Appalachian Folklore & Myths
On clear days the road up from downtown Norton curls through hardwoods, past picnic pull offs and salamander habitat, until the pavement narrows and the world drops away. At Flag Rock Overlook, three thousand feet above the streets and parking lots, you can see the whole Powell Valley cupped below High Knob. Somewhere between the flagstone wall and the forest edge another figure waits for visitors: a hulking metal Woodbooger, head bent, one arm crooked forward as if stepping out of the laurel.
This officially sanctioned monster did not simply appear one night in a swirl of mountain fog. In October 2014 the Norton City Council adopted a resolution that “hereby declared” the city a Sasquatch, Bigfoot, and Woodbooger sanctuary, citing the High Knob area as possible habitat and urging visitors to seek out the creature without harming it or its woods. A year later local businesses helped fund the statue that now greets hikers at the overlook and anchors an annual Woodbooger Festival.
For a town long known as a coal and railroad hub, the idea of a municipal Bigfoot preserve sounds like a punch line. Yet in Norton the Woodbooger has become something stranger and more interesting: a mascot for a new outdoor economy, a symbol of protected mountain habitat, and a case study in how Appalachian communities fold folklore into planning documents and tourism campaigns.
Flag Rock, High Knob, and a Coal Town on the Edge
Norton sits in Wise County in far southwest Virginia, a city of roughly four thousand people ringed by high ridges and decades of underground and surface mining. High Knob, just above town, is one of the wettest and most biologically diverse corners of the state, with more than twenty salamander species and sweeping views into Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and West Virginia from the observation tower.
In the 1970s the city began developing what became Flag Rock Recreation Area, a thousand acre municipal park three miles above downtown on the lower slopes of High Knob. Over the next decades Norton added campgrounds, picnic shelters, and trails. By the early twenty first century Flag Rock had become the centerpiece of a broader “Get Outside” campaign that framed outdoor recreation as part of the city’s transition away from coal.
Public media reporter Brittany Patterson, writing for the Ohio Valley ReSource in 2019, described how Norton officials saw the park and nearby public lands as a way to draw visitors and keep younger residents from leaving. New mountain bike trails, an upgraded campground, and plans for a downtown visitor center offered one path forward. The other path arrived in the form of a shaggy biped on cable television.
From Beast of Gum Hill to Finding Bigfoot
The modern Woodbooger story usually begins not in Norton itself but on a back road near Gum Hill, on the borderlands of southwest Virginia and neighboring Appalachia. In 2009 an ATV rider filmed a short, grainy clip of a large dark figure striding across a creek, a piece of footage that enthusiasts later dubbed “The Beast of Gum Hill.” The video circulated on YouTube and cryptid forums, where writers treated it as one of the more intriguing Appalachian Bigfoot clips and debated whether the shaggy shape was a hoax, a misidentified animal, or something stranger.
Producers for Animal Planet’s series Finding Bigfoot took notice. In 2011 the show filmed an episode titled “Virginia is for Bigfoot Lovers” that brought its cast and crew to southwest Virginia. According to both city tourism pages and later journalistic coverage, the team spent about a week in the region, holding town hall style meetings and scouting locations around High Knob, Saltville, Damascus, Washington County, and nearby hollows.
The episode treated the local Bigfoot stories as part of a broader pattern. For decades hunters, drivers, and campers across the Appalachian spine had reported tall, hair covered figures on back roads and ridgelines. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization maintains a database of eyewitness accounts that includes numerous southwestern Virginia reports, some of which explicitly describe the area around High Knob and the New River as a “hotspot” for such sightings.
What made Norton different was not simply that a television crew came to town. It was how the city chose to answer.
Declaring a Sanctuary for a Creature That May Not Exist
Three years after Finding Bigfoot filmed on High Knob, Norton officials put the Woodbooger into the public record. The key document is a one page resolution in the city’s document center titled “Resolution Declaring a Sasquatch / Bigfoot Sanctuary.”
