For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace. Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot, dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads, and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
I just finished recording an interview for Sasquatch Odyssey. I sat down with friend and fellow researcher named Natalie Smearman, and by the time we wrapped, I knew I'd be sitting back down at this mic and telling you about it over here too, because what she shared with me wasn't the kind of thing you keep to one show. Some encounters need a wider audience. Some encounters, frankly need a campfire and a long stretch of quiet woods to settle into. So that's what we're going to do tonight.
I'm going to tell you what Natalie told me, her words, her experiences, in the order she lived them, from the moment she started taking this seriously, all the way through the week she spent at land between the Lakes that fundamentally rewrote her understanding of what's out there. Natalie grew up in West Virginia, and, like a lot of us who came up in places where the woods pressed right up against the back porch, she heard the Bigfoot stories
her whole childhood. Heard them at school, heard them from older cousins, heard them from parents trying to keep kids from doing the dumb things kids do.
In the woods after dark.
Don't go out to that party, don't run off into the trees, don't drag a keg out past the tree line and disappear for the night, because something out there will get you. She thought it was a joke, That's how she said it. They all thought it was a joke. Parental nonsense, the kind of thing grown up say when they're tired of arguing and want to scare you straight. She was raised hearing about this creature, and she filed it under the same drawer where most kids filed the
Boogeyman and the closet monster, funny stories. Nothing more. Then life moved her down to Florida. She's settling into Central Florida, raising two kids, going about her business, and one evening, the local news comes on, not some grainy YouTube channel, not a friend of a friend on social media, the actual local news, and the anchor leads with a story about a bigfoot sighting in the Okalla National Forest about
an hour and a half from where she's living. She told me her brain just stopped, because if the news is reporting it, somebody saw something. The news doesn't lead with the boogeyman. The news leads with what people are actually calling in about. And here was her local affiliate in central Florida, of all places, talking about bigfoot in the swamp pines like it was just another item on the rundown. That was the moment for her. That was the spark. She went home and started reading, and she
didn't read casually. She read the way somebody reads when they've just realized that a thing they laughed at their whole life might be standing in the trees behind the house. Books, magazine articles, old interviews, documentaries on whatever.
Channel was running them.
Whatever she could find, she ran down. She started piecing together a picture of this creature from every angle she could pull. And then life moved her again. She landed up north of Boston for a stretch northern Massachusetts, and right around that time, the local site reports out of western Massachusetts started coming in heavy forest country out there, the Berkshires bleeding into the Vermont border, people reporting bipedal creatures moving through the timber. So she added that to
her file, Florida sidings, Massachusetts sidings. The map kept getting bigger. By the time she'd move back down to Florida, the show Finding Bigfoot was on the air. Now, I'll tell you what she told me about that show. She knew it was entertainment, she knew it was a production. But even through the bits that played for laughs, there were nuggets in there that pointed her toward more serious sources.
She'd watch an episode here, a researcher mentioned a methodology or a region or a name, and she'd go track that thread, pull on it, see what was at the other end. The thing was, she was a mom of two young kids. At that point, she wasn't packing a tent and heading into the National forest for a week. Couldn't, wasn't realistic, So her research stayed in books and on score theoretical studied. She built up years of reading without ever once stepping into the woods to look for one
of these things herself. That changed in March of twenty twenty four. Her marriage ended fast. She didn't dress it up for me on the call, and I'm not going to dress it up for you either. It went into the toilet, was how she put it, quick and ugly. And her birthday was March sixteenth, right in the middle
of the wreckage. So she did something for herself. She bought herself a VIP ticket to the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference in Okalla two days Friday and Saturday, booked a hotel room, drove herself out there alone, and told herself she was going to learn as much as she possibly could and talked to as many people as she possibly could in the time she had on the ground. That
weekend cracked her life open. She met Adam Davis there, She met RPG, She met Ken Gearhard, she met witnesses with encounter stories spanning Florida all the way up through North Carolina, people who had seen things, heard things, lived through things, and who were willing to sit and tell her about it. Because she was sitting and listening, the southeast was well represented. The Florida community came out in force, and by the time she drove home from that conference,
her whole posture toward the subject had shifted. She wasn't a reader anymore. She was about to become a participant. Her next move was the Gatlinburg conference. She volunteered up there, worked the event, and then because of the people she'd met, she got an invitation that most folks dream about. She got to go out into the forest with Shane Corson, with Amy bou with Lester Kerr. Names you've heard on this show, names that mean something in this community. She
told me, she felt like she'd won the lottery. They took her out for the day, showed her how they squatched, what to look for, how to read the ground, how to smell check in area, how rocks get arranged. The whole vocabulary of field research taught to her first hand by people who've been doing it for decades. She was soaking it up asking questions, watching how they moved through the timber. By the end of that day, she had more practical knowledge in her head than years of reading
had given her. And that's where she made the mistake. I'm going to say this exactly the way she said it to me, because she was emphatic about it. Don't do this, Nobody listening should ever do this. She decided to go solo camping in the Everglades. There's a campground behind the Skunk Ape headquarters, just south of Alligator Alley. She booked it, drove down by herself off season, set
up her tent. There were a handful of other campers way off in the distance, but for all practical purposes, she was alone in one of the most predator rich environments on the North American continent.
She had her bare spray. That was it.
