owl. Earl insisted, I know owls. This was different.
(14:39):
I had my two best hounds, Duke and Sadie. Earle
brought his walker hound Ranger. Tommy had Blue, an old
blue tick that could cold trail better than any dog
i'd known. Roy had two young dogs he was training,
Rex and Blackie. We turned them loose around nine o'clock.
The plan was to spread out along the ridge, each
(14:59):
man co a section. Stay tuned for more backwoods bigfoot stories.
We'll be back after these messages. We'd done it a
hundred times. The dogs would run the coon up a tree,
we'd converge on the sound, shoot the coon, move on
to the next one. Simple. For the first two hours,
(15:19):
everything was normal. The dogs ran two coons, we got both.
I remember joking with Roy about how his young dogs
were doing, giving him grief about Rex getting distracted by
a rabbit trail. Regular hunting talk. But something felt off.
The woods were too quiet between the dog's runs. Usually
you hear small stuff, mice in the leaves, owls calling
(15:42):
deer moving through. That night, nothing around eleven thirty. We
were working a thick stand of timber on the north
side of the ridge. The dogs had struck another trail
and were pushing hard toward the creek bottom. Their voices
echoed off the ridges. If you've never heard hounds in
full crow night, it's a beautiful sound, musical almost Then
(16:04):
their voices changed. It started with blue. That old dog
had never been afraid of anything in his life. But
suddenly his steady ball turned into something else. Confused yelps,
then a sound I'd never heard him make, almost like screaming.
The other dogs joined in, their voices going high and frantic.
(16:24):
What the hell, Earl's voice crackled through the radio. The
dog's voices were scattering, spreading across the hillside in different directions.
Then one by one they went silent, not the normal
quiet when they lose a trail, just cut off, like
turning off a radio. Duke's coming back, I radioed. My
(16:44):
male hound burst through the laurel, running flat out, tail
tucked so tight it was under his belly. He went
straight past me, heading for the truck. I'd never seen
him act like that. Ranger won't come, Earl called, He's
just standing here shaking. That's when we heard the first vocalization.
It came from the direction the dogs had been running,
(17:05):
maybe two hundred yards out. Started as a low hum,
almost below hearing something you felt in your chest more
than heard. Then it climbed, getting louder, higher, until it
was this wavering shriek that made my teeth hurt. Lasted
maybe ten seconds, then stopped. We stood frozen, waiting. The
(17:27):
silence was worse than the sound. Then it came again,
from a different direction, closer. Meet at the big oak.
I radioed now, but Roy was already calling. Blackie's up
a tree. I can see her with my light. She's
fifteen feet up. How'd she get up there? We converged
on Roy's position. Sure enough, his young female was high
(17:50):
in an oak, spread eagled on a branch, crying while
Roy tried to coax her down. I scanned the woods
with my light. That's when I noticed the saplings in
a rough circle around us. Young trees were bent over
their tops, twisted together like someone braiding hair. It wasn't
wine damage. These were deliberate knots. The hair on my
(18:11):
neck stood up. We need to go, Tommy said his
voice was steady, but I could see his hands shaking.
Blackie lost her grip and fell. Roy caught her and
she immediately tried to burrow inside his jacket. That's when
we heard rex scream. It wasn't a yelp or a howl.
It was a high pitched scream. Then silence. Rex Roy
(18:34):
started toward the sound, but I grabbed his arm. No,
we need to stay together. Another sound came from the darkness, breathing, deep,
rhythmic breathing, too big, like bellows working. It circled us,
staying just outside the reach of our lights. Sometimes it
was on two feet, distinct bipedal steps. Sometimes it dropped
(18:58):
to all fours. Could hear the different gait the hands
hitting the ground. There, Tommy said, his light caught eyes
shine in the brush, yellow green, about seven feet off
the ground. The eyes blinked slow and deliberate, then moved left, fast,
faster than anything that sighs should move. Earl's light swung
(19:20):
to follow Jesus Christ. For just a second we saw
it in profile. The head was wrong, not quite human,
not quite ape. The forehead sloped back, the jaw jutted forward,
but the nose was almost flat against the face. Dark
hair covered everything except parts of the face, and it
was looking right at us, evaluating. It made another sound then,
(19:45):
not a roar or a howl. It was clicking its
tongue against its teeth, like you'd call a horse. Click, click, click, rhythmic, purposeful.
