Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This week on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, we're taking a break from the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip to open the listener mailbag—and this time, it's not Bigfoot lurking in the darkness. Six listeners. Six states. Six terrifying encounters with something that shouldn't exist.From the cornfields of Iowa to the remote hills of the Missouri Ozarks, listeners share chilling firsthand accounts of a mysterious, upright, wolf-like creature commonly known as the Dogman. 

Standing on two legs, possessing unnatural speed and strength, and displaying disturbingly human characteristics, these creatures left witnesses with experiences they still struggle to explain.

In Iowa, a farmer harvesting corn after midnight encounters a towering, dog-headed figure pacing his combine through the fields. In Michigan, a woman walking her beagle discovers something monstrous lurking beneath a suburban streetlight. 

On a deserted Kentucky back road, three teenagers come face-to-face with a creature so enormous it towers over their vehicle. A Pennsylvania bowhunter finds himself trapped high in a tree stand as something begins climbing toward him. 

In Wisconsin, a woman driving home from work is pursued by a creature capable of keeping pace with her truck at seventy miles per hour.

And deep in the Missouri Ozarks, a man recalls a terrifying childhood encounter involving his grandfather, missing livestock, and a mysterious predator that changed their family farm forever.

But what makes these Dogman sightings especially unsettling isn't just what the witnesses claim to have seen. It's what they say was left behind: deep claw marks, damaged steel, unexplained hair, and physical traces of encounters they can never forget.

Are these sightings evidence of an undiscovered predator, misidentified wildlife, or something far stranger hiding in America's forests and rural communities?

Turn down the lights, settle in, and prepare for six unforgettable Dogman encounter stories that will make you think twice about what might be watching from the darkness.

If you enjoy terrifying cryptid encounters, eyewitness Dogman sightings, Sasquatch stories, mysterious creatures, and unexplained wilderness encounters, subscribe to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories for more chilling tales from the places where the pavement ends and the unknown begins.




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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.

Deep in the mountains and hollows of Tennessee, something terrifying has stalked the forests for generations. From the rugged Cumberland Plateau to the shadowy foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, witnesses have described a massive, hair-covered creature known as the Tennessee Wildman—a mysterious figure whose legend stretches back to newspaper reports from the 1870s.

In this chilling installment of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian explores more than a century of Tennessee Wildman history, folklore, and frightening encounters.Two veteran hunters spot a towering figure outside a secluded rock shelter. A young couple camping along the Big South Fork discovers enormous footprints before coming face-to-face with something watching from across a creek.

A lone hunter awakens to a terrifying face staring through his cabin window. Deep in the Smokies, experienced hunting dogs abandon a trail in fear. And inside a remote McNairy County cave, a farmer carrying a lantern discovers something unimaginable waiting in the darkness.

Along the way, Brian investigates the historical accounts that helped create the Tennessee Wildman legend, including the mysterious Wild Man of Chilhowee, strange baboon-like creatures reported near South Pittsburg in 1934, and the infamous 1976 Flintville Monster sightings, which reportedly sent armed residents searching the forests of Lincoln County.

From forgotten newspaper reports to terrifying backwoods encounters, this episode explores one disturbing possibility: Has something been hiding in Tennessee's mountains, caves, and forests for more than 150 years?

Turn down the lights and join us for another unforgettable journey into the unknown on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.


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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.

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads into South Dakota, where stories of a towering, faceless figure follow the roads through Pine Ridge and Rosebud after dark. He’s described as thin, seven feet tall or more, and sometimes wearing a hat. His name is Walking Sam.

Brian follows accounts of a grandmother who spotted an enormous figure beyond her fence, a teenager who encountered a stranger silhouetted against the stars, and a mother who heard something breathing outside her trailer for four consecutive nights. Other stories tell of children dreaming about the same tall visitor—and an elder who remembered the Tall Man decades before Walking Sam made headlines.

Along the way, Brian explores the Lakota traditions discussed in these accounts, their parallels with shadow people and the Hat Man, and the attention Walking Sam received during Pine Ridge’s 2015 youth suicide crisis. 