She set up camp, and she told me looking back, she set up camp in a way that made her look as vulnerable as possible. A solo woman in a tent, off season, way out from any other human being anything in those swamps could have decided to come check her out, and there wouldn't have been a single thing she could
have done about it. She knows that now. She knew it then on some level, but she'd just spent a weekend with the best researchers in the country, and she was riding the high Around one point thirty in the morning, she heard a chirp. Now she's awake, she's lying there in the tent listening, and she thought to herself, that's not a normal sound, not for the time of night, not for the spot, just a single sharp chirp out in the dark. So she lay there, listening for what
came next. What came next was footsteps right beside her tent, heavy footsteps, close enough that the ground vibrated, close enough that she could feel something moving past the thin nylon wall a few inches from her face. And then after the footsteps, she heard what sounded like a small child trying to talk soft garbled, the kind of vocalization that doesn't belong in a swamp at one point thirty in the morning, when the nearest human being is half a mile away.
She sat up.
By the time she sat up and looked, there was nothing there. Now here's where Natalie's mind started working the way a researcher's mind ought to work. She got out of her tent the next morning, talked to some of the locals around the area. Some of them said, oh, you had a skunk ape, you had a big foot encounter. They wanted to plug it right into the most exciting box on the shelf. She wouldn't let them, She told me, And this is the part I want you to remember.
You've got to look at it holistically. You've got to consider every possible explanation. Don't just pick the answer you want and call it a day. That's not research, that's wishful thinking. And she was determined not to fall into that trap her first time out. So she dug into it and she figured out what had actually happened. It
was a male Florida panther. The chirp was a panther call, the footsteps were a big cat moved moving in to investigate, and the small child vocalization was the panther doing what panthers do when they're trying to figure out what's in a tent that they can smell from a distance. A lot of researchers would have walked out of those swamps the next morning, convinced they'd had a skunk ape encounter, would have dined out on that story for the rest of their lives.
She didn't.
She did the work, traced it back to the actual cause, and added it to her growing body of knowledge as a lesson in restraint. Don't claim what you can't prove, even when the story sounds better the other way. A couple months later, the call came Adam Davis from Relic Films. He'd been watching her, watching how she carried herself, watching the work she was putting in, and he told her they were looking for somebody to bring on for filming
and they'd love to have her on the team. February of twenty twenty five, she joined them, and from that point on she wasn't a hobbyist with a tent and some bear spray. She was a researcher with a film crew, going into places most of us will never set foot in.
Now.
From February through November of twenty twenty five, Natalie was out in the field constantly. She heard whoops, wood knocks, screams, growls, grunts. She heard them in pockets all over the country. She heard them in the Everglades, where she sat one night listening to two of these things vocalized back and forth across miles of open swamp, just talking to each other in the dark, and she couldn't get a visual on either one because there's no line of sight in that
country at night. She heard them up north. She investigated graveyards and forest edges and ridge lines. What she didn't do in all those months was actually see one until November of twenty twenty five. And when she finally did, she didn't see one. She saw several. She saw things she still doesn't have words for. She saw lights, she saw orbs. She saw a creature charge her in the dark, and she saw a bigfoot the size of a small car walk behind her truck and appear into thin air.
She and the team went to a place called Land between the Lakes. If you're not familiar with it, let me set the stage for you, because the geography matters. Land between the Lakes is a one hundred and seventy thousand acre stretch of forest sitting between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley along the Kentucky and Tennessee border. It's a National Recreation Area federally administered, and it has a reputation in the High Strangeness community that's hard to overstate. People
go missing there, people see things there. Natalie told me the area has a long and violent history of death and bloodshed, going back generations, combat disease, the kind of small town tragedies that pile up over a century and never quite leave. And scattered across those one hundred and seventy thousand acres are a great number of cemeteries, old ones, forgotten ones, family plots that the forest has half swallowed and never given back.
She has theories about why the area is the way it is.
We'll get to those for now. Just hold the picture in your head. One hundred and seventy thousand acres heavy forest, cemeteries scattered through it like bones, and documented sightings of Bigfoot, of dog men, of crawlers, of UFOs, of portals of every category of weird this field knows how to name. That's where Natalie went in November. Before they ever set foot on the ground, she had a conversation with Greg Ogles. Greg is the producer, owner, and director of Relic Films.
He's the man calling shots on what they film and how they film it, and Natalie had pitched him a series of experiments she wanted to run that week. Things She'd been thinking about things that, by her own admission, were on the outlandish side. She told me, Greg has never once told her no, not once. She'll come to him with something dangerous, something strange, something that any reasonable producer would push back on, and Greg wild look at
her and say, let's try it. So when she pitched her ideas for Land between the Lakes, he didn't blink. He told her to go for it. Here was her plan. She'd been reading reports out of Land between the Lakes about attacks on people, specifically attacks where the victims were noted to be wearing heavy perfumes or cologonnes. That detail
kept showing up in the reports. The victim was wearing something strong, something with pheromones, and Natalie's theory was that whatever was out there in those woods was being drawn in by the scent. So she ran the experiment. She drove to a department store and bought Obsession for Men, the cologne specifically because it contains pheromones. Obsession for Men has been used by big Cat researchers for years to draw cougars and jaguars in for camera trap photography. The
stuff works. She picked that up. Then she went to Victoria's Secret and bought their teas line, also for the pheromone content. Then she added Jovanne Musk to the mix, three different scent products, all loaded with the chemicals that mammals respond to. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Then she went to
the dollar store. She bought brightly colored dog toys, the cheapest plastic ones she could find, and brightly colored feather boas because she wanted visual bait as well as scent bait. She wanted whatever was coming in to see something and to smell something at the same time. So she got back to camp and she saturated those dog toys with
all three cents, drowned them in the stuff. Then she tied them around the trees that ring their base camp, saturated bait visible from any direction, strung in a perimeter around where they were sleeping. She told me, why not, might as well try to bring them right into camp and see what happens. The first night out, they didn't stay at camp. They ran their first investigation. They started
in a graveyard. There's a logic to that. By the way, in land between the lakes, a disproportionate number of the sidings happen in or around the cemeteries scattered through the forest. Whatever's in those woods has a relationship with those places. So the team went to one of the older ones set up and walked in to establish a baseline. That standard practice, walk in, calm, look around, listen, see what the area feels like before you start any active investigation work.
