November 26, 2025 • 52 mins
Welcome to this special collection episode of Sasquatch Odyssey, featuring six of the most compelling Bigfoot encounters I’ve documented across the Southeastern United States over the past five years. These stories span sixty years of fear, awe, and unanswered questions, carrying us from Alabama’s river bottoms to South Carolina’s swamps, and showing why the South may be one of the last true sanctuaries for something we still don’t understand.
We open in the suffocating heat of Alabama in 1967, where a power company lineman working near the Cahaba River noticed something impossible: massive handprints sunk deep into a utility pole. Moments later, he found himself face to face with a towering presence that moved with purpose and intelligence. That encounter sets the tone for everything that follows—brief, terrifying interactions where the creature controls the moment, revealing itself only on its own terms.From there, we climb into the mountains of North Georgia in 1973, where four seasoned hunters discovered the woods had a hierarchy they didn’t sit atop.
Near Blue Ridge, their camp became the target of relentless intimidation—rocks crashing through darkness, trees shaking violently, and a chilling discovery at dawn: dozens of stick figures arranged in a perfect warning circle around them. The night didn’t just scare them; it shattered friendships and ended their lives in the forest forever.
The third account takes us into Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains in 1985, where a park ranger and wildlife biologist experienced something that demolished her scientific certainty.
While stationed in a fire tower, she watched a massive creature climb the structure and examine her equipment with unsettling curiosity, as if it understood what it was seeing. Even more disturbing was what she learned afterward—that similar encounters had been quietly documented for decades, tucked away and never meant for public eyes.The most heartbreaking story comes from the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas in 1991.
A family camping trip turned into a nightmare when towering beings approached their site and demonstrated strength beyond anything human—crushing rocks in their hands while the family huddled in terror. A young girl watched it unfold, and the trauma that followed tore the family apart, leaving permanent scars long after the woods fell silent again. In 2002, deep in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, an experienced hiker found himself living through an encounter unlike any other in my files.
He described three days in captivity with what appeared to be a family group of these beings, observing tool use, complex social behavior, and a kind of focused curiosity toward human objects. His story challenges the idea of Sasquatch as a solitary wilderness phantom and suggests something closer to culture—structured intelligence living beyond our reach.Our final encounter lands in South Carolina in 2014, when college biology students captured forty-three minutes of high-definition footage of a creature inspecting their research equipment with clear understanding of its purpose.
What happened next was just as chilling as what they filmed: a rapid government response, confiscated evidence, and enforced silence that raises the question of how long this phenomenon has truly been known—and how actively it’s been buried.
Across six stories and six decades, the same threads surface again and again: the heavy, musky odor that announces their presence, the massive handprints left behind like signatures, and the unnerving sense of being watched by something that doesn’t panic or flee—but evaluates.
Most unsettling of all is the repeated realization that these creatures could harm us effortlessly, yet choose restraint instead. Witnesses don’t describe a mere animal. They describe something hovering in a blurred space between human and beast, perfectly adapted to remain hidden while living alongside us. What emerges from these accounts is a portrait of the American South as a vast refuge for an undiscovered species—or perhaps a parallel branch of human evolution that chose isolation over contact.
From Alabama’s rivers to Tennessee’s peaks and the deep wild of the Ozarks and Carolinas, these beings have claimed territories in the spaces we’ve ignored or forgotten. They watch from cover, occasionally stepping into view when a boundary is crossed, always vanishing before the mystery can be pinned down.
They want you to know the woods are not empty, that something ancient and intelligent still moves through them, and that the old instinct to tread carefully in the dark may be rooted in more than superstition.
As you listen, notice how the behavior of these creatures shifts over time, especially around human technology. Consider what it means that responses to evidence sometimes seem immediate and organized. And ask y
We open in the suffocating heat of Alabama in 1967, where a power company lineman working near the Cahaba River noticed something impossible: massive handprints sunk deep into a utility pole. Moments later, he found himself face to face with a towering presence that moved with purpose and intelligence. That encounter sets the tone for everything that follows—brief, terrifying interactions where the creature controls the moment, revealing itself only on its own terms.From there, we climb into the mountains of North Georgia in 1973, where four seasoned hunters discovered the woods had a hierarchy they didn’t sit atop.
