A Couple Says Bigfoot Jumped a Guardrail on Highway 64—In Broad Daylight

It was sometime between four and five on a Wednesday afternoon, July 30, 2025. Not midnight. Not the middle of a camping trip. Just an ordinary summer drive through the North Carolina mountains.

Susan King and her fiancé were traveling from Sapphire Valley toward Highlands on U.S. Highway 64 when the blue Hyundai Genesis ahead of them suddenly hit its brakes.

Something large and dark had appeared near the road.

King said it was extraordinarily tall, with dark hair and long arms. The figure moved so quickly that she couldn't make out a face. Then, according to her account, it jumped over the guardrail with ease and vanished from view.

There was no moonlight or fog to blame for the confusion. This was broad daylight, on one of western North Carolina's better-known mountain highways, with another vehicle right in front of them. And King, who later described herself as a skeptic, was sufficiently shaken to file a formal Bigfoot sighting report two days later.

King's original account is preserved as Report #78967 in the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization's database. She described her fiancé as a second witness and said the car ahead of them was a blue Hyundai Genesis.

That detail matters. It introduces a person—or possibly more than one person—who may have been closer to the incident than the couple. According to King's account, the Hyundai braked sharply just as the dark figure appeared, apparently startling its driver.

But there's an important distinction between a car visibly hitting its brakes and a separately verified eyewitness account. We have not found a published interview with the Hyundai's driver or passengers. The car's abrupt stop is something King reported seeing, not independent confirmation that its occupants saw Bigfoot.

Still, imagine being the person in that blue Hyundai. You'd remember slamming on your brakes in front of something unusual on Highway 64, wouldn't you?

King described the figure as black or very dark, exceptionally tall, long-armed and hairy. She said it appeared suddenly, cleared the roadside guardrail, and was gone. She and her fiancé couldn't make out a face. There is no reliable height measurement in the original report and no detailed description of feet, hands, or facial features.

It was a brief encounter, not a prolonged observation. The published file includes no image or recording of the purported creature. No verified footprints, biological samples, or physical evidence are supplied with the account. It's the testimony of two people who said they were there, plus an investigator's later assessment.

We have to resist the temptation to add details that aren't in the record. It's tempting to picture some massive beast standing in the center of the road, looking into the windows, or roaring at oncoming cars. But that's not what King reported. She reported a sudden appearance, a leap across a guardrail, the sharp braking of the vehicle ahead, and a few bewildering seconds.

And here's where the story becomes more tangible. The investigator didn't just put a pin somewhere in the mountains around Highlands. His report identifies a location on U.S. 64 at approximately 35.088390° N, 83.172519° W, roughly three straight-line miles northeast of town.

His published satellite view labels Cherrywood Drive, Cashiers Road/Highway 64, and a Dollar General store, with a red circle marking the reported crossing point. There's even a separate street-level image showing the roadway and guardrail.

That's an interesting contrast with the mental image most people have when somebody says 'Bigfoot.' The location isn't miles beyond the end of the road. It's along a paved highway near a small cluster of buildings, with wooded hillsides surrounding it. That doesn't tell us what the witnesses saw, but it does give this otherwise fleeting story a surprisingly specific setting.

Examine the investigator's original location images: regional map · annotated aerial image showing Cherrywood Drive and the store · roadside view and guardrail. These are the BFRO's location illustrations—not photographs of a Bigfoot.

Location note: the coordinates and annotated maps were supplied by the BFRO investigator. We have not independently reconstructed the witnesses' route or verified the precise crossing point. Please do not stop in traffic or walk along the highway to investigate.

King submitted her account on August 1, 2025. The report was reviewed by Matthew Moneymaker, founder of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization and a former host of Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot. Moneymaker wrote that he spoke to both witnesses by phone and found them credible.

He went further, writing that, given the daylight circumstances, the figure could only have been a Sasquatch. The BFRO assigned the report its Class A designation, which the organization uses for sightings it considers less susceptible to ordinary misidentification.

But that's the investigator's conclusion, not an independently established scientific finding. The BFRO itself explains that eyewitness accounts are anecdotal and not the same as testable scientific evidence. A phone interview can help document a person's story. It can't establish an unknown species by itself.

Could the figure have been a bear moving in an unexpected way? A person at an unusual angle? Something else entirely? The available report doesn't provide enough independently verifiable detail to eliminate every ordinary explanation. What it does establish is that King made a detailed report almost immediately after the alleged encounter and that an investigator spoke with the couple.

There's a small factual mistake floating around some of the retellings of this case. An August 2025 article by Coast to Coast AM described the encounter as taking place on Friday, August 1. But that is the date King filed the report, not the date she said she saw the creature.

The original witness account specifies Wednesday, July 30, 2025, between 4 and 5 p.m. This is one reason we like going back to source documents rather than copying a story from the most recent person who retold it.

And those two days? They're part of what makes this case intriguing. King didn't wait years to come forward. According to the published record, she submitted her description that same week.

For anyone who thinks this is an isolated case, remember that the foothills have been talking about giant hairy figures for decades. In 1978–79, the Knobby sightings in Cleveland County drew hundreds of curious people into the woods. In 2010, Tim Peeler called 911 near Casar after claiming to have chased a towering visitor away from his dogs.

In 2011, a five-second video from Rutherford County spread across the internet. Two years later, two drivers reported sightings around Taylorsville, one near a cattle pasture and one beside a muscadine vineyard.

Now add a 2025 report on the Cashiers-to-Highlands highway to the archive. Not proof of Bigfoot, but another story preserved in a way that allows readers to examine exactly what the witnesses said, and what remains unanswered.

We've been fascinated with North Carolina's Bigfoot folklore for years. Our Fall 2023 edition of Foothills Digest, Issue #23, Ghosties, Witches, Haints & Spirits, includes a feature simply titled “Bigfoot,” starting on page 10. Here's the actual spread from that issue. Click it to open the magazine and keep reading.

It's the loose thread I can't stop thinking about.

The couple's account names the make, model and color of the car immediately ahead of them. According to their report, it stopped suddenly when the dark figure appeared. But the person behind that steering wheel has never been separately identified in the published material we've reviewed.

If you were driving a blue Hyundai Genesis on Highway 64 between Cashiers and Highlands on Wednesday, July 30, 2025, around 4–5 p.m.—or you know someone who was—we would like to hear what happened. We're interested in firsthand recollections, photographs, or dashcam footage. You don't have to believe in Bigfoot to help sort out what was actually seen.

In the meantime, next time you're driving toward Highlands, look out at those steep wooded slopes above the guardrails. They're beautiful enough without a mystery. But they do have a way of making you wonder what might be moving just beyond the road.

• BFRO Report #78967 — Susan King's original July 30 account (submitted August 1, 2025), Matthew Moneymaker's telephone follow-up, and links to the investigator's location photographs and maps.
• BFRO explanation of its classifications — what Class A does and does not mean.
• Coast to Coast AM, August 7, 2025 — early media coverage of the claimed sighting; note that this report confuses the filing date and encounter date.
• Sky Ships Over Cashiers — additional regional coverage reproducing the eyewitness account.
• Foothills Digest Issue #23, pages 10–11 — our original Bigfoot feature.

Editorial note: This article reports a claimed sighting, not a verified observation of an unidentified animal. The investigator's annotated aerial views and street-level images are linked directly to their source, not presented as eyewitness photographs. Featured road photograph by Jeff Miller/Unsplash; illustrative image, not the site of the alleged crossing.