This is the first episode in a five-part series called The Corridor. Over the past eight months, five separate people submitted encounter stories to the show, each from a different decade, none of them connected to one another in any way. When their accounts were mapped, every one of them described experiences along the same north-south ridgeline running from the Cohutta Wilderness in northern Georgia up through the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

A narrow valley cuts between two parallel ridges through the heart of this stretch, and every submitter described it independently — the terrain, the quiet, the feeling that something about the place isn't right. This series lays out their stories in chronological order, beginning in nineteen seventy-eight and ending in the present day, and lets the overlapping details speak for themselves.

In Part One, a retired carpet millworker named Herschel shares an account he kept private for forty-six years. 

In the fall of nineteen seventy-eight, Herschel and three hunting buddies leased a parcel in the southern Cohutta through a timber company and set up a deer camp on a bench overlooking the valley at about twenty-eight hundred feet. The first two nights were uneventful. On the third morning, Herschel woke to find the camp rearranged overnight — both Coleman coolers relocated without damage, and a field-dressed doe removed from the hanging pole and placed carefully in the center of the fire ring, untouched and unharmed.

Over the following nights, the encounters escalated. Wood-on-wood knocking echoed from the valley below, answered by identical knocking from the ridge above in a coordinated call-and-response pattern. Bipedal footsteps passed through camp close enough for one of the men to feel the ground vibration through his boots and camp chair. 

On the final night, Herschel aimed his flashlight into the hemlocks at the edge of camp and was met with reddish eyeshine at approximately seven and a half to eight feet, while a deep vocalization from the ridge behind him produced a sound he felt physically in his chest.

On the morning they broke camp, Herschel discovered a line of creek stones arranged at the camp's edge, evenly spaced and pointing due north along the ridgeline. The episode introduces the four men who were present — Herschel, Dale, Pete, and Jimbo — and provides context for their backgrounds, their familiarity with the woods, and their complete lack of interest in or knowledge of the paranormal prior to this experience.

It also details Herschel's solo return to the site in nineteen eighty, where he found additional tree breaks extending north along the ridge in a line, and stood on the crest looking into a corridor of unbroken forest stretching as far as he could see. 

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.

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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.

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