About this episode
In this episode, we head deep into the Appalachian spine to uncover one of America’s most enduring mountain mysteries: the Wood Booger. Known across Southwest Virginia and neighboring highland communities, this legend reaches back long before European settlers ever set foot on these ridges.Indigenous nations carried generations of warnings about wild men in the forest—the Monacan and Mannahoac spoke of untamed beings in the woods, and Cherokee stories told of Tsul ‘Kalu, the slant-eyed giant who watched from the highest places. These accounts weren’t bedtime tales. They were cautionary history.We open with a startling story tied to the final chapter of Daniel Boone’s life. In his last year, Boone reportedly confided a secret he’d kept for decades: an encounter with a ten-foot-tall, hair-covered creature he called a “Yahoo.” We dig into the historical trail behind this claim, drawing from John Mack Faragher’s landmark Boone biography and Theodore Roosevelt’s writings on Boone’s Kentucky expeditions to weigh what’s legend, what’s record, and what still refuses to fit neatly into either. From there, we travel to Norton, Virginia—modern ground zero for Wood Booger research. This tiny mountain city, the smallest independent city in the state, has built a surprising identity around the creature. We explore the region’s coal-mining roots and the eerie stories miners carried out of the tunnels beneath these ancient mountains. We also visit nearby Saltville, where humans have mined salt for thousands of years—and where reports of something unexplainable have echoed just as long. The investigation then turns to one of the most talked-about pieces of evidence in recent memory: the 2009 Beast of Gum Hill video. When Chuck Newton captured footage of a massive biped stepping out of the Washington County treeline, the clip drew national attention—and eventually brought the Finding Bigfoot television crew to Southwest Virginia. We revisit the town hall they hosted at the Palmer Grist Mill in Saltville, where the turnout stunned everyone: hunters, hikers, families, and a teenager who described being struck by a rock moments after locking eyes with a dark figure on a hillside. We break down decades of witness descriptions to build a composite profile of the Wood Booger—its reported height and muscular build, the powerful odor so often mentioned in sightings, and the vocalizations that roll through hollows at night.You’ll hear accounts from hunters encountering something impossibly close in tree stands, truck drivers watching a hulking form cross Route 23 at three in the morning, and a woman outside Bristol who met the creature in her headlights on a quiet back road near Mendota. The scientific discussion brings us to the work of the late Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, who examined hundreds of footprint casts and argued that certain evidence was extraordinarily difficult to dismiss. We look at reported dermal ridges
