Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This is part nine of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina.On September 21, 2019, Garrett and his longtime friend Cliff hike to a ridge shoulder above the property at dusk to deliberately attempt wood knocks and a call blast. Cliff brings a baseball bat for striking and Garrett brings an audio recorder with a directional microphone.

They set up about two hundred yards south of the bluff where Garrett had previously observed three creatures on the talus slope.Cliff's first three bat strikes on a dead oak produce a response within two minutes. A single heavy knock from the north, toward the bluff, at roughly a hundred and fifty yards. A second round of knocking draws two responses from the north and a third from the east, down the Bishop Creek drainage, confirming at least two separate individuals bracketing their position. Cliff identifies the two sources by their different acoustic signatures.Garrett then plays a Sierra Sounds vocalization through a Bluetooth speaker.

After nearly four minutes of silence, the ridge produces three simultaneous responses. A sustained rising vocalization from the north at close range. A rapid series of barking tonal bursts from the east, closer than the previous knock. And a massive tree strike from the south, directly on their primary exit route back to the cabin.

With three sides covered and only the western downslope open, Garrett directs their descent through trailless hardwood forest toward the meadow. Something parallels them on the north side, tapping position knocks coordinated with answering taps from the ridge behind them. Halfway down, both men experience strong infrasound, a subsonic vibration felt in the chest, teeth, and inner ear that produces disorientation and acute anxiety. A heavy branch snap from forty yards confirms proximity. At the tree line, all sounds and the infrasound cease simultaneously, and Garrett and Cliff cross the meadow to the cabin.

Cliff tells Garrett he won't return to the property after dark and drives home the next morning. Garrett retrieves the recorder the following day and finds seven hours of post-encounter audio including knocking at 11:42 PM, a low vocalization at 1:15 AM, and clear heavy footsteps passing within ten feet of the recorder at 3:27 AM.

The series concludes with Story Ten, in which Garrett discovers what Earl left behind and finally understands why the creatures have allowed him to stay.

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.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part eight of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. On the evening of November 9, 2018, a major storm system stalls over the mountains, producing over thirty hours of continuous heavy rain. The power goes out at 4:17 PM Saturday afternoon.

With the generator dead from moisture in the magneto, Garrett settles in for a night of oil lamps and firelight. Both dogs have been agitated since the barometric pressure began dropping, with Ruby pacing a tight patrol route between the windows and back door. At 9:14 PM, both dogs snap to alert facing the front wall in complete silence. Garrett hears the porch planks creak in sequence as something crosses the porch and leans against the front wall. For forty-two minutes, he listens to deep, rhythmic breathing transmitted through the poplar logs. At 9:56, the creature walks back across the porch and descends the steps.

Twenty-six minutes of silence follow before footsteps approach the back of the cabin from the ridge side. The creature takes up a second position against the back wall, directly behind the bedroom. When Garrett investigates with a lamp, he finds two massive wet handprints pressed flat against the bedroom window glass from the outside. A low chuffing sound accompanies the breathing from the back wall. At 10:41, the front doorknob turns approximately fifteen degrees and holds before slowly returning to position, indicating a second individual at the front door while the first remains at the bedroom window. The cabin fills with a heavy musk odor penetrating through the rain-soaked logs.At 11:20, a small impact sounds on the front porch.

All activity ceases at 11:34, and Garrett hears footsteps receding toward the ridge. The following morning he documents compression marks on the porch, a clear track line in the mud behind the cabin with prints measuring sixteen to seventeen inches, handprint photographs on the window glass, and a smooth creek stone placed on the porch directly in front of the door.

The series continues with Story Nine, in which Garrett and Cliff deliberately attempt contact from the ridge

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.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part seven of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina.In late April 2018, an elderly woman named Opal crosses Bishop Creek and arrives at Garrett's cabin. She and her late husband Vernon lived on twenty acres across the creek for fifty-one years.

Vernon spent thirty years with the Forest Service and documented the creatures along the Bishop Creek corridor from 1963 until shortly before his death in 2004. He and Earl were friends who compared notes for years.Opal shares her own mimicry encounter from October 1974. Alone with her two young sons while Vernon was away, she heard his voice calling from the tree line, then heard her own voice calling the boys' names from the opposite direction. Her six-year-old grabbed her hand and broke the spell.

