November 21, 2025 • 52 mins
Welcome to this special collection episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, a journey across sixty years of encounters from the deep woods of the Southeastern United States. In this episode, I share six of the most compelling accounts I’ve documented over the past five years—stories that take us from the riverbanks of Alabama to the swamps of South Carolina and reveal just how many secrets the South still keeps hidden.
Our journey begins in Alabama in 1967, where a power company lineman discovered enormous handprints embedded in a utility pole along the Cahaba River. His face-to-face encounter with a towering creature challenged everything he believed about the world and set the tone for the stories that followed: intelligent beings that choose their moments carefully and always remain in control. From there, we move into the mountains of North Georgia in 1973, where four seasoned hunters found themselves under siege near Blue Ridge.
A night of rock throwing, violent tree shaking, and dozens of stick figures arranged in a perfect warning circle around their camp left them shattered and unwilling to ever return to the woods.In Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains in 1985, a park ranger and wildlife biologist had her scientific worldview upended when a massive creature climbed her fire tower and examined her equipment with deliberate intelligence. Her experience led her to discover that the Park Service had quietly documented similar incidents for decades.
The most tragic encounter comes from the Ozark Mountains in 1991, where a family camping trip spiraled into terror. A young girl watched as towering beings demonstrated their strength by crushing rocks with their bare hands. The emotional and psychological fallout broke her family apart, leaving scars that never healed. In 2002, the forests of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest became the setting for an encounter unlike any before it.
An experienced hiker spent three days in what he described as captivity with a family group of these beings, observing their social dynamics, tool use, and an unmistakable curiosity about human objects—suggesting a species far more complex than previously imagined.
Our final story takes us to South Carolina in 2014, where two college biology students captured over forty minutes of high-definition footage showing a creature examining their research equipment with clear understanding of its purpose.
The immediate government intervention and enforced silence that followed hinted at a much larger effort to conceal the truth. Across all six encounters, the patterns are unmistakable: the heavy musky odor that announces their presence, the massive handprints, the intelligent eyes studying and evaluating, and the sense that these beings could harm us—but choose not to.
Together, these stories paint the American South as a hidden refuge for an undiscovered species, or perhaps a separate branch of human evolution that has mastered the art of staying unseen. This episode serves as both a warning and an invitation. The woods are not empty. Something ancient and intelligent is out there, watching from the edges of our world.
As you listen, consider how these beings’ behavior has evolved over the decades, how closely they seem to be studying us, and what it means that evidence is so quickly suppressed. These are not campfire tales—they are the testimonies of people whose lives were forever changed by what they saw. And sometimes, in the quiet space between dusk and dawn, the South’s best-kept secrets step out of the darkness and make themselves known.
Our journey begins in Alabama in 1967, where a power company lineman discovered enormous handprints embedded in a utility pole along the Cahaba River. His face-to-face encounter with a towering creature challenged everything he believed about the world and set the tone for the stories that followed: intelligent beings that choose their moments carefully and always remain in control. From there, we move into the mountains of North Georgia in 1973, where four seasoned hunters found themselves under siege near Blue Ridge.
A night of rock throwing, violent tree shaking, and dozens of stick figures arranged in a perfect warning circle around their camp left them shattered and unwilling to ever return to the woods.In Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains in 1985, a park ranger and wildlife biologist had her scientific worldview upended when a massive creature climbed her fire tower and examined her equipment with deliberate intelligence. Her experience led her to discover that the Park Service had quietly documented similar incidents for decades.
The most tragic encounter comes from the Ozark Mountains in 1991, where a family camping trip spiraled into terror. A young girl watched as towering beings demonstrated their strength by crushing rocks with their bare hands. The emotional and psychological fallout broke her family apart, leaving scars that never healed. In 2002, the forests of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest became the setting for an encounter unlike any before it.
An experienced hiker spent three days in what he described as captivity with a family group of these beings, observing their social dynamics, tool use, and an unmistakable curiosity about human objects—suggesting a species far more complex than previously imagined.
Our final story takes us to South Carolina in 2014, where two college biology students captured over forty minutes of high-definition footage showing a creature examining their research equipment with clear understanding of its purpose.
The immediate government intervention and enforced silence that followed hinted at a much larger effort to conceal the truth. Across all six encounters, the patterns are unmistakable: the heavy musky odor that announces their presence, the massive handprints, the intelligent eyes studying and evaluating, and the sense that these beings could harm us—but choose not to.
Together, these stories paint the American South as a hidden refuge for an undiscovered species, or perhaps a separate branch of human evolution that has mastered the art of staying unseen. This episode serves as both a warning and an invitation. The woods are not empty. Something ancient and intelligent is out there, watching from the edges of our world.
As you listen, consider how these beings’ behavior has evolved over the decades, how closely they seem to be studying us, and what it means that evidence is so quickly suppressed. These are not campfire tales—they are the testimonies of people whose lives were forever changed by what they saw. And sometimes, in the quiet space between dusk and dawn, the South’s best-kept secrets step out of the darkness and make themselves known.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
(00:23):
dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Folks always ask me why I started my first podcast.
(01:06):
The truth is simple, but maybe not what you'd expect.
It wasn't fame or fortune that drove me to sit
behind a microphone five years ago. It was something much
more personal, much more primal. It was the need to
document the truth about what's really out there in our forests,
hiding just beyond the edge of civilization, watching us from
(01:27):
the shadows between the pines. I started Sasquatch Odyssey, specifically
to document encounter stories from the southeastern United States. Everybody
thinks Bigfoot is a Pacific Northwest phenomenon. They picture the
creature stalking through the misty forests of Washington State or
leaving tracks in the Oregon Wilderness. But I'm here to
(01:48):
tell you that's only part of the story. The real story,
the one that'll make your skin crawl and have you
checking your locks twice before bed. That story lives right
here in the South. Over these past five years, I've
documented hundreds of stories from across the country and around
the world. I've talked to witnesses from the Himalayas who've
seen the Yetti, folks from Australia who've encountered the Yowie,
(02:11):
and people from every corner of North America who've come
face to face with something that shouldn't exist. But no
matter how far I travel, no matter how many stories
I collect, I always find myself coming back to the
land where I was born and raised. There's something about
the South, something about these ancient mountains and endless pine forests,
these swamps and hollers that seems to attract these creatures
(02:34):
like moths to a flame. Maybe it's the isolation. Maybe
it's the fact that we've got more untouched wilderness down
here than most folks realize. Or maybe just maybe it's
because these things have always been here, long before the
Cherokee walked these lands, long before any human set foot
in these dark woods. They're as much a part of
(02:55):
the South as Kudzoo and sweet Tea, just hidden better.
This collection of stories I'm about to share with you,
they're all from right here in the South. Every single
one of them comes from witnesses who shared their accounts
through phone calls, emails, and written testimonies. After all these years,
after all these interviews, I've developed a pretty good sense
(03:17):
for when someone's spinning tales versus recounting genuine trauma. These
folks weren't lying. The fear in their voices, the specific
details they remembered, the way their stories never changed no
matter how many times they told them. These were people
haunted by something real. Some of them were still scared
(03:38):
decades after their encounters. What you're about to hear might
challenge everything you think you know about the world. It
might make you reconsider that camping trip you've been planning,
or have you thinking twice about that shortcut through the
woods you take to get home, And that's probably for
the best, because the truth is, we're not alone out
(03:58):
there in the wilderness have been. So settle in, lock
your doors, and prepare yourself for six encounters that'll make
you understand why down here in the South we don't
whistle in the woods after dark, and we sure as
hell don't go investigating when we hear something big moving
through the trees. These stories span sixty years and six states,
(04:19):
but they all have one thing in common. They're all
absolutely true. Let's start our journey in the heart of
Alabama back in nineteen sixty seven, when the world was
a different place, but the things in the woods were
exactly the same as they've always been. Earl Hutchinson's story
came to me through his grandson. Earl was eighty one
(04:40):
years old by then and had never told anyone outside
his immediate family what happened to him in the summer
of nineteen sixty seven. His written account, sent to me
shortly before his death, contain details that still give me chills.
Back in sixty seven, Earl was twenty nine years old
and worked for Alabama Power company. His job took him
(05:01):
all over central Alabama, checking power lines and substations, often
in remote areas. On July fifteenth of that year, he
was sent to investigate a series of outages along the
Cahaba River, about thirty miles southwest of Birmingham. The area
was rural, even by nineteen sixties Alabama standards, nothing but
forest and the occasional farm for miles in any direction.
(05:25):
Earl started his work around three in the afternoon, following
the power lines through the woods with his equipment. The
temperature was pushing ninety five degrees with humidity that made
the air feel like soup. He was sweating through his
work shirt within minutes, swatting at mosquitoes and cursing the heat.
The first few poles checked out fine, but as he
(05:46):
went deeper into the woods, following the lines toward the river,
he started noticing things that didn't sit right. First, it
was the silence. Anyone who spent time in Alabama woods
in summer knows they're never quiet. There's always something making noise,
whether it's birds, insects, or small animals rustling through the underbrush.
(06:07):
But as Earl got closer to the river, the woods
went dead, silent. Not even the mosquitoes were buzzing. He
remembered thinking maybe a storm was coming, that sometimes animals
go quiet before bad weather, but the sky was clear
blue through the canopy. The second thing he noticed was
the smell. It hit him about a quarter mile from
(06:28):
the river, a musky almost overpowering odor like a wet
dog mixed with something rotten. Earl had hunted these woods
his whole life and knew the smell of every animal
native to Alabama. This wasn't any of them. It was stronger,
more pungent, and it seemed to be getting stronger the
closer he got to the river. When he finally reached
(06:49):
the pole near the river bank, he found the problem.
The transformer at the top had been completely destroyed, torn apart,
like something had grabbed it and ripped it clean off
the pole. But that wasn't what made Earle's blood run cold.
