October 24, 2025 • 56 mins
Tonight on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, we head deep into the haunted woods of rural Alabama — a place where family, legacy, and terror collide.In the summer of 1995, a struggling family inherited more than just forty acres of untouched woodland.
After losing his job at the paper mill, a man packed up his wife, Sarah, and their twelve-year-old son, Tyler, and moved them into his late grandfather’s abandoned cabin, hoping for a fresh start far from mounting debts and dwindling opportunities. But as they soon discovered, some inheritances come with a terrible price — and some places should have been left empty forever.What began as small disturbances — mysterious rocks hitting the roof in the dead of night — quickly escalated into something beyond comprehension.
The family found themselves under siege by massive, intelligent beings that had claimed those ancient woods long before humans ever set foot there.For nearly three decades, the man who lived through it kept his story buried. But now, after twenty-seven years of silence, he’s ready to tell what really happened during those horrifying weeks — when enormous hands slapped against the cabin walls, when red eyes watched from the darkness outside his son’s window, and when voices that no human throat could form whispered threats through the trees.
This isn’t just another Bigfoot encounter. It’s a story of survival, of territory violated, and of ancient rules broken. Drawing from newspaper reports dating back to the 1950s and scattered local testimonies, we uncover why certain areas in the deep Alabama backwoods remain untouched by development — and why locals still speak in whispers about the old Tillman place. In this chilling episode, you’ll hear his testimony — a warning passed down through time to anyone who might inherit an old property in the woods. Because in those forgotten corners of Alabama’s wilderness, the Old Ones still walk.
They still watch. And they still play their terrible games with anyone foolish enough to enter their domain. Some gifts are curses in disguise. Some monsters are patient enough to let you go — knowing they can always come back for you later.
So settle in and listen close. This is “The Inheritance.”
After hearing it, you’ll never look at the woods the same way again.
After losing his job at the paper mill, a man packed up his wife, Sarah, and their twelve-year-old son, Tyler, and moved them into his late grandfather’s abandoned cabin, hoping for a fresh start far from mounting debts and dwindling opportunities. But as they soon discovered, some inheritances come with a terrible price — and some places should have been left empty forever.What began as small disturbances — mysterious rocks hitting the roof in the dead of night — quickly escalated into something beyond comprehension.
The family found themselves under siege by massive, intelligent beings that had claimed those ancient woods long before humans ever set foot there.For nearly three decades, the man who lived through it kept his story buried. But now, after twenty-seven years of silence, he’s ready to tell what really happened during those horrifying weeks — when enormous hands slapped against the cabin walls, when red eyes watched from the darkness outside his son’s window, and when voices that no human throat could form whispered threats through the trees.
This isn’t just another Bigfoot encounter. It’s a story of survival, of territory violated, and of ancient rules broken. Drawing from newspaper reports dating back to the 1950s and scattered local testimonies, we uncover why certain areas in the deep Alabama backwoods remain untouched by development — and why locals still speak in whispers about the old Tillman place. In this chilling episode, you’ll hear his testimony — a warning passed down through time to anyone who might inherit an old property in the woods. Because in those forgotten corners of Alabama’s wilderness, the Old Ones still walk.
They still watch. And they still play their terrible games with anyone foolish enough to enter their domain. Some gifts are curses in disguise. Some monsters are patient enough to let you go — knowing they can always come back for you later.
So settle in and listen close. This is “The Inheritance.”
After hearing it, you’ll never look at the woods the same way again.
Mark as Played
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.
They say, some inheritances come with strings attached. Mine came
(01:06):
with something else entirely. I've spent twenty seven years trying
to forget what happened at that cabin in the summer
of nineteen ninety five. Twenty seven years of therapy sessions
where I dance around the truth of waking up at
three in the morning with my sheets soaked through with sweat,
of never being able to look at a dark tree
line without feeling my chest tighten. My therapist thinks I
(01:28):
suffered some kind of trauma related to my grandfather's death.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
She's half right.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
There was trauma, but it had nothing to do with
losing Grandpa Roy. The truth is something I've never told anyone.
Not the sheriff who found us on Highway two seventy
eight that August morning, our truck's engine blown and our
face as white as fresh cotton. Not my ex wife
who left me because I refused to take our kids camping.
Not even my son Tyler, who's thirty nine now and
(01:56):
still asks why we left Alabama and never went back.
Sixty eight years old, and my doctor says, my heart's
not what it used to be. If I don't tell
someone what really happened at that cabin in Cleeburn County,
the truth dies with me. Maybe that would be for
the best. Maybe some truths are meant to be buried.
But every time I close my eyes, I can still
(02:17):
smell that thick animal stench that used to seep through
the cabin walls. I can still hear those massive hands
slapping against the wooden siding, and the dead of night,
I can still see those eyes reflecting red in the darkness,
watching us through Tyler's bedroom window. So I'm going to
tell you everything exactly as it happened. Not because I
(02:37):
expect you to believe me, held there are days when
I barely believe it myself, but because maybe, just maybe
it might save someone else from making the same mistake
we did. Maybe someone else will inherit a piece of
property in the deep woods of Alabama, and they'll remember
this story, and they'll have the good sense.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
To stay away.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
We should have known something was wrong from the beginning.
The signs were all there, But grief has a way
of blinding you to danger, and desperation can make even
the most obviously cursed gift seem like a blessing. The
call came on a Tuesday morning in May of nineteen
ninety five. I was working at the paper mill in Montgomery,
standing near the digester tanks when my supervisor tapped me
(03:20):
on the shoulder and pointed toward the office. The plant
manager was holding the phone, his face arranged in that
particular expression people where when they're about to deliver bad news.
Grandpa Roy had died in his sleep, eighty three years old.
Heart gave out peaceful as could be. The lawyer said
he'd left me something in his will, and could I
(03:40):
come to Heflin for the reading. I hadn't seen Grandpa
Roy in probably five years. He'd become something of a
recluse after Grandma died in eighty seven. Hold up in
that little house in town, only coming out for groceries
in church. We'd exchange Christmas cards, maybe a phone call
on birthdays, but that was about it. The distance wasn't personal.
(04:02):
That's just how the Brennan men were, spread out across Alabama,
like seeds scattered by an indifferent hand. Sarah took it
harder than I did. She'd always liked the old man,
said he had character. Tyler barely remembered him at all,
which somehow made it worse. A twelve year old boy
shouldn't have so few memories of his grandfather. When I
(04:23):
told them about the will, Sarah insisted we all go together.
Make it a family trip. She said, show Tyler where
his daddy grew up. The drive from Montgomery to Heflin
took three hours, winding through the kind of small towns
that seemed to exist solely to slow you down on
your way to somewhere else. Tyler had his face pressed
against the back window most of the way, watching the
(04:46):
hills roll by. Sarah kept touching my hand on the
gear shift, that gentle way she had of showing support
without saying anything. The lawyer's office was above the hardware
store on Main Street, up a narrow staircase that with
every step. Mister Pemberton was older than Moses and moved
about as fast, shuffling papers with liver spotted hands, while
(05:07):
we sat in chairs that probably came with the building.
The will was simple enough, a few thousand dollars in savings,
some tools his truck, and then Pemberton adjusted his glasses
and read the part that changed everything. The cabin forty
acres of woodland, a place I'd never even known existed.
Pemberton pulled out a Manila envelope thick with documents and
(05:30):
old photographs. The picture showed a log cabin that looked
straight out of a frontier museum, tucked into a hillside
and surrounded by massive pines. There was Grandpa Roy in
one photo, maybe thirty years younger, standing on the porch
with a rifle, looking proud as could be. The deed
went back to nineteen twenty four. Roy's father, my great grandfather,
(05:53):
had built the place with his own hands. It had
been in the family ever since, though Pemberton said Roy
hadn't been out there in nearly a decade. Too remote,
too hard to maintain. The old man had kept paying
the taxes on it, though, year after year, like he
couldn't quite let it go. Sarah grabbed my hand when
Pemberton showed us the location on a county map, forty
(06:15):
acres of pristine woodland. He called it only accessible by
an old logging road, no power lines, no phone service,
but there was a well and a septic system installed
in the seventies. The nearest neighbor was three miles away.
To understand why this mattered so much, you have to
understand where we were in our lives. The paper mill
(06:36):
had been laying people off for two years.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Every Friday.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
We'd hold our breath until the shift ended, grateful to
have survived another week. We were behind on the mortgage,
behind on the truck payments, behind on everything except the
urgent business of keeping our heads above water.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Tyler needed braces. The roof leaked.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
The transmission in Sarah's car was making sounds that promised
expensive repairs. And here was forty acres of land, free
and clear. Here was a place to start over. We
drove out to look at it that same afternoon. The
logging road was exactly as advertised, a rough cut through
the forest that had our truck's suspension groaning. It went
(07:17):
on for two miles, winding through stands of pine and
oaks so thick you couldn't see more than twenty feet into.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
The woods on either side.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
The trees seemed to press in on us, their branches
scraping the truck's roof like fingers testing for a way in.
But then the road opened into a clearing, and there
it was. The cabin sat on a rise, looking down
into a hollow where a creek ran, clear and cold.
It was bigger than the photos suggested, maybe twelve hundred
square feet, with a stone chimney and a covered porch
(07:48):
that wrapped around two sides. The logs had weathered to
a silver gray, and the metal roof was rusty but intact.
Behind it, the forest rose up the hillside, thick and
dark even in the after afternoon sun.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Tyler was out of.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
The truck before I'd fully stopped running toward the creek
with the kind of pure joy only a twelve year
old can muster. Sarah stood beside me, her arm around
my waist, looking at that cabin like it was a mansion.
We spent two hours exploring. The inside was rough but livable,
two bedrooms, a main room with a stone fireplace, a
(08:23):
kitchen with an ancient wood stove, and a bathroom that
miraculously still worked when we primed the pump. The furniture
was covered in dust and mouse droppings, but it was
solid stuff, hand built pieces that had lasted seventy years
and might last seventy more. Tyler found a shed full
of old tools, each one wrapped in oiled cloth. Sarah
(08:45):
discovered a root cellar stocked with empty canning jars. I
stood on that porch, looking out at land that belonged
to me, to us, and felt something I hadn't.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Felt in years. Hope.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
We should have wondered why Roy had stopped coming. We
should have asked why a perfectly good cabin had sat
empty for a decade. We should have noticed that there
were no bird sounds in those woods, no squirrels in
the trees, no deer tracks by the creek, but we didn't.
We saw salvation where we should have seen warning. We
moved in three weeks later. It took everything we had.
