Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

Epizode

• 
  Oregon: Bigfoot & Colossal Claude 02.10.2026 1h

  In March of 1934, the crew of the lightship Columbia and the supply tender Rose watched something come up out of the water near the mouth of the Columbia River. The men said it was about 40 feet long with an 8-foot neck, and the tender's captain told the Salem Capital Journal it opened its mouth and gaped at the lightship. The crew wanted to lower a boat and go after it, and the officers told them no.Oregon would eventually give it a name, Colossal Claude.On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads to the Oregon coast and the Columbia River Bar, the stretch of water sailors call the Graveyard of the Pacific. The episode follows the sea serpent through the newspaper record, from the 1934 lightship sighting to Captain Charles Graham of the troller Viv in 1937, the couple who chased a 55-foot animal down the coast highway from Devil's Churn to Heceta Head, and Captain Chris Anderson of the halibut schooner Argo, who said in 1939 that it passed within 10 feet of his boat and ate a 20-pound halibut off his line.Along the way there's the crowd of more than 30 people at Nelscott, the 1,000-pound carcass called Old Hairy that washed up at Delake in 1950, and Marvin the Monster, filmed by Shell Oil cameras in 1963.You'll also hear from the people who never called a reporter: a salmon troller crossing the bar in 1951, an assistant keeper on Tillamook Rock, a family at the Neahkahnie Mountain viewpoint, a crabber off Clatsop Spit who had something follow his boat for 40 minutes, and a fisherman on the South Jetty in 2012.Then the road turns inland.Nearly half of Oregon is forest, and the reports of something upright in that timber go back to the wild man of the Sixes mining district in 1904.Brian covers the 1971 sightings at The Dalles, where a music teacher put a rifle scope on a creature in his headlights and couldn't pull the trigger, along with Peter Byrne's Bigfoot Information Center and the Bigfoot trap that still stands in the Siskiyous. The episode closes with Sasquatch encounters from the Tillamook State Forest, the Clackamas River, the North Umpqua, Olallie Lake and Bear Camp Road.If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, email [email protected] BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Oklahoma: The Octopus & Bigfoot 30.09.2026 54min

  Every lake in this episode was somebody's pasture once. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian King-Sharp drives into Oklahoma, where the three lakes said to hide the Oklahoma Octopus were all built by the government inside living memory.Lake Tenkiller, Lake Thunderbird, and Oologah Lake are reservoirs, not natural water, and under every one of them are drowned roads, standing timber, fence lines, and the foundations of houses that were dry ground three generations ago. That's the ground this legend grew on, and it's why this is a don't-swim-after-dark episode.The stories start on the Fourth of July, 1978, with a seventeen-year-old girl floating on her back off a houseboat on Tenkiller when something wraps her leg from ankle to knee and pulls her under. From there the episode follows a bass fisherman in the drowned timber at Thunderbird who watched an arm feel its way around a dead oak, a scuba diver who cut himself loose from something in the old river channel at thirty-five feet and came up with sucker marks pressed into his wetsuit, and a farm kid on Oologah who saw two arms come over the tops of his family's flooded fence posts and pull the wire down.Between the encounters, Brian traces the real paper trail behind the legend, which is thinner and stranger than the television version. It starts with a June 2, 1982 item in the Daily Oklahoman about two boys and a dead saltwater octopus found in the Verdigris River near Lock and Dam 18 on the barge canal, runs through a 1987 article by Kiowa writer Russell Bates about a horse-sized, reddish-brown creature said to drag people into sandstone caverns, and picks up again in 2007 with two cryptid books that named the three lakes without citing a source, a reporter at the Oklahoma Gazette who found that no park manager or diver on those lakes had ever heard of the thing, and Loren Coleman's guess that it all began with a planted carcass.Then in January 2009 Animal Planet's Lost Tapes turned it into a monster with a name. Along the way the episode looks at why man-made lakes breed this kind of story, from the cold water sitting in the old channel to the drownings that happen every summer in water nobody can see into.The second half leaves the water for the timber. It begins with the Noxie Monster of September 1975, when farmer Kenneth Tosh, Sheriff Robert Donald, researcher Hayden Hewes, and two dozen witnesses in Nowata County put a seven-foot hairy creature on the wire services and a Tulsa Tribune artist's drawing in front of the whole country.Then come the encounters that never made a newspaper: a noodler chest-deep in the Verdigris below Oologah dam watching something on the gravel bar bite the head off a fish, a deer hunter above a spring in the Kiamichi Mountains a few miles from where the Honobia Bigfoot Festival now stands, a nurse stopped on Highway 82 in the Cookson Hills above Tenkiller at 12:14 in the morning with a gray figure shading its eyes from her headlights, and a woman on a rock at Clear Bay on Lake Thunderbird who watched something wade out of the blackjack oak at dusk and come back with a fish held against its chest.The episode also covers the Siege at Honobia in 2000, the founding of the Honobia Bigfoot Festival in 2005, and how a valley in the Choctaw Nation turned its stories into college scholarships.If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop to add to the map, email [email protected] the next stop, stay out of the water after dark, and keep your eyes on the tree line.Email BrianJoin Our FREE Newsletter
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  Six Stories From The Mailbag 27.09.2026 56min