Near Blue Ridge, their camp became the target of relentless intimidation—rocks crashing through darkness, trees shaking violently, and a chilling discovery at dawn: dozens of stick figures arranged in a perfect warning circle around them. The night didn’t just scare them; it shattered friendships and ended their lives in the forest forever.
The third account takes us into Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains in 1985, where a park ranger and wildlife biologist experienced something that demolished her scientific certainty.
While stationed in a fire tower, she watched a massive creature climb the structure and examine her equipment with unsettling curiosity, as if it understood what it was seeing. Even more disturbing was what she learned afterward—that similar encounters had been quietly documented for decades, tucked away and never meant for public eyes.The most heartbreaking story comes from the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas in 1991.
A family camping trip turned into a nightmare when towering beings approached their site and demonstrated strength beyond anything human—crushing rocks in their hands while the family huddled in terror. A young girl watched it unfold, and the trauma that followed tore the family apart, leaving permanent scars long after the woods fell silent again. In 2002, deep in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, an experienced hiker found himself living through an encounter unlike any other in my files.
He described three days in captivity with what appeared to be a family group of these beings, observing tool use, complex social behavior, and a kind of focused curiosity toward human objects. His story challenges the idea of Sasquatch as a solitary wilderness phantom and suggests something closer to culture—structured intelligence living beyond our reach.Our final encounter lands in South Carolina in 2014, when college biology students captured forty-three minutes of high-definition footage of a creature inspecting their research equipment with clear understanding of its purpose.
What happened next was just as chilling as what they filmed: a rapid government response, confiscated evidence, and enforced silence that raises the question of how long this phenomenon has truly been known—and how actively it’s been buried.
Across six stories and six decades, the same threads surface again and again: the heavy, musky odor that announces their presence, the massive handprints left behind like signatures, and the unnerving sense of being watched by something that doesn’t panic or flee—but evaluates.
Most unsettling of all is the repeated realization that these creatures could harm us effortlessly, yet choose restraint instead. Witnesses don’t describe a mere animal. They describe something hovering in a blurred space between human and beast, perfectly adapted to remain hidden while living alongside us. What emerges from these accounts is a portrait of the American South as a vast refuge for an undiscovered species—or perhaps a parallel branch of human evolution that chose isolation over contact.
From Alabama’s rivers to Tennessee’s peaks and the deep wild of the Ozarks and Carolinas, these beings have claimed territories in the spaces we’ve ignored or forgotten. They watch from cover, occasionally stepping into view when a boundary is crossed, always vanishing before the mystery can be pinned down.
They want you to know the woods are not empty, that something ancient and intelligent still moves through them, and that the old instinct to tread carefully in the dark may be rooted in more than superstition.
As you listen, notice how the behavior of these creatures shifts over time, especially around human technology. Consider what it means that responses to evidence sometimes seem immediate and organized. And ask y
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now one of your pudding. I got a string going
on here, something just because my dog. Something killed your dog,
my dog. We're flying through the air, over the tree.
I don't know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm
really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over
the fence and he was dead. And once you hit
the ground like, I didn't see any cars. All I
saw was my dog coming over the fence. Sat, what
(00:38):
are you putting? We got some wonder or something crawling
around out here? Did you see what it was? Or
was it was? Standing enough? I'm out here looking through
the window now and I don't see anything. I don't
want to go outside. Jesus Quice, you better hello, get
(01:03):
somebody out here. What quen? I'm out there? I thought
of a bench about tech forty nine. I don't know
easy out there? Yeah, I'm walking right. Hey. Uh.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Folks always ask me why I started my first podcast.
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,
(01:33):
hiding just beyond the edge of civilization, watching us from
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
(01:54):
leaving tracks in the Oregon Wilderness. But I'm here to
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
(02:17):
seen the Yetti, folks from Australia who've encountered the Yowie,
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,
(02:40):
these swamps and hollers that seems to attract these creatures
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 walk these lands, long before any human set foot
(03:02):
in these dark woods. They're as much a part of
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,
(03:24):
after all these interviews, I've developed a pretty good sense
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
(03:47):
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
(04:07):
there in the wilderness. We never 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
(04:28):
six states, 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
(04:49):
eighty one 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 short before his death, contained details that still
give me chills. Back in sixty seven, Earl was twenty
nine years old and worked for Alabama Power Company. His
(05:10):
job took him 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,
(05:30):
nothing but forest and the occasional farm for miles in
any direction. 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 workshirt within minutes, swatting at mosquitoes and cursing the heat.
