The Woodbooger of Norton, Virginia: Legend, Statue & Festival

In most of the country, a big hairy figure in the woods is Bigfoot or Sasquatch. In the coalfield mountains of Southwest Virginia, people have another name for it: the Woodbooger.

The name sounds like a joke, and the little city of Norton has leaned into the fun. It has a giant statue, an official sanctuary resolution, a fall festival with a night search, and a word that shows up on T-shirts, menus and trail signs. But the Woodbooger also sits on top of a real tradition of mountain storytelling, the kind told to keep kids out of the woods after dark.

Here's what we found when we dug into the records.

Norton is an independent city in Wise County, in the far southwestern tip of Virginia, close to the Kentucky line. Wikipedia lists its population at 3,687 in the 2020 census, which makes it one of the smallest cities in the state.

It sits at the foot of High Knob and the Flag Rock area of the Jefferson National Forest. That's steep, wooded, often foggy country, cut with hollows and old logging and mining roads. If you were going to invent a place for a forest creature to live, you'd probably invent something like it.

According to Cooperative Living magazine, Norton officials researching the legend found a newspaper article from The Old Post, dated November 24, 1892, that referred to a Bigfoot-like "Woodbooger." The magazine suggests the name may come partly from "boogeyman."

The folklore site Spooky Appalachia tells the same story about the 1892 article and adds the reason behind the name: the creature was said to carry off children who wandered into the woods at night. In other words, it started out as a warning, the same job the boogeyman does in a lot of families.

We weren't able to view a scan of that 1892 article ourselves, so treat the date as the one the city and these writers report rather than one we've confirmed in the original paper.

"Woodbooger" also fits a broader Appalachian habit of giving local names to wild-man figures. If you like regional names, our list of Bigfoot names by state has dozens more.

The modern Woodbooger story starts with television.

The City of Norton's official Woodbooger Sanctuary page says that in 2011, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot "spent a week in Southwest Virginia filming an episode that features scenes from High Knob, as well as Washington County, Damascus, and Saltville."

A PBS documentary series, Life in Virginia's Appalachia, adds some local color. In it, locals connect the TV visit to a YouTube clip called "The Beast of Gum Hill," which they say showed a large Bigfoot-like figure crossing a creek in front of a father and son on ATVs in April 2009. A speaker in the PBS program recalls that the show's team stayed up on High Knob overnight listening and even put powdered sugar on the ground to try to catch footprints. The PBS speakers place the filming in 2012, while the city says 2011; we use the city's date.

After the episode aired, people who live in the area started telling their own stories. One local in the PBS program describes hearing "screams in the woods that they couldn't understand," wood hitting on trees, and glimpses of something walking across the road.

Cooperative Living quotes a city official describing what happened next. After the show aired, two employees at Norton's local hardware store, known as "Big O" and "Pickle," began printing and selling Woodbooger T-shirts. "It all sort of blossomed from there," he told the magazine.

According to the same article, the city then obtained a service mark for the Woodbooger name from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to use in promoting tourism. That's a smart move. It means the name works for the whole town, not just one shop.

Spooky Appalachia mentions a downtown restaurant with Woodbooger in its name, plus guided search hikes. The city's sanctuary page says local businesses sell Woodbooger merchandise.

On October 21, 2014, Norton City Council adopted a resolution "declaring a Sasquatch/Bigfoot sanctuary." We read the original document on the city's website. The resolution says:

The whole thing is written with a wink, and it's built on "ifs." It still does something useful: it tells visitors to look, photograph and enjoy without hurting anything. Norton is one of several American communities to take a step like this. Our upcoming post on Bigfoot laws and sanctuaries covers the others, from Skamania County, Washington, to Derry, Pennsylvania.

The most photographed Woodbooger in the world is made of resin, and it lives at Flag Rock Recreation Area.

The city's sanctuary page puts it this way: "If walking the gravel footpath to the Flag Rock Overlook in Flag Rock Recreation Area, you can't miss the giant statue of a Bigfoot-like creature located just beyond the parking area."

Cooperative Living reports that the city put up the statue in 2015, after the council's 2014 sanctuary vote. A speaker in the PBS program explains that a private fundraiser in 2014 raised enough to buy the statue and several plaques that tell a bit of the history.

Tips for visiting:

The Woodbooger Festival is Norton's annual fall celebration. According to the city's festival page, it was "created to celebrate Norton's unique city and mountain landscape, as well as its natural resources, folklore, and history." Events take place in downtown Norton and then move up to Flag Rock Recreation Area.

The city lists these attractions:

The 2026 festival is scheduled for September 25–27. The city says to check back for the full schedule of events. Contact for the festival is Rebecca Kilgore with the City of Norton, listed on the official page. Vendor registration for 2026 is open through the city.

A bit of history: In the PBS program, a local organizer recalls that the first festival, in 2014, drew close to 900 people. Visitors came from the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee. The early festivals had costumed characters along the trails who would tell walkers, "Yeah, I've seen him right over here." The same speaker says the event paused after 2019 because of COVID. The city's current page shows it running again, with the 2026 dates above.

Find the festival on our Bigfoot festivals map and in our roundup of Bigfoot festivals for 2026.

Not every Bigfoot town approaches it the same way. In the PBS program, a Norton official contrasts the city with gatherings where people go into the woods seriously hunting for evidence. "We, on the other hand, we want to do it for an entertainment purpose," he says. "We want to bring people to our city to visit the Flag Rock, to get up on the mountain."

That's a big part of what makes Norton fun. You don't have to believe anything to enjoy a statue, a night hike and a funnel cake. And if you are a believer, the hills around High Knob are as good a place to listen as any.

We also checked the public BFRO-based dataset we use for our maps. It includes 73 mapped Virginia reports (through 2021), ranging from 1957 to 2021. The counties with the most entries are Rockingham (6), followed by Wythe, Giles and Franklin (4 each).

The far southwest corner is quiet in this dataset. Wise County has no mapped reports, and the neighboring counties of Scott and Dickenson have one each:

That doesn't prove anything either way. The dataset only includes reports that were submitted to one organization and had map coordinates, and plenty of people never report what they see. It's also a reminder that the Woodbooger is mostly a story about place, community and folklore, not a data hotspot.

If you've had an experience in Southwest Virginia, see our guide on how to report a Bigfoot sighting.

The Woodbooger is what happens when an old mountain warning meets a TV crew and a town with a sense of humor. Norton took a word with roots in the 1890s and built a sanctuary, a statue and a festival around it. Whether you come for the legend, the view or the Night Search, Flag Rock is a fine place to stand on a fall evening and listen to the hollows below.

Event details change. Always confirm dates and schedules on the City of Norton's festival page before you travel.