Bigfoot On The Ridge

A listener named Caleb from Hazard, Kentucky shares the story his late grandfather Harold carried in silence for nearly sixty years. Harold was a tobacco farmer in Perry County who worked a piece of bottomland along Pigeon Roost Creek that had been in the family since before the Civil War.

In the fall of 1962, at twenty-nine years old, he began noticing things he couldn't explain on the steep, heavily timbered ridge behind his property — fence posts yanked from the ground, his unflappable mule refusing to approach the tree line, and massive bare footprints pressed into the first frost of the season.

On the evening of November 21, 1962, he saw a towering figure standing motionless between two cedars at the top of the ridge, backlit by the last light of the day. What followed was nearly a decade of escalating encounters that included rocks thrown onto the barn roof from over a hundred yards away, a gut-churning stench near the creek crossing, wood knocks echoing across the ridgeline at night, and vocalizations unlike anything he'd ever heard in a lifetime of hunting those mountains. One night in November 1963, something circled the farmhouse on two legs for close to forty-five minutes while the family slept and the dogs cowered in total silence beneath the porch.

Harold saw the creatures up close on multiple occasions — once at roughly forty yards near the creek in 1966, where he described a reddish-brown, hair-covered figure standing over seven feet tall with unmistakably human hands and a flat, dark face that regarded him with what he called a look of consideration rather than aggression. In October 1968, he watched two of them walking single file through the timber, a large dark one and a smaller, lighter companion, and realized he wasn't dealing with a lone animal but a family that had been living on that ridge longer than his own people had been farming the valley below it. Harold never called them Bigfoot or Sasquatch.

He used the old Appalachian word — boogers — and he framed the experience not as a monster story but as the unsettling reality of sharing a hollow with something intelligent that knew everything about his family while remaining almost entirely unseen. By 1970, after losing calves from the lower pasture and enduring years of nighttime activity, he made the painful decision to sell the back forty acres that had been in the family for over a century. He told his children the soil was played out. He told only his grandson and his brother the truth. Family lore traces the presence on Briar Ridge back even further, to Harold's great-uncle Fess in the 1870s and his grandfather Jeremiah, who homesteaded the property after the Civil War and warned his children about "the old ones" on the ridge.

A local folk healer named Effie, whose grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, told Harold that her people had a name for the creatures that translated roughly to "the watchers" or "the ones who stay hidden," and that they'd been in those mountains since the beginning.

Harold's last sighting came in 1982, when one crossed the gravel road in front of his truck at dawn without so much as a glance in his direction. He died on March 7, 2019, at eighty-six years old, in the same house where those footsteps had circled decades before. Caleb still visits the farm.

The ridge still stands behind it, dense and dark and unchanged. And he's convinced that whatever his grandfather saw is still up there, watching with the same patient intelligence it always has.

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.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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