It was the hand prints on the pole itself. They
were enormous, easily twice the size of his own hands,
(07:10):
with distinct finger marks pressed deep into the creosot treated wood.
The Prince went all the way up the forty foot
pole like whatever made them had climbed it as easily
as a ladder. Earl stood there staring at those prints,
trying to make sense of what he was seeing. When
he heard it, a low, rumbling growl from across the river.
(07:31):
He looked up and saw something that his mind couldn't
quite process at first. Standing on the opposite bank, partially
hidden behind a massive oak tree, was a figure. It
was covered in dark brown hair, standing upright like a man,
but broader, taller, more massive than any human being had
a right to be. Earl estimated it was at least
(07:52):
eight feet tall, with shoulders that must have been four
feet across. The creature was watching him. Earle could see
its eye, dark and intelligent, studying him with an intensity
that scared him more than anything. They stood there, frozen,
staring at each other across maybe fifty feet of slow
moving water. Then the creature did something that haunted him
(08:14):
for the rest of his life. It smiled, not a
friendly smile, but a warning showing teeth that were too large,
too sharp, too wrong, to belong to anything Earl new
existed in Alabama or anywhere else. Earle backed away slowly
at first, keeping his eyes on the creature. It didn't move,
(08:34):
just watched him go, But when Earle reached the tree
line and couldn't see it anymore, he ran. He ran
faster than he'd ever run in his life, crashing through
the underbrush, branches, tearing at his clothes and skin. He
could hear something behind him, not running, but moving through
the woods with a casual ease that was somehow more
terrifying than if it had been chasing him outright. He
(08:57):
made it back to his truck and drove straight to
Burmah him without stopping. When his supervisor asked about the
damaged transformer, Earle told him it must have been struck
by lightning. He never went back to that section of
the Cahaba River, and he never told anyone at Alabama
Power what he really saw that day. But he knew,
and his family knew after he finally broke his silence
(09:19):
decades later, that whatever was living along that river in
nineteen sixty seven was still out there. Because these things
they don't just disappear. They've been here longer than us,
and they'll be here long after we're gone. Earl passed
away last year, but before he died, he made his
grandson promise to share his story. He wanted people to
(09:41):
know that there are things in the Alabama woods that
were not meant to encounter, things that watch us from
the shadows, and sometimes when we venture too far into
their territory, let us know we're not welcome. That transformer
was never fixed, by the way, Alabama Power eventually re
routed the lines a band that section entirely. If you
(10:02):
know where to look, you can still find the old
poles out there, including the one with those massive hand
prints burned deep into the wood. But I wouldn't recommend
going looking for it. Some things are better left alone.
Speaking of leaving things alone, that's a lesson that wasn't
learned by a group of hunters in North Georgia in
nineteen seventy three. Their encounter would make Earl's experience look
(10:25):
like a casual meeting between neighbors. Let me tell you
about what happened in the mountains near Blue Ridge, in
a place the locals still won't hunt after dark. Tom
Garrett's acount reached me through a series of letters written
in a shaky hand from his cabin outside Blue Ridge, Georgia.
Tom was seventy eight years old when he decided to
document what happened in November nineteen seventy three. Knowing his
(10:48):
time was running short due to emphysema. His written testimony
was detailed, methodical, and absolutely terrifying. Tom and three buddies
had gone up into the Chattahooche National Forest for their
annual deer hunting trip. They'd been doing this same trip
for ten years, running, always the second week of November,
always the same camp spot near Cooper Creek. The group
(11:12):
consisted of Tom, his brother Dale, and two friends from
the paper mill where they all worked, Bobby Suggs and
James Crawford. They were all experienced hunters, all mountain men
who knew these woods like their own backyards. The first
two days of the hunt went normal enough. They'd bagged
a couple of decent bucks, had them hanging from a
tree near camp to cool. The weather was perfect for hunting,
(11:35):
cold and crisp, with no rain in the forecast. On
the third night, things started getting strange. It began with
the smell. They were sitting around the campfire after dinner,
passing around a flask of bourbon and telling lies about
past hunts when this god awful stench rolled through the camp.
Tom described it as a combination of rotten eggs, wet dog,
(11:59):
and something that had been laying in the sun too long.
It was so strong that Bobby actually gagged, and James
threw his coffee into the fire, thinking maybe something was
wrong with it. Then came the sound. It started as
a low whistle, almost like wind through the trees, but
there was no wind that night. The whistle grew louder closer,
(12:20):
circling their camp. Tom wrote that it was like nothing
he'd ever heard, not quite animal, but sure as hell
not human either. It would start low, build to an
almost painful pitch, then cut off abruptly, only to start
again from a different direction. Dale wanted to investigate, grabbed
his rifle in a flashlight. Tom tried to stop him,
(12:44):
something in his gut, telling him this wasn't right, but
Dale was already heading into the woods. He made it
maybe twenty yards from camp when they heard him scream,
not a startled shout or a curse, but a genuine
scream of terror. Dale came crashing back into camp, his
face white as a sheet in the firelight. He couldn't
(13:04):
speak at first, just pointed back toward the woods with
a shaking hand. When he finally found his voice. He
said there was something out there, something big, walking on
two legs but covered in hair. He shined his light
on it and saw its face, almost human but wrong,
with eyes that reflected the light like a cat's. The
(13:25):
four men huddled around the fire, weapons loaded and ready.
Tom suggested they pack up and leave right then, but
it was a two mile hike back to where they'd
park the trucks, through dense forest in the dark. They
decided to wait until dawn. That's when things got really bad.
The whistling came back, but this time it was answered
by another whistle from the opposite side of camp, then
(13:48):
another Tom counted at least four distinct sources. They were
surrounded the creatures, and by now all four men knew
that's what they were dealing with. Started throwing things into
the camp. First it was small stones and sticks, then
larger rocks, branches as thick as a man's arm. One rock,
(14:08):
about the size of a bowling ball, landed so close
to the fire it sent embers flying everywhere. Bobby lost
his nerve and fired his thirty ought six into the darkness.
The muzzle flash lit up the edge of the camp
for a split second, and in that brief moment, Tom
saw them. Three figures, massive and hair covered, standing just
(14:29):
outside the circle of firelight. They were at least seven
feet tall, probably more, with broad shoulders and long arms
that hung past their knees. Their faces were almost human,
but with heavy brow ridges and flat noses. The one
in the center was looking right at Tom, and its
expression wasn't fear or anger, it was contempt. After Bobby shot,
(14:52):
all hell broke loose, the creature started screaming, a sound
Tom described as a woman's scream mixed with a lion's roared.
Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
after these messages. They began shaking the trees around the camp,
and these weren't saplings. These were full grown pines and oaks,
(15:14):
shaking them so violently that branches were breaking off and
falling into the camp. The men fired more shots into
the darkness, not aiming at anything specific, just trying to
keep whatever was out there at bay. Then suddenly everything stopped.
The screaming, the tree shaking, the rock throwing, all of
it just ceased. The silence was almost worse than the chaos.
(15:38):
The men stayed awake all night, backs to the fire guns,
ready jumping at every sound. When dawn finally broke, they
discovered something that made them pack up and leave immediately.
The deer they'd hung up two good sized bucks, were gone,
not just taken down, but gone entirely, along with the
rope they'd been hanging from. But that wasn't the worst part.
(16:02):
Arranged in a perfect circle around their camp, about thirty
feet out were dozens of stick structures. Tom called them scarecrows,
but they were more like warnings branches twisted together in
humanoid shapes, some seven or eight feet tall, all facing
inward toward the camp. The men left everything except their
guns and the clothes on their backs. They practically ran
(16:25):
the two miles back to the trucks. When they got there,
they found massive handprints all over the vehicles, pressed into
the dust and dirt on the windows and hoods. One
of the truck's side mirrors had been twisted completely around
the metal, bent like it was made of rubber. They
never went back for their gear. Tom never hunted that
area again, and neither did the others. Bobby Suggs moved
(16:49):
to Florida the next year and refused to ever talk
about what happened. James Crawford became a heavy drinker and
died in a car accident in nineteen seventy six. Dale
Tom's brother never stepped foot in the woods again, not
even for a picnic. Tom's letters expressed that what bothered
him most, what kept him up at night, even fifty
years later, wasn't the fear he felt that night. It
(17:12):
was the intelligence behind those actions. These weren't animals acting
on instinct. They were something else, something that understood exactly
what they were doing. They could have killed those four
men easily, but they didn't. They just wanted them gone,
wanted them to know that they were trespassing in territory
that belonged to something else, something that had probably claimed
(17:35):
those mountains long before the Cherokee, long before anyone. From
the mountains of North Georgia, we head north to Tennessee,
to the Great Smoky Mountains, where, in nineteen eighty five,
a park ranger had an encounter that changed everything she
thought she knew about the natural world. Her story is
different from the others because she was a trained observer,
(17:56):
a scientist, someone whose job was to document and protect wildlife.
What she documented that summer night wasn't in any field guide.
Rebecca Martinez's testimony came to me through a long series
of encrypted emails two years ago. She was living in Asheville, retired,
and finally ready to share what happened to her on
(18:17):
the night of August twenty third, nineteen eighty five. As
a trained wildlife biologist with a master's degree from the
University of Tennessee, her account carried a scientific precision that
made it all the more compelling. Rebecca was thirty two
years old in nineteen eighty five, working as a backcountry
ranger in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She had been
(18:38):
with the Park Service for eight years and was stationed
at the Mount Sterling fire Tower for a two week
rotation part of the park's firewatch program. The tower sat
at five thy eight hundred feet elevation, accessible only by
a six mile hike from the nearest road. It was
isolated duty, just her and a radio watching for smoke
(18:58):
during the dry summer month us that August had been
particularly dry, with several small fires already reported in the region.
Rebecca was extra vigilant, using her binoculars to scan the
ridges and valleys constantly. On the evening of the twenty third,
around seven point thirty, she noticed something moving through a
clearing on the ridge below her tower, maybe a quarter
(19:20):
mile away. At first, she thought it was a black bear.