They didn't get to a baseline. The moment they were inside the cemetery, every single person in the group felt it at the same time, an intense pressure, the kind of pressure where you know you're being watched, and you're not just being watched from one direction, You're being watched from all sides at once, from the trees, from the ground, from angles that don't make sense for a single observer.
Martin Groves was with them. Martin had walked a little ahead of the rest of the group, and he turned around and told them, calm the way a man like Martin says things, that he had a crawler in the forest.
He could see it. So the rest of the group moved up to where.
He was standing and they tried to get eyes on whatever he'd seen. They couldn't, but that pressure on them was getting heavier by the minute. Their security team was running about ten minutes behind. The security team came in with long guns, two or three men armed and ready, taking up positions on the perimeter of the group, and Natalie told me the moment those men with rifles took up their positions, every bit of the movement around them stopped.
The pressure didn't fully release, but the activity, the sense of things moving in the trees halted on a dime, like it was being managed. Martin turned to her and told her to walk up the hill and start singing. She told me she looked at him like he had two heads sing out here in a graveyard in the middle of the woods, surrounded by armed men and whatever was in the trees. But Martin doesn't ask for things lightly.
So she and Melissa, another woman on the team, walked up the hill together and they started singing, and everything went calm. The pressure released, the anxiety dropped, the sensation of being surrounded by hostile observers just evaporated. Whatever had been wringing the men like wolves around a campfire, backed off and settled down. It was, Natalie said, like a switch being flipped. Martin had a theory about why. He told her she'd calmed them the way a mother calms
a frightened child. Most of the people who go into these woods to look for these creatures are men, loud men, armed men, men with bright lights and confident postures. And to whatever's in those woods, that whole package reads his threat. Three armed men with rifles and headlamps walking into your territory at night is not a friendly visit. It's an invasion. But two women walking up a hill singing that apparently registered differently. Natalie filed that one away, and she made
a decision right there. If they wanted to make actual contact, they were going to have to go in differently. They were going to have to go in vulnerable, no long guns, no security perimeter, just researchers willing to be soft enough to get close. That decision is the reason for everything that happened next. It's also almost the reason none of them came out of those woods the next day at
base camp. The activity started second night in Natalie's lying in her tent, and she hears heavy footsteps right outside the tent wall, big ones, not raccoon footsteps, not deer footsteps, the kind of weight that carries through the ground when something tall is walking past. She lay there and listened.
Then she heard splashing. The team had a big bin of water set up at camp for showers, a big plastic tub of water with the day's heat soaked into it, and from her tent she heard somebody or something splashing the water hard, like a hand had gone in and started slapping the surface. Her first thought was that one of the guys had gotten drunk and was screwing around, because that would have been the boring explanation, the mundane explanation.
She told me she was actually irritated lying there, thinking who is up at this hour playing in the shower water like a child. She was getting ready to climb out of her tent and go put a stop to it. Then she heard the scratching. The team had a big
yetti cooler at camp. YETI coolers have these little molded indentations along the sides for grip, and whatever was at her tent had moved over to that cooler and started scratching, long scratches, methodical, like fingernails being dragged across the plastic, deliberately finding those indentations one at a time. She sat up pulled herself out of the tent. By the time
she got out, nothing was there. The water in the bin was disturbed, the cooler was sitting where it had been, but whatever had been splashing and scratching was gone, and no human being had come out of any of the other tents. She checked. Everybody was asleep. It hadn't been one of the team. The pheromones were working, or at
least something was working. Whatever Natalie had set up around camp with that bait was bringing things in, and those things were bold enough now to come right up to where the humans were sleeping, to play in their water, to explore their gear, to see what they were. That same trip, one night, she got up to use the bathroom. The bathroom was a structure about thirty or forty yards from where her tent was set, just a little outhouse with a hole in the ground, standard primitive camping set up.
She had her flashlight. Everybody at camp knew where she was going, so she walked it. She got to the outhouse, did her business, and on her way back in the dark, she stopped because she heard something in the tree line, a growl low coming from the woods just beside the trail. She didn't run, she didn't shout. She turned faced the tree line, and she said, calm and steady, I hear you. I'm not going to come for you. I just need
to use the restroom. And the thing in the woods didn't come for her either.
It just stayed where it.
Was, held its ground, like the two of them had reached a mutual understanding right there in the dark. You stay there, I'll stay here. We'll both get on with our nights. She walked back to her tent, and the whole way back she sang just a melody to let whatever was watching her know that she wasn't going to escalate. That she was the same calm presence from the cemetery and she was going to keep being that presence as
long as she was on their land. By the time she got back to her tent, she was at peace with whatever was out there in the trees. That growl was a preview because the next night, that same growl, made by Natalie herself, became the trigger that broke open everything.
Here's what they did.
The next night, they split into teams. One team would stay at base camp running security. That was Martin Groves's job. Other teams would head to different locations across the area, and the team Natalie was on. The all female team plus two cameramen, was going back to that same cemetery from the first night, the one where the singing had calmed everything down. Greg Ogles and Jim were the cameramen. They each had a small pistol concealed under their jackets.