The preamble traces the council’s reasoning in a series of “whereas” clauses. It notes that Finding Bigfoot filmed an episode in southwest Virginia in 2011 focusing on Bigfoot or Sasquatch, “locally known as the Woodbooger,” with an emphasis on the High Knob Recreation Area. It then suggests that if the creature is as scarce and rare as believers claim, and if High Knob and adjoining Norton recreation lands are possible habitat, the city should treat it as an endangered species and protect its home.
The operative language is brief but striking. The council resolves that “the City of Norton is hereby declared a Sasquatch /Bigfoot/Woodbooger sanctuary” and welcomes anyone who wants to find and photograph the creature, as long as they do not injure it or damage its habitat.
Municipal websites and tourism portals now echo that language. The official Flag Rock Recreation Area page notes that in October 2014 the council passed a memorandum declaring the park a Woodbooger Sanctuary, crediting the Finding Bigfoot visit as the inspiration. Norton’s tourism site, Norton VA Outside, puts it more bluntly for potential visitors: in October 2014 “the City of Norton passed a resolution declaring the city a sanctuary for Bigfoot (locally known as the Woodbooger).”
Here a local tall tale and a television show have been translated into the bureaucratic language of habitat protection. The city is not claiming to have scientifically proven Bigfoot’s existence. Instead it writes the possibility of the creature into law, then uses that framing to invite tourists to treat the surrounding forest with the same care one might give a rare animal.
Statues, Festivals, and the Woodbooger Effect
The 2014 resolution was only the first step. Within a year Norton had gone from declaring a sanctuary on paper to giving visitors something they could photograph even if the real Woodbooger stayed hidden.
Co operative Living magazine’s 2022 feature “The Legend of the Woodbooger” notes that the city erected a statue at Flag Rock Overlook in 2015, the year after the sanctuary resolution, and that local businesses chipped in to make the project possible. The sculpture, modeled on a popular commercial Sasquatch form, stands on a stone pedestal just off the overlook’s gravel path, where it has become a standard stop for families, hikers, and travel vloggers. Municipal material emphasizes that the figure represents a “Bigfoot like creature” known locally as the Woodbooger.
A local restaurant took the name Wood Booger Grill; a downtown hardware store began selling Woodbooger t shirts; regional guides and travel blogs now pitch hikes headlined as “In Search of the Woodbooger” that lead visitors from Legion Park on the valley floor up to the overlook and the statue. Birding Virginia’s site profile for Norton cheerfully mentions that Flag Rock Recreation Area is both a haven for high elevation songbirds and “a designated sanctuary for the Woodbooger, a subspecies of Bigfoot ostensibly found in Appalachia.”
By the mid 2010s Norton had also launched a Woodbooger Festival, held each fall at Flag Rock. City announcements and regional event calendars describe guided hikes, nighttime “Woodbooger hunts,” cryptid focused speakers, and family activities alongside 5K races and outdoor music.
In her public radio piece on Norton’s economic transition, Brittany Patterson labels this bundle of statue, festival, merchandise, and notoriety “the Woodbooger Effect.” After the Finding Bigfoot broadcast, she reports, tourists started arriving expressly to look for the creature. City manager Fred Ramey recalls that “no one even knew they had been here” while the show was filming, but that once word got out, visitors followed. The 2014 sanctuary resolution, festival, and statue are his city’s way of leaning into that attention.
Woodboogers, Salamanders, and Protected Places
The Woodbooger is not the only creature to win special recognition on Norton’s mountain. A separate city page describes a Green Salamander Sanctuary at Flag Rock, set aside for the arboreal Green Salamander, a rare species whose suction cup like toe pads and bright green markings make it stand out among the region’s unusually diverse salamander population.
That page begins by acknowledging the monster. “While the City of Norton is famous for being home to the fabled Woodbooger,” it notes, the city is also home to a creature that is “lesser known than the Woodbooger but just as fascinating,” and goes on to explain why the Green Salamander is scientifically important and sensitive to disturbance.
Birding and herpetology blogs pick up the same thread. A field report from the site Herping Virginia lists several salamander species encountered on a trip to Norton, including a Green Salamander found in a rock crevice at Flag Rock, and mentions in passing that the location is known as a Green Salamander Sanctuary. The writer ends the day by eating at a Woodbooger themed restaurant in town, treating cryptid branding and rare amphibians as two sides of one mountain experience.
