Georgia: Bigfoot & River Monsters

This week on Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, the truck rolls into Georgia, and for Brian this stop is personal, because Georgia is home. Born and raised in the north Georgia mountains, Brian opens up about the afternoon when he was twelve years old that set the course of his entire life, when something heavy and bipedal paced him through a thicket of pine, charged out of the brush, and sent him running six hundred yards home so terrified he was sick in his own front yard.From there he hands the mic to Mr. Brown, a Summerville carpenter and part-time ginseng hunter who, in August of 1986, came face to face with an eight-foot creature near a fire tower at Jenkins Gap. It had a withered left arm, fingernails grown so long they'd knotted, and a limp like a drunk old man, and Mr. Brown reported it to the sheriff, the newspaper, and Atlanta TV stations because he was afraid it might cross paths with a child.Brian then opens the wider file on Georgia, a state most people overlook for Bigfoot but which ranks among the most active in the country, with well over a hundred credible reports on record. He walks through the 1829 Okefenokee Swamp attack, one of the earliest written Sasquatch accounts in American history, complete with eighteen-inch tracks, a thirteen-foot creature, and a deadly battle reported in the Milledgeville Statesman.He covers the much-argued 2009 Lumpkin County sheriff's dash cam footage, the 2000 Rood Creek camping scare on the Chattahoochee, the broad-daylight 2024 Fort Valley sighting near Macon, the Expedition Bigfoot museum up in Cherry Log, and the old Cherokee Tsul'kalu legend his father's friend Elijah used to tell around the fire.Then the road drops south, out of the mountains and across the fall line into the black-water country of the coast, to the town of Darien and the Altamaha River. Settled by Scottish Highlanders from the shores of Loch Ness itself, Darien has spent nearly two centuries telling stories about a thirty-foot river monster the locals call the Altamaha-ha, or Altie for short.Brian traces the legend from its Muscogee Creek and Tama roots through the colonial timber rafts, then lays out the documented sightings, including Captain Delano's seventy-foot serpent off St. Simons Island in 1830, the timbermen and hunters of the early twentieth century, the 1969 brothers, the 1970s reports from Harvey Blackman and Frank Culpepper, the Butler Island sightings, the 1981 Larry Gwin and Steven Wilson encounter that put Altie on the national map, the 2010 video off Fort King George, and the strange remains that washed up at Wolf Island in 2018. He closes the river out with the encounters that never make the papers but never stop circulating, the fishermen watching humps roll through the channel, the boaters tracking something long swimming against the current, the night sounds that send grandmothers to latch the windows on the hottest nights, the shrimper whose new net got torn open by something he still calls a bull shark, the duck hunter whose old Lab climbed into his lap, and the dockside witnesses who watched a long head rise, look at them, and sink straight down into the dark. Brian weighs the sturgeon, manatee, and right whale explanations honestly, and lands where he always does, in the not-knowing, which he'll tell you is the most alive he ever feels.Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.