♪♪
[ growling ]
[ crow cawing ]
♪♪
[ woman screams ]
♪♪
[ roaring ]
♪♪
[ growling ]
he's coming back.
Not another step or I'll shoot!
He throwed his head back and let out a roar,
and it was like an african lion.
[ roars ]
there's things that happens out there,
things you will hear, things you will see
that's unexplainable.
I've never in my life been that scared.
[ growling ]
it was horrible. I almost died.
♪♪
felt like we were being watched,
like eyes were on us.
This thing was following us.
We didn't know what was going to happen.
What the hell?
The feeling I had
of the presence was, you know, a heightened sense of danger.
It felt like something was coming out to attack us.
♪♪
my name is mike wooley.
This happened 1981 on a Saturday.
♪♪
I'm 63 years old.
My daddy took me fishing when I was 2 years ago.
When I got 4 years old,
he asked to start taking me in the woods with him.
And he squirrel hunted. And that was a lot of fun.
And as I got older, I got more into deer hunting.
That Saturday, I said, "you know what?
I got stuff I need to do around the house.
I'll do it and I'll go deer hunting in the evening time."
♪♪
got everything?
All set.
Probably going to be late.
Good luck.
My name is jackie wooly.
We have been together since we were 17 years old.
Oh, he was always going hunting every spare minute.
When hunting season started,
every spare minute he got he went hunting.
He went after work.
He went before work. He went on the weekends.
♪♪
I loved it. Well, I tell you, man, I just --
every minute I could get out in the woods, I was out there.
♪♪
where I was hunting,
it was down a logging road, and it dead ended.
That's where I had my deer stand.
♪♪
it's mostly pine trees.
There are some hardwood trees, your oak trees.
You know, the acorns
squirrels and the deer eat falls off of them.
You get some cedar trees, you know.
That's mainly it.
Peaceful.
Trees would smell so good
and the birds chirping, you know?
It was just like a getaway from all your problems.
And nobody bothered you.
And it was a beautiful day. Wasn't no clouds.
As they say, it was a bluebird day.
♪♪
the land had been logged out,
but it'd been like 20, 25 years,
and there's a lot of good timber grown back,
and it was thick.
You couldn't see 40 yards.
♪♪
[ growling ]
♪♪
[ insects buzzing ]
♪♪
it was really weird.
I went back there and I smelled something real bad,
like something dead.
I smelled a stink.
I just wasn't comfortable.
♪♪
and a hair was brushed up against a tree.
Black. Black, shiny hair.
Ohh.
♪♪
something had set down to get up against the tree,
had its back against the tree,
and there was big old butt prints.
♪♪
and over to the right was a big, big pile of turkey feathers.
That right there was weird.
♪♪
over to the left was a humongous pile
of bones, turkey bones.
♪♪
my deer stand was made out of drill stem pipe.
And drill stem pipe is what's used in the oil field.
They use it to drill the wells.
It's tough.
♪♪
and made about a 12-foot stand, 10-to 12-foot tall,
and put a seat on it.
♪♪
the reason that you get up high on a deer stand
is you want to get your smell over the deer's head.
If he smells you, that's it.
♪♪
it's peaceful, you know?
You sat there, you know, and you see a lot of wildlife.
♪♪
jackie: From the time he was able to walk,
he was just an outdoors person.
Anybody say, "hey, you want to go for hunting,"
he was right there.
He'd leave about 5:00,
and he'd get on the stand and wait till the daylight come.
♪♪
I sat there about three or four hours, you know?
♪♪
it was really weird.
It was just like everything was so quiet.
♪♪
and you don't hear no birds.
Everything just shuts down.
Everything just gets dead still.
♪♪
and no crickets or nothing. You couldn't hear nothing.
I knew something was up.
[ branches rustling, creaking ]
and then all of a sudden,
you know, rustling, limbs breaking.
♪♪
[ grunting ]
♪♪
and a creature come up.