(09:20):
I cashed out my retirement from the mill, such as
it was. We sold everything that wouldn't fit in the
truck or the U haul trailer. Sarah's mother called us crazy,
said we were dragging that poor boy into the wilderness
like some kind of mountain hermits. My brother down in
Mobile said I'd lost my mind giving up a steady
job to play pioneer. But every night Sarah and I
(09:42):
would sit at our kitchen table in that rental house
in Montgomery, going over the numbers. No rent, no mortgage,
no utility bills except propane for the stove and generator
fuel for the few appliances we absolutely needed. We could
make it work. We had to make it work. The
move itself was a nightmare. The logging road, which had
(10:03):
seemed rough but passable in Pemberton Sedan, became a genuine
obstacle course with a loaded U haul trailer. Twice we
had to unhook it and clear fallen branches. Once the
truck got high centered on a ridge of exposed rock,
and it took two hours with the jack and boards
to get free, But finally, as the sun was starting
to set on that first Saturday in June, we pulled
(10:25):
into the clearing home. We worked until well past dark,
hauling boxes by flashlight, Tyler helping despite clearly being dead
on his feet. Sarah had thought ahead and packed sleeping
bags and pillows in the truck cab, so at least
we had somewhere to sleep that first night, I remember
lying there on the floor of the main room, Sarah
(10:46):
on one side and Tyler on the other, listening to
the absolute silence. No traffic, no neighbors, no hum of
electrical wires, just the soft whisper of wind in the
pines and the distant gurgle of the creek. Tyler fell
asleep almost instantly, exhausted from the move. Sarah took longer,
(11:06):
but eventually her breathing deepened and slowed. But I stayed awake,
staring at the ceiling beams in the darkness, wondering if
I'd just made the best or worst decision of my life.
Sometime around midnight, I heard the first rock hit the roof.
It wasn't loud, just a solid thunk that could have
been a pine cone or a branch. I barely noticed it,
(11:27):
but about ten minutes later there was another, then another,
irregular intervals, but deliberate, somehow, like someone was standing out
there in the darkness, tossing stones onto our metal roof.
I got up carefully, not wanting to wake Sarah and Tyler,
and crept to the window. The moon was nearly full,
casting everything in silver light and black shadows. I could
(11:50):
see the truck, the trailer, the edge of the forest.
Nothing moved.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
The rock stopped after a.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Few more minutes, and I convinced myself it had been
branches falling from the trees. Old forest, old trees, dead
branches falling natural as could be. I should have known better.
Nothing about those woods was natural. The next morning, Tyler
was up with the sun, eager to explore. Sarah started
(12:17):
the monumental task of unpacking and organizing while I worked
on getting the generator running. It was an old diesel unit,
probably from the sixties, but it fired up after I
changed the fuel filter and bled the lines. We had power,
limited but sufficient. Tyler spent the morning down by the creek,
building a dam with river rocks. I could see him
(12:38):
from the kitchen window, knee deep in that cold water,
happy as I'd ever seen him. Sarah hummed while she
worked arranging our few pieces of furniture, hanging pictures on.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
The log walls.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
For a few hours, it felt like we'd made the
right choice. The rock started again that second night. This
time I was ready for them. When the first one hit,
around eleven o'clock. I grabbed the flashlight and headed for
the door. Sarah stirred but didn't wake Tyler was dead
to the world in his small bedroom. I stood on
the porch, flashlight beams sweeping the tree line. The rocks
(13:13):
were coming more frequently now, not just hitting the roof,
but the walls. Too small ones, maybe the size of
golf balls, but thrown with enough force to make a
solid impact. Then I saw eyes shine, just for a second,
two points of red light at the edge of the forest,
maybe seven feet off the ground. When I swung the
(13:33):
flashlight toward them, they vanished. A deer, I told myself,
had to be a deer, But deer don't throw rocks.
I stayed out there for another hour, but nothing else happened.
The rocks stopped as suddenly as they'd started. The forest
was silent. Even the creek seemed to have quieted its voice.
(13:53):
When I finally went back inside, I found Tyler standing
in the hallway, pale and wide eyed in his Superman pajamas.
He said he'd heard something at his window, scratching like branches,
but rhythmic, deliberate. I told him it was just the trees,
that we were surrounded by forest and would have to
get used to the sounds. He nodded, but I could
(14:15):
see he didn't quite believe me. I didn't believe me either.
By the end of our first week, the pattern was established.
During the day, everything was perfect. We worked on the cabin,
Tyler played in the creek. Sarah started a vegetable garden
in a sunny spot near the shed. The sun made
everything feel safe and normal and possible. But at night,
(14:36):
the woods came alive with something that had no name.
The rocks were every night now, starting around eleven and
continuing for an hour or more, but it was escalating.
By the fourth night, it wasn't just pebbles, but stones
the size of baseballs, hurled with impossible force. One shattered
a window in the kitchen. I boarded it up and
(14:57):
told Sarah a branch had fallen. Then came the slaping.
Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
after these messages. The first time it happened, I shot
straight up in bed, heart hammering. The sound was massive,
like someone had hit the side of the cabin with
a telephone pole. The whole structure shook. Sarah grabbed my arm,
(15:19):
her nails digging in deep enough to draw blood. It
came again, a tremendous slap against the wall, this time
on the opposite side of the cabin, then the back wall,
then right above our heads on the roof, an impact
so powerful that dust filtered down from the rafters. Tyler
appeared in our doorway, crying. He was twelve years old,
(15:42):
trying so hard to be grown up, but this had
broken through his defenses. Sarah pulled him into bed with us,
and we lay there, the three of us, as something
circled our cabin, striking the walls with what could only
be enormous hands. It lasted for twenty minutes, then silence.
The next morning I found handprints in the mud outside.
(16:05):
They were human in shape, but wrong in size. The
palm was as wide as a dinner plate. The fingers
were proportionally too long, almost delicate despite their size, and
they were everywhere, dozens of them, pressed into the dirt
around the cabin's foundation. I showed Sarah. Her face went white,
and she asked the question I'd been avoiding. What could
(16:27):
make prints like that? I didn't have an answer, or
rather I had an answer, but it was impossible. It
was the kind of answer that belonged in supermarket tabloids
and grainy documentaries on cable TV, not in real life, not.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
In our life.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
That afternoon, I drove into town alone. Heflin wasn't much,
but it had a library, and the library had old
newspapers on microfilm. I told Sarah I was getting supplies.
I think she knew I was lying, but she didn't
call me on it. The librarian was a widow named
missus Henley, who remembered my grandfather. She set me up
at the microfilm reader and showed me how to work it,
(17:06):
then left me alone with sixty years of the Cleborne
County News. It didn't take long to find what I
was looking for. August nineteen fifty three, local farmer reports
livestock missing. Giant footprints found near Chokaloco Creek. October nineteen
sixty one. Hunters claim encounter with wild man and National
Forest sheriff investigates finds no evidence. July nineteen sixty eight,
(17:32):
family abandons homestead after reported harassment by unknown persons. Strange
prints photographed it scene, and then from April nineteen seventy one,
a longer article, a family named the Washburns had lived
about five miles from where our cabin sat. They'd reported
weeks of harassment, rocks thrown at their house, livestock killed,
(17:55):
their children, terrorized by something that watched them from the forest.
The father, Dale Washburn, had finally had enough. He sat
up one night with a rifle, determined to kill whatever
was tormenting his family. The sheriff found him the next morning,
wandering on Highway nine, catatonic. His hair, the article said,
had turned completely white. The family moved to Tennessee the
(18:18):
next week. Dale Washburn never spoke again. He died in
a state mental hospital three years later. The last paragraph
was what made my blood run cold. The sheriff, a
man named Buford Hayes, was quoted as saying, sometimes the
old forest don't want neighbors. Smart folks learned to listen
when they're not welcome. I was rolling through more articles
(18:40):
when missus Henley appeared at my shoulder. Your granddaddy used
to come in here, she said, same research, same articles.
This was maybe fifteen years ago. He'd bought that cabin
from the Tillman estate, you know, thought he could make
a hunting lodge out of it. I asked her what happened.
She looked at me for a long moment, and I
could see her deciding whether to tell me the truth
(19:02):
or the polite version. He lasted one summer, she finally said,
never would talk about why he left. But I remember
him returning those microfilms. His hands were shaking so bad
he could barely hold them. You fixing to stay out there,
I told her we were. She nodded slowly, like she'd
expected that answer. Your granddaddy tried to burn that cabin down,
(19:24):
she said, back in eighty five. Sheriff stopped him, said
it would start a forest fire.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
But Roy tried.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Said some things ought not to exist, said some places
ought to be left alone. I thanked her and left
my mind spinning. When I got back to the cabin,
Sarah had dinner ready and Tyler was showing off an
arrowhead he'd found by the creek. We ate and laughed
and pretended everything was normal. But after Tyler went to bed,
I told Sarah what I'd learned. She listened without interrupting,
(19:55):
then asked what.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
I wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
We had nowhere else to go, money to start over,
no jobs to return to. We were trapped by poverty
as surely as if we'd been chained to that cabin.
We'll be careful, I said, We'll respect the forest. Maybe
if we don't bother it, it won't bother us. Sarah nodded,
but I could see the fear in her eyes. We
(20:18):
both knew I was lying. Two weeks into our stay,
Tyler saw it at his window. I woke to the
sound of his scream, high and terrified, cutting through the night.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Like a blade.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Sarah and I burst into his room to find him
pressed against the far wall, pointing at the window with
a trembling hand. There's nothing there, I said, But even
as the words left my mouth, I could smell it.
A thick animal stench, like a wet dog crossed with
rotting vegetation. It was seeping through the walls, so strong
(20:50):
it made my eyes water. Tyler was sobbing, trying to
explain a face, he said, massive covered in hair, with
eyes that were almost human, reflecting red in the moonlight.
It had been watching him sleep, just standing there, face
pressed against the glass, watching. I grabbed the flashlight and
(21:12):
the shotgun i'd started keeping by the bed. Outside. The
smell was even stronger. There were tracks in the dirt
beneath Tyler's window, the same massive human like prince, but
deeper this time. Whatever had made them was heavy, heavier
than any man could be. And there on the window glass,
lit by my flashlight beam, were smudges, hand prints, and
(21:37):
the oily impression of a face pressed against the pane,
like a child at a candy store window. We moved
Tyler's bed into our room.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
That night.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
None of us slept. The next day, I drove back
to town and bought plywood, nails, and a rifle, a
thirty six, the most powerful thing I could afford. The
man at the sporting goods store, a good old boy
named Rick, asked if I was planning to hunt elk
something like that.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
I told him.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
He gave me a long look, then threw in an
extra box of ammunition.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
For free.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
You're Roy Brennan's grandson, aren't you living out at the
old Tillman Place?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I nodded.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Rick leaned in close, dropping his voice, even though we
were alone in the store. My uncle lived out that
way in the fifties. Said there were things in those
woods that ain't got no business existing. Said, they mostly
leave folks alone, if folks leave them alone, but sometimes
they take a dislike to someone.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
And when that happens.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
He trailed off, shaking his head. You got family, wife
and kids, I nodded again. Get them out of there,
he said, whatever it costs, whatever you have to do,
get them out. Some places ain't meant for people. But
I couldn't. We had nowhere to go, no money for rent,
no job prospects, no family willing to take us in.
(22:59):
We were stuck. That night, I boarded up Tyler's window
from the inside. It didn't matter. The thing came anyway.
This time, it didn't just watch. It knocked three deliberate
raps on the wall beside Tyler's window, like a visitor
announcing their presence. When no one answered, it knocked again harder.