  This week, Backwoods Bigfoot Stories pulls off the road for a special listener mailbag episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip is taking a brief pause while Brian opens the inbox and shares six disturbing encounters sent in from six different states—each from someone who spent years wondering whether anyone would believe what they saw.In the Washington Cascades, Nathan and his cousin Pete watch something enormous cross a clearcut on two legs in October 2015. Two nights later, it appears again at the edge of their firelight. But what they discover while driving out of the mountains is enough to make one of them swear off the woods for good.In Michigan, Kelsey finishes a late bar shift in January 2022 and begins an eighteen-mile drive through state forest. Something running upright keeps pace with her truck along the tree line at nearly fifty miles an hour. She thinks she finally loses it—until she reaches home and sees something waiting near her mailbox.In northern Maine, veteran trapper Ray is checking a brook he has worked for thirty years when he hears his wife calling his name from downstream. The problem is that she is twenty miles away. Then Ray sees what is standing in the alders—and realizes its mouth never moves when it speaks.In North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, Trisha encounters what at first appears to be a deer. Then it looks directly at her with both eyes, begins moving in ways no deer should, and eventually rises onto its hind legs miles deeper into the trail.In south Georgia, Marcus is sitting in a ladder stand when he spots a pale, hairless figure hanging by its arms from a longleaf pine forty yards away. Moments later, it begins moving through the canopy without ever touching the ground.And along Idaho’s Lochsa River, Jeff drives Highway 12 late at night and passes the same walking figure on the shoulder six separate times. Each time it appears closer to the road. His dash cam should have captured everything—but when he reviews the footage, the highway is empty.If you’ve had an encounter of your own, send it to [email protected] BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Ohio: Bigfoot & The Loveland Frog 25.09.2026 54min

  This week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into Loveland, Ohio, a quiet river town northeast of Cincinnati with one of the strangest creature legends in America.In March 1972, Loveland police officer Ray Shockey was patrolling an icy stretch of Riverside Drive near the old Totes factory when he spotted something crouched in the road. According to his account, the creature stood upright, looked directly at him, and moved over the guardrail toward the Little Miami River. Two weeks later, fellow officer Mark Matthews reported his own encounter on the same road and fired his revolver at what he saw. Decades later, Matthews would publicly offer a very different explanation for that night. But the Loveland Frog story may go back even further. The episode revisits a 1955 account recorded by investigator Leonard Stringfield, in which witness Robert Hunnicutt described three strange gray figures near a bridge, including one allegedly holding a wand-like object that gave off sparks. Then, in 2016, a photograph taken during the Pokémon Go craze pushed the Loveland Frog back into the national spotlight and once again raised the question of what people have really been seeing along the river.Brian also digs into lesser-known local reports involving a canoe livery, a late-night drive home, and a catfishing spot near Nisbet Park before heading east into the hills of Appalachian Ohio.From there, the road leads into some of the state’s best-known Bigfoot country, including the 1978 Minerva Monster case, as well as reported Grassman encounters from East Fork, Vinton County, Wayne National Forest, Salt Fork State Park, Noble County, Shawnee State Forest, and Zaleski State Forest.From frogmen along the Little Miami to massive hairy figures in the Appalachian foothills, Ohio proves to be one of the strangest stops yet on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip.If you have an encounter or a stop Brian should add to the map, email [email protected] BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Bigfoot Encounters Mailbag 23.09.2026 55min

