Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

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Nebraska: The Thing in Alkali Lake Aug 23, 2026

Show notes

This week the road trip leaves the timber and runs into the Nebraska Sandhills, where there's nothing to hide behind for 100 miles and the only thing you can't see into is the water.
A few miles southeast of Hay Springs sits a 50-acre lake the state renamed Walgren Lake decades ago and that nobody local has ever stopped calling Alkali Lake. In the early 1920s it produced one of the strangest monster stories in American newspapers, a 40-foot alligator-shaped animal with a single horn and a smell that could turn a man's stomach, reported in the Omaha World-Herald in 1923 under the initials J.A. Johnson and carried from there to Chicago, New York, and by some accounts London.
Brian walks through the Hay Springs News items that started it, the wire-service telling that made it famous, and the Chadron newspaperman John G. Maher (1859–1939), a man Nebraska historians remember as the state's most accomplished hoaxer, whose fingerprints a lot of people see on the whole affair.
Then the episode goes to the people who lived on the lake and never went near a reporter, from a homesteader's daughter who found a calf torn up on the shore in 1922, to a county road worker on the dam in 1954, to a couple bank fishing for bullheads in 1979, a grain hauler on a wet road at midnight in 1986, two brothers on the ice in 2001, and a woman whose kayak came to a stop over 8 feet of water in 2014.
From there the trip follows the rivers, because Nebraska's woods run in lines, and the second half of the episode is given over to people who saw something upright in the Pine Ridge in 1994, along the Niobrara in 2006, in the Missouri bottoms near Ponca in 1988, on the Dismal River below the hand-planted forest at Halsey in 1971, and on the frozen Platte south of Omaha in 2003.
A deer hunter on a rock, a woman driving home from her sister's, a farm wife waiting with supper, a 12-year-old with a fishing pole, and a rural mail carrier who still parks where he parked that day.
If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything we do at paranormalworldproductions.com.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Born Wild: Koda's Odysey Vol II Part V Aug 21, 2026

Show notes

Part Five of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two begins with the mistake the clans always knew was coming. Summer settles over the forest and brings people with it. More hikers, more campers, more cameras scanning the ridgelines for a postcard moment to carry home.
The sasquatch do what they've always done when the world crowds in, pulling back into the heavy timber, moving only in the gray hours, eating less and resting less and watching more.
But discipline can only stretch so far, and out in a dense stretch of old growth four miles from the nearest trail, a wildlife photographer named David Reeves is about to point his lens at something no magazine will ever publish.
David isn't a weekend tourist. He's patient, serious, and good enough at reading the backcountry to go exactly where he shouldn't. That's the problem. One glimpse, one held breath, and suddenly the secret three years of caution were meant to protect is sitting exposed in the viewfinder of a man who knows what he's looking at.
What follows tests everything Koda and the clans have built. A single photograph in the wrong hands could bring the whole outside world down on them, and the choices the sasquatch make in the hours after that encounter carry a weight none of the earlier fights ever did.
This is the danger the clans have always feared most, and it doesn't come with claws or howls. It comes with a camera.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Montana: The Shunka Warak'in Aug 19, 2026

