Every story I ever heard that involved a person living in a tent in someone's backyard had a true crime connection
I once knew someone who was living in a shed in someone's back garden. Interestingly he was getting junk mail faster than the council sent him an eviction notice.
I second the implied HUGE FUCK NO on Appalachia. The people up there are basically uncontacted tribes.
What's the deal with Appalachia ? It seems a common location for horror films involving inbred locals and lonely gas stations with toothless attendants telling New York hipsters to take a short cut which turns out to be a really bad idea, and they mostly all die unpleasantly after having some gratuitous sex in the abandoned cabin which turns out not to be abandoned and is riddled with traps involving barb wire and cannibalism or something...
I lived in a van in a friend's driveway for a few months. Eventually hung out with them enough and moved into one of the rooms, which was better during winter, but I had to pay rent.
Whenever it gets warm like this, wilderness living gets on my mind. I can get to very remote wilderness locations far from a road or snooper that are 10 minutes from stores in my town on an ebike. I take some pemmican with me and I like the freedom of it. Knowing that you can be completely okay and even happy with just some pemmican, a water filter/bottle and a knife will reset any attachments to material items that you have.
If someone is charging you to put a tent in their back yard, I think the issue is that you don't have enough friends in your city who care about you. There would be about 5 different people offering one of their spare rooms to me for free if I asked to live in their back yard in a tent.
If you want to know more about the practicalities of wilderness living for free without being caught, I recommend the book on Vonu by the pseudonymous "El Rayo". It should be available as an audiobook on YouTube and Odysee. Rayo lived for free in the wilderness of the Siskyou region, all the way up to Bella Coola in British Columbia, while still operating a magazine and teaching in the late 60s. Rayo and his "freemate" experimented with truck camper living but eventually got rid of the vehicle and did full wilderness living with polyethylene tarp and on-site materials.