Yeti or Not, Here They Come

Jerry Millwood and a group of friends were hunting on a ridge in the South Mountains when they heard a knock on a tree.

The group stopped and took a knee, smelling the telltale stench of their intended target. 

“It’s decaying flesh with a little bit of skunk mixed in,” Millwood explained. “You ever been to a pig farm? You have that really foul smell of pig feces. Some of that, all mixed in together. It’s very, very strong.”

Millwood, who is retired from his job in the legal system, doesn’t have any special equipment for these hunts—it’s prohibitively expensive—but one of his companions that October night had a thermal camera. Millwood trained the scope on a huge pine tree, about 30 yards away. The tree was about two and a half feet wide, but Millwood swears he could see shoulders on both sides, suggesting the presence of a very wide animal. Then, said Millwood, it peered around the tree at the hunters before walking backward into the scrub brush. The stench dissipated. 

When most people think about Bigfoot, they imagine an ape-like creature lurking in the coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. But the Bigfoot-hunting and fan community in Appalachia, particularly in North Carolina, is also robust–and Millwood counts himself as part of it. 

Legends about Bigfoot have haunted the hollows of western North Carolina for hundreds of years. “People in this region are quick to embrace this kind of folklore,” said Zach Bales, a cryptozoologist and paranormal researcher from Kentucky. “It gives the region an identity that it might not otherwise have.”

But in the past decade, Bigfoot has morphed from a mainstay of regional folklore into a tourism boon for North Carolina, with a museum, a festival, and other attractions that bring thousands streaming into the state. For true believers like Millwood, searching for evidence of an elusive, hairy, apparently odiferous biped is an opportunity to escape into nature with comrades while plumbing the heart of a mystery. For others, Bigfoot is big business. 

Man Meets Beast

Cultures all over the world have legends about huge hairy beast-men lurking in forests, from the Yeti of the Himalayas to the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest. 

“Bigfoot” is commonly pictured as a preternaturally tall, bipedal ape-like creature, perhaps with supernatural abilities. He is properly categorized as a cryptid: an animal who many believe in, but whose existence has never been proven. 

But if you believe the thousands of local Bigfoot fans and hunters, he’s been lurking in the mountains and forests of our state for thousands of years. The Cherokee had a legend about a monstrous giant named Tsul ’Kalu, whose story is intertwined with Judaculla Rock in Nantahala National Forest. When European settlers colonized the western part of the state, they brought tales from their native lands of the prototypical wild man, a furred creature that existed in the liminal space between society and ferality–tales that contributed to the Bigfoot legends we know today. 

Over the past two centuries, generations of Appalachian residents have whispered about lurking spirits and creatures: “boogers,” a special Appalachian word for malevolent beasts, menacing travelers at night; glowing red eyes along the byways; albino bipedal bears. In the mid-20th century, cryptid and paranormal enthusiasts started getting more serious about recording these encounters. The first North Carolina report in an online database run by the national Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization is from 1968 and concerns a woman from Greene County who heard thumping footsteps and an ungodly scream outside her window at 4 a.m. one clear night. 

Over the past decade, the footprint in Appalachia, and across the state, has gotten even bigger. A North Carolina-based group called Bigfoot 911 investigates reports of incidents from laypersons across the Southeast. A Bigfoot museum in Littleton, a 500-person community nestled near the Virginia border, lures in tourists. And Marion, a foothills town about 40 minutes east of Asheville, has hosted an annual Bigfoot Festival since 2018, drawing tens of thousands of visitors from all over the country. 

Then there are hunters like Millwood, who venture out into the woods with increasingly sophisticated equipment. 

In May, Millwood and his friend Todd Landers took me on a hunt on the very ridge where they say they encountered Bigfoot last October. Millwood and Landers have known each other since their childhood near Bessemer City. Millwood was still a kid when he saw The Legend of Boggy Creek, a movie about a Sasquatch-like creature menacing an Arkansas community. That sparked Millwood’s initial interest in the supernatural, but his fascination was solidly rooted in entertainment until he retired 11 years ago and moved to his farm in the periphery of the South Mountains, a swath of wilderness between Asheville and Charlotte. 