(05:53):
The first few poles checked out fine, but as he
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,
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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
(06:59):
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 Earl's blood run cold.
It was the hand prints on the pole itself. They
were enormous, easily twice the size of his own hands,
(07:20):
with distinct finger marks pressed deep into the creosoak 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. Earle 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.
(07:41):
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
(08:02):
eight feet tall, with shoulders that must have been four
feet across. The creature was watching him. Earle could see
its eyes, 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
(08:24):
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 knew
existed in Alabama or anywhere else. Earle backed away slowly
at first, keeping his eyes on the creature. It didn't move,
just watched him go. But when Earle reached the tree
(08:47):
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, running, but moving through the
woods with a casual ease that was somehow more terrifying
than if it had been chasing him outright. He made
(09:07):
it back to his truck and drove straight to Birmingham
without stopping. When his supervisor asked about the damaged transformer,
Earl 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 decades later, that
(09:30):
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 know that there are
(09:51):
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 te territory, let us
know we're not welcome. That transformer was never fixed, by
the way, Alabama Power eventually re routed the lines, abandoning
that section entirely. If you know where to look, you
(10:13):
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
(10:33):
make Earl's experience look 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 account 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
(10:56):
nineteen seventy three, knowing his time was running short due
to emphasine. His written testimony was detailed, methodical, and absolutely terrifying.
Tom and three buddies had gone up into the Chattahoochee
National Forest for their annual deer hunting trip. They'd been
doing the same trip for ten years, running, always the
(11:16):
second week of November, always the same camp spot near
Cooper Creek. The group 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.
(11:38):
They'd bagged a couple of decent bucks, had them hanging
from a tree near camp to cool. The weather was
perfect for hunting, 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
(11:59):
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, and something dead 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.
(12:19):
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, 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,
(12:42):
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, 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
(13:04):
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 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
(13:25):
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 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.
(13:49):
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 another Tom counted at
least lest 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
(14:11):
it was small stones and sticks, then larger rocks, branches
as thick as a man's arm. One rock, 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
(14:31):
a split second, and in that brief moment, Tom saw
them three figures, massive and hair covered, standing just 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
(14:53):
center was looking right at Tom, and its expression wasn't
fear or anger. It was contempt. Stay tuned for more
sasquatch ott to see. We'll be right back after these messages.
After Bobby's shot, all hell broke loose. The creature started screaming,
(15:14):
a sound Tom described as a woman's scream mixed with
a lion's roar. They began shaking the trees around the camp,
and these weren't saplings. These were full grown pines and oaks,
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
(15:36):
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.
The men stayed awake all night, backs to the fire, guns,
ready jumping at every sound. When dawn finally broke, they
(15:58):
discovered something that made 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.
Arranged in a perfect circle around their camp, about thirty
feet out were dozens of stick structures. Tom called them scarecrows,
(16:22):
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
the two miles back to the trucks. When they got there,
they found massive handprints all over the vehicles, pressed into
(16:44):
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
to Florida the next year and refused to ever talk
about what happened. James Crawford became a heavy drinker and
(17:07):
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
was the intelligence behind those actions. These weren't animals acting
(17:29):
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
those mountains long before the Cherokee, long before anyone. From
(17:52):
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,
a scientist, someone whose job was to document and protect wildlife.
(18:14):
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
the night of August twenty third, nineteen eighty five. As
a trained wildlife biologist with a master's degree from the
(18:36):
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
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
(19:00):
at five eight hundred feet elevation, accessible only by a
six mile height from the nearest road. It was isolated
duty just her and a radio watching for smoke during
the dry summer months. 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
(19:23):
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
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
(19:46):
focused her binoculars, she realized this wasn't moving like a bear.
It was walking upright, steadily, purposefully, not with the occasional
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.
(20:07):
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
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
(20:29):
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
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,
(20:52):
Rebecca tried to radio the ranger station to report what
she'd seen, but the radio was dead nothing but static.
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,
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Rebecca was awakened by something hitting the tower. Not the wind,
which was calm that night, but deliberate impacts against the
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
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knew about wild life behavior. The creature from the clearing
was there, and it was methodically testing the tower's support posts,
pushing 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
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the light with a green eye shine, like a nocturnal predator.
