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We’re pulling off the road trip for a pit stop this week, because the inbox filled back up and these five emails belong together. Nobody in them went looking for anything. They were at home, asleep or working or out checking stock, and something walked up to where they live and kept coming back. Oleta was the overnight donut maker at a shop in Pinetop, Arizona, in two thousand three, which meant she went to bed at six in the evening and slept beside an upstairs window she kept cracked for air. The bottom of that window sat more than seven feet off the hillside behind the cabin, and on two nights that June something stood outside it and looked in. Lavelle was eleven years old in October of nineteen seventy-six, living in a house on brick piers in Franklin County, Mississippi, with a swept sand yard and a pear tree out back. For eleven nights in a row something heavy walked laps around that house with one hand dragging along the clapboards, and on the ninth night his daddy sat out front in the truck to wait for it. Orrin is a taxidermist outside Crystal Falls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and in the fall of twenty eleven something started raking the salt off the deer hides behind his shop. His twelve-year-old son was the one who worked out the timing. It only came on mornings his mother left to run her mail route, about twenty minutes after she pulled out of the driveway. Leander tunes pianos for a living, and in the summer of nineteen ninety-four he had a gutted church upright sitting under a tarp on the side porch of his farmhouse in Estill County, Kentucky. First the porch glider got moved. Then, at two in the morning, somebody started plucking one low string, over and over. Vesta ran a cow-calf outfit in Idaho County, Idaho, and her late husband had built a gate latch that took two hands, a shoulder and a knee to open.  In the spring of nineteen eighty-five she kept finding that gate swung wide open with sixty pairs of cattle bunched in the far corner of the pasture, so one evening she parked the stock truck in the lane and watched to see who was opening it. If something has ever come up on your porch, looked in your window, or let itself into your pasture, send it to [email protected].  Next time we’re back on the road. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story. Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods. Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

We’re pulling off the road trip for a pit stop this week, because the inbox filled back up and these five emails belong together. Nobody in them went looking for anything. They were at home, asleep or working or out checking stock, and something walked up to where they live and kept coming back. Oleta was the overnight donut maker at a shop in Pinetop, Arizona, in two thousand three, which meant she went to bed at six in the evening and slept beside an upstairs window she kept cracked for air. The bottom of that window sat more than seven feet off the hillside behind the cabin, and on two nights that June something stood outside it and looked in. Lavelle was eleven years old in October of nineteen seventy-six, living in a house on brick piers in Franklin County, Mississippi, with a swept sand yard and a pear tree out back. For eleven nights in a row something heavy walked laps around that house with one hand dragging along the clapboards, and on the ninth night his daddy sat out front in the truck to wait for it. Orrin is a taxidermist outside Crystal Falls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and in the fall of twenty eleven something started raking the salt off the deer hides behind his shop. His twelve-year-old son was the one who worked out the timing. It only came on mornings his mother left to run her mail route, about twenty minutes after she pulled out of the driveway. Leander tunes pianos for a living, and in the summer of nineteen ninety-four he had a gutted church upright sitting under a tarp on the side porch of his farmhouse in Estill County, Kentucky. First the porch glider got moved. Then, at two in the morning, somebody started plucking one low string, over and over. Vesta ran a cow-calf outfit in Idaho County, Idaho, and her late husband had built a gate latch that took two hands, a shoulder and a knee to open.  In the spring of nineteen eighty-five she kept finding that gate swung wide open with sixty pairs of cattle bunched in the far corner of the pasture, so one evening she parked the stock truck in the lane and watched to see who was opening it. If something has ever come up on your porch, looked in your window, or let itself into your pasture, send it to [email protected].  Next time we’re back on the road. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Exeter, Rhode Island, where on the seventeenth of March in eighteen ninety-two a group of farmers opened the graves of three women from the same family and burned the heart of the youngest one on a rock behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. Her name was Mercy Lena Brown, she was nineteen years old, and she'd been dead for two months. Her neighbors believed she was feeding on her dying brother from the grave. The ashes of her heart were mixed into water and given to him to drink. Brian tells the story of the Brown family from the beginning, starting with the death of Mary Eliza Brown in eighteen eighty-three and following consumption through the house as it took her daughter Mary Olive, then Lena, then Edwin.  