North Carolina: Bigfoot & The Beast

0:00If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm Sean Evans from Hot Ones and I want to tell you about YouTube Premium. It has offline downloads, so you can watch without Wi-Fi. Background play, so you can lock your phone and it still plays, baby. Oh, and it is completely ad-free. Yes, I said it, ad-free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com slash premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel anytime. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want, like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet. Track your cha-chings from every channel, right in one spot, and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today.

1:00And I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business. But Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop on my dicted. Start your free trial at Shopify.com. 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 Backwood's Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, dogman, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out. Others aren't so lucky. Are you ready? Because once you hear these stories,

2:01you'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. Mrs. C.E. Ken Law looked out from her house on a dirt street in Bladenbore, right at dark on the 5th of January, 1954, and there was something down by some dogs three houses away. She told the Raleigh News and Observer it was a big mountain lion. It saw her and it came toward her at a run, and she screamed, and it turned and went off the other way. That was the whole of it. She forced came out afterward and looked at the road in front of her house, and there were tracks in the dirt, and he said they were bigger than a silver dollar.

3:03The Raleigh paper ran it on page 1 the next morning, vampire charges woman. Inside of two weeks, a thousand armed men would be walking the swamps outside that town, looking for whatever did it. We've come home. The road up to our place turns to gravel aways before you get to the house, and after dark, the only light on it is what's on the front of the truck. The woods come right down to the edge of it on both sides. There's a ridge behind the house that goes flat and black against the sky by eight o'clock this time of year, and past that ridge, there's more woods, and past those, there's more. Forty acres of it is ours. Danny and I have been out here going on six years now, in the foothills of North Carolina, and I don't see us leaving. Some nights a dog gets going somewhere down the valley. You can't tell who's it is or what it's barking at. Then it quits, and it's quiet, and the quiet out here is a real thing, not the absence of something.

4:04You can sit on the porch and listen to it for an hour. I was born and raised in the mountains of North Georgia, and I'll always be from there. But this is where we live now, and it's where I sit at night and listen, and it's where the backwoods cryptid road trip stops this time. Every other stop on this trip, I've had to tell you what the country looks like. This one I can see from the porch. North Carolina is three states pretending to be one. On the west end, it's the highest ground east of the Mississippi, the smokies and the black mountains and the blue ridge, real Appalachia, steep and wet, and thick with laurel. In the middle, it's rolling Piedmont, red clay and pine and old tobacco ground, with the U-Warris sitting in it like a set of worn down teeth. And then it falls off onto the coastal plain, and the coastal plain is another world. Flat, sandy, cut through with black water rivers and pocked with swamps that run for miles. Bay swamps and bogs and cypress bottoms

5:06were the waters the color of strong tea, and the ground under it isn't ground. People in all three of those places have been describing things in the woods for as long as there've been people in the woods. In the mountains, it's the same upright thing we've been chasing across the whole country, and we'll get there. But the story that put North Carolina on the cryptid map didn't come from the mountains. It came from the other end of the state, from the swamp country, from a cotton mill town of about 900 people in the first two weeks of 1954. So that's where we start. Down in Bladen County with the dogs, Bladenbrose sits in the southwest corner of the county, about 20 miles east of Lumberton and 60 some miles up the road from Wilmington. In the 50s, it was the mill and the mill houses and a main street of a few blocks. And outside of that, farms. And outside of the farms, the swamps. Big swamp lies a few miles out of town, a long wet tangle of bay and gum and cane that runs down toward the Lumber River.

6:07The whole country around there is like that. You can be a half mile from the post office and standing at the edge of something nobody's ever walked across. Mrs. C.E. Kinlaw looked out from her house on a dirt street in Bladenbore right at dark on the 5th of January 1954. And there was something down by some dogs, three houses away. She told the Raleigh News and Observer it was a big mountain lion. It saw her and it came toward her at a run and she screamed and it turned and went off the other way. That was the whole of it. But it happened on a street in town to a woman standing outside her own house with neighbors close enough to hear. And it was the first time the animal had gone after a person instead of a dog. Chief Force came out afterward and looked at the road in front of her house and there were tracks in the dirt and he said they were bigger than a silver dollar. The Raleigh paper ran it on page one the next morning. Vampire Charges Woman. Bladenbore was a mill town of about 900 people in Bladen County down in the swamp country

7:08of southeastern North Carolina. It had a police chief named Force and a mayor named Fussell who owned the movie theater and Fussell was the one who'd picked up the phone and called the papers. One man out on the edge of town lost a hog to it and he never told a reporter. He fed the rest of his hogs first because that was what he'd walked out to the pen to do that morning. And then he went in the house and got his shotgun and walked the fence line with it. And on the swamp side of the corner post there was a print in the sand, one clear one. It was round with no claw marks and it was bigger across than the bottom of a coffee cup. And he said it was a large cat's foot. He didn't call Force. Everybody in the county was calling the police chief that week he said. And he didn't see what the police was going to do about a dead hog. So he buried it and he moved the hogs up closer to the house and he slept with the shotgun by the bed for a month and nothing else came to the pen. He told that to his grandson in the 1980s when the boy was in high school and the grandson wrote it down.

