podcast

Bigfoot Research in Oklahoma

What starts as Bigfoot in Oklahoma research doesn’t always stay that way. In Oklahoma, investigator Coleman Atchley and the team at Red Dirt Cryptid Investigations found themselves chasing reports that blurred the lines between cryptids, paranormal activity, UFO encounters, and something much harder to define. The deeper they went, the stranger the phenomenon became.

This conversation started as a discussion about Bigfoot research in Oklahoma and turned into something else entirely. Time slips. EVPs that talk back. The Lady in White showing up where she doesn’t belong. Places where phenomena stack on top of each other like bad architecture.

This is one of those interviews where the lines between categories collapse. Bigfoot. Paranormal. UFOs. Consciousness. The land itself doing something we don’t have language for yet. You’ll hear it unfold in real time.

Below is the written version of my conversation with Coleman Atchley , field investigator with Red Dirt Cryptid Investigations and the filmmaker behind Whispers From the Woods.

Coleman didn’t set out to be a documentary filmmaker. He started filming in 2021–2022 with friends who were brand new to Bigfoot research in Oklahoma. The first project was exactly what you’d expect. People learning as they went. Mimicking what they’d seen on TV. Hollering in the woods and cringing later.

But something stuck. The filming. The interviews. The fieldwork. Being in places where people reported encounters. That part hooked him.

After the first documentary, Coleman reached out to Brian of Red Dirt Cryptid Investigations. A message. A meeting. An invite to investigate. That was the beginning of a long collaboration with Brian and Eric, and eventually, Whispers From the Woods.

This time, Coleman wanted to do it differently. Less performance. More research. Something he could watch without embarrassment. In Bigfoot research, there’s a dominant framework. Flesh and blood. A biological species. A primate. Something explainable if we just find the right evidence.

Coleman started there, too.

But the longer you stay in the field, the harder it gets to ignore what doesn’t fit that model. Reports of mind speak. Cloaking. Lights. Experiences that don’t behave like animals.

And then there was the Lady in White.

Coleman jokes that he went looking for Bigfoot and found ghosts. But that experience changed how he understood the work. Not because he suddenly believed in the paranormal, but because he couldn’t unsee it.

When he started researching further, he found something unsettling. The Lady in White wasn’t just a haunted house phenomenon. She showed up in Bigfoot hotspots too. Places where multiple types of phenomena overlap. Not everywhere. But enough to notice a pattern.

Brown Springs doesn’t feel neutral.

Even people who aren’t into paranormal research describe it as heavy. Historically, it’s been a dumping ground. First for bodies in the 1800s. Later for organized crime. Violence layered on violence. Coleman didn’t know that history when he first had his experience. He didn’t research it until afterward.

What he remembers most is the woman’s hair. Wet. Clumped. As if she’d just come out of water. Her clothing looked 1800s. Her face had a Native quality. The possibility that she was a victim, not a symbol, lingers. Speculation, yes. But the land holds memory. And Brown Springs feels like it knows what it’s for.

Bigfoot sightings. Dogman reports. UFO activity. Paranormal experiences. They don’t compete here. They coexist. While filming Whispers From the Woods, the team followed witnesses to the location where a Bigfoot print had been cast. On the walk back, they heard it. A deep, guttural growl. Loud. Close. Too close.

Five times. It faded, then stopped. They searched. Nothing. Brian, who had always leaned toward the flesh-and-blood explanation, couldn’t reconcile it. Whatever made that sound should have been visible. It wasn’t. That moment shifted the entire documentary.

Later, at Brown Springs, while walking near the springs at the base of the cemetery, an EVP was captured. No one reacted at the time. No one heard it. Months later, while editing, Coleman isolated the audio. The voice was clear. Calm. Close.

“Say this place is haunted.”

It sounded like it was spoken directly into Brian’s lapel mic. Coleman wasn’t wearing one. No one remembers speaking. No one reacts on camera. The spectrogram made it stranger. Brian’s voice lights up the screen with layered frequencies, like a normal human voice should. The EVP appears as three faint purple dots. Minimal signature. Wrong shape.

