Bigfoot Killed 6 Hikers — Alleged REAL Bigfoot Footage Caught on Camera

There are six people I should have brought home, and I think about them every single day. We had two videos that never went public. One showed something dragging a man off a trail, and one from our own equipment proved it wasn’t a joke. I was there when we found them, and I was there when the decision was made to tell the public nothing.

I was a field ranger with the Forest Service when it happened, working the south end of the Gifford Pinchot. Back then, I was in my mid-thirties, no kids, still taking more patrol shifts than desk time. I lived in a rental outside of Carson with a half-broken washer and a dumb old Labrador that shed in the truck more than he rode in it. My job was gates, trailheads, vandalism, lost hikers, and small fires—the unglamorous stuff. On top of that, I was one of the Search and Rescue liaisons the county used when they needed someone who knew the back roads and the unofficial spur trails. That meant when a hiker didn’t come home, my phone went off.

The call that started all of this came in on a Sunday night in early spring, during one of those gray stretches where the clouds just park over the mountains and refuse to leave. I had finally pried my boots off and had a game on low, not really watching, when the phone lit up with the Sheriff’s Office number. It was Mark Decker. He was a sergeant then, a stocky guy with a calm voice who had been running SAR callouts long enough that he didn’t waste words.

“You sitting down?” he asked.

“Yeah. What do you need?”

“Overdue couple. Vehicles at Micah Creek. Looks like they left Friday morning, were supposed to be back yesterday. Friend called it in. You know the area.”

I saw it immediately in my head. Micah Creek is a gravel turnout off a rutted spur, with old timber cuts regrown above it. It wasn’t the worst place to get turned around, but it wasn’t gentle. “What’s their experience level?”

“Weekend hikers,” Decker said. “Megan Shaw, Luke Fenner. Responsible types. I’m heading to set up the mobile unit. You able to meet us?”

I drove out into the gray. The Micah Creek trailhead isn’t fancy—just a brown carite post, a beat-up metal box for the register, and enough room for six vehicles. When I arrived, there was the Sheriff’s command trailer and a blue Subaru with a climbing gym sticker. That was our couple. Decker was at a foldout table, map spread.

“No obvious damage to the car,” he said. “Check the register.”

I scanned the list. Friday morning. Megan Shaw, Luke F. Planned route: loop back by Saturday. But above them was a name I recognized before I even told myself why. Kelsey Rainer.

“You know her?” Decker asked.

“Missing person out of Lewis County a couple of weeks back,” I said. “Solo hiker. Different jurisdiction, different drainage, but it’s the same forest.”

Decker frowned. “We’ll loop that in with the detective. For now, we treat this like any other overdue callout.”

We brought in the first wave of volunteers within an hour. I took a team up the main trail with Lena, a volunteer who had a German Shepherd named Duke. The dog had more hours in these woods than most humans. The trail climbed quickly through second-growth fir. The soil was soft under the duff, good for tracks. About a mile in, Duke stopped. He didn’t bark; he just slowed, nose working the edge of the trail, and turned a tight circle.

“That’s weird,” Lena said. “He’s got scent, then he loses it.”

We moved twenty yards further and found the first sign: a jacket, light teal, snagged on a branch just off the trail. The sleeve was torn right along the seam, a clean failure of stitching where something had pulled hard. It matched the photo of Megan Shaw we’d seen. We flagged it and kept moving. Ten yards later, we found a trekking pole snapped clean in two.

I looked for tracks near the break. There were impressions in the soft soil, but they were wrong. They were bare-looking, wider than my palm, longer than my own boot, with toes splayed.

“Bear?” Decker asked when he came up to look.

“No claws,” I said, pacing heel-to-heel on the faint marks. “And the stride is too long for someone wandering casually.”

We pulled the teams as dark came on. The rain started around midnight, the kind that soaks into your bones. I sat in my truck, looking at the map where Decker had marked red circles. I tried not to picture the teal jacket in the dark.

The first video didn’t come from the hikers. People always assume the footage came off a GoPro or a phone found in the dirt. It didn’t. It came from us.