8:10The descriptions that got into print that first week didn't agree with each other and the papers ran them anyway. One after the next. A man told the morning star it was about four and a half feet long and bushy and that it looked like a bear or a panther. He couldn't say which. Another man said it was small and that there'd been a little one just like it running alongside it. The one that got repeated the most came from a man who'd seen it in the road. About 20 inches high he said, dark, with a long tail, 14 inches or so. A face exactly like a cat's. Only he'd never seen a cat that big. It was walking around stealthy and sneaky and sneaky was the word the paper printed. Vernon saw it in the road too on the night of the fourth and he never told anybody but his wife. He worked a second shift at the mill and got off at 11 and he was driving home toward Clarkton in a 1948 Chevrolet that had one headlight out. It was cold and clear.

9:10About a mile out of town the highway run straight between fields with a ditch on either side and a strip of wood set back a ways. And he was doing 40 and thinking about his bed when something came up out of the left hand ditch and crossed in front of him. It crossed low with its belly close to the road and it crossed fast but not so fast that he didn't get a look. The good headlight was on the right side of the car so the thing was lit from the wrong angle but he said it was as long as the hood of the Chevrolet from its nose to the end of its tail. And the tail was a good part of that. It was dark, more of a dark brown than black and the hair on it was short and slick. The head was round and the ears were small and set back. It looked at the car once as it went and the eyes came around green in the light and then it was a cross and down into the right hand ditch and up into the field and he was past it. He didn't stop. He said there wasn't any point. He went on home and told his wife and she said it was a bobcat

10:12and he said he shot bobcats and a bobcat has a stub of a tail and this one had a tail like a rope. He worked at that mill another 22 years when the hunters came in that week he didn't go out with them. He said he'd already seen what he needed to see and he didn't care to be in the swamp at night with 500 other men carrying guns. On the fifth, the same day as Mrs. Ken Law, the animal was seen going after a dog. The dog got away and was never found. Along the creek bank near where it happened, there were tracks, two sets of them, one smaller than the other. The morning stars headline the next morning was Bladen B. Still Prous. On the sixth, a boy named Dalton Norton told the Charlotte news he'd seen a big cat on his porch. It made a noise like a baby crying, he said and then it left. That's the whole account, a boy and a porch and a cat and a sound, but it's in the record with his name on it and by then the baby crying sound was in three separate reports from three separate people.

11:13Inaz was 14 that winter and she heard it before she saw it. Her family lived in the last house on their street in the mill village where the field started and her bedroom window faced the fields. The screaming began right around the first of the year. She said it was a scream like a woman, long and then it would stop and then it would start again from somewhere else and she couldn't tell if it was closer or farther off. Her mother said it was a bobcat, her father hunted and he said a bobcat didn't scream like that and he went out on the porch with a shotgun and stood there and it didn't scream again while he was out. On the night of the sixth, the town was full of hunters and there were men with lights walking the streets and trucks going by all night and she couldn't sleep so she was at her window. Out past the backyard, there was a clothesline and past the clothesline the field started and there was a little bit of moon. Something walked along the edge of the field. It came from her left and went to her right, slow

12:14and it was long and low with a tail that curved up at the end and one foot set down and then the next. She said it was as long as the clothesline pole was tall and the pole was about six feet. It stopped once and its head turned toward the house and she could see the eyes, not shining, just two dark spots in the face. Then it went on and where the field met the woods, it went in and she said it didn't push through the brush. It just wasn't there anymore. She woke her father, he went out with the gun and a flashlight and walked the edge of the field and he came back and said he'd found where the grass was laid down in a line and that was all he'd found. In the morning he went back out looking for tracks and the ground was too hard to hold one. He didn't tell anybody, he said the town had enough people telling things. The hunt had started on the night of the fourth. Chief Forest went out with eight or 10 other officers and a group of hunters came up from Wilmington that same night and worked the swamp with dogs and they told a reporter afterward

13:14that they'd trailed the animal for three miles around the swamp. The tracks showed claws at least an inch long they said and had been made by something that weighed 80 or 90 pounds and the way it circled made them think there was a mate or a litter somewhere close. One of the Wilmington men, S.W. Garrett, said he'd heard it scream out there and it screamed like a panther. On the night of the fifth, the papers counted more than 500 people in the woods and swamps with dogs and guns. On the sixth, it was more than 800. On the seventh, it was somewhere between 800 and 1,000. The town had 900 residents. The hunters came from Wilmington and Lumberton and Fayetteville and farther off than that with rifles and shotguns and hounds and lights and they went out into the bays after dark and groups that had no way of knowing where the other groups were. Julian Shaw, who everybody called Tater, told Wilmington Reporter 50 years later that everybody was scared,