That was the whole arsenal. No long guns, no security detail. Natalie had her bear spray, Greg and Jim had cameras and side arms. Everyone else was unarmed. The plan was Natalie's. She wanted to use the same growl she'd heard the night before at the bathroom. She was going to mimic that exact vocalization in that cemetery and see what came of it. They walked in, got about halfway up the
slope of the cemetery, and Natalie did three growls. Everything broke loose from the top of the ridge line above them. There came a massive impact, a boom big enough that the ground beneath their feet shook, not a vibration, a shake like something the size of a refrigerator had been dropped from a height onto the dirt at the top
of the hill. She growled again. It happened again, boom, the ground shaking, and now all around them in the trees movement, things shifting, branches moving, the kind of activity that tells you that the woods.
Around you are no longer empty. This was it. They knew it. This was contact.
Then Natalie looked up at the top of the hill and there was a light, bluish white, illuminating the back of one of the trees on the ridge line. Not a flashlight, not a lantern, a glow, the kind of glow that doesn't have a source you can point to. She asked the team if they were seeing it. Every single one of them said yes, they were seeing it too. None of them knew what it was. She told them to keep an eye on it. That's when the sounds
got strange. They heard what sounded like a car driving past, the wish of a vehicle on a road, tires on pavement, but there was no road there. There hadn't been a road there in a hundred years.
What they were.
Hearing was a sound that didn't belong in the place they were standing. Melissa did a whoop, a long ape like vocalization, the way researchers do when they want to get a response, and the response came back as more booms from the ridge above them, But this time the booms had a rhythm to them, patterned almost like a drum beat, the way an indigenous tribe might pound out a beat at a ceremonial gathering. Not random impacts, coordinated ones.
Then Jamie got sick. Jamie was another researcher on the team, and she suddenly turned to Natalie and told her she didn't feel well. She had a headache, she was nauseous. It had come over her and seconds Natalie told her to step in close, get behind her, use her body as a barrier against whatever was hitting her. Jamie did and she started to feel better. Then Jamie stepped back out and Melissa got hit with the same thing, same headache,
same nausea, same suddenness. Melissa stepped behind Natalie and she started to.
Feel a little better.
Whatever was being directed at them, it was bouncing off Natalie. She wasn't getting any of it. Meanwhile, that light up on the ridge was changing. It was getting more defined, more intense. It was forming into a perfect oval shape, and around it now were tiny lights sparkling, moving the kind of thing she described as fairy lights dancing around the perimeter of this oval glow up at the top
of the hill. She kept asking the team if they were seeing what she was seeing, because at that point, she told me, she'd entered a strange phase, a phase where she wasn't sure if her own eye were lying to her. She thought maybe she was hallucinating, Maybe the stress of the encounter, the adrenaline, the bad water, somewhere along the line, something had her seeing things that weren't there.
So she kept checking, kept asking, and every single member of the team kept confirming, Yes, we see it, We see exactly what you're seeing. Then a dog started barking behind them, somewhere off in the distance, a dog. Now there was nobody living within miles of where they were. There were no homes, no campers nearby that they knew of, no farms, just one hundred and seventy thousand acres of federal forest with cemeteries.
Scattered through it.
But there was a dog somewhere in the dark, barking like it had something cornered. Greg decided to do a growl himself, a long, drawn out growl, mimicking the one Natalie had used. He let it ride out into the air, and that's when the crawler came out of the light. She was looking up at the hill, watching the oval glow, and out of that glow, on all fours a creature emerged, long, lanky, moving in a way that didn't belong to anything she'd
ever seen. It came forward into the open and it stood there on all fours, swaying its body back and forth slowly side to side, with its head turned toward them. She called it out to the team. She said, I have a crawler at my twelve o'clock. She used the word crawler because she didn't know what else to call it. She didn't know what species this was. She didn't know
what category to file it in. All she knew was that it was on all fours and it was moving wrong, long and lanky, head fixed on them, body rocking side to side. At the top of the hill, she asked the team again, are you seeing this? Is that thing actually moving up there? And again every member confirmed. Then Melissa and Jamie got sick at the same time. Both of them hit at once, both of them moving in close behind Natalie to use her as a shield, and
while Natalie was looking up at that first crawler. A second one came out of the light, then a third. She told the team, I have three crawlers up there, three of them standing on all fours, swaying, watching the team in the cemetery below. Now nobody could get them on thermal nobody, not Natalie's thermal, not anybody else's. They
were seeing all of this with their naked eyes. The light, the fairy lights, the crawlers, the movement, But thermal imaging, which should have lit up any warm body up on that ridge like a torch, was getting nothing. The thermals were blank. The eyes saw it, the instruments did not. The movement around them in the trees was closing in, and then.
She heard Greg yell.
Greg threw his camera from one hand to the other, reached under his jacket for the pistol. Natalie looked up and saw what he was reacting to. One of the crawlers was charging them. It came down off the ridge on all fours, a galloping kind of crawl, closing the distance in a hurry, coming straight at the team in the cemetery. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Natalie pulled out her bare spray.
She told me she lunged forward as Greg was reaching for his side arm because she didn't want him to fire. She wanted to try the spray first. Bare spray shoots about fifteen to twenty feet. It comes out with a loud sound. A canister hiss combined with the propellant, and she pointed it at the charging crawler and let it go. The bare spray stopped it. The creature broke off, the charge retreated back up the hill. Whether it was the spray itself or the noise of the canister, something registered
and it backed off. But now the team was in their own cloud. Bear spray doesn't discriminate. You can't fire it at something coming at you and then keep standing where you fired it. So the entire team had to retreat back down the hill away from the spray cloud, in a tight, close group, moving as one, making their way back down toward the trucks at the base of the cemetery. That's when the screaming started, a woman screaming in the field behind them. Jim whipped his camera around
and he called out that there was something in the field. Kristin, who had her thermal up at that point, swung her thermal around to the same direction and she confirmed it. She had a large bipedal creature in the field watching them. The dog was still barking somewhere in the dark. That dog had not stopped. The three crawlers were still up on the ridge, moving back and forth, watching, and the activity in the trees around them was closing in tightening.
