“I SHOT THIS CREATURE” – They Went Looking for Bigfoot… and Found Something TERRIFYING

🌲 The Unforgiving Wilderness: A Triad of Vanishings

The wilderness is a deceptive veil. It promises solitude and primal challenge, but often delivers only silence and unresolved grief. Across the United States and the Amazonian jungle, there exist vast, untamed territories that seem to actively resist human presence, not merely through natural hazard, but through a chilling, inexplicable force. The stories of Cory Fay, Mark Stritmatter, and Steven Carr are three such terrifying accounts, stitched together by their impossible details: belongings scattered in impossible locations, fragments of remains with no accompanying body, and the haunting, colossal footprints of something monstrous. These are not mere accidents; they are chapters in the enduring, unsettling legend of the missing.

⛰️ The Ascent of Cory Fay: Oregon’s Cold Mystery

It was September of 1992 when the first, sickening clues emerged from the Badger Creek Wilderness in Oregon. Two unassuming hunters stumbled upon the discarded remnants of a year-old tragedy. The belongings belonged to Cory Fay, a 17-year-old whose disappearance in November 1991 had baffled authorities. Cory was no novice. Born in Beaverton, he was an experienced hunter with professional survival training—he knew the rules of the wild.

On November 23rd, 1991, Cory and his friend, Mark, ventured into the rugged, elk-rich territory. Despite hours of searching, the hunt was fruitless. As darkness encroached, they made the fateful decision to split up at 6:30 p.m. When Mark returned to the car, Cory was gone. A massive search ensued, involving over 250 people, helicopters, and trained dogs, combing a 12 square mile area for 10 agonizing days. They found nothing.

Nearly a year later, the discovery by the two hunters cracked the case open, only to reveal a core of bizarre, unsettling inconsistencies. They found Cory’s backpack and hunting rifle near the initial search area. But then, the locations began to defy logic. His jacket was found miles away, on a steep mountain ridge, buried under deep snow at a punishing altitude of about 6,500 feet. A mile from the jacket, investigators recovered fragments of his skull and a single tooth. There were no other major bones—no femurs, no rib cage—just scattered fragments.

The sheriff overseeing the case was completely confounded. Why would an experienced young man, lost and in deep snow, disregard basic survival wisdom—which dictates heading downhill or staying put—and instead climb to a remote, high-altitude ridge?

The Stalker’s Print

The puzzle took an eerie turn with the discovery of footprints. Large, deeply embedded prints, far too massive to belong to any ordinary human. A local newspaper later ran a story revealing that a helicopter crew during the initial search had spotted massive, human-like footprints in the snow, prints twice the size of an adult man’s foot. They were so heavy they remained visible even after the snow melted, suggesting they were made by something of incredible weight, and most chillingly, walking barefoot.

The initial theories—accidental shooting, murder, hypothermia, or an animal attack—all failed to account for the scattered belongings across three separate, remote locations, the absence of major remains, and the baffling uphill trek.

The only theory that gave a grim, awful coherence to the details was the one that truly sent shivers down the spine: an encounter with a cryptid, a creature like Bigfoot. The scattering of belongings, the dismemberment, and the transportation of remains to a nearly inaccessible high-altitude location painted the picture of a monstrous predator. As Cory’s heartbroken grandfather tearfully reflected, the distance required to reach the final site through deep snow was simply inconceivable for any person. The truth, if it involved those colossal footprints, was a terrifying one: Cory Fay was stalked, attacked when most vulnerable, and carried high into the mountains by a creature determined to conceal its grim act.

🏔️ Mark Stritmatter: The Hunter Who Hunted a Myth

Years later and hundreds of miles away, the wilderness of the Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming and Colorado delivered its own harrowing enigma with the disappearance of Mark Stritmatter. Mark, a 44-year-old former forest guide, vanished on October 19th, 2019, while on a solo hunting trip. His disappearance was not conventional; Mark had a specific, all-consuming goal: to hunt a Sasquatch.

Surveillance footage captured Mark driving into the forest early that morning. By 11:00 a.m., he had called his girlfriend, Kelly, then sent a text claiming he had “nearly killed a Bigfoot.” Kelly, who dismissed his increasingly eccentric fixation on the creature, urged him to return home due to an approaching blizzard. Mark abruptly hung up.

When Kelly found his white pickup truck days later at the Changi Campground, it was buried in snow. Inside were his phone, wallet, and keys—a sign he had briefly returned to the vehicle before venturing out again. The only items missing were his shotgun and backpack.