  This week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip leaves the highway behind and opens the mailbag for five listener encounters that have lingered for years—sometimes decades—after they happened.In Aroostook County, Maine, a seventeen-year-old working the 1959 potato harvest walks alone to the bottom of a frost-covered field and realizes something is already waiting in her row, crouched among the potatoes and feeding.In the darkness of West Virginia’s New River Gorge, a railroad track inspector responds to a tripped slide fence and finds himself standing beside the rails as a ninety-four-car coal train roars past. On the other side of the tracks, something is standing there watching him.Before dawn in New Mexico’s Gila country, a wrangler rides into a frozen meadow to gather the camp horses.Then something rises out of the frost directly in front of her. Deep inside the Boundary Waters, two college students watch a strange figure swim across a channel at dusk, crawl onto the far shore, and shake the water from its body like an animal. Hours later, with darkness surrounding their campsite, rocks begin splashing into the water nearby.And in the tangled wilderness of the Big Thicket of East Texas, a man mowing a remote pipeline right-of-way stops his tractor when two figures step into the clearing ahead of him.One of them is carrying the other on its back.Five witnesses. Five places. Five encounters with things that should not have been there. If you have an encounter of your own, send it to [email protected] BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  North Dakota: Miniwashitu & Bigfoot 20.09.2026 54min

  On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads into North Dakota and follows the Missouri River in search of one of the strangest creatures ever recorded in the folklore of the northern plains: the Miniwashitu.More than a century ago, ethnologist Melvin Randolph Gilmore wrote of a mysterious being said to live beneath the Missouri. Covered in red hair like a buffalo, with a single eye, one horn, and a jagged backbone resembling the teeth of an enormous saw, the Miniwashitu was believed to swim upstream each spring as the river broke apart.Witnesses were said to hear its terrible roar, see a strange redness trailing through the water, and know better than to look directly at it in daylight.According to the story Gilmore preserved, the last man who did was struck blind, lost his reason, and died soon afterward.From that chilling piece of recorded folklore, Brian travels the Missouri and the reservoirs connected to it through five unsettling accounts involving something moving upstream beneath breaking ice. A nine-year-old girl watches a saw-toothed back rise from the river north of Washburn. A worker below Garrison Dam sees an enormous red-haired form tear through an ice jam. Teenagers on Standing Rock watch a red glow moving beneath frozen Lake Oahe. Kayakers encounter something impossibly large fighting the Missouri's current.And an ice fisherman feels the frozen lake rise beneath his feet before hearing a roar coming through the ice.Then the episode leaves the water behind.North Dakota may be known for open prairie, but its river bottoms, wooded valleys, badlands, and scattered forests have produced another kind of report.Brian heads into the Turtle Mountains, Pembina Gorge, Missouri River bottoms, Killdeer Mountains, and Sheyenne Valley for five accounts of enormous upright, hair-covered figures seen by hunters, riders, ranch hands, and families.Along the way, Brian also reflects on the unexplained things he's encountered on his own property in the Appalachian woods—footprints, strange nighttime vocalizations, bent saplings, tree structures, and rock stacks—and why stories from people who encounter something impossible in familiar country hit differently once you've experienced something you can't easily explain yourself.From something roaring beneath the Missouri River ice to massive figures watching from the timber, North Dakota may be one of the most unexpected—and unsettling—stops on the entire road trip.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  North Carolina: Bigfoot & The Beast 18.09.2026 50min

  This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip brings the journey home to North Carolina.Brian and Dani have spent the last six years living on forty wooded acres in the foothills, and this episode begins on their own porch before traveling across the state and back to the winter of 1953–1954, when the small town of Bladenborowas gripped by fear.Something was killing dogs.Using newspaper coverage from Wilmington, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Lumberton, Brian follows the story night by night: dogs found dead with almost no blood left in their bodies, terrified hounds refusing to follow the trail, eyewitness reports of a strange catlike creature, and the massive armed hunt that sent hundreds of people into the surrounding bay swamps searching for what the press had already dubbed the Beast of Bladenboro.The episode also explores the theories that followed—from wolves and catamounts to bobcats and a mysterious dog called Big Boy—along with three chilling encounter accounts from the height of the panic.Then the story shifts from the Beast of Bladenboro to something even larger moving through the North Carolina woods.Brian shares experiences from his own property before diving into Bigfoot encounters from Bladen Lakes, Badin Lake and the Uwharries, the South Mountains, Big Laurel, the Croatan National Forest, Wilkes County, Roan Mountain, and McDowell County.From hounds hiding beneath a truck to towering figures seen beside roads, creeks, pastures, and mountain balds, this episode explores two of North Carolina’s most enduring mysteries: the creature that terrorized Bladenboro and the upright figures still reported across the state today.Bladenboro still celebrates its strange history with Beast Fest every fall, but more than seventy years later, nobody can say for certain what was really stalking those streets.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Bigfoot & The Wild Tales of Appalachia 16.09.2026 1h 30min