(23:21):
The whole wall shook, Then it spoke. The sound was
like nothing I'd ever heard, deep enough to vibrate in
your chest, but with an almost plaintive quality. It wasn't English,
wasn't any language I recognized, but somehow the meaning was clear.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Let me in.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Tyler was screaming, Sarah was praying, clutching her rosary so
tight the bead's left marks on her palms. And I
sat there with that rifle across my lap, knowing with
absolute certainty that if I opened that door, if I
confronted whatever was out there, I would end up like
Dale Washburn, catatonic, white haired, lost. The knocking continued for
(24:01):
an hour, sometimes at the boarded window, sometimes at the door,
sometimes on the roof directly above us. Each knock was massive,
powerful enough to shake dust from the rafters, and between
the knocks that horrible voice speaking in syllables that human
throats were never meant to form. Then, as suddenly as
(24:21):
it had started, it stopped. The silence was somehow worse
than the noise. We stayed huddled together until dawn, when
the first rays of sunlight made the world seem possible again.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
But we all knew the truth.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
We were being hunted, studied, evaluated, and whatever was out
there in the woods had decided we didn't belong. By
the third week we were prisoners. None of us would
go outside after dark. I'd reinforced all the windows with plywood,
turning our cabin into a fortress or a tomb, depending
on how you looked at it. During the day, we
(24:56):
went about our business, but there was a brittle quality
to our normal. We were actors playing the parts of
a happy family, and we all knew it. Tyler had
stopped playing by the creek. He wouldn't go more than
twenty feet from the cabin, and even then he was
constantly looking over his shoulder. Sarah had abandoned her garden.
The vegetables were already being choked by weeds, but she
(25:18):
wouldn't go out there alone, and I couldn't blame her.
We were all losing weight. Sleep was nearly impossible. The
things in the woods came every night, now, sometimes just one,
sometimes what sounded like three or four. They would circle
the cabin, knocking on the walls, speaking in their terrible language,
testing the doors and windows for weakness, and they were
(25:40):
getting bolder. One night I woke to the sound of
splintering wood. One of them had torn a board off
Tyler's window and was reaching inside. The arm was covered
in dark, coarse hair, impossibly long, with fingers that seemed
to go on forever. It was feeling around, searching, and
I realized with horror that it was trying to unlock
(26:01):
the window from the inside. I grabbed the rifle and
fired through the wall. The sound was deafening in the
small space. Sarah screamed. Tyler was sobbing, but the arm
withdrew and I heard something crash through the underbrush outside,
moving faster than anything that size should be able to move.
There was blood on the windowsill, dark almost black, with
(26:24):
an oily consistency. It smelled like copper and rotting meat.
I'd heard it. That should have made me feel better.
It didn't. The next night, they didn't come to the cabin. Instead,
they destroyed everything outside it. The truck's windows were smashed,
the tires slashed, the hood crushed like something massive had
(26:45):
sat on it. The shed was torn apart, tools scattered
and broken. Sarah's garden was obliterated. The plants not just
pulled up, but shredded, scattered like confetti, and their footprints
were everywhere, hundreds of them in the dirt in the
mud by the creek, pressed into the middle of our
ruined truck, a message clear as day. You hurt us,
(27:08):
now we hurt you. That's when Sarah broke. I found
her in the bedroom, packing what little we had of
value into a suitcase. Tears were streaming down her face,
but her movements were determined, methodical. We're leaving, she said.
I don't care if we have to walk, I don't
care if we have to live in a homeless shelter.
We're leaving. I tried to explain that the truck was destroyed,
(27:32):
that we were twenty miles from town, that we had
no way to transport our things. She just kept packing.
Then Tyler spoke from the doorway. They don't want us
to leave, he said. We both turned to look at him.
He was pale, hollow eyed, looking far older than his
twelve years. I've been watching them, he continued, from my
(27:53):
window before you boarded it up. They're not animals, they're
not stupid. They understand things. They know we're trapped here.
I asked him what he meant. Tyler walked to the
living room window, the one that still had glass, and
pointed to the tree line they're out there right now,
he said, watching, waiting. If we try to leave on foot,
(28:16):
they'll follow us. They'll wait until we're far from the cabin,
far from shelter. And then he didn't finish the sentence.
He didn't need to. I looked out the window, scanning
the forest. At first I saw nothing. Then gradually my
eyes began to pick out the shapes. They were standing
perfectly still among the trees, their dark hair blending with
(28:38):
the shadows. One, two, five, eight of them that I
could see, maybe more. They weren't hiding. They wanted us
to know they were there. That's when I understood we
weren't just unwelcome. We were entertainment, toys to be played with, terrorized, broken,
They were enjoying this. The full siege began on our
(28:59):
twenty third night in the cabin. It started differently this time,
no rocks, no knocking, just voices. They surrounded the cabin,
all of them, and began to speak in unison, that terrible,
deep sound, rising and falling in what might have been
a chant, or a song or a prayer. The walls
vibrated with it, the windows rattled in their frames. Tyler
(29:23):
was curled in a ball on our bed, hands.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Over his ears.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Sarah was sitting in the corner holding her rosary lips,
moving in silent prayer, and I stood at the window
with the rifle watching them. They weren't hiding anymore. They
stood in a rough circle around the cabin, maybe fifteen
of them, swaying slightly as they voiced their awful chorus.
In the moonlight, I could see them clearly for the
(29:48):
first time. They were massive, seven or eight feet tall,
covered in dark hair that seemed to absorb light. Their
bodies were humanoid, but different, arms way longer than they
should be, shoulders impossibly broad. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Their faces
(30:09):
were the worst part, neither human nor ape, but something
caught between, with deep set eyes that glowed with an
intelligence that was unmistakably malevolent. The chanting went on for hours.
Sometimes it would rise to a crescendo that made.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
My teeth ache.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Sometimes it would drop to a whisper that was somehow worse.
And underneath it all was a rhythm, a pulsing beat
that seemed to match my heart beat, seemed to be
pulling at something deep in my chest. Then, just before dawn,
they stopped.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
One of them, the.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Largest, stepped forward. It stood directly in front of the
main door, not moving, just standing there waiting. I knew
what it wanted. It wanted me to come out to
confront it, to end this one way or another. I
almost did it. My hand was on the doorknob, the
rifle in my other hand, when Sarah grabbed my arm.
(31:03):
Don't she whispered, please, That's what happened to the others,
the ones in the newspapers. They went outside.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
She was right.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
I backed away from the door, and the thing outside
made a sound that might have been laughter, deep rumbling, utterly,
without humor. For a long moment, it just stood there, massive, silent,
almost human in its stillness, and somehow, without a sound,
something passed between us. It didn't speak, not in any
(31:33):
language we know, but in that instant I understood a thought,
A warning pressed into my mind so clearly I couldn't
deny it, even though I can't explain how I knew
three days that's what it meant, three days before they
would come in. Then it turned and walked back into
the forest, its shaped, dissolving into the mist. The others followed,
(31:56):
melting into the shadows like smoke.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Three days.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
The first day we tried to prepare, I used what
tools had survived to reinforce the doors, nailing boards across them,
pushing furniture against them. It was pathetic, really, If those
things wanted in, truly wanted in, no amount of plywood
would stop them. Sarah spent the day praying and writing.
She filled a notebook with letters to her family, to
(32:22):
her mother, to siblings and cousins, goodbye letters. She made
me promise that if something happened to her, I would
make sure they got the letters. I promised, knowing it
was a lie. If something happened to her, it would
happen to all of us. Tyler surprised me. He spent
the day studying. He'd found some of Grandpa Roy's old
(32:43):
journals in a trunk in the bedroom closet. They were
from his time at the cabin before he'd fled. Tyler
read them with an intensity I'd never seen from him before,
taking notes, cross referencing entries Dad. He said that evening,
I think I know what they are. I sat beside him,
looking at the journals. Roy's handwriting was cramped, urgent, filling
(33:06):
page after page with observations, theories, desperate attempts to understand.
He called them the old ones, Tyler said, pointing to
an entry, said the Cherokee had stories about them from
before white people came. They were here first. The forest
belongs to them. I read the passage. Tyler indicated. Roy
(33:27):
had written about finding cave paintings in a hollow deeper
in the woods, ancient things showing tall hair covered figures
standing among trees, with smaller human figures bowing before them.
They're not animals, Tyler continued, They're people, different people, but people,
and we're in their territory. So we leave, I said,
(33:48):
as soon as we can, we leave. Tyler shook his head.
That's just it. Grandpa tried to leave. Look, he showed
me an entry from July nineteen eighty. Roy had attempted
to hike out to reach the road and escape, but
they had followed him, herded him back, played with him
like cats with a mouse. He'd barely made it back
(34:10):
to the cabin alive. They don't let people leave, Tyler said,
not once they've decided you don't belong. The only reason
Grandpa got out was because the sheriff came looking for him.
They don't like groups, they don't like witnesses. I felt
the weight of that settle on my shoulders. We were alone.
No one was coming for us, No one even knew
(34:31):
we were in trouble. The second day, we tried to
make weapons. I had the rifle and a box and
a half of ammunition. Sarah found a hatchet in what
was left of the shed. Tyler fashioned spears from broken
tool handles, sharpening the ends with a kitchen knife. It
was almost comically inadequate, but it was something. It gave
(34:51):
us the illusion of being able to fight back. That night,
they came to every window, pressing their faces against the boards,
breathing so heavily we could hear it.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Inside.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
The smell was overwhelming, that wet dog and rot stench
that made us gag. They didn't speak, didn't knock, just breathed,
letting us know they were there, letting us know they
were coming. The third day dawned gray and drizzly. The
forest was shrouded and missed visibility down to maybe thirty feet.
(35:22):
We couldn't see them, but we knew they were there, waiting, watching.
I made a decision. I told Sarah and Tyler to
barricade themselves in the bedroom, push everything against the door,
and no matter what they heard, don't come out. Sarah argued,
But I could see the relief in her eyes. She
didn't want to face what was coming. Neither did I,
(35:44):
but someone had to. As the sun set on that
third day, I took position in the main room, rifle
loaded extra ammunition within reach, hatchet on the table beside me.
I'd pushed the couch against the front door and the
kitchen table against the back. The windows were all boarded.
There was only one way this could end, but I
(36:04):
was going to make them work for it. Full dark came,
and with it silence, no insects, no wind, no creak, babble,
just my breathing and the pounding of my heart. Then
at exactly midnight they announced themselves. The front door exploded inward,
not opened, not broken, exploded. The couch I'd pushed against
(36:27):
it flew across the room, slamming into the far wall.
Splinters of wood filled the air like shrapnel, and through
the destroyed doorway came something out of a nightmare. It
had to duck to get through, folding its massive frame
almost in half. Once inside, it stood to its full height,
and its head nearly touched the eight foot ceiling. Its
(36:49):
eyes reflected the coalman lantern light, glowing like hot coals.
The smell that came with it was overwhelming, a physical
presence that made me gag. I shot its center mass.
