Six Stories From The Mailbag

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

In this special mailbag episode, host Brian shares six chilling accounts from listeners regarding unexplained encounters in the wilderness.

Key takeaways

• Nathan and Pete witnessed a large, bipedal creature in the Washington Cascades that could step over heavy logs with ease.
• Kelsey reported a dog-headed humanoid running alongside her truck at high speeds through Michigan forests.

Main topics

• Bigfoot sightings
• Dogman encounters

Notable quotes

Some things in the woods don't want to be found.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a haunting compilation of evidence that challeng

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace. Some blame wild animals. Others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in. But those who have survived, they know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, dogmen, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out. Others aren't so lucky. Are you ready? Because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember, some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button. Turn on auto downloads and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Speaker 1 (1:02) The road trip's not going anywhere. The next state's already picked and the next town's already on the map. And we'll get there. But the inbox is filled up. And there's a stack of emails in there that don't belong to any town. Nobody built a statue for these. Nobody put them on a welcome sign. Every one of them is one person. On one night. In the woods or on a road through the woods. And most of them have never told anyone about it. But me. They come in late. I'll sit down at my desk out in the studio and open my email. The timestamps say 1, 2, 3 in the morning, and the first line is some version of the same thing every time. I've never told anyone this. I don't know why I'm writing you. I saw the show and figured you'd at least read it. Tonight I've got six of them. They're not the kind of people who write things like this. That's the thing you notice reading them. A trapper. A nurse's worth of night shifts behind a bar. A long-haul driver. A woman who's hiked alone for 15 years. And a man who's hunted the same elk drainage for nine. People who know what the woods sound like at night. And what a deer looks like. And what a bear looks like standing up. And who spent years not telling anybody because they knew exactly how it'd sound. One's a Bigfoot. One's a dogman. The other four, I don't have a name for. And neither did the people who saw them. They're from six different states. Washington to Maine and Michigan down to Georgia. Let's start with Nathan. Nathan and his cousin Pete have hunted elk in the same drainage in the Washington Cascades for nine seasons. And in nine seasons, the biggest thing they'd ever seen up there was a black bear. Twice. This was October of 2015. They were camped four miles up a gated logging road in a stand of old fur along a creek. and every morning they'd hike out before light to glass the clear cuts across the drainage, where the elk come down to feed. Second morning, Nathan's sitting on a stump at the edge of the road with his binoculars up, watching the big clear cut across the way go from gray to green as the light comes, and something walks out into it. It comes out of the timber at the top of the cut and starts down through the stumps and slash toward the bottom, on two legs, the whole way. same color as the wet bark on the firs behind it. Nathan had it in the glass for close to two minutes. That cut is about 400 yards across from where he sat, and steep, and the thing went down it at an angle like it had all day, and it stepped over the downed logs. That's what got him first. There are fir logs lying across that slope that he and Pete would have had to climb over on hands and knees, and it stepped over them without slowing down. The arms hung past where a man's knees would be. The head sat low, no neck he could see, just a rounded top coming up out of the shoulders like a post out of a mound, and the head by itself looked as wide as a man's shoulders. The hair on the back and shoulders was long enough to move when it walked. He couldn't get a face at that distance. The front of the head was darker than the rest, and that's all he had. About two-thirds of the way down it stopped. stood there with the arms hanging, turned the whole top half of its body to the left, toward the creek, and held it. Then it turned the other way, toward the road, toward him. Nathan lowered the binoculars an inch at a time and didn't lift them again till it had turned back downhill. He's got no idea if it saw him. It walked on down into the bottom and into the alders along the creek. Those alders run 15 feet tall down there, and when it walked into them, the tops moved. Pete was 100 yards up the road glassing a different cut. Nathan walked up and told him. Pete looked at him, then looked at the clear cut for a long time, and didn't say anything, and they hunted the rest of that day like any other day. They talked about elk. They didn't see any. That night a rock hit the tent, about the size of a softball. It came down on the rainfly around 11, hard enough to wake them both, and bounced off into the brush, and they lay there with the headlamps off and listened. A minute later, a second one cracked off a fur trunk a few feet from the tent, then nothing. Pete said it was a limb coming down. Nathan let that stand because he wanted it to be true. In the morning, both rocks were lying in the moss on the roadside of the tent. wet and round and gray, creek rocks, and the creek was 60 yards downhill. Third day, they didn't see a single animal, not a deer, not a squirrel, not a grouse, in a drainage where they'd never gone a morning without seeing something. Late that afternoon, coming back along the creek, Pete stopped at the crossing they'd been hopping across for nine years and pointed at the mud on the far bank. There was a print in it, just the one, where something had come up out of the water and gone into the alders. Longer than Nathan's boot by a good six inches, near twice as wide, flat across the front, five round dents in a row for toes, and pressed down into mud his own boot barely dimpled. The otters above it were snapped off at about the height of his head, a whole line of them going uphill, the tops hanging down by the bark. Pete looked at it a minute, crossed the creek, and kept walking, and Nathan followed him. There was a smell in camp that evening. It came and went with the air, from up the hill, a wet dog smell with something sour behind it, and it'd be there strong for a minute, and then gone. And Nathan