SO EP:593 Missing: National Park Nightmares Vol.3

Over the next few weeks, I'm gonna be sharing my new book with you—start to finish. The whole thing. It's called Bigfoot Country. All told, it's around eight hours of narration. So, I'll be putting it out in multiple episodes. And honestly... I've been sitting on this for a long time. I'm excited—and a little nervous—to finally put it out there. But before we jump in, I wanna take a minute. Just you and me.What you're about to hear is loosely based on my life. Some of it happened exactly the way I tell it. No embellishment, no polish. Other parts are rooted in real experiences—real people, real moments, real emotions—but maybe stretched a bit, or reimagined, to help the story breathe. And then there are parts where… well, you get to decide what you believe.I also wanna be upfront about something. Early on, you might find yourself wondering where this is all headed. There's a lot of groundwork—family, childhood, personal history. Just know this: it's going somewhere. This book is about Bigfoot. That's the destination. I promise. Just trust me long enough to get there. At its heart, this is a story about my earliest experiences with the strange and unexplained. It starts with something that happened to me when I was twelve years old—an encounter with what I believe was a Sasquatch. That moment stayed with me. It shaped a lot of who I became. And for years, I struggled with how—or even if—I should ever tell that story. Because how do you talk about something the world insists isn't real? How do you open yourself up like that, knowing people are gonna judge you, doubt you, or dismiss you entirely?But these stories have always mattered to me. This book has always mattered. And at some point, I realized I was done keeping it all tucked away. Here's the thing, though—I didn't just write about Bigfoot. I wrote about me. All of me. My childhood. My parents. My failures. My struggles. And yeah… Dani.I know that part isn't gonna sit well with everyone. I get that. Some folks are gonna have opinions, and that's their right. But for me, leaving any of that out would've been dishonest. I can't ask you to trust me with these experiences and then hide pieces of who I am. I can't tell my story without including the person who stood beside me through the hardest parts of it. That's just not how I live, and it's not how this book was written.Believe me, I thought about sanding down the rough edges. Making it cleaner. Safer. Easier to swallow. Cutting out the parts that might make people uncomfortable. But I couldn't do it. I've spent too much of my life holding back, and I'm done with that.So this is me. This is my story. All of it. Some of what you'll hear happened exactly as I describe it. Some of it is how I imagine things might have gone—if the timing had been different, if I'd pushed harder, if the world worked the way I think it sometimes should.And one last thing before we start—this is Book One. There's more coming. A lot more. This is just the beginning. I hope you enjoy Bigfoot Country... as much as I did writing it. Part One is called The Hollow, and it begins in September of 1984. I was eleven years old, just a few months shy of twelve, and my family had just moved to a place called Lyerly, Georgia. Population next to nothing. No stoplight. One gas station. The kind of town where everybody knew everybody's business before you even finished doing it. We moved into an old house at the end of a dirt road—a house that looked like something had crawled there to die. White paint gone gray. Porch sagging in the middle. Eighty acres of woods stretching out behind it like a wall. My father, Jerry Patterson, was a drinker. A man whose silence usually meant a storm was building. My mother, Jean, was small but fierce in the ways that mattered—even if she couldn't fix the things that were broken in our family. She stayed. She always stayed. The woods became my escape. I spent those early weeks mapping the land, building forts out of fallen branches and rotting tarps, disappearing into the trees whenever the tension at home got too thick. I learned every trail, every landmark, every corner of that property. All except one. There was a section way back at the far edge, where our land butted up against the national forest, that I couldn't bring myself to enter. Every time I got close, something pushed me back. A wrongness I couldn't name. A feeling like walking into a cold spot in a warm room.One day in late October, I decided I'd had enough of being scared. I was almost twelve years old. Too old for this. So I grabbed my BB gun and headed out to prove to myself there was nothing back there worth fearing. I was wrong. What I found was a clearing with a depression in the ground where something big had been bedding down. The smell hit me first—wet dog mixed with a dumpster behind a butcher shop. And then the sounds. Heavy footsteps. Bipedal. Something walking on two legs that weighed more than any man. Huffing. Growling. Sounds that rose and fell in patterns that almost seemed like language. It charged at me through the underbrush, stopped maybe twenty feet away, and just... breathed. Watched. Decided. It let me go.I ran home faster than I'd ever run in my life. And I never told a soul.But that wasn't the only strangeness that followed us to that house. At night, I started hearing voices in the walls—whispery, indistinct, speaking in languages I couldn't understand. A dark figure began appearing at the foot of my bed, a void shaped like a man, watching me while I lay frozen and unable to scream. Scratching moved through the walls like something was circling me. Three heavy knocks shook my bedroom door one night, and when I opened it, no one was there—but downstairs, a fire was burning in a fireplace we never used, in a chimney my father said was blocked.Something was in that house. Something that had been there before us and didn't want us there. And then, in January, everything changed. My mother got sick. Skin Cancer. The doctors gave her six months, maybe a year. And my father—the man who was supposed to hold us together—disappeared. Shacked up with some woman in another town, drowning himself in pills and booze while his wife was dying and his son was alone. I ended up staying with my best friend Brad Henderson's family. They took me in without question, gave me a bed and a place at their table. And every weekend, someone drove me to Atlanta so I could watch my mother fade away in a hospital room. She lost her hair. Lost her weight. Lost everything except her will to fight.Against all odds, she won. Almost a year to the day after her diagnosis, the doctors told us her cancer was in remission. She came home for Christmas, weighing maybe eighty pounds, wrapped in a scarf my friend's mother had knitted for her. And the first thing she did was look at my father's empty chair and say the words I'd been waiting to hear my whole life. We're leaving. But leaving wasn't simple. My father showed up one last time, took my mother's pain medication right out of the medicine cabinet, and vanished. He started selling those pills around town—the same town that had taken up a collection to help us, the same community that had rallied around my dying mother while he was nowhere to be found People got angry. The wrong kind of people. One night in January, I woke up to the sound of voices and vehicles in the yard. I looked out my window and saw twenty figures in white robes standing around a burning cross. The Klan had come to our house. Not because of us—because of him. Because of the shame he'd brought on his family in a place that took such things seriously.We left Lyerly two weeks later. My mother divorced my father, took back her maiden name, and we started over in a tiny apartment in Summerville. Two bedrooms. Thin walls. Stained carpet. But it was ours. And it was safe. I got a job at Dairy Queen. Went to school. Helped my mother however I could. The nightmares followed me—the dark figure, the dreams of something chasing me through endless woods—but I buried it all. Pushed it down. Told myself it didn't matter anymore.But I never forgot what I heard in those woods. Never forgot that huffing, that growling, those footsteps too heavy to be human. I knew it was real. I knew it was out there. And someday, I was going to find it again.But first, I had to grow up. First, I had to survive. That's Part One of Bigfoot Country.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.