Show notes

Montana is the only stop on this road trip where the animal is sitting in a display case. In 1886, in the Madison River Valley, a settler named Israel Ammon Hutchins killed something that had been coming into ranch yards after geese and dogs across fifteen miles of valley.
He gave the carcass to a grocer named Joseph Sherwood over at Henry Lake, Idaho, who mounted it, called it the Ringdocus for reasons nobody has ever explained, and put it in his store. It sat there into the 1980s and then it vanished. For two decades the only proof it had ever existed was a black-and-white photograph in a naturalist's 1977 autobiography. In 2007 a descendant named Jack Kirby tracked it to a storage room at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello and brought it home to Ennis, and before it went on display he drove it to the cemetery and parked it next to the old man's grave. It's still there, four feet long, dark, high in the shoulder and low in the hip, with the ghost of stripes on its sides. Nobody has ever run its DNA.
This episode covers where the name Shunka Warak'in actually comes from and why it doesn't belong to Montana at all, what Lance Foster told Loren Coleman in 1995, and what an earlier anthropologist recorded about the same word. It covers what a dog was worth on the northern plains and on a homestead, and why an animal that carries off dogs earns its own name. It covers the forty-year campaign that emptied Montana of wolves, including the 1905 state law that required the veterinarian to infect wolves and coyotes with mange and turn them loose, and what it does to a landscape when the main predator is removed and then put back.
And it covers the two modern cases everybody brings up, the Creature of McCone County that killed roughly 120 head of livestock in 2005 and 2006 before Wildlife Services shot it from an aircraft, and the strange short-legged animal a rancher killed near Denton in 2018 that had the whole country convinced for about a month.Then come the letters. Dale, losing three dogs in five weeks out of a lit yard and finding a collar in a hayfield the following spring. Jenny, walking through a sheep band counting the same wound on the same side of every animal.
Cal, watching one through a rifle scope for forty seconds and not being able to make himself shoot until it turned to leave. Owen, nineteen years old, finding a covered calf against a fence and then meeting the thing on a two-track at eighty yards. Marla, standing between her children and the kitchen door while something screamed in the cottonwoods a week after her dog died inside a closed gate. And Wendell, who backed a gravel truck up in the dark to put his headlights on a track line.
The second half of the episode changes animals entirely and moves into Montana's Sasquatch country, the Bitterroots and the Bob Marshall and the Yaak, with accounts from an elk hunter who hiked eleven miles out in the dark, a firewood cutter who came back three weeks later and found three lodgepoles twisted off above head height, a woman who spent eleven nights sleeping in a windowless hallway, and a thirty-year outfitter who counted eleven barefoot impressions in fresh snow and never told a single client.
It also covers what happened on U.S. Highway 93 south of Kalispell on August 26, 2012, and the two teenage girls who have been carrying it ever since.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Bigfoot Around The Globe Aug 16, 2026

Show notes

We're pulling off the road again. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is still running state by state, but the mailbag keeps filling up with letters that don't have a state on them at all, so this week we're taking the detour overseas.
Five encounters, five countries, all of them sent in by listeners, all of them set in places you can pull up on a map before you go to bed tonight.In England, a night shift warehouse worker named Neil walks his lurcher across Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, 26 square miles of pine plantation and heathland sitting in the middle of the country, laid over the buried remains of two First World War training camps.
He has a two-note whistle he uses for the dog. In October something on the Chase starts using it back, right down to the crack in the middle of it. What follows includes a valley walk he now calls the stupidest decision of his life, a fallow deer wedged in the fork of a Scots pine at head height, and a single toed impression in the mud that he never cast and never photographed.In central China, a 26-year-old field assistant named Lin is running primate transects in the Shennongjia Forestry District in Hubei Province, the same mountains the Chinese Academy of Sciences flooded with more than 100 people in 1977 after a carload of officials reported a large reddish creature in their headlights in 1976.
Lin gets a rock thrown at her, a smell she compares to vinegar and wet fur, and a look at something standing in arrow bamboo 20 meters off the trail. Then something spends a good part of the night pushing on the shutters of her field station, and a camera trap 400 meters down the mountain fires 11 times between one and two in the morning with every single frame coming back black.In Queensland, Australia, a fencing contractor named Wade is camped at Booloumba Creek in the Conondale Range when a rock lands in his fire and a second one hits the roof of his truck.
What comes off the slope after that scares every dog along the creek quiet. Fourteen months later, running a boundary fence near Jimna, his working dogs quit on him, he finds prints in creek clay with a stride of over a meter and a half, and something puts its weight on the side of his truck at two in the morning while he's lying in the tray.
He still has what he pulled off the top wire of that fence, in a coffee tin, in his shed.
In southern Siberia, a miner named Pavel rides a snowmobile up the Mrassu River in February to check his late uncle's hunting hut in Mountain Shoria, near Tashtagol. He crosses a line of tracks that covers 400 meters of open river ice in a perfectly even stride, finds a young elk cached uphill with its neck broken and almost nothing eaten, and then spends a night listening to something scatter his woodpile, stand over his stovepipe, and knock three times on his door.
He leaves bread on a stump now, every night he stays there, and he'll tell you he doesn't believe it does anything. And in eastern Bhutan, a trekking guide named Sonam takes a group through Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary between the villages of Merak and Sakteng, a protected area established in 2003 that lists the migoi in its founding purpose alongside the snow leopard and the red panda.
He gets whistling above camp after two in the morning, a client who wakes to something standing outside her tent, a herder's mastiff that has to be dragged out from under a hut, and an argument in the mud with an older Brokpa man about which direction a set of footprints was actually facing.
A week later a healthy female yak turns up 30 meters above where she'd been grazing, on a shelf you have to scramble to reach, neck broken, untouched.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey Vol II Part IV Aug 14, 2026

