Massachusetts: The Dover Demon and Bigfoot

The road trip crosses into Massachusetts, and the Bay State delivers two of the strangest files in the entire eastern catalog.

It starts on a dark stretch of Farm Street in Dover in April of 1977, where a seventeen-year-old named Bill Bartlett watched something creep along a stone wall that no one has ever explained, a spindly, hairless creature with a huge watermelon head and glowing eyes.

Within twenty-six hours it was seen twice more by three other teenagers who had never compared notes, and then it vanished forever, leaving behind matching sketches, a police chief who vouched for every witness, and a case so stubborn it made a small New England town famous on the other side of the world. 

From there the episode heads forty miles south, where the manicured suburbs give way to the Hockomock Swamp, five thousand flooded acres the Wampanoag named the place where spirits dwell, and where the reports never stopped. An armed police search in 1970, a fur trapper stalked from the bank of a black waterway, Joseph DeAndrade's famous Clay Banks sighting, a kayaker who watched something rise out of a crouch on the Town River, footfalls booming across the frozen ice of Lake Nippenicket, and a farmer whose family spent sixty years sharing a fence line with something that never once introduced itself.

One state, two monsters, and a swamp with a middle no one has ever reached.


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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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