The rifle kicked against my shoulder, the sound deafening in
the enclosed space. The creature staggered back a step, looked
down at the spreading dark stain on its chest, then
(37:10):
looked back at me, and it smiled a very human
expression on that inhuman face. Then it came for me.
I got off two more shots before it reached me.
One hit its shoulder, spinning it slightly. The other went wild,
punching a hole in the wall. Then its hand, impossibly
large and impossibly strong, wrapped around the rifle barrel and
(37:33):
yanked it from my grasp, bending it like a pretzel
and tossing it aside. I grabbed the hatchet and swung
with everything I had. The blade bit into its arm,
drawing more of that black blood. It howled a sound
that made my ears ring, and back handed me across
the room. I hit the wall hard enough to punch
a hole in the dry wall. Stars exploded across my vision.
(37:56):
When I could focus again, the creature was standing over me,
studying me with those terrible eyes. Up close, I could
see they weren't animal eyes at all. There was intelligence there, calculation,
and something that might have been amusement. It reached down
with one massive hand, fingers wrapping around my throat, and
lifted me off the ground like I weighed nothing. My
(38:19):
feet dangled kicking uselessly. Black spots began to dance at
the edges of my vision. Then Tyler screamed, not a
scream of fear, but a war cry. He came charging
out of the bedroom with one of his makeshift spears,
all twelve years and ninety pounds of him, and drove
it into the creature's side. The thing dropped me and
(38:40):
spun toward Tyler, moving faster than something that large should
be able to move. But Tyler was already backing away,
and Sarah was beside him with the only ammunition we
had left, the pot of boiling water she'd been heating
on the propane stove. She threw it full in the
creature's face. The howl it made shook dust from the
rafters It clawed at its face, stumbling backward, and in
(39:03):
that moment of distraction, I found the hatchet and buried
it in the back.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Of its knee.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
The creature went down, crashing to the floor with enough
force to crack the boards. It tried to rise, but
the damaged knee wouldn't support its weight. It looked at us,
all three of us, and for the first time, I
saw something like respect in its eyes. Then, without sound,
without speech, the message hit me like a pulse of
(39:29):
cold air through my chest. Others coming, and I understood
this wasn't over, It was only beginning, As if on cue,
I heard them outside, multiple footsteps on the porch surrounding
the cabin. We'd fought off one, but there were so
many more. I looked at Sarah and Tyler, my wife,
(39:49):
my son. We were going to die here in this cabin,
twenty miles from nowhere. But at least we die together.
At least we'd die fighting. That's when we heard the engines.
Headlights cut through the darkness outside, multiple vehicles, engines roaring
as they came up the logging road. Doors slammed, voices, shouted,
(40:11):
human voices. The creature on our floor made a sound
of frustration and began dragging itself toward the door, leaving
a trail of black blood outside. I could hear the
others retreating, crashing through the underbrush, their heavy footfalls fading
into the distance. A spotlight hit the cabin, so bright
it hurt to look at. Then a voice amplified by
(40:33):
a megaphone. This is Sheriff Hayes. Anyone in the cabin,
come out with your hands visible. I helped Sarah and
Tyler over the wreckage of our front door. The front
yard was full of vehicles, Sheriff's department SUVs, their lights
painting the clearing and reds and blues. There were at
least six deputies, all armed with rifles, all scanning the
(40:55):
tree line nervously. Sheriff Hayes was a small, compact man
with gray hair and eyes that had seen too much.
He took one look at us, covered in blood some hours, someknot,
shaking with adrenaline and fear, and made a quick decision.
Get them in the vehicles, he barked, Now we're leaving.
One of the deputies started to ask about the scene,
(41:17):
about evidence, but Hayes cut him off. There is no scene.
There is no evidence we were never here. Move They
bundled us into separate vehicles. I ended up in Hayes's
suv in the back behind the cage. As we started
down the logging road, I looked back and saw the
cabin one last time, lit by the headlights of the
(41:39):
vehicles behind us. Something massive stood in the doorway, watching
us leave. Even from that distance, I could feel its
eyes on me. Then the road curved and it was gone.
Hayes drove in silence for a few minutes, navigating the
rough road with practiced ease. Finally he spoke your neighbor, Missus.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Watson, and called us.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Said she hadn't seen any lights from your place in
three days.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Got worried.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
We get calls like that sometimes about the old places
in these woods. Usually it's nothing. Sometimes he trailed off,
shaking his head. My grandfather was sheriff back in the seventies.
He continued, he had a rule about these woods. If
someone goes missing out here, you've got three days to
find them. After that, you're not finding them alive. Don't
(42:28):
know how he knew that, but he was never wrong.
I asked him what those things were. He was quiet
for a long moment, then glanced at me in the
rear view mirror. Officially, nothing black bears. Maybe bunch of
city folks getting spooked by the woods. That's what the
report will say. Unofficially, he shrugged. My grandmother was Cherokee.
(42:51):
She had stories about the tall people who lived in
the deep woods before humans came. Said they were here, first,
said they'd be here last, had wise men knew to
leave certain places alone. But the cabin, I said, my
grandfather's cabin. Hayes nodded, the Tillman place. Yeah, that's one
of the bad ones, has been as long as anyone
(43:13):
can remember. Your grandfather found that out the hard way.
Surprised he didn't burn it down, he tried, I said.
Hayes actually smiled at that. Good for him, Maybe I'll
have better luck. Two days later, the cabin did burn
down electrical fire, according to the report, faulty wiring in
an old generator. The Forest Service decided not to investigate
(43:37):
too thoroughly. Lightning strikes, they said, happens all the time
in these old woods. We stayed with Sarah's mother in
Birmingham for three months while I looked for work. I
found a job at a steel mill, hard work, but honest.
We rented a small apartment in the suburbs, as far
from any forest as we could get. Tyler had nightmares
(43:58):
for years. Sarah slept with the lights on. I couldn't
stand to have my back to a window. We never
talked about it, not to each other, not to anyone.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
What was there to say? Who would believe us?
Speaker 1 (44:11):
We'd survived something impossible, something that couldn't exist in the
rational world. So we pretended it hadn't happened.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
But it had.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Happened, and it changed us. Tyler grew up quiet, studious.
He became a software engineer, builds programs for banks and
insurance companies. Lives in Manhattan now in a high rise
apartment where you can't even see a tree from his window.
He's never been camping, never been hiking, never set foot
in a forest. Since that summer, he says, he's just
(44:40):
not outdoorsy. We both know better. Sarah found religion, not
the casual Sunday morning kind, but deep, desperate faith. She
goes to Mass every day, sometimes twice. She wears a
silver cross that she never takes off, even in the shower.
She prays for protection, for forgiveness, for things she can't
(45:00):
name out loud. The priest thinks she's devoted. I know
she's terrified. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
be back after these messages. We divorced eight years ago,
not because we didn't love each other, but because we
couldn't look at each other without remembering. Every time I
saw her face, I saw it twisted in terror as
(45:22):
that thing came through our door. Every time she looked
at me, she saw the man who'd almost gotten her
and her son killed for the sake of forty acres
of cursed land. She remarried a nice man named Frank,
who sells insurance and doesn't understand why she won't go
on their company camping retreats. They live in Phoenix, now
about as far from the Alabama woods as you can
(45:43):
get and still be in America. And me, I never remarried.
I work, I come home, I watch TV with all
the lights on. I live in a second floor apartment
with good locks and a clear view of the parking lot.
I keep a loaded shotgun in the closet, though I
know it won't help if they ever come for me,
because that's the thing I haven't told you the thing
(46:04):
I've never told anyone.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
They let us go.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
That creature I injured, the one that could have killed
me with one hand.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
It let me go.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
When Tyler stabbed it, it could have torn him apart,
it didn't. When Sarah threw that water, it could have
charged through the pain and destroyed her.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
It didn't.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
They were toying with us, the whole thing, the siege,
the terror, the attack. It was all a game to them.
And when we'd provided enough entertainment, when we'd proven ourselves
worthy opponents, or at least amusing ones, they let us leave.
But I see them sometimes, not in the flesh, not anymore,
(46:44):
but in dreams, in shadows, in the corner of my eye,
when I'm walking past a park at dusk, I know
they're watching, not hunting, not threatening, just watching, checking in
on their favorite toy. Because that's what haunts me most,
not that they exist, not that they terrorized us, but
that we survived because they chose to let us survive.
(47:07):
We didn't escape, we were released. And sometimes on quiet nights,
when I can't sleep, I wonder if they're done with us,
or if someday when they're bored, when the deep woods
get too quiet, They'll come to collect what they consider theirs.
I live in Orlando now, in a studio apartment near
the airport. The constant sound of planes taking off and
(47:29):
landing helps me sleep. It drowns out the other sounds,
the ones that might or might not be my imagination,
the scratching at windows, the heavy footfalls on the stairs,
the breathing just outside my door. Last week, I found
a handprint on my bathroom mirror, too large to be human.
I told myself it was a trick of the steam,
(47:52):
a pattern in the condensation that just looked like fingers
in a palm. I've told myself that every night since.
But I've started looking for a new apartment, maybe further south,
maybe the Keys, where there's nothing but ocean and sky.
It won't help.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
I know that they.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Found us once, three states away from those Alabama woods.
They can find us anywhere. But the illusion of safety
is all I have left, and I cling to it
like Sarah clings to her cross. That's my story, all
of it. Every detail I can remember, and many I've
tried to forget. I know how it sounds. I know
(48:29):
what you're thinking, old man telling tall tales. Too many beers.
Too many years, too much time to let a simple
bear encounter grow into something monstrous in his memory. But
I have proof, not the kind that would hold up
in court. Not photographs or video or plaster casts of footprints.
(48:50):
Those things can be faked, dismissed, explained away. No, my
proof is simpler than that. The cabin is gone, but
the land remains. Forty acres of Brennan family property in
Cleborn County, Alabama. It's mine, technically has been for twenty
seven years. Never sold it, never could bring myself to
(49:10):
sign the papers. It just sits there, empty, returning to wilderness.
And in all those years, with all the development that's
happened in Alabama, with all the urban sprawl and suburban expansion,
no one has ever made an offer on it. No developers,
no hunting clubs, no timber companies. Forty acres of prime woodland,
(49:32):
and no one wants it.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
The locals know.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
They don't talk about it, not directly, but they know.
There are places in this world that belong to something
older than us, something that was here before we came
down from the trees, before we learned to use tools,
before we forgot what it meant to be prey. Most
of those places are gone, now paved over or clearcut
or developed into subdivisions with names like Whispering Pines and
(49:58):
Forest Glen, and some remain hidden pockets of the old
world where the original inhabitants still hold court. If you
inherit land in the deep woods, if a distant relative
leaves you a cabin or a homestead that's been in
the family for generations, ask yourself why it's been empty,
Ask yourself why they left, Ask yourself why no one
(50:21):
else wanted it. And if you start finding massive footprints
around your property, if rocks begin hitting your roof at night,
if you smell that thick animal stench and hear voices
that shouldn't exist, don't try to fight, don't try to understand,
don't try to make friends with the forest. Just leave,
walk away, run away, crawl. If you have to leave
(50:44):
everything behind, your possessions can be replaced. Your pride will
heal your life. Once lost is gone forever. The old ones,
the tall people, the sasquatch, bigfoot, whatever you want to
call them, they're They're out there in the deep woods,
in the places we've forgotten to fear. They were here first,
(51:07):
they'll be here last, and they don't like visitors. Some
will say I'm crazy, some will say I'm lying. Some
will say I'm just an old man trying to make
sense of a trauma I can't fully remember. Maybe they're right.