The case lay dormant for a year until a tourist found Mark’s binoculars and loaded shotgun about 600 meters from his truck. The gun had been fired at least once, but a final bullet remained unused in the chamber—a silent, chilling question mark. Two years after his vanishing, hunters in the Rock Mountain area, 17 miles (27 km) away from his vehicle, made the decisive discovery: Mark’s backpack, containing his hunting license, and, nearby, a human mandible and several broken ribs.

Forensic analysis confirmed the remains were Mark’s. He had suffered severe trauma before death, and his clothes were found completely torn apart. The transportation of Mark’s remains dozens of kilometers away, up to an elevation of over 10,000 feet (3,000 m), defied all logic. No known North American animal possesses the strength or motivation to move a human body that far and high.

The Blizzard and the Beast

The key to Mark’s terrifying end may lie in his own beliefs. Kelly recounted Mark’s conviction that Bigfoot was only vulnerable during a blizzard, when it would let its guard down. Mark, who believed he had been previously stalked and harassed by a juvenile Sasquatch, saw this trip as an act of revenge and proof of his skill.

His agitated state, noted by two other hunters who warned him about the blizzard, suggests he was close to his target. Like Cory Fay, Mark’s death was characterized by extreme elevation, scattered remains, and, during the search, the discovery of more massive footprints leading deeper into the mountains—prints significantly larger than any known animal track.

Mark Stritmatter’s end was classified as an unexplained, possibly supernatural occurrence. His loaded, but not fully discharged, shotgun, and the impossible distance his body traveled, remains the ultimate symbol of the deadly hunt where the hunter became the hunted by a creature of myth and staggering power.

🐍 Steven Carr: The Cryptid of the Amazon

The final, and perhaps most disturbing, mystery unfolds in the humid, vast expanse of Brazil’s Amazon state. Here, the threat is not Bigfoot, but the local legend of the Mapinguari, a massive, foul-smelling, red-haired ape-like creature said to be the guardian of the rainforest. Eyewitnesses paint a gruesome portrait: standing 7 to 8 feet tall, with a fearsome presence, and, most bizarrely, a single cyclopian eye and a gaping mouth in its abdomen used to swallow prey whole.

In July 2015, British botanist Steven Carr vanished while searching for a rare medicinal plant in the Ulatuma Biological Reserve. He was separated from his team around noon, and all contact was lost. Days later, his backpack was found abandoned near a remote riverbank. Inside were his camera, phone, and plant samples, but no sign of Steven.

Steven’s phone contained a chilling piece of recovered footage: he is disoriented, moving through darkness, with the rainforest alive with unsettling noises—a strange distant call, sharp cracks of breaking branches, and the distinct thud of a thrown stone or stick landing nearby. He had attempted seven distress calls, all without connection. He was isolated, stalked, and cut off.

A year later, the mystery deepened when a tourist stumbled upon human skeletons not far from where Steven’s backpack had been found. Authorities excavated a nearly complete human skeleton—all except the skull. Forensic analysis confirmed the grim truth: the remains belonged to Steven Carr.

The Missing Skull and the Buried Body

Steven’s death defied conventional explanations. He had been buried in a mud pit. No wild animal would kill, bury a body, and leave it there. Furthermore, the body was found in a remote spot, separated from his backpack by a river, making a human killer’s involvement logistically impossible without a boat. Why would a killer bury the body but leave the backpack with valuables by the river? And most chillingly, why was the skull missing?

Local tribes offered the terrifying possibility that Steven was killed by the Mapinguari. Reports of this creature describe it attacking livestock, with carcasses found with tongues and eyeballs missing. Crucially, past reports of human victims encountering the creature describe corpses torn apart, and the creatures seem to fixate particularly on heads.

The Mapinguari, if real, possesses the strength to easily carry a human body over great distances and could explain the dismemberment, the peculiar burial, and the missing skull. Steven Carr’s fate, like Cory Fay and Mark Stritmatter, remains a haunting testament to the power of the unknown. They vanished not through mere misfortune, but by stepping onto the ancient, protected territory of something vast, brutal, and utterly unwilling to be found.

🔮 The Haunting Enigma

Three different men, three different wildernesses, yet the same terrifying signature: inexplicable high-altitude or remote-location movement, scattering of remains, and massive, anomalous footprints. These cases, cataloged by investigator David Paulides, suggest that in the deepest parts of the world’s wildernesses, a non-human intelligence, a cryptid, operates with a chilling, predatory purpose. Whether called Bigfoot, Wild Man, or Mapinguari, the result is the same: utter devastation, scattered remains, and a grief that is compounded by the terrifying absence of answers.

The three vanishing acts stand as permanent warnings etched into the landscape of human exploration, suggesting that in certain parts of the world, the hunt is not only for elk or rare plants, but for the very lives of those who dare to trespass.