Then Jim called out that his camera battery had died, not low dead. He swapped to his backup battery. The backup died too. In seconds. Greg said that his camera battery was dead too. Then phones started dying, every member of the team in sequence, watching their devices go to black. Cameras, phones, the thermals. Everything they had brought to document this encounter
was dropping out of service simultaneously. They were dead in the water, standing in the dark in a cemetery, surrounded by closing movement, watched by three crawlers on a hill, watched by a bipedal creature in a field with no working cameras, no working phones, no working thermals. That's when she saw the bigfoot. She was looking around, trying to track everything, trying to keep her eyes on the ridge, on the field, on the trees, and she happened to
look to her left. Two red orbs were sitting in front of her truck. She looked to her right, two more red orbs were sitting behind the other truck. Now she's tracking orbs. The light is still on the ridge, Crawlers are still on the ridge, there's a creature in the field, there's a dog barking. And in the middle of all of it, while every other member of her team was scanning a different direction, she saw a massive
bigfoot walk out from behind her truck. It walked across her field of view, calm, in no hurry, and then it disappeared into thin air, just like that, midstride gone. And I want you to understand what kind of truck we're talking about. Natalie drives a Hyundai Santa Cruz. That's a small to mid size pickup. It is not a big truck. And the bottom of this bigfoot's rear end was sitting at the top of the bed of that truck.
The arms were enormous, the chest was massive. When the creature was standing sideways, it was half the width of her truck side to side.
She watched it walk.
She watched it disappear, and nobody else on the team saw it. Every other person was looking somewhere else, tracking the field, tracking the ridge, trying to make their dead cameras work. She was the only one whose eyes happened to be in the right place at the right second, and by the time she could call it out, there was nothing to call out. The creature was gone. Greg called off the investigation due to safety concerns. He said, this is now a safety issue. We're getting in the
trucks we're leaving. So the team piled into the vehicles, and the moment they were inside the trucks, every one of them got physically ill. Natalie told me it felt like somebody had a hand around her throat and was sitting on her chest at the same time. Couldn't breathe couldn't think, just nausea and pressure and the sense of something heavy on her body. Every single person in the
trucks was hit with it. They drove out fast, climbed the hill out of the cemetery, made the turn onto the next dirt road, and the moment they made that turn, all of it stopped. The pressure released, the nausea was gone. Everyone in the trucks was suddenly fine. They had crossed an invisible line and left the whole field of influence behind them. They were trying to talk through what had just happened, all of them at once, trying to piece
it together while it was still fresh. And what they kept coming back to was this, whatever had been at the cemetery had been actively trying to divert their attention. That's the language they all settled on. Diversion. Look here, look there, Look at this thing in the field. Look at the crawlers on the ridge, Look at the orbs in front of the trucks, look at the dead cameras,
Look anywhere except at the thing that's actually happening. Because if your eyes are full of distractions, you're not going to see what's really moving. Natalie thinks that's why she was the only one who saw the Bigfoot disappear behind her truck. She just happened to look at the right spot during the one second they weren't successfully redirecting her. They got back to base camp, Martin Groves was waiting
for them, and Martin had his own story. While they had been at the cemetery, getting hit with all of this the squatches had tried to come into base camp. I want to repeat that. While the team was off in the cemetery being charged by a crawler, two bigfoot had attempted to walk into base camp, where Martin was alone running security. The Pheromone bait had done exactly what Natalie hoped it would do. It brought them in, and they brought themselves in hard. Now, anybody who knows Martin
Groves knows the man as a gentleman. He does not curse in front of women. He keeps his language clean. It's part of who he is. He looked at Natalie when she got back and he told her, and I'm quoting Natalie quoting Martin here. He told her, Natalie, I used bad language. I used language I would not say in front of you. He had to grab his stick and go after these two bigfoot to drive them out of camp. He was yelling at them, cursing at them,
using language he was not proud of. He had his hand on his gun and was preparing to use it. He held them off with the stick and his voice until they finally backed off and left.
The bait had worked.
Now the team had a decision to make push forward or pull back.
They pushed forward.
The next night they went to a different cemetery, and this time they brought everybody, the whole crew, because they wanted as many witnesses as possible and as many cameras as possible in case the activity from the previous night repeated.
This cemetery was set up.
Next to a campable area that ran in a big loop, so they decided to split into two groups and approach from opposite ends. Half went one way, half went the other. Natalie was in the right hand group, Jamie was with her. Jamie's sister Amy was with her. A man named Sean was at the head of their group. The night was different this time. The previous night had been the day before a full moon. They'd had no flashlights on, just like the night before, because the moon was bright enough
to navigate. Now the moon was full, they could see clearly in the timber outlines of trees, distant shapes. They were moving with all the light a full moon gives you. They got to a section of the loop where there were power lines. Jamie stopped the group. Jamie is one of those researchers who picks up on energy in a way other people don't. Some people have it, some people don't, and Jamie does.
She told the group to hold up.
She felt something. She didn't know if it was the power lines themselves throwing off some interference, or if it was something else. Amy raised her thermal. Amy started panting across the trees ahead of them, and then she stopped. She turned to Natalie quietly and said, I have a bipedal creature behind a tree. It's peeking out at us.