16 Tammi 1h 8min

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the experiences and investigations of Dan Nedrelo, a wildlife photographer and biologist from Wisconsin whose fascination with Sasquatch began in childhood. What started with the encouragement of a fifth-grade teacher evolved into a lifelong pursuit of understanding one of the most elusive figures in the natural world. Dan shares how those early moments of curiosity shaped his path, leading him into decades of field research, collaboration with fellow researchers, and countless hours spent in remote wilderness areas.Throughout the conversation, Dan recounts some of his most compelling experiences in the field, including the discovery of anomalous footprints, unexplained vocalizations, and the recurring presence of strange holes with sticks—an unusual phenomenon documented across multiple research locations. He offers thoughtful insight into the challenges of Bigfoot footprint analysis, emphasizing the fine line between misidentification and genuinely anomalous evidence.Drawing from investigations conducted across several states, Dan paints a vivid picture of the patterns, behaviors, and unanswered questions that continue to surround the Sasquatch phenomenon. The episode also explores Dan’s ongoing work with the Wildman Literature Group and the White Biped Project, initiatives dedicated to preserving eyewitness accounts, historical references, and modern research related to Bigfoot encounters. Get Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.

16 Tammi 57min

Fred from the SubArctic Alaska Sasqutch YouTube Channel shares three chilling Sasquatch encounters from the Last Frontier. A surveyor working near Tuck in the late 1980s finds himself stalked by multiple creatures while mapping remote acreage north of the Parks Highway. What begins with rock throwing and glimpses of a gray-skinned, black-eyed figure through his transit scope escalates when his entire campsite ends up mysteriously hoisted into a tree. The harassment continues as trees crash across his path and shadowy figures close in from all directions.Fred also shares Brian's harrowing experience on the Richardson Highway near Delta Junction during a winter trip to help a friend with a broken-down snow machine. A black figure spotted on the snow leads to a terrifying pursuit through waist-deep powder, complete with a screaming creature and a truck that almost fails to start.The episode closes with Clint's snow machining trip near Paxton at the start of the Denali Highway, where a massive white Sasquatch with dark roots showing through its fur leaves enormous tracks in the snow. One witness ends up pinned under an 800 RMK snow machine, when his buddy drops the machine and runs.Check Out SubArctic Alaska Sasquatch Get Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.