But it was the hands that struck her most massive
but remarkably 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
(22:20):
head slightly, the way a dog does when it's trying
to understand something. Then it began to climb. Rebecca had
studied primates, knew 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
(22:43):
tower to sway within seconds, it was at the observation
deck level forty feet up. 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
(23:06):
that distinctive musky odor through the gaps in the windows.
It spent several minutes examining the door, running 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
(23:29):
dawn broke, she went outside to examine the tower. What
she found challenged her scientific skepticism to its core. 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
(23:49):
gripped during its climb. Most significantly, caught on a rough
edge of metal was a tuft of dark brown hair.
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.
(24:09):
The response was not what she expected. She was told
firmly but politely, to forget what she'd seen. The hair
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
(24:32):
primatologists at other institutions, but without physical evidence and with
pressure from her employers, she eventually gave up. She left
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,
(24:56):
all carefully filed away and marked as resolved with explanations
like bear sightings or misidentification. The Park Service knew she
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,
(25:17):
a family's camping trip became a nightmare that would tear
them apart and leave scars that never fully healed. This
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
(25:38):
went camping in the Ozark National Forest. She was the
only family member willing or able to talk about what happened.
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 Walsh family
(25:58):
was from Memphis, class normal in every way. Dad was
an accountant, Mom taught elementary school. They weren't outdoorsy 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
(26:19):
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. 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
(26:42):
being happy, feeling closer to her family than she had
in years. On the third night, everything changed. They'd 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 pitt toilet. It's
about fifty yards from their camp site. She grabbed her
(27:03):
flashlight and unzipped the tent as quietly as possible, not
wanting to wake anyone. The moment she stepped outside, she
knew 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
(27:25):
the tent, her flashlight beam wavering as her hand shook.
Then she saw the eyes, multiple pairs of eyes, reflecting
her flashlight 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
(27:46):
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 all saw them. Creatures, massive and covered in dark fur,
standing at the edge of their campsite. They were bipedal,
like humans, but wrong in every way. Their arms were
(28:10):
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
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,
(28:33):
was crying hysterically. The creatures didn't attack, though, they just
stood there, watching, occasionally making low, grunting sounds to each
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
(28:55):
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.
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,
(29:17):
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,
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
(29:38):
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
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,
(29:59):
but it was possible, and stay tuned for more sasquatch
ott to see We'll be right back. After these messages,
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 drinking heavily, and refused
(30:22):
to ever discuss what happened. 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, 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
(30:43):
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 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
(31:04):
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. Jennifer spent years trying to
understand what happened to her family that night. She's researched
(31:25):
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, what they all saw,
and she knows that somewhere in the Ozark Mountains, those
(31:46):
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 for Sometimes they take people.
From the Ozarks. We travel east to North Carolina, where,
(32:07):
in two thousand and two, an experienced hiker disappeared for
three days in the Pisga National Forest. When he was found,
he was alive, 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 and two. An experienced hiker who
(32:29):
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 and two, David set out for
(32:49):
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 Balsom 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 made it to his
(33:11):
planned campsite. According to his account, he was about 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 musky odor that every
(33:33):
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 sources around him. He tried
(33:57):
to sit up, but hit his head on something raw
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 large to be human. The
(34:17):
smell was overwhelming, that same musky odor, but concentrated, like
being inside a bare 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, and it was definitely
(34:40):
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 of what was happening. Over the next
(35:02):
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, berries, and something
meat like that he couldn't identify. He wasn't restrained, but
every time he tried to leave, one of the creatures
would gently but firmly guide him back to his spot
(35:25):
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 that were almost human but not quite.
(35:48):
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 than the adults, often coming close
(36:09):
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 each other through a combination of
(36:29):
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, feeling the laces, clearly fascinated by the construction.
(36:54):
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,
completely invisible from the outside. He emerged on a hillside
(37:18):
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
was under way. He'd been missing for four days. When
(37:40):
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 in intriguing. David's clothes had a strong, musky odor
(38:03):
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 it informally and found it contained several
(38:24):
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 the creatures meant him harm. If they'd wanted
(38:48):
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 have long believed, that these creatures are not
(39:09):
just animals, but something more complex, with their own intelligence, culture,
and reasons for remaining 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 to the swamps and pine forests of South Carolina,
(39:31):
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
the consequences. The most recent story in this collection comes
(39:53):
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.
Marcus and five friends decided to spend spring break camping
(40:16):
in Francis mary And 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
video camera for documenting their findings. They set up camp
(40:40):
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.