Natalie looked at the thermal screen. There it was heat signature, tall behind a tree, peeking out and pulling back in the same way a person plays peekaboo with a child, except this thing was tall and it was hiding from them in the dark. Sean was at the head of the group. He decided to move forward to get a better angle. The thing growled at him. Sean stepped back. The growl was clear enough that he didn't need to
be told twice, so they tried something different. They moved forward as a group, all together, same posture as the singing and the cemetery, calm presence, not aggressive, not threatening, just moving as a collective, and the creature didn't run. It moved away from the tree, and it started paralleling them in the forest, walking alongside them as they walked
twenty five maybe thirty feet off into the timber. The forest was thick enough that they couldn't see it clearly, but they could hear it footfalls, branches, moving a presence, keeping pace with them through the trees. It walked with them for a while. Then they came to a service road that turned off to the right. Down at the bottom of that service road, a long way off, a man was camping. They could see his little campfire glowing in the distance, just a pinpoint of orange in the dark.
And the moment they hit that intersection, the bipedal creature stopped paralleling them. It wouldn't go any further. Natalie's read on it, and I think it's a sound read, was that the creature had been working that area to scope out the camper, working out what kind of food was at that fire, whether it could be approached, whether it could be rated, and the team had just walked through
its hunting ground. The creature had paralleled them for a stretch to monitor what they were doing, and it had stopped at the edge of the area it had been working because it wasn't going to give up on the camper for them. They kept walking, made their way around the loop, and right before they linked up with the other team, Jamie's sister, Amy spoke up again. Amy said she had just caught something on her thermal that she
could not explain. Natalie asked her to describe it. Amy described it as a witch's hat, or maybe a small garden gnome, a small figure conical, floating across the forest floor and then moving out of sight. When they went to look, it was gone. Natalie told her to take a note of it. They'd come back to it. They didn't have time right then to investigate. They were on a clock to meet the other team at the rendezvous point,
so they kept moving. Met the other team, did some yells together, got nothing in response, and then the whole crew broke down into smaller groups of two to four people each scattered across the area, just sitting and observing. Natalie didn't see another bipedal.
Creature that night.
What she did see was a full bodied apparition. She told me this casually, in the middle of describing a quiet stretch of the night, A full bodied apparition walking past her line of sight in the dark. She also saw faery lights all over the area and an orb whitish red floating through the trees. Other teams had their own sightings large orbs, shadow figures. One team heard something in the US they couldn't explain, possibly bipedal, but no
visual to back it up. That's how that night went, quieter than the night before, but still alive with things that nobody could fully account for. Then they got back to base camp. Jim had been on camp security that night, just like Martin had been the night before, and Jim had bad news. He told them that the squatches had come in again, just like the night before, but this time they were more aggressive, significantly more. Jim is not
a small man. Jim is not a meek man. He yelled at them, he cursed at them, he pulled his weapon, He tried every single thing he could think of to drive them off. Nothing worked. They kept pushing in, pushing closer, pushing into the camp itself. He had to get inside his tent and hunker down. That's the part that stays with me. A man with a gun with a clear sight line, with the confidence of his own training, decided the safest move was to go inside the tent and
let them do whatever they were going to do. They wanted in, they wanted to observe, they wanted to be in the camp, and he wasn't going to win that fight.
So they came in.
And here's the part that I think tells you something about the intelligence of these creatures. The tents with people sleeping in them, they left alone, didn't touch a single one. But anybody in a hard camper, the kind with rigid walls, those they messed with. They went up to the hard campers and they pushed on them, knocked on them, shoved at them like they wanted whoever was inside to know they were out there. Every single hard camper in the base camp got pushed or knocked that night. Not one
was missed. Methodical, deliberate. The team spent the rest of the trip just gathering what evidence they could, looking for prints, trying to understand the pattern of activity. They never even covered the whole area. One hundred and seventy thousand acres takes months to walk properly, and they a week. They covered a fraction of it. When she told me the whole arc of that week, I asked her what she made of it. She told me she went into land between the lakes with a handful of questions and came
out with a basket full of them. She had more questions at the end than she had at the beginning. The crawlers, the rakes, whatever you want to call them, those were a complete shock. Nobody had been expecting them. The Bigfoot disappearing into thin air, that wasn't something she had a category for in her head before that night. The biggest thing that struck her was the cooperation. The
bigfoot she saw walk behind her truck was massive. She told me point blank that creature could have killed every member of the team in a matter of seconds if it had wanted to, could have snapped every neck in twenty seconds or less, and it chose not to. It just stood back and let the rakes do the closing in. She compared it to a property owner letting the dogs out. You know how you've got pit bulls, she said, you're inside the house, strangers come into your yard, You let
the dogs out, let them go handle it. That was the dynamic she felt that night. The Bigfoot was the property owner, the rakes were the dogs. And these two species or two whatever they are, is we're working together to manage a situation. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. She doesn't know how that works, she doesn't know what that means. She just
knows she watched it happen. And here's where I want to tell you about another spot Natalie talked about because it's important context for everything she experienced. There's a place she calls the trifecta. It's the Amaeus Asylum in Missouri. It's an abandoned asylum. You can tour it. People go through it for the paranormal investigation crowd, ghost hunters, and so on. But the area around it, the forest around the building, has a documented history of bipedal creature sightings,
both Bigfoot and dog Man. And on top of that, the area also get it's UFO sidings. That's the trifecta asylum, hauntings, cryptid sidings, UFO activity all in one spot. You can spend a few days there and probably hit all three. When Natalie went there last, it was overcast, so she didn't see any UFOs the cloud cover ate the sky, but she got plenty of paranormal activity inside the building, got growled at got pushed by something she couldn't see.