I saw something black run up, get behind a tree,
you know, and try to hide.
You know, I'm looking at it like, you know, "what's this?"
♪♪
so he was hiding behind a tree looking at me.
I estimated the creature about 7-foot tall,
between 450 and 500 pounds.
♪♪
I couldn't believe that, what I seen.
I just couldn't believe it.
[ growling ]
♪♪
[ growling ]
♪♪
mike: I was shaking so bad.
My knees were knocking, my teeth, and I was froze.
The creature was hairy -- black, black, shiny hair.
I'm pretty sure it was a bigfoot.
[ roars ]
and so he's standing behind a tree
looking at me about 15 yards.
And I'm looking at him, and it was terrible.
[ growling, roaring ]
♪♪
he was growling.
He got -- one time, he got so mad at me
he started beating the tree with the sides of his fist.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, you know?
He can have the deer stand.
You know, I don't care. I just want to get out of here.
[ growling ]
♪♪
he was growling real bad, yelling at me.
[ roaring ]
stay back there! Stay back!
He showed me his teeth.
They were just big and flat.
And indian friends told me,
they said, "you were fixing to die."
stay back or I'll shoot!
I said, you know, "I might have to shoot this thing," you know?
And so I knew I would have to make a head shot.
♪♪
what I'm gonna do is look through my scope.
He had like a human face,
and his eyes scared me.
Everybody said, "well, did the body scare you?"
I said, "no, his eyes."
I mean, they were satanic.
[ growling ]
I'm never my life been that scared.
I just -- I wanted to cry
because I've never seen nothing like that.
It was horrible.
♪♪
I was actually afraid to shoot him
because I thought I'd make him madder, you know?
And like I said, I just wanted him to leave.
Go back where he come from.
And I was gonna go back where I come from,
but he wouldn't do it.
♪♪
I had the cross hairs right between his eyes,
and it's like about a 20-yard shot, maybe 15 yards.
And as I was getting ready to pull the trigger,
he let out a roar like a lion.
[ roars ]
♪♪
about 100 yards to the north from him,
a whistle come back,
a shrill whistle,
kind like a steam engine, you know?
And I'd heard that whistle all my life in the woods,
but I thought I was a bird.
[ whistle ]
♪♪
well, he looked over at it.
Then he come back and looked at me.
And he whistled back.
Kind of did a grin.
[ whistles ]
who's th--
who's there?!
[ whistle ]
and that's when I heard the other one coming.
He was coming.
[ growling ]
stay back!
♪♪
stop!
You know, something told me "you better go
or you're gonna die."
♪♪
[ growling, whistle ]
♪♪
not another step or I'll shoot!
He let out a roar,
and it's just like a 70-mile-per-hour wind hit me.
You know, and it was loud. You could have heard it a mile.
[ roars ]
[ rustling ]
when I heard the other creature coming,
I decided, you know, I had to do something.
And it was coming down to a deal whether I live or die.
♪♪
you've got to be kidding.
You could tell whatever it was was heavy
because the way it was cracking the brush coming,
and it was coming in such a way,
it was a hostile, mean way.
You could tell it was trying to get there.
And so, you know, these things are everywhere.
You know? I'm gonna die.
[ branches clatter ] - who is that?
I knew they'd overrun me,
so I take out running down that road fast as I could.
Started running towards my truck.
♪♪
I was ready to just run like all get out, you know?
Because I was scared.
[ growling ]
♪♪
with no gun, I know it would have got me.
[ growling, footsteps approaching ]
♪♪
I'm running. I'm running.
I'm trying to run, but I'm so afraid
that my legs felt like they weighed 500 pounds,
and I felt like I couldn't move.
♪♪
and so here he comes.
He's chasing me.
[ growling ]
♪♪
and he's in the woods about 50 feet from me.
We were running like that.
♪♪
I was running to my truck,
and he was flanking me over to the left.