Maybe all of this is just the fantasy of a
frightened mind trying to explain something unexplainable. But I know
what I saw, I know what I felt, I know
(51:29):
what I survived, and I know that somewhere in the
dark woods of Alabama, they're still out there, watching, waiting,
playing their ancient games with anyone foolish enough to enter
their domain. My grandfather tried to warn us in his way.
He left us the cabin, yes, but he also left
(51:49):
us the story of why he'd abandoned it. We just
chose not to listen. We saw opportunity where we should
have seen danger. We saw salvation where we should have
seen damnation. Don't make our mistake. When the forest tells
you to leave, leave when the darkness has eyes. Don't
look back. When something knocks at your door in the
(52:10):
dead of night, don't answer. Because sometimes the old stories
are true, sometimes the monsters are real, and sometimes the
only reason you survive is because something much older and
much more powerful than you decided, for reasons you'll never understand,
to let you go. That's all I have to say.
That's my testimony, my confession, my warning. Do with it
(52:33):
what you will, believe it or don't. But if you
ever find yourself in the deep woods of Alabama or
anywhere else where the trees grow thick and the darkness
seems alive, remember this story. Remember what happened to us
in the summer of nineteen ninety five. Remember and be warned.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
S Pat Pat Pat
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.
They say, some inheritances come with strings attached. Mine came
(01:06):
with something else entirely. I've spent twenty seven years trying
to forget what happened at that cabin in the summer
of nineteen ninety five. Twenty seven years of therapy sessions
where I dance around the truth of waking up at
three in the morning with my sheets soaked through with sweat,
of never being able to look at a dark tree
line without feeling my chest tighten. My therapist thinks I
(01:28):
suffered some kind of trauma related to my grandfather's death.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
She's half right.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
There was trauma, but it had nothing to do with
losing Grandpa Roy. The truth is something I've never told anyone.
Not the sheriff who found us on Highway two seventy
eight that August morning, our truck's engine blown and our
face as white as fresh cotton. Not my ex wife
who left me because I refused to take our kids camping.
Not even my son Tyler, who's thirty nine now and
(01:56):
still asks why we left Alabama and never went back.
Sixty eight years old, and my doctor says, my heart's
not what it used to be. If I don't tell
someone what really happened at that cabin in Cleeburn County,
the truth dies with me. Maybe that would be for
the best. Maybe some truths are meant to be buried.
But every time I close my eyes, I can still
(02:17):
smell that thick animal stench that used to seep through
the cabin walls. I can still hear those massive hands
slapping against the wooden siding, and the dead of night,
I can still see those eyes reflecting red in the darkness,
watching us through Tyler's bedroom window. So I'm going to
tell you everything exactly as it happened. Not because I
(02:37):
expect you to believe me, held there are days when
I barely believe it myself, but because maybe, just maybe
it might save someone else from making the same mistake
we did. Maybe someone else will inherit a piece of
property in the deep woods of Alabama, and they'll remember
this story, and they'll have the good sense.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
To stay away.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
We should have known something was wrong from the beginning.
The signs were all there, But grief has a way
of blinding you to danger, and desperation can make even
the most obviously cursed gift seem like a blessing. The
call came on a Tuesday morning in May of nineteen
ninety five. I was working at the paper mill in Montgomery,
standing near the digester tanks when my supervisor tapped me
(03:20):
on the shoulder and pointed toward the office. The plant
manager was holding the phone, his face arranged in that
particular expression people where when they're about to deliver bad news.
Grandpa Roy had died in his sleep, eighty three years old.
Heart gave out peaceful as could be. The lawyer said
he'd left me something in his will, and could I
(03:40):
come to Heflin for the reading. I hadn't seen Grandpa
Roy in probably five years. He'd become something of a
recluse after Grandma died in eighty seven. Hold up in
that little house in town, only coming out for groceries
in church. We'd exchange Christmas cards, maybe a phone call
on birthdays, but that was about it. The distance wasn't personal.
(04:02):
That's just how the Brennan men were, spread out across Alabama,
like seeds scattered by an indifferent hand. Sarah took it
harder than I did. She'd always liked the old man,
said he had character. Tyler barely remembered him at all,
which somehow made it worse. A twelve year old boy
shouldn't have so few memories of his grandfather. When I
(04:23):
told them about the will, Sarah insisted we all go together.
Make it a family trip. She said, show Tyler where
his daddy grew up. The drive from Montgomery to Heflin
took three hours, winding through the kind of small towns
that seemed to exist solely to slow you down on
your way to somewhere else. Tyler had his face pressed
against the back window most of the way, watching the
(04:46):
hills roll by. Sarah kept touching my hand on the
gear shift, that gentle way she had of showing support
without saying anything. The lawyer's office was above the hardware
store on Main Street, up a narrow staircase that with
every step. Mister Pemberton was older than Moses and moved
about as fast, shuffling papers with liver spotted hands, while
(05:07):
we sat in chairs that probably came with the building.
The will was simple enough, a few thousand dollars in savings,
some tools his truck, and then Pemberton adjusted his glasses
and read the part that changed everything. The cabin forty
acres of woodland, a place I'd never even known existed.
Pemberton pulled out a Manila envelope thick with documents and
(05:30):
old photographs. The picture showed a log cabin that looked
straight out of a frontier museum, tucked into a hillside
and surrounded by massive pines. There was Grandpa Roy in
one photo, maybe thirty years younger, standing on the porch
with a rifle, looking proud as could be. The deed
went back to nineteen twenty four. Roy's father, my great grandfather,
(05:53):
had built the place with his own hands. It had
been in the family ever since, though Pemberton said Roy
hadn't been out there in nearly a decade. Too remote,
too hard to maintain. The old man had kept paying
the taxes on it, though, year after year, like he
couldn't quite let it go. Sarah grabbed my hand when
Pemberton showed us the location on a county map, forty
(06:15):
acres of pristine woodland. He called it only accessible by
an old logging road, no power lines, no phone service,
but there was a well and a septic system installed
in the seventies. The nearest neighbor was three miles away.
To understand why this mattered so much, you have to
understand where we were in our lives. The paper mill
(06:36):
had been laying people off for two years.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Every Friday.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
We'd hold our breath until the shift ended, grateful to
have survived another week. We were behind on the mortgage,
behind on the truck payments, behind on everything except the
urgent business of keeping our heads above water.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Tyler needed braces. The roof leaked.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
The transmission in Sarah's car was making sounds that promised
expensive repairs. And here was forty acres of land, free
and clear. Here was a place to start over. We
drove out to look at it that same afternoon. The
logging road was exactly as advertised, a rough cut through
the forest that had our truck's suspension groaning. It went
(07:17):
on for two miles, winding through stands of pine and
oaks so thick you couldn't see more than twenty feet into.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
The woods on either side.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
The trees seemed to press in on us, their branches
scraping the truck's roof like fingers testing for a way in.
But then the road opened into a clearing, and there
it was. The cabin sat on a rise, looking down
into a hollow where a creek ran, clear and cold.
It was bigger than the photos suggested, maybe twelve hundred
square feet, with a stone chimney and a covered porch
(07:48):
that wrapped around two sides. The logs had weathered to
a silver gray, and the metal roof was rusty but intact.
Behind it, the forest rose up the hillside, thick and
dark even in the after afternoon sun.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Tyler was out of.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
The truck before I'd fully stopped running toward the creek
with the kind of pure joy only a twelve year
old can muster. Sarah stood beside me, her arm around
my waist, looking at that cabin like it was a mansion.
We spent two hours exploring. The inside was rough but livable,
two bedrooms, a main room with a stone fireplace, a
(08:23):
kitchen with an ancient wood stove, and a bathroom that
miraculously still worked when we primed the pump. The furniture
was covered in dust and mouse droppings, but it was
solid stuff, hand built pieces that had lasted seventy years
and might last seventy more. Tyler found a shed full
of old tools, each one wrapped in oiled cloth. Sarah
(08:45):
discovered a root cellar stocked with empty canning jars. I
stood on that porch, looking out at land that belonged
to me, to us, and felt something I hadn't.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Felt in years. Hope.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
We should have wondered why Roy had stopped coming. We
should have asked why a perfectly good cabin had sat
empty for a decade. We should have noticed that there
were no bird sounds in those woods, no squirrels in
the trees, no deer tracks by the creek, but we didn't.
We saw salvation where we should have seen warning. We
moved in three weeks later. It took everything we had.
(09:20):
I cashed out my retirement from the mill, such as
it was. We sold everything that wouldn't fit in the
truck or the U haul trailer. Sarah's mother called us crazy,
said we were dragging that poor boy into the wilderness
like some kind of mountain hermits. My brother down in
Mobile said I'd lost my mind giving up a steady
job to play pioneer. But every night Sarah and I
(09:42):
would sit at our kitchen table in that rental house
in Montgomery, going over the numbers. No rent, no mortgage,
no utility bills except propane for the stove and generator
fuel for the few appliances we absolutely needed. We could
make it work. We had to make it work. The
move itself was a nightmare. The logging road, which had
(10:03):
seemed rough but passable in Pemberton Sedan, became a genuine
obstacle course with a loaded U haul trailer. Twice we
had to unhook it and clear fallen branches. Once the
truck got high centered on a ridge of exposed rock,
and it took two hours with the jack and boards
to get free, But finally, as the sun was starting
to set on that first Saturday in June, we pulled
(10:25):
into the clearing home. We worked until well past dark,
hauling boxes by flashlight, Tyler helping despite clearly being dead
on his feet. Sarah had thought ahead and packed sleeping
bags and pillows in the truck cab, so at least
we had somewhere to sleep that first night, I remember
lying there on the floor of the main room, Sarah
(10:46):
on one side and Tyler on the other, listening to
the absolute silence. No traffic, no neighbors, no hum of
electrical wires, just the soft whisper of wind in the
pines and the distant gurgle of the creek. Tyler fell
asleep almost instantly, exhausted from the move. Sarah took longer,
(11:06):
but eventually her breathing deepened and slowed. But I stayed awake,
staring at the ceiling beams in the darkness, wondering if
I'd just made the best or worst decision of my life.
Sometime around midnight, I heard the first rock hit the roof.
It wasn't loud, just a solid thunk that could have
been a pine cone or a branch. I barely noticed it,
(11:27):
but about ten minutes later there was another, then another,
irregular intervals, but deliberate, somehow, like someone was standing out
there in the darkness, tossing stones onto our metal roof.
I got up carefully, not wanting to wake Sarah and Tyler,
and crept to the window. The moon was nearly full,
casting everything in silver light and black shadows. I could
(11:50):
see the truck, the trailer, the edge of the forest.