On the second day of the search, the district office reminded Decker about a trail camera we’d set up months prior near a decommissioned spur road. We were using it to time patrol unit response, not for wildlife. It was pointed down an overgrown track where log trucks used to run. I went to retrieve it alone.

The spur was quiet, the gate still locked. I hiked in, popped the SD card, and sat in my truck to review it on a tiny, dashboard-mounted DVR screen. I scrolled through files of empty trails and deer. Then, the next file opened.

At first, the frame was full of leaves, as if something had brushed against the lens. Then the leaves swung away, and something stepped into the frame. It was tall, dark, and broad through the shoulders. It moved from left to right with a steady, heavy gait—not a trot, just deliberate power.

It was carrying a person.

Two massive arms were wrapped around a body. The person was limp, head tipped back, arms hanging. I couldn’t see the face clearly due to the resolution, but I saw the hair—a long braid, half-unraveled, swinging with each step. Megan’s friend had told us specifically that she always braided her hair before a hike.

The figure didn’t look at the camera. It didn’t flinch. It just walked like it owned the woods. The head was high enough that the top of the frame cut it off, but I could see the line of the shoulder.

My first thought wasn’t Bigfoot. My first thought was, That’s a man in a suit carrying a dead girl. My second thought was, If this is a hoax, it is a sick one.

I called Decker. When he watched it, he sat in silence for a long time. “That’s a person in a suit,” he said finally, but he didn’t sound convinced. He sounded like a man piling sandbags against a flood he knew was coming.

“We treat it like a kidnapping,” he said. “We do not show this to the volunteers. And we sure as hell do not mention Bigfoots to anyone.”

We brought in Detective Wynn. She watched the clip in the same truck. She was the one they sent for the weird calls. “Unknown subject,” she said. “Until the lab says otherwise, that’s what we call it.”

We kept searching, but the weather turned against us. We didn’t find Megan. We didn’t find Luke. We didn’t find Kelsey. But a week later, a second car sat overnight at Micah Creek.

When I saw the registration, my heart stopped. It was a white Honda belonging to my cousin, Ethan. He was in his twenties, an aspiring YouTuber who thought he was going to break the story of the missing hikers. He had called me days before, asking about the search. I had told him to stay away. I had told him it was dangerous. He had laughed and said, “We’re just going to get some B-roll.”

Now his name was in the register, along with his friends Priya and Tyler.

We found their camp a mile and a half in, set in a little flat near the creek. The tent was still up. The zippers were half-open, sleeping bags laid out inside. Shoes were lined up neatly in the vestibule, toes pointed out like they expected to step into them. A pot of water sat on a rock by the fire ring. It was a scene of interrupted life.

Thirty yards from the tent, near the creek bank, the mud was disturbed. I saw the handprint. It was five fingers, clear and spread, deep in the mud. The palm was massive. If I put my own hand inside it, there would be an inch of margin on all sides. It had no claws, just blunt tips and pressure ridges.

“Could be carved,” Decker said, standing over it. “Someone could have cut that in with a tool.”

“Or someone with a really big hand put it there,” I said.

Two days later, we found Ethan’s phone lying in the middle of the trail. The screen was cracked. We bagged it and took it to Detective Wynn.

“You’re not going to like this,” she told me in the command trailer. She hooked it up to the evidence laptop. “Last file is video.”

She hit play. The image jolted into focus sideways. The camera was lying on the ground. I could see Ethan’s face, cheek pressed into the leaves, eyes glassy. There was a smear of dirt on his forehead. His body jerked.

That’s when I saw the hand on his ankle.

It wasn’t a human hand. It was dark, covered in hair that was thick enough to obscure the skin. The fingers closed all the way around his boot and most of his lower leg. Ethan slid along the ground, leaves crunching. He made a sound—a moan knocked sideways out of him. The angle shifted. I caught a glimpse of trunks sliding by, faster now, as he was dragged off the trail into the brush. He twisted, his arm coming up to claw at the ground. Then there was a sharp jerk, and he was gone.

