Tonight we're pulling off the highway for this one. Somewhere between mile markers on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, an email came in that I couldn't drive past, so we're parking in the gravel for a while to hear it. A man who's listened to just about everything I've put out finally wrote down something he'd carried alone for forty years, and he sent it to me because he trusts how I handle a story.

He was nineteen, deep in the military in the mid-1980s, out on an extended field problem in mountain country so remote that help was a full day away if anything went wrong. His commanding officer briefed them on bears and big cats and told them to keep their heads on a swivel, that this wasn't the kind of country that announces itself. By the third day, his element of six men had found crude shelters built from bent saplings woven together with living vines, and the birds had gone silent across the whole drainage.

What happened that night is the reason he's telling it now. White points of light with no source to reflect them, hanging six feet off the ground in the dark. Vocalizations from opposite slopes that climbed past anything an animal should be able to make, answering each other across the men's position. A smell that came in waves as something circled them. Rocks the size you don't throw by hand, dropped inside their perimeter close enough to kick dirt in a man's face, placed like a warning rather than an attack.

One of them breaking branches at slow, even intervals as it walked right up to a soldier's position and just stood there, breathing. And in the gray light before dawn, through their night vision, three of them at the tree line. One very large, two smaller by a foot or two and skinnier, restless, hanging back.

The way the three of them moved off together didn't look like animals scattering. It looked like a family heading home.



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.