14:15that just about everybody with a gun was carrying it, that the thing kept snowballing and that it got to where nobody would walk out on the street at night. The headlines kept up with the crowds. On the seventh, the Morningstar ran guns. Dog's circle blood lusty beast across the top of the front page. The Bladen Journal, the county weekly, went with hunt animal blamed with killing eight dogs at Bladenbroe in week. The Charlotte News sent three reporters down for a day and they came back with a piece called, the Beast of Bladenbroe. They all know it'll come back and that's the story with Dalton Norton in it and the pet rabbit with its head gone and the game wardens Catamount and a town full of people telling the reporters they expected the thing back. Fussell said about the same thing in fewer words. The town was armed to the teeth. Even small boys were carrying guns. He enforced both news somebody was going to get shot by accident. Fussell had a plan to draw the animal out. He was going to tie dogs out in the swamp

15:16as bait and wait on them. The plan got into the papers and on the eighth he got a telegram from a humane society in Asheville, 300 miles away, protesting it and the dogs were never staked out. On the sixth with 800 men walking his swamps, the mayor drove to Charlotte and booked a movie for his theater. It was called The Big Cat. It had come out in 1949 and it was about a cougar. He ran it for a day in the Morningstar noticed and ran a little item about it under the headline Enterprise and let the readers work out the rest. By the evening of the eighth, the only hunters anybody could find out in the woods were four fraternity brothers who driven down from Chapel Hill. And that night Fussell called it off. There'd be no more organized hunts, he said, unless the animal made another clear kill or somebody had a sighting that could be checked out. The crowds had gotten too big to be safe. The Morningstar's headline on the ninth was Vampire Beast wins Battle of Bladenboro.

16:17The animals kept dying for a while after that. On the fifth, somebody's pet rabbit had been found with its head taken clean off and the body still warm. On the seventh, a dog turned up dead in a pasture near the swamp. A goat was found with its head flattened. On the 11th, two cars on the highway stopped for an animal crossing the road. And one of the men in them said it was four feet long, brownish and tabby, with what he called runty-looking ears. The paper called that one Beast takes stroll, frightens autoists. On the 13th of January it ended, or at least the town decided it had. Stay tuned for more Backwood's Bigfoot Stories. We'll be back after these messages. If your dog treats dinner like it needs a better chef, check this out. Sunday's for dogs is the food that gets tails wagging at mealtime. Sunday's for dogs combines real meat with a gentle air drying process that locks in flavor and nutrition. It looks like food, not kibble. In an independent taste test, all 39 dogs

17:18prefer Sundays chicken recipe to a premium kibble. Make the switch today at sundaysfordogs.com and get 30% off your first order. Treat your best friend right and make it Sundays for dogs. I started or not in 2013 and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non-technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end, front end, and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle. It's the thing that you do the thing on. We run the business on Shopify. Start your free trial on Shopify.com. If your dog treats dinner like it needs a better chef, check this out. Sunday's for dogs is the food that gets tails wagging at mealtime. Sunday's for dogs combines real meat with a gentle air drying process that locks in flavor and nutrition. It looks like food, not kibble. In an independent taste test, all 39 dogs preferred Sunday's chicken recipe to a premium kibble.

18:21Make the switch today at sundaysfordogs.com and get 30% off your first order. Treat your best friend right and make it Sundays for dogs. At six o'clock that morning, a farmer named Luther Davis went out to check a steel trap. He'd said in big swamp, four miles from town. And there was a bobcat in it struggling. He shot it in the head and brought it in. Fussell had it photographed and sent the picture out to the papers. And he told them the beast of Bladenborro had been found and killed. The same day, a man named Bruce Souls was driving out of Bladenborro on his way home to Taber City and hit a cat with his car. He said it was spotted like a leopard and stood 20 inches or more at the shoulder and weighed somewhere between 75 and 90 pounds. And he loaded it in his car and took it home with him. A third man, a professional hunter and guide named Barry Lewis got credit in some of the papers for killing the beast and he shot a bobcat too. In a different part of the county altogether,

19:21there's still no agreement about which cat was in the mayor's photograph. Everybody in this story said bobcat at one point or another. Vernon's wife said it. Inaz's mother said it. The mayor said it with a photograph. And the bobcat is a real animal that lives in every bay in Bladen County. It screams. It kills at night and it does it quietly and it'll take a small dog or a house cat or a chicken and it'll take a phone. It has a face exactly like a cat's because it is one. Seen in headlights for two seconds, it looks bigger than it is. And seen at the edge of a lantern's light by a man who's just found a dead hog, it looks bigger still. Then there were the dogs. There were dogs running loose all over that country and a big dog can kill another dog and crush it skull and drag it off and a dog will lap blood. AR Stanton, a man in Lumberton, told the Morningstar he thought the beast was a dog he'd given away. A German shepherd and hound cross named Big Boy,

