Retired Engineer Logs Six Weeks of Bigfoot Sightings at Georgia Cabin

Posted Wednesday, September 23, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

The Cohutta Wilderness in Northwest Georgia has earned a reputation over the decades as one of the more intriguing hotspots for Bigfoot reports in the eastern United States, and a recent video circulating online dives deep into one family's unsettling experience on the very edge of that vast, roadless terrain. The story comes courtesy of Cody Marsh, a retired civil engineer who spent 32 years working for the state of Tennessee out of Chattanooga. In 2005, Cody and his wife Rebecca purchased a 71-acre cabin property sitting on the eastern flank of the Cohutta Wilderness in Murray County, Georgia. Their eastern fence line borders the federal wilderness directly, meaning they share a boundary with roughly 36,000 acres of uninterrupted forest that runs for miles without a single road or structure. Cody describes the property in meticulous detail. A cleared bench where the cabin sits facing northwest toward Grassy Mountain. A creek running along the southern boundary. And a tree line about 90 feet from the back wall of the cabin. It's the kind of setup that sounds like paradise until the summer of 2009, when things started getting strange. For six weeks straight, Cody was waking Rebecca up in the middle of the night, dragging her to the bedroom window to show her a shape in the trees she could never quite see before it vanished. He installed four motion-activated flood lights around the perimeter. He started keeping a log in a composition notebook. He even called the Gilmer County Sheriff's Office twice. The deputy who responded the second time walked the property line with him, looked at the ground, looked at the tree line, looked at Cody, and politely suggested the area was known for black bear activity and that he might want to consider keeping his garbage cans inside the garage. Cody acknowledges the deputy wasn't wrong about the bears. But he insists the deputy was completely wrong about what was standing at the edge of his tree line every night between 11 PM and 3 AM. The first sighting Cody logged was July 11th, 2009, at 12:40 AM. He woke up with no sound, no dream, just the feeling that the night outside had changed. He looked out the bedroom window and saw a shape at the tree line. Standing upright. Tall enough to register against the lighter darkness of the open sky above the cleared bench. Not moving. Not a tree. Cody knows every tree on that property. Not a deer. A deer does not read as a vertical shape against an open sky. It stood there for what Cody estimates was two or three minutes, and then it was gone. What makes this account particularly compelling is the geographic context Cody provides. The Cohutta Wilderness is one of the largest roadless wilderness areas east of the Mississippi River. The Jacks River and Conasauga River drainages inside the wilderness have had no commercial timber harvest since the early 20th century, meaning those sections of forest are approaching 100 years of unmanaged succession. Cody notes that a forest in late succession offers higher structural complexity, higher prey availability for a large omnivore, and far greater concealment opportunity than managed timberland. The wilderness boundary, he points out, is not a wall. Whatever was using his tree line as a position was operating in a landscape that included both his property and the federal wilderness land, treating them as a single continuous space with different characteristics at different points. The Cohutta region has a long history of Bigfoot reports stretching back decades. The dense, roadless terrain, the late-successional forest, and the relative isolation make it exactly the kind of habitat where a large, intelligent, secretive hominid could thrive undetected. Sightings in the area often describe a tall, dark figure watching from the tree line at night,