  Tonight Backwoods Bigfoot Stories takes a break from the Cryptid Road Trip and heads home to the Appalachian Mountains for a night of old-fashioned mountain storytelling.Brian begins with the warnings and superstitions passed down through generations: three knocks in the night, covered mirrors, strange sounds outside the house, and the belief that the dogs often know something is there long before we do.Along the way, he separates genuine Appalachian traditions from the modern versions that have taken on a life of their own online. From there, the episode ventures into the darker corners of mountain folklore—haints, witches, the Wampus Cat, mysterious black panthers that people continue to report despite official skepticism, and the Not-Deer, a remarkably young legend that offers a rare look at folklore being created in real time.Then the trail leads toward something much larger. Brian digs into nineteenth-century accounts of Appalachian “wild men,” the famous Daniel Boone Yahoo story and its origins, and an 1877 newspaper report describing a strange wild man roaming Globe Valley near Blowing Rock, North Carolina. From the old mountain meaning of “booger” to Virginia’s Woodbooger and North Carolina’s legendary Knobby, the stories begin to sound increasingly familiar.The second half of the episode belongs to the encounters. From the remote backcountry of the Great Smoky Mountains to frightening road crossings across five states, hunters who watched enormous figures moving through the timber, terrified dogs, strange activity in the mountains of north Georgia, and unsettling reports from the hollows of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, the same description keeps appearing again and again.Different generations gave it different names: Wild Man. Yahoo. Booger. Woodbooger. Knobby. Today, most of us would simply call it Bigfoot. Have Appalachian families been describing the same creature all along?And one final, quiet encounter from a back porch in Johnson County, Tennessee, may leave you wondering just how old these stories really are.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  New York: Champ Meets Bigfoot 13.09.2026 1h 1min

  The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip rolls into New York and follows the western shore of Lake Champlain, home to one of America's oldest and most enduring lake-monster legends.Across the water, Vermont may have the famous photograph, but Port Henry, New York has spent generations embracing Champ. A hand-painted sightings board records reports dating back more than two centuries, a highway sign welcomes visitors to the "Home of Champ," and every August the town celebrates a creature no one has ever managed to catch. The journey begins on the lake with strange encounters reported from a Port Henry dock, Crown Point, Westport, the Valcour channel, and the ferry landing at Essex. From there, Brian digs into the history behind the legend—from Indigenous traditions and Samuel de Champlain's often-misquoted 1609 account to Captain Crum's enormous creature, the famous 1873 sightings, P. T. Barnum's reward, Sheriff Nathan Mooney's report, and the controversial 1977 Sandra Mansi photograph.The episode also follows researcher Joseph Zarzynski's decades of investigation, the unusual laws passed by New York and Vermont to protect Champ, mass sightings, sonar contacts, recordings, and videos that have kept the mystery alive into the modern era.Then the road turns south to Whitehall, New York, where a series of dramatic August 1976 sightings involving local residents and police became one of the most famous Bigfoot cases in the state.From there, the trip pushes into the Adirondacks, the hills around Fort Ann, Allegany State Park, the Catskills, and the Tug Hill Plateau for frightening Sasquatch encounters involving hunters, hikers, fishermen, loggers, and families who found themselves face-to-face with something they never expected to see in the New York wilderness.Lake monsters, Bigfoot, and more than two centuries of unexplained encounters—this stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip belongs to New York.Have a sighting of your own? Send it to [email protected] BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Bigfoot Mailbag 11.09.2026 56min