Along the way the episode covers the wider New England vampire panic, the century of tuberculosis outbreaks that drove it, and the earlier Rhode Island cases that Exeter already knew by heart, including Stephen Staples and his petition to the Cumberland town council in seventeen ninety-six, the dream of Stukeley Tillinghast and his dying orchard, Nancy Young of Foster, the Rose family of Peace Dale, the Ray brothers of Jewett City, and the Connecticut farmer whose coffin was marked J B fifty-five. The episode also follows the story out of Exeter and into the Providence Journal, the papers of Bram Stoker, the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, and the research of folklorist Michael Bell.The cemetery has its own encounters. A teenager with a dying flashlight finds a girl standing over a headstone in nineteen seventy-nine. A groundskeeper's daughter watches a blue light travel along the back wall in nineteen fifty-seven. And a woman caring for her father in his last week walks into his bedroom at three in the morning and finds somebody sitting in the chair beside his bed. Then the road turns west. Ten Rod Road runs from the cemetery straight into the Arcadia Management Area, fourteen thousand acres of forest grown up over the same farms that emptied out in Mercy Brown's lifetime, and it's the same road where the best-known Bigfoot video in Rhode Island was filmed. From there the episode moves through the state's Sasquatch encounters. A duck hunter on Worden Pond watches something pale wade across a frozen cove.  A forestry worker sees a figure step over a stone wall during the gypsy moth summer of nineteen eighty-one. A beagle man at Big River has his whole pack go silent at once. A firewood cutter in Burrillville turns around to find something at his woodpile holding a piece of his oak. And a rider at Escoheag sits on a mare that won't take another step.If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, you can reach Brian at [email protected].   Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story. Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods. Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Exeter, Rhode Island, where on the seventeenth of March in eighteen ninety-two a group of farmers opened the graves of three women from the same family and burned the heart of the youngest one on a rock behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. Her name was Mercy Lena Brown, she was nineteen years old, and she'd been dead for two months. Her neighbors believed she was feeding on her dying brother from the grave. The ashes of her heart were mixed into water and given to him to drink. Brian tells the story of the Brown family from the beginning, starting with the death of Mary Eliza Brown in eighteen eighty-three and following consumption through the house as it took her daughter Mary Olive, then Lena, then Edwin.  Along the way the episode covers the wider New England vampire panic, the century of tuberculosis outbreaks that drove it, and the earlier Rhode Island cases that Exeter already knew by heart, including Stephen Staples and his petition to the Cumberland town council in seventeen ninety-six, the dream of Stukeley Tillinghast and his dying orchard, Nancy Young of Foster, the Rose family of Peace Dale, the Ray brothers of Jewett City, and the Connecticut farmer whose coffin was marked J B fifty-five. The episode also follows the story out of Exeter and into the Providence Journal, the papers of Bram Stoker, the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, and the research of folklorist Michael Bell.The cemetery has its own encounters. A teenager with a dying flashlight finds a girl standing over a headstone in nineteen seventy-nine. A groundskeeper's daughter watches a blue light travel along the back wall in nineteen fifty-seven. And a woman caring for her father in his last week walks into his bedroom at three in the morning and finds somebody sitting in the chair beside his bed. Then the road turns west. Ten Rod Road runs from the cemetery straight into the Arcadia Management Area, fourteen thousand acres of forest grown up over the same farms that emptied out in Mercy Brown's lifetime, and it's the same road where the best-known Bigfoot video in Rhode Island was filmed. From there the episode moves through the state's Sasquatch encounters. A duck hunter on Worden Pond watches something pale wade across a frozen cove.  A forestry worker sees a figure step over a stone wall during the gypsy moth summer of nineteen eighty-one. A beagle man at Big River has his whole pack go silent at once. A firewood cutter in Burrillville turns around to find something at his woodpile holding a piece of his oak. And a rider at Escoheag sits on a mare that won't take another step.If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, you can reach Brian at [email protected].   Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway for a pit stop this week so Brian can open the mailbag. Most of the encounters that land in the inbox are straightforward: somebody sees something big and hairy walking on two legs, and it walks away. The five in this episode didn't go that way. In each of them, seeing a giant ape that isn't supposed to exist was only part of what happened. Casimir was a railroad signal maintainer called out after midnight in October 1993 to a siding in the northern Minnesota bog country. On the way in he watched 3 pale lights travel north over the tamaracks, and 25 minutes later something came walking down the middle of the track toward his floodlights, stepping on every third tie. Odalys was running the instrument on a Florida survey crew in February 2008 when she followed a red-brown, mud-caked animal across an open cattle pasture through a 30-power telescope. She watched it walk behind a lone cabbage palm with a trunk 14 inches thick and never come out the other side. Linnea was calling spotted owls from a log landing in California's Klamath Mountains in June 1997. Her data sheet shows a start time of 9:42 PM for station six and nothing after it, and the next thing she remembers is sitting on her tailgate at 1:51 AM with her boots full of water. Verlene was alone in a Colorado elk camp in October 1986, 9 miles from the nearest road, when she heard what sounded like two people talking down at the creek and walked to the edge of the bench with a shotgun to see who was there. And Rosalind writes on behalf of her late father, Evander, a pipeline patrol pilot who flew past something black and upright on a bare wheat stubble hill in eastern Washington in August 1974. He banked around for a second look and found the hill empty 15 seconds later. There are no verdicts here and no explanations, only what five people saw and what happened around it that they've never been able to account for. If you've had an encounter of your own, Brian wants to read it. Send it to [email protected]. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story. Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods. Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The next stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is Pennsylvania, home of the most miserable monster in American folklore. The squonk comes out of the state's old lumber camps, where woodhicks and bark peelers told of a small, wart-covered animal with skin that didn't fit, so ashamed of its own looks that it hid in the hemlocks and cried all night. It reached print in 1910 in William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, along with the story of J. P. Wentling, a forester near Mont Alto who lured one into a sack and got home to find nothing inside but tears and bubbles. This episode covers the logging era that gave rise to the legend, from the Williamsport boom and the hemlock bark trade to life in the camps and the real dangers of the deep woods. It then follows the crying through the years in accounts from a Potter County bark camp in 1898, a Civilian Conservation Corps trail crew in 1934, a dairy farm springhouse in 1952, a deer camp above Pine Creek in 1967, a trout stream in the Loyalsock State Forest in 1979, and a gas well pad in Tioga County in 2011. From the squonk, the trip moves on to Pennsylvania's long history with Bigfoot, starting with an 1830s account from Susquehanna County, an 1897 newspaper report from Potter County, the 1973 wave of sightings Stan Gordon investigated along Chestnut Ridge, and the 2007 trail camera photos from the Allegheny National Forest. The encounters that follow take place on a strip mine haul road, a school bus route through the national forest, a maple sugarbush in Somerset County, a bow hunter's tree stand, a late-night wrecker call in elk country, and the Pine Creek Rail Trail. If you enjoyed this stop, please leave the show a rating and a review, and tell your friends and family about it. Send your own sightings, stories, and suggestions for future stops to [email protected] Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story. Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods. Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway for a pit stop this week so Brian can open the mailbag. Most of the encounters that land in the inbox are straightforward: somebody sees something big and hairy walking on two legs, and it walks away. The five in this episode didn't go that way. In each of them, seeing a giant ape that isn't supposed to exist was only part of what happened. Casimir was a railroad signal maintainer called out after midnight in October 1993 to a siding in the northern Minnesota bog country. On the way in he watched 3 pale lights travel north over the tamaracks, and 25 minutes later something came walking down the middle of the track toward his floodlights, stepping on every third tie. Odalys was running the instrument on a Florida survey crew in February 2008 when she followed a red-brown, mud-caked animal across an open cattle pasture through a 30-power telescope. She watched it walk behind a lone cabbage palm with a trunk 14 inches thick and never come out the other side. Linnea was calling spotted owls from a log landing in California's Klamath Mountains in June 1997. Her data sheet shows a start time of 9:42 PM for station six and nothing