got up twice to see if something had died in the brush behind the tent and found nothing and sat back down. Pete didn't say anything about it. Nathan didn't either. The third night's the one he wrote me about. They'd built the fire up bigger than usual. They were sitting on the cooler and a round of fur with the lantern on Pete's tailgate behind them. Full dark, cold, no wind. And Nathan got up to get more wood. And Pete said his name. Quiet. Speaker 1 (7:13) Once. Nathan turned around. It was standing at the edge of the light, maybe 20 yards off, across the fire from them, right where the lantern gave out and the furs started, standing the way it had stood in the clear cut, arms down, upright. He could see it from about the waist up. The fire was in the way of the rest. The face was dark and flat, with the eyes set deep under a brow that stuck out over them, and the eyes didn't shine back at the fire. the way a deer's would. They were just two darker spots in a dark face. Mouth closed, shoulders wider than the tailgate. It was looking at Pete, not at Nathan. At Pete, who was still sitting on the cooler with his hands on his knees looking right back at it. Nobody moved. The fire popped. Nathan could hear it breathing, slow and deep, and he could see the breath come out of it, in the cold, and roll up through the light. His rifle was leaning on the truck 10 feet away. He knew exactly where it was. He never took a step toward it. And the closest he's come to explaining that is it never crossed his mind that he was allowed to. Pete says it stood there about a minute. Nathan thinks longer. Then it took one step backward into the furs and the light let go of it. And they heard it walk away. Walk, not run. One heavy step after another. Uphill. Away from the road, going on for a lot longer than seemed possible, until they couldn't hear it anymore, and the creek was the only sound left. They didn't sleep. Around three in the morning, a call came down off that hill. One long, low sound that climbed at the end and then dropped. Four seconds, maybe. Nothing Nathan had ever heard in the woods or anywhere else. Pete got up and put another piece of wood on the fire and sat back down. It didn't come again. They sat there with the lantern on and the rifle across Nathan's knees now. Finally, and at first light, they broke camp without a word about it and drove out. Their food had been in a cooler under the tailgate, a big white one with two latches and a bungee cord across the lid on account of bears. When they went to load it that morning, the bungee cord was lying on the ground beside the truck, unhooked at both ends and coiled up. Not thrown. Coiled. The latches were shut. The lid was on, and the cooler was sitting on a stump on the far side of the road, 30 feet from where they'd left it, level and square, with nothing missing out of it. The road out has a Forest Service gate at the bottom, a steel pipe gate with a chain and a padlock, and they'd locked it behind them coming in like they always did, because the timber company doesn't want anybody up there, and neither did they. When they came down to it that morning, the gate was standing open, swung all the way back against the bank. The padlock was still locked. It was hanging off the end of the chain on the post side, closed, and the other end of the chain was lying in the gravel with the last link pulled open. Pete got out and looked at it and got back in the truck, and Nathan drove through, and neither of them got out to close it. A half mile below the gate, the elk were in the road, 20-some cows and calves standing bunched up on the gravel in the middle of the morning, which they don't do, and they were all looking up the road. Up toward the gate, toward camp. Nathan stopped the truck and they didn't move. He honked. A couple of the calves shifted. The cows stood there with their heads up looking past the truck up that road. And he had to ease the bumper up to within a few feet of the nearest one before they finally broke and went off into the timber. And even then they went slow. And they kept looking back up the road and not at the truck. Nine years hunting that drainage and it was the most elk he'd ever seen in one place. and he drove on past them and never lifted a rifle. Pete called him about a month later, near midnight, which Pete doesn't do. Nathan picked up and Pete said, you awake? And Nathan said, yeah. And Pete didn't say anything for a while. And then he said, all right, and hung up. Nathan says that was the whole conversation, and he's not sure what it was about, but he's got a pretty good idea. Pete didn't buy a tag the next year, or the year after. Says his knees are bothering him. They were 41. Nathan's been back to that drainage twice since, by himself, and he doesn't camp up there anymore. He drives out every evening to a motel 40 minutes away, and nobody in his family knows why. Kelsey wrote hers at four in the morning. Because she'd just gotten home from the same drive again and sat in her car in the garage for 20 minutes before she could make herself go in the house. And she was sick of doing that. She tends bar in a little town in the northern part of Michigan's Lower Peninsula. And for six years, her drive home has been a two-lane state highway that runs 18 miles through state forest with nothing on it but jack pine and a couple of snowmobile crossings. January of 2022. 2.30 in the morning. It had snowed a few inches that evening and quit. The plow hadn't been through, and she was taking it slow in her Silverado. 35, maybe 40 miles an hour tops. High beams on, heater going, and nobody on the road but her. Six miles in, there was something standing at the tree line on the right. She saw it the way you'd see a deer at night. The shape first, and then the rest, as the light swing across it. Except this was standing up. Upright. On two legs, at the edge of the jack pines with the snow up around its shins, taller than the cab of her truck. And the head was a dog's head, long muzzle, ears up. A dog's head on something standing like a man. The eyes threw her headlights back yellow-green like any animals would, but they were too far apart and too far forward in the face. And they were looking directly at her. The body was covered in hair, dark, gray, or brown. She couldn't tell. The shoulders were huge and rolled forward. The arms hung down long with the hands turned in toward the body. And she calls them hands because she doesn't know what else to call them. The legs bent backward at the knee like a dog's back legs do. And it was standing on those bent legs with its weight forward, like it was about to come off the line. She didn't stop. Her foot came off the gas for about a second and went back down harder.