Taken together, the Woodbooger Sanctuary and Green Salamander Sanctuary show how a small city can wrap playfulness and serious conservation around the same landscape. The Bigfoot language invites visitors to see High Knob as a place where something mysterious still lives. The salamander designation reminds them that some of those mysteries are fully real, measurable, and fragile.
Wood Boogers and Boogeymen in the Appalachian Imagination
Norton’s Woodbooger would not make sense, or draw visitors, without a longer regional tradition. The very name “Woodbooger” plays on an older southern and Appalachian vocabulary of “boogers,” “boogermen,” and “bogeys” that parents once invoked as child snatchers or cautionary figures tied to dark woods and hollows. Folklore bibliographies from the West Virginia and Regional History Center and studies of mountain märchen show how “booger” tales functioned as both entertainment and moral warning in rural communities.
Modern cryptid writers often connect that older boogeyman image to Bigfoot style stories. Online entries at sites like Cryptid Wiki describe the Wood Booger as a Bigfoot type creature in southwest Virginia and note that the name comes from rumors that it carried off young children “like the boogey man,” a phrasing that echoes more traditional scary stories.
Regional overviews of Bigfoot in Virginia, such as Colonial Ghosts’ “Bigfoot in Virginia” article, trace reports from across the state and emphasize that sightings cluster in mountainous southwestern counties similar to those around Norton. Books like L. B. Taylor Jr.’s Monsters of Virginia gather accounts of “wild men” and hairy creatures from nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers, long before the modern Woodbooger boom.
Recent essays by writers like Jeff O’Connor at Connect Paranormal push the analysis further. His 2025 piece “Wood Booger Legends: Myths of Appalachia Explored” argues that figures such as the Wood Booger embody stories about the relationship between humans and the forest, blending Indigenous ideas about powerful beings in the woods with European bogey figures and modern environmental anxiety.
In this light, Norton’s sanctuary resolution looks less like a one off joke and more like the latest entry in a long record of mountain communities talking about dangerous, sacred, or liminal spaces through the language of mysterious creatures.
Bigfoot, Tourism, and an Appalachian Future
Outside of Norton, other Appalachian towns have also turned cryptids into economic tools. West Virginia’s Mothman and Flatwoods Monster are the most obvious examples, but broader coverage shows that Bigfoot has become a regional tourist draw from western North Carolina to the Cumberland Plateau.
The podcast Outside/In devoted a 2024 episode, “Bigfoot is from North Carolina,” to this phenomenon. Reporters followed Bigfoot themed festivals, shops, and guided tours through southern Appalachia and spoke with residents who saw the creature less as a literal animal and more as a way to talk about wilderness, land loss, and local pride.
Norton’s Woodbooger fits neatly into that pattern. Brittany Patterson’s “Woodbooger Effect” section makes clear that officials do not imagine tourism as a magic fix for coal’s collapse. Recreation jobs rarely match former mining wages, and the city is simultaneously pursuing industrial redevelopment on a reclaimed surface mine. Yet the sanctuary and statue give Norton an image that sets it apart from hundreds of other small Appalachian towns trying to attract hikers and bikers.
Public television has started to notice. In 2025 Blue Ridge PBS aired an episode of Life in Virginia’s Appalachia focused on folklore that used the Woodbooger story and Norton’s sanctuary as a central case study. Folklorist Ricky Cox joined the program to talk about how tales of cryptids help mountain communities express both fear and attachment to their landscapes and how playful civic adoptions of monsters can still carry serious meaning.
From that perspective, the Woodbooger is not just a mascot on a t shirt. It is a way for Norton to say that its future is tied to High Knob’s forests rather than only to its coal seams.
Reading the Sanctuary as a Historical Document
For historians and teachers, the Woodbooger Sanctuary resolution is a reminder that primary sources do not always look like battle reports or census tables. Here a one page municipal action packs together a television show, a local nickname, environmental language about endangered species and habitat, and a city’s attempt to rebrand itself.
