Anisa Khalifa: Recently, journalist Emily Cataneo found herself with a small group walking in a remote part of western North Carolina.
Emily Cataneo: We trekked out there into the woods about 8 p. m. as the sun was setting. The plan was to stay out there until about midnight and See what we could see, hear what we could hear, smell what we could smell.
Anisa Khalifa: Her crew had their eyes, ears, and noses out for one thing in particular.
Emily Cataneo: Bigfoot is typically associated with the Pacific Northwest, which is how a lot of people respond when I tell them about the story. They're like, oh, you went to Oregon, huh? And I'm like, no, no, no.
Anisa Khalifa: Yep, Appalachia is Bigfoot territory, in a big way. There are tens of thousands of curious folks in the region wondering where the mythical ape-like creatures live, including Emily's midnight hunting party.
Emily Cataneo: By that point, it was really getting to be dusk and they were like, let's settle down and wait because a lot of Bigfoot hunting is just about watching and waiting and listening. So we sat down on the Path, and started to wait.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, we look at the legend, lore, and economic impact of Bigfoot in Appalachia. And follow one reporter's journey in search of Sasquatch.
Emily Cataneo: Bigfoot is a big deal in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: Emily Cataneo is a freelance journalist and contributor for The Assembly, an online outlet based in North Carolina. She's especially attracted to oddball stories, and her latest is about one of the South's most unusual subcultures.
Emily Cataneo: There's a lot of interest in Bigfoot in this state, and people attribute that to a couple of different factors: Appalachian culture, and also the mountainous regions. It seems like where there's mountains, where there's wilderness, there will be tales of Bigfoot.
Anisa Khalifa: What, or who, is Bigfoot anyway?
Emily Cataneo: There are legends about Bigfoot from all over the world. Um, the Yeti, the Sasquatch, Bigfoot, these are all names for this 8 to 12 foot tall, bipedal ape-like hairy creature, which is basically what a Bigfoot is. And from my understanding, there have been legends about a Bigfoot-esque creature in this part of the world for a very long time.
John Bruner: Bigfoot are very intelligent animals. They don't want anything to do with us. They want to be left alone. And that's why we don't have good pictures.
Emily Cataneo: I would say sort of the godfather of the Bigfoot culture in North Carolina is a man named John Bruner who has been into Bigfoot since he was a child. He got into Bigfoot through the movies, which is a common pipeline to being into Bigfoot from what I've found.
And in 2015, he founded a group called Bigfoot 911, which is a Bigfoot investigative group. So if you live out in one of the mountainous counties and you think you hear Bigfoot or see Bigfoot or Bigfoot went through your trash, you call Bigfoot 911. And they are, I believe, nine chapters that are now spread across the Southeast with about 40 people who are active members of those chapters across the Southeast. That said, their Facebook group has a lot more people in it. I believe about 13, 000 at this time.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, wow.
Emily Cataneo: And they will investigate for you. They'll take a report. What time was it? What was the noise like? What kind of environment do you live in? They'll try to assess whether the report is legitimate or not. And then they may go on a hunt to see if they can find the Bigfoot that they sighted. They, um, you know, have a lot of tips and tricks. Like, for example, Bigfoot apparently loves glow sticks. So if you want to attract Bigfoot, you can hang glow sticks in a tree and see if he'll take them and wander on.
Anisa Khalifa: Likes to party, I guess.
Emily Cataneo: Exactly. He's a raver. So John founded this group, and in addition, he also spearheaded the Bigfoot Festival, which takes place in Marion, North Carolina, every May. Lots of booths here at the festival. There's a paranormal road tripper booth. There's a Sasquatch watcher YouTuber making a video. We're currently near the sign that says Bigfoot Crossing, which people are taking selfies with.
And the Bigfoot Festival is quite the affair. I am not sure I've ever had so much fun at a festival. There are some elements that are just normal festival elements, um, you know, booths selling cotton candy, overpriced lemonade, that sort of thing. But the Bigfoot game is strong there. There are so many people wearing Bigfoot Hawaiian shirts. Um, there is a man there who calls himself the Bigfoot Troubadour who roams about dressed as Bigfoot and sings Bigfoot songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIGFOOT TROUBADOUR SINGING)
Bigfoot Troubadour: Bigfoot is, you know it's my dream. To be a kicker on an NFL team…
Emily Cataneo: And there's a woman named Yeti Betty, not her real name, who dresses sort of like a hot Bigfoot and is also a metal artist who has sculpted statues of Bigfoot after having what she described as a significant encounter with him. There are speeches on the main stage where people talk about encounters that they've had, or experts answer questions for people. So for example, there was a question from the audience about what do you do if Bigfoot is just like always going through your trash or always in your yard, just causing issues like a deer or a bear might be. And the speaker said cheap perfume is the way to dispel Bigfoot. Not some modern perfume, but old fashioned cheap perfume like your grandma might have worn.
