The Bigfoot Mailbag

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories features a mailbag segment where host Brian shares five listener-submitted cryptid encounters spanning from 1953 to 2019 across five different

Key takeaways

• Cordell (Tennessee, 2019) witnessed a large creature climb a cell tower rope to test what was attached before dropping an $80 antenna
• Emmett (Vermont, 1964) lost a milk can to a hairy biped and was docked $11.40 by his creamery manager despite the creature's presence

Main topics

• Listener-submitted cryptid encounters
• Rural and isolated work environments

Notable quotes

"He only knew what it cost him."

Conclusion

The episode delivers a grounded, atmospheric collection of firsthand accounts that highlight how

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore. Because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Speaker 2 (0:11) Turning dreams into direction. Speaker 2 (0:17) Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. Speaker 2 (0:23) So, where will your journey take you? Etihad. Beyond borders. Speaker 1 (0:32) 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 (1:32) We're pulling off the road this week. The Backwoods Cryptid road trip has been rolling from state to state for a good while now, and there's a lot of maps still ahead of us. So, before we get back on it, we're making a pit stop. The truck's parked, the engine's off, and the mailbag's open on the seat. It fills up while we drive. Every stop on the trip brings in more email, and a lot of it has nothing to do with whatever state we happen to be in that week. It's your own encounter. Something you saw on a day that started out like any other. Or it's a story that got handed to you by somebody who isn't around to tell it anymore, and you've decided it ought to be told somewhere besides the kitchen table. There's five of them in this episode. Three came from the people who were there, and two came from a daughter and a granddaughter who wrote down what they'd been told. The oldest goes back to 1953 and the newest to 2019. They come from a ridge in Tennessee, a hill farm road in Vermont, a cranberry marsh in Wisconsin, a fire lookout in Montana, and an oyster bed in Washington State. Cordell climbs cell towers for a living. and on the afternoon he wrote about, he was 260 feet up one with nothing to do. That was October of 2019, on a ridge in Morgan County, Tennessee, up on the Cumberland Plateau. He was 33, and he worked for a contractor out of Knoxville that swapped out antennas for the phone carriers. The job that week was a 300-foot tower at the end of a mile-and-a-half of gravel road, with a fenced compound at the bottom about the size of a tennis court. It was a two-man crew. Cordell did the climbing, and a groundhand named Jory ran the hoist and the rope. and sent up whatever Cordell called for. A little after one o'clock, they found out that the mounting brackets shipped with the new antennas were the wrong ones. The right ones were at a supply house in Knoxville, better than an hour each way. They'd driven up in one truck, and Cordell's gear was spread all over it. So Jory called a buddy on another crew who was working a site near Wartburg, and the buddy came up the hill and got him. That left the company truck in the compound and Cordell on the tower. He could have come down. But 300 feet of tower is a 20-minute climb in each direction, and he'd already made it twice that morning. So he clipped off on the antenna mount, sat down on the steel with his legs hanging, and waited. The company has a rule against leaving a climber on a structure with nobody on the ground. He wrote that both of them knew the rule, and neither of them brought it up. The leaves were about half turned. From where he sat, he was looking down on the tops of the oaks and hickories like he was looking down on a rug, and the compound was a gray square cut out of it, with the white truck parked inside the gate and the gate standing open. On the gravel next to the truck, laid across two sawhorses, was the next antenna to go up. It was a panel about eight feet long and a foot wide in a white plastic shell, and the load line was already tied to it. That rope ran from the antenna straight up the tower to a pulley block a few feet from Cordell's shoulder, and then back down to the hoist on the truck's hitch. It was a still day. On a still day, a climber can hear a lot from the top of a tower. A car door down on the county road, or a dog two hollows over. And somewhere around two o'clock, what Cordell heard was the fence. It was a thin, steady ripping sound. and the closest thing he could compare it to was a tent zipper being pulled slowly. He looked down between his boots. Something was walking along the outside of the chain link on the uphill side of the compound, with one hand held out to the side, dragging its fingers across the wire. From straight overhead, he couldn't tell how tall it was. What he had was the top of a head and a pair of shoulders, and arms that swung out wider than the body with every step. He could see its feet come out ahead of the shoulders