And I was worried about the other one.
You know, where was he at?
He was running parallel with me,
but he was running through trees.
I'm running down an old logging road.
It's pretty clean.
But he was running through trees,
and he was just bulldozing them.
[ growling ]
got those big thorn trees,
and they got thorns on them like that.
They'll cut you. If you touch, you get cut bad.
But he was running through that stuff.
I mean, it was like he's mowing it down.
And [growls] I could hear him.
[ whistle ]
[ growling ]
♪♪
yeah, these are some very smart, intelligent creatures.
I think what he was trying to do,
get ahead of me and cut me off.
[ panting ] please!
No, no, no!
No, no, please!
I'm running up to my truck and I get to thinking,
you know, when I've got to stop, put the key in it,
that's when he'll attacking me,
when I got my back to him.
[ growling ]
[ whistle ]
he'll probably come up and jump me.
♪♪
[ roars ]
♪♪
I had a .270 remington. A high-powered rifle.
That creature, he made me feel like it was a bb gun, you know?
And he let me know, "boy, mike, hey, I'm not afraid of you."
[ growling ]
♪♪
[ gunshot ]
♪♪
[ growling ]
♪♪
[ whistle ]
♪♪
I fired. I fired a round just to try to, you know,
scare him up a little bit.
♪♪
[ gunshot ]
the bullet hit the back of a tree about 7 foot,
and his head where he was stopped was like that.
I mean, it had been a couple more seconds,
the bullet would have got him in the head.
[ growling ]
well, I was able to get in the truck.
♪♪
aah!
♪♪
I mean, I shot out of there.
But it was just a really big nightmare
all the way around.
[ whistle ]
♪♪
you know, I went home, and it messed me up.
♪♪
it just terrified me, you know?
♪♪
what kept you?
Normally he'd come in and he'd say "hi, hon,"
and come put his arm around me or kiss me or something.
And that day, he just come in and he sat down.
♪♪
mike, what's wrong?
Nothing's wrong.
He'd come back, and he just was real nervous.
And, you know, you could tell he was upset,
but I didn't know what was wrong.
Mike, what is it?
I said, "mike, what's wrong?"
he said, "nothing. Nothing's wrong."
I said, "mike, something's wrong."
he said, "no, jackie, there's nothing wrong."
and he never was sharp with me like that.
♪♪
I saw something out in the woods.
♪♪
what? What did you see?
I think it was a bigfoot.
And he just said, "jackie, I saw bigfoot."
♪♪
I didn't know if he was joking or if he meant it.
And I said, "you saw what?"
he said, "I saw a bigfoot."
there was two of them.
♪♪
okay. You sure?
They tried to kill me.
He said, "I've seen it. I've seen two of them."
♪♪
I was just floored. You know, I don't know what to say.
♪♪
do I believe this? Is he joking?
But I looked at him real close,
and I said, "you're serious, aren't you?"
he said yeah.
"if you saw him, then I believe you.
You've never lied to me.
You've always told me the truth.
And you're dead serious right now."
♪♪
he finally went to sleep early in the morning,
and when he went to sleep, he was really tossing then.
[ roars ]
[ whimpers ]
he kind of whimpered a little bit.
And I thought, "that's weird."
[ whimpers ]
[ screams ]
then I heard him scream in his sleep.
I'm sitting there going, "uh, what's going on?"
it's okay.
[ panting ]
it's okay.
♪♪
[ whistle ]
♪♪
he completely changed.
He used to be a really outgoing person.
He was always really cheerful and a bubbly type person.
And we had people over to our house all the time.
And after that day,
he kind of started withdrawing from his friends.
It's going to be okay.
♪♪
it's down over here.
I got intimidated real bad, and I lost my guts,
and it's something I had to make up.
I had to go back.
You know, when I went back,
I went back to get the deer stand.
I spent a lot of time building it,
and I really liked it.
Well, here it is.