The Smokies have the highest density of black bears in
the eastern United States, and Rebecca had observed hundreds of
them over her years in the park. But as she
focused her binoculars, she realized this wasn't moving like a bear.
It was walking upright, steadily, purposefully, not with the occasional
(19:42):
bipedal shuffle of a bear, but with a smooth, almost
human gait. Rebecca was a scientist trained to observe and document.
She grabbed her notebook and began recording what she saw.
The figure was dark brown or black, difficult to tell
in the fading light. It was massive, she estimated seven
to eight feet tall based on comparison with the trees
(20:05):
it passed. Its arms were disproportionately long, swinging as it walked.
Its head seemed to sit directly on its shoulders with
no visible neck, and its entire body was covered in
hair or fur. She watched it for maybe three minutes
as it crossed the clearing and disappeared into the tree line.
Rebecca's hands were shaking as she wrote her notes, not
(20:27):
from fear, but from excitement. She thought she might be
witnessing something extraordinary, possibly an unknown primate species or a
case of gigantism in the black bear population. As darkness fell,
Rebecca tried to radio the ranger station to report what
she'd seen, but the radio was dead nothing but static.
(20:48):
This wasn't unusual. Atmospheric conditions in the mountains often interfered
with radio signals. She decided to document everything thoroughly and
report it when her rotation ended in three days. Around midnight,
Rebecca was awakened by something hitting the tower. Not the wind,
which was calm that night, but deliberate impacts against the
(21:08):
support posts. The tower, which stood sixty feet high, was
shaking slightly with each hit. She grabbed her flashlight and
looked out the window, shining the beam down toward the
base of the tower. What she saw defied everything she
knew about wildlife behavior. The creature from the clearing was there,
and it was methodically testing the tower's support posts, pushing
(21:30):
against each one, seemingly evaluating the structure's stability. In the flashlight, beam,
she could see it clearly for the first time. Its
face was almost human, but with a pronounced brow ridge
and a flat nose. Its eyes reflected the light with
a green eye shine, like a nocturnal predator. But it
was the hands that struck her most massive but remarkably
(21:53):
human like, with ipposable thumbs that gripped the posts as
it pushed. The creature looked up at her, directly into
the flashlight beam, and Rebecca wrote that its expression was
one of curiosity, not aggression. It tilted its head slightly,
the way a dog does when it's trying to understand something.
Then it began to climb. Rebecca had studied primates, knew
(22:16):
their climbing capabilities, but what she witnessed was beyond anything
in the scientific literature. The creature scaled the tower's support
structure with incredible speed and agility, using both hands and feet,
its massive weight causing the entire tower to sway. Within seconds,
it was at the observation deck level, forty feet up.
(22:37):
Rebecca retreated to the center of the cabin, grabbing the
fire axe from the wall. The creature didn't try to enter, though,
Instead it circled the observation deck, looking in each window
studying the interior. She could hear its breathing, deep and rhythmic,
and smell that distinctive musky odor through the gaps in
the windows. It spent several minutes examining the door, running
(23:01):
its fingers along the edges, testing the lock mechanism. Then,
as suddenly as it had appeared, it climbed back down
and walked away into the darkness. Rebecca stayed awake the
rest of the night, axe in hand, but it didn't return.
When dawn broke, she went outside to examine the tower.
What she found challenged her scientific skepticism to its core.
(23:25):
There were handprints on the glass windows, enormous and clearly
showing dermal ridges like fingerprints, but much larger. On the
metal support posts were scratches and indentations where the creature
had gripped during its climb. Most significantly caught on a
rough edge of metal was a tuft of dark brown hair.
(23:45):
Rebecca carefully collected the hair sample, placing it in an
evidence envelope from her ranger kit. She completed her rotation
three days later and immediately reported the encounter to her supervisors.
The response was not what she expected. She was told
firmly but politely, to forget what she'd seen. The hair
(24:05):
sample was confiscated, her notes were taken, and she was
transferred to a front country position where she'd have no
more isolated assignments. Rebecca tried to push the issue, contacted
professors at the University of Tennessee, even reached out to
primatologists at other institutions, but without physical evidence and with
pressure from her employers, she eventually gave up. She left
(24:29):
the Park Service two years later and became a high
school biology teacher. Before she left the Park Service, she
had accessed incident reports going back decades and found dozens
of similar encounters reported by rangers, hikers, and maintenance workers,
all carefully filed away and marked as resolved with explanations
like bear sightings or misidentification. The Park Service knew she
(24:52):
was certain of it. They knew these creatures were out
there and had made a decision to keep it quiet.
From the ancient mountains of Tennessee, we travel west to
the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where, in nineteen ninety one,
a family's camping trip became a nightmare that would tear
them apart and leave scars that never fully healed. This
(25:12):
encounter was different because it involved children, and because what
happened was so traumatic that it destroyed a marriage and
sent one person to a psychiatric facility. Jennifer was twelve
in the summer of nineteen ninety one when her family
went camping in the Ozark National Forest. She was the
only family member willing or able to talk about what happened.
(25:33):
Her father died of a heart attack in two thousand
and five, her mother was in a memory care facility
with early onset dementia, and her younger brother Michael, hadn't
spoken to her in over a decade. The Wash family
was from Memphis, middle class, normal in every way. Dad
was an accountant, Mom taught elementary school. They weren't outdoorsy
(25:54):
people particularly, but they wanted their kids to experience nature,
to unplug from Nintendo and television for a week. They
borrowed camping gear from friends, bought a guidebook, and headed
to Arkansas for what was supposed to be a wholesome
family adventure. They set up camp near Richland Creek in
a designated camping area, but one that was fairly remote.
(26:16):
It was just them, no other campers within miles. The
first two days were exactly what they'd hoped for. They hiked,
swam in the creek, roasted marshmallows, told ghost stories. Jennifer
remembered being happy, feeling closer to her family than she
had in years. On the third night, everything changed. They'd
(26:37):
gone to bed around ten, all four of them in
a large family tent. Jennifer woke up sometime after midnight,
needing to use the bathroom. The campground had pit toilets
about fifty yards from their campsite. She grabbed her flashlight
and unzipped the tent as quietly as possible, not wanting
to wake anyone. The moment she stepped outside, she knew
(26:58):
something was wrong. The forest was completely silent, not even
the sound of crickets or frogs from the creek. But
more than that, there was a feeling, a presence, like
being watched by something predatory. Jennifer stood frozen outside the tent,
her flashlight beam wavering as her hand shook. Then she
saw the eyes, multiple pairs of eyes, reflecting her flashlight
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from the tree line around their camp. They were too
high to be deer or coyotes, at least seven feet
off the ground, and they weren't running away like wild
animals should when hit with light. They were just watching.
Jennifer screamed and dropped her flashlight. Her parents and brother
came tumbling out of the tent, her father with a
camping lantern. In the broader light of the lantern, they
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all saw them. Three creatures, massive and covered in dark fur,
standing at the edge of their camp site. They were bipedal,
like humans, but wrong in every way. Their arms were
too long, their heads seemed to sit directly on their shoulders,
and their faces were almost human, but with features that
were somehow primitive and advanced. At the same time, Jennifer's
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mother started praying out loud, falling to her knees. Her
father pushed the family behind him, holding the lantern high,
trying to look bigger, more threatening. Michael, only nine years old,
was crying hysterically. The creatures didn't attack, though, they just
stood there, watching, occasionally making low, grunting sounds to each
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other that almost sounded like communication. Then one of them,
the largest, took a step forward. Jennifer's father yelled at it,
waved the lantern even through a rock. The creature caught
the rock, caught it mid air. Like it was nothing,
examined it for a moment, then crushed it in its hand,
letting the fragments fall to the ground. The message was clear.
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They could hurt the family if they wanted to, but
they were choosing not to. The standoff lasted maybe ten minutes,
though Jennifer said it felt like hours. Then, without warning,
the creatures turned and melted back into the forest. The
family waited until dawn, huddled together in the car, not
daring to go back to the tent. At first light,
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they discovered their entire campsite had been ransacked while they
were in the car. The tent was shredded, their cooler
was destroyed, food scattered everywhere. But the most disturbing thing
was that their shoes, all of their shoes had been
arranged in a perfect line leading from the campsite into
the forest. They left immediately, didn't even bother, packing most
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of their gear. The drive home was silent. No one
knew what to say, how to process what they'd seen.
Back in Memphis, they tried to return to normal life,
but it was impossible. Jennifer's mother started having panic attacks,
couldn't sleep, eventually had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized
for three months. Her father threw himself into work, started
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drinking heavily, and refused to ever discuss what happened. Stay
tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
these messages. Michael, the youngest, was affected the worst. He
started having night terrors, would wake up screaming about the
eyes in the forest. He became withdrawn, stopped playing with friends,
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would only draw pictures of dark figures with long arms.
The family tried therapy, but how do you tell a
therapist that your family trauma stems from an encounter with
something that supposedly doesn't exist. The family fell apart within
two years. Jennifer's parents divorced, her mother moving back to
live with family in Ohio, taking Michael with her. Jennifer
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stayed with her father, but their relationship was never the same.
He died when she was twenty seven, and she found
his journal while going through his things. He'd written about
that night, obsessively trying to make sense of it. His
final entry, written the day before his heart attack, simply
said they were real. God help us, they were real.
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Jennifer spent years trying to understand what happened to her family.
That night. She's researched bigfoot encounters, joined support groups, even
returned to the Ozarks once, though she couldn't bring herself
to go back to that specific camp site. She knows
most people wouldn't believe her, would think her family experienced
some kind of shared delusion, But she knows what she saw,
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what they all saw, and she knows that somewhere in
the Ozark Mountains, those creatures still roam, still watch, still
decide who lives and who doesn't based on criteria. We
can't begin to understand that encounter in Arkansas destroyed a family.
