Welcome to this special collection episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, a journey across sixty years of encounters from the deep woods of the Southeastern United States. In this episode, I share six of the most compelling accounts I’ve documented over the past five years—stories that take us from the riverbanks of Alabama to the swamps of South Carolina and reveal just how many secrets the South still keeps hidden.

Our journey begins in Alabama in 1967, where a power company lineman discovered enormous handprints embedded in a utility pole along the Cahaba River. His face-to-face encounter with a towering creature challenged everything he believed about the world and set the tone for the stories that followed: intelligent beings that choose their moments carefully and always remain in control. From there, we move into the mountains of North Georgia in 1973, where four seasoned hunters found themselves under siege near Blue Ridge. 

A night of rock throwing, violent tree shaking, and dozens of stick figures arranged in a perfect warning circle around their camp left them shattered and unwilling to ever return to the woods.In Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains in 1985, a park ranger and wildlife biologist had her scientific worldview upended when a massive creature climbed her fire tower and examined her equipment with deliberate intelligence. Her experience led her to discover that the Park Service had quietly documented similar incidents for decades.

The most tragic encounter comes from the Ozark Mountains in 1991, where a family camping trip spiraled into terror. A young girl watched as towering beings demonstrated their strength by crushing rocks with their bare hands. The emotional and psychological fallout broke her family apart, leaving scars that never healed. In 2002, the forests of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest became the setting for an encounter unlike any before it. 

An experienced hiker spent three days in what he described as captivity with a family group of these beings, observing their social dynamics, tool use, and an unmistakable curiosity about human objects—suggesting a species far more complex than previously imagined.

Our final story takes us to South Carolina in 2014, where two college biology students captured over forty minutes of high-definition footage showing a creature examining their research equipment with clear understanding of its purpose. 

The immediate government intervention and enforced silence that followed hinted at a much larger effort to conceal the truth. Across all six encounters, the patterns are unmistakable: the heavy musky odor that announces their presence, the massive handprints, the intelligent eyes studying and evaluating, and the sense that these beings could harm us—but choose not to. 

Together, these stories paint the American South as a hidden refuge for an undiscovered species, or perhaps a separate branch of human evolution that has mastered the art of staying unseen. This episode serves as both a warning and an invitation. The woods are not empty. Something ancient and intelligent is out there, watching from the edges of our world. 

As you listen, consider how these beings’ behavior has evolved over the decades, how closely they seem to be studying us, and what it means that evidence is so quickly suppressed. These are not campfire tales—they are the testimonies of people whose lives were forever changed by what they saw. And sometimes, in the quiet space between dusk and dawn, the South’s best-kept secrets step out of the darkness and make themselves known.