Researchers familiar with EVP work say this happens. Clear voices without human vocal structure.

But that wasn’t the end of it. About thirty minutes after the EVP, the team conducted an EVP session in the cemetery. When Coleman starts the session, something feels off. He forgets how he usually begins. He hesitates.

Then he says it.

“A lot of people say this place is haunted.”

The same sentence. The same phrasing. The EVP had instructed him before he said it. No one knew until months later. Coincidence is possible. But it doesn’t explain why that exact phrase surfaced, unprompted, in a moment of confusion. One theory is subconscious pickup. Another is a feedback loop. Another is time folding in on itself.

Coleman describes another experience where an EVP recorder played audio out of order. Words spoken later appeared at the beginning of the recording. The opening appeared at the end.

It’s rare. But it happens. And it never happens at home. It happens in hotspots. Places where time feels thin. Flexible. Less linear.

I shared my own experience with sessions where language, imagery, and real-world events synced in real time. Not metaphorically. Literally. Birds. Volcanoes. Words spoken in trance were reflected moments later by people unaware of the session.

If time isn’t linear everywhere, then maybe these places aren’t haunted. Maybe they’re unstable. This is the question I couldn’t ignore. Why does the phenomenon keep interacting with Coleman? Not just appearing. Not just happening near him. But responding. Using his words. Folding him into the event.

Coleman doesn’t claim anything special about himself. But he talks about “lighthouse” people. Sensitive individuals who seem to draw activity, whether they want to or not. Not everyone notices. Not everyone reacts. But some people become part of the system. Observers and participants at the same time. That’s when things escalate. Coleman’s position is simple.

Bigfoot is weird.

It always has been.

Eight to nine-foot beings have been seen worldwide. Physical evidence without bodies. Telepathy reported by credible witnesses. Lights. High strangeness. Pretending this is just a primate problem is limiting the research.

At the same time, not everything in the woods is Bigfoot. Tall shadow figures throwing rocks may be categorized wrong simply because of location. If it happened in a house, we’d call it paranormal. In the woods, we call it Bigfoot.

That’s a problem. Without better categories, we can’t sort what’s happening. We just label and move on. Coleman is currently working on a Dogman documentary and preparing for a full-scale project focused entirely on Brown Springs.

Multiple investigations. Historical research. Folklore. EVP work. Time spent letting the place respond. Not chasing proof. Listening. Nothing in this conversation resolves cleanly. That’s the point.

If you’re waiting for the moment where someone explains it all, you won’t find it here. What you’ll find instead is a crack in the narrative. A place where explanations stop working.

Reports of strange lights, unseen presences, and unexplained entities appear in investigations all over the country. For another account involving shadow figures, antler entities, and activity near moving water, check out my article on paranormal encounters in the Pennsylvania woods.

Tall Shadow Figures in the Pennsylvania Woods

Reports of tall shadow figures have appeared in folklore, paranormal investigations, and witness accounts for decades. In this interview, investigators from Podcast of the Paranormal discuss years of encounters in a remote Pennsylvania woodland involving strange lights, antler entities, unexplained sounds, ritual activity, and a presence that seemed to interact with visitors in unsettling ways.

In this episode, Heather Woodward speaks with investigators from Podcast of the Paranormal about a series of encounters in a wooded area in Northeastern Pennsylvania that they have been investigating for several years.

The guests explain how they originally became involved in paranormal investigation, starting with team investigations in college and later returning to the field shortly before the pandemic. Their renewed interest led them to form their own team, with their first investigation taking place in a wooded location tied to local urban legends.

They describe the area as heavily forested, remote, and historically associated with reports of a woman in white, rumors of witchcraft and ritual activity, and a nearby hospital or asylum that burned down. The site is also located near moving water and is accessed by walking a significant distance away from visible roads or lights.

During early visits, they began observing unexplained lights in the woods. These lights appeared in multiple colors, did not behave like lightning bugs, and seemed to increase in activity depending on the emotional state of the investigators. Over time, they noticed the lights became dimmer after nearby construction work altered the flow of a stream.