♪♪
my deer stand was built out of drill stem pipe.
That's what they drill oil wells with.
It was a good stand, and it got destroyed
like a piece of macaroni or something, you know?
You think the bigfoot did this?
♪♪
not a doubt in my mind.
[ whistle ]
it was like a message from them.
You know, "stay out of here," you know?
There are things out there that you've never seen before.
And there's things that happens out there,
things you will hear,
things you will see that's unexplainable.
Mike: Before I had this encounter,
I didn't believe none of this stuff.
I quit hunting.
I tried, I tried, but I couldn't.
You know, I couldn't focus.
I kept looking for those creatures.
Come on. Let's get out of here.
It really -- it changed my life, you know?
It made me realize that, you know, we're not alone.
We're not alone.
There's stuff in those woods that will get you.
It was tough,
really tough ordeal.
♪♪
[ growls ]
♪♪
mac: We felt like we were being watched,
like eyes were on us.
This thing was following us.
We didn't know what was going to happen.
What the hell?
The feeling I had of the presence
was a heightened sense of danger.
It felt like something was coming out to attack us.
♪♪
mac: I was born and raised in the appalachian mountains
about 30 minutes right outside of chattanooga.
♪♪
back then, we both worked for the university of tennessee
at chattanooga campus police department.
And interested in, you know, what happens when we die,
if there is an afterlife, how it is that
some people can move on and some people get stuck here.
I just think it's interesting to collect that kind of evidence.
And hopefully one day
somebody can solidly prove that ghosts exist.
Mac: I've had an interest in ghost hunting all my life.
As a kid, I would go to battlefields,
graveyards, stuff like that.
Hey. All good, lee?
I'm all really.
Yeah, we won't need everything today.
Just some emf, infrared, just some baseline readings.
Sounds good. It is pretty isolated.
It's about three klicks from the village,
so we're gonna have to hike in.
We were looking for
places in our area that were haunted
or reportedly haunted
so that we could go investigate them.
And corpsewood came up on one of the top-10 sites
in the south to go ghost hunting at.
♪♪
back then, we both worked for the police department,
so we had our guns with us that day.
Just in case.
Thanks, man.
Corpsewood is located in a town called trion, georgia.
It's about an hour outside of chattanooga, tennessee.
♪♪
the house was owned by charles scudder
and joseph odom.
♪♪
these guys are pioneers, man.
Their own little utopia.
Lee: We were captivated by the story.
It was two guys that were living off the grid, basically.
They built their house out in the middle of nowhere.
They didn't have electricity.
Sounds beautiful.
Deep in the woods.
Completely isolated.
Well, they were from chicago,
and they wanted to live in seclusion.
That's what makes it so sad.
They were hunted down and murdered.
♪♪
[ gunshot ]
♪♪
mac: So lee and I, we decide we're gonna go up there
and try and find corpsewood.
We had to look for a rock, a boulder,
and somebody had sprayed "cw" on it.
I guess for corpsewood.
♪♪
and eventually found the site,
the entrance to the pathway to get to the home.
♪♪
lee: Walking up towards corpsewood,
it was peaceful at first.
There is no road to the house at all, just a trail.
The only way you can get to it is on foot.
♪♪
other than the small gravel road,
it's woods everywhere all around.
See what I mean? It's totally off the grid.
You can say that again.
You sure this is the right way?
Your guess is as good as mine, man.
This place is so remote that there's no cellphone service.
It is three miles from the main highway.
♪♪
when we finally get there, we can see a brick gate.
There it is.
♪♪
corpsewood manor.
It's covered in vines. It's overgrown.
But we were excited
that we had finally found what we were looking for.
After we passed through the gate,
we see the main structure.
It's got two walls still standing.
The rest of it is rubble.
It's overgrown with vines and shrubbery.
♪♪
wow.
Makes what happened here feel very real.
We're in the actual spot this all happened.
No kidding.