  This week the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls off the highway and Brian opens the mailbag. Five listeners wrote in about the day they saw something on two legs in a place they thought they knew. A coon hunter in the flatwoods east of the Okefenokee follows his dogs to a big cypress at the head of a slough in October of nineteen seventy-nine and finds them looking at the water instead of the tree.A section hiker on Vermont's Long Trail wakes in a moonlit shelter to the sound of her bear hang being pulled, and watches something work the rope like a toy before it walks past the front of the lean-to and into the brook.A timber cutter in the sandstone hollows of Winston County, Alabama, is left alone on a rained-out landing and watches something with a bad left knee come up the skid trail out of the fog to put its hand on the fresh-cut logs.A mother camping with her family above Pagosa Springs walks back from the aspens at two in the morning and finds something old and silver-haired leaning on the tailgate of her truck with a piece of firewood in its hand.And a young gas well tender in the Allegheny National Forest comes over a rise at daybreak to find something on its knees at the base of a brine tank, licking salt, with ice frozen into its hair. Every one of them saw it clearly enough to describe it.Every one of them went home and back to work the next morning.If you've seen something, Brian wants to hear about it at [email protected],Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  New Mexico: La Mala Hora & Bigfoot 09.09.2026 1h 2min

  This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip follows the High Road out of Chimayó and deep into the old Spanish villages of northern New Mexico, where generations have warned their children about what can happen when you linger at a crossroads after dark.Here, the thing on the road is known as La Mala Hora—the Bad Hour. It doesn’t chase you. It doesn’t attack. It simply appears. Sometimes it looks like a woman dressed in black. Sometimes it is nothing more than a shapeless mass of darkness standing where two roads meet.Witnesses say it can grow larger as you watch it, and according to the old stories, seeing it is not the danger. The danger is what comes afterward. By morning, someone close to you may be dead. This episode traces the legend from one of its earliest written accounts, folklorist Aurelio Espinosa’s story of a strange ball of wool that grew at a crossroads, through tales of owl-witches and mysterious fireballs in the Río Puerco Valley, and eventually into the Four Corners, where Highway 550 cuts across Diné country and outsiders have spent decades trying to put familiar names on things they may not fully understand.Along the way, we revisit a series of unsettling encounters: a woman driving to the airport in 1978, a produce hauler traveling the grade south of Cuba, a girl on a bridge in Mora County, and a man on Highway 54 who struck a cow just two miles after driving straight through something that seemed to be standing in the road—but wasn’t there.Then comes the story of an oil-field pumper who found herself being paced at 75 miles per hour by something running on four legs beside her vehicle. Something that eventually stood upright and looked directly through her window.From there, the road climbs higher into the mountains for five Bigfoot encounters from a state that rarely gets the attention it deserves. An elk hunter in the Jemez Mountains who lowered his rifle rather than pull the trigger. A night-shift dispatcher on the road to Sandia Crest. A 17-year-old fishing the Middle Fork of the Gila. A woman alone at a family cabin outside Cloudcroft who discovered that her grandfather had seen the same creature from the same porch years earlier. And finally, a sheep camp above Mora in 1962, on the only night one herder could remember seeing his dogs abandon the darkness and move behind the people for protection.Crossroads, mountain roads, old villages, and things that appear where nothing should be standing.New Mexico has stories buried in its backcountry that go far beyond the legends most people know.If you have a sighting, a story, or a stop you think belongs on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip map, email Brian at [email protected], and find everything else at our website paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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...
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  New Jersey: The Jersey Devil & Bigfoot 06.09.2026 59min

  The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip crosses the Delaware River into the most densely populated state in America, then disappears into nearly a million acres of Pine Barrens.This stop digs into the full story of the Jersey Devil, beginning with the real Leeds family of colonial Burlington County. We trace the strange history of Daniel Leeds, a printer condemned by members of his own religious community, and his son Titan Leeds, who became the target of one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous public feuds.From there, the story evolves into the legend of Mother Leeds and the birth of her infamous thirteenth child in 1735.Then comes January 1909, when Jersey Devil hysteria exploded across the region. Mysterious hoofprints appeared on rooftops and through snow from Bristol to Camden, witnesses reported a winged creature moving through the night, police allegedly opened fire in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania, schools and businesses temporarily closed, and the Philadelphia Zoo offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of the creature.But the legend didn’t end there. The episode follows later encounters deep inside the Pine Barrens, including a chicken farmer in 1960, a frightened couple staying at a remote deer cabin, and two campers along the Mullica River who claimed something followed them through the darkness.And the Jersey Devil may not be the only unexplained creature roaming these woods.The second half of the episode turns to New Jersey’s lesser-known Bigfoot history, including listener accounts of towering, hair-covered figures seen from a cranberry bog dike, beneath a hunter’s tree stand, and during a solitary night along the Batona Trail.It’s a journey through colonial history, newspaper panic, generations of folklore, and modern eyewitness encounters from one of the strangest stretches of wilderness on the East Coast.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey Vol II Part VII 04.09.2026 1h 6min