The investigators describe performing ritual work at the site to attempt direct communication with whatever presence might be there. They report that the communication was brief and conveyed that it was time for them to leave. After this initial interaction, the presence did not visually manifest again, though the investigators continued returning to the site regularly and leaving offerings.

They recount a specific night in April following a full moon when multiple people were present. After walking family members back to their vehicles, the remaining investigators stayed near their cars. At that point, they began hearing movement in the woods and observed a large shadow cross the road. Shortly afterward, something charged toward them from the woods, producing heavy footsteps and animal-like sounds.

They describe encountering a large, black shadow figure estimated to be seven to eight feet tall with prominent antlers. The witnesses perceived the figure differently, with one describing it as upright and humanoid and another describing it as moving on all fours. When flashlights were directed toward it, the figure disappeared immediately. All witnesses reported feeling that the encounter was a clear signal to leave the area.

Since that night, the investigators report consistently feeling watched and sensing a boundary when visiting the location at night. They describe additional Estes sessions that referenced doorways, instructions to enter the water, and requests involving offerings and penance.

They note environmental patterns associated with the site, including moving water, underground mines, alterations to the land, and disappearing rocks previously used as seating or altars. They report that offerings left at the site appeared to be acknowledged through changes in the environment, including arrangements that mirrored the number of people present.

The conversation expands to include broader patterns observed by Heather Woodward across similar locations, including the presence of converging waterways, underground disturbances, traumatic histories, and proximity to nuclear power plants. The guests confirm that their site feeds into the Susquehanna River and is located within proximity to a nuclear facility.

They also discuss a specific instance where an Estes session instructed them to return on November 5th, coinciding with election night. The group describes widespread feelings of unease and disorientation on that date, as well as inconsistencies in intuitive and tarot-based predictions.

Additional corroborating experiences are discussed, including childhood encounters with shadow figures in cemeteries, later confirmed by other witnesses, and accounts from other investigators who independently reported similar sightings in the same Pennsylvania location.

Throughout the episode, the guests emphasize that they still do not know what the entity or phenomenon is. They acknowledge similarities to folklore, cryptid reports, and nature spirit traditions but do not settle on a definitive explanation. They continue to visit the site regularly, perform investigations, and leave offerings while remaining cautious about further contact.

Encounters with tall shadow figures appear in reports from all over the world. If you’re interested in recurring paranormal patterns, you may also enjoy my article on Gates of Hell Cemetery and the strange entities reported at one of Oklahoma’s haunted locations.

The Legend of Gates of Hell Cemetery

Some places earn their reputation. Gates of Hell Cemetery in Oklahoma is one of them. For decades, locals have shared stories of strange rituals, shadow figures, unexplained encounters, and a landscape that seems to carry its own unsettling energy. In this interview, paranormal investigator Jason Walker shares his experiences with one of Oklahoma’s haunted locations.

Some places don’t just get haunted. They get scared. They get used. They get fed, over and over, until the land develops its own appetite.

When I sat down with Jason Walker, I wasn’t expecting the usual campfire stories. Jason’s been in this long enough to know the difference between a cheap scare and something that alters your nervous system. And the things he’s seen in southern Oklahoma sit in that category people whisper about but never really unpack.

He’s a seasoned investigator, an author whose novel The Gates of Hell and the Demons That Protect It is based on true events, and a guy who’s seen enough to understand that most hauntings are just personality carryovers. Assholes in life stay assholes in death. Not everything is a demon. Not everything is a portal. But every now and then, something is.

Jason grew up hearing about a family cemetery along a river locals have called “The Gates of Hell” since before he was born. Not in a cheesy, urban-legend way. More in that “everyone knows what happens out there, but nobody says it out loud” kind of way.

In the seventies, the place was a magnet for satanic ritual groups. There was a giant burnt-out pit in the middle of the cemetery, actual 13-foot metal gates that looked like something from a medieval fever dream, and a stretch of treeline leading toward where people claimed there was a hidden church deep in the woods. A church that only appears when it wants to.

