These REAL Bigfoot Encounters Will Make You Regret Watching Alone

These REAL Bigfoot Encounters Will Make You Regret Watching Alone

Three Paths Into the Dark

In the deep wilderness, people vanish in ways that leave no clean explanation. A backpack left behind. A phone full of impossible photographs. A leg bone hanging from a branch. The official reports speak of sinkholes, exposure, and the ordinary cruelty of remote country. The older stories, the ones carried by indigenous memory and the uneasy accounts of those who go looking afterward, speak of something else.

This is the story of three such vanishings.

Selene

In June of 2023, a Belgian backpacker named Selene Cremer drove a white Chevrolet SUV into the Tarkine rainforest of northwestern Tasmania. She was thirty-one years old, born in Brussels in 1992, a seasoned solo traveler who had already crossed most of Europe and much of Australia. Friends described her as adventurous, disciplined, and quietly fearless. She had free-dived with sharks without tanks. She had walked into uncharted jungle before and always walked out again. Tasmania was meant to be the final stop before a ferry to New Zealand.

On June 17 she parked near Philosopher Falls and walked into the forest. GPS data later recovered from her Google account showed her returning to the vehicle twice, then setting out a third time in a different direction. At 4:18 p.m. her phone pinged on a rainforest plateau. After that the signal dropped into silence. She never boarded the ferry. She never returned to the car. Her backpack, wallet, and camera remained inside it, undisturbed.

Search teams worked for more than three weeks through winter rain and cold. Ground crews, helicopters, cadaver dogs, and water searches found nothing. On July 10 the official operation was suspended. The terrain was too dangerous, the weather too harsh, the chance of survival already vanishingly small.

A private investigator named Ken Gamble, a former U.S. Army soldier with search-and-rescue experience, took the case pro bono at the request of Selene’s friend Justin. He pulled the overlooked GPS coordinates and mapped more than forty points the police had never thoroughly checked. In April 2024 he led a small team into the Tarkine. The plateau where Selene was last seen was dark even at midday, the canopy so thick that sunlight barely reached the ground. The undergrowth forced them to crawl under fallen logs. Gamble later said the place gave him the creeps—an ominous silence broken only by the sound of their own movement.

Along the way they found an old stone marker, its surface corroded but still legible in places. It warned of rotting moss-covered trunks, hidden ravines, and monsters. Two companions, the inscription claimed, had already been lost. The words sent a chill through the team.

Thermal drones and camera traps captured more than wallabies. In several clips, two humanoid figures moved rapidly through the trees—bent knees, exaggerated gait, too large and too fluid for any known animal. Another clip, taken on the exact plateau where Selene’s signal died, showed a single humanoid form moving slowly through the gloom. Gamble, who had worked many primeval forests, said he had never seen anything like it.

In January 2025 a backpacker named Zachary Hafner claimed to have found a blue women’s t-shirt and a pair of jeans stuffed inside a tree hollow on the same plateau. The clothes were torn to shreds. The claim remains unverified by authorities.

In September 2025 a vlogger named Robert Parkinson used Selene’s coordinates to retrace her steps. The forest was unnaturally quiet until he reached the plateau. Then the insects and birds erupted into sudden noise—an old local sign, according to legend, that something was about to move. A moment later a massive roar tore through the trees. Parkinson froze, filmed briefly, and fled.

Tasmanian police believe Selene either became lost or fell into a hidden sinkhole. They rule out murder: the parking area would have been a far easier place to strike, and nothing was stolen. Animal attack is considered unlikely; the island’s larger mammals are not known to kill adult humans. The remaining theory is the one the stone marker and the drone footage keep alive: the Tasmanian ape, a seven-to-eight-foot humanoid with brown or reddish hair, red eyes, and a foul odor, aggressive when threatened, capable of tearing a wallaby apart. Indigenous stories speak of giant apes along the beaches. Modern sightings describe upright postures, stick-banging warnings, and deafening roars. In active areas, the sudden chorus of insects and birds is said to signal an imminent attack.

Selene Cremer’s disappearance remains open. The clothes in the hollow, the drone figures, the warning stone, and the roar that sent Parkinson running have never been fully explained.