It's calling others, Earle said, from three different directions, we
heard answering, clicks, run, I said. We ran, not in panic,
(20:07):
but with purpose, making for the logging road behind us.
I could hear them moving. They weren't trying to catch us.
They were hurting us, pushing us toward the steep section
where the old road narrowed. We reached the bad stretch,
a game trail cut into the slope, maybe three feet wide,
steep drop on the left, rock face and thick rhododendron
(20:29):
on the right. No choice but single file. Earl led,
then Roy with Blackie, then Tommy, then me. My light
played across the trail behind us, watching. The breathing was
closer now, and that clicking sound came from multiple directions.
That's when the big one stepped onto the trail ahead
of Earl. My light hit it full on. It stood
(20:52):
maybe seven and a half feet covered in dark hair
that looked black but might have been dark brown. The
face was almost human, heavy brow ridge, deep set eyes
that caught the light and threw it back, yellow green,
nose flat but clearly a nose, mouth wider than ours,
but with lips. Its arms hung past its knees. The
(21:13):
hands were perfect five fingers, fingernails opposable, thumbs but huge,
and its left leg was wrong, twisted at the knee.
Foot turned slightly inward old injury. When it shifted weight,
I could see it favor that side. It tilted its head,
studying us like a predator calculating distance. Its lips pulled back,
(21:36):
showing teeth that were two large, but disturbingly human like,
not a smile, but a threat display, like a dog
about to bite. Earl raised his thirty thirty get back.
It dropped into a slight crouch, muscles tensing. Then it
took a step forward, dragging that bad leg. Earl fired.
(21:57):
The shot was deafening in the narrow space at twenty feet,
he couldn't miss. The bullet took it high in the
chest and it rocked backward but didn't fall. It made
a horrible sound, part cough, part sob, part something else.
Dark blood, almost black in our lights, ran from the wound.
(22:17):
Then it moved. God, it was fast, even with the
bad leg. It covered the distance to Earl and two strides.
One arm swept out, catching Earl in the chest. I
heard ribs break. Earl went sideways off the trail, his
light spinning through the air, illuminating everything in crazy flashes, trees, rocks.
(22:39):
The thing's face twisted in rage or pain. We heard
Earl hit the slope, bouncing off trees, then a final
heavy thud, then nothing. Roy tried to bring his twelve
gage up, but the creature grabbed the barrel, twisted. The
gun broke like a toy, and Roy fell backward into
the rhododendron. Blackie still clutched against his chin. Tommy and
(23:01):
I were already firing. My first shot hid it in
the shoulder, spinning it partially around Tommy's two seventy caught
it in the side. More of that black blood, and
it dropped to one knee behind us. Something else stepped
onto the trail, smaller than the first, maybe six feet,
but built heavier. Female. I realized the proportions were different,
(23:23):
and there were visible breasts beneath the hair. She It
made a keening sound, looking at the wounded male. Then
she charged. I spun fired without aiming. The bullet caught
her in the hip and she stumbled but kept coming.
Tommy turned to worked his bolt with shaking hands. His
(23:44):
shot went wide, sparked off the rock face. The big
male was getting up again. I could hear it breathing,
wet and labored. Blood ran from its mouth, but it
was moving toward us. The head, Tommy gasped, got to
be the head. The female was almost on us. I
put the crosshairs between her eyes and squeezed. The rifle bucked,
(24:06):
and she went down hard, twitching. The male roared then,
not like an animal, like a man in agony. It
lurched toward us, and Tommy and I fired together. Both
shots hit the head. It stood for a moment, swaying,
then toppled backward. The clicking sounds from the wood stopped.
The breathing faded as whatever else was out there retreated.
(24:29):
We stood in the sudden silence, guns ready waiting. Earl
Roy croaked from the rhododendron. We need to find Earle.
We found him forty feet down, wrapped around a pine tree,
his neck was bent at an impossible angle, eyes open
and staring. He'd probably died when he hit the first tree.