It also shows how official and unofficial stories intertwine. First hand testimonies on Bigfoot databases, podcasts like Backwoods Bigfoot Stories that collect oral accounts from hunters and drivers in southwest Virginia, and field posts from groups like the New River Valley Bigfoot Organization all frame the Woodbooger as a real creature. Municipal pages and televised documentaries frame it as folklore that nonetheless deserves a place in the city’s identity.
Skeptical readers may conclude that there is no ape like primate on High Knob. Believers will point to the Beast of Gum Hill video, BFRO case files, and personal experiences. Either way, Norton’s sanctuary invites everyone to act as if something rare and worth protecting lives on the mountain. In the process it nudges hikers and drivers to treat the place with a little more care, whether they are watching for green salamanders or for a dark shape stepping between the trees.
Sources & Further Reading
Norton City Council, “Resolution Declaring a Sasquatch / Bigfoot Sanctuary,” adopted 21 October 2014, City of Norton Document Center.Norton VA+1
City of Norton, “Flag Rock Recreation Area” and “Woodbooger Sanctuary” pages, official descriptions of the park, statue, and 2014 sanctuary memorandum.Norton VA+3Norton VA+3Norton VA+3
City of Norton, “Green Salamander Sanctuary” page, outlining salamander diversity on High Knob and Norton’s parallel sanctuary designation.Norton VA
Norton VA Outside tourism site, “Woodbooger” page, summarizing the 2014 resolution and listing Woodbooger themed businesses and events.Norton, VA Tourism
Birding Virginia, “Norton” site profile, describing Flag Rock, the Green Salamander, and the area’s designation as a Woodbooger Sanctuary.Birding Virginia
“2009 The Beast of Gum Hill ‘Woodbooger’ Bigfoot Video,” YouTube and related cryptid forum discussions, widely circulated as an early twenty first century southwest Virginia Bigfoot clip.YouTube+1
Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, “Reports for Virginia” and selected southwestern Virginia case files, a volunteer maintained database of eyewitness testimonies.bfro.net+2bfro.net+2
Brittany Patterson, “The Coal Town Betting Big on Outdoor Recreation,” Ohio Valley ReSource / WOUB / West Virginia Public Broadcasting, 27 September 2019, especially the “Woodbooger Effect” section on Norton.WOUB Public Media+2The Allegheny Front+2
“The Legend of the Woodbooger,” Co operative Living magazine, October 2022, on the sanctuary, statue, and festival as a boon for Virginia’s smallest city.Co-Op Living+1
“The Legend of the Woodbooger: Appalachia’s Mysterious Forest Guardian,” Real Appalachia, 2024, framing the Woodbooger as a forest guardian figure associated with High Knob and Flag Rock.realappalachia.com+2realappalachia.com+2
Life in Virginia’s Appalachia: Folklore (Blue Ridge PBS, 2023–2025), episode on the Woodbooger near Norton featuring folklorist Ricky Cox on Appalachian monster tales and identity.PBS+2blueridgepbs.org+2
“Wood Booger Legends: Myths of Appalachia Explored,” Connect Paranormal, 26 March 2025, discussing Wood Booger lore within longer Indigenous and European storytelling traditions.Connect Paranormal Blog
“Bigfoot in Virginia,” Colonial Ghosts, 2017, overview of Bigfoot reports across Virginia, with emphasis on southwestern counties.Williamsburg Ghost Tours+1
“Hike to Norton’s Flag Rock Overlook in Search of the Woodbooger,” Go Hike Virginia, 2020, trail description from Legion Park to the overlook and statue.Go Hike Virginia+1
Herping Virginia, “Salamanders in Norton,” 2021 trip report noting Green Salamanders at Flag Rock and dinner at a Woodbooger themed restaurant.HERPING VIRGINIA
“Bigfoot is from North Carolina,” Outside/In podcast, 2024, on Bigfoot’s legend and economic impact in Appalachia.Apple Podcasts+2GetPodcast+2
Cryptid Wiki, “Wood Booger” entry, and related online discussions of “booger” and “boogeyman” terminology in Appalachian monster lore.Cryptid Wiki+2the-bigfoot.fandom.com+2
West Virginia and Regional History Center, Appalachian folklore bibliographies and related resources on boogeyman tales and regional monster traditions.MapSquatch+1