20:24dark with a long bushy tail, that he'd given to a native boy who lived along the edge of Big Swamp. Big Boy could clear a six foot fence, he said and had killed chickens now and then. A Lumberton veterinarian named NG Bear told the Robosonian it was very feasible that Big Boy was responsible and that a dog could kill another dog and lap up the blood. And that would look a lot like sucking it to whoever came along afterward. Nobody ever found Big Boy, one way or the other. What the people who'd found the bodies had trouble with was the size of things. A bobcat in North Carolina runs 20 to 30 pounds and a big male might go 40. In 1976, a folklorist named Gala Hu wrote the case up for the North Carolina Folklor Journal and made the point that it was hard to see how a cat that size had crushed the skulls of full grown dogs and carried them off. The tracks the Wilmington Hunters followed were made, they said, by an animal of 80 or 90 pounds.

21:25The tracks in front of the Kenlaw house were bigger than a silver dollar. The man in the road had said 14 inches of tail and a bobcat doesn't have that. So the theories piled up and never got sorted. Force said, wolf, and the old people said there'd been wolves in the bays. Harry Davis, the curator at the state museum in Raleigh, said a panther never occurs in this country and thought it might be a coyote, which was an animal that hadn't spread into North Carolina yet in 1954. Sam Colberth, the game warden out of Elizabeth City, looked at the tracks and said catamount, which is an old word for a cougar. And Mrs. Kenlaw had said mountain lion, which is the same animal. The state's position then and now is that the eastern cougar was gone from North Carolina by around the turn of the century. Somebody said Wolverine, somebody said a wild police dog. Under all of that, there's the older argument, which is that people in eastern North Carolina have been seeing panthers for 200 years,

22:28black ones and tawny ones, crossing the road at dusk and screaming in the bays at night. And the people whose job it is to no say the animal isn't there. That's the same argument they have in the mountains. It didn't start in Bladenboro and it didn't end there either. Years later, Fussell told the writer John Corey that in his opinion, the animal was about 90% imagination and 10% truth. The newspaper reporters were the ones who'd called it a beast and a vampire, he said. He didn't mention that he'd been the one who called the reporters. A one-armed sign painter in town made up bumper plates that said home with the beast of Bladenboro and sold them. In December of 1954, something killed five pigs and three chickens on a tenant farm over in Robson County near the hospital in Lumberton. The Robesonian reported crushed skulls and three of the pigs with their legs torn off their bodies and no blood. And the paper said the killer had used the same blood-sucking traits as the Bladenboro beast.

23:30The next day, the county dog wore it and killed a stray dog and said it was most probably the animal responsible. Nobody compared the dogs' tracks to the tracks at the farm and nobody explained how a dog had gotten to chickens that had been roosting in a tree. That's where the newspaper record ends. Bladenboro went back to being a mill town and the beast turned into a story told to grandchildren and then a name on a t-shirt and then a festival. The town's booster group, Boost the Borough, started beast fest in the 2000s and they hold it every fall now with a parade and vendors and a hunt for the kids and a mascot they call Bob. There's a beast on the town's welcome side. It's about what Churobusco, Indiana did with its turtle except the turtle never killed anything. Whatever was in Bladen County in January of 1954 killed at least eight dogs and a rabbit and a goat. And the people who found the bodies described a dog on a porch with no blood in it and its jaw broken back into its skull.

24:31Bladen County has something else in it and the people who live around the swamps have known about it longer than they've known about the beast. The county is full of Carolina bays, the oval lakes and wet depressions that lie all over the coastal plain with their long axes all pointed the same direction and nobody has ever settled what made them. Some of them hold water, white lake and Jones lake and Singletary Lake are bays. Most of them don't and those are pocosan and algonquian word that gets translated as swamp on a hill. A wet, peat flat grown up in pond pine and tie tie and bay. Sooth thick you can't walk 10 feet into it without a machete. Bladen Lakes State Forest is 30 some thousand acres of that. South of there the green swamp runs on into Brunswick and Columbus counties and it's bigger. The Cape Fear runs down the east side of the county black and slow with bottom land on both banks that floods every spring. It's flat country.

25:33There's no ridge to stand on and no rock to climb but it has the same thing the mountains have which is a lot of ground nobody goes into and the people who hunt the edges of that ground have been describing something upright in it for a long time. We've been on our 40 acres in the foothills for six years now and in that time I found footprints on our property as well as our neighbor's property just up the road. I found tree structures back in the woods where nobody had any reason to be as well as strange rock stacks and I've heard things off the ridge at night that I couldn't put a name to. So this part of the state is close to home in more ways than one. Lonnie was deer hunting in Bladen Lakes State Forest in November of 2011 on a game land tracked off one of the sand roads north of Elizabethtown and he'd been in the stand since before daylight. It was a ladder stand set against a long leaf pine at the edge of a burned block where the forest service had run a controlled fire the winter before and the ground had come back open and green.