Then the road turns toward the Black Hills and South Dakota’s river country, where accounts of a different presence emerge: the hairy giant known as the Big Man. From the 1977 Little Eagle sighting reports to encounters involving loggers, ranchers, backpackers, and a tribal game warden, these stories describe rocks moving above a remote campsite, a massive figure watching a newborn calf, footsteps circling a tent, and tracks disappearing into the White River.

It’s a journey through roadside legends, wilderness encounters, and the stories people carry long after they get home. And when we return to Highway 18, the porch lights are still on.

Share your sightings, encounter stories, or suggestions for a future stop with Brian at [email protected].

If this episode touches on something close to home, support is available. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.


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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.

Most encounters on Backwoods Bigfoot Stories involve something tall, hairy, and walking on two legs. This week, five listeners describe something else: unexplained lights, unfamiliar figures, and ordinary trips into the backcountry that took a disturbing turn.

In Idaho’s Selway backcountry, an elk hunter alone at a spike camp watches a glowing object descend over a creek. Then he discovers a tall, faceless figure standing across his campfire. When he wakes, his rifle has been unloaded, and the cartridges are standing in a neat row on a log.

On a Louisiana bayou in 1961, a trapper running trotlines by lantern hears every frog fall silent at once. The water begins pulling his pirogue toward three small figures in the shallows, one holding its hand flat against the surface.

At the end of an Oregon logging spur, two stream surveyors wake inside their company truck to a hum that makes their teeth ache. One of them gets out and starts walking toward an orange light above the alders, his face strangely blank.On an Ozark river float, three teenage boys and a dog watch the pool beneath a bluff glow green from the bottom. 

Then something stands up in the shallows.And in interior Alaska, a woman running a trapline alone has her snowmachine die in the middle of a frozen lake. A flat black disc sits on the ice at the far end. Three figures begin walking toward her, crossing the snow without sinking.

Same woods as always. Something else in them.

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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 heads deep into the South Carolina Lowcountry, where a terrifying encounter on a lonely stretch of road sparked one of the strangest cryptid mysteries in American history. On June 29, 1988, seventeen-year-old Christopher Davis was changing a flat tire near Scape Ore Swamp outside Bishopville, South Carolina, when he claimed a horrifying seven-foot-tall, green-skinned creature with three fingers emerged from the darkness and charged straight at him. 

Davis barely escaped into his car, but according to his account, the creature grabbed his door, climbed onto the roof, and attacked the vehicle as he sped down Browntown Road. Within weeks, reports of the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp had exploded into a nationwide sensation. Mysterious three-toed footprints, damaged vehicles, eyewitness accounts, a million-dollar reward, and national television coverage turned the quiet community into the center of a cryptid frenzy.

But was something truly lurking in the blackwater swamp, or had an entire town been caught up in an elaborate hoax? We investigate the original 1988 encounters, the sheriff who stood behind Christopher Davis, the controversial evidence, and the mysterious sightings that continued for decades. Then we venture beyond the headlines into the darker, lesser-known stories from people who claimed to encounter something terrifying around Scape Ore Swamp.

A truck driver confronts a towering figure on a deserted bridge. A farmer's daughter discovers something stalking the tobacco barns. Two cousins find themselves trapped in a silent swamp, and a school bus driver experiences something that one terrified child will never forget. But South Carolina's unexplained encounters don't end with the Lizard Man.

Our journey continues into the remote forests, river bottoms, and isolated wilderness of the Palmetto State, where witnesses describe something entirely different: massive, hair-covered, humanlike creatures believed to be Sasquatch.From the ancient swamps of Congaree and the dense forests of Francis Marion to the Great Pee Dee River, Sumter National Forest, and the secluded shores of Lake Jocassee, we explore chilling Bigfoot encounter stories from across South Carolina.

One state. Two terrifying mysteries. Countless miles of dark wilderness.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Leave Us A Voicemail

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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.