Two Viewers Share Terrifying Bigfoot Encounter Stories

If you've been on the hunt for some genuinely chilling encounter stories, a recent upload from the Shadow Trail Stories YouTube channel is absolutely worth carving out some time for. The host walks through three separate accounts, and two of them are Bigfoot encounters that will have you checking the locks on your doors. The first story comes from a woman who grew up in Monmouth County, New Jersey back in the 1970s. Her neighborhood bordered an elementary school that backed up against thousands of acres of thick woods. As kids, she and her friends would explore a circular trail behind a friend's house, about a mile around, even though their parents told them to stay out. Strange things happened regularly out there, whistles from the woods, pebbles tossed at them, a wet dog smell that would come and go, and treetops swaying with no wind. One day they found a strange ground nest, flat and round like a dog bed with dried grass piled around the edges. Not long after, they came across a massive footprint with almost rectangular toes, so big their feet weren't even a third the size of the track. The real terror came in the fall of 1981 when she was around 14 or 15. She and her boyfriend were walking along the edge of the school field at dusk, sneaking a cigarette before her parents took him home. She spotted something on a hill about 50 yards away, a seven or eight foot tall creature covered in long reddish-brown fur, standing perfectly still and staring in their direction. Then it charged. Full speed, no sound of footsteps, just this massive thing running at them like the wind. She screamed for her boyfriend to run and they bolted through a neighbor's backyard. Her mom thought she was crazy, her boyfriend never saw it, but she has never forgotten what she witnessed that day. For anyone familiar with the Pine Barrens region, New Jersey has a long history of unusual sightings, and the Jersey Devil isn't the only thing people have reported stumbling across in those deep woods. The rectangular toe prints she described are consistent with what many researchers have documented in track casts over the years. The second story is a wild one out of Berkeley County, South Carolina, near Lake Marian. A man and his girlfriend were sitting on their back deck after dark when they heard something splashing through the swamp behind their yard. His girlfriend joked it was a big deer, but he quickly realized whatever it was, it was moving on two legs. Hurricane Matthew had flooded the area a month earlier, and the water was hip-deep, yet this thing was clearing the water with each step, something he knew he couldn't do himself. The splashing stopped behind his utility building about 15 yards from the woods. His girlfriend grabbed a handgun and a flashlight and walked ahead of him to investigate. When she rounded the corner of the building, she threw down the gun and the light and sprinted past him, screaming and crying all the way into the house. What she described seeing was something very big and black that had jumped flatfooted onto a downed pine tree, one that had broken off about six to ten feet high with the trunk suspended in the air. It ran the length of that tree and then jumped back off into the swamp, tearing through water and trees as it left. About a month later, the man was alone on his deck when he heard something knocking propane cylinders together behind his building. This region of South Carolina falls right into what's often called Swamp Ape territory, a name used throughout the Lowcountry and coastal Southeast for Sasquatch-type creatures. The behavior described here, bipedal movement through deep swamp water, incredible strength demonstrated by jumping onto a suspended tree trunk, matches up with patterns researchers have noted in other Southern encounters. The third story in the video, which gets cut off in the discussion, involves a man whose grandfather and uncle had an encounter with a lesser-known cryptid, and the host mentions it's something he had never heard of before either. That alone makes it worth tuning in for. The host does a great job letting the witnesses tell their stories in their own words, and his reactions add a nice touch without dismissing anything. If you're a fan of raw encounter accounts, this one delivers. Definitely check out the full video over on the Shadow Trail Stories channel.