Unidentified Speaker: Get a gallon of that junk, put it around the property. They hate that smell.
Anisa Khalifa: So, how many people come to this festival?
Emily Cataneo: The first year, it was at least 40,000 people.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow. How big is Marion?
Emily Cataneo: 8,000 people.
Anisa Khalifa: This is like, more people coming to visit for the festival than actually live in the town.
Emily Cataneo: Absolutely.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow. So out of all these people, this huge number of people that attend this festival, how many of these are people who also go on these hunts in the woods and are like serious Bigfoot hunters?
Emily Cataneo: I got the impression that it was not a huge percentage of the people who go. I think a lot of the people who go, again, are casual fans. Um, they're interested, maybe they have some Bigfoot paraphernalia. I think for other people it's this fun, kitschy thing. And then I would say my impression, again, is that a small percentage of the attendees are ride or die hunters, investigators, et cetera.
Anisa Khalifa: And you went to the woods with a small group of true believers.
Emily Cataneo: I sure did. Their names are Jerry Millwood and Todd Landers. And Jerry invited me and Cornell, who's the photographer who worked on the story, to go with him in the woods near his home in the South Mountains. I can't tell you where it is because he told me many, many times that I had to describe it as an undisclosed location. So it is an undisclosed location in the South mountains. We started to climb a small ridge. It took us maybe about 20 to 30 minutes of slow hiking to get up to the top. We got to what I think is the most exciting spot, which is this huge pine tree, maybe two and a half feet across.
And Jerry was telling us that the previous October they had been up there at night and they had seen a creature standing behind this pine tree that was so broad-shouldered that you could see the shoulders on either side of the tree. They were up there. They had some, um, thermal imaging, which they didn't have with them when we went hiking, sadly.
He says he looked through the thermal camera and saw this creature peering around the tree and then backing up very slowly and then running away into the woods and that he smelled it and Bigfoot. has a very distinctive smell. He smells like, um, hog farms and decay and corpses and gross things, basically. So, yeah, that was a really big encounter for them. They brought us up and showed us, oh, this is the pine tree where it all happened.
Anisa Khalifa: So, did you see Bigfoot?
Emily Cataneo: It's unclear.
Anisa Khalifa: Okay. Coming up, we try to clear up what happened to Emily and her crew in the woods, and find out why Sasquatch fits so well in the mountains and foothills of western North Carolina.
Okay, so, let's go back to the Bigfoot hunt. How did it feel to be trekking around in the woods for hours?
Emily Cataneo: I mean, I'll say that I grew up in a rural area. I'm no stranger to being in the woods at night, but there is something, I think, a little atavistically creepy about being out there, even though I've done it a million times. And so we were sitting up at the top of this ridge and suddenly it was pitch black, as happens in the mountains, right? And the hair on the back of your neck does stand up a little bit when you're in a situation like that, I think. Again, there's just something a little scary about it. So we spent a lot of time just sitting and waiting and listening.
And then Todd said, Oh, I just caught a whiff of Bigfoot. I caught the smell. And Jerry said, Oh yeah, yeah, I smell it too. They asked if we'd smelled anything. And I will say I did smell something. It did not smell like a hog farm or corpse, but there was a little shift in what I was smelling in the woods, a little bit stronger, like rancid floral decay. And I said, okay, interesting. I guess that's what Bigfoot smells like. And then Todd and Jerry decided to do a couple different techniques to try to elicit a response from Bigfoot. Bigfoot calls are one way that people do that.
Anisa Khalifa: What do they sound like?
Emily Cataneo: Sometimes they sound like a tortured dog bark. Sometimes they sound like a unbridled yell. The one that Todd did, it sounded completely uninhibited, loud, wild.
Anisa Khalifa: It almost feels like there's an element of ritual to all of this.
Emily Cataneo: Absolutely. Yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: So what other kind of tactics do they use to lure out Bigfoot? And what did they do that night?
Emily Cataneo: Yeah, so the other big one is tree knocking. So tree knocking is finding, um, a stick that's big enough and sturdy enough — it could even be like a small sapling or what have you — and knocking it against a tree. To try to elicit a knock in response, or perhaps some sort of reaction from Bigfoot. And I believe this was actually in response to Todd's call. We were walking along, I had my big headphones on, so my hearing was not as good as it could have been. And all of a sudden, I heard Jerry go, Did you hear that? He had heard what he said was Bigfoot. Now, when I listen to the tape, I'm like, can I hear something? Is that a sound? Is that the Bigfoot sounds that I missed when I was in person?
