Episode
The Residents
- Podcast
- Backwoods Bigfoot Stories
- Published
- Apr 5, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4250
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-residents--71102428
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/backwoods-bigfoot-stories-6739689/episodes/the-residents/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/backwoods-bigfoot-stories-6739689/the-residents.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
This is part seven of a ten-part series from Garrett, a residential contractor on a remote forty-seven-acre property in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina.In late April 2018, an elderly woman named Opal crosses Bishop Creek and arrives at Garrett's cabin. She and her late husband Vernon lived on twenty acres across the creek for fifty-one years. Vernon spent thirty years with the Forest Service and documented the creatures along the Bishop Creek corridor from 1963 until shortly before his death in 2004. He and Earl were friends who compared notes for years.Opal shares her own mimicry encounter from October 1974. Alone with her two young sons while Vernon was away, she heard his voice calling from the tree line, then heard her own voice calling the boys' names from the opposite direction. Her six-year-old grabbed her hand and broke the spell. Vernon and Earl later concluded the mimicry was a standardized assessment the creatures ran on every new resident of the corridor. Earl got his in 1971. Garrett got his in 2015. Same test. Same playbook. Fifty years apart.She recounts Vernon's close encounter from February 1976, when he surprised one of the creatures drinking from Bishop Creek at twenty feet. It stood to over eight feet, screamed at a volume that shook snow from the branches, then snapped an eight-inch hemlock clean through at chest height. The broken tree fell across the trail between them. Vernon ran. The creature watched him go.Opal gives Garrett seven boxes of Vernon's field records spanning 1963 to 2003, including an annotated USGS topo map showing the full four-mile creek corridor, knock zones, structure sites, den areas, and a four-thousand-acre circuit the creatures orbit seasonally. Vernon's notes document a juvenile sighting in 1991 and c…