(24:49):
Maybe felt a second or two of falling, better than
what might have happened. Roy was crying, trying to shake
Earl awake. Tommy threw up, then sat down hard, wouldn't
get back up. I felt empty, hollow, like someone had
scooped out my insides. We'd known Earl for thirty six years,
played Little League together, been in each other's weddings. His
(25:12):
daughter called me Uncle Frank. Now he was cooling meat
on a mountain side, killed by something that shouldn't exist.
What do we do? Roy asked. I looked back up
the trail. Even dead, they looked too human, especially the female, smaller,
more delicate features. The male's face, relaxed in death, looked
almost peaceful despite the wounds. If someone found them, did
(25:37):
DNA tests, We bury them deep. Then we get Earl
out and never speak of this again. What about Betty?
The kids? He fell chasing a coon, slipped in the dark.
Happens every season to someone. We wrapped the bodies in
tarps from the trucks, dragged them away from the trail.
(25:58):
The ground was rocky, to dig, but fear gave us strength.
As we worked, I got a better look at them.
The male's left leg had been broken and healed wrong,
probably years ago, maybe Luther's thirty ought six, maybe something else.
There were other scars what looked like old bullet wounds,
(26:18):
claw marks from fights, gray mixed with the dark hair
around the face. This thing was old. The female was younger,
fewer scars, Her hands were smaller, more delicate. There was
dried milk on her breasts. Oh God, Roy said she
had a baby somewhere out in those woods. There was
(26:38):
an infant orphaned now because of us. We dug until
we hit solid rock about four feet, rolled them in,
covered them with dirt and stones. It was nearly dawn
when we finished. My hands were raw and bleeding. We
all were. Then we went back for Earl. Carrying his
body out was the hardest thing I've ever done. He
(27:00):
was stiff by then, stuck in that broken position. We
took turns two carrying while one walked ahead with a light.
At the trucks, Tommy found Earl's thirty thirty, the barrel
slightly bent from the impact. We threw it in the creek.
The story came together on the drive out. Earl had
been moving too fast in the dark, following a coon,
(27:22):
stepped wrong, went over the edge. We'd heard him fall
found him at first light. Simple, tragic, believable. Betty never
questioned it, neither did the sheriff. The corner noted the
broken neck, the crushed ribs, consistent with a fall. Earle
was buried three days later. Half the town came to
(27:43):
the funeral. I gave the eulogy, stood up there in
my only suit, and lied about how Earle died doing
what he loved, how it was quick, how he didn't suffer.
Betty squeezed my hand after thanked me for being such
a good friend. I wanted to die. The money trouble
started right away. Earl didn't have life insurance, none of
(28:04):
us did back then, couldn't afford it with kids to raise.
Betty worked part time at the school, not nearly enough
to cover the mortgage and bills. We took up a
collection at the plant where Earle had worked, guys who
barely knew him through in twenties fifties. The church's helped too.
Tommy Roy and I emptied our savings. Told Betty it
(28:25):
was from Earl's hunting club emergency fund that didn't exist.
We made sure she could keep the house, made sure
the kids stayed in school, but money wasn't the real cost.
Tommy started drinking the day after the funeral and didn't stop.
His wife, Sandra, tried to help him, but he'd just
stare through her like she wasn't there. He'd call me
(28:45):
at three in the morning, drunk, crying about the baby
we'd orphaned. What if it's still out there, Frank, what
if it's starving. He lost his job within six months.
Sandra took the kids and moved in with her mother.
Tommy lived in his truck for a while, then disappeared.
They found him two years later in Memphis, dead in
a flophouse overdose. The report said he was thirty nine
(29:10):
years old. Roy lasted longer, but fell apart differently. He
became obsessed with religion, joined one of those extreme churches.
Said we were damned for what we'd done, that we'd
killed angels or demons or nephelon. The story changed depending
on how worked up he was. His wife left him
when he started talking about going back to find the
(29:30):
bodies to prove they were real. Last I heard, Roy
was living in some compound in Idaho, waiting for the end. Times.
Sends me letters, sometimes pages of Bible verses and drawings
of what he remembers. I burned them unopen now me.