after it, and the next thing she remembers is sitting on her tailgate at 1:51 AM with her boots full of water. Verlene was alone in a Colorado elk camp in October 1986, 9 miles from the nearest road, when she heard what sounded like two people talking down at the creek and walked to the edge of the bench with a shotgun to see who was there. And Rosalind writes on behalf of her late father, Evander, a pipeline patrol pilot who flew past something black and upright on a bare wheat stubble hill in eastern Washington in August 1974. He banked around for a second look and found the hill empty 15 seconds later. There are no verdicts here and no explanations, only what five people saw and what happened around it that they've never been able to account for. If you've had an encounter of your own, Brian wants to read it. Send it to [email protected]. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

The next stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is Pennsylvania, home of the most miserable monster in American folklore. The squonk comes out of the state's old lumber camps, where woodhicks and bark peelers told of a small, wart-covered animal with skin that didn't fit, so ashamed of its own looks that it hid in the hemlocks and cried all night. It reached print in 1910 in William T. Cox's Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, along with the story of J. P. Wentling, a forester near Mont Alto who lured one into a sack and got home to find nothing inside but tears and bubbles. This episode covers the logging era that gave rise to the legend, from the Williamsport boom and the hemlock bark trade to life in the camps and the real dangers of the deep woods. It then follows the crying through the years in accounts from a Potter County bark camp in 1898, a Civilian Conservation Corps trail crew in 1934, a dairy farm springhouse in 1952, a deer camp above Pine Creek in 1967, a trout stream in the Loyalsock State Forest in 1979, and a gas well pad in Tioga County in 2011. From the squonk, the trip moves on to Pennsylvania's long history with Bigfoot, starting with an 1830s account from Susquehanna County, an 1897 newspaper report from Potter County, the 1973 wave of sightings Stan Gordon investigated along Chestnut Ridge, and the 2007 trail camera photos from the Allegheny National Forest. The encounters that follow take place on a strip mine haul road, a school bus route through the national forest, a maple sugarbush in Somerset County, a bow hunter's tree stand, a late-night wrecker call in elk country, and the Pine Creek Rail Trail. If you enjoyed this stop, please leave the show a rating and a review, and tell your friends and family about it. Send your own sightings, stories, and suggestions for future stops to [email protected] Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway this week for a pit stop, and Brian opens the mailbag. These are five Sasquatch encounters sent in by listeners, covering 66 years and five states, and two of them were handed down inside a family before they ever reached the show. Cordell was 260 feet up a cell tower on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee in October 2019, alone, when something walked out of the woods and into the compound below him. It stood beside his truck, took hold of his load line, and followed the rope up with its eyes until it found him. Philippa writes in with the story her father Emmett told for 40 years. In November 1964 he was hauling milk cans on a hill farm route in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom when his headlights caught something lifting a full 10-gallon can off a farmer's stand and carrying it up the pasture under one arm. The creamery docked him $11.40 for the can, and he never got over it. Marit was first out to the back beds on a Wisconsin cranberry marsh in October 1996 and found it standing in the flooded bed at daylight, scooping up berries with both hands. Her boss looked at the tracks on the dike and reached for a rake. Wrenna shares her grandmother Opal's diary from the summer of 1953, when Opal was a Forest Service fire lookout in the Yaak country of northwest Montana. For 11 days she took a compass bearing on something that crossed the same rock slide every evening. Then one night it didn't cross, and she heard her woodpile move. Ansel was 22 and picking oysters by lantern on Willapa Bay, Washington, in January 1982, with the tide out and no way off the bed for hours, when something came across the mud flats from Long Island, squatted 80 yards from the crew, and watched them work. If you've got an encounter of your own, or one that's been told at your family's supper table for years, Brian wants to hear it. Email [email protected] Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story. Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods. Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway this week for a pit stop, and Brian opens the mailbag. These are five Sasquatch encounters sent in by listeners, covering 66 years and five states, and two of them were handed down inside a family before they ever reached the show. Cordell was 260 feet up a cell tower on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee in October 2019, alone, when something walked out of the woods and into the compound below him. It stood beside his truck, took hold of his load line, and followed the rope up with its eyes until it found him. Philippa writes in with the story her father Emmett told for 40 years. In November 1964 he was hauling milk cans on a hill farm route in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom when his headlights caught something lifting a full 10-gallon can off a farmer's stand and carrying it up the pasture under one arm. The creamery docked him $11.40 for the can, and he never got over it. Marit was first out to the back beds on a Wisconsin cranberry marsh in October 1996 and found it standing in the flooded bed at daylight, scooping up berries with both hands. Her boss looked at the tracks on the dike and reached for a rake. Wrenna shares her grandmother Opal's diary from the summer of 1953, when Opal was a Forest Service fire lookout in the Yaak country of northwest Montana. For 11 days she took a compass bearing on something that crossed the same rock slide every evening. Then one night it didn't cross, and she heard her woodpile move. Ansel was 22 and picking oysters by lantern on Willapa Bay, Washington, in January 1982, with the tide out and no way off the bed for hours, when something came across the mud flats from Long Island, squatted 80 yards from the crew, and watched them work. If you've got an encounter of your own, or one that's been told at your family's supper table for years, Brian wants to hear it. Email [email protected] Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

In March of 1934, the crew of the lightship Columbia and the supply tender Rose watched something come up out of the water near the mouth of the Columbia River. The men said it was about 40 feet long with an 8-foot neck, and the tender's captain told the Salem Capital Journal it opened its mouth and gaped at the lightship. The crew wanted to lower a boat and go after it, and the officers told them no. Oregon would eventually give it a name, Colossal Claude. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads to the Oregon coast and the Columbia River Bar, the stretch of water sailors call the Graveyard of the Pacific.  The episode follows the sea serpent through the newspaper record, from the 1934 lightship sighting to Captain Charles Graham of the troller Viv in 1937, the couple who chased a 55-foot animal down the coast highway from Devil's Churn to Heceta Head, and Captain Chris Anderson of the halibut schooner Argo, who said in 1939 that it passed within 10 feet of his boat and ate a 20-pound halibut off his line. Along the way there's the crowd of more than 30 people at Nelscott, the 1,000-pound carcass called Old Hairy that washed up at Delake in 1950, and Marvin the Monster, filmed by Shell Oil cameras in 1963.You'll also hear from the people who never called a reporter: a salmon troller crossing the bar in 1951, an assistant keeper on Tillamook Rock, a family at the Neahkahnie Mountain viewpoint, a crabber off Clatsop Spit who had something follow his boat for 40 minutes, and a fisherman on the South Jetty in 2012.Then the road turns inland. Nearly half of Oregon is forest, and the reports of something upright in that timber go back to the wild man of the Sixes mining district in 1904. Brian covers the 1971 sightings at The Dalles, where a music teacher put a rifle scope on a creature in his headlights and couldn't pull the trigger, along with Peter Byrne's Bigfoot Information Center and the Bigfoot trap that still stands in the Siskiyous.  The episode closes with Sasquatch encounters from the Tillamook State Forest, the Clackamas River, the North Umpqua, Olallie Lake and Bear Camp Road. If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, email [email protected]. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story. Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods. Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

In March of 1934, the crew of the lightship Columbia and the supply tender Rose watched something come up out of the water near the mouth of the Columbia River. The men said it was about 40 feet long with an 8-foot neck, and the tender's captain told the Salem Capital Journal it opened its mouth and gaped at the lightship. The crew wanted to lower a boat and go after it, and the officers told them no. Oregon would eventually give it a name, Colossal Claude. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads to the Oregon coast and the Columbia River Bar, the stretch of water sailors call the Graveyard of the Pacific.  The episode follows the sea serpent through the newspaper record, from the 1934 lightship sighting to Captain Charles Graham of the troller Viv in 1937, the couple who chased a 55-foot animal down the coast highway from Devil's Churn to Heceta Head, and Captain Chris Anderson of the halibut schooner Argo, who said in 1939 that it passed within 10 feet of his boat and ate a 20-pound halibut off his line. Along the way there's the crowd of more than 30 people at Nelscott, the 1,000-pound carcass called Old Hairy that washed up at Delake in 1950, and Marvin the Monster, filmed by Shell Oil cameras in 1963.You'll also hear from the people who never called a reporter: a salmon troller crossing the bar in 1951, an assistant keeper on Tillamook Rock, a family at the Neahkahnie Mountain viewpoint, a crabber off Clatsop Spit who had something follow his boat for 40 minutes, and a fisherman on the South Jetty in 2012.Then the road turns inland. Nearly half of Oregon is forest, and the reports of something upright in that timber go back to the wild man of the Sixes mining district in 1904. Brian covers the 1971 sightings at The Dalles, where a music teacher put a rifle scope on a creature in his headlights and couldn't pull the trigger, along with Peter Byrne's Bigfoot Information Center and the Bigfoot trap that still stands in the Siskiyous.  