Former Skeptic Trish Spots 8-Foot Bigfoot at Devil's Backbone

A recent episode of The Cryptid Podcast features one of the most intense firsthand encounters I've come across in a while. Host Dano sits down with Trish, a field investigator who went from skeptic to firm believer after locking eyes with a 7-to-8-foot bipedal creature in Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes region. The encounter went down on January 11th, 2026, in an area known as the Devil's Backbone. For anyone unfamiliar with the region, the Land Between the Lakes is a massive peninsula sitting between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley along the Tennessee-Kentucky border. It's dense, remote, and has a long, well-documented history of cryptid sightings. Sasquatch reports out of this area go back decades, and the Devil's Backbone ridge specifically has been associated with strange activity by locals for generations. Trish and her team, including her husband Doug and team members Andy and Crystal Johnson, had been scouting the area during the day, collecting audio and planning a future investigation. By around 5:30 PM, they hadn't eaten since 7 that morning, so they built a fire and started roasting hot dogs. Trish and Crystal had walked out to the bay looking for prints before settling in for the meal. That's when things got strange. Trish describes hearing a howl that wasn't like the others. Not a normal coyote howl, but something deeper that triggered the coyotes around them into a frenzy. Anyone who's spent real time in the field with experienced researchers knows exactly what she means. There are howls out there that just don't sound right. They set off the local coyotes and create this cascading effect that goes on for minutes. The last coyote, she says, squealed out like something had grabbed it. What happened next is the kind of story that keeps researchers going back into the woods. Trish had been having experiences for months before this night. She'd had her ear scratched so badly she lost hearing for two weeks. She'd been at a culvert where two other researchers saw a dogman emerge, and both got sick afterward. She'd been smacked in the face by something invisible and smelled this horrible sulfur-metallic odor that made her physically ill. On this night, she felt something coming. She started praying. Then she started yelling at the woods. "I know you're here. Just show yourself. I'm not scared." The woods went dead silent. No birds. No squirrels. Nothing. When they decided to pack up, Trish refused to get in her Jeep. She told Andy she wasn't leaving her team. Crystal walked off toward her truck alone, and Trish followed to keep eyes on her. Crystal climbed up on her running board, staring at a ridge to their left. Trish turned her camera around, hoping to catch whatever Crystal was seeing. She didn't see anything at first. She started to pan back toward the others, and there it was. Standing between two trees, 7 to 8 feet tall, perfectly bipedal. A dogman. And its amber eyes were locked onto hers. Trish froze. Completely stiff. She describes it as being trapped in a trance, staring into eyes that looked like the pits of hell. Then something, some internal voice or instinct, told her three times: "Go. Get out of here. Go." She snapped out of it and told the team they had to leave. Now. Andy walked up behind her but didn't get a look. Her husband Doug came closer to cover her while she turned to get in the Jeep. When she turned around, Doug saw it too. They got in the vehicle. Doug started patting his head, asking if she had a headache. She didn't. She was in shock. "Did you see that?" He had. But he couldn't explain it. Then Trish checked her camera. She had footage. She took screenshots, and when she showed her husband, a military man, active duty, big guy, no history of anxiety or panic attacks, he had a panic attack right there. He could barely drive out of the area. What happened after the encounter is almost as disturbing as the encounter itself. Trish started having out-of-body nightmares. In one, she saw her body lying on the bed while black crawling things moved through her bedroom floor. In another, she floated out of her body and watched a dogman standing in her daughter's bedroom doorway. When she tried to return to her body, the hallway expanded and things got worse. Shadow figures started appearing in her house. Doors she always keeps closed were standing wide open when she returned from a trip to West Virginia to ground herself. Her computer wouldn't work, kept throwing error messages that couldn't be fixed. This is the kind of encounter that separates the casual curious from the dedicated researchers. Trish went in as a skeptic. She'd seen photos her team had captured months earlier and still didn't believe. After this night, she's a knower. The Land Between the Lakes has been a hotspot for as long as people have been telling stories about these things. The dense hardwood forests, the isolation, the history, it all adds up to a place where something is clearly living that doesn't want to be found. Many researchers in the Sasquatch community consider this region one of the