Nothing moved.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
The rock stopped after a.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Few more minutes, and I convinced myself it had been
branches falling from the trees. Old forest, old trees, dead
branches falling natural as could be. I should have known better.
Nothing about those woods was natural. The next morning, Tyler
was up with the sun, eager to explore. Sarah started
(12:17):
the monumental task of unpacking and organizing while I worked
on getting the generator running. It was an old diesel unit,
probably from the sixties, but it fired up after I
changed the fuel filter and bled the lines. We had power,
limited but sufficient. Tyler spent the morning down by the creek,
building a dam with river rocks. I could see him
(12:38):
from the kitchen window, knee deep in that cold water,
happy as I'd ever seen him. Sarah hummed while she
worked arranging our few pieces of furniture, hanging pictures on.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
The log walls.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
For a few hours, it felt like we'd made the
right choice. The rock started again that second night. This
time I was ready for them. When the first one hit,
around eleven o'clock. I grabbed the flashlight and headed for
the door. Sarah stirred but didn't wake Tyler was dead
to the world in his small bedroom. I stood on
the porch, flashlight beams sweeping the tree line. The rocks
(13:13):
were coming more frequently now, not just hitting the roof,
but the walls. Too small ones, maybe the size of
golf balls, but thrown with enough force to make a
solid impact. Then I saw eyes shine, just for a second,
two points of red light at the edge of the forest,
maybe seven feet off the ground. When I swung the
(13:33):
flashlight toward them, they vanished. A deer, I told myself,
had to be a deer, But deer don't throw rocks.
I stayed out there for another hour, but nothing else happened.
The rocks stopped as suddenly as they'd started. The forest
was silent. Even the creek seemed to have quieted its voice.
(13:53):
When I finally went back inside, I found Tyler standing
in the hallway, pale and wide eyed in his Superman pajamas.
He said he'd heard something at his window, scratching like branches,
but rhythmic, deliberate. I told him it was just the trees,
that we were surrounded by forest and would have to
get used to the sounds. He nodded, but I could
(14:15):
see he didn't quite believe me. I didn't believe me either.
By the end of our first week, the pattern was established.
During the day, everything was perfect. We worked on the cabin,
Tyler played in the creek. Sarah started a vegetable garden
in a sunny spot near the shed. The sun made
everything feel safe and normal and possible. But at night,
(14:36):
the woods came alive with something that had no name.
The rocks were every night now, starting around eleven and
continuing for an hour or more, but it was escalating.
By the fourth night, it wasn't just pebbles, but stones
the size of baseballs, hurled with impossible force. One shattered
a window in the kitchen. I boarded it up and
(14:57):
told Sarah a branch had fallen. Then came the slaping.
Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
after these messages. The first time it happened, I shot
straight up in bed, heart hammering. The sound was massive,
like someone had hit the side of the cabin with
a telephone pole. The whole structure shook. Sarah grabbed my arm,
(15:19):
her nails digging in deep enough to draw blood. It
came again, a tremendous slap against the wall, this time
on the opposite side of the cabin, then the back wall,
then right above our heads on the roof, an impact
so powerful that dust filtered down from the rafters. Tyler
appeared in our doorway, crying. He was twelve years old,
(15:42):
trying so hard to be grown up, but this had
broken through his defenses. Sarah pulled him into bed with us,
and we lay there, the three of us, as something
circled our cabin, striking the walls with what could only
be enormous hands. It lasted for twenty minutes, then silence.
The next morning I found handprints in the mud outside.
(16:05):
They were human in shape, but wrong in size. The
palm was as wide as a dinner plate. The fingers
were proportionally too long, almost delicate despite their size, and
they were everywhere, dozens of them, pressed into the dirt
around the cabin's foundation. I showed Sarah. Her face went white,
and she asked the question I'd been avoiding. What could
(16:27):
make prints like that? I didn't have an answer, or
rather I had an answer, but it was impossible. It
was the kind of answer that belonged in supermarket tabloids
and grainy documentaries on cable TV, not in real life, not.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
In our life.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
That afternoon, I drove into town alone. Heflin wasn't much,
but it had a library, and the library had old
newspapers on microfilm. I told Sarah I was getting supplies.
I think she knew I was lying, but she didn't
call me on it. The librarian was a widow named
missus Henley, who remembered my grandfather. She set me up
at the microfilm reader and showed me how to work it,
(17:06):
then left me alone with sixty years of the Cleborne
County News. It didn't take long to find what I
was looking for. August nineteen fifty three, local farmer reports
livestock missing. Giant footprints found near Chokaloco Creek. October nineteen
sixty one. Hunters claim encounter with wild man and National
Forest sheriff investigates finds no evidence. July nineteen sixty eight,
(17:32):
family abandons homestead after reported harassment by unknown persons. Strange
prints photographed it scene, and then from April nineteen seventy one,
a longer article, a family named the Washburns had lived
about five miles from where our cabin sat. They'd reported
weeks of harassment, rocks thrown at their house, livestock killed,
(17:55):
their children, terrorized by something that watched them from the forest.
The father, Dale Washburn, had finally had enough. He sat
up one night with a rifle, determined to kill whatever
was tormenting his family. The sheriff found him the next morning,
wandering on Highway nine, catatonic. His hair, the article said,
had turned completely white. The family moved to Tennessee the
(18:18):
next week. Dale Washburn never spoke again. He died in
a state mental hospital three years later. The last paragraph
was what made my blood run cold. The sheriff, a
man named Buford Hayes, was quoted as saying, sometimes the
old forest don't want neighbors. Smart folks learned to listen
when they're not welcome. I was rolling through more articles
(18:40):
when missus Henley appeared at my shoulder. Your granddaddy used
to come in here, she said, same research, same articles.
This was maybe fifteen years ago. He'd bought that cabin
from the Tillman estate, you know, thought he could make
a hunting lodge out of it. I asked her what happened.
She looked at me for a long moment, and I
could see her deciding whether to tell me the truth
(19:02):
or the polite version. He lasted one summer, she finally said,
never would talk about why he left. But I remember
him returning those microfilms. His hands were shaking so bad
he could barely hold them. You fixing to stay out there,
I told her we were. She nodded slowly, like she'd
expected that answer. Your granddaddy tried to burn that cabin down,
(19:24):
she said, back in eighty five. Sheriff stopped him, said
it would start a forest fire.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
But Roy tried.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Said some things ought not to exist, said some places
ought to be left alone. I thanked her and left
my mind spinning. When I got back to the cabin,
Sarah had dinner ready and Tyler was showing off an
arrowhead he'd found by the creek. We ate and laughed
and pretended everything was normal. But after Tyler went to bed,
I told Sarah what I'd learned. She listened without interrupting,
(19:55):
then asked what.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
I wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
We had nowhere else to go, money to start over,
no jobs to return to. We were trapped by poverty
as surely as if we'd been chained to that cabin.
We'll be careful, I said, We'll respect the forest. Maybe
if we don't bother it, it won't bother us. Sarah nodded,
but I could see the fear in her eyes. We
(20:18):
both knew I was lying. Two weeks into our stay,
Tyler saw it at his window. I woke to the
sound of his scream, high and terrified, cutting through the night.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Like a blade.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Sarah and I burst into his room to find him
pressed against the far wall, pointing at the window with
a trembling hand. There's nothing there, I said, But even
as the words left my mouth, I could smell it.
A thick animal stench, like a wet dog crossed with
rotting vegetation. It was seeping through the walls, so strong
(20:50):
it made my eyes water. Tyler was sobbing, trying to
explain a face, he said, massive covered in hair, with
eyes that were almost human, reflecting red in the moonlight.
It had been watching him sleep, just standing there, face
pressed against the glass, watching. I grabbed the flashlight and
(21:12):
the shotgun i'd started keeping by the bed. Outside. The
smell was even stronger. There were tracks in the dirt
beneath Tyler's window, the same massive human like prince, but
deeper this time. Whatever had made them was heavy, heavier
than any man could be. And there on the window glass,
lit by my flashlight beam, were smudges, hand prints, and
(21:37):
the oily impression of a face pressed against the pane,
like a child at a candy store window. We moved
Tyler's bed into our room.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
That night.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
None of us slept. The next day, I drove back
to town and bought plywood, nails, and a rifle, a
thirty six, the most powerful thing I could afford. The
man at the sporting goods store, a good old boy
named Rick, asked if I was planning to hunt elk
something like that.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
I told him.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
He gave me a long look, then threw in an
extra box of ammunition.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
For free.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
You're Roy Brennan's grandson, aren't you living out at the
old Tillman Place?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I nodded.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Rick leaned in close, dropping his voice, even though we
were alone in the store. My uncle lived out that
way in the fifties. Said there were things in those
woods that ain't got no business existing. Said, they mostly
leave folks alone, if folks leave them alone, but sometimes
they take a dislike to someone.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
And when that happens.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
He trailed off, shaking his head. You got family, wife
and kids, I nodded again. Get them out of there,
he said, whatever it costs, whatever you have to do,
get them out. Some places ain't meant for people. But
I couldn't. We had nowhere to go, no money for rent,
no job prospects, no family willing to take us in.
(22:59):
We were stuck. That night, I boarded up Tyler's window
from the inside. It didn't matter. The thing came anyway.
This time, it didn't just watch. It knocked three deliberate
raps on the wall beside Tyler's window, like a visitor
announcing their presence. When no one answered, it knocked again harder.
(23:21):
The whole wall shook, Then it spoke. The sound was
like nothing I'd ever heard, deep enough to vibrate in
your chest, but with an almost plaintive quality. It wasn't English,
wasn't any language I recognized, but somehow the meaning was clear.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Let me in.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Tyler was screaming, Sarah was praying, clutching her rosary so
tight the bead's left marks on her palms. And I
sat there with that rifle across my lap, knowing with
absolute certainty that if I opened that door, if I
confronted whatever was out there, I would end up like
Dale Washburn, catatonic, white haired, lost. The knocking continued for
(24:01):
an hour, sometimes at the boarded window, sometimes at the door,
sometimes on the roof directly above us. Each knock was massive,
powerful enough to shake dust from the rafters, and between
the knocks that horrible voice speaking in syllables that human
throats were never meant to form. Then, as suddenly as
(24:21):
it had started, it stopped. The silence was somehow worse
than the noise. We stayed huddled together until dawn, when
the first rays of sunlight made the world seem possible again.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
But we all knew the truth.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
We were being hunted, studied, evaluated, and whatever was out
there in the woods had decided we didn't belong. By
the third week we were prisoners. None of us would
go outside after dark. I'd reinforced all the windows with plywood,
turning our cabin into a fortress or a tomb, depending
on how you looked at it. During the day, we
(24:56):
went about our business, but there was a brittle quality
to our normal. We were actors playing the parts of
a happy family, and we all knew it. Tyler had
stopped playing by the creek. He wouldn't go more than
twenty feet from the cabin, and even then he was
constantly looking over his shoulder. Sarah had abandoned her garden.
The vegetables were already being choked by weeds, but she
(25:18):
wouldn't go out there alone, and I couldn't blame her.