The episode closes with Sasquatch encounters from the Tillamook State Forest, the Clackamas River, the North Umpqua, Olallie Lake and Bear Camp Road. If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, email [email protected]. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

Every lake in this episode was somebody's pasture once. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian King-Sharp drives into Oklahoma, where the three lakes said to hide the Oklahoma Octopus were all built by the government inside living memory. Lake Tenkiller, Lake Thunderbird, and Oologah Lake are reservoirs, not natural water, and under every one of them are drowned roads, standing timber, fence lines, and the foundations of houses that were dry ground three generations ago. That's the ground this legend grew on, and it's why this is a don't-swim-after-dark episode. The stories start on the Fourth of July, 1978, with a seventeen-year-old girl floating on her back off a houseboat on Tenkiller when something wraps her leg from ankle to knee and pulls her under. From there the episode follows a bass fisherman in the drowned timber at Thunderbird who watched an arm feel its way around a dead oak, a scuba diver who cut himself loose from something in the old river channel at thirty-five feet and came up with sucker marks pressed into his wetsuit, and a farm kid on Oologah who saw two arms come over the tops of his family's flooded fence posts and pull the wire down. Between the encounters, Brian traces the real paper trail behind the legend, which is thinner and stranger than the television version. It starts with a June 2, 1982 item in the Daily Oklahoman about two boys and a dead saltwater octopus found in the Verdigris River near Lock and Dam 18 on the barge canal, runs through a 1987 article by Kiowa writer Russell Bates about a horse-sized, reddish-brown creature said to drag people into sandstone caverns, and picks up again in 2007 with two cryptid books that named the three lakes without citing a source, a reporter at the Oklahoma Gazette who found that no park manager or diver on those lakes had ever heard of the thing, and Loren Coleman's guess that it all began with a planted carcass. Then in January 2009 Animal Planet's Lost Tapes turned it into a monster with a name. Along the way the episode looks at why man-made lakes breed this kind of story, from the cold water sitting in the old channel to the drownings that happen every summer in water nobody can see into. The second half leaves the water for the timber. It begins with the Noxie Monster of September 1975, when farmer Kenneth Tosh, Sheriff Robert Donald, researcher Hayden Hewes, and two dozen witnesses in Nowata County put a seven-foot hairy creature on the wire services and a Tulsa Tribune artist's drawing in front of the whole country. Then come the encounters that never made a newspaper: a noodler chest-deep in the Verdigris below Oologah dam watching something on the gravel bar bite the head off a fish, a deer hunter above a spring in the Kiamichi Mountains a few miles from where the Honobia Bigfoot Festival now stands, a nurse stopped on Highway 82 in the Cookson Hills above Tenkiller at 12:14 in the morning with a gray figure shading its eyes from her headlights, and a woman on a rock at Clear Bay on Lake Thunderbird who watched something wade out of the blackjack oak at dusk and come back with a fish held against its chest. The episode also covers the Siege at Honobia in 2000, the founding of the Honobia Bigfoot Festival in 2005, and how a valley in the Choctaw Nation turned its stories into college scholarships. If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, email [email protected]. Until the next stop, stay out of the water after dark, and keep your eyes on the tree line. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story. Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods. Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

