His Trail Camera Recorded Bigfoot Just Before It Attacked His Cabin – Sasquatch Encounter Story

💀 The Weight of the Wrong Target

The first snowflake of winter always brought with it a sense of deep, gnawing dread, a cold reminder of the previous year’s tragedy. Last winter, that dread almost killed me. It certainly stripped away everything I thought I knew about the wilderness and the monstrous nature of grief. Most people who’ve heard my account—the few I’ve dared to tell—label me a lunatic, a man whose sanity buckled under the weight of loss. Let them. I possess proof: two grainy images on a laptop, captured by a trail camera just hours before a creature I’d spent three years hunting for revenge nearly ended me. They show a Bigfoot lurking in the falling snow, a beast I believed had murdered my best friend. The truth, revealed in the darkest hour of the storm, was infinitely more complex and devastating.

The ghost of my friend, Mike, haunted those mountains. Three years prior, I’d lost him in the vast, unforgiving backwoods of northern Montana. We were inseparable hunting partners, men who understood the language of the forest as well as any naturalist. Mike could read a trail like a book—he knew the subtle shift in a bird’s call, the meaning behind every broken twig. Then, one October, he ventured out alone to scout an area so remote, it existed only on old trapper’s maps. He was due back in five days. On day six, I reported him missing.

The search was brutal. Massive, indifferent terrain swallowed the search and rescue teams. On the third day, they located his campsite. What they found spoke of violence and terror: a shredded backpack, its contents scattered; a sleeping bag ripped apart as if by massive claws; a tent torn to ribbons. But no body. No blood. Nothing but the wreckage and the photographs the police showed me. My skin crawls still when I recall the sheer impossibility of the footprints: eighteen inches long, seven inches wide, pressed deeply into the mud, suggesting a weight of several hundred pounds. Five toes, an arch, a heel—too human in shape, too monstrous in scale to be anything known.

The official conclusion, a pat, convenient lie, was a “distorted bear attack.” Case closed. Move on. But I couldn’t. Every seasoned hunter knew those weren’t bear tracks. I copied every photo, every file, and dove into a world of shadowed truth. I spent months cataloging unexplained disappearances, strange nocturnal howls, and massive, apelike footprints reported across the Pacific Northwest. My conclusion, one I knew would sound insane to the rational world, became my sole, burning reality: a Bigfoot had killed my friend.

The Architecture of Vengeance

For the next two years, I was consumed by a single, focused obsession: revenge. I quit my job as a construction foreman—my colleagues assumed I was having a breakdown—and liquidated my life, selling my truck and possessions to fund my own war. This wasn’t a casual trek with a rifle; this was a military-grade operation. I became a scholar of the cryptid: I studied every Bigfoot sighting, mastered indigenous tracking techniques, and practiced with my large-game rifle until I could hit a target at 300 yards in a crosswind.

On my apartment wall, the evidence was an altar to my obsession. Topographic maps, bristling with pins marking every recorded sighting, helped me calculate patrol routes based on water, food, and remoteness. I had reduced the creature to an enemy combatant, an equation to be solved. I carried Mike’s photo everywhere, a silent vow pressed against my heart. Justice, I believed, demanded I find out what really happened and put an end to the killer.

The reports suggested a creature that was smart, territorial, and most active in winter. My scouting led me to an abandoned trapper’s cabin, twelve miles from where Mike disappeared. It sat, a rotting shell, right in the heart of the most dense sighting cluster. I spent late fall repairing it, reinforcing the door, sealing the windows, and stocking it with six months of freeze-dried food and all the ammunition and emergency gear I could afford. Crucially, I set up a network of six military-grade trail cameras with heat-sensing infrared on a fifty-yard perimeter. They were my eyes, my tripwire. If the creature came, I would have proof.