26:34A hundred yards behind him the bay started. A wall of tie tie and gallberry with pond pine standing up out of it. The bay was where the deer bedded and the burn was where they came out to feed and he'd seen a doe in a yearling at first light and let them walk. About 930 he heard something in the bay behind him. It was heavy and it was waiting. After a wet fall there standing water in a bay and this was moving through it slow with the sound of water pulling off something at every step. He turned in the stand to look and he was looking down into the edge of the bay from about 15 feet up. It came out of the tie tie at the edge of the burn about 70 yards from his tree. It stood there at the edge of the thicket upright and it was a brown so dark it was near black and the water was running off its legs. It was taller than the small pond pine standing around it and he paced off to those later and figured them at seven feet. The shoulders were rounded and the head sat forward and low and the arms were long and it stood with the arms down

27:38and it was still and it was looking out across the burn. Then it bent over and put a hand down into the new growth and came up with something and put it in its mouth. He thinks it was a mushroom or a root, he couldn't tell. It did that three or four times walking a few steps between each one, working along the edge of the burn away from him. It walked flat footed and its feet came up high behind it. The hair on it was longer on the arms and the back of the head and shorter on the legs and it was wet and dark and stuck to it. It did that three or four times walking a few steps between each one working along the edge of the burn away from him. It walked flat footed and its feet came up high behind it. The hair on it was longer on the arms and the back of the head and shorter on the legs and it was wet and dark and stuck to it. He had a rifle across his lap and he said he never lifted it. He sat there with both hands on the rail of the stand and watched it feed along that burn for what he figured was four or five minutes

28:40and it never once looked up at his tree and then it walked back into the bay and had a spot a couple hundred yards down from where it had come out and he heard it waiting away for a long time. He climbed down at noon and walked to where it had come out. The tie tie was pushed apart in a gap about three feet wide and in the sand at the edge of the burn there were three prints in a line with water standing in the bottoms of them. They were longer than his rifle stock and there were five toes and the big toe was the biggest. His phone didn't take good pictures. He took some anyway and they show a long dark shape in sand and not much else. He hunted that track the rest of the season and didn't see it again. He still hunts blatant lakes. He said he sets up on the burns with his back to the road now instead of the bay and he said the bay behind that stand holds water most winners and he figures whatever it was is still in there somewhere because there's nowhere else for it to go. The U-Hawry sit in Montgomery County east of Charlotte

29:41and by some accounts they're the oldest mountains in North America. Warned down over a few hundred million years to hills about a thousand feet high with hard woods and pine on the slopes and a lot of old gold mines and old homesteads gone back to woods. It's a national forest now. 50,000 acres and pieces with batten lake along the west side and a campground on the lake. It doesn't look like much from the road from inside it on a trail that hasn't been cleared in a while. It looks about the way it did in 1850. In May of 2015 Marlene and her husband had a camper at batten for a long weekend. She was 55. Her husband was asleep by 10 most nights and she'd sit outside with a book and a lantern and on the second night a Saturday. That's what she was doing. The site backed up to the woods. There were a few other campers along the loop but most people had gone in. She'd had the lantern on low when she turned it off to look at the stars. And she sat in the dark a while.

30:41Something was standing at the edge of the site. She hadn't heard it come. It was just there between two sweet gums at the back of the site, about 40 feet from her chair. And she'd been looking straight at that spot with the lantern on 10 minutes before and there hadn't been anything in it. It was upright and it was as tall as the lowest limbs on the sweet gums. And she said those limbs were higher than her husband could reach and her husband is six foot two. It was broad. The shape of it against the sky was wider than the camper door. She couldn't see a face. She could see that the head was rounded and set forward and she could see the arms and the arms hung down past where she'd have expected the knees to be. It wasn't moving. The only reason she knew it was alive was that she heard it breathe. One long breath out and she said it sounded like a horse blowing. She didn't move either. She said she was afraid to reach for the lantern because reaching would be moving. Then it turned its whole body and it took one step to its right.

31:42And it was gone behind the sweet gum. And then she heard it walking off into the woods two feet with a long pause between each one. She counted 11 steps before she couldn't hear it anymore. She went in the camper and woke her husband and told him and he got up and got a flashlight and went out and shown it around the back of the site and didn't find anything. The asterisk it could have been a person and she said it could have been a person if the person was eight feet tall and had no neck. They packed up the next morning a day early. They haven't camped at bad and since. She said what stays with her is not hearing it. She spent her life in the woods. She can hear a squirrel move and dry leaves at 50 feet and something the size of a refrigerator walked up over leaves and sticks to within 40 feet of her chair without making a sound. It only made noise when it left. She's decided that was on purpose. Gene was running bear dogs in the South Mountains when he saw his. The South Mountains sit off by themselves in Burke,

32:43Rutherford and Cleveland counties, southeast of Morganton, cut off from the main blue ridge by a valley. There's a state park in the middle with game land around it and private timber beyond that. Stay tuned for more back woods big foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. My name is Shannon Maldonado. I'm the founder of Yowee, a gift shop from the lens of artists and handmade objects. I chose Shopify because when I was testing other platforms, it was definitely one of the most user-friendly. It was important to me to think about where we would be in the future. All of the tools for reading your sales like planning inventory. They're just right there on your dashboard. For anyone starting a small business, the biggest thing I can tell you, it doesn't have to be perfect. Shopify can help you build upon it. Start your free trial on Shopify.com. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify. Get everything you need to grow the way you want. Like all the way. Stack more sales with the best converting checkout on the planet.