Every lake in this episode was somebody's pasture once. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian King-Sharp drives into Oklahoma, where the three lakes said to hide the Oklahoma Octopus were all built by the government inside living memory. Lake Tenkiller, Lake Thunderbird, and Oologah Lake are reservoirs, not natural water, and under every one of them are drowned roads, standing timber, fence lines, and the foundations of houses that were dry ground three generations ago. That's the ground this legend grew on, and it's why this is a don't-swim-after-dark episode. The stories start on the Fourth of July, 1978, with a seventeen-year-old girl floating on her back off a houseboat on Tenkiller when something wraps her leg from ankle to knee and pulls her under. From there the episode follows a bass fisherman in the drowned timber at Thunderbird who watched an arm feel its way around a dead oak, a scuba diver who cut himself loose from something in the old river channel at thirty-five feet and came up with sucker marks pressed into his wetsuit, and a farm kid on Oologah who saw two arms come over the tops of his family's flooded fence posts and pull the wire down. Between the encounters, Brian traces the real paper trail behind the legend, which is thinner and stranger than the television version. It starts with a June 2, 1982 item in the Daily Oklahoman about two boys and a dead saltwater octopus found in the Verdigris River near Lock and Dam 18 on the barge canal, runs through a 1987 article by Kiowa writer Russell Bates about a horse-sized, reddish-brown creature said to drag people into sandstone caverns, and picks up again in 2007 with two cryptid books that named the three lakes without citing a source, a reporter at the Oklahoma Gazette who found that no park manager or diver on those lakes had ever heard of the thing, and Loren Coleman's guess that it all began with a planted carcass. Then in January 2009 Animal Planet's Lost Tapes turned it into a monster with a name. Along the way the episode looks at why man-made lakes breed this kind of story, from the cold water sitting in the old channel to the drownings that happen every summer in water nobody can see into. The second half leaves the water for the timber. It begins with the Noxie Monster of September 1975, when farmer Kenneth Tosh, Sheriff Robert Donald, researcher Hayden Hewes, and two dozen witnesses in Nowata County put a seven-foot hairy creature on the wire services and a Tulsa Tribune artist's drawing in front of the whole country. Then come the encounters that never made a newspaper: a noodler chest-deep in the Verdigris below Oologah dam watching something on the gravel bar bite the head off a fish, a deer hunter above a spring in the Kiamichi Mountains a few miles from where the Honobia Bigfoot Festival now stands, a nurse stopped on Highway 82 in the Cookson Hills above Tenkiller at 12:14 in the morning with a gray figure shading its eyes from her headlights, and a woman on a rock at Clear Bay on Lake Thunderbird who watched something wade out of the blackjack oak at dusk and come back with a fish held against its chest. The episode also covers the Siege at Honobia in 2000, the founding of the Honobia Bigfoot Festival in 2005, and how a valley in the Choctaw Nation turned its stories into college scholarships. If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, email [email protected]. Until the next stop, stay out of the water after dark, and keep your eyes on the tree line. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

This week, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories pulls off the road for a special listener mailbag episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is taking a brief pause while Brian opens the inbox and shares six disturbing encounters sent in from six different states—each from someone who spent years wondering whether anyone would believe what they saw. In the Washington Cascades, Nathan and his cousin Pete watch something enormous cross a clearcut on two legs in October 2015. Two nights later, it appears again at the edge of their firelight. But what they discover while driving out of the mountains is enough to make one of them swear off the woods for good. In Michigan, Kelsey finishes a late bar shift in January 2022 and begins an eighteen-mile drive through state forest. Something running upright keeps pace with her truck along the tree line at nearly fifty miles an hour. She thinks she finally loses it—until she reaches home and sees something waiting near her mailbox. In northern Maine, veteran trapper Ray is checking a brook he has worked for thirty years when he hears his wife calling his name from downstream. The problem is that she is twenty miles away. Then Ray sees what is standing in the alders—and realizes its mouth never moves when it speaks. In North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, Trisha encounters what at first appears to be a deer. Then it looks directly at her with both eyes, begins moving in ways no deer should, and eventually rises onto its hind legs miles deeper into the trail. In south Georgia, Marcus is sitting in a ladder stand when he spots a pale, hairless figure hanging by its arms from a longleaf pine forty yards away. Moments later, it begins moving through the canopy without ever touching the ground. And along Idaho’s Lochsa River, Jeff drives Highway 12 late at night and passes the same walking figure on the shoulder six separate times. Each time it appears closer to the road. His dash cam should have captured everything—but when he reviews the footage, the highway is empty. If you’ve had an encounter of your own, send it to [email protected]. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story. Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories. Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods. Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.