New Hampshire: The Wood Devils

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.



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