Alaska — The Kushtaka

Alaska doesn't just have Bigfoot. It has something older.This is the second stop on our cryptid road trip across America. Last time out, we worked the longleaf pine country of Alabama and the legend of the White Thang.

Tonight we head north to the rain coast of southeast Alaska, where the fog comes down low over the tideline and the spruce trees grow right to the water. This is the country of the Tlingit, a maritime people who have been reading these waters for somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years. And it is the country of the Kushtaka — the otter people, the shape-shifting beings who imitate the voices of the people you love and call you out into the dark.

We open in a fourteen-foot skiff outside Wrangell, with a fisherman in the fog and a child crying near the shore, and what his Tlingit grandmother told him to do if it ever happened.

From there we go deep. Into the ethnography of the Kushtaka, into the protections the old stories say can save your life — copper, dogs, and one other thing nobody likes to bring up — into three traditional accounts passed down through generations, and into two modern reports from a Forest Service ranger in the Tongass and a pair of kayakers on Admiralty Island. We close with a long, cinematic survival story from a cannery cove outside Hoonah in October of two thousand and eleven, and the one small tell that may be the only thing standing between you and what's on the other side of the door.Handle this one with respect.

The Kushtaka belong to a living tradition still carried by Tlingit families in southeast Alaska today. Listen with that in mind. And if you ever find yourself on a piece of Alaskan water you don't quite know, on a night when the fog has come down and the world has gone quiet, and you hear a voice you recognize calling your name from the trees, you already know what to do.

Put your back to it. Keep your hands on something made of copper. And don't look back.

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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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