one at a time, dark on top and long, and they came out a long way. The fence posts in that compound are set 10 feet apart, and it was going from one post to the next in two steps. The hair was dark brown, close to black, with gray across the tops of the shoulders, and he compared that to an old black lab going white around the muzzle. The top of the head had a ridge running front to back. And from above, it looked like the crease and the crown of a cowboy hat. It walked on two legs the whole length of that fence, about 60 feet, and it never hurried. At the corner, it turned and came along the front side, and when it got to the open gate, it stopped. It stood in the gateway for a while. The air conditioner on the equipment shelter kicked on while it was standing there, and Cordell watched the head turn toward the shelter and stay on it until the fan settled into a hum. Then the head turned toward the truck, and it walked in. The truck is how he knows the size of it. It was a three-quarter ton Ford with a utility bed, and that evening, he ran a tape measure up the side of the cab, and the roof was six feet seven inches off the ground. The thing walked up the driver's side and stood by the door, and its shoulders were higher than the roof. Looking down from that angle, Cordell could see the top of the cab and the tops of its shoulders at the same time, and the shoulders were closer to him. When it moved around to the front bumper, They covered better than half the width of the hood. It laid a hand flat on the hood and left it there for a few seconds. Then it went down the passenger side where the antenna and the rope were. It walked past the antenna and took hold of the rope on the side of the line that ran down to the hoist with one hand wrapped around it about head high. It stood there holding it. Then it tipped its head back and followed the rope up. Cordell wrote that for the first three or four minutes, he'd been watching it like he'd watch a deer in a field from a tree stand, where he could see everything and nothing knew he was there. When the face came up, that was over. He was sitting on a steel frame in a white hard hat and a yellow harness with nothing behind him but sky, and there wasn't anything else up there to look at. He couldn't give much on the face from that distance. It was bare, or close to it, and a shade lighter than the hair. A worn brown that reminded him of an old catcher's mitt. It was wide. The brow stuck out far enough that the eyes stayed in shadow under it, even with the face turned straight up into the daylight. The mouth was closed. It held that position, one hand on the rope and its face tipped up at him, for long enough that his neck started to ache from looking down. Then it pulled. It brought the rope down hand over hand, three or four pulls, and on the other end of the line, the antenna came up off the sawhorses. That antenna weighed about 80 pounds, and Jory raised them with a gas-powered hoist. This one went up 15 feet in a couple of seconds, swung in toward the tower, and hit one of the legs broadside. A tower leg is a steel pipe, and when the antenna hit it, the whole structure rang. Cordell grabbed the mount with both hands. He felt the note through the seat of his pants before he heard it. A low one. And the guy wires hummed for several seconds afterward. On the ground, the thing let go of the rope and dropped into a squat, with both arms out to the sides and its hands spread open. The rope ran loose through the block beside Cordell's head with a whine, and the antenna came down on one end and fell over flat on the gravel. He heard the shell crack from 260 feet up. It stayed down in that squat for a few seconds. Then it stood, looked at the antenna, and looked up the tower again, at him. It backed away from the rope four or five steps before it turned around. It went out through the gate at a walk, a quicker one than it had come in at, and instead of going back up the fence line, it went down the access road, right down the middle of the gravel and around the first bend where the trees closed over the road. From the first sound of the fence to the last sight of it on the road was about seven minutes. He checked his watch when the fence started, because climbers log everything they do up there, and he checked it again when the road was empty. Jory wasn't due back for another hour. Cordell had a radio on his harness, and the other radio was sitting on the dash of the truck. His phone was in the truck, too, on the charger, because he doesn't climb with it. So he stayed where he was. He wrote that he thought hard about coming down and shutting himself in the cab, and that every time he worked it through, he got to the part where he'd be on the ladder for 20 minutes with his back to the woods and both hands busy. He unclipped his second lanyard and clipped it back in a different spot every few minutes to have something to do, and he watched the bend in the road. He could tell where it was for a while after he lost sight of it. A squirrel started barking down the hill, somewhere along the road. and kept at it for most of ten minutes. Then