(41:00):
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 erased, but showing no
recorded activity, despite the trigger logs indicating dozens of events.
(41:21):
Their audio equipment had picked up something, though, 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
(41:42):
from camp and a blind they'd constructed for wildlife observation.
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 fucking upright, smoothly, deliberately. He nudged Tyler, who
(42:04):
started recording with the HD camera equipped with an infrared illuminator.
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
(42:26):
moved with a fluid grace that seemed impossible for something
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
(42:49):
camera was and how to disable it without destroying it.
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,
(43:13):
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
(43:35):
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.
(43:57):
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 Marcus still can't identify
showed up. They confiscated all equipment, all recordings, and all notes.
(44:22):
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
(44:42):
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. Stay tuned for
more sasquatch Ott to see We'll be right back. After
(45:04):
these messages, he studies human evolution and primate behavior, always
looking for clues about where 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,
possibly another branch of the hominin family tree that developed
(45:27):
parallel to us choosing isolation over civilization. The Francis Marion
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,
(45:47):
hearing unusual vocalizations, or catching a glimpse of something that
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.
(46:09):
These aren't isolated incidents or cases of misidentification. These are
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.
(46:30):
They're not mindless animals operating on instinct. They understand our technology,
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
(46:51):
remind us that we're not the only intelligent species on
this planet. The South with its dense forests, sprawling swamps,
and isolated mountain 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.
(47:16):
Every person who shared their story with me took a risk.
They risked ridicule, risk their reputations, in 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
(47:38):
and more wonderful than we're taught to believe. I started
my podcast to collect these stories, to preserve them, 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
(48:00):
us from the shadows, and for reasons we don't understand,
chooses to remain hidden. So the next time you're in
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
(48:21):
a little nod to the forest, an acknowledgment that you
know you're not alone and that you mean no harm
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.
(48:44):
We're only beginning to understand. The truth isn't just out there.
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. Di
Now one of your pudding. I got a string going
on here, something just because my dog. Something killed your dog,
my dog. We're flying through the air, over the tree.
I don't know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm
really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over
the fence and he was dead. And once you hit
the ground like, I didn't see any cars. All I
saw was my dog coming over the fence. Sat, what
(00:38):
are you putting? We got some wonder or something crawling
around out here? Did you see what it was? Or
was it was? Standing enough? I'm out here looking through
the window now and I don't see anything. I don't
want to go outside. Jesus Quice, you better hello, get
(01:03):
somebody out here. What quen? I'm out there? I thought
of a bench about tech forty nine. I don't know
easy out there? Yeah, I'm walking right. Hey. Uh.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Folks always ask me why I started my first podcast.
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,
(01:33):
hiding just beyond the edge of civilization, watching us from
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
(01:54):
leaving tracks in the Oregon Wilderness. But I'm here to
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
(02:17):
seen the Yetti, folks from Australia who've encountered the Yowie,
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,
(02:40):
these swamps and hollers that seems to attract these creatures
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 walk these lands, long before any human set foot
(03:02):
in these dark woods. They're as much a part of
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,
(03:24):
after all these interviews, I've developed a pretty good sense
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
(03:47):
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
(04:07):
there in the wilderness. We never 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
(04:28):
six states, 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
(04:49):
eighty one 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 short before his death, contained details that still
give me chills. Back in sixty seven, Earl was twenty
nine years old and worked for Alabama Power Company. His
(05:10):
job took him 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,
(05:30):
nothing but forest and the occasional farm for miles in
any direction. 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 workshirt within minutes, swatting at mosquitoes and cursing the heat.
(05:53):
The first few poles checked out fine, but as he
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,
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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
(06:59):
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 Earl's blood run cold.
It was the hand prints on the pole itself. They
were enormous, easily twice the size of his own hands,
(07:20):
with distinct finger marks pressed deep into the creosoak 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. Earle 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.
(07:41):
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
(08:02):
eight feet tall, with shoulders that must have been four
feet across. The creature was watching him. Earle could see
its eyes, 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
(08:24):
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 knew
existed in Alabama or anywhere else. Earle backed away slowly
at first, keeping his eyes on the creature. It didn't move,
just watched him go. But when Earle reached the tree
(08:47):
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, running, but moving through the
woods with a casual ease that was somehow more terrifying
than if it had been chasing him outright. He made
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it back to his truck and drove straight to Birmingham
without stopping. When his supervisor asked about the damaged transformer,
Earl 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 decades later, that
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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 know that there are
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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 te territory, let us
know we're not welcome. That transformer was never fixed, by
the way, Alabama Power eventually re routed the lines, abandoning
that section entirely. If you know where to look, you
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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
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make Earl's experience look 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 account 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
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nineteen seventy three, knowing his time was running short due
to emphasine. His written testimony was detailed, methodical, and absolutely terrifying.