Show notes

Part Four of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two takes the alliance out of the meeting ground and into the dark, where good intentions stop counting for much and skill is the only thing that keeps you alive. It opens with Eli's first real night patrol, and the forest is not kind to him.
Where Koda moves through the black between the trees like water around stone, Eli crashes through it like a wounded elk, learning the hard way that eyes are almost useless out there and that everything he thought he knew about the woods was daylight knowledge.
Koda becomes his teacher, and the lessons are patient but unforgiving, because both of them understand that a single mistake in the wrong moment could expose everything they've built. This is where the fragile alliance stops being an idea and starts becoming real work.
The humans have to earn their place, prove they can be an asset instead of a liability, and every close call out in the dark is a test of whether two species can truly watch each other's backs.
But the forest holds more than lessons, and the deeper Koda and Eli push into the night, the clearer it becomes that neither the Dogmen nor the humans at the tree line have gone anywhere. The quiet is only ever borrowed, and the price of protecting something wild keeps climbing.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Missouri: Bigfoot Meets Momo Aug 12, 2026

Show notes

In July of 1972, in the river town of Louisiana, Missouri, two little boys were playing in their backyard at the foot of Marzolf Hill when their older sister heard them start screaming.
Fifteen-year-old Doris Harrison went to the bathroom window and saw something standing by a tree, six or seven feet tall, covered in black hair, with no face she could make out and something dead tucked under its arm. The town laughed at those kids for about a day and a half.
Then a Pentecostal congregation of roughly fifty people heard something come down off that hill, and nobody in Pike County thought it was funny for the rest of the month.This is stop number twenty-five on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the halfway point, and it's the story of Momo, the Missouri Monster.
We walk through the whole flap as it actually happened, from the picnic encounter on Highway 79 in 1971 to the Harrison sighting on July 11, 1972, to Edgar Harrison hanging bait on a tree behind his own house and sitting out in the dark waiting for whatever took his children's afternoon away from them. We cover the sick dog, the smell that runs through every account like a thread, the church meeting on the night of July 14, and Police Chief Shelby Ward putting two dozen armed men across Marzolf Hill three times and finding nothing at all.
We get into the plaster casts, the three-toed track that a zoo director in Oklahoma City looked at and called a hoax, and the out-of-state investigators who camped in a family's backyard and left with a theory about flying objects that did more damage to this case than any skeptic ever managed. And we talk about what happens to a town when the newspapers show up, name your monster for you, and turn one bad July into a festival.
The second half of the episode leaves Momo behind and gets into Missouri Sasquatch country, because strip the nickname and the novelty record off the Harrison case and what's left is an ordinary Sasquatch report. Missouri has produced roughly 147 catalogued encounters and has never stopped generating them.
We cover a farmer near Bowling Green who came around a creek bend on a four-wheeler and found something squatting in the water thirty feet in front of him, the ongoing reports out of Cuivre River State Park and Bowling Green Lake, the night four young men sat in a Jeep near Smithville Lake and listened to the woods go quieter than any of them had ever heard, and the men out of southeast Missouri who put their names to what they saw in the Mark Twain National Forest country.
Then we turn it over to the mail. Jenny was seven years old and bringing laundry off the line when the sheet in front of her moved the wrong way. Ray watched something cross a river road in front of his headlights and drove eleven miles out of his way for a year afterward without telling his wife why. Marla found tracks along a fence line and watched her husband go get a shovel and bury them.
Dean sat in a deer stand and listened to the silence travel toward him. Colleen's three children came across the yard at a dead run, and the middle one said the thing at the tree line had no face, which is exactly what a fifteen-year-old girl told a newspaper thirty years before.
And Wes put a light on something standing chest deep in the Mississippi at forty feet, and it didn't run.
The kids saw it first. Nobody ever believes the kids.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Bigfoot & Dogman Aug 09, 2026