The Confrontation in the Storm

I moved into the cabin in mid-December, just as the weather forecasts predicted a “once-in-a-generation” blizzard—the worst winter in decades. It was perfect. The intense cold and isolation would keep the human element away, allowing the creature to grow curious about the smoke and the smell of cooking food.

The first few weeks were a monotonous grind of survival: chopping wood, checking the cameras, battling the sub-zero cold. The silence was absolute, save for the wind’s eerie whistle. But then, the signs began. Wood stacked outside the cabin would be scattered. A frozen deer carcass vanished without a trace in the fresh snow. And then, the wood knocking began. Three deliberate, evenly spaced knocks, starting far off, slowly circling the cabin over hours, a sound reported in Bigfoot lore as a form of communication or intimidation. Whenever I opened the door, rifle in hand, the sound would cease, as if it knew I was listening, testing me.

Soon, the creature was circling the cabin just beyond the camera range. Massive handprints smeared the frosted glass. Rocks were stacked in strange formations near the tree line. It had taken the food I left out, avoiding the cameras with surgical precision. This thing wasn’t just an animal; it was strategic, aware of my surveillance, and actively outsmarting me. My heart raced and pounded against my ribs every time I pulled a memory card and found nothing but deer and elk.

The blizzard hit on January 7th. Winds over sixty mph, temperatures plunging to minus thirty. The world outside turned into a howling, swirling white oblivion. Huddled by the fire, I thought I was secure until my laptop chirped. An alert from Camera 3—motion detected.

I pulled up the feed with shaking hands. Through the heavy snowfall, there it was: a dark, massive humanoid shape standing between two pines. It was towering, its arms impossibly long, its shoulders broad. The conical skull shape, the sheer size—it was unmistakable.

A second ping. Camera 5. Closer now, circling. The image was clearer, showing the dark, matted fur, the incredible bulk, and the unsettling intelligence in the eyes reflecting the flash. Pings continued—Camera 2, Camera 6. It was moving fast, methodically completing its circuit.

This was it. Three years of grinding hatred culminated in this moment. The thing that killed my friend was twenty feet from my shelter. Fueled by pure, burning rage, I checked my rifle, pulled on my coat, and—ignoring every screaming survival instinct—stepped out into the suicidal storm.

The wind was a physical blow, the snow a billion tiny knives. I could barely see five feet ahead. I trudged toward the camera locations, navigating by instinct through knee-deep drifts. When I reached the first tree, Camera 2 was gone. Ripped clean off, the mounting bracket twisted like foil, the unit smashed in the snow. Deep parallel gouges marked the bark where massive claws or thick fingers had torn it away. The Bigfoot hadn’t just avoided my cameras; it had waited for the worst possible moment—when I was trapped inside—to systematically eliminate my surveillance system.

Freezing, hypothermic, and beaten, I finally checked the last camera—destroyed. I was outside for over an hour. My hands were numb blocks of ice, my feet unresponsive. I had failed. The hunter had become the desperate, retreating prey.

The Revelation in the Cave

I turned back, exhausted, my mind getting fuzzy from the cold, but relief flooded me when the dark shape of the cabin emerged from the swirling white. Then, a new horror. The door was off its hinges, the boarded windows smashed inward. Through the wreckage, I heard heavy footsteps, the crash of furniture—the Bigfoot was inside, destroying my shelter.

I stood frozen in the snow, rifle raised. This was the moment I’d planned for. But as a massive, dark shadow—eight feet tall, snow clinging to its fur—emerged from the broken doorway, I couldn’t shoot. The creature didn’t charge; it simply watched me, waiting. Then, I heard it: more movement. Heavy footsteps through the trees. There was more than one. Panic broke me. I fired wildly at shadows until my rifle clicked empty.

The creature charged. It hit me like a freight train, driving the air from my lungs. I flew backward, crashed, and the world went dark.

I awoke to the crushing, cold reality of pain: a throbbing head, two likely broken ribs, and a left arm screaming in agony—a dislocated shoulder, perhaps. I was alive, but stripped of my gear, lying on cold stone in a cave. And less than three feet from my face, the Bigfoot was crouched, watching me.