a second one took it up farther down, and a third one below that, and he followed it down the ridge by the squirrels until the last one quit. Jory came up the hill at ten after three in the other crew's truck with a box of brackets on his lap. He hadn't passed anything on the way. He got out, saw the antenna lying on the gravel with a crack down the shell, picked the radio up off the dash, and asked Cordell what he'd done. Cordell told him to stay by the truck, and he came down. About halfway, he missed a step peg with his foot, which he hadn't done since his first year on the job. On the ground, he told Jory all of it, in the order it happened, and Jory listened with his arms crossed, and then walked over and picked up the rope. The rope was the only thing in the compound that held any sign. The ground inside a tower fence is crushed stone laid over fabric, and it doesn't take a track from anything. Outside the fence, on the uphill side, the tower company sprays Speaker 2 (11:38) a Speaker 1 (11:38) strip twice a year to keep the brush off the wire, and that strip was bare clay baked as hard as a parking lot. But about six feet of the load line, starting just above Jory's head, was dark and damp and gritty. and the rope above and below that stretch was clean. Jory held it to his nose and jerked it away. Cordell smelled it too. He described it as the floor mats of a truck that somebody hauls beagles in, with something sharper on top of that, like a penny that's been held in a sweaty hand. Jory wiped his hand down his jeans and asked if they could finish tomorrow. They locked the hoist in the utility bed, chained the gate, and were on the county road by 3.30. The driver from the other crew had waited at the gate with his engine running, and he wanted to know why they were quitting two hours early. Jory told him the antenna was busted, which was true. That antenna cost a little over $2,000. The company wanted an incident report, and the two of them rode it that evening in the truck, parked at a gas station in Wartburg. The report says the load was dropped during a lift because of a rigging error. Jory signed it as the hoist operator, and Cordell signed it as the climber. Each of them got a written warning. They went back the next morning with a third man. Cordell had asked the office for one and hadn't given a reason. The third man was a kid named Tobin in his first month on the job, and he spent most of that morning asking why the other two kept looking down the road. Before Jory would run the load line through the hoist again, he cut the dirty section out of it with his knife, and back at the shop, he threw it in the trash barrel. They finished the tower in a day and a half, and nothing came out of the woods. Cordell told his father about it that weekend. His father had spent 30 years as a lineman for the power company, and he heard the whole thing out on the back porch without interrupting. When it was over, he said that in 30 years on poles, he'd looked down on bears, deer, coyotes, and one time a man stealing copper, and that not one of them had ever looked up. Cordell still climbs. He's on a tower four days a week, mostly in Tennessee and Kentucky. He doesn't stay up anymore when the ground man leaves the site, for any reason. If somebody has to go for parts, he comes down and rides along. And when a foreman complains about the lost time, Cordell tells him it's company policy. Jory left the next spring and went to work for a power company in Georgia. The two of them still talk. Cordell wrote that Jory has brought it up one time, at a cookout, when he asked whether Cordell thought it had pulled that rope to find out what was on the other end, or to find out what he'd do. Cordell told him he'd been asking himself the same question for a year. The written warning is still in this file. It says rigging error and his signature's on it. Philippa's father told this one for 40 years, and he told it because of $11.40. His name was Emmett, and in the fall of 1964, he was 29 years old and hauling milk for a creamery in Orleans County, Vermont, up in the part of the state they call the Northeast Kingdom. A lot of the bigger dairies had gone over to bulk tanks by then, but the small hill farms on his route still shipped in cans. A farmer would milk in the evening and again before daylight, pour it into 10-gallon steel cans, and set the cans out on a wooden stand at the end of his lane. The stand was built to the height of a truck bed, so the hauler could roll them straight across. Every can had the farm's number painted on its shoulder. Emmett picked up the full ones, left the same number of clean empties, and went on to the next stand. And he did that at about 40 farms before most people had finished breakfast. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Speaker 2 (15:31) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore. Because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Speaker 2 (15:43) Turning dreams into direction. Speaker 2 (15:48) Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. Speaker 2 (15:54) So, where will your journey take you?