In this episode, Brian welcomes two guests with remarkable Bigfoot encounters that span decades and stretch from the mountains of North Carolina to the swamps of Connecticut.
First, North Carolina truck driver Dwayne shares a startling daylight sighting along Highway 18 near Kings Creek School. Traveling the familiar two-lane road in late April roughly two years ago, Dwayne watched an estimated eight-foot-tall, black, powerfully built creature cross the highway directly in front of him.
In only five or six enormous strides, it covered the road, stepped over a roughly three-foot guardrail without breaking pace, and disappeared into the thick woods on the opposite side. The encounter sent Dwayne searching through local Bigfoot reports, Appalachian folklore, and stories passed down through families around the Linville Gorge, Watauga County, and the surrounding North Carolina mountains.
That search leads Brian into the historical record and an old newspaper story Dwayne remembered as dating to 1888. While investigating the claim, Brian uncovers a verified December 14, 1877, account from the Charlotte Daily Observer, reprinted from the Statesville Landmark, describing a mysterious “Wild Man” reportedly seen prospecting in the Globe Valley near Blowing Rock.
Witnesses described a hairy figure beating its chest and retreating toward a cave, offering a fascinating glimpse into Appalachian wild-man traditions decades before the term “Bigfoot” entered the American vocabulary.
Brian also examines how seriously these nineteenth-century reports should be taken in an era when sensational newspaper stories and outright hoaxes were common. From there, the conversation explores Daniel Boone’s famous late-life story of encountering and killing what he reportedly called a “Yahoo,” the heavily publicized 1978 and 1979 sightings of the creature known as “Nobby” near Carpenter’s Knob, and a much more recent 911 report from 2010.
Then Brian welcomes Steve, now living in North Carolina, who takes the story back to 1986 and one of the closest encounters ever shared on the show. While stationed at a submarine facility in Connecticut, Steve went squirrel hunting before daylight in the Assetunk Swamp. As morning arrived, he heard something moving through the woods and initially assumed it was a deer.
Instead, an enormous hairy figure stepped across the trail less than thirty feet away. Steve estimates the creature stood at least nine feet tall, with dark skin, heavy hair, and a surprisingly human-looking face. Rather than immediately retreating, Steve moved closer, eventually getting within roughly fifteen feet before the creature looked down at him and exploded through the woods with enough force to sound, in his words, like a bulldozer.
When Steve circled ahead and unknowingly cut off its path, the encounter changed. The creature unleashed a deep growl powerful enough that Steve says he could feel it throughout his body. Armed only with a sixteen-gauge double-barrel shotgun, he decided it was time to back away.Steve continued hunting the area afterward without another direct confrontation, but his experiences did not end in Connecticut.
Since returning to North Carolina, he describes unexplained tree movements, possible vocalizations, strange nighttime sounds, unusual activity around his property, and other incidents that have kept him interested in the mystery.
His approach, however, remains skeptical. Steve prefers going into the woods without assuming Bigfoot is responsible for every unexplained sound or broken branch, looking instead for evidence and conventional explanations first.
Brian and Steve also discuss one of the biggest divisions within modern Bigfoot research: whether these creatures are undiscovered biological animals or something far stranger.
Both remain skeptical of claims involving portals, cloaking, interdimensional travel, and extraterrestrial connections without physical evidence to support them. The conversation turns to the continuing absence of a confirmed body or scientifically accepted DNA sample, and the frustration that comes from decades of extraordinary eyewitness testimony without the definitive physical evidence needed to settle the question.
From an eight-foot figure crossing a North Carolina highway in broad daylight to a nine-foot creature standing only yards from a hunter in a Connecticut swamp, this episode connects modern encounters with more than a century of Appalachian stories about wild men, hairy giants, and unexplained creatures lurking just beyond the tree line.
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Have you had a Bigfoot encounter, Sasquatch sighting, Dogman experience, or other cryptid or paranormal encounter? We’d love to hear your story. Email [email protected] to be featured on a future episode of Sasquatch Odyssey.
Sasquatch Odyssey is a leading Bigfoot and cryptid podcast exploring real encounters, field research, and scientific analysis of the Sasquatch phenomenon.
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