This is part one of a ten-part series from a single witness named Garrett, a residential contractor from Gastonia, North Carolina, who recounts a decade of escalating encounters on one remote mountain property in the southern Appalachians.

Garrett has been listening to Sasquatch Odyssey, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, Disturbing History, and The Guilty Files for over two years and asked that his experiences be shared in order. After losing his mother in February 2014, Garrett used his inheritance to purchase a forty-seven-acre property and hand-built cabin from an eighty-two-year-old man named Earl, whose wife Reba had passed the previous autumn after more than four decades together on the land. 

Garrett moved in during May 2014 with his red heeler mix, Bowie, and began renovating the cabin while settling into the quiet of mountain life. Within three weeks, he started hearing sharp wood knocks from the ridgeline northeast of the cabin each evening, arriving consistently within a twenty-minute window after sunset. 

He logged the sounds for weeks, tracking their timing, rhythm, and direction, and noted that they were occasionally answered from entirely different positions in the surrounding hollow. Bowie's behavior shifted noticeably during this stretch, refusing to cross the northern tree line and relocating his sleeping spot to a hallway position between the bedroom and the back door. In late July 2014, Garrett knocked back using a piece of oak firewood against a hickory tree and received matching patterns from the ridge within seconds.

 After a heavy rainstorm in early August, he found a line of seventeen-and-a-quarter-inch bipedal tracks pressed into clay along a game trail leading from the ridge toward his cabin, each showing five individually articulated toes and a defined arch at a depth suggesting several hundred pounds behind every step.

The story reaches its peak on the evening of September 27, 2014, when Garrett spotted a massive upright figure standing between two white oaks at the meadow's edge. He describes a broad, hair-covered form estimated between seven and eight feet tall with coloring close to dark walnut bark.

The figure watched him briefly, turned, and stepped into the forest with a single heavy footfall. Later that night, he heard a deep, sustained vocalization from the direction it had gone, unlike anything he had ever encountered in the woods.

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.

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