Virginia Man Recalls Terrifying Childhood Bigfoot Encounters in Blue Ridge Mountains

Posted Thursday, August 20, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

The Blue Ridge Mountains have long been a hotspot for Sasquatch encounters, and a video I recently stumbled across adds another chilling chapter to that legacy. A man named Dan Morgan shares his firsthand account of growing up on his grandfather's sprawling property in Franklin County, Virginia, where his family experienced a series of unsettling encounters that began long before he was even born. Dan's mother grew up on the same land back in the late 1940s and '50s, and she often spoke of hearing blood-curdling screams echoing through the hollers behind their home. She also warned him to be careful because "the hookers might get you" - a term rooted in Appalachian folklore that often refers to mysterious, hook-handed entities said to roam the mountains. Whether she meant those legendary beings or something else entirely, her warnings carried a weight of genuine fear that stuck with Dan throughout his childhood. His own experiences started when he was just seven years old, riding in the back of his father's old station wagon down a gravel road. Out of nowhere, something massive - he describes it as a "big bone flash" - darted across the road with impossible speed. He later compared it to a police dashcam video he'd seen of something similar crossing a road in the blink of an eye. But the most harrowing encounter came when Dan was around nine or ten years old. His sisters were sunbathing in the backyard and kept noticing something peeking from behind a tree near the chicken coop, about 50 feet from the house. That evening, after his father came home from work, things escalated in a way nobody could have anticipated. Around bedtime, the family heard knocking on the side of the house. Dan's dad assumed it was the kids fooling around. Then, just minutes later, something slammed into the side of the house with such violent force it nearly shook the structure off its foundation. His father grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and headed to the back porch, flipping on the floodlights. What happened next is the kind of story that stays with you forever. In the darkness to the left, a deep growl erupted. Dan's father fired into the shadows. And then, near the chicken coop, illuminated by the floodlight, a figure stepped out - standing roughly eight feet tall, towering just above the coop itself. Before his father could reload, the creature dropped to all fours and vanished into the garden with terrifying speed, disappearing into the woodline in seconds. But the encounters didn't stop there. A few nights later, Dan awoke from a dead sleep to find a dark figure standing in his bedroom doorway. The figure was pitch black, but surrounded by an eerie orange-red glow, with its arms spread wide. He doesn't remember what happened after that moment, but his mother later told him he began sleepwalking in the days that followed, often standing silently in her room without responding when she spoke to him. The Blue Ridge region has a rich history of Sasquatch reports, with the subject being deeply woven into Appalachian folklore for generations. Stories like Dan's align with countless other witness accounts describing large, bipedal beings with incredible speed and an almost otherworldly presence. The orange-red glow he describes around the figure in his doorway is particularly intriguing - similar luminous phenomena have been reported by other witnesses over the years, though no one has ever satisfactorily explained what causes them. The raw emotion in Dan's voice as he recounts these events is palpable, and the detail he provides - from the creature's height to its sudden shift to all fours - adds real weight to an already chilling story. Definitely worth checking out the full video for yourself.