Show notes

We're pulling off the highway on this one. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip runs state by state, but the reports don't arrive that way, and this episode is for the five that have been sitting in the folder waiting for a place to land. Four decades, five states, and no connection between any of them except that the people involved all ended up carrying something they couldn't put down.
We start in the North Carolina mountains in the summer of 1985, where an eighteen-year-old alone in his mother's house spent three nights with a .357 in his lap. Something covered the window in his front door from top to bottom, worked the doorknob, screamed back when he threatened it, and knocked the porch off its pillars. By the third night it was breathing through his bedroom screen from less than two feet away, and it took a load of buckshot from his grandfather to end it.
From there we head to West Virginia, where a young man fishing a secluded spot before sunrise heard rocks landing in the water, watched an upright canine push the foliage apart, and fired five rounds on a trail while it circled around to get ahead of him. Then a quick stop in Calvert County, Maryland, in July of 1992, where a sixteen-year-old in the back seat of his family's car locked eyes with something seven feet tall standing braced between two trees with both arms spread, and spent the next thirty years being told he made it up.
The last two are Sasquatch.
In the Kiamichi country of southeastern Oklahoma, a welder named Ray sat a ladder stand through rock clacking and two wood knocks before something walked across a creek bottom on two legs in gray light, and he went back the next day with flagging tape and a tape measure to find out how tall it really was.
And on an Ozark river in July of 1998, two brothers running a trotline heard a two-beat wading sound coming downstream at midnight, put a spotlight on it at forty yards, and came back at daylight with their father to find a fifteen-and-three-quarter-inch track with no claw marks in it and a fifty-two-inch stride between the prints. What they poured that afternoon sat in a shed for twenty-two years. Every one of these five people paid something for telling it. That's the part I keep coming back to, and it's the reason the offer at the end of this episode stays open.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Mississippi — River Aliens & Bigfoot Aug 07, 2026

