Woodbooger

Old-timers in the southwest Virginia coalfields have always known the high country wasn't empty. 'Booger' is the mountain word for a haunt or a frightful thing, and a 'woodbooger' is precisely that — the big hairy something that lives back in the woods and has no business being there by any ordinary reckoning. Long before the cryptid was on a T-shirt, it was a thing parents named to keep children off the dark ridges after supper.

The creature came into its own around High Knob and the Flatwoods above Norton, where the terrain is steep, the timber is thick, and a nine-foot animal could pass a lifetime unseen. The defining detail, the one that separates the Woodbooger from a plain Bigfoot, is the eyes — a deep, glowing red that hunters swear shines back out of the laurel at the edge of a flashlight beam, low and patient and entirely too high off the ground.

Reports out of the High Knob highlands follow the familiar Appalachian shape: a towering upright figure crossing a forest road, heavy footfalls and snapping brush in country where nothing that size should be, an overpowering musky stink, and those red eyes hanging in the dark. Hunters, hikers, and folks driving the back roads above Norton have logged encounters for decades, told and retold in country stores and on tailgates across Wise County.

Rather than hush it up, Norton leaned all the way in. The town hosts an annual Woodbooger Festival that draws cryptid enthusiasts and Bigfoot researchers from across Appalachia, a stretch of nearby forest was even dubbed Woodbooger territory, and you can get a bite in town at the Woodbooger Grill. The creature has become a genuine point of local pride — proof that the mountains kept something the rest of the country only daydreams about.

Skeptics line the Woodbooger up with every other Bigfoot: misjudged bears standing upright, the play of red eyeshine from ordinary animals, the human gift for turning a shape in the dark into a story by morning. And the southwest Virginia mountains, vast and steep and thinly traveled, are exactly the kind of country where a story like that can root deep and grow tall without anyone ever pinning it down.

But the believers have the terrain on their side. High Knob and the surrounding hollers run for miles of rugged, near-roadless forest, and the people who live closest to it are the ones who take the Woodbooger most seriously. Norton has turned its mountain haunt into a mascot without ever quite explaining him away — and up in the laurel above town, when two red coals come on in the dark and rise to meet your eyes, no festival in the world makes that feel like a joke.