Near their home on a winding country road, where he and his wife live with 12 dogs and a small pack of alpaca and goats, Millwood started having encounters he couldn’t explain. Red eyes gleaming at him from the dark swale at the bottom of his property. Grapefruit-sized rocks hurtling out of nowhere in the middle of the woods. Mysterious knocks echoing off the hardwood trees up the ridge behind his house. Breathy growls emanating from the forest at night. 

Millwood also heard tale after tale from locals who’d had their own mysterious, sometimes terrifying, encounters. 

“The first six months I thought, ‘Are they hoaxers who don’t have anything better to do?’” said Millwood. “But it would take a lot of people and a lot of time to produce the kinds of results we’ve seen. It backed me into a corner where I didn’t have any choice but to try to figure out what was happening.”

Millwood joined Dirty South Squatching, a Bigfoot research group with four core members. The group stays in touch over the phone and Internet and gets together about a dozen times a year to venture into the woods. Millwood has a window decal from the group on his truck, side-by-side with a sticker for the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group. 

Many hunters had their own peculiar experiences in the woods that captured their imagination, including Landers, who works in quality control in Bessemer City. “I’ve been in the woods all my life,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of strange things.”

Photographer Cornell Watson and I met them at Millwood’s home, which he’d repeatedly cautioned me to describe as “an undisclosed location in the South Mountains.” From there we  set off through tall, rustling grasses down a hill toward a creek bed. One of the dogs loped along with us but soon turned back –a good choice, said Millwood, because, he told us, Bigfoot recently killed a neighborhood dog by flinging it against a tree. 

Bigfoot cognoscenti say North Carolina’s geography makes it an ideal habitat: vast swathes of ancient, biodiverse wilderness, from Pisgah to Nantahala. “I honestly think it has to do with the mountains,” said Christian McCloud, a paranormal researcher who lives in Hendersonville. “I’ve been places seven or eight miles in, where the car radio doesn’t come in, the emergency button on your cell phone doesn’t work. There’s a vast space out there.”

Millwood feels the same about the acres of heavily forested land where he conducts his hunts. “I could take a company of soldiers into the South Mountains, and if we never wanted to be seen, we wouldn’t be seen,” said Millwood, who was in the U.S. Army before working as a clerk in the court system. 

That night we were planning to use the mountains’ camouflaging ability to our advantage: We were going to “go ahead and disappear into the woods,” Millwood explained as Landers checked the creek bed for footprints. We needed to climb higher, though: This was a poor tactical location to camp out because the running water would drown out any other sounds. We stopped for a group selfie before starting up the ridge. 

The sky turned puce, and the light leeched from the undergrowth as we climbed higher. Millwood pointed out places where he and his comrades have had strange encounters, such as the spot where something lobbed a rock at him. 

After about half an hour we reached the top. Even up here the close, thick foliage of the deciduous trees blotted out most of the waning light. We squinted through the gloaming at that huge pine tree where Millwood said he saw Bigfoot last autumn. 

Bigfoot research requires patience, Millwood stressed. Much of it entails sitting, swatting mosquitoes in summer or trying to keep your fingers warm in winter, listening and watching and sniffing in the dark. He’s spent hundreds of hours doing this; some members of Dirty South Squatching have spent thousands. 

We settled in near the pine tree to wait. 

Kitsch and Caboodle

There are Bigfoot hunts. Then, there’s Bigfoot tourism. Once you start looking for it, you’ll see little signs of it everywhere, especially in mountain cities like Hendersonville and Asheville: bumper stickers, magnets, T-shirts, and other kitschy gifts. 

But Bigfoot’s contribution to North Carolina’s tourism sector extends beyond a proliferation of tchotchkes. Related attractions are bringing tourists to tiny, forgotten towns like Littleton. 