33:44Track your cha-chings from every channel, right in one spot, and turn real-time reporting into big-time opportunities. Take your business to a whole new level. Switch to Shopify. Start your free trial today. Ranked number one in innovation, 12 consecutive years. Arizona State University isn't just ahead of the curve. It's creating new paths to success. Learn from notable research faculty. Online, that's a degree better. Explore programs at ASUOnline.asu.edu. I've been out there with a group of local big-foot researchers. And I can tell you from personal experience, the terrain is steep. Laurel, rock, creeks that come off the mountain and falls. It's also bear country. It's only about 30 miles from Carpenter's Nob, where the thing people called Nobby was seen in the winter of 1978. And the older bear hunters in those counties still bring that up. In December of 2003, Gene had six plot hounds out on a private track

34:45on the north side of the range. Two other men were with him, and a truck with a dog box on it. The dog struck a bear track around eight in the morning and went up the mountain. And the three men split up to follow them by sound. Gene took the middle, straight up a hollow with a creek in it. He was alone and he had a rifle. About an hour in, the dog stopped. They didn't bay. When plots have a bear stopped or treed, they bay. It's a steady chop, and a bear hunter knows it from a mile off. This was all six dogs going quiet at once in the middle of a run. He'd never heard that in 30 years of running dogs. Then the dogs came back down the hollow. They ran past him down the creek, flat out, tails down. One of them was his best dog, a nine-year-old jip that had never quit a bear in her life, and she went by without looking at him. He hollered at her. She didn't turn. He stood in the creek bottom and heard something coming down the hollow behind the dogs.

35:46It was walking slow in the creek. He backed up against a big popular, got the rifle up and looked up the creek. About 80 yards up where the creek came around a boulder, something walked out into the open. It was in water to its shins, walking downstream toward him, upright and black. He said it was as tall as the boulder. He went back later and the boulder was over eight feet. It walked with its head down. Picking its footing, arms held out a little from its sides for balance. And the arms were long enough that the hands were down near the water. The head sat low and the shoulders sat high. He couldn't see any neck. The hair was long on the back and the arms. And it was wet. About 50 yards from him it stopped, lifted its head and looked down the creek. He said he knows it saw him because it quit moving altogether. It stood in the creek and looked at him. And he stood against the popular with the rifle on it and looked back. He had the cross hairs on its chest.

36:46He said it was the easiest shot he'd ever had in his life and he didn't take it. The only reason he's ever given is that it was standing there looking at him the way a man would. It turned and went back up the creek. It walked back around the boulder the way it had come. He heard it in the water going up, then heard it come out of the creek and go into the lural. And after that, he didn't hear it. He went back down the mountain. All six dogs were at the truck under it. The other two men were standing there wanting to know what had happened to the bear and he told them the dogs had lost it. About a month later, at a deer camp after a few drinks, he told them the truth. One of them believed him and one didn't. That's still where it stands. In January, he went back up the hollow with a camera. The lural was broken on the bank above the boulder and in one spot in the mud at the creek edge, there was a print, the heel and middle of a foot with the toes lost in the water. It was a good bit longer than his boot. The jip wouldn't hunt that side of the mountain again.

37:48He ran her on the other side for three more years and over there she was fine. Francis was driving home from her sisters in Marshall to her own place, up Big Laurel in Madison County, around 11 o'clock on a night in October of 1999. That's up on the Tennessee Line north of Asheville where the French broad goes through and it's as rough as anything in the state. Big Laurel, spring creek, Shelton Laurel. Hollows that run back for miles. The roads followed the creeks, narrow with the trees closed over them. She was in a Ford Ranger. It was raining a little and she had the wipers on slow and the heater going. On a stretch where the road runs right along the creek with a rock face on the other side, she came around a curve and something was in the road ahead of her in the lights. It was walking down the middle of the road away from her on two legs. She took it for a man in a long dark coat with the hood up, walking in the rain and slowed down to go around him. Then the size of it came to her, it filled the lane.

38:50If you stood the Ranger on end, it was taller than the truck was long. The shoulders went nearly from the center line to the edge of the pavement. It walked with a swing, the arms going, the hands coming up near the hips at the end of each stride and the hair on its back was long and lay flat with the rain. It heard the truck or saw the lights because it turned its head, just the head to the side. She saw the profile of the face, dark, with a brow that stuck out and a flat nose. Then it stepped off the road on the creek side, went down the bank in one step and was gone. She was maybe 60 feet from it when it stepped off. She kept driving. She didn't slow down at the spot and didn't look. She got home, sat in the truck in the yard with the engine running until her husband came out and told him, the next morning he went down there with a flashlight and looked at the creek bank. It was torn out where something had gone down it and there was a place in the gravel of the creek bed where the rocks had been pushed aside.