Unidentified Speaker: Did you hear that? You'll have to edit that out. Cause I cussed.
Anisa Khalifa: I don't know. Do you think it was Bigfoot, Emily?
Emily Cataneo: I mean, I can't say that I'm a believer, but I will say when you're in the woods, late at night, you It's easy to start believing in things, or to start having part of your subconscious believing in things. I'll say that.
Anisa Khalifa: And Bigfoot, maybe it's not an animal that people traditionally associate with the Southeast, but the Appalachian Mountains are a very mystical place, and there's a lot of folklore, and we have a lot of stories about supernatural beasts in the woods. So how does this, you know, bear that walks upright, quote unquote, fit in with all of that?
Emily Cataneo: My understanding is that there have been legends about Bigfoot since this area has been settled. There are Cherokee legends about, um, mind controlling giants, and there are Indigenous legends from all over the Americas about Bigfoot as well. There are still old-timers in the region who'll talk about boogers, which is a special Appalachian word for malevolent beasts.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh wow.
Emily Cataneo: Um, there are also a lot of legends in Europe about giant hairy men and when Irish and Scottish and British and German settlers came to the Americas and to this region, they brought those legends with them. So this has been a really prevalent legend, um, pretty much throughout the world and then in our region too.
Anisa Khalifa: For these true believers who some of them are willing to spend every weekend out there, you know, hunting Bigfoot in the woods, perhaps in the dark, what's the appeal?
Emily Cataneo: Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of different elements that go into it. It seems that a lot of them are very imaginative and have been thinking about Bigfoot since they were children. And this is a way that they get to keep doing that. And I think for others of them, Um, opportunity to go in the woods with their friends and try to solve a mystery and try to gather evidence. And of course, that's very fun.
An interesting theory that I've read about and that was sort of alluded to by some people that I talked to is that the more people get concerned with the environment and conservation in the woods, the more into Bigfoot they are. It's sort of like how there's this paradox where they say that hunters are really into conservation because they spend so much time in the woods and they don't want to see that habitat destroyed. Um, it sort of seems like the same dynamic with Bigfoot, that people are, you know, interested in preserving their environment and paying close attention to the natural world around them. And there's sort of an overlap between that and interest in Bigfoot. Jerry told me he's very into conservation and gathering plants and such.
Anisa Khalifa: That's fascinating.
Jerry Millwood: The only area on earth more biodiverse from a plant standpoint than the Appalachians and the foothills of the Appalachians is the Amazon River Basin.
Emily Cataneo: Interestingly, too, I've noticed that some people in this hardcore community are using skills that they developed in emergency response or military roles. So for example, John Bruner used to be an emergency responder. Now he runs a group called Bigfoot 911.
Anisa Khalifa: Makes sense.
Emily Cataneo: Yes. Um, Jerry was a military observer in the army. And you could definitely tell that he was bringing some of that training to our hunt. So I think that part of it too, perhaps, is using skills that people developed in other arenas of life and bringing that to the Bigfoot world.
Anisa Khalifa: So for people like me or people like our listeners, potentially, who don't really know much about Bigfoot, don't have any experience like this, why should we even care about Bigfoot?
Emily Cataneo: I think it's about the importance and power of myth and folklore. And it's indelibly woven into the fabric of Appalachia and this western part of the state. It's a huge part of the traditional culture there. I think it's fascinating how this myth has come into the modern age and is even being fueled by TV, by streaming TV, which is a very modern thing.
And I also think it's fascinating that, you know, whether you believe that these people are having real experiences or not, the experiences are real to them. And the fact that this whole subculture. and set of activities has grown up around those experiences is really fascinating to me. And I think that anybody who's interested in folklore and myth and belief would be fascinated by that as well.
Anisa Khalifa: So when you went out there, maybe you heard something, maybe you smelled something. What do you think about Bigfoot now?
Emily Cataneo: I'm a pretty skeptical person and I think it would take, especially now that I'm not in the woods in the dark anymore, I think it would take more experiences than that to turn me into a Bigfoot believer.
Anisa Khalifa: Would you ever go on another Bigfoot hunt?
Emily Cataneo: Sure. Why not? It was fun.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was a co-production with The Assembly. If you'd like to read Emily's article about Bigfoot at their website, we've dropped a link in the show notes. Charlie Shelton-Ormond is our producer. Jared Walker is our editor. Our executive producer is Wilson Sayre. The Broadside is a production of WUNC-North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network.
You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.