There was an entity in the building, a doctor figure who was still hanging around the asylum because he believed he was needed there, believed he still had patience to care for, and he made it clear to the investigators that they were interrupting his patient care and they needed to leave. That was inside the building. Outside, in the forest, they heard growls, wood knocks, saw orbs in the trees
in every direction. They sat out there for the longest time, listening to all of these noises, listening to movement back and forth across the timber. There was more than one of whatever was out there, There were many. The next morning they took a walk to see what they could find. They were still hearing noises. Up at the very top
of the ridge, they could hear something large moving. The forest was too thick to push into safely, and the tick population was nasty enough that they weren't equipped for it, so they walked the tree line instead. That's when Natalie looked down. She saw something at her feet. She brushed the leaves away. Underneath was a perfect print. She described
it to me carefully. You could see the heel, you could see the arch, you could see every toe, and along the edge of the print you could see the ridge of the foot where it had rolled off as the creature took its next step. A walking print, crisp, clean, the kind of print attracer dreams about finding. She took pictures, she took video, she took measurements. What she didn't take was a cast. Because the team hadn't gone there to squatch,
they'd gone for paranorimal investigation. They didn't have casting material with them, So the print is documented in the video and the photographs, but there's no cast of it. People who have seen the print are split on what made it. Some say it's a dog man print, some say it's a bigfoot print. Natalie doesn't claim to know. What she does know is what she saw, a perfect heel, a perfect arch, perfect toes. Sitting in the dirt at the
edge of a forest. She could hear something moving in They found what looked like a partial print further on, walking distance away, but it wasn't as clean as the first one. Could have been the same creature, could have been something else. That area, she told me, is loaded. The activity there is constant, and the good news if you want to call it. That is that you can go. The asylum is open to the public. There's some airbnbs nearby. People live in the area, but it's not heavily populated.
If you want to.
Spend a few nights up there yourself, you can. That's not the case for a lot of these hot zones, the really active places, the ones with documented histories of sightings going back decades. A lot of them have been bought up quietly by people with money and reasons. Natalie told me about places where the government has come in,
purchased the land and posted it no public access. You can't get on it, you can't investigate it, and whatever's there, whatever's been seen there, is now off the books for anybody on the outside. She gave me an example in the Okala National Forest. There's a tiny piece of land, a postage stamp she called it, owned by the government, and it happens to sit right next to a river.
She and a team walked down to that river one night, about one thirty or two in the morning, and they heard a whoop from one side of the river, then a whoop from the other side, then two tree knocks, and about two minutes after that a scream, coordinated communication across the water, multiple individual rules talking to each other in vocalizations researchers know well, and the team couldn't get any of it on thermal. Natalie told me they could
see something on that postage stamp of land. They knew where to look, but the thermal kept coming up empty. Frustrating because this thing was right there and they couldn't put it on a screen to prove it. And of course this is Florida. The river was full of alligators, so you weren't going to swim across to investigate the property yourself. The eyes of the gators were all you'd
see in the water if you tried. So you stand on your side of the river and you listen, and you accept that you're not going to set foot on that land. Whatever the government bought it for, it's theirs now. Then there's the Smoky Mountains. Natalie told me the Smoky Mountains are her absolute favorite place to investigate.
She filmed up.
There last year and the activity she got in those mountains was constant disembodied voices orbs, the sound of metal clanking somewhere in the timber where there was no metal source just the sound of metal on metal ringing through the forest on the Tennessee side. That filming trip turned into something bigger. She and Adam Davis ended up making
a film called The Vanished. It's about two unsolved missing person cases in the Smokies, two of many, because the Smokies have a documented pattern of people just walking off into the forest and never coming out. People with experience, people with maps, people with families waiting on them at the trailhead. They go in and they're gone. The standard explanations get trotted out. It was the wild people, it
was the feral folks living back in the hallers. It was Bigfoot, it was dog Man, it was a portal, pick your favorite. Natalie and Adam decided to actually investigate. They went in, not assuming, not committed to one explanation over another. They went in to find out and what they found was something they weren't expecting. It opened up a whole avenue they didn't know existed. The film is going to be streaming on two, Biroku and Amazon in
the next couple weeks. As I record this, I'd recommend you go find it because what they uncovered changes the
way you walk into a forest now. I want to come back to the rakes because when Natalie was telling me about those creatures coming out of the light up on the ridge at Land between the Lakes, my mind went to a story I covered recently over on my Sasquatch Odyssey podcast, a nine to one to one call out of North Carolina five or six years back that's been making the rounds again on social media in the last few months. A man called nine to one one
in a panic. He'd been driving through the woods. He'd seen what he thought was a Civil War era figure standing by the road, bleeding, and then while he was still trying to make sense of that, something jumped onto the back of his truck, latched on started.
Riding with him.
People in the bigfoot community wanted to call it a Bigfoot. I don't think it was. The descriptions don't match, the behavior doesn't match what it sounds like when you read the call transcripts and listen to the audio. Is one of these rape creatures? Long, lanky, wrong shaped, aggressive in a way bigfoot generally isn't so, I asked Natalie. Was that what she saw? Was that what came out of the light at her Yes, she said, she didn't even
have to think about it. She told me they'd come home from the trip and started doing research trying to figure out what the thing they'd seen actually was. Melissa, who hadn't seen it directly because she was behind Natalie when it charged, found something on the internet and showed it around asked was this it? And both Natalie and Greg stopped and said, that's it. That's exactly what we saw. Then it gets down on all fours, goes into that side to side rocking.
That's the one.