I threw myself into research, started hitting libraries, reading every
(29:51):
account I could find. Learned there were hundreds of sightings,
thousands maybe learned about footprint casts, hair samples that came
back un known primate. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
We'll be back after these messages, recordings of sounds, just
like what we heard that night. I mapped out disappearances
(30:13):
in our area going back a century. The pattern was
clear if you looked, always near water sources, always in
remote areas, clusters every few decades, than nothing for years,
like something was passing through following ancient roots. I found
a professor at the State University who studied this stuff.
Showed him my research without telling him why I was interested.
(30:36):
He had theories about relic populations, about parallel evolution, about
things that were almost human but took a different path.
If they exist, he told me, they're probably as intelligent
as us, just different. They'd have language, culture, family bonds,
killing one would be like killing a person from an
undiscovered tribe. I never went back to see him. The
(31:00):
nightmare started right away, always the same. I'm back on
that trail, raising my rifle, but when I look through
the scope, it's Earl's face looking back at me, or
Betty's or sometimes my own. I wake up tasting copper,
smelling blood and cordite. My wife knows something happened that night,
(31:20):
not the truth, but she knows Earle didn't fall. She's
caught me talking in my sleep, calling out warnings, apologizing
to something. She doesn't ask anymore, just holds me until
the shaking stops. I went back once in twenty ten,
had to see the areas all developed now, gas stations, subdivisions,
(31:42):
a walmart. They built a road right through where we
buried them. When they were doing the construction. I watched
the news obsessively, waiting for reports of strange remains. Nothing
ever came up. Maybe the bodies were scattered by equipment,
maybe they're under tons of concrete. Maybe they're still there waiting.
I've seen three more over the years, never up close,
(32:05):
never for long, but I know what I'm looking at now.
Once on a fishing trip in Oregon, just a glimpse
through trees, but the size, the way it moved. Once,
driving through Colorado at dusk, a figure at the tree
line that stood too tall turned to watch my car pass.
Once right here in Tennessee, not fifty miles from Copper Creek,
(32:26):
I shine from a ridge too high to be a
bear that blinked and turned away when I stopped the car.
They're out there, not many, maybe, but some living in
the spaces we haven't ruined yet, avoiding us when they can,
having families raising their young, trying to survive in a
world that's running out of room for them. I think
(32:48):
about that baby we orphaned. If it lived, it would
be thirty seven. Now. Does it remember its parents? Does
it know what happened to them? Does it hate us?
Or does it just try to avoid humans like were
a natural disaster, something to survive. I think about Earl
every day. His kids grew up without him, his grandson
(33:08):
born five years after he died. We'll never know what
kind of man he was. All because we went into
woods we'd been warned about, laughed off stories we should
have heeded. But mostly I think about those two creatures
we buried. They had hands like ours. They had faces
that showed emotion. The male tried to gesture, tried to
communicate before earl shot. The female was a mother, protecting
(33:32):
her territory, her family. We killed them for being in
the way, for being different, for frightening us. Some nights
I wake up wondering if they had names, if others
mourned them, if there were burial rituals. We interrupted grieving.
We caused beyond our understanding. We acted out of fear
and left three bodies on that mountain, earls and theirs.
(33:55):
I'm seventy nine now, My hands shaked too much to
hold a rifle, knees were don't carry me up mountain trails.
But I still hear that sound the male made when
the female went down, that roar of loss that was
too human to be animal, too animal to be human.
I still see its eyes in that moment before we
fired the last shots. Not angry anymore, just sad, like
(34:19):
it knew this was how it would always end between us.
The stories about Copper Creek have mostly stopped. Every now
and then someone reports something, but it's dismissed as bears
or imagination. The young people don't know the history. The
old timers who remembered are mostly gone, but they're still
out there. I know it, keeping to the deep woods,
(34:41):
the places we haven't reached yet, teaching their young to
fear us, to run rather than stand their ground. We
won that night on the trail, But what did we
really win? The right to pretend we're alone, the comfort
of not sharing the world with something that shows us
what we might have been. I don't ask for forgiveness.
What we did is unforgivable. I just needed someone to
(35:04):
know the truth. Earl didn't die in a hunting accident.