When former Long Island tabloid reporter Stephen Barcelo moved there, he immediately took note of the many Bigfoot legends in the area. Barcelo had done a piece on Bigfoot in upstate New York 15 years ago, but it was locals’ stories about strange encounters with bipedal bears in Littleton that set him on the path to paranormal investigation. He now runs the Cryptozoology and Paranormal Museum of Littleton, a private collection of items such as a doll that nauseates people and brings bad luck if you touch it, a haunted well, a dybbuk box, cursed church pews, and casts of abnormally large footprints as well as a hulking, menacing Bigfoot statue. 

Barcelo, who’s invested in thermal and parabolic cameras to aid him on his Bigfoot hunts, said he’s had two sightings since he’s been here: one, a daytime sighting with his daughter that involved a log appearing on the path where no log had been before; and the second, a nighttime sighting at Medoc Mountain State Park which entailed, he said, seeing a creature that was “either a fat naked camper or Bigfoot.”

Medoc Mountain is a hotbed of Bigfoot sightings, said Barcelo, and so why shouldn’t this famed cryptid contribute to the tiny town’s revitalization campaign? “If you have the world’s most famous cantaloupe,” he said, “you should advertise it.”

Four hours west is Marion, home to just over 8,000 people. Among its residents is John Bruner, a former emergency responder who now runs Bigfoot 911, which investigates alleged sightings across the Southeast. 

Marion Mayor Steve Little maintains that it was Bruner’s idea to start the festival; Bruner claims it was the city’s idea. Either way, in 2018, Bruner organized the first iteration of the one-day celebration. That first year, said Bruner, they were expecting 8,000 people. Instead, they got 60,000. (Numbers have fallen since that first banner year, with 40,000 reported at subsequent festivals, but attendees come from as far away as Kansas and Maine.) 

After I battled my way into a parking space at this year’s event, I strolled the packed streets. Some aspects of the festival were normal: candy, candles, overpriced lemonade, cotton candy, excited kids, strutting teenagers. 

But the sheer amount of Bigfoot stuff overshadowed the ordinary street fair ambience. People carried signs stating “Bigfoot for President 2024” and wore American flag overalls with Bigfoot slippers. The T-shirt game was strong, with some silly shirts (“I’m sasquatching you”) and other hilariously obscene ones (“Bigfoot is real and he tried to eat my ass.”).

A self-styled Bigfoot Troubadour roamed the crowd in faux fur and bedroom slippers, rasping songs with lyrics like “I cut my toenails with a machete.” Yeti Betty, a local metalworking artist who declined to give her real name and who sculpted a huge statue of Bigfoot after an “intense sighting,” swanned about the crowd wearing three wigs, snowboots with hair extensions peeking out, and tight pants and a top that she described as “stepping up the glam game.” 

At midday about a dozen contestants ascended to the main stage for a Bigfoot calling contest, where they hunched into simian shapes and yodeled, whooped, howled and screamed to see who could produce the best imitation of everyone’s favorite cryptid. 

I got the impression that a large percentage of the festival’s attendees were casual fans. Blake Medlin, who drove out from Raleigh, was wearing a Hawaiian shirt festooned with images of Bigfoot carrying flamingo-shaped pool floats that he’d bought on Temu. He jovially told me that this is his second year attending, and he likes to attend to eat the food and look for Bigfoot. “I know where he’s at, but there’s a bounty on him, so I’m not telling anyone,” joked Medlin, who said he has a Bigfoot statue at home guarding his chicken coop. 

Then there are casual fans like locals Teresa and AJ Edwards, whose grandson was asked to wear a Bigfoot costume for official photo ops at the festival. While the grandson sweated through selfies nearby, Teresa explained that they come to the festival because they like shopping and exploring, but also because they’re intrigued by Bigfoot. “We love Bigfoot,” she said. “The mystery, learning new facts, learning everything.”

Then there are the more serious attendees. At noon on the festival’s main stage, Christian McCloud, that paranormal investigator from Hendersonville, answered questions from the dozens of enthusiasts in the audience and shared tips and tricks about Bigfoot. 