But sometimes these creatures do more than just frighten. Sometimes
they take people. From the Ozarks we travel east to
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North Carolina, where in two thousand and two, an experienced
hiker disappeared for three days in the Pizga National Forest.
When he was found, he was a live but changed,
and what he described during his missing time challenges all
the preconceived notions about these creatures. David was a thirty
five year old software engineer from Charlotte in two thousand
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and two, an experienced hiker who spent most weekends in
the mountains. He'd hike the Appalachian trail in sections summitted
multiple fourteen ers in Colorado, and knew the Pizga National
Forest like his own backyard, which makes what happened to
him all the more inexplicable. On October fourth, two thousand
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and two, David set out for a solo overnight hike
in the Shining Rock Wilderness area of Pisga. He'd done
this exact route dozens of times, a fifteen mile loop
that would take him up to Black Balsam Knob and back.
He checked in at the ranger station, filed his hiking plan,
and hit the trail around noon. He was expected back
the next day by six in the evening. David never
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made it to his planned camp site. According to his account,
he was at five miles into the hike, climbing through
a dense rhododendron thicket when he heard what sounded like
a woman crying somewhere off the trail. His first thought
was that another hiker was injured. He called out, but
the crying stopped immediately. Then he smelled it that distinctive
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musky odor that every witness describes, like a wet dog
rolled in something dead. The next thing David remembered was
waking up in complete darkness, not the darkness of night
in the forest, but absolute blackness, like being in a cave.
He was lying on what felt like pine needles and leaves,
and he could hear breathing, heavy rhythmic breathing from multiple
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sources around him. He tried to sit up, but hit
his head on something rock or hard packed earth. He
was in some kind of low cave or den. As
his eyes adjusted, David realized there was a faint light
coming from somewhere deeper in the cave. He could make
out shapes moving in that dim light, large shapes too
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large to be human. The smell was overwhelming, that same
musky odor, but concentrated, like being inside a bar den,
but worse. He tried to crawl toward the entrance, toward
what he hoped was outside, but something grabbed his ankle,
not aggressively, but firmly, the way you might grab a
child who was about to touch a hot stove. The hand,
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and it was definitely a hand, was massive, easily encompassing
his entire ankle. It held him for a moment, then released.
David heard what sounded like vocalizations, not quite speech, but
more complex than animal sounds like a language he couldn't understand.
He lay still, terrified, trying to make sense of what
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was happening. Over the next hours or maybe days, David
said he lost all sense of time. He was given
water and food. The water was in what felt like
a hollowed out gored and the food was a mixture
of nuts, bare trees, and something meat like that he
couldn't identify. He wasn't restrained, but every time he tried
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to leave, one of the creatures would gently but firmly
guide him back to his spot in the cave. During
the periods of dim light, which David later realized corresponded
to daylight filtering in from somewhere, he could see his
captors more clearly. There were three of them, two adults
and what appeared to be a juvenile. They were exactly
what you'd expect, massive hair covered bipedal beings with faces
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that were almost human but not quite. The adult male
was enormous, probably eight feet tall and built like a linebacker,
covered in dark brown hair. The female was smaller, but
still massive by human standards, maybe seven feet tall, with
slightly lighter, reddish brown hair. The juvenile was about the
size of an adult human, but clearly young, more curious
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than the adults, often coming close to David and examining
his clothes and gear. What struck David most was their intelligence.
They used tools, simple ones, but tools. Nonetheless, They had
bowls made from gourds, used sticks to dig, and seemed
to have a complex social structure. They communicated constantly with
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each other through a combination of vocalizations and gestures. The
juvenile seemed to be trying to communicate with David, making
sounds and gestures, then waiting as if expecting a response.
On what David thought was the third day, he woke
to find the cave empty except for the juvenile. The
young creature was examining David's hiking boots, turning them over,
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feeling the laces, clearly fascinated by the construction. David slowly
sat up, and the juvenile didn't stop him. Instead, it
handed him his boots, then pointed toward the cave entrance.
David didn't need a second invitation. He put on his
boots and crawled toward the light. The entrance was hidden
behind a massive fallen tree and a curtain of rhododendron,
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completely invisible from the outside. He emerged on a hillside
he didn't recognize. Disoriented and weak, he could hear the
juvenile making sounds behind him, almost like it was saying goodbye,
but he didn't look back. It took David another full
day to find a trail and make his way back
to civilization. By then, a massive search and rescue operation
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was underway. He'd been missing for four days. When rescuers
found him, he was dehydrated and disoriented. He told them
he'd fallen, hit his head, and had been unconscious for
most of the missing time. He never mentioned the creatures
to anyone except his therapist, and only then after years
of PTSD and nightmares. The physical evidence was limited but intriguing.
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David's clothes had a strong, musky odor that persisted through
multiple washings. He had marks on his ankle consistent with
being gripped by a large hand, though doctors attributed them
to a possible fall. Most interesting was a mixture of
plant matter found in his pocket that he claimed the
creatures had given him as food. A botanist friend analyzed
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it informally and found it contained several plants known to
have nutritional and mild antibiotic properties. Combined in a way
that suggested deliberate preparation rather than random gathering. David never
hiked alone again. He moved away from North Carolina took
a job in Arizona, somewhere far from the dense forests
of the east. But he says that he didn't think
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the creatures meant him harm. If they'd wanted to hurt him,
they easily could have. Instead, they seemed curious, maybe even
protective in their own way. The juvenile especially, seemed fascinated
by him, like a human child might be fascinated by
an exotic animal. David's experience suggests something that indigenous peoples
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have long believed, that these creatures are not just animals,
but something more complex, with their own intelligence, culture, and
reasons for romaine hidden. Perhaps sometimes for reasons we don't understand,
they choose to interact with us, to study us the
way we would study them if given the chance. From
the mountains of North Carolina, we make our final journey
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to the swamps and pine forests of South Carolina. We're
just eight years ago. In twenty fourteen, a group of
college students had an encounter that was captured on video.
Though that video was quickly confiscated, and the students were
convinced to sign non disclosure agreements. One of them, however,
decided that some stories need to be told, regardless of
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the consequences. The most recent story in this collection comes
from Marcus Williams, though that's not his real name. He
was a twenty one year old biology major at the
College of Charleston in twenty fourteen. Marcus reached out to
me through encrypted channels, still paranoid about violating the NDA
he'd signed, but determined that the truth needed to be documented.
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Marcus and five friends decide to spend spring break camping
in Francis Maryan National Forest instead of going to the
beach like everyone else. They were all science majors environmental
biology and ecology students who wanted to do some amateur
research on the forest's ecosystem. They had university issued equipment,
including trail cameras, audio recording devices, and a high definition
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video camera for documenting their findings. They set up camp
in a remote section of the forest near the Santee River,
in an area that required a special permit to access.
It was pristine wilderness, exactly what they were looking for.
The first two days were productive. They documented various plant
and animal species, recorded bird calls, and collected water samples.
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On the third night, March twentieth, twenty fourteen, everything changed.
It started with their trail cameras being triggered repeatedly throughout
the night, but when they checked the memory cards in
the morning, they were blank. Not a rape east but
showing no recorded activity, despite the trigger logs indicating dozens
of events. Their audio equipment had picked up something, though,
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low frequency vocalizations that their professor would later tell them
were below the range of most known animals in the region.
That night, they decided to stay up and investigate. Two students,
Marcus and his friend Tyler, took the HD video camera
and night vision equipment and set up about one hundred
yards from camp in a blind they'd constructed for wildlife observation.
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The other four stayed in camp with walkie talkies, ready
to document anything unusual. Around two in the morning, Marcus
saw movement through the night vision scope. At first, he
thought it was a bear, but the shape was wrong.
It was walking upright, smoothly. Deliberately. He nudged Tyler, who
started recording with the HD camera equipped with an infrared illuminator.
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What they captured over the next forty three minutes would
change their lives. The creature was massive, approximately seven and
a half feet tall based on comparison with trees they
later measured. It was covered in dark hair except for
its face, hands, and the soles of its feet. It
moved with a fluid grace that seemed impossible for something
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so large. But what truly astounded them was its behavior.
The creature approached one of their trail cameras, examined it carefully,
then did something extraordinary. It opened the camera case, removed
the memory card, examined it in the moonlight, then replaced
it and closed the case. It knew exactly what the
camera was and how to disable it without destroying it.
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This wasn't random curiosity. This was deliberate, intelligent behavior. Tyler
kept filming as the creature moved through their research area.
It examined their equipment with obvious interest, picked up and
studied their field guides, even opened a sample container and
smelled the contents before carefully replacing the lid. At one point,
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it stood still and seemed to be listening to the
audio playback device they'd left running. Its head tilted in
an almost human gesture of concentration. Then it looked directly
at their blind Marcus said that moment was the most
terrifying and exhilarating of his life. The creature knew they
were there, had probably known the entire time. It walked
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toward them, slowly, deliberately, stopping about twenty feet away. In
the infrared light of the camera, they could see its
face clearly. The features were heavy, primitive in some ways,
but the eyes showed undeniable intelligence. The creature made a sound,
not quite a word, but a vocalization that conveyed clear displeasure.
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Then it turned and walked back into the forest, disappearing
into the darkness. The students packed up immediately and left
the forest that night. When they returned to the university
and showed their professor the footage, things moved quickly. Within hours,
representatives from a federal agency that marked still can't identify
showed up. They confiscated all equipment, all recordings, and all notes.
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The students were interviewed separately, told that they had filmed
a person in an elaborate costume conducting a hoax, and
they were presented with NDAs that came with both threats
of prosecution and offers of research grant money if they signed.
They all signed, He said. What bothers him most about
the experience isn't that the creature existed, but that the
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government clearly knew about them and had protocols in place
or containment when evidence surfaced. Marcus graduated and went on
to get his PhD in biology. He now teaches at
a university he asked me not to name, but he
says the encounter shaped his entire career. He studies human
evolution and primate behavior, always looking for clues about where
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these creatures might fit in the taxonomic tree. His conclusion,
based on what he observed is that they're not apes
or missing links. There's something else, sibly, another branch of
the hominin family tree that developed parallel to us, choosing
isolation over civilization. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
(45:10):
We'll be back after these messages. The Francis Maryan National
Forest is still there, still wild, still hiding its secrets.