Tommy didn't become a drunk for no reason. Roy didn't
lose his mind from nothing. We killed two beings that
might have been the last of their kind in our area,
orphaned a baby, and covered it all up with lies.
If you're ever in the woods at night and you
hear something that's not quite animal, not quite human, just leave,
(35:28):
don't investigate, don't be heroes. They've learned to fear us now,
and that's probably for the best for them and for us.
Some things can't be undone, Some guilt can't be absolved.
Some secrets eat you alive, whether you tell them or not.
But now you know, do with it what you will.
(35:49):
I found a track and made a plaster cast back
in nineteen ninety five up near the Oregon border, seventeen
inches long, eight inches wide, clear tow impressions. I had
a didiatrists look at it unofficially. He said whatever made
it walked upright, had a compliant gait, but carried probably
four hundred pounds. Said the bone structure would be fascinating
(36:10):
to study. I've never shown it to anyone else, never
reported it. What would be the point to help prove
they exist? So we can hunt them to extinction, to
satisfy scientific curiosity at the cost of their survival. They've
survived this long by staying hidden. Let them stay that way.
We've taken enough from them already. Earl would have been
(36:33):
ninety this year. I think about what kind of old
man he would have been. Probably would have spoilt his
grandkid's rotten told the same hunting stories over and over.
Would have given me grief about my bad knees, challenged
me to checkers at the diner every morning. Instead. He's
been in the ground for thirty seven years, and his
death started a chain of destruction that took Tommy broke
(36:55):
Roy and left me carrying this weight, all because we
thought we were the only things in those woods that mattered.
We were wrong about so many things, but mostly we
were wrong to pull those triggers. There's one more thing
I've never told anyone. When we were burying them, I
found something clutched in the female's hand, A riverstone, smooth
(37:17):
and round, with marks on it, deliberate marks, not writing exactly,
but patterns, art maybe, or just doodling, something made when
she had quiet moments, something she carried with her. I
kept it. God helped me. I kept it. It sits
on my desk where I can see it every day.
(37:38):
Proof that they were more than animals, Proof that we
killed something that could create, that could find beauty in
simple things. Sometimes I hold it and wonder if she
made it for her baby, a toy, a lesson, a
gift we made sure would never be given. That's the
worst part, not the killing, not the lies, not even
(37:59):
Earl's death. It's knowing they were people in every way
that matters, and we killed them anyway. Wow, what a story.
I struggled with whether to share this one, not just
because it's so fantastical, but because of the raw emotions
throughout the death of those creatures, the tragedy of Earl's death,
(38:20):
and the complete destruction it brought to the lives of
those men who survived. This isn't like other encounter stories.
There's no sense of adventure or excitement here, just guilt, loss,
and lives torn apart by a single night of violence.
What strikes me most about this story is the human
tragedy at its core. Four friends went honey, One died
(38:42):
that night, another drank himself to death within two years,
the third descended into religious mania, and Frank spent thirty
seven years carrying a weight that crushed him slowly day
by day. The toll it took on these men was complete.
Earl's children grew up without a father, Tommy lost his family,
his job, his life, Roy lost his mind searching for
(39:05):
meaning in what they'd done, and Frank lived with nightmares
and guilt that never faded. So many unanswered questions remain.
Was it real or was it the result of over
active imaginations on a dark mountain night group hysteria brought
on by fear and adrenaline. We may never know, but
if it is real, it's a tragic story on every level.
(39:28):
The death of a friend, the killing of creatures that
may have been the last of their kind in those mountains,
an orphaned infant left to survive alone, lives destroyed by
a single night of fear and violence. Is it real
or imagination? At the end of the day, as always,
it's up to you to decide what you believe. If
(39:49):
you have an encounter story that you'd like to share
on the show, I want to hear from you. Whether
it's something you've carried for years, like Frank, or a
recent experience that left you with questions, Glory deserves to
be heard. Email me at Brian at Paranormalworldproductions dot com.
Every encounter adds another piece to the puzzle. Your experience
(40:09):
might be the one that helps someone else make sense
of what they've seen. It might be the story that
changes how we understand these mysteries. Don't let your story
go untold. B
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