39:50That was all he found. She's told it may be five times in 25 years. What she can't get past, she said, is the way it walked. Down the middle of a public road at 11 at night like it had every right to be there and she was the one in the way. The Crow-O-Tan National Forest is down on the coast between Newburn and Morehead City, 160,000 acres of pockison pine and saltwater creek with the news river on one side, the White Oak on the other and bog sound at the bottom. There are alligators in it. There are black bears as big as any in the state because they eat well down there. And the pockison in the middle is thick enough that there are tracks hardly anybody goes into. In August of 2008, Dewey was fishing for reds and a skiff up one of the creeks off the news. He was alone and it was early. He'd run up the creek at first light on the outboard, cut it off and was polling along the bank in about two feet of water, casting to the marsh edge.

40:52The marsh gave way to pine and pockison about 50 yards back from the water. And between the marsh and the creek, there was a mud bank out of the water at low tide. He came around a bend and something was on the mud bank a hundred yards ahead on all fours head down. He thought bear because there are bears on that creek and he stopped polling. It was digging. It had one arm down in the mud to the elbow. It pulled something out and lifted it and he saw that it was a hand doing the lifting and not a paw and that what it had was a crab. It put the crab in its mouth. Then it stood up. The way a man stands up out of a squat. On its feet, it was taller than the marsh grass by four feet and the marsh grass on that creek is five feet high. It was a reddish brown lighter than he'd have expected with short hair on the body and longer hair on the head. The chest was wide and flat and it was covered in mud from the arms down. It looked at the skiff.

41:52It turned its head and shoulders toward him and looked right at him at a hundred yards and full daylight. Then it went back down on all fours, put its arm back in the mud and went on digging. It did that for another minute with him sitting there in the skiff. It came up with two more crabs and ate them. Then it stood, turned and walked up through the marsh into the pines upright. The grass closed behind it. He could see the top of its head moving through the pines above the low limbs for a little way and then he couldn't. He pulled up to the mud bank. The mud was torn up over an area about the size of a truck bed with holes in it where the arm had gone in and there were tracks in the soft mud going up into the marsh. Long ones, already filling with water. He didn't get out of the skiff. He fished that area for years after that. The reds were good on that creek and he wasn't giving it up but he never fished it at first light again. He goes in around nine now when the sun's up good.

42:53On a Friday night in August of 2017, a man named John Bruner from Marion in McDowell County was out on a forest road in the mountains near Lake James. With a small group he'd started called Bigfoot 9-1-1. They'd hung glow sticks in the trees along the road to watch for anything passing between them. Bruner said one of the sticks went out of sight. He turned on his headlamp and there was a large animal covered in hair, upright, crossing the road about 30 yards off. Its face was bare and black, he said. With a flat nose and its arms hung below its waist. It took a few steps and went down the hill out of the light. On the way out, he said, rocks were thrown at the group. That one hit the television stations in Ashville, Raleigh and Charlotte inside a couple of days. A police department in Greenville, South Carolina put out a notice asking people, please not to shoot at Bigfoot since they'd most likely be shooting a man in a guerrilla suit. The next year, the town of Marion named Bigfoot its official animal and held its first Bigfoot festival.

43:55With a calling contest and a knocking contest, it's been held every fall since. Hazel was standing at her kitchen sink in Wilkes County around seven in the evening in March of 2020. Stay tuned for more Backwood's Bigfoot Stories. We'll be back after these messages. Ranked number one in innovation, 12 consecutive years. Arizona State University isn't just ahead of the curve. It's creating new paths to success. Learn from notable research faculty online. That's a degree better. Explore programs at ASUOnline.asu.edu. If your dog treats dinner like it needs a better chef, check this out. Sunday's for dogs is the food that gets tails wagging at meal time. Sundays for dogs combines real meat with a gentle air drying process that locks in flavor and nutrition. It looks like food, not kibble. In an independent taste test, all 39 dogs preferred Sundays chicken recipe to a premium kibble. Make the switch today at sundaysfordogs.com and get 30% off your first order.

44:55Treat your best friend right and make it Sundays for dogs. Your sausage Bigfoot with egg didn't change. You'll recete it. The sausage Bigfoot with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for limited time. Price and British Switching May vary. It was the first week the whole state shut down and she'd been in the house for days. She lives at the head of a hollow off the road toward Stone Mountain, up in the northwest corner of the Piedmont, where the ground starts lifting into the blue ridge in a house her husband built. She was 71 that spring. She'd buried him four years before. The house sits with its back to the woods and its front to a pasture that a neighbor keeps cattle in. And the kitchen window looks out across the pasture to the tree line about 150 yards off. There was still a little light on the grass. The cattle were bunched at the near fence. That was the first thing she noticed. All 20 head were up at the fence closest to the house.