The government still issues special permits for that area, but
they're rarely approved, and sometimes hikers report finding strange stick structures,
hearing unusual vocalizations, or catching a glimpse of something that
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shouldn't exist, but most people keep quiet because some truths
are too strange for the world to accept. These six stories,
spanning from nineteen sixty seven to twenty fourteen from Alabama
to South Carolina, paint a picture that's hard to ignore.
These aren't isolated incidents or cases of misidentification. These are
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consistent encounters with something that lives alongside us, hidden in
the vast wilderness areas that still exist in the American South.
What strikes me most about these accounts is not just
the similarity of the creatures described, but the intelligence they display.
They're not mindless animals operating on instinct. They understand our technology,
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can disable our cameras, and seem to make deliberate choices
about when and how to interact with us. They could
hurt us, kill us, even but they generally choose not to.
They seem content to remain hidden, emerging only occasionally to
remind us that we're not the only intelligent species on
this planet. The South, with its dense forests, sprawling swamps,
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and isolated mountain hollers, provides perfect habitat for a species
that wants to avoid human contact. We've got millions of
acres of wilderness here, places where a careful, intelligent creature
could live undetected for centuries, and maybe that's exactly what's
been happening. Every person who shared their story with me
took a risk. They risked ridicule, risk their reputations, in
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some cases, risked legal action. But they all felt the
same need, the need to have their truth documented, to
know that someone believed them, because seeing one of these
creatures changes you. It makes you realize that the world
is far stranger and more wonderful than we're taught to believe.
I started my podcast to collect these stories, to preserve them,
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to look for patterns and truth in the tales people tell.
After five years and hundreds of interviews, I can tell
you with certainty that something is out there, something intelligent,
something that's been here longer than us, something that watches
us from the shadows, and for reasons we don't understand,
chooses to remain hidden. So the next time you're in
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the woods and you get that feeling of being watched,
that primitive alertness that makes the hair on your neck
stand up, trust it. Trust millions of years of evolution
that gave you that instinct and maybe just maybe give
a little nod to the forest, an acknowledgment that you
know you're not alone and that you mean no harm.
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Because they're watching. They're always watching, and sometimes if you're
very unlucky or very fortunate, depending on how you look
at it, they might just let you see them too.
Sleep Tight, folks, and remember we share this world with mysteries.
We're only beginning to understand. The truth isn't just out there.
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It's closer than you think, hiding in the shadows of
the pines, waiting in the places we've forgotten to look
until next time. Keep your eyes open, your wits about you,
and always always respect the woods, because you never know
what might be watching back.
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.
Folks always ask me why I started my first podcast.
(01:06):
The truth is simple, but maybe not what you'd expect.
It wasn't fame or fortune that drove me to sit
behind a microphone five years ago. It was something much
more personal, much more primal. It was the need to
document the truth about what's really out there in our forests,
hiding just beyond the edge of civilization, watching us from
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the shadows between the pines. I started Sasquatch Odyssey, specifically
to document encounter stories from the southeastern United States. Everybody
thinks Bigfoot is a Pacific Northwest phenomenon. They picture the
creature stalking through the misty forests of Washington State or
leaving tracks in the Oregon Wilderness. But I'm here to
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tell you that's only part of the story. The real story,
the one that'll make your skin crawl and have you
checking your locks twice before bed. That story lives right
here in the South. Over these past five years, I've
documented hundreds of stories from across the country and around
the world. I've talked to witnesses from the Himalayas who've
seen the Yetti, folks from Australia who've encountered the Yowie,
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and people from every corner of North America who've come
face to face with something that shouldn't exist. But no
matter how far I travel, no matter how many stories
I collect, I always find myself coming back to the
land where I was born and raised. There's something about
the South, something about these ancient mountains and endless pine forests,
these swamps and hollers that seems to attract these creatures
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like moths to a flame. Maybe it's the isolation. Maybe
it's the fact that we've got more untouched wilderness down
here than most folks realize. Or maybe just maybe it's
because these things have always been here, long before the
Cherokee walked these lands, long before any human set foot
in these dark woods. They're as much a part of
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the South as Kudzoo and sweet Tea, just hidden better.
This collection of stories I'm about to share with you,
they're all from right here in the South. Every single
one of them comes from witnesses who shared their accounts
through phone calls, emails, and written testimonies. After all these years,
after all these interviews, I've developed a pretty good sense
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for when someone's spinning tales versus recounting genuine trauma. These
folks weren't lying. The fear in their voices, the specific
details they remembered, the way their stories never changed no
matter how many times they told them. These were people
haunted by something real. Some of them were still scared
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decades after their encounters. What you're about to hear might
challenge everything you think you know about the world. It
might make you reconsider that camping trip you've been planning,
or have you thinking twice about that shortcut through the
woods you take to get home, And that's probably for
the best, because the truth is, we're not alone out
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there in the wilderness have been. So settle in, lock
your doors, and prepare yourself for six encounters that'll make
you understand why down here in the South we don't
whistle in the woods after dark, and we sure as
hell don't go investigating when we hear something big moving
through the trees. These stories span sixty years and six states,
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but they all have one thing in common. They're all
absolutely true. Let's start our journey in the heart of
Alabama back in nineteen sixty seven, when the world was
a different place, but the things in the woods were
exactly the same as they've always been. Earl Hutchinson's story
came to me through his grandson. Earl was eighty one
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years old by then and had never told anyone outside
his immediate family what happened to him in the summer
of nineteen sixty seven. His written account, sent to me
shortly before his death, contain details that still give me chills.
Back in sixty seven, Earl was twenty nine years old
and worked for Alabama Power company. His job took him
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all over central Alabama, checking power lines and substations, often
in remote areas. On July fifteenth of that year, he
was sent to investigate a series of outages along the
Cahaba River, about thirty miles southwest of Birmingham. The area
was rural, even by nineteen sixties Alabama standards, nothing but
forest and the occasional farm for miles in any direction.
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Earl started his work around three in the afternoon, following
the power lines through the woods with his equipment. The
temperature was pushing ninety five degrees with humidity that made
the air feel like soup. He was sweating through his
work shirt within minutes, swatting at mosquitoes and cursing the heat.
The first few poles checked out fine, but as he
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went deeper into the woods, following the lines toward the river,
he started noticing things that didn't sit right. First, it
was the silence. Anyone who spent time in Alabama woods
in summer knows they're never quiet. There's always something making noise,
whether it's birds, insects, or small animals rustling through the underbrush.
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But as Earl got closer to the river, the woods
went dead, silent. Not even the mosquitoes were buzzing. He
remembered thinking maybe a storm was coming, that sometimes animals
go quiet before bad weather, but the sky was clear
blue through the canopy. The second thing he noticed was
the smell. It hit him about a quarter mile from
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the river, a musky almost overpowering odor like a wet
dog mixed with something rotten. Earl had hunted these woods
his whole life and knew the smell of every animal
native to Alabama. This wasn't any of them. It was stronger,
more pungent, and it seemed to be getting stronger the
closer he got to the river. When he finally reached
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the pole near the river bank, he found the problem.
The transformer at the top had been completely destroyed, torn apart,
like something had grabbed it and ripped it clean off
the pole. But that wasn't what made Earle's blood run cold.
It was the hand prints on the pole itself. They
were enormous, easily twice the size of his own hands,
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with distinct finger marks pressed deep into the creosot treated wood.
The Prince went all the way up the forty foot
pole like whatever made them had climbed it as easily
as a ladder. Earl stood there staring at those prints,
trying to make sense of what he was seeing. When
he heard it, a low, rumbling growl from across the river.
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He looked up and saw something that his mind couldn't
quite process at first. Standing on the opposite bank, partially
hidden behind a massive oak tree, was a figure. It
was covered in dark brown hair, standing upright like a man,
but broader, taller, more massive than any human being had
a right to be. Earl estimated it was at least
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eight feet tall, with shoulders that must have been four
feet across. The creature was watching him. Earle could see
its eye, dark and intelligent, studying him with an intensity
that scared him more than anything. They stood there, frozen,
staring at each other across maybe fifty feet of slow
moving water. Then the creature did something that haunted him
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for the rest of his life. It smiled, not a
friendly smile, but a warning showing teeth that were too large,
too sharp, too wrong, to belong to anything Earl new
existed in Alabama or anywhere else. Earle backed away slowly
at first, keeping his eyes on the creature. It didn't move,
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just watched him go, But when Earle reached the tree
line and couldn't see it anymore, he ran. He ran
faster than he'd ever run in his life, crashing through
the underbrush, branches, tearing at his clothes and skin. He
could hear something behind him, not running, but moving through
the woods with a casual ease that was somehow more
terrifying than if it had been chasing him outright. He
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made it back to his truck and drove straight to
Burmah him without stopping. When his supervisor asked about the
damaged transformer, Earle told him it must have been struck
by lightning. He never went back to that section of
the Cahaba River, and he never told anyone at Alabama
Power what he really saw that day. But he knew,
and his family knew after he finally broke his silence
(09:19):
decades later, that whatever was living along that river in
nineteen sixty seven was still out there. Because these things
they don't just disappear. They've been here longer than us,
and they'll be here long after we're gone. Earl passed
away last year, but before he died, he made his
grandson promise to share his story. He wanted people to
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know that there are things in the Alabama woods that
were not meant to encounter, things that watch us from
the shadows, and sometimes when we venture too far into
their territory, let us know we're not welcome. That transformer
was never fixed, by the way, Alabama Power eventually re
routed the lines a band that section entirely. If you
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know where to look, you can still find the old
poles out there, including the one with those massive hand
prints burned deep into the wood. But I wouldn't recommend
going looking for it. Some things are better left alone.