We were all losing weight. Sleep was nearly impossible. The
things in the woods came every night, now, sometimes just one,
sometimes what sounded like three or four. They would circle
the cabin, knocking on the walls, speaking in their terrible language,
testing the doors and windows for weakness, and they were
(25:40):
getting bolder. One night I woke to the sound of
splintering wood. One of them had torn a board off
Tyler's window and was reaching inside. The arm was covered
in dark, coarse hair, impossibly long, with fingers that seemed
to go on forever. It was feeling around, searching, and
I realized with horror that it was trying to unlock
(26:01):
the window from the inside. I grabbed the rifle and
fired through the wall. The sound was deafening in the
small space. Sarah screamed. Tyler was sobbing, but the arm
withdrew and I heard something crash through the underbrush outside,
moving faster than anything that size should be able to move.
There was blood on the windowsill, dark almost black, with
(26:24):
an oily consistency. It smelled like copper and rotting meat.
I'd heard it. That should have made me feel better.
It didn't. The next night, they didn't come to the cabin. Instead,
they destroyed everything outside it. The truck's windows were smashed,
the tires slashed, the hood crushed like something massive had
(26:45):
sat on it. The shed was torn apart, tools scattered
and broken. Sarah's garden was obliterated. The plants not just
pulled up, but shredded, scattered like confetti, and their footprints
were everywhere, hundreds of them in the dirt in the
mud by the creek, pressed into the middle of our
ruined truck, a message clear as day. You hurt us,
(27:08):
now we hurt you. That's when Sarah broke. I found
her in the bedroom, packing what little we had of
value into a suitcase. Tears were streaming down her face,
but her movements were determined, methodical. We're leaving, she said.
I don't care if we have to walk, I don't
care if we have to live in a homeless shelter.
We're leaving. I tried to explain that the truck was destroyed,
(27:32):
that we were twenty miles from town, that we had
no way to transport our things. She just kept packing.
Then Tyler spoke from the doorway. They don't want us
to leave, he said. We both turned to look at him.
He was pale, hollow eyed, looking far older than his
twelve years. I've been watching them, he continued, from my
(27:53):
window before you boarded it up. They're not animals, they're
not stupid. They understand things. They know we're trapped here.
I asked him what he meant. Tyler walked to the
living room window, the one that still had glass, and
pointed to the tree line they're out there right now,
he said, watching, waiting. If we try to leave on foot,
(28:16):
they'll follow us. They'll wait until we're far from the cabin,
far from shelter. And then he didn't finish the sentence.
He didn't need to. I looked out the window, scanning
the forest. At first I saw nothing. Then gradually my
eyes began to pick out the shapes. They were standing
perfectly still among the trees, their dark hair blending with
(28:38):
the shadows. One, two, five, eight of them that I
could see, maybe more. They weren't hiding. They wanted us
to know they were there. That's when I understood we
weren't just unwelcome. We were entertainment, toys to be played with, terrorized, broken,
They were enjoying this. The full siege began on our
(28:59):
twenty third night in the cabin. It started differently this time,
no rocks, no knocking, just voices. They surrounded the cabin,
all of them, and began to speak in unison, that terrible,
deep sound, rising and falling in what might have been
a chant, or a song or a prayer. The walls
vibrated with it, the windows rattled in their frames. Tyler
(29:23):
was curled in a ball on our bed, hands.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Over his ears.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Sarah was sitting in the corner holding her rosary lips,
moving in silent prayer, and I stood at the window
with the rifle watching them. They weren't hiding anymore. They
stood in a rough circle around the cabin, maybe fifteen
of them, swaying slightly as they voiced their awful chorus.
In the moonlight, I could see them clearly for the
(29:48):
first time. They were massive, seven or eight feet tall,
covered in dark hair that seemed to absorb light. Their
bodies were humanoid, but different, arms way longer than they
should be, shoulders impossibly broad. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Their faces
(30:09):
were the worst part, neither human nor ape, but something
caught between, with deep set eyes that glowed with an
intelligence that was unmistakably malevolent. The chanting went on for hours.
Sometimes it would rise to a crescendo that made.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
My teeth ache.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Sometimes it would drop to a whisper that was somehow worse.
And underneath it all was a rhythm, a pulsing beat
that seemed to match my heart beat, seemed to be
pulling at something deep in my chest. Then, just before dawn,
they stopped.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
One of them, the.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Largest, stepped forward. It stood directly in front of the
main door, not moving, just standing there waiting. I knew
what it wanted. It wanted me to come out to
confront it, to end this one way or another. I
almost did it. My hand was on the doorknob, the
rifle in my other hand, when Sarah grabbed my arm.
(31:03):
Don't she whispered, please, That's what happened to the others,
the ones in the newspapers. They went outside.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
She was right.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
I backed away from the door, and the thing outside
made a sound that might have been laughter, deep rumbling, utterly,
without humor. For a long moment, it just stood there, massive, silent,
almost human in its stillness, and somehow, without a sound,
something passed between us. It didn't speak, not in any
(31:33):
language we know, but in that instant I understood a thought,
A warning pressed into my mind so clearly I couldn't
deny it, even though I can't explain how I knew
three days that's what it meant, three days before they
would come in. Then it turned and walked back into
the forest, its shaped, dissolving into the mist. The others followed,
(31:56):
melting into the shadows like smoke.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Three days.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
The first day we tried to prepare, I used what
tools had survived to reinforce the doors, nailing boards across them,
pushing furniture against them. It was pathetic, really, If those
things wanted in, truly wanted in, no amount of plywood
would stop them. Sarah spent the day praying and writing.
She filled a notebook with letters to her family, to
(32:22):
her mother, to siblings and cousins, goodbye letters. She made
me promise that if something happened to her, I would
make sure they got the letters. I promised, knowing it
was a lie. If something happened to her, it would
happen to all of us. Tyler surprised me. He spent
the day studying. He'd found some of Grandpa Roy's old
(32:43):
journals in a trunk in the bedroom closet. They were
from his time at the cabin before he'd fled. Tyler
read them with an intensity I'd never seen from him before,
taking notes, cross referencing entries Dad. He said that evening,
I think I know what they are. I sat beside him,
looking at the journals. Roy's handwriting was cramped, urgent, filling
(33:06):
page after page with observations, theories, desperate attempts to understand.
He called them the old ones, Tyler said, pointing to
an entry, said the Cherokee had stories about them from
before white people came. They were here first. The forest
belongs to them. I read the passage. Tyler indicated. Roy
(33:27):
had written about finding cave paintings in a hollow deeper
in the woods, ancient things showing tall hair covered figures
standing among trees, with smaller human figures bowing before them.
They're not animals, Tyler continued, They're people, different people, but people,
and we're in their territory. So we leave, I said,
(33:48):
as soon as we can, we leave. Tyler shook his head.
That's just it. Grandpa tried to leave. Look, he showed
me an entry from July nineteen eighty. Roy had attempted
to hike out to reach the road and escape, but
they had followed him, herded him back, played with him
like cats with a mouse. He'd barely made it back
(34:10):
to the cabin alive. They don't let people leave, Tyler said,
not once they've decided you don't belong. The only reason
Grandpa got out was because the sheriff came looking for him.
They don't like groups, they don't like witnesses. I felt
the weight of that settle on my shoulders. We were alone.
No one was coming for us, No one even knew
(34:31):
we were in trouble. The second day, we tried to
make weapons. I had the rifle and a box and
a half of ammunition. Sarah found a hatchet in what
was left of the shed. Tyler fashioned spears from broken
tool handles, sharpening the ends with a kitchen knife. It
was almost comically inadequate, but it was something. It gave
(34:51):
us the illusion of being able to fight back. That night,
they came to every window, pressing their faces against the boards,
breathing so heavily we could hear it.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Inside.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
The smell was overwhelming, that wet dog and rot stench
that made us gag. They didn't speak, didn't knock, just breathed,
letting us know they were there, letting us know they
were coming. The third day dawned gray and drizzly. The
forest was shrouded and missed visibility down to maybe thirty feet.
(35:22):
We couldn't see them, but we knew they were there, waiting, watching.
I made a decision. I told Sarah and Tyler to
barricade themselves in the bedroom, push everything against the door,
and no matter what they heard, don't come out. Sarah argued,
But I could see the relief in her eyes. She
didn't want to face what was coming. Neither did I,
(35:44):
but someone had to. As the sun set on that
third day, I took position in the main room, rifle
loaded extra ammunition within reach, hatchet on the table beside me.
I'd pushed the couch against the front door and the
kitchen table against the back. The windows were all boarded.
There was only one way this could end, but I
(36:04):
was going to make them work for it. Full dark came,
and with it silence, no insects, no wind, no creak, babble,
just my breathing and the pounding of my heart. Then
at exactly midnight they announced themselves. The front door exploded inward,
not opened, not broken, exploded. The couch I'd pushed against
(36:27):
it flew across the room, slamming into the far wall.
Splinters of wood filled the air like shrapnel, and through
the destroyed doorway came something out of a nightmare. It
had to duck to get through, folding its massive frame
almost in half. Once inside, it stood to its full height,
and its head nearly touched the eight foot ceiling. Its
(36:49):
eyes reflected the coalman lantern light, glowing like hot coals.
The smell that came with it was overwhelming, a physical
presence that made me gag. I shot its center mass.
The rifle kicked against my shoulder, the sound deafening in
the enclosed space. The creature staggered back a step, looked
down at the spreading dark stain on its chest, then
(37:10):
looked back at me, and it smiled a very human
expression on that inhuman face. Then it came for me.
I got off two more shots before it reached me.
One hit its shoulder, spinning it slightly. The other went wild,
punching a hole in the wall. Then its hand, impossibly
large and impossibly strong, wrapped around the rifle barrel and
(37:33):
yanked it from my grasp, bending it like a pretzel
and tossing it aside. I grabbed the hatchet and swung
with everything I had. The blade bit into its arm,
drawing more of that black blood. It howled a sound
that made my ears ring, and back handed me across
the room. I hit the wall hard enough to punch
a hole in the dry wall. Stars exploded across my vision.
(37:56):
When I could focus again, the creature was standing over me,
studying me with those terrible eyes. Up close, I could
see they weren't animal eyes at all. There was intelligence there, calculation,
and something that might have been amusement. It reached down
with one massive hand, fingers wrapping around my throat, and
lifted me off the ground like I weighed nothing. My
(38:19):
feet dangled kicking uselessly. Black spots began to dance at
the edges of my vision. Then Tyler screamed, not a
scream of fear, but a war cry. He came charging
out of the bedroom with one of his makeshift spears,
all twelve years and ninety pounds of him, and drove
it into the creature's side. The thing dropped me and
(38:40):
spun toward Tyler, moving faster than something that large should
be able to move. But Tyler was already backing away,
and Sarah was beside him with the only ammunition we
had left, the pot of boiling water she'd been heating
on the propane stove. She threw it full in the
creature's face. The howl it made shook dust from the
rafters It clawed at its face, stumbling backward, and in
(39:03):
that moment of distraction, I found the hatchet and buried
it in the back.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Of its knee.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
The creature went down, crashing to the floor with enough
force to crack the boards. It tried to rise, but
the damaged knee wouldn't support its weight. It looked at us,
all three of us, and for the first time, I
saw something like respect in its eyes. Then, without sound,
without speech, the message hit me like a pulse of
(39:29):
cold air through my chest. Others coming, and I understood
this wasn't over, It was only beginning, As if on cue,
I heard them outside, multiple footsteps on the porch surrounding
the cabin. We'd fought off one, but there were so
many more. I looked at Sarah and Tyler, my wife,
(39:49):
my son. We were going to die here in this cabin,
twenty miles from nowhere. But at least we die together.