Let's get our equipment set up.
Get some leads. Sounds good.
This was just supposed to be a day recon trip
because we had planned a night investigation
for later on that week.
♪♪
wow. [ speaks indistinctly ]
♪♪
hey, I'm gonna head over here.
Get started?
So the presence of electromagnetic fields,
especially in a location that doesn't have any electricity
or any devices nearby,
can be indicative of paranormal activity.
When there's an entity nearby,
there could be a temperature drop.
You getting anything yet?
No, not here.
♪♪
whoa, whoa, whoa. Come look at this.
What do you got? What do you got?
That's 37 degrees lower than the atmospheric temperature.
That's low. You can feel that.
We got a cold spot.
It was extremely cold.
It felt like you were sticking your arms into a freezer.
So we moved on to other parts of the structure.
Whoa, whoa, there it is again.
No way, no way, no way. Come here.
We got another temperature drop.
37 degrees.
This isn't happening.
That's cold.
It was ice cold.
That's when we started to feel slightly uneasy.
Wow, man.
We felt like we were being watched,
like eyes were on us.
Lee.
Yeah.
I feel like someone is watching us.
♪♪
suddenly we hear footsteps in the woods.
[ footsteps ]
♪♪
I don't see a person.
The trees and branches aren't moving.
We don't see any movement like that at all.
Let's get out of here.
But yet the footsteps are continuing,
and it sounds like they're coming towards us.
♪♪
[ footsteps ]
♪♪
let's go. Let's get out of here.
We couldn't figure out what it was.
We thought it might be an animal.
Every time we walked, it walked.
If we sped up, it sped up.
[ footsteps ]
♪♪
when we stopped, it stopped.
♪♪
whatever it is, it's tracking us.
♪♪
I mean, you get this feeling.
It's hard to explain.
♪♪
you feel like you're in danger.
♪♪
[ growl ]
[ footsteps ]
do you hear that? Yeah.
I was afraid because
we were hearing something that we could not see.
♪♪
the feeling I had of, you know, a heightened sense of danger.
It felt like something was coming out to attack us.
♪♪
I was really on edge.
We were three miles in the woods from civilization.
Nobody lived around the area.
So what would somebody else be doing out there?
[ footsteps ]
felt like somebody was gonna come out.
But we never saw any movement in the woods.
♪♪
I felt threatened.
Mac: This thing was following us.
It was terrifying at the moment
because what was keeping pace
started basically coming around us
and overtaking us and going around us.
We didn't know what was going to happen.
♪♪
then we hear whatever it is,
it speeds up and goes at a run,
and there's a small stream crossing the trail.
And there's a splash like a foot.
There's nothing there.
But you see a splash in this thing.
♪♪
what the hell?
Run.
♪♪
something invisible hit water.
So it validated that there was something there to us.
I don't run very often,
but I was getting out of there in a hurry.
And I really felt like if we didn't leave,
if we had stuck around,
that something would have happened to us.
♪♪
lee: Go, go, go, go.
I'm trying, man. I'm trying. Come on.
Go, go, go. I'm trying.
Go.
♪♪
when we get off of the gravel road,
I looked at lee, I said,
"man, what was that?
And who's gonna believe us when we tell this story?"
lee: Went over theories about what it could be.
Was it an animal? Was it a human?
Was it a ghost?
♪♪
mac: Did research and discovered
locals in the area said that they were devil worshipers.
They nicknamed the side of the mountain
devil worship mountain.
[ woman screams ]
♪♪
this is the closest thing to proof of unknown
that I've encountered.
And it's the only time I've ever been afraid
during any investigation.
So, do you think it was one of the victims,
one of the murderers,
or something else?
When I explain it,
I just call it the watcher in the woods.
I think something is there that is trying to
keep people out of there for whatever reason.
I don't know if it's a ghost.
I don't know what it is.
But I think there's something in there
that wants to make sure people leave.