Show notes

On the night of October 11, 1973, two shipyard workers drove into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told a story that neither of them expected anybody to believe. Charles Hickson spelled his name into a tape recorder and said that even if they laughed him out of the county he was going to tell it anyway.
Then he described a blue light coming down over the bayou, three figures floating out of an opening, and something that looked like a big eye moving over his body while he lay immobilized inside a machine. Calvin Parker, the younger of the two, said almost nothing about the inside of it, because by his own account he passed out at the beginning and didn't come around until it was over.What makes Pascagoula different from almost every case like it is what the sheriff did next.
Fred Diamond and Captain Glenn Ryder finished the interview around 11 p.m., walked out, and left the two men alone in a room with the recorder still running, expecting to catch a hoax. What they caught instead was a 42-year-old man trying to talk a terrified teenager down, and then, after Hickson stepped out for coffee, a young man from Jones County praying out loud to a machine he didn't know was there.This episode is the Mississippi stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, and it goes in deep. I work the case from the primary recording rather than the retellings, which means you get Hickson's actual answers to the deputies, including all the places he told them he didn't know.
I lay out the geography of the Pascagoula River, the Singing River legend and why I don't trust the version that got printed for a century, and the Phantom Barber summer of 1942, because this is not a town with no history of strange. I walk through the 1973 flap that was already in the local paper four days before any of this happened, including the service station operator who called in a light around 8 p.m., roughly two hours before Hickson ever knocked on a newspaper door.
I also deal with the part a lot of tellings skip, which is what Charles Hickson did with the next 20 years of his life, the ongoing contact claims, the television circuit that started with Dick Cavett on November 2, and the arrest in January 1974, and why none of that gets to reach backward and rewrite what's on that tape.
There's a witness who waited 45 years and came forward in 2019, eight years after the man who spent his life asking for her had already died. And there's a historical marker, unveiled June 22, 2019, standing today at the spot where Hickson was certain he'd be run out of town. The back half of the show goes into the woods, because that's the other reason we came.
I get into the Choctaw material collected by Henry Halbert in the 1800s, David Bushnell in 1910, and John Swanton after him, including Shampe and Nalusa Falaya, and I'm careful about what that material does and doesn't prove.
Then I go county by county through Mississippi's actual documented Sasquatch record, including a very close encounter in the Homochitto National Forest on November 28 of either 1978 or 1979, with 14-inch three-toed tracks and corroborating witnesses, and a report from the Stennis Space Center buffer zone in Hancock County from January 18, 2025.
We finish with listener accounts out of the DeSoto, the Delta, the Pearl River, the Tombigbee, and Noxubee.
No body, no bone, no photograph worth arguing about. But there's a tape sitting in a county file that anybody can listen to, and I still can't tell you what came down over that bayou.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Bigfoot Mailbag Aug 05, 2026

Show notes

Tonight we pull off the road trip for one episode and hand the microphone to five people who wrote in. Five first names, five parts of the country, five different jobs, and not one of them looking to be believed.
A long-haul driver in northwest Montana counts fourteen deer on a March night and then watches something cross the westbound lane in three strides at three-forty in the morning, and goes back sixteen days later to walk the ditch in daylight.
A twenty-three-year-old fire lookout in northern California puts eight-power binoculars on a salvage cut for twelve minutes, takes a bearing off the firefinder while she's watching, hits it with a bullhorn, and writes the whole thing into a government logbook in pencil.
A seventy-eight-year-old Wisconsin dairyman describes an October evening in nineteen seventy-three when thirty-one Holsteins wouldn't come up the hill and his stock dog got under the porch steps, and what his father pulled off the top wire the next morning and put in the kitchen stove that same night. An emergency room tech in Arkansas gets forty seconds at forty-one yards from a climbing stand, then sits in that tree for two hours and forty minutes because the ground between her and her truck runs the wrong direction.
And a West Virginia line crew, three nights into an ice storm restoration, has four of five men looking up the right-of-way at the edge of the light while the generator runs.
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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 brian@paranormalworldproductions.com 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.

