Episode
The Alabama White Thang
- Podcast
- Backwoods Bigfoot Stories
- Published
- May 15, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3679
- Processing state
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Summary
The Backwoods America series kicks off in north Alabama with one of the strangest and most persistent cryptid legends in the American South. The Alabama White Thang. A tall, pale, hair-covered creature that has walked the back roads and hollers of this state for more than a hundred years — screaming from two ridges over, standing in the middle of dark country roads, and sometimes, when it decides to, coming back the next night. This is the first stop on a fifty-state cryptid road trip. Over the coming months we're going coast to coast, every two-lane highway and dirt cut and red clay holler we can find, documenting the creatures that local people have been talking about for generations. Some of these episodes will land on names you already know. Most won't. The goal is to surface the stories that have stayed local for a century — the ones the farmers and hunters and night-shift workers only let out when they've decided you might believe them. In this premiere we cover the historical roots of the White Thang, going back through Cherokee folklore and the figure of Tsul'kalu, the Scots-Irish settler tradition that fed Southern wild-man legends, and the earliest written references to the creature in north Alabama newspapers in the early-to-middle twentieth century. We dig into the geography that has let the legend last — the Bankhead National Forest, the Sipsey Wilderness, and the kind of broken Appalachian foothill country where a small persistent population of something could hide indefinitely. Then we work through encounter accounts spanning four counties and four decades. A man named Daryl, who came up out of a bridge in Morgan County after the late shift at a parts plant outside Decatur and saw something standing in his headlights that he could not explain away. A bow…