Tom and three buddies had gone up into the Chattahoochee
National Forest for their annual deer hunting trip. They'd been
doing the same trip for ten years, running, always the
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second week of November, always the same camp spot near
Cooper Creek. The group 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.
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They'd bagged a couple of decent bucks, had them hanging
from a tree near camp to cool. The weather was
perfect for hunting, 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
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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, and something dead 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.
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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, 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,
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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, 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
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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 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
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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 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.
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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 another Tom counted at
least lest 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
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it was small stones and sticks, then larger rocks, branches
as thick as a man's arm. One rock, 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
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a split second, and in that brief moment, Tom saw
them three figures, massive and hair covered, standing just 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
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center was looking right at Tom, and its expression wasn't
fear or anger. It was contempt. Stay tuned for more
sasquatch ott to see. We'll be right back after these messages.
After Bobby's shot, all hell broke loose. The creature started screaming,
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a sound Tom described as a woman's scream mixed with
a lion's roar. They began shaking the trees around the camp,
and these weren't saplings. These were full grown pines and oaks,
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
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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.
The men stayed awake all night, backs to the fire, guns,
ready jumping at every sound. When dawn finally broke, they
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discovered something that made 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.
Arranged in a perfect circle around their camp, about thirty
feet out were dozens of stick structures. Tom called them scarecrows,
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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
the two miles back to the trucks. When they got there,
they found massive handprints all over the vehicles, pressed into
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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
to Florida the next year and refused to ever talk
about what happened. James Crawford became a heavy drinker and
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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
was the intelligence behind those actions. These weren't animals acting
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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
those mountains long before the Cherokee, long before anyone. From
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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,
a scientist, someone whose job was to document and protect wildlife.
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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
the night of August twenty third, nineteen eighty five. As
a trained wildlife biologist with a master's degree from the
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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
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
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at five eight hundred feet elevation, accessible only by a
six mile height from the nearest road. It was isolated
duty just her and a radio watching for smoke during
the dry summer months. 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
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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
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
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focused her binoculars, she realized this wasn't moving like a bear.
It was walking upright, steadily, purposefully, not with the occasional
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.
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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
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
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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
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,
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Rebecca tried to radio the ranger station to report what
she'd seen, but the radio was dead nothing but static.
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,
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Rebecca was awakened by something hitting the tower. Not the wind,
which was calm that night, but deliberate impacts against the
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
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knew about wild life behavior. The creature from the clearing
was there, and it was methodically testing the tower's support posts,
pushing 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
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the light with a green eye shine, like a nocturnal predator.
But it was the hands that struck her most massive
but remarkably 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
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head slightly, the way a dog does when it's trying
to understand something. Then it began to climb. Rebecca had
studied primates, knew 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
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tower to sway within seconds, it was at the observation
deck level forty feet up. 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
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that distinctive musky odor through the gaps in the windows.
It spent several minutes examining the door, running 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
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dawn broke, she went outside to examine the tower. What
she found challenged her scientific skepticism to its core. 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
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gripped during its climb. Most significantly, caught on a rough
edge of metal was a tuft of dark brown hair.
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.
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The response was not what she expected. She was told
firmly but politely, to forget what she'd seen. The hair
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
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primatologists at other institutions, but without physical evidence and with
pressure from her employers, she eventually gave up. She left
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,
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all carefully filed away and marked as resolved with explanations
like bear sightings or misidentification. The Park Service knew she
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,
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a family's camping trip became a nightmare that would tear
them apart and leave scars that never fully healed. This
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
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went camping in the Ozark National Forest. She was the
only family member willing or able to talk about what happened.
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 Walsh family
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was from Memphis, class normal in every way. Dad was
an accountant, Mom taught elementary school. They weren't outdoorsy 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
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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. 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
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being happy, feeling closer to her family than she had
in years. On the third night, everything changed. They'd 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 pitt toilet. It's
about fifty yards from their camp site. She grabbed her
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flashlight and unzipped the tent as quietly as possible, not
wanting to wake anyone. The moment she stepped outside, she
knew 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
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the tent, her flashlight beam wavering as her hand shook.
