Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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.

This is part four 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.After the vocal mimicry encounter in October 2015, Garrett pulled back from the back acreage and spent the late fall and early winter in a contracted routine close to the cabin. The knocking went quiet by mid-December, and he assumed the creature had withdrawn deeper into the national forest for the cold months.

On the night of January 8, 2016, a storm dropped nine inches of fresh snow. Garrett woke the next morning to a pristine landscape and discovered a line of enormous bipedal tracks leading from the northeast tree line to the cabin in a straight, undeviating path. The tracks circled the full perimeter of the structure, pausing at the southwest corner directly outside his bedroom window and again at the back door, where handprints in the snow on the log wall indicated something had leaned against the cabin with both palms splayed.

The trail then crossed the meadow to Bishop Creek, where the thing entered the water and vanished without leaving an exit trail on either bank.Garrett called his friend Cliff, who drove up from Gastonia and spent the afternoon examining and measuring the evidence. Individual prints measured seventeen inches long and punched through the full snowpack into frozen ground.

Handprints beside the back door extended beyond the span of Cliff's outstretched hand. The stride averaged fifty-four inches at a walking pace.That evening, after Cliff left, Garrett went out to recheck the tracks and discovered a second set of prints paralleling his own bootprints from that morning. Something had returned and retraced his exact route around the cabin. At the bedroom window, the new tracks stepped even closer than the overnight set, and knuckle impressions on the windowsill indicated something had leaned forward to look inside. After midnight, Garrett heard four sequential wood strikes descending from the ridge toward the cabin, each closer and louder than the last. The final strike, from roughly thirty-five yards away, rattled the window glass. 

At dawn, he found a fresh trail ending at a massive red oak near the cabin, its bark shattered at eight feet by a single blow.Garrett reflects on the realization that the winter visits had likely been occurring all along, invisible without snow, and that the creature's nightly routine included circling the cabin and observing him while he slept.

The series continues with Story Five, in which Garrett hikes to a bluff overlook that Earl warned him never to visit after dark.

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 three 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.Garrett introduces his brother Wade, a Marine veteran six years his senior, now living in Winston-Salem with his wife Colleen and two kids.

He describes the bond they built during childhood cabin trips in the Blue Ridge, anchored by a pivotal hike near Blowing Rock that cemented Wade's voice as one of the most emotionally significant sounds in Garrett's life.On October 11, 2015, while resting at the bottom of a ravine during a routine boundary walk, Garrett hears Wade's voice call his name from upslope. The voice is a perfect acoustic match.

His dog Bowie reacts with immediate fear. A second call follows, and when Garrett turns south to leave, his name is called from in front of him while "Over here" comes simultaneously from behind, boxing him in from two directions within seconds of each other. Garrett scrambles up the western ravine wall as the voice follows, closer and more insistent each time. After reaching the ridgetop, he experiences a sudden total loss of spatial orientation on land he has walked dozens of times.

 He reorients only by listening for the sound of Bishop Creek and following it back to the cabin. At the cabin, he finds a single sixteen-and-three-quarter-inch footprint pressed into damp clay beside his back door, facing the threshold, left while he was in the ravine. He photographs it from seventeen angles and documents the measurements.

Garrett reflects on the emotional precision of the mimicry, the sustained close-range observation required to replicate a specific human voice, and what appears to be a coordinated event — a luring attempt in the ravine happening while something else visited the cabin.

The series continues with Story Four, in which tracks in fresh snow reveal how often the creature visits when Garrett believes it is gone.

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.