The video ended with the camera staring at the empty trail. Somewhere off-camera, close to the mic, something made a sound. It was long, deep, and sounded like air forced through a chest the size of a refrigerator.

“We are not telling the public this,” Decker said. He was standing in the doorway, arms folded. “We say bear. We say evidence of a struggle. We do not say something grabbed him by the ankle.”

“The lab will love this,” Wynn said, but she looked pale.

The lab report on the fibers from Megan’s jacket came back days later: Structure inconsistent with common regional wildlife. That’s how the system talks when it doesn’t want to say “unknown.” They let you fill in the blanks.

Decker drew a thick red box on the map around the Micah Creek drainage. “Restricted,” he wrote. “We’re shutting it down. Hazard area.”

For a few days, things quieted down. Then the reports started coming in from the volunteers working the perimeter. Strange knocking sounds at 2:00 AM. Rocks thrown from the treeline. A smell of wet dog and rot that rolled in and vanished. Wynn found fresh bootprints near a locked gate—someone had squeezed through.

“What if this is a hoax?” a deputy asked. “Someone staging this?”

“They’re dragging real people away,” I snapped.

But the hoax theory died when Lena came back from a perimeter search with Duke. She was crying. “He followed a scent line,” she told me. “Strong. He was pulling hard. We hit a slope, loose basalt, near the place the hunters call the Black Steps. Duke just stopped. He went low, tail tucked. He wouldn’t go near the edge. He was shaking.”

I knew the Black Steps. It was dangerous terrain, steep basalt outcrops. A hoaxer doesn’t drag bodies into that.

I tried to stay away, but I couldn’t. I needed to know if the corridor in the first video was real. I took my truck up an old spur parallel to the drainage and hiked in. I found the spot—the double trunk cedar, the rotten stump. It was the exact hallway where the thing had walked with Megan.

I stood there, breathing the damp air. “Okay,” I said to the empty woods. “You found it.”

Then I heard the breath. It came from my left, high up, behind a screen of brush. It wasn’t the wind. It was a slow, heavy inhale. I turned my head. Through a gap in the firs, I saw black hair, matted and long. Then it stepped out.

It was a shoulder like a door frame turned sideways. An arm that hung almost to the knee. The head was too high for me to see clearly at first, but I saw the face in shadow. The nose didn’t jut like a bear’s. The eyes were deep-set and dark. It took one step toward me.

I ran. I am not proud of it. My heart hammered in my throat, and I scrambled back down the trail, boots slipping on leaves. I hit the spur road and dove into my truck.

I slammed the key into the ignition. That’s when something hit the side of the truck. The whole cab rocked sideways. A hand slapped against the driver’s side window—palm flat, fingers spreading to cover most of the glass. I saw the nails, blunt and thick, scuffing the window.

I mashed the accelerator. The truck fishtailed, gravel spraying. As I shot down the road, something screamed behind me. It wasn’t a roar. It was a dual-tone sound, high and low at the same time, that vibrated in my teeth. A rock the size of a softball hit the bed rail behind the cab with a deafening bang.

I made it back to the command post. Decker saw the dent in the panel and the crack in the window. He didn’t ask what happened.

“We’re done,” he said.

Officially, the cases were closed. Megan and Luke: Presumed deceased, terrain or weather-related. Ethan, Priya, and Tyler: Evidence of struggle, no remains recovered. Kelsey’s file was folded into the stack.

Months later, hunters found bones near the Black Steps. DNA matched one of our missing. Not enough for a funeral, just enough to close a file.

I worked there for three more years. I watched the signs stay up. I watched the map in the office get marked “ADMU”—administrative use only. That’s the code for a timber sale, or a road project, or a patch of forest where six people were taken and nobody wants to say why.

The footage is still locked away in an evidence room somewhere. I’m telling this now because I’m tired of the silence. I’m tired of people thinking the woods are just scenery. There is a corridor in the Gifford Pinchot where six people walked in and didn’t walk out. The government put a label on a messy thing and pushed it to the back of a shelf. But I saw the hand on the window. I know what’s out there. And I know why they closed the gate.