Speaking of leaving things alone, that's a lesson that wasn't
learned by a group of hunters in North Georgia in
nineteen seventy three. Their encounter would make Earl's experience look
(10:25):
like a casual meeting between neighbors. Let me tell you
about what happened in the mountains near Blue Ridge, in
a place the locals still won't hunt after dark. Tom
Garrett's acount reached me through a series of letters written
in a shaky hand from his cabin outside Blue Ridge, Georgia.
Tom was seventy eight years old when he decided to
document what happened in November nineteen seventy three. Knowing his
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time was running short due to emphysema. His written testimony
was detailed, methodical, and absolutely terrifying. Tom and three buddies
had gone up into the Chattahooche National Forest for their
annual deer hunting trip. They'd been doing this same trip
for ten years, running, always the second week of November,
always the same camp spot near Cooper Creek. The group
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consisted of Tom, his brother Dale, and two friends from
the paper mill where they all worked, Bobby Suggs and
James Crawford. They were all experienced hunters, all mountain men
who knew these woods like their own backyards. The first
two days of the hunt went normal enough. They'd bagged
a couple of decent bucks, had them hanging from a
tree near camp to cool. The weather was perfect for hunting,
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cold and crisp, with no rain in the forecast. On
the third night, things started getting strange. It began with
the smell. They were sitting around the campfire after dinner,
passing around a flask of bourbon and telling lies about
past hunts when this god awful stench rolled through the camp.
Tom described it as a combination of rotten eggs, wet dog,
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and something that had been laying in the sun too long.
It was so strong that Bobby actually gagged, and James
threw his coffee into the fire, thinking maybe something was
wrong with it. Then came the sound. It started as
a low whistle, almost like wind through the trees, but
there was no wind that night. The whistle grew louder closer,
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circling their camp. Tom wrote that it was like nothing
he'd ever heard, not quite animal, but sure as hell
not human either. It would start low, build to an
almost painful pitch, then cut off abruptly, only to start
again from a different direction. Dale wanted to investigate, grabbed
his rifle in a flashlight. Tom tried to stop him,
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something in his gut, telling him this wasn't right, but
Dale was already heading into the woods. He made it
maybe twenty yards from camp when they heard him scream,
not a startled shout or a curse, but a genuine
scream of terror. Dale came crashing back into camp, his
face white as a sheet in the firelight. He couldn't
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speak at first, just pointed back toward the woods with
a shaking hand. When he finally found his voice. He
said there was something out there, something big, walking on
two legs but covered in hair. He shined his light
on it and saw its face, almost human but wrong,
with eyes that reflected the light like a cat's. The
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four men huddled around the fire, weapons loaded and ready.
Tom suggested they pack up and leave right then, but
it was a two mile hike back to where they'd
park the trucks, through dense forest in the dark. They
decided to wait until dawn. That's when things got really bad.
The whistling came back, but this time it was answered
by another whistle from the opposite side of camp, then
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another Tom counted at least four distinct sources. They were
surrounded the creatures, and by now all four men knew
that's what they were dealing with. Started throwing things into
the camp. First it was small stones and sticks, then
larger rocks, branches as thick as a man's arm. One rock,
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about the size of a bowling ball, landed so close
to the fire it sent embers flying everywhere. Bobby lost
his nerve and fired his thirty ought six into the darkness.
The muzzle flash lit up the edge of the camp
for a split second, and in that brief moment, Tom
saw them. Three figures, massive and hair covered, standing just
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outside the circle of firelight. They were at least seven
feet tall, probably more, with broad shoulders and long arms
that hung past their knees. Their faces were almost human,
but with heavy brow ridges and flat noses. The one
in the center was looking right at Tom, and its
expression wasn't fear or anger, it was contempt. After Bobby shot,
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all hell broke loose, the creature started screaming, a sound
Tom described as a woman's scream mixed with a lion's roared.
Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
after these messages. They began shaking the trees around the camp,
and these weren't saplings. These were full grown pines and oaks,
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shaking them so violently that branches were breaking off and
falling into the camp. The men fired more shots into
the darkness, not aiming at anything specific, just trying to
keep whatever was out there at bay. Then suddenly everything stopped.
The screaming, the tree shaking, the rock throwing, all of
it just ceased. The silence was almost worse than the chaos.
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The men stayed awake all night, backs to the fire guns,
ready jumping at every sound. When dawn finally broke, they
discovered something that made them pack up and leave immediately.
The deer they'd hung up two good sized bucks, were gone,
not just taken down, but gone entirely, along with the
rope they'd been hanging from. But that wasn't the worst part.
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Arranged in a perfect circle around their camp, about thirty
feet out were dozens of stick structures. Tom called them scarecrows,
but they were more like warnings branches twisted together in
humanoid shapes, some seven or eight feet tall, all facing
inward toward the camp. The men left everything except their
guns and the clothes on their backs. They practically ran
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the two miles back to the trucks. When they got there,
they found massive handprints all over the vehicles, pressed into
the dust and dirt on the windows and hoods. One
of the truck's side mirrors had been twisted completely around
the metal, bent like it was made of rubber. They
never went back for their gear. Tom never hunted that
area again, and neither did the others. Bobby Suggs moved
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to Florida the next year and refused to ever talk
about what happened. James Crawford became a heavy drinker and
died in a car accident in nineteen seventy six. Dale
Tom's brother never stepped foot in the woods again, not
even for a picnic. Tom's letters expressed that what bothered
him most, what kept him up at night, even fifty
years later, wasn't the fear he felt that night. It
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was the intelligence behind those actions. These weren't animals acting
on instinct. They were something else, something that understood exactly
what they were doing. They could have killed those four
men easily, but they didn't. They just wanted them gone,
wanted them to know that they were trespassing in territory
that belonged to something else, something that had probably claimed
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those mountains long before the Cherokee, long before anyone. From
the mountains of North Georgia, we head north to Tennessee,
to the Great Smoky Mountains, where, in nineteen eighty five,
a park ranger had an encounter that changed everything she
thought she knew about the natural world. Her story is
different from the others because she was a trained observer,
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a scientist, someone whose job was to document and protect wildlife.
What she documented that summer night wasn't in any field guide.
Rebecca Martinez's testimony came to me through a long series
of encrypted emails two years ago. She was living in Asheville, retired,
and finally ready to share what happened to her on
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the night of August twenty third, nineteen eighty five. As
a trained wildlife biologist with a master's degree from the
University of Tennessee, her account carried a scientific precision that
made it all the more compelling. Rebecca was thirty two
years old in nineteen eighty five, working as a backcountry
ranger in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She had been
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with the Park Service for eight years and was stationed
at the Mount Sterling fire Tower for a two week
rotation part of the park's firewatch program. The tower sat
at five thy eight hundred feet elevation, accessible only by
a six mile hike from the nearest road. It was
isolated duty, just her and a radio watching for smoke
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during the dry summer month us that August had been
particularly dry, with several small fires already reported in the region.
Rebecca was extra vigilant, using her binoculars to scan the
ridges and valleys constantly. On the evening of the twenty third,
around seven point thirty, she noticed something moving through a
clearing on the ridge below her tower, maybe a quarter
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mile away. At first, she thought it was a black bear.
The Smokies have the highest density of black bears in
the eastern United States, and Rebecca had observed hundreds of
them over her years in the park. But as she
focused her binoculars, she realized this wasn't moving like a bear.
It was walking upright, steadily, purposefully, not with the occasional
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bipedal shuffle of a bear, but with a smooth, almost
human gait. Rebecca was a scientist trained to observe and document.
She grabbed her notebook and began recording what she saw.
The figure was dark brown or black, difficult to tell
in the fading light. It was massive, she estimated seven
to eight feet tall based on comparison with the trees
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it passed. Its arms were disproportionately long, swinging as it walked.
Its head seemed to sit directly on its shoulders with
no visible neck, and its entire body was covered in
hair or fur. She watched it for maybe three minutes
as it crossed the clearing and disappeared into the tree line.
Rebecca's hands were shaking as she wrote her notes, not
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from fear, but from excitement. She thought she might be
witnessing something extraordinary, possibly an unknown primate species or a
case of gigantism in the black bear population. As darkness fell,
Rebecca tried to radio the ranger station to report what
she'd seen, but the radio was dead nothing but static.
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This wasn't unusual. Atmospheric conditions in the mountains often interfered
with radio signals. She decided to document everything thoroughly and
report it when her rotation ended in three days. Around midnight,
Rebecca was awakened by something hitting the tower. Not the wind,
which was calm that night, but deliberate impacts against the
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support posts. The tower, which stood sixty feet high, was
shaking slightly with each hit. She grabbed her flashlight and
looked out the window, shining the beam down toward the
base of the tower. What she saw defied everything she
knew about wildlife behavior. The creature from the clearing was there,
and it was methodically testing the tower's support posts, pushing
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against each one, seemingly evaluating the structure's stability. In the flashlight, beam,
she could see it clearly for the first time. Its
face was almost human, but with a pronounced brow ridge
and a flat nose. Its eyes reflected the light with
a green eye shine, like a nocturnal predator. But it
was the hands that struck her most massive but remarkably
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human like, with ipposable thumbs that gripped the posts as
it pushed. The creature looked up at her, directly into
the flashlight beam, and Rebecca wrote that its expression was
one of curiosity, not aggression. It tilted its head slightly,
the way a dog does when it's trying to understand something.
Then it began to climb. Rebecca had studied primates, knew
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their climbing capabilities, but what she witnessed was beyond anything
in the scientific literature. The creature scaled the tower's support
structure with incredible speed and agility, using both hands and feet,
its massive weight causing the entire tower to sway. Within seconds,
it was at the observation deck level, forty feet up.
