New Mexico: La Mala Hora & Bigfoot

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip follows the High Road out of Chimayó and deep into the old Spanish villages of northern New Mexico, where generations have warned their children about what can happen when you linger at a crossroads after dark.

Here, the thing on the road is known as La Mala Hora—the Bad Hour. It doesn’t chase you. It doesn’t attack. It simply appears. Sometimes it looks like a woman dressed in black. Sometimes it is nothing more than a shapeless mass of darkness standing where two roads meet.

Witnesses say it can grow larger as you watch it, and according to the old stories, seeing it is not the danger. The danger is what comes afterward. By morning, someone close to you may be dead. This episode traces the legend from one of its earliest written accounts, folklorist Aurelio Espinosa’s story of a strange ball of wool that grew at a crossroads, through tales of owl-witches and mysterious fireballs in the Río Puerco Valley, and eventually into the Four Corners, where Highway 550 cuts across Diné country and outsiders have spent decades trying to put familiar names on things they may not fully understand.

Along the way, we revisit a series of unsettling encounters: a woman driving to the airport in 1978, a produce hauler traveling the grade south of Cuba, a girl on a bridge in Mora County, and a man on Highway 54 who struck a cow just two miles after driving straight through something that seemed to be standing in the road—but wasn’t there.

Then comes the story of an oil-field pumper who found herself being paced at 75 miles per hour by something running on four legs beside her vehicle. Something that eventually stood upright and looked directly through her window.

From there, the road climbs higher into the mountains for five Bigfoot encounters from a state that rarely gets the attention it deserves.

An elk hunter in the Jemez Mountains who lowered his rifle rather than pull the trigger.

A night-shift dispatcher on the road to Sandia Crest. A 17-year-old fishing the Middle Fork of the Gila. A woman alone at a family cabin outside Cloudcroft who discovered that her grandfather had seen the same creature from the same porch years earlier.

And finally, a sheep camp above Mora in 1962, on the only night one herder could remember seeing his dogs abandon the darkness and move behind the people for protection.Crossroads, mountain roads, old villages, and things that appear where nothing should be standing.

New Mexico has stories buried in its backcountry that go far beyond the legends most people know.

If you have a sighting, a story, or a stop you think belongs on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip map, email Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com, and find everything else at our website paranormalworldproductions.com.

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