As a kid, Jason watched a group of robed figures cross the field toward the cemetery carrying torches. Black robes, no faces. His mother screamed, threw him in the car, and peeled out. That memory stayed with him.

Years later, he went back as a teenager. Of course he did. Curiosity always wins.

He and two friends crossed through the cemetery into the open field and headed for the woods. The place was already weird with trenches in the field, old land scars, the river moving in the dark, and the deeper they walked, the heavier it felt.

Their first scare was a possum. The kind of jump scare that makes you laugh after you realize your body prepared for war.

The second scare wasn’t funny.

Jason’s flashlight caught a pair of glowing yellow eyes low to the ground. Then those eyes rose. Higher. Higher. Until whatever that thing was stood around 13 feet tall. The eyes were three feet apart. Massive. Darker than the dark surrounding it.

Then two more stood up beside it. Three of them. All huge. All silent. There was no body visible, just height and presence. Jason wasn’t thinking Bigfoot at that moment. He wasn’t thinking anything except: nothing in these woods is that tall.

Then one of them made a noise — a deep, impossible sound that shook all three of their bones. The other two flanked them in the trees. Surrounded. Predator-logic, not haunting-logic.

The three of them ran for their lives, branches tearing their faces, stumbling through trenches, every primal alarm going off. Jason kept checking behind him, making sure the other two were ahead while he covered the rear. Whatever those things were, they were closing in on both sides.

By the time they reached the cemetery again, one was already standing inside it, watching them leave. Just watching. They got in the car and escaped. Barely. Jason has never forgotten the feeling. It wasn’t a ghost. It wasn’t a typical cryptid. It wasn’t demonic because they were allowed to leave. Whatever it was had orders. Territory. Purpose.

So What Lived in That Forest? Jason leans toward a hybrid answer. Maybe Bigfoot-like. Maybe demonic-adjacent.
Maybe guardians of an old ritual site. Maybe something that once had form and no longer needs it. Maybe a creature tied to the land long before humans showed up. Whatever they were, they weren’t random.

They let him leave. They wanted him gone. They wanted to protect whatever was deeper in those woods.

And the land around them holds all the ingredients for high strangeness: moving water, heavy history, ritual scars, electrical infrastructure, and an old story locals still whisper.

Haunted cemeteries are only one piece of the paranormal puzzle. If you’re interested in locations where folklore, history, and unexplained experiences collide, you may also enjoy my article on Rush, Arkansas and the stories that still linger around one of the Ozarks’ most famous ghost towns.

Childhood Paranormal Experiences and Family Patterns

Childhood paranormal experiences are easy to dismiss when you’re young. Adults call them imagination. Nightmares. Overactive minds. But what happens when multiple people in the same family grow up having strange encounters, seeing unusual things, and sharing experiences that don’t fit neatly into any conventional explanation? In this conversation, the Woodward sisters compare notes on ghosts, psychic experiences, family stories, UFO encounters, and the weird moments that followed us from childhood into adulthood.

This episode is exactly what happens when you put three psychic sisters in a room and ask them to talk about childhood paranormal experiences. The question we start with is the big one.

Why did we have so many paranormal experiences growing up?

No one knows. Maybe it’s the old family witch stories. Maybe it’s unresolved generational trauma. Maybe it’s because our parents were too distracted fighting with each other to notice the children communing with spirits in the hallway. We grew up Baptist but also somehow feral and psychic. Ghosts were treated the same as burnt toast. You point it out, the adults shrug, and everyone goes on with their day.

From there, each of us takes turns unpacking our earliest memories.

Sarah goes first with the dead cat sitting on her chest, fully formed and warm, even though they had buried it days earlier. Her brain took a few seconds to catch up: oh right, that cat is dead. It blinked, stared, existed, and then vanished. Later, she remembers full-body hallucination episodes where people morphed into each other in front of her, but that was during the infamous stoner-night portal she and Rachel accidentally opened at the Chrisman house. THC plus two psychic teenagers equals shape-shifting cousins. Classic.