45:57Backstead her heads toward the woods and they weren't grazing. There was something standing at the tree line. It stood with the trees behind it. And she'd have missed it if it hadn't been a shade darker than the trees. It was upright and it was still. It was beside a cedar at the corner of the pasture that her husband never cut because he liked the shape of it. The cedar is about 12 feet tall and the thing was more than half the height of the cedar. It was broad through the shoulders. The head was rounded on top with no neck she could see and the arms hung down and did nothing. It was looking at the cattle. Then it looked at the house. She knows that she said because the shape of the head changed. And after that it didn't change again for a long time. She stood at the sink with a dish towel in her hands and it stood at the cedar and she doesn't know how long. Long enough for the light to go from gold to gray. Then it stepped back one step and it was in the trees. The cattle stayed at the fence until full dark.

46:59She stayed at the window until she couldn't see the cedar anymore. She called her son in Wilkesboro and he came out the next morning and walked the tree line with her. At the cedar the grass was pressed flat in a patch. On the ground under the fence where the cattle had stood there were the tracks of 20 cows. Beyond the fence at the edge of the trees there was one long impression in the leaves that could have been anything. The cattle wouldn't graze that corner of the pasture the rest of the spring. The neighbor asked her if she knew why and she said she had no idea. She wasn't going to tell a man she'd known 40 years that she'd seen a thing at his fence and then have to see him at church every Sunday. She still lives in the house. She keeps the curtain over the kitchen window pulled after dark now. She said that's the only thing that's different. Rufus was sitting on his pack at the top of a bald on Ron Mountain in June of 1987 waiting on the sun. Ron sits on the Tennessee line above Baker'sville in Mitchell County.

47:59The top of it is a run of grassy balds, open meadow at 6,000 feet with nothing on it but grass, rota dendron and wind. The Appalachian trail runs across them and below them on the North Carolina side the mountain drops off into spruce and fur and then into hardwood coves that go down for miles. He was 24 and section hiking the trail northbound with a friend. They'd camped in a gap below the balds and gotten up before daylight to be on top for the sunrise. They walked up through the last of the trees onto the open grass in the dark with headlamps and stopped at the top to wait for the light. His friend went off a ways to sit by himself. Rufus was looking east. The sky was going gray and the fog was down in the coves below with the ridges standing up out of it. Something was walking across the bald below him. It was about 200 yards down the slope on the open grass going from the trees on one side toward the trees on the other and he watched it against the gray light

49:00for the whole crossing. It was upright and it never went down. It walked with a long stride and the arm swung. At 200 yards in that light he couldn't make out hair or a face or anything about it but the shape and the way it moved. The shape was a man's shape made too wide and too long in the arm. The way it moved was a walk, steady, across a quarter mile of open meadow without a break in it. It took about two minutes to cross. He sat on his pack and watched it the whole way. He didn't call to his friend because his friend was 80 yards off and calling would have meant taking his eyes off it. At the far side of the bald it went into the road of dendron without slowing. He said the road of dendron on that side is a solid wall. A person has to crawl through and it went in the way you'd walk into tall grass. His friend came back when the sun was up and Rufus told him. His friend said it was probably a bear. Rufus said it had walked a quarter mile on two legs and his friend said then it was probably a man.

50:02Rufus said all right and they hiked on. He went back to Rome in 1991, alone in June. He camped in the same gap and sat on the same bald in the dark and nothing crossed it. He's been back a few times since. He said it's a good place to watch the sun come up regardless. I didn't go looking for any of it on our place. The footprints were there when I walked up on them. The sounds off the ridge came to the porch. The tree structures were standing in the woods when I found them and I still don't know how long they'd been there. Danny and I came here from Georgia for the land and the quiet. We got both. We got whatever else is out here along with it. Most nights I sit on the porch. The ridge goes black. A dog gets going somewhere down the valley and that's all that happens. Some nights there's a sound off the ridge I still can't put a name to. Bladenbro's beast fest is this fall. There'll be a parade, vendors, a hunt for the kids and a mascot named Bob.

51:03And somebody old enough to remember will tell somebody too young to remember about January of 1954. The dogs and the thousand men in the swamp. The big swamp is still there, four miles from town. Luther Davis's trap line is long gone. Nobody ever settled which cat was in the mayor's photograph. If you've got a story of your own from this state or any other, I'd like to hear it. You can get me as always via email at Brian. That's B-R-I-A-N at paranormalworldproductions.com. And do me a favor. If you got something out of this one, pass it along. Tell your family. Tell a buddy. Tell the one guy at work who's always bringing this stuff up at lunch. That's how the show gets around. One person handing it to the next. Next time we get back on the road and cross a state line. Until then, folks, watch the swamp edge and keep your eyes on the tree line. ["The Swamp Edge"] Your sausage Mcbuffin with egg didn't change.

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