Then she saw the eyes, multiple pairs of eyes, reflecting
her flashlight 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
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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 all saw them. Creatures, massive and covered in dark fur,
standing at the edge of their campsite. They were bipedal,
like humans, but wrong in every way. Their arms were
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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
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,
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was crying hysterically. The creatures didn't attack, though, they just
stood there, watching, occasionally making low, grunting sounds to each
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
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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.
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,
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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,
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
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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
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,
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but it was possible, and stay tuned for more sasquatch
ott to see We'll be right back. After these messages,
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 drinking heavily, and refused
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to ever discuss what happened. 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, 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
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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 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
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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. Jennifer spent years trying to
understand what happened to her family that night. She's researched
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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, what they all saw,
and she knows that somewhere in the Ozark Mountains, those
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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 for Sometimes they take people.
From the Ozarks. We travel east to North Carolina, where,
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in two thousand and two, an experienced hiker disappeared for
three days in the Pisga National Forest. When he was found,
he was alive, 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 and two. An experienced hiker who
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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 and two, David set out for
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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 Balsom 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 made it to his
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planned campsite. According to his account, he was about 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 musky odor that every
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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 sources around him. He tried
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to sit up, but hit his head on something raw
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 large to be human. The
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smell was overwhelming, that same musky odor, but concentrated, like
being inside a bare 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, and it was definitely
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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 of what was happening. Over the next
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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, berries, and something
meat like that he couldn't identify. He wasn't restrained, but
every time he tried to leave, one of the creatures
would gently but firmly guide him back to his spot
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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 that were almost human but not quite.
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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 than the adults, often coming close
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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 each other through a combination of
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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, feeling the laces, clearly fascinated by the construction.
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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,
completely invisible from the outside. He emerged on a hillside
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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
was under way. He'd been missing for four days. When
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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 in intriguing. David's clothes had a strong, musky odor
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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 it informally and found it contained several
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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 the creatures meant him harm. If they'd wanted
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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 have long believed, that these creatures are not
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just animals, but something more complex, with their own intelligence, culture,
and reasons for remaining 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 to the swamps and pine forests of South Carolina,
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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
the consequences. The most recent story in this collection comes
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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.
Marcus and five friends decided to spend spring break camping
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in Francis mary And 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
video camera for documenting their findings. They set up camp
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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 erased, but showing no
recorded activity, despite the trigger logs indicating dozens of events.
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Their audio equipment had picked up something, though, 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
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from camp and a blind they'd constructed for wildlife observation.
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 fucking upright, smoothly, deliberately. He nudged Tyler, who
(42:04):
started recording with the HD camera equipped with an infrared illuminator.
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
(42:26):
moved with a fluid grace that seemed impossible for something
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
(42:49):
camera was and how to disable it without destroying it.
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,
(43:13):
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
(43:35):
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.
(43:57):
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 Marcus still can't identify
showed up. They confiscated all equipment, all recordings, and all notes.
(44:22):
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
(44:42):
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. Stay tuned for
more sasquatch Ott to see We'll be right back. After
(45:04):
these messages, he studies human evolution and primate behavior, always
looking for clues about where 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,
possibly another branch of the hominin family tree that developed
(45:27):
parallel to us choosing isolation over civilization. The Francis Marion
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,
(45:47):
hearing unusual vocalizations, or catching a glimpse of something that
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.
(46:09):
These aren't isolated incidents or cases of misidentification. These are
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.
(46:30):
They're not mindless animals operating on instinct. They understand our technology,
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
(46:51):
remind us that we're not the only intelligent species on
this planet. The South with its dense forests, sprawling swamps,
and isolated mountain 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.
(47:16):
Every person who shared their story with me took a risk.
They risked ridicule, risk their reputations, in 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
(47:38):
and more wonderful than we're taught to believe. I started
my podcast to collect these stories, to preserve them, 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
(48:00):
us from the shadows, and for reasons we don't understand,
chooses to remain hidden. So the next time you're in
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
(48:21):
a little nod to the forest, an acknowledgment that you
know you're not alone and that you mean no harm
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.
(48:44):
We're only beginning to understand. The truth isn't just out there.
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. Di
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