  Part Seven brings Born Wild: Koda’s Odyssey, Volume Two to a close while quietly opening the door to everything that comes next.The story returns to the clearing where so much of Koda and Eli’s journey began, the same place where a frightened human boy once left gifts for a curious young sasquatch.One year later, the two sit together and look back on everything they have built: the alliance, the sacrifices, the dangers, and a friendship that should never have been possible in the first place. As Eli faces a choice between the life he has known and the one he is beginning to understand, the final chapter settles into a quieter, more reflective moment. It is an ending built around trust, connection, and the possibility that fear does not have to decide what happens when two very different worlds finally meet.But Volume Two does not end there.Once the main story closes, Part Seven shifts into an extended preview of Volume Three and reveals that someone believed to be dead is still alive. Far to the west, beneath the desert at a secret installation known as Site Seven, Adanowa has spent the last year imprisoned, cataloged, cut open, tested, and studied as if he were nothing more than a specimen.Then, in the darkness beneath the facility, he finds something he never expected: an ally. Skull is a Dogman born in captivity, hardened by the only world he has ever known. Somehow, two creatures who should have every reason to distrust one another become the unlikeliest of friends.Together, they find a way out.Their escape changes everything. Adanowa is now heading east, back toward the clans that once believed him lost, with Skull walking beside him. And that means he is returning home alongside the very kind of creature his people are already at war with.The friendship forged beneath Site Seven is about to collide with old loyalties, old hatred, and a conflict that is far from over.This is the end of Volume Two.It is also the beginning of the next chapter.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  New Hampshire: The Wood Devils 02.09.2026 57min

  The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip heads to the northern edge of New England for a stop in Coös County, New Hampshire, where the forests stretch toward the Canadian border and generations of loggers, hunters, and woodsmen have carried strange stories out of the timber.This has been logging country for more than 150 years, from the era of massive log drives down the Connecticut River to the paper mills of Berlin and Groveton. Every spring, men returned from isolated camps with stories about things they claimed to have seen deep in the North Country. One of the strangest was the Wood Devil.Usually described as tall, unnaturally thin, and gray, the Wood Devil was said to stand edgewise against tree trunks, blending so completely into the forest that it could be mistaken for part of the tree itself. According to the old stories, if someone approached, the creature would quietly shift around to the opposite side of the trunk, staying just out of sight. When caught in the open, it was said to simply stand motionless and disappear into the landscape.In this episode, Brian digs into the written history behind the Wood Devil legend and discovers that the documented record is far thinner than many modern retellings would have you believe. From there, the episode follows eight unsettling accounts from the forests and back roads of northern New Hampshire. There is a deer hunter near Nash Stream who watched what appeared to be a gray, broken tree trunk suddenly turn its head. A teenager on a burned-over hillside above Colebrook realizes there is one tamarack standing where no tree should be. A pulpwood scaler working along the Dead Diamond tries to circle a suspicious tree and learns why old logging camp bosses supposedly warned men never to do exactly that.There is also a trucker traveling Route 3 around 4:00 a.m., a woodcutter salvaging spruce budworm-killed timber near Stewartstown, a woman and her dog on a snowmobile trail outside Errol, a hiker deep on the Cohos Trail, and two men camped above Perry Stream who hear heavy footsteps circling their tent before finally seeing an eye looking back at them through the darkness.Deep in the forests of New Hampshire’s North Country, the Wood Devil may have left behind very little written history. But the stories from the people who claim to have encountered something tall, gray, and almost perfectly camouflaged among the trees are much harder to dismiss.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Born Wild Koda's Odyssey Vol II Part VI 30.08.2026 1h 8min