Laypeople might think of hunters as searching for one solitary creature, which would complicate the competing Pacific Northwest and Appalachian claims of being hot spots for sightings. But those who take the endeavor more seriously say it’s a mammal like any other, giving birth and producing new generations just like us. 

McCloud, for one, told the crowd that he believes that Bigfoot are highly intelligent, have a hierarchical society and typically travel in family units, with the father taking up the front of the pack and the mom guarding children from behind. 

But Bigfoot (nobody was able to tell me the plural form of the word) have their limits, which McCloud explained in response to a question about how to keep them off your property: Spray cheap perfume. “Nothing with pheromones in it. You know that old Jean Naté stuff Grandma used to wear? Get a gallon of that stuff and put it around the property,” he said. “I think they’re opportunistic. If they can go through someone’s garbage, it’s better than chasing down a deer.”

Despite the rain that rolled in at 3 p.m., flooding the streets and shutting down the festival early, Mayor Little was positively ebullient. Bigfoot has been transformative for his city. The people of Marion talk about it year-round. Bigfoot flags go up on Main Street on March 1; in the two weeks before the festival, local businesses can hire an artist to paint Bigfoot scenes on the storefront windows downtown. Along with excitement and passion, Bigfoot brings significant economic value to Marion: Little said that the first year, one store owner told him that he brought in as much revenue during the festival weekend as he had for the past six months. 

Marion is also home to the Livermush Festival and the Mountain Glory Festival, but Little feels those festivals don’t have the “pizzazz” of Bigfoot. “I think it’s the nature of the topic,” he said. “Depending upon how committed a person is to their hobby, they are either absolutely convinced that Bigfoot is real and is out in the woods, or they just have a good time looking at other people who become so passionate and they get a good laugh out of it. It’s a wide spectrum.”

So where does he fall on the spectrum? “Here’s my answer I always give,” Little said. “I believe in the people who believe in Bigfoot.”

Bigfoot’s Biggest Fans

Besides pioneering the festival, Bruner’s other major contribution to North Carolina’s cryptid culture comes in the form of Bigfoot 911. 

Bruner has been keeping notebooks about Bigfoot since he was a preteen, and he founded his group with his four sons in 2015 to investigate reports of Bigfoot and other inexplicable phenomena. He chose the name because he was a paramedic for 28 years and decided to combine two of his interests (Bigfoot and 911). The group now has 38 members in nine divisions across the Southeast, plus about 13,000 people in its Facebook group. Bruner attributes the popularity to increased media interest and public awareness. “Time has a way of making things cool, and Bigfoot is one of those things,” Bruner said. 

Bruner conducts his hunts from a command post, with his captains radioing back any evidence. He’s not into calling—he thinks Bigfoot is a highly intelligent creature who can distinguish the real thing from a human’s poor imitation—but he is a proponent of tree-knocking, which entails strategically hitting sticks against trees, to attract them. His biggest hack, however, is hanging Glow Sticks in the woods, since in his experience Bigfoot loves Glow Sticks. “Bigfoot see flashlights and headlamps frequently, but how often, if ever, do they see a Glow Stick? I believe that it all relates back to curiosity,” Bruner said. 

A Bigfoot 911 hopeful must first complete a phone interview with a division chief. If the chief recommends that the candidate advance, they then must complete a 10-module cryptozoology course. The course is free, and Bruner said the only way to fail is to not finish. Once a candidate finishes the course, they can then join a division and start hunting.

At the festival I spoke to a Mount Holly couple, Rich and Randy Perkins, who have been members of Bigfoot 911 for about two years. Rich got into Bigfoot through—you guessed it—the movies, and now the two of them take reports from locals who claim to have experienced the inexplicable, including the date, time, and location, then conduct interviews to assess legitimacy. If a sighting seems real, they head out into the woods with a recorder, looking for footprints and tree breaks. They said they’ve received more calls over the years as Bigfoot has “become more mainstream.” Even if their investigations yield nothing, it’s still fun. 