Vernon and Earl later concluded the mimicry was a standardized assessment the creatures ran on every new resident of the corridor. Earl got his in 1971. Garrett got his in 2015. Same test. Same playbook. Fifty years apart.She recounts Vernon's close encounter from February 1976, when he surprised one of the creatures drinking from Bishop Creek at twenty feet. It stood to over eight feet, screamed at a volume that shook snow from the branches, then snapped an eight-inch hemlock clean through at chest height.

The broken tree fell across the trail between them. Vernon ran. The creature watched him go.Opal gives Garrett seven boxes of Vernon's field records spanning 1963 to 2003, including an annotated USGS topo map showing the full four-mile creek corridor, knock zones, structure sites, den areas, and a four-thousand-acre circuit the creatures orbit seasonally. Vernon's notes document a juvenile sighting in 1991 and conclude with a final entry expressing his belief that the creatures assess humans individually and choose restraint based on decades of observation.

Opal explains that Earl kept silent because he believed the creatures listened to conversations and that talking about them openly would break the arrangement. She warns that the generational credit from Earl's silence is running out as newer individuals write their own terms. After Opal moves to Morganton in June, Garrett finds her abandoned property still being visited — worn trails, folded chicken wire, removed tomato plants, and handprints on the window ledge. The series continues with Story Eight, in which Garrett and Cliff deliberately try to make contact from the ridge.

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.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part six of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. In the spring of 2017, Garrett adopted a young shepherd mix named Ruby from a gas station near Chimney Rock. 

She bonded with Bowie within weeks and joined him on nightly dusk patrols of the meadow, adopting his boundary rules around the property without being taught. On October 14, 2017, both dogs froze mid-patrol, then bolted into the eastern tree line in pursuit of something Garrett couldn't see. 

He followed with a flashlight as something paralleled him through the trees, matching his pace at a fixed distance. He found Bowie wedged under a fallen tree in a blowdown clearing, trembling and unresponsive. Ruby was forty yards further upslope, frozen in front of four stick structures built in a depression between two beech trees, including a conical teepee of stripped branches and a cluster of living saplings braided together and secured with bark-strip knots.

While Garrett stood with Ruby, branch snaps began from three positions behind them, closing in a coordinated circle. He walked south through the formation, and the snapping stopped simultaneously. The circle opened. He retrieved Bowie and descended with both dogs pressed against his legs. During the walk out, Ruby stopped once, turned east, and delivered a single recognition bark into the darkness. The following sounds stopped.

Both dogs recovered within days but permanently changed their patrol, stopping at the tree line every evening and refusing to enter the forest again.

The series continues with Story Seven, in which a woman from across the creek arrives at the property with information connecting Earl, Reba, and the reason the creatures have never harmed Garrett.

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.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.

This is part five of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. During his first visit to the property in 2014, the previous owner Earl pointed out a rocky prominence on the ridgeline about half a mile northeast of the cabin and warned Garrett never to go there after dark, offering no explanation.

By the spring of 2016, with two years of escalating encounters behind him and the nightly knocking returning from that same direction, Garrett decided to hike to the bluff at dusk to understand the terrain the creatures were using as a corridor.On the evening of June 18, 2016, Garrett climbed to the overlook alone. He found a granite shelf with a commanding view of three counties and a direct sightline to his cabin below.

The margins of the bluff held overlapping tracks in the soil from numerous visits across an extended period. Stone arrangements along the eastern edge, including stacked rocks and a semicircle around a flat sitting slab, indicated habitual occupation rather than a casual stopover.As the sun set, Garrett heard stone-on-stone clacking from the talus slope below the cliff. A large upright creature stepped from behind a boulder about forty feet below him. He describes a conical head with a sagittal crest, a massively built torso, and a complete absence of fear as it looked straight up at him.

A second, smaller creature appeared on a ledge fifty yards along the cliff face, striking a stone against the rock wall. A third was heard but never seen, producing a sustained vocalization from the tree line that the other two turned toward simultaneously.Garrett retreated from the bluff in near-dark, fell once on the descent, and returned to the cabin shaken but with a new clarity about the scale of what he was dealing with.

Over three subsequent visits that summer, he found the stone arrangements rearranged each time and eventually discovered a smooth, water-polished creek stone placed on the exact slab where he'd been sitting, carried from Bishop Creek half a mile below.Earl passed away in September 2016.

Standing at his grave on the property, Garrett reflected on the half-truths and coded warnings Earl had offered across two years and wished the old man had simply said what he knew. The series continues with Story Six, in which Garrett's dogs chase something into the woods and don't come back.

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.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.