That's when she started asking the bigger question, why are these things in an area where bigfoot also live? What's the relationship between them? And the more she dug, the more she came back to that property owner and the dog's picture I told you about. That's the working theory that the rakes might be territorial muscle for whatever bigger thing is running an area that when something walks into
territory that's claimed, the rakes come out. She interviewed a guy who had a rake encounter while driving home one night.
He was on a road.
The rake was in the road, he swerved to avoid it, and as he was going past, the rake reached out and tried to grab his jeep. He was rattled, got home, got inside, tried to calm down. The next morning he went out to.
Look at his jeep.
Down the side of the vehicle were claw and handprints, massive where the thing had reached for him in the moment of the swerve. There's no negotiating with these creatures. That's what Natalie kept coming back to with Bigfoot. You can sometimes find a peaceable register. The growl from the bathroom and the singing on.
The way back. That's negotiation.
That's two intelligences finding a way to coexist for a few minutes. The rakes don't do that. They stare at you, They click at each other.
They charge. There's a story out of.
Land between the Lakes about a man who heard clicking in the trees above him. He raised his flashlight and up in the branches, two of these rakes were watching him, clicking back and forth at each other, communicating about him, whether they were honing in, whether they were about to attack. He didn't stay to find out. When she described all of this to me, I asked her the question I always want to ask researchers who've crossed over. I asked her if her view of the subject had changed. Because
I'm a flesh and blood guy, always have been. I want a body, I want bones, I want a creature you can take a tape measure to. That's been my position for a long time. But the more I talk to people who've actually been in the field for years, who've actually spent nights out in places like Land between the Lakes, the more I'm starting to shift, not to abandon the flesh and blood model, but to make room
for what people keep telling me they're seeing. Natalie told me she used to be exactly where I was when she first got into this. Her working model was that this was an undiscovered ape, some great primate, maybe living in cave systems, maybe dinning underground. There was a DNA puzzle to solve, and there were biologists who would eventually solve it. That was her frame. Then she got out into the field and she started seeing things she had no slot for.
The orbs, the lights.
Things appearing and disappearing, a bigfoot the size of a small car walking out from behind her truck and stepping out of existence mid stride. Crawlers emerging from a glow on a ridge, which is hat figures floating across a forest floor, indigenous style drum beats coming from a hilltop with no one on it. None of that fit her frame, so her frame had to grow.
She told me.
She's a business woman, has been in business almost thirty years. A team, lives in spreadsheets and analytics and quarterly reports. She is not, by training or by temperament, a person who wants to believe in weird things. She wants the data to support what she's saying. She wants to be
able to defend her conclusions. But the data she's collecting in the field is not the data she expected to collect, and so like any honest investigator, she's adjusting her conclusions to fit the data instead of the other way around. She doesn't have the answers yet, She's the first to say it. She doesn't know how the orbs connect to the bipeds. She doesn't know what the lights are. She doesn't know what's on the other side of the portals people have reported. She doesn't know what the rakes are
or where they fit. She just keeps going back, keeps asking, keeps interviewing witnesses, keeps walking into the timber with cameras and bare spray, and a willingness to be wrong about everything she thought she knew. That's the kind of researcher I want on this subject. I want people who can change their mind. I want people who can walk into a panther encounter, walk out and be honest enough to call it a panther, even though the Bigfoot story would
have made better dinner conversation. I want people who can stand at the bottom of a hill while three things they can't name stare down at them from a glowing oval, and instead of running, ask their team if they're seeing the same thing she's seeing. Because that's discipline. That's not credulity, that's the opposite of credulity. You can find Natalie on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, and on YouTube under her own name. Relic Films Media is on Facebook, on TikTok, and on
YouTube under that handle. They've also got a talk show now eight episodes deep, called Beyond the Ordinary.
It's on YouTube.
They interview folks across the field, bigfoot, paranormal, psychic mediums, the whole spectrum. She'll be at the Great Floor Ada Bigfoot Conference down in Okaala on June thirteenth. She'll be at the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Conference in Gatlinburg on July twenty fifth. If you're going to either of those, find her. Tell her you heard her story here. She'd love to talk to you. That's the kind of researcher she is.
Now. I want to leave you with one image.
I want you to picture Natalie standing at the bottom of that cemetery in land between the lakes. Her cameras are dead, her phone is dead, her thermal is fried. Two members of her team are physically ill behind her, three crawlers are on the ridge above her, A bipedal creature is in the field behind her. A dog is barking somewhere in the dark for no reason. Four red orbs are sitting around her truck, and a big foot the size of a small car has just stepped out
from behind her vehicle and disappeared into the air. She is the only person on her team looking in the right direction at the right second. She's one woman with a canister of bear spray standing in a graveyard at night in November, and she is the only witness to one of the strangest things any of us has ever heard described and Here's what she said when she finished telling me the whole story. She said, it just opened up so many more doors. She said, it just gives you so many more questions.
She said.
She keeps going out because she has to know. That's where I'm going to leave it tonight. Land between the Lakes is one hundred and seventy thousand acres. Most of it has never been investigated. Most of those cemeteries have never been sad at after dark by anybody with a thermal and the patience to wait. Most of those ridges have never been growled at to see what answers back.
The country is full of places like that. Whatever's living in those places, whatever's working those places, whatever's cooperating across species in those places, it doesn't need our permission to keep doing what it's been doing. It was there before the people came in to look for it. It'll be there after we leave. Natalie's going back, She's going back as soon as she can. Some of you, after hearing this,
are going to want to go too. Just remember what you said about the Everglades, about setting up alone in a place that's older and meaner than you are, with one canister of bear spray and a tent. Don't do that. Whatever you do, don't do that. Some of these stories don't get told because the people in them don't make it back to tell them. Luckily, Natalie made it back this time money by