Rachel’s experiences revolve around faces layered on faces. Since childhood, she’s always seen another image superimposed over the person talking to her. Masculine, androgynous, sharp eyes watching through her. She’s the one who shared the portal story: sitting across from their cousins while their faces melted, swapped bone structure, and turned into other people entirely. Both sisters saw the exact same thing at the exact same time, silently, for ten minutes straight. No one else in the room noticed a thing.

Rachel also had a couple of strange physical encounters. A man at the Renaissance Faire grabbed her hand and wouldn’t let go—no one else saw him. A palm reader once took one look at her lines, went pale, shut the hand, backed away, and refused to explain. She avoided Rachel the rest of the night and fled the hotel the next morning. Rachel spent years half-convinced she died in the car crash and is living on borrowed time.

I share my first memory too. Five years old, Santa Rosa Street. An enormous glowing winged being in the back room with eyes blinking independently across its feathers. I talked to it like it was a spirit guide. It never scared me, just startled me with how intense it looked. Later, I nearly fell off the Grand Canyon following… something. My mom claims I actually did fall and was pushed back by something unseen. It fits the theme of our childhood: children running wild, almost dying constantly, yet somehow protected.

We talk about inherited fear. Rachel and Sarah both had childhood terror about being taken in the dark. Blanket burrowing. Nightlights. Worm-tunnels made of quilts as a defense system. Both of them have water fears, too. Meanwhile, I’m the weirdo who takes showers in the dark and walks around the house without lights on.

There’s a lot of talk about telepathy. All three of us did it. Rachel used to hear people’s thoughts as external voices. I used telepathy to call my son home when he was little; he’d stomp upstairs, annoyed that I was “in his head.” Rachel used to dream-interrogate her partners without meaning to and start fights the next day based on conversations that only happened on the astral plane. Empath hell.

Then we drift into the Santa Rosa house hauntings. Wet footprints that appeared out of nowhere. A bearded man in the bathroom who vanished when Dad came running. A face that showed up in the glass door at random hours. Kitchen footsteps pacing back and forth all night. Dad’s houses were always more haunted than Mom’s.

Someone in the audience asked whether we believed in a “father’s curse”—the idea of generational depression or misfortune moving down the male line. We talk about trauma inheritance, both sides of the family, and the long line of dysfunction, violence, and emotional damage that gets passed around like heirlooms. There’s also the longstanding rumor in our family that the women are cursed to be single. It tracks. Nobody’s married, nobody stays with anyone, and the teepee ritual our relatives did decades ago didn’t fix shit.

Then the alien abduction bomb gets dropped, because of course it does. Rachel remembers sleep-paralysis episodes at the Chrisman house. I explain the research linking female abductees to later cancers and hysterectomies. Sarah immediately goes, “Oh shit,” because she lost her ovaries in three separate surgeries. One surgeon even said she talked to him during anesthesia—about what, he refuses to say. The tumor they removed had hair and teeth, basically trying to grow itself into something else. We joke about aliens, but the pattern fits way too well.

We end the episode laughing about microchips, South Park jokes, and who’s getting abducted next. Sarah volunteers as tribute because she’s “not fertile anymore.” Classic Sarah exit line.

That’s the episode. A full tour through our childhood encounters, psychic wiring, generational weirdness, hauntings, portals, curses, fears, and maybe a few UFO-adjacent medical mysteries. Just another Tuesday in the Woodward family.

Childhood paranormal experiences often leave people searching for answers later in life. If you’re interested in lifelong encounters with the unexplained, you may also enjoy my interview with Alison Hartman about her decades of ET contact experiences.

What Is a CE5 Event?

We attended a CE5 event in Berryville, Arkansas to see firsthand what happens when a group gathers with the intention of making contact. Part meditation circle, part UFO watch, and part social experiment, the evening produced some interesting experiences and raised a few questions about the nature of contact itself.

If you’ve ever been to a CE5 event, you know the vibe. It’s not “we’re hunting aliens.” It’s more “we’re raising the room’s frequency, asking the sky politely, and hoping something answers.”

The facilitator’s approach was gentle. Very love-and-connection focused. That worked for the newbies and for the people who need a safe container to open up. Sarah actually liked that part. It felt sweet, grounded, and human.

I’m not built for the soft opening credits. I’m already plugged into the ether before my shoes are off. I don’t need the warmup. And I definitely don’t want anything touching me. Consent-only paranormal. Always.

We started inside with a guided meditation in a circle. Not everybody “sees” visuals during meditation, so there was a lot of discussion about how people receive things differently. Some people feel. Some people see. Some people just get knocked sideways by an energy shift and spend the rest of the time wondering if their nervous system is glitching.

There was an energy shift.

A few people felt something move through the room, like a presence checking everyone in the circle. Sarah felt a distinct touch and immediately did the correct thing, which is basically “get off me” in shoulder-shake form.

There was also a heavy feeling near the door. That quiet “something is standing there” sensation. The kind that doesn’t need a spotlight to be obvious.

Then we went outside.

Skywatching, weird lights, and the red thing

Outside, we did more meditation and skywatching. There were planes, and you could tell they were planes because they sounded like planes and behaved like planes. Then there were other things. There were intermittent flashes. Brief. Sharp. Gone before you can make your brain cooperate.

And there was the red hovering thing.

A hovering red light that had multiple people tracking it. At one point, a smaller group of us started walking toward it across an open field, which is objectively how you end up as a Dateline special. It hovered. It held. Then it drifted off and disappeared.

There were also reports of military jets overhead, which stood out because that isn’t normal for that area at that time of night. Planes had sound. The hovering thing didn’t.

You could feel the difference. And when you’ve lived near bases, and you know what jets look and sound like at night, you don’t confuse that with a silent hovering light. The contact event itself stayed pretty gentle.

What got intense was everything it stirred up around it.

The conversation slid from aliens into memory gaps, sleep paralysis, astral projection, and that familiar question that always shows up at the worst possible time: what the hell is consciousness anyway?

We talked about missing time from a teenage night near Rocketdyne, a big light in the sky, and the weird blank space after it. About how multiple people remember the light but not the in-between. About how curiosity is sometimes the exact thing that gets you into trouble.

We ended up circling an old thread I forgot existed.

Sarah remembered a “greaser” type figure from my teen years. A presence, an invisible friend, a guide, a whatever-the-hell-it-was. I didn’t remember him at all until she described him, and my brain went cold and clicked.

Then I remembered dreams. Pegged black pants, leather jacket, the Outsiders vibe. A sense of familiarity so strong it feels like emotional fraud. And the creepiest detail: eyes flashing green, then red.

If that sounds like a spirit guide, a thoughtform, an old astral ally, a trauma-born protector, or a straight-up glitch in the simulation… welcome to the episode. One of the things we kept circling back to is how different people react to the same invisible world.

I lean in. Always have.

As a kid, I heard the pacing in the kitchen, stared into the dark like “who are you and what do you want?” and treated it like research.

Sarah got hit with the physical realism. The bearded man. The dead cat she could feel purring until she remembered it was dead. The Ouija board chaos in a house where the vibe already felt wrong. That kind of thing doesn’t make you curious. It makes you build a brick wall and set it on fire.

So when we go to something like a contact event, we’re not starting from the same nervous system.

That matters.

It doesn’t make one of us “more open” or “more blocked.” It means our bodies learned different safety rules. The takeaway: The Berryville contact night was a good experience. Gentle. Weird in the right ways. Interesting without turning into chaos.

But the real story isn’t “did we see aliens?”

It’s this:

When you intentionally open the door, even a crack, you don’t always get what you asked for. Sometimes you get the sky. Sometimes you get your own timeline. Sometimes you get the ghost of a boy you forgot you ever knew, tapping the glass from the inside like, hey… remember me?

If you’re interested in contact experiences and UFO phenomena, you may also enjoy my article on the Hopkinsville Goblins encounter and the strange patterns that continue to appear throughout UFO research.