  Part Six of Born Wild: Koda's Odyssey, Volume Two settles into the hardest work in the whole story, and there isn't a single punch thrown in it.The emergency council runs deep past midnight, and for the first time sasquatch, Dog men, and humans are all in the same clearing trying to build something instead of tearing it down.The immediate crisis has passed. Dask's offer of cooperation has been met, cautiously, and now comes the part nobody's good at.The details. Where the boundaries fall, what counts as a violation, who answers for it when someone crosses a line. None of these peoples has ever trusted the others, and every one of them has a reason not to start now.Into that standoff steps an unlikely figure. Eli, the boy with no rank and no claws and no official standing, turns out to be the one voice all three sides can hear, precisely because he threatens none of them. What he offers isn't strength. It's a different way of looking at a problem the older ones have been too angry, or too proud, to solve.This is the quiet center of the book, where the story stops asking who can win a fight and starts asking whether old enemies can actually choose something better.The answer doesn't come easy, and it doesn't come clean, and the forest beyond the firelight hasn't stopped being dangerous just because a few of them decided to talk.What gets built here is fragile. Whether it holds is a question for the road still ahead.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Nevada: Tahoe Tessie & Bigfoot 28.08.2026 55min

  This week, the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip crosses Spooner Summit and drops down to the Nevada shore of Lake Tahoe, the second-deepest lake in the United States, to investigate one of the West’s most enduring lake monster legends: Tahoe Tessie.For generations, people have reported seeing long, dark shapes moving through Tahoe’s famously cold, deep water.We look at the geography of the lake, its extreme depth, and the conditions that have helped fuel stories of something large living below the surface.Along the way, we examine recorded Washoe traditions connected to Cave Rock, the 1897 newspaper account attributed to I. C. Coggin, and the surge of reports during the 1980s involving Reno police officers, hikers, an optician, and a local television station owner. We also dig into the University of California, Davis seminar that considered whether an unusually large sturgeon could explain some of the sightings, and separate fact from one of Tahoe Tessie’s most repeated legends: the supposed Jacques Cousteau expedition that never actually happened.Then the stories move from the archives to the water itself.Listeners describe seeing a long shape passing beneath the clear water near Sand Harbor, feeling something massive roll beneath them while diving along the wall at Cave Rock, watching three distinct humps move across the north end of the lake against the chop, and having something large surface alongside a boat during a nighttime mackinaw fishing trip off Crystal Bay.From Lake Tahoe, the road climbs into the Carson Range and continues east toward the Ruby Mountains for five Nevada Bigfoot encounters. The reports take us to Marlette Lake, the Mount Rose Highway during a storm, the aspen groves near Spooner Summit, a roadside pullout on Kingsbury Grade, and a remote talus slope above Lamoille Canyon.If you’ve had a cryptid encounter, strange sighting, or unexplained experience you’d like to share for a future episode, send it to [email protected] BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Bigfoot Holding A Hog 26.08.2026 50min

  This week we pull off the road for one episode. The Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip picks back up next time, but a stack of emails has been building from listeners who saw something they still can't explain, and five of them deserved a full hour.A rancher in the Owyhee desert of Idaho comes over a rise in the middle of an August afternoon and finds something standing in his stock tank, drinking with both hands.A nurse in the Ouachita National Forest of Arkansas, driving home from a night shift, watches something cross the road in two steps and climb a twelve-foot clay bank the way a person would, and she sees the bottoms of its feet. A snowmobiler in Michigan's Upper Peninsula stops in a cedar swamp at ten below and realizes the stump he's looking at has snow on its shoulders and is breathing. A daughter and her father, picking chanterelles in the Oregon Coast Range, come to the edge of a clearcut and find something sitting on a slash pile, looking out at the valley.And a hog hunter on a dead-end channel off the Ocmulgee River in Georgia swings his spotlight onto a sow at the water's edge and sees the hand that's holding her there.Five states, five decades, five people who never met and never asked to be believed.These are visual sightings only, told the way they were sent in, first names only, with what each person did afterward and what's still sitting in a drawer or on a laptop or on a tupelo trunk in a river bottom.If you've had an encounter of your own, send it straight to Brian at [email protected]. Use your first name or none at all.And if this episode was worth your hour, pass it along to your family, a friend, or the guy at work who's always bringing this stuff up at lunch. That's how the show grows.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Nebraska: The Thing in Alkali Lake 23.08.2026 52min

  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 [email protected], and find everything we do at paranormalworldproductions.com.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Born Wild: Koda's Odysey Vol II Part V 21.08.2026 1h 1min

  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.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave 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.
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  Montana: The Shunka Warak'in 19.08.2026 1h

  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.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail