Bigfoot Attacks Cyclists On Appalachian Trail In 2025 | BIGFOOT ENCOUNTER

The fog over the Jefferson National Forest doesn’t just roll in; it breathes. It clings to the ancient hemlocks of the Appalachian Trail like a damp shroud, swallowing sound and light until the world is reduced to a twenty-foot circle of gray. On March 22, 2025, that fog became a tomb.

Devin Matthews, Jake Rodriguez, and Marcus Thompson were not the kind of men who vanished. Devin was a creature of the technical descent, a mountain biker who viewed a 2,400-foot vertical climb as a warm-up. Jake, a former Marine, treated every excursion like a tactical deployment, his gear organized with the rhythmic precision of a man who had survived the Hindu Kush. Marcus was the eyes of the group, a professional photographer who lived to capture the “mystical” in the mundane.

They set out from southwestern Virginia for a five-day expedition, forty-seven miles of rugged, unmaintained trail. Only one of them would survive—and only in the most technical sense of the word.

The Anatomy of a Trap

The first sign that the forest had changed wasn’t a sound, but a structure. On the second day, the descent into White Top Laurel Creek was choked by massive tree falls. Jake, scanning the splintered wood, noted that the trunks hadn’t just fallen; they were interlaced.

“Storm damage,” Jake had muttered, though his hand drifted instinctively to the tactical knife on his hip.

Devin, however, recorded a different observation in his waterproof journal: The trees weren’t just down. They were laid out. Strategic. Like a barricade meant to turn us off the main line. We’re being funneled.

That night, the silence began. The Appalachian woods are usually a cacophony of nocturnal life—the screech of owls, the rustle of foraging raccoons, the persistent hum of insects. But as they camped near the Grayson Highlands, the woods went dead.

Devin’s journal entries grew frantic. He described “heavy, rhythmic footsteps” circling the tent—steps that displaced enough earth to be felt through the ground cloth, yet vanished whenever a flashlight beam cut through the dark. Jake found the first print by the stream: sixteen inches long, eight inches wide, with five clear toe impressions pressed nearly four inches into the sun-baked clay.

The Herding

By day four, the group realized they were no longer on a bike trip; they were being hunted. Every time they tried to double back toward the Damascus checkpoint, they found the trail blocked by fresh rockslides or “nests” of tangled laurel. The GPS showed them drifting further west, deeper into the “vortex” of the forest where the map lines blurred into white space.

The GoPro footage, recovered weeks later from beneath a pile of debris, reveals the psychological collapse of the group. In one clip, Marcus is adjusting his lens when a figure appears 75 yards out, standing perfectly still behind a screen of pine. It is bipedal, massive—estimated later by forensic experts to stand nine feet tall—and covered in hair the color of dried blood. It doesn’t growl. It just watches.

“It’s not an animal,” Devin’s final journal entry reads. “Animals kill for food. This thing is playing a game. It wants us to see it. It wants us to know that every exit is a wall.”

The Final 43 Minutes

The search teams that reached the site on April 5th found a scene of “unnatural violence.” Jake’s high-end mountain bike had been bent into a literal U-shape, the aluminum frame snapped like a twig. Marcus and Jake were found at the camp, but Devin was gone.

The GoPro, however, captured the end. The footage shows the creature stepping into the clearing at dawn. It didn’t rush. It moved with a terrifying, calculated focus. It disabled Jake first—not with a bite, but with a strike of such force it shattered his ribs instantly. Marcus ran, his camera shaking violently, capturing a glimpse of the creature’s face: deep brow ridges, a wide, crushing jaw, and eyes that held a cold, predatory intelligence.

The video ends with Devin sprinting through a thicket of rhododendrons. The sound of something heavy crashing through the brush behind him grows louder until a roar—a sound analyzed by linguists as having the frequency of a mountain lion mixed with a human scream—shatters the audio. Then, the screen goes black.

The Asheville Connection

Three months later, the nightmare found a twin. Kelly Morrison, a nurse and veteran hiker, emerged from the Pisgah National Forest with shredded clothes and a story that echoed Devin’s journal word for word. She and her friend Sarah had been stalked by “coordinated” beings.

Kelly described a “lead female” who took a blast of bear spray to the face, let out an “almost human” scream, and retreated—only to be replaced by three others who moved in a flanking maneuver. Sarah fell, her ankle snapping in a rock crevice. Kelly’s last memory of her friend was Sarah begging her to run as the shadows closed in.

Sarah’s backpack was found three days later. It had been neatly unzipped, its contents inspected and then shredded, but Sarah was never found.

The Silence of Authorities

The response from the National Park Service was a masterclass in obfuscation. Despite DNA samples from the Matthews campsite showing a “hybrid primate” sequence that matched nothing in the North American database, official reports blamed a “rogue bear.”

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by the families were denied under “National Security” exemptions—a bizarre classification for a wildlife attack.

To this day, the section of the trail near the Grayson Highlands remains closed. Rangers patrol the perimeter with high-powered rifles, but they don’t look for bears. They look up into the canopy, into the places where the fog never quite lifts.

The mystery of Devin Matthews isn’t that he disappeared; it’s the message he left behind. As researchers continue to broadcast “calls” into the woods hoping for a response, they miss the terrifying truth. Bigfoot isn’t trying to talk to us. He is talking to his brothers, coordinating the hunt, and waiting for the next set of tires to crunch on the gravel path.

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