Five listener accounts. Five different parts of the country. Five different decades. And in every one of them, something out there showed an ordinary person, in no uncertain terms, that they were not at the top of the food chain. This episode isn't about quick glimpses through the trees. It's about the slow encounters. The ones where something took its time, where it watched, where it made a deliberate decision about whether or not to let the witness walk away.
The first account comes from Dale, a lifelong hunter from Sequim, Washington, who was twenty-three years old in October of 1978 when he climbed into a drainage off the Dosewallips before first light and saw something standing in the fog at the base of the slope. Sixty yards away. Gray-skinned, slope-browed, motionless in a way that no living thing should be able to manage.
Dale walked out of those woods that morning and didn't return to any forest for twenty-six years.
From there we move to Karen, a young woman from Elkins, West Virginia, who was twenty-four years old in September of 1993 and out for a solo overnight on a loop she'd hiked many times before. At two in the morning, every insect in the Monongahela went silent, something pressed a hand the size of a dinner plate against the wall of her tent, and the heat of a living body radiated through the nylon inches from her face. The next morning she saw what had been standing over her.
Brent rides next, a heavy equipment operator out of Athens, Ohio, who was on the OHV trails in the Wayne National Forest with his buddy Cody on a clear October afternoon in 2019. They heard whoops trade across the saddle of a ridge. They turned around to leave. And on the way back down the trail they'd just ridden, they found a fourteen-inch oak laid across the two-track that had not been there forty minutes earlier, with no root ball, drag marks in the dirt, and something watching them from behind a white oak thirty yards uphill.
The fourth account is told secondhand by Katelyn, the granddaughter of a northern Wisconsin trapper named Cal, who walked his line on a state forest tract north of the Bois Brule River in October of 1972 and found his sets methodically disabled. A foothold trap hung ten feet up in a hemlock. A marten cubby pried off a maple, turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and re-nailed backwards. A young whitetail arranged on the moss above an otter set, legs folded, head balanced upright, like a chess piece placed for him to find. Then three wood knocks from three different directions.
Then a tall, lean, gray-haired figure standing between two pines in the dawn light, watching him with an expression Cal could only describe as tired.
The episode closes with Marisol, a freelance photographer who in late August of 2015 hiked into a small alpine lake in the Trinity Alps Wilderness of northern California to shoot the milky way. The wind shifted across the cirque, the smell of a wet animal carried over the water, and through her two-hundred-millimeter zoom she watched something kneel at the far shore, cup water in its palm, drink, and then turn its head and look directly into her lens. A face with a heavy brow, a square jaw, and a small but distinct chin. Eight feet tall when it stood.
She broke camp in the fading light and hiked six miles back to the trailhead in the dark, and she has never reviewed the photographs she took that afternoon.What links these five accounts isn't the description of the creature. The descriptions vary. Reddish brown. Gray. Nearly black. Heavy jaw, no chin. Narrower jaw, slight chin. Lean and starved-looking. Massive and barrel-chested. What links them is the aftermath.
Every one of these people rearranged their lives around what happened. Hunting careers ended. Backpacking ended. Photography careers pivoted indoors. Decades of silence followed by a single attempt to put it down somewhere, with someone, before the memory had to go to the grave with them.If you've been carrying something of your own, the inbox is open.
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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