At least we'd die fighting. That's when we heard the engines.
Headlights cut through the darkness outside, multiple vehicles, engines roaring
as they came up the logging road. Doors slammed, voices, shouted,
(40:11):
human voices. The creature on our floor made a sound
of frustration and began dragging itself toward the door, leaving
a trail of black blood outside. I could hear the
others retreating, crashing through the underbrush, their heavy footfalls fading
into the distance. A spotlight hit the cabin, so bright
it hurt to look at. Then a voice amplified by
(40:33):
a megaphone. This is Sheriff Hayes. Anyone in the cabin,
come out with your hands visible. I helped Sarah and
Tyler over the wreckage of our front door. The front
yard was full of vehicles, Sheriff's department SUVs, their lights
painting the clearing and reds and blues. There were at
least six deputies, all armed with rifles, all scanning the
(40:55):
tree line nervously. Sheriff Hayes was a small, compact man
with gray hair and eyes that had seen too much.
He took one look at us, covered in blood some hours, someknot,
shaking with adrenaline and fear, and made a quick decision.
Get them in the vehicles, he barked, Now we're leaving.
One of the deputies started to ask about the scene,
(41:17):
about evidence, but Hayes cut him off. There is no scene.
There is no evidence we were never here. Move They
bundled us into separate vehicles. I ended up in Hayes's
suv in the back behind the cage. As we started
down the logging road, I looked back and saw the
cabin one last time, lit by the headlights of the
(41:39):
vehicles behind us. Something massive stood in the doorway, watching
us leave. Even from that distance, I could feel its
eyes on me. Then the road curved and it was gone.
Hayes drove in silence for a few minutes, navigating the
rough road with practiced ease. Finally he spoke your neighbor, Missus.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Watson, and called us.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Said she hadn't seen any lights from your place in
three days.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Got worried.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
We get calls like that sometimes about the old places
in these woods. Usually it's nothing. Sometimes he trailed off,
shaking his head. My grandfather was sheriff back in the seventies.
He continued, he had a rule about these woods. If
someone goes missing out here, you've got three days to
find them. After that, you're not finding them alive. Don't
(42:28):
know how he knew that, but he was never wrong.
I asked him what those things were. He was quiet
for a long moment, then glanced at me in the
rear view mirror. Officially, nothing black bears. Maybe bunch of
city folks getting spooked by the woods. That's what the
report will say. Unofficially, he shrugged. My grandmother was Cherokee.
(42:51):
She had stories about the tall people who lived in
the deep woods before humans came. Said they were here, first,
said they'd be here last, had wise men knew to
leave certain places alone. But the cabin, I said, my
grandfather's cabin. Hayes nodded, the Tillman place. Yeah, that's one
of the bad ones, has been as long as anyone
(43:13):
can remember. Your grandfather found that out the hard way.
Surprised he didn't burn it down, he tried, I said.
Hayes actually smiled at that. Good for him, Maybe I'll
have better luck. Two days later, the cabin did burn
down electrical fire, according to the report, faulty wiring in
an old generator. The Forest Service decided not to investigate
(43:37):
too thoroughly. Lightning strikes, they said, happens all the time
in these old woods. We stayed with Sarah's mother in
Birmingham for three months while I looked for work. I
found a job at a steel mill, hard work, but honest.
We rented a small apartment in the suburbs, as far
from any forest as we could get. Tyler had nightmares
(43:58):
for years. Sarah slept with the lights on. I couldn't
stand to have my back to a window. We never
talked about it, not to each other, not to anyone.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
What was there to say? Who would believe us?
Speaker 1 (44:11):
We'd survived something impossible, something that couldn't exist in the
rational world. So we pretended it hadn't happened.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
But it had.
Speaker 1 (44:19):
Happened, and it changed us. Tyler grew up quiet, studious.
He became a software engineer, builds programs for banks and
insurance companies. Lives in Manhattan now in a high rise
apartment where you can't even see a tree from his window.
He's never been camping, never been hiking, never set foot
in a forest. Since that summer, he says, he's just
(44:40):
not outdoorsy. We both know better. Sarah found religion, not
the casual Sunday morning kind, but deep, desperate faith. She
goes to Mass every day, sometimes twice. She wears a
silver cross that she never takes off, even in the shower.
She prays for protection, for forgiveness, for things she can't
(45:00):
name out loud. The priest thinks she's devoted. I know
she's terrified. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
be back after these messages. We divorced eight years ago,
not because we didn't love each other, but because we
couldn't look at each other without remembering. Every time I
saw her face, I saw it twisted in terror as
(45:22):
that thing came through our door. Every time she looked
at me, she saw the man who'd almost gotten her
and her son killed for the sake of forty acres
of cursed land. She remarried a nice man named Frank,
who sells insurance and doesn't understand why she won't go
on their company camping retreats. They live in Phoenix, now
about as far from the Alabama woods as you can
(45:43):
get and still be in America. And me, I never remarried.
I work, I come home, I watch TV with all
the lights on. I live in a second floor apartment
with good locks and a clear view of the parking lot.
I keep a loaded shotgun in the closet, though I
know it won't help if they ever come for me,
because that's the thing I haven't told you the thing
(46:04):
I've never told anyone.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
They let us go.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
That creature I injured, the one that could have killed
me with one hand.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
It let me go.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
When Tyler stabbed it, it could have torn him apart,
it didn't. When Sarah threw that water, it could have
charged through the pain and destroyed her.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
It didn't.
Speaker 1 (46:23):
They were toying with us, the whole thing, the siege,
the terror, the attack. It was all a game to them.
And when we'd provided enough entertainment, when we'd proven ourselves
worthy opponents, or at least amusing ones, they let us leave.
But I see them sometimes, not in the flesh, not anymore,
(46:44):
but in dreams, in shadows, in the corner of my eye,
when I'm walking past a park at dusk, I know
they're watching, not hunting, not threatening, just watching, checking in
on their favorite toy. Because that's what haunts me most,
not that they exist, not that they terrorized us, but
that we survived because they chose to let us survive.
(47:07):
We didn't escape, we were released. And sometimes on quiet nights,
when I can't sleep, I wonder if they're done with us,
or if someday when they're bored, when the deep woods
get too quiet, They'll come to collect what they consider theirs.
I live in Orlando now, in a studio apartment near
the airport. The constant sound of planes taking off and
(47:29):
landing helps me sleep. It drowns out the other sounds,
the ones that might or might not be my imagination,
the scratching at windows, the heavy footfalls on the stairs,
the breathing just outside my door. Last week, I found
a handprint on my bathroom mirror, too large to be human.
I told myself it was a trick of the steam,
(47:52):
a pattern in the condensation that just looked like fingers
in a palm. I've told myself that every night since.
But I've started looking for a new apartment, maybe further south,
maybe the Keys, where there's nothing but ocean and sky.
It won't help.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
I know that they.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Found us once, three states away from those Alabama woods.
They can find us anywhere. But the illusion of safety
is all I have left, and I cling to it
like Sarah clings to her cross. That's my story, all
of it. Every detail I can remember, and many I've
tried to forget. I know how it sounds. I know
(48:29):
what you're thinking, old man telling tall tales. Too many beers.
Too many years, too much time to let a simple
bear encounter grow into something monstrous in his memory. But
I have proof, not the kind that would hold up
in court. Not photographs or video or plaster casts of footprints.
(48:50):
Those things can be faked, dismissed, explained away. No, my
proof is simpler than that. The cabin is gone, but
the land remains. Forty acres of Brennan family property in
Cleborn County, Alabama. It's mine, technically has been for twenty
seven years. Never sold it, never could bring myself to
(49:10):
sign the papers. It just sits there, empty, returning to wilderness.
And in all those years, with all the development that's
happened in Alabama, with all the urban sprawl and suburban expansion,
no one has ever made an offer on it. No developers,
no hunting clubs, no timber companies. Forty acres of prime woodland,
(49:32):
and no one wants it.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
The locals know.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
They don't talk about it, not directly, but they know.
There are places in this world that belong to something
older than us, something that was here before we came
down from the trees, before we learned to use tools,
before we forgot what it meant to be prey. Most
of those places are gone, now paved over or clearcut
or developed into subdivisions with names like Whispering Pines and
(49:58):
Forest Glen, and some remain hidden pockets of the old
world where the original inhabitants still hold court. If you
inherit land in the deep woods, if a distant relative
leaves you a cabin or a homestead that's been in
the family for generations, ask yourself why it's been empty,
Ask yourself why they left, Ask yourself why no one
(50:21):
else wanted it. And if you start finding massive footprints
around your property, if rocks begin hitting your roof at night,
if you smell that thick animal stench and hear voices
that shouldn't exist, don't try to fight, don't try to understand,
don't try to make friends with the forest. Just leave,
walk away, run away, crawl. If you have to leave
(50:44):
everything behind, your possessions can be replaced. Your pride will
heal your life. Once lost is gone forever. The old ones,
the tall people, the sasquatch, bigfoot, whatever you want to
call them, they're They're out there in the deep woods,
in the places we've forgotten to fear. They were here first,
(51:07):
they'll be here last, and they don't like visitors. Some
will say I'm crazy, some will say I'm lying. Some
will say I'm just an old man trying to make
sense of a trauma I can't fully remember. Maybe they're right.
Maybe all of this is just the fantasy of a
frightened mind trying to explain something unexplainable. But I know
what I saw, I know what I felt, I know
(51:29):
what I survived, and I know that somewhere in the
dark woods of Alabama, they're still out there, watching, waiting,
playing their ancient games with anyone foolish enough to enter
their domain. My grandfather tried to warn us in his way.
He left us the cabin, yes, but he also left
(51:49):
us the story of why he'd abandoned it. We just
chose not to listen. We saw opportunity where we should
have seen danger. We saw salvation where we should have
seen damnation. Don't make our mistake. When the forest tells
you to leave, leave when the darkness has eyes. Don't
look back. When something knocks at your door in the
(52:10):
dead of night, don't answer. Because sometimes the old stories
are true, sometimes the monsters are real, and sometimes the
only reason you survive is because something much older and
much more powerful than you decided, for reasons you'll never understand,
to let you go. That's all I have to say.
That's my testimony, my confession, my warning. Do with it
(52:33):
what you will, believe it or don't. But if you
ever find yourself in the deep woods of Alabama or
anywhere else where the trees grow thick and the darkness
seems alive, remember this story. Remember what happened to us
in the summer of nineteen ninety five. Remember and be warned.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
S Pat Pat Pat
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