“A bad night out in the woods camping is still a good night,” Rich said. 

Besides investigating reports, the group also undertakes its own research, selecting a region to assess as Bigfoot habitat. Does it have water sources, cover, concealment, and travel routes–which according to Bruner are “the four things necessary to support a Bigfoot population.” They’re also curious about larger questions: Do these creatures migrate? Do they live in family units? (Bruner stressed that he has no interest in killing Bigfoot.)

Even among those who believe Bigfoot exists, there’s still an open question of what, exactly, this creature might be. Most focus on three possible categories: He’s a cryptid, or an undiscovered animal, which enthusiasts call “flesh and blood”; a supernatural or paranormal being with abilities beyond those of  humans and other animals; or he might be interdimensional, a theory supported by the fact that sightings often coincide with UFO reports. 

Many of the believers I spoke to said they think Bigfoot is flesh and blood with, perhaps, some paranormal abilities. Bruner’s adamant about which camp he falls into. 

“A lot of people ask me, does Bigfoot come out of spaceships? No. It’s a living and breathing animal. I saw it about 15 feet away, and its chest was rising and falling.” 

As for why they’re so elusive, he said, “Bigfoot are very intelligent animals. They don’t want anything to do with us. They want to be left alone.”

I Want To Believe

Bigfoot fans, believers, hunters, and experts aren’t stupid: They know full well that many of us are skeptical of their pursuit at best. But none of the enthusiasts I spoke to seemed to care. They all had the strength of their convictions. What they’ve seen and heard is real, and anybody who doubts it just hasn’t experienced it yet. 

“I don’t try to convince people that Bigfoot’s real because I think that that’s something an individual has to do,” Bruner said. 

Millwood agreed that he’s not bothered by skeptics: They haven’t logged the hours he has. “Until you have your own experience, you probably tend to side with the skeptics,” he said. “After a number of experiences, you start questioning things. The ones who mock us, they haven’t spent the time in the woods we have.”

And Yeti Betty pointed out that whether or not Bigfoot exists, it might lead us to larger lessons about the natural world, an opinion that dovetails with theories that environmental anxiety has led to a surge in Bigfoot interest in recent years. There’s an overlap between Bigfoot and outdoor enthusiasts like Millwood, who describes himself as a conservationist who enjoys hiking and looking for plants. “It’s a great opportunity to just think about a way to take care of our woods,” Yeti Betty said, “to take care of our community and respect what we have.” 

I thought about this when I was up on the ridge in the South Mountains as night encroached. I grew up in the country and have done my fair share of camping, but there’s something humbling about a forest at night. Perhaps a better descriptor is atavistically spooky. We sat on the rocky path, straining to hear any calls, knocks, or other telltale sounds.

It was almost 10 p.m. when the team decided to roll out some techniques to try to elicit a response. Landers trawled the undergrowth for a suitable small branch for tree knocks. He swung a stick at a nearby tree, making a sharp, metallic sound that reverberated along the ridge. 

We wandered closer to the infamous pine, and Landers ducked behind it to demonstrate the size of the creature they saw back in October. Then he sniffed the air. “He just got the smell. Can you smell that?” Millwood said.  

I did. Or, at least I thought I did. Not nearly as strong as a hog farm, but more like rotting petals, or musky urine on swampy leaves. 

Our leaders decided to try some calls. Landers psyched himself up, then let out a wild, uninhibited yell, the kind of loose, loud sound that might spark a police call in a more populated area. 

Then Millwood and another member of our party heard a low, breathy huff coming from the direction of the trail leading back toward the house. “Did you hear that?” Millwood asked, low and urgent. I didn’t: I had my audio recording headphones on, but when I listen to the recording, I think I can, maybe. 

“Yeah, that was it,” said Millwood. “Remember, you don’t have to outrun Sasquatch. You just have to outrun the slowest member of your party.”

Realizing that the slowest member of the party was probably me, we headed back down the mountain.