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Rebecca retreated to the center of the cabin, grabbing the
fire axe from the wall. The creature didn't try to enter, though,
Instead it circled the observation deck, looking in each window
studying the interior. She could hear its breathing, deep and rhythmic,
and smell that distinctive musky odor through the gaps in
the windows. It spent several minutes examining the door, running
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its fingers along the edges, testing the lock mechanism. Then,
as suddenly as it had appeared, it climbed back down
and walked away into the darkness. Rebecca stayed awake the
rest of the night, axe in hand, but it didn't return.
When dawn broke, she went outside to examine the tower.
What she found challenged her scientific skepticism to its core.
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There were handprints on the glass windows, enormous and clearly
showing dermal ridges like fingerprints, but much larger. On the
metal support posts were scratches and indentations where the creature
had gripped during its climb. Most significantly caught on a
rough edge of metal was a tuft of dark brown hair.
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Rebecca carefully collected the hair sample, placing it in an
evidence envelope from her ranger kit. She completed her rotation
three days later and immediately reported the encounter to her supervisors.
The response was not what she expected. She was told
firmly but politely, to forget what she'd seen. The hair
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sample was confiscated, her notes were taken, and she was
transferred to a front country position where she'd have no
more isolated assignments. Rebecca tried to push the issue, contacted
professors at the University of Tennessee, even reached out to
primatologists at other institutions, but without physical evidence and with
pressure from her employers, she eventually gave up. She left
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the Park Service two years later and became a high
school biology teacher. Before she left the Park Service, she
had accessed incident reports going back decades and found dozens
of similar encounters reported by rangers, hikers, and maintenance workers,
all carefully filed away and marked as resolved with explanations
like bear sightings or misidentification. The Park Service knew she
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was certain of it. They knew these creatures were out
there and had made a decision to keep it quiet.
From the ancient mountains of Tennessee, we travel west to
the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where, in nineteen ninety one,
a family's camping trip became a nightmare that would tear
them apart and leave scars that never fully healed. This
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encounter was different because it involved children, and because what
happened was so traumatic that it destroyed a marriage and
sent one person to a psychiatric facility. Jennifer was twelve
in the summer of nineteen ninety one when her family
went camping in the Ozark National Forest. She was the
only family member willing or able to talk about what happened.
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Her father died of a heart attack in two thousand
and five, her mother was in a memory care facility
with early onset dementia, and her younger brother Michael, hadn't
spoken to her in over a decade. The Wash family
was from Memphis, middle class, normal in every way. Dad
was an accountant, Mom taught elementary school. They weren't outdoorsy
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people particularly, but they wanted their kids to experience nature,
to unplug from Nintendo and television for a week. They
borrowed camping gear from friends, bought a guidebook, and headed
to Arkansas for what was supposed to be a wholesome
family adventure. They set up camp near Richland Creek in
a designated camping area, but one that was fairly remote.
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It was just them, no other campers within miles. The
first two days were exactly what they'd hoped for. They hiked,
swam in the creek, roasted marshmallows, told ghost stories. Jennifer
remembered being happy, feeling closer to her family than she
had in years. On the third night, everything changed. They'd
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gone to bed around ten, all four of them in
a large family tent. Jennifer woke up sometime after midnight,
needing to use the bathroom. The campground had pit toilets
about fifty yards from their campsite. She grabbed her flashlight
and unzipped the tent as quietly as possible, not wanting
to wake anyone. The moment she stepped outside, she knew
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something was wrong. The forest was completely silent, not even
the sound of crickets or frogs from the creek. But
more than that, there was a feeling, a presence, like
being watched by something predatory. Jennifer stood frozen outside the tent,
her flashlight beam wavering as her hand shook. Then she
saw the eyes, multiple pairs of eyes, reflecting her flashlight
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from the tree line around their camp. They were too
high to be deer or coyotes, at least seven feet
off the ground, and they weren't running away like wild
animals should when hit with light. They were just watching.
Jennifer screamed and dropped her flashlight. Her parents and brother
came tumbling out of the tent, her father with a
camping lantern. In the broader light of the lantern, they
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all saw them. Three creatures, massive and covered in dark fur,
standing at the edge of their camp site. They were bipedal,
like humans, but wrong in every way. Their arms were
too long, their heads seemed to sit directly on their shoulders,
and their faces were almost human, but with features that
were somehow primitive and advanced. At the same time, Jennifer's
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mother started praying out loud, falling to her knees. Her
father pushed the family behind him, holding the lantern high,
trying to look bigger, more threatening. Michael, only nine years old,
was crying hysterically. The creatures didn't attack, though, they just
stood there, watching, occasionally making low, grunting sounds to each
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other that almost sounded like communication. Then one of them,
the largest, took a step forward. Jennifer's father yelled at it,
waved the lantern even through a rock. The creature caught
the rock, caught it mid air. Like it was nothing,
examined it for a moment, then crushed it in its hand,
letting the fragments fall to the ground. The message was clear.
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They could hurt the family if they wanted to, but
they were choosing not to. The standoff lasted maybe ten minutes,
though Jennifer said it felt like hours. Then, without warning,
the creatures turned and melted back into the forest. The
family waited until dawn, huddled together in the car, not
daring to go back to the tent. At first light,
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they discovered their entire campsite had been ransacked while they
were in the car. The tent was shredded, their cooler
was destroyed, food scattered everywhere. But the most disturbing thing
was that their shoes, all of their shoes had been
arranged in a perfect line leading from the campsite into
the forest. They left immediately, didn't even bother, packing most
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of their gear. The drive home was silent. No one
knew what to say, how to process what they'd seen.
Back in Memphis, they tried to return to normal life,
but it was impossible. Jennifer's mother started having panic attacks,
couldn't sleep, eventually had a complete breakdown and was hospitalized
for three months. Her father threw himself into work, started
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drinking heavily, and refused to ever discuss what happened. Stay
tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
these messages. Michael, the youngest, was affected the worst. He
started having night terrors, would wake up screaming about the
eyes in the forest. He became withdrawn, stopped playing with friends,
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would only draw pictures of dark figures with long arms.
The family tried therapy, but how do you tell a
therapist that your family trauma stems from an encounter with
something that supposedly doesn't exist. The family fell apart within
two years. Jennifer's parents divorced, her mother moving back to
live with family in Ohio, taking Michael with her. Jennifer
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stayed with her father, but their relationship was never the same.
He died when she was twenty seven, and she found
his journal while going through his things. He'd written about
that night, obsessively trying to make sense of it. His
final entry, written the day before his heart attack, simply
said they were real. God help us, they were real.
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Jennifer spent years trying to understand what happened to her family.
That night. She's researched bigfoot encounters, joined support groups, even
returned to the Ozarks once, though she couldn't bring herself
to go back to that specific camp site. She knows
most people wouldn't believe her, would think her family experienced
some kind of shared delusion, But she knows what she saw,
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what they all saw, and she knows that somewhere in
the Ozark Mountains, those creatures still roam, still watch, still
decide who lives and who doesn't based on criteria. We
can't begin to understand that encounter in Arkansas destroyed a family.
But sometimes these creatures do more than just frighten. Sometimes
they take people. From the Ozarks we travel east to
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North Carolina, where in two thousand and two, an experienced
hiker disappeared for three days in the Pizga National Forest.
When he was found, he was a live but changed,
and what he described during his missing time challenges all
the preconceived notions about these creatures. David was a thirty
five year old software engineer from Charlotte in two thousand
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and two, an experienced hiker who spent most weekends in
the mountains. He'd hike the Appalachian trail in sections summitted
multiple fourteen ers in Colorado, and knew the Pizga National
Forest like his own backyard, which makes what happened to
him all the more inexplicable. On October fourth, two thousand
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and two, David set out for a solo overnight hike
in the Shining Rock Wilderness area of Pisga. He'd done
this exact route dozens of times, a fifteen mile loop
that would take him up to Black Balsam Knob and back.
He checked in at the ranger station, filed his hiking plan,
and hit the trail around noon. He was expected back
the next day by six in the evening. David never
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made it to his planned camp site. According to his account,
he was at five miles into the hike, climbing through
a dense rhododendron thicket when he heard what sounded like
a woman crying somewhere off the trail. His first thought
was that another hiker was injured. He called out, but
the crying stopped immediately. Then he smelled it that distinctive
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musky odor that every witness describes, like a wet dog
rolled in something dead. The next thing David remembered was
waking up in complete darkness, not the darkness of night
in the forest, but absolute blackness, like being in a cave.
He was lying on what felt like pine needles and leaves,
and he could hear breathing, heavy rhythmic breathing from multiple
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sources around him. He tried to sit up, but hit
his head on something rock or hard packed earth. He
was in some kind of low cave or den. As
his eyes adjusted, David realized there was a faint light
coming from somewhere deeper in the cave. He could make
out shapes moving in that dim light, large shapes too
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large to be human. The smell was overwhelming, that same
musky odor, but concentrated, like being inside a bar den,
but worse. He tried to crawl toward the entrance, toward
what he hoped was outside, but something grabbed his ankle,
not aggressively, but firmly, the way you might grab a
child who was about to touch a hot stove. The hand,
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and it was definitely a hand, was massive, easily encompassing
his entire ankle. It held him for a moment, then released.
David heard what sounded like vocalizations, not quite speech, but
more complex than animal sounds like a language he couldn't understand.
He lay still, terrified, trying to make sense of what
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was happening. Over the next hours or maybe days, David
said he lost all sense of time. He was given
water and food. The water was in what felt like
a hollowed out gored and the food was a mixture
of nuts, bare trees, and something meat like that he
couldn't identify. He wasn't restrained, but every time he tried
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to leave, one of the creatures would gently but firmly
guide him back to his spot in the cave. During
the periods of dim light, which David later realized corresponded
to daylight filtering in from somewhere, he could see his
captors more clearly. There were three of them, two adults
and what appeared to be a juvenile. They were exactly
what you'd expect, massive hair covered bipedal beings with faces
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that were almost human but not quite. The adult male
was enormous, probably eight feet tall and built like a linebacker,
covered in dark brown hair. The female was smaller, but
still massive by human standards, maybe seven feet tall, with
slightly lighter, reddish brown hair. The juvenile was about the
size of an adult human, but clearly young, more curious
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than the adults, often coming close to David and examining
his clothes and gear. What struck David most was their intelligence.