14 Tammi 45min

Welcome back to Sasquatch Odyssey. Tonight, we conclude The Bigfoot Journals. Seven men walked out of the hidden valley in November of seventeen ninety-nine. They carried knowledge that would haunt them for the rest of their lives... and a secret they swore never to reveal.In this final installment, we follow the Stone Expedition on their three-month winter journey home. We witness the debate that consumed them... publish or protect? We hear the oath sworn at Thornton's Tavern in Richmond, where seven survivors bound themselves to silence. And we learn what became of them all.Thomas Mercer, the scientist who died bitter in eighteen twenty-six, still regretting the discovery he could never publish. Sam Walker, who returned to the mountains he loved and passed peacefully in eighteen twenty-three. Josiah Whitfield, who found peace somewhere beyond the Mississippi. Solomon Reed, who carried his grandmother's wisdom north. Jim Sutton, whose last words were about the creatures.Young Zeke Stone, forever changed by his connection with the juvenile, gone by eighteen twenty. And Elijah Stone himself... who built a cabin in the Virginia mountains and watched the forest every night for twenty-seven years. We'll read his final journal entry, written on July fourth, eighteen twenty-six. The fiftieth anniversary of American independence. The day he passed the burden to his son. The chain of keepers had begun.Then we jump forward. Two centuries forward. To Marcus Stone, a history professor who inherits his estranged father's cabin... and discovers a trunk in the cellar that changes everything. The journals. The pendant. The truth.And finally, we witness what happens when Marcus leads a small expedition into the mountains. When the creatures reveal themselves once more. When the gesture of peace is given... and returned.This is the story of secrets that span generations. Of truths too dangerous to share. Of a family that watched and waited, keeper after keeper, century after century. And somewhere in those mountains... the creatures are still watching.They've always been watching. They always will be.Get Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.

11 Tammi 47min

In this episode, Brian sits down with Andy, a Virginia native whose life has been shaped by a series of unsettling and deeply personal encounters that began when he was just four years old. Andy takes listeners back to his earliest memories of glowing red eyes peering into the darkness outside his rural home, an experience that would mark the beginning of a lifelong connection to the unknown.As the years unfold, he recounts increasingly intense moments in the woods, from unexplained rock-throwing incidents and eerie, unidentifiable vocalizations while hunting, to overwhelming odors and strange activity that seemed to track him through the mountains of Virginia.Andy’s account is rich with detail and reflection, blending fear, curiosity, and a persistent search for understanding. He opens up about late-night investigations, moments of doubt, and the difficulty of reconciling these experiences with a world that often dismisses them outright.The conversation also explores the weight of skepticism, the challenge of putting language to something so elusive, and how these encounters have quietly but profoundly influenced the course of his life. Get Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.

9 Tammi 47min

Fred from Alaska is back with a terrifying story originally told by a man named Edwin. While exploring the remote and hauntingly quiet Snake Lake with a group of Filipino friends, Edwin had a close encounter with an enormous, human-like creature. Armed with only a 9mm pistol and a sense of curiosity, he found himself face-to-face with a towering being whose intimidating presence and strange, unexplainable behavior left the entire group shaken and confused.But that’s only the beginning. The episode also delves into other disturbing encounters from across Alaska’s vast wilderness—stories of shadowy figures near the Nok River, and a lone man’s brush with the unknown near the Sona River. Each account adds another layer to the growing body of eerie reports from the region, painting a picture of a land where the wild is truly wild—and perhaps inhabited by beings we’ve yet to understand.These firsthand tales highlight the fear, mystery, and awe experienced by those who have crossed paths with something extraordinary—and serve as a stark reminder that in Alaska’s deep wilderness, we may not be as alone as we think.Get Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.

7 Tammi 46min

In this week’s gripping episode, Jerry returns with the latest chapter in his ongoing investigation into cryptid activity deep within North Carolina’s enigmatic South Mountains. This installment chronicles an intense 40-hour field expedition to a known hotspot of unexplained activity—an area steeped in reports of Bigfoot-like creatures and strange wilderness phenomena.Jerry shares  compelling physical evidence, including possible Sasquatch footprints, unusual tree breaks, and a series of unsettling deer kill sites. The episode also delves into spine-chilling moments from a nighttime hike, featuring unexplainable vocalizations and striking thermal imagery that may suggest the presence of an unknown being nearby.Adding depth to the investigation, Jerry revisits two fascinating historical accounts: a 1987 sighting near Lake Moultrie in South Carolina shared by a father and son, and a life-changing encounter in 1979 by two men hiking in the remote Linville Gorge. These narratives highlight the enduring mystery and emotional impact of such encounters.Tune in as Jerry pieces together the past and present in his pursuit of truth. Are these simply legends passed down through generations—or is something truly unexplained roaming the South Mountains? You decide.Get Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.

4 Tammi 40min

In this episode, Brian sits down with Darren from Oregon, a seasoned paranormal investigator turned dedicated Bigfoot researcher. Darren recounts the life-changing encounter that occurred during a bachelor party in the wilderness—an experience that shifted his focus from ghost hunting to tracking cryptids.What began as one startling sighting of Bigfoot evolved into years of ongoing research, multiple encounters, and the collection of compelling evidence.Darren shares remarkable details, including thermal camera footage, massive footprints, and hidden nesting sites deep in the forest. But Bigfoot isn't the only cryptid on his radar.Darren also dives into terrifying Dogman encounters—describing chilling moments that hint at a dangerous, possibly territorial conflict between these two legendary creatures.His stories provide a rare glimpse into the shadowy edge of the unknown, where cryptids clash and researchers tread carefully.  Darren also shores some of the tools that he uses in the field, including game cameras, thermal imaging, and the unexpected role of medicinal plant research in uncovering patterns in cryptid behavior.DBK Investigations YouTube Get Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.

2 Tammi 46min