Two Bigfoot Sightings, Four Months Apart, in Alexander County, North Carolina

One afternoon in June 2013, a man driving with his family through rural Alexander County glanced toward a cattle pasture and spotted something he couldn't explain. On the ridge above the fence line, a tall, hairy figure was moving through a power-line clearing. It walked on two legs, he said, and its arms hung almost to its knees.

He turned his car around. By the time he got back, the figure was gone.

Four months later, another driver on another country road outside Taylorsville saw something sitting in a muscadine vineyard. He thought it was a bear. But when he returned for a better look, a woman who had also stopped reportedly told him, “That's no bear.”

Both encounters were submitted to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), and both were followed up by the same investigator. Neither established that Bigfoot exists. But together, they left behind two wonderfully specific records of what two North Carolina motorists believed they'd seen in 2013—and they happened right here in our corner of the foothills.

The first report came from a 38-year-old man driving with family in the northeastern part of Alexander County, near the Iredell County line. The witness named Damascus Church Road; the BFRO investigator's follow-up located the encounter along Sharpe Mill Road, which becomes Damascus Church Road across the county line.

It was around 4:30 in the afternoon, under cloudy skies. The driver glanced toward the top of a fenced cattle pasture and noticed a figure moving across an opening beneath power lines. He later estimated its height at seven to nine feet, described reddish-brown hair perhaps six inches long, and recalled an unusually thin, long-armed body. It was upright, hunched forward, and moving quickly between two patches of woods.

The strangest detail was the movement. According to the investigator's notes, the driver thought it seemed to glide rather than run. He watched for perhaps eight to ten seconds, then told his family he thought he had just seen a Bigfoot. He turned around to check, but the figure had already disappeared into the trees.

The man said he'd grown up on a farm and was a hunter. He hadn't seen anything like it before. Although relatives were with him in the vehicle, he was the only person who reported actually seeing the figure. The witness did not report having a photograph or physical evidence.

He submitted the account to the BFRO on June 26, 2013, two weeks after the reported sighting. Investigator Larry Sidwell interviewed him by telephone. The published case is BFRO Report #41508.

By October, the landscape was heading toward autumn. A second driver, visiting family in the Taylorsville area, was traveling along Friendship Church Road toward Highway 16 at about 5:45 p.m. He was on his way to meet relatives before a Halloween haunted-trail outing.

As he passed a field where muscadine grapes were grown and sold, he noticed what looked like a bear sitting or squatting in the vineyard. It was perhaps 30 to 40 yards off the road. He got a glimpse lasting only a few seconds, continued down the road, and then decided to turn around in a church parking lot.

When he came back, another car had stopped near the field. Its driver, a woman he estimated to be in her fifties, was watching the same area. According to his recollection, when he asked whether she'd seen the bear, she told him it wasn't a bear and pointed toward the field.

He looked again. This time, he reported seeing a large, dark figure walking on two legs into the woods. He described it as tall and broad, with dark brown or black coloring. He could not distinguish its facial features.

The two motorists talked briefly before he left. The woman was never identified in the published investigation, and there is no separate interview with her in the public record. So although the report describes a second person who allegedly witnessed the encounter, her account cannot be independently checked from the available documentation.

The driver submitted his story to the BFRO on December 9, 2013. Sidwell again conducted a telephone follow-up. The original document is BFRO Report #43204.

I think the most interesting part is what happens when you lay the reports next to each other.

The June witness described a thin, lanky, reddish-brown figure crossing a power-line opening on a ridge. The October witness described something dark, broad and bear-like sitting in a vineyard before, he said, it stood and walked away.

The locations were both in Alexander County, but on different roads, months apart. The witnesses did not report encountering one another. Nothing in the published accounts establishes that they saw the same animal—or even the same kind of thing.

There is, however, a detail that would make anyone driving these back roads curious: both people said they looked away only briefly, then turned around, and the strange figure was already gone into the woods.

The BFRO marks the June encounter Class A and the October report Class B. Those classifications are the organization's own assessments of how clearly a purported subject was observed and how much room there was for misidentification. They are not scientific confirmation that a Sasquatch was present.

Both reports were investigated by a telephone interview, but neither published file supplies a photograph of an unknown animal, a verified track cast, DNA evidence, or a police record. The BFRO investigator considered both witnesses credible. That tells us what he made of their testimony; it does not independently establish what was actually in either field.

A bear is an obvious possibility to consider in a story that begins with something thought to be a bear. People are also quite capable of misjudging distance, scale and unfamiliar movements in a brief roadside glimpse. We simply don't have enough evidence to identify either reported figure with certainty.

The documented story is the reports themselves: two people who believed they saw something highly unusual, the circumstances they described, and the records that remain.

These sightings were decades after the original Knobby excitement of 1978–79, when hundreds gathered around Carpenter's Knob in Cleveland County in hopes of seeing an unidentified hairy creature. And in 2010, Tim Peeler famously called 911 from near Casar after claiming he'd chased a towering, yellowish-haired visitor away from his dogs.

We covered the long history of Bigfoot stories in our Fall 2023 issue of Foothills Digest, Ghosties, Witches, Haints & Spirits. The “Bigfoot” feature begins on page 10. Here's the actual magazine spread—click it to open the issue and read the story as it appeared in print.

Look out across those pastures, wooded ridges and fields of muscadines. Not because there's proof a giant unknown primate lives there—there isn't—but because some of the most memorable folklore in North Carolina begins with an ordinary person on an ordinary road, noticing something that doesn't seem to belong.

And I love that both these men stopped, turned around, and looked again. I'd have done exactly the same thing.

Do you remember hearing about the 2013 sightings? Were you living near Friendship Church Road or the Alexander–Iredell county line at the time? We'd love to hear what you remember.

• BFRO Report #41508 — June 12, 2013: the cattle pasture and power-line sighting, submitted June 26.
• BFRO Report #43204 — October 18, 2013: the Friendship Church Road muscadine vineyard sighting, submitted December 9.
• BFRO's explanation of its Class A and Class B labels.
• Foothills Digest Issue #23, “Bigfoot,” beginning on page 10.

Editorial note: These are firsthand reports reproduced and summarized from the BFRO archive. Foothills Digest has not independently interviewed the witnesses or verified an unidentified animal. Featured vineyard photograph: Lucas Gallone/Unsplash. It is illustrative, not an image of the field described in 2013.