Rage returned. I swung my good arm at its face, but it casually swatted my fist aside, then pushed me back with a gentle, casual shove that sent jolts of fire through my ribs. Gasping, I screamed every curse I knew, calling it a killer, a monster, the murderer of my friend.

Then, through my tears, I reached into my pocket and pulled out Mike’s photo, holding it up to the creature’s enormous face. “This is who you killed!” I spat.

The Bigfoot did the unbelievable. It gently took the photo, held it up close, and studied the image with those dark, intelligent eyes. Then, it made a sound—low, deep, mournful—and looked from the photo to me, then back to the photo, and nodded. It knew.

The Final, Shameful Truth

The Bigfoot rose, its head hunched against the cave ceiling, and gestured outside. I followed, crippled, baffled, out of options. Outside, the storm had passed, revealing a world buried in snow and bathed in the weak, late afternoon sun. We were high up, the cabin gone. The creature, with its fluid, powerful gait, led me through the deep snow for ten grueling minutes, occasionally pausing to wait for my agonizing crawl.

It finally stopped in a small, pine-ringed clearing and pointed to a spot on the ground. I pushed forward until I saw it: a cairn, a pile of carefully stacked rocks, and scattered around it, Mike’s belongings—a camping mug, a torn piece of his unique blue Gore-Tex jacket, withered, brown flowers. This was a grave.

Tears of absolute grief and shock washed the snow from my face. My friend hadn’t been devoured and dragged away. He was here. Someone had buried him. Someone had mourned him. The creature that I had hunted for three years had brought me to my friend’s final, honored resting place.

Then, the Bigfoot pointed again, to the edge of the clearing. Stumbling over, I found the final piece of the puzzle: a circle of massive, long grizzly bear claws arranged like a trophy around a flat stone. The police had been right about the bear attack, but wrong about the rest. A massive grizzly had killed my friend, but it was the Bigfoot who had found the body, fought off the bear, and given Mike a proper, protected burial. The eighteen-inch footprints weren’t from the killer; they were from the mourner, the protector, the creature who had given my friend more honor in death than I had.

I fell to my knees, the shame and the crushing weight of my three-year hatred dissolving into pure, agonizing realization. I had hunted the wrong thing. I had tried to murder the only being that had shown my friend, and now me, any true compassion in the wilderness.

When I finally looked up, the Bigfoot was gone, vanished as silently as it had appeared, leaving me alone with my friend’s grave and my guilt.

Epilogue: The Stone of Truth

I made it out, hypothermic and broken, by following my compass south for two days, eventually being found by hikers. I spent three days in the hospital, telling the official story of getting lost in the storm and abandoning my cabin. I never mentioned the Bigfoot. Who would believe me?

Months later, when the snow melted, I returned with GPS, found the grave, and led authorities to the site, giving Mike’s family the closure they deserved. I never told them the truth about his protector. Some truths are too strange for the rational world.

I carried two things out of those mountains: Mike’s photo and a small, smooth stone from his cairn. I still have the photos from the trail camera, the images of the “killer” that would later save my life. They are my proof of a reality that science denies.

The real monster wasn’t the Bigfoot; it was the story of hatred and revenge I’d built in my own mind, a narrative that blinded me to the truth. The Bigfoot had fought, buried, and mourned my friend. It had saved me when I was dying in the snow after I tried to shoot it. It showed more grace and mercy than I deserved.

I don’t go into those mountains anymore. I’m done hunting. But I carry the stone from the cairn everywhere. It is a constant reminder of how hatred can blind you and how sometimes, the things we fear the most are not the monsters at all, but the hidden examples of compassion and humanity in a world that doesn’t always make sense. The creature that shouldn’t exist taught me more about being human than most people I’ve ever met. It earned its right to remain hidden, in peace. And I owe it at least that much.