They used tools, simple ones, but tools. Nonetheless, They had
bowls made from gourds, used sticks to dig, and seemed
to have a complex social structure. They communicated constantly with
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each other through a combination of vocalizations and gestures. The
juvenile seemed to be trying to communicate with David, making
sounds and gestures, then waiting as if expecting a response.
On what David thought was the third day, he woke
to find the cave empty except for the juvenile. The
young creature was examining David's hiking boots, turning them over,
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feeling the laces, clearly fascinated by the construction. David slowly
sat up, and the juvenile didn't stop him. Instead, it
handed him his boots, then pointed toward the cave entrance.
David didn't need a second invitation. He put on his
boots and crawled toward the light. The entrance was hidden
behind a massive fallen tree and a curtain of rhododendron,
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completely invisible from the outside. He emerged on a hillside
he didn't recognize. Disoriented and weak, he could hear the
juvenile making sounds behind him, almost like it was saying goodbye,
but he didn't look back. It took David another full
day to find a trail and make his way back
to civilization. By then, a massive search and rescue operation
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was underway. He'd been missing for four days. When rescuers
found him, he was dehydrated and disoriented. He told them
he'd fallen, hit his head, and had been unconscious for
most of the missing time. He never mentioned the creatures
to anyone except his therapist, and only then after years
of PTSD and nightmares. The physical evidence was limited but intriguing.
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David's clothes had a strong, musky odor that persisted through
multiple washings. He had marks on his ankle consistent with
being gripped by a large hand, though doctors attributed them
to a possible fall. Most interesting was a mixture of
plant matter found in his pocket that he claimed the
creatures had given him as food. A botanist friend analyzed
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it informally and found it contained several plants known to
have nutritional and mild antibiotic properties. Combined in a way
that suggested deliberate preparation rather than random gathering. David never
hiked alone again. He moved away from North Carolina took
a job in Arizona, somewhere far from the dense forests
of the east. But he says that he didn't think
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the creatures meant him harm. If they'd wanted to hurt him,
they easily could have. Instead, they seemed curious, maybe even
protective in their own way. The juvenile especially, seemed fascinated
by him, like a human child might be fascinated by
an exotic animal. David's experience suggests something that indigenous peoples
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have long believed, that these creatures are not just animals,
but something more complex, with their own intelligence, culture, and
reasons for romaine hidden. Perhaps sometimes for reasons we don't understand,
they choose to interact with us, to study us the
way we would study them if given the chance. From
the mountains of North Carolina, we make our final journey
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to the swamps and pine forests of South Carolina. We're
just eight years ago. In twenty fourteen, a group of
college students had an encounter that was captured on video.
Though that video was quickly confiscated, and the students were
convinced to sign non disclosure agreements. One of them, however,
decided that some stories need to be told, regardless of
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the consequences. The most recent story in this collection comes
from Marcus Williams, though that's not his real name. He
was a twenty one year old biology major at the
College of Charleston in twenty fourteen. Marcus reached out to
me through encrypted channels, still paranoid about violating the NDA
he'd signed, but determined that the truth needed to be documented.
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Marcus and five friends decide to spend spring break camping
in Francis Maryan National Forest instead of going to the
beach like everyone else. They were all science majors environmental
biology and ecology students who wanted to do some amateur
research on the forest's ecosystem. They had university issued equipment,
including trail cameras, audio recording devices, and a high definition
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video camera for documenting their findings. They set up camp
in a remote section of the forest near the Santee River,
in an area that required a special permit to access.
It was pristine wilderness, exactly what they were looking for.
The first two days were productive. They documented various plant
and animal species, recorded bird calls, and collected water samples.
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On the third night, March twentieth, twenty fourteen, everything changed.
It started with their trail cameras being triggered repeatedly throughout
the night, but when they checked the memory cards in
the morning, they were blank. Not a rape east but
showing no recorded activity, despite the trigger logs indicating dozens
of events. Their audio equipment had picked up something, though,
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low frequency vocalizations that their professor would later tell them
were below the range of most known animals in the region.
That night, they decided to stay up and investigate. Two students,
Marcus and his friend Tyler, took the HD video camera
and night vision equipment and set up about one hundred
yards from camp in a blind they'd constructed for wildlife observation.
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The other four stayed in camp with walkie talkies, ready
to document anything unusual. Around two in the morning, Marcus
saw movement through the night vision scope. At first, he
thought it was a bear, but the shape was wrong.
It was walking upright, smoothly. Deliberately. He nudged Tyler, who
started recording with the HD camera equipped with an infrared illuminator.
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What they captured over the next forty three minutes would
change their lives. The creature was massive, approximately seven and
a half feet tall based on comparison with trees they
later measured. It was covered in dark hair except for
its face, hands, and the soles of its feet. It
moved with a fluid grace that seemed impossible for something
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so large. But what truly astounded them was its behavior.
The creature approached one of their trail cameras, examined it carefully,
then did something extraordinary. It opened the camera case, removed
the memory card, examined it in the moonlight, then replaced
it and closed the case. It knew exactly what the
camera was and how to disable it without destroying it.
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This wasn't random curiosity. This was deliberate, intelligent behavior. Tyler
kept filming as the creature moved through their research area.
It examined their equipment with obvious interest, picked up and
studied their field guides, even opened a sample container and
smelled the contents before carefully replacing the lid. At one point,
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it stood still and seemed to be listening to the
audio playback device they'd left running. Its head tilted in
an almost human gesture of concentration. Then it looked directly
at their blind Marcus said that moment was the most
terrifying and exhilarating of his life. The creature knew they
were there, had probably known the entire time. It walked
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toward them, slowly, deliberately, stopping about twenty feet away. In
the infrared light of the camera, they could see its
face clearly. The features were heavy, primitive in some ways,
but the eyes showed undeniable intelligence. The creature made a sound,
not quite a word, but a vocalization that conveyed clear displeasure.
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Then it turned and walked back into the forest, disappearing
into the darkness. The students packed up immediately and left
the forest that night. When they returned to the university
and showed their professor the footage, things moved quickly. Within hours,
representatives from a federal agency that marked still can't identify
showed up. They confiscated all equipment, all recordings, and all notes.
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The students were interviewed separately, told that they had filmed
a person in an elaborate costume conducting a hoax, and
they were presented with NDAs that came with both threats
of prosecution and offers of research grant money if they signed.
They all signed, He said. What bothers him most about
the experience isn't that the creature existed, but that the
(44:27):
government clearly knew about them and had protocols in place
or containment when evidence surfaced. Marcus graduated and went on
to get his PhD in biology. He now teaches at
a university he asked me not to name, but he
says the encounter shaped his entire career. He studies human
evolution and primate behavior, always looking for clues about where
(44:49):
these creatures might fit in the taxonomic tree. His conclusion,
based on what he observed is that they're not apes
or missing links. There's something else, sibly, another branch of
the hominin family tree that developed parallel to us, choosing
isolation over civilization. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
(45:10):
We'll be back after these messages. The Francis Maryan National
Forest is still there, still wild, still hiding its secrets.
The government still issues special permits for that area, but
they're rarely approved, and sometimes hikers report finding strange stick structures,
hearing unusual vocalizations, or catching a glimpse of something that
(45:33):
shouldn't exist, but most people keep quiet because some truths
are too strange for the world to accept. These six stories,
spanning from nineteen sixty seven to twenty fourteen from Alabama
to South Carolina, paint a picture that's hard to ignore.
These aren't isolated incidents or cases of misidentification. These are
(45:56):
consistent encounters with something that lives alongside us, hidden in
the vast wilderness areas that still exist in the American South.
What strikes me most about these accounts is not just
the similarity of the creatures described, but the intelligence they display.
They're not mindless animals operating on instinct. They understand our technology,
(46:18):
can disable our cameras, and seem to make deliberate choices
about when and how to interact with us. They could
hurt us, kill us, even but they generally choose not to.
They seem content to remain hidden, emerging only occasionally to
remind us that we're not the only intelligent species on
this planet. The South, with its dense forests, sprawling swamps,
(46:41):
and isolated mountain hollers, provides perfect habitat for a species
that wants to avoid human contact. We've got millions of
acres of wilderness here, places where a careful, intelligent creature
could live undetected for centuries, and maybe that's exactly what's
been happening. Every person who shared their story with me
took a risk. They risked ridicule, risk their reputations, in
(47:05):
some cases, risked legal action. But they all felt the
same need, the need to have their truth documented, to
know that someone believed them, because seeing one of these
creatures changes you. It makes you realize that the world
is far stranger and more wonderful than we're taught to believe.
I started my podcast to collect these stories, to preserve them,
(47:27):
to look for patterns and truth in the tales people tell.
After five years and hundreds of interviews, I can tell
you with certainty that something is out there, something intelligent,
something that's been here longer than us, something that watches
us from the shadows, and for reasons we don't understand,
chooses to remain hidden. So the next time you're in
(47:48):
the woods and you get that feeling of being watched,
that primitive alertness that makes the hair on your neck
stand up, trust it. Trust millions of years of evolution
that gave you that instinct and maybe just maybe give
a little nod to the forest, an acknowledgment that you
know you're not alone and that you mean no harm.
(48:10):
Because they're watching. They're always watching, and sometimes if you're
very unlucky or very fortunate, depending on how you look
at it, they might just let you see them too.
Sleep Tight, folks, and remember we share this world with mysteries.
We're only beginning to understand. The truth isn't just out there.
(48:30):
It's closer than you think, hiding in the shadows of
the pines, waiting in the places we've forgotten to look
until next time. Keep your eyes open, your wits about you,
and always always respect the woods, because you never know
what might be watching back.
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