Minnesota: The Wendigo & Bigfoot Aug 02, 2026

Show notes

On the morning of December 20, 1879, a Cree trapper named Swift Runner stood on a scaffold in Alberta and waited in the cold, because the hangman had forgotten the straps and had to go back for them. He had already confessed.
He had already walked the police out to a clearing in the bush and shown them what was left of his family, and his explanation never changed across four months in custody. Something came into him that winter, and it made him hungry in a way that food could not answer. The men who tried him did not believe in that thing and the men who guarded him did, and both groups agreed on the physical facts, which were a camp 25 miles from a post that was issuing rations, a cooking pot, bones cracked open at the ends, and one man who walked out of those woods in the spring heavier than he went in.The road trip turns north in January, and this stop is different from the others.
The wendigo is not a cryptid with a gift shop. It comes out of the traditions of living Algonquian-speaking peoples, and in northern Minnesota that means the Anishinaabe, whose seven nations in this state are governments with citizens, not historical footnotes. So we spend a few honest minutes on what the old accounts actually describe before we go anywhere near a sighting, and it turns out to be almost the opposite of what has been sold to you.
There are no antlers. The deer skull came out of concept art in the last 20 years. What the tradition describes is something starving, with the skin drawn tight over the bones and the eyes sunk back in the sockets, that grows in exact proportion to whatever it eats so that the arithmetic never breaks in its favor and it is never one bite closer to full than it was when it started. And it is not only something out in the timber.
It is something a person can become.Then we go into the woods, and we stay there. Ray heard his own name spoken through the spruce four miles from the nearest road on a trapline nobody ran but him, and he answered out loud and was walking toward it before he had decided to. Marlys followed a child crying in a tamarack swamp and covered 60 yards without the sound ever coming one foot closer. Dale and Ron met in the middle of the timber a quarter mile apart, each one having heard the other call his name, and looked down at four inches of fresh snow holding nothing but their own two trails.
Faye was 11 years old when her mother's voice started calling her in from the yard of a cabin on the Bigfork River, and the fear did not arrive until about 30 years later. Wayne opened the door of a fish house on the ice at two in the morning after somebody outside politely said come here, and found open snow under a moon in every direction. Lonnie lay in a wheelhouse north of Deer River and counted the footsteps of whatever walked past him at 40 feet, and walked the interval out himself at first light.
Delores was taught as a small child on the Red Lake reservation not to look at the treeline, not to run, to hold her pace, and to say out loud to an adult what had happened, and the same instruction turns up from Manitoba to Michigan in communities that never compared notes. Gordon watched something stand past his woodpile at 35 yards in the gray before deer season light, went in for a rifle, and signed his share of that hunting camp over to his brother's boys without ever explaining why.
Kenny came through the door eight seconds behind his brother into an empty yard with fresh snow and no track under the window, and they sold the shack four years later. Verna gave up a bedroom after three February nights of something dragging along the outside wall at waist height, 20 seconds down and 20 seconds back, with a full minute of pause in between.
Orval watched something cross a burn scar for two minutes through binoculars from a staffed fire tower in the Superior, called it in on the radio, and would not answer when the man on the other end asked him what it was.Sam and Wes heard a scream in the Boundary Waters at two in the morning that ran longer than a lung should allow and never broke for breath, and then heard it again from a different position. Andrea's whole body turned before her mind did on a February trail outside Ely, and she still snowshoes and no longer does that trail alone.
Tara has worked out how fast something would have to move to cover the ground it covered in 90 seconds, and she does not say the number out loud.The turn to sasquatch is a real one and the episode explains it rather than assuming it, because Anishinaabe tradition carries a separate word for the hairy man of the woods and he is not made by cannibalism and does not eat anybody.
That opens up a Minnesota record almost nobody outside the state discusses. Remer in Cass County, where the town's founder described tracks much bigger than a man's and sunk deep into the earth, where the old accounts talk about whole families of them and a stretch of Big Sand Lake that people left alone out of courtesy, and where a trail camera caught something in October 2009. The Vergas Trails in Otter Tail County and the Hairy Man, running since the late 1960s, including two 12-year-old cousins on a snowmobile in 1972.
A researcher out of Moorhead who found nine published Minnesota sightings when he started looking and spent his life demonstrating how badly incomplete that number was. Tracks crossing a frozen lake in a single line with a stride over four feet. A bear bait barrel worked 40 yards off its tree with the chain still whole. A deer wedged nine feet up a maple with no claw marks on the bark and no blood in the leaves underneath.
And the report this state produces more than any other, which is not a monster standing in a road at all, but a line of tracks that came out of the treeline, crossed a yard, stopped 10 feet from the back window, and turned around, left for a woman who had been standing at that sink in the night with the kitchen light on.
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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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