Dale

On June 9, 2013, fifty-one-year-old Dale Stehling of Texas stood with his wife Diane and her parents near the Spruce Tree House ruins in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. Their RV had broken down on a cross-country trip. While waiting for repairs they decided to visit the park. At 4:30 p.m. Dale told Diane he wanted to hike alone to a distant ruin. He declined a bottle of water. He did not take the main path. He chose a steep, narrow 4.2-mile loop trail of jagged rock and sudden drop-offs. Another tourist photographed him from behind as he rounded a bend. He was never seen alive again.

Search teams worked for two weeks with sixty people, dogs, a helicopter, and rope teams. The park’s restricted archaeological zones and brutal terrain yielded nothing. In November another K-9 unit found no trace. The sheriff later said Dale’s case was the most bizarre he had ever handled.

Seven years later, on September 17, 2020, an anonymous hiker found skeletal remains on a low mesa in Montezuma Valley, six miles from where Dale had vanished. Nearby lay his glasses, cell phone, and ID. Massive footprints were noted in the immediate area. The hiker had been trespassing in a restricted zone and chose to remain anonymous.

The phone told a stranger story. Call logs showed Dale trying and failing to place a call around 7:00 p.m. on the day he disappeared, then attempting a voicemail that also failed. The photo gallery began ordinarily—steep trail, canyon drop-offs—then shifted. One image showed a massive uprooted tree deep in thick forest. Another captured what looked like a giant footprint. Later frames showed swampy ground and a running stream, evidence he had left the trail and was following water. The final photograph, timestamped 7:30 p.m., showed a dark, towering humanoid figure standing in the shadows of the trees directly in front of the camera. Though blurry, the outline was ape-like and heavily built.

Two short video clips remained on the card. In the first, Dale walked a dark, heavily wooded path while an eerie, overlapping whistling rose and fell through the trees—deliberate, coordinated, unlike wind or any known animal. In the second, he turned the camera over his shoulder in rising panic. For a split second a tall, unnaturally thin humanoid figure moved between the trunks, keeping pace. Moments later a large rock crashed into the nearby stream, narrowly missing him. Dale’s startled shout cut the footage short.

Police ruled out foul play. Nothing was stolen. Official theory holds that Dale, who walked with a hunched gait after multiple back surgeries, slipped or became lost, followed a watercourse in the dark, and died of exposure. The six miles he covered in three hours across steep, broken country is difficult to reconcile with his physical condition unless he was driven by extreme fear.

Cryptozoologist Dr. Elizabeth Sharper has linked the whistling and rock-throwing to reports of Colorado’s “rock apes.” She notes that Bigfoot-like creatures are frequently described as whistling before throwing stones as territorial warnings—a behavior not typical of known primates. Ancestral Puebloan lore speaks of giant hairy beings that can turn invisible or shift form, abilities Sharper interprets as extreme camouflage and hyper-vigilance. Recent sightings, including a brown Sasquatch observed from the Durango & Silverton railroad in 2023 that crouched and seemed to vanish into the hillside, keep the older stories alive.

One final unsent text message was recovered from Dale’s phone: “Don’t look for me. I might not make it back. Take care of the family.”

Robert

On July 12, 2010, fifty-seven-year-old Robert Bissell left his home in Portland, Oregon, for a camping and fishing trip in the Rock Lakes area of Mount Hood National Forest. He was an experienced outdoorsman who preferred weekdays in the deep woods, always carried a handgun, and knew the risks. He filed a wilderness permit and told his brother Michael he would return by July 16.

When he did not, Michael drove to the trailhead, found Robert’s car, and hiked to the campsite. The tent stood empty. A sleeping pad, an unboxed camp stove, and a backpack lay scattered inside. The headlamp, fishing gear, and handgun were gone. There was no sign anyone had actually lived at the camp—no fire, no food scraps, only a heavy silence. Michael left a note and returned home. Days later the camp remained untouched. On July 25 he reported his brother missing.

Searchers found a yellow storage box containing a compass and whistle, a gray shirt and camo hat, a green wool sock, and a rubber band matching one from Robert’s car. A psychic tip led teams toward Serene Lake. On July 28 deputies found a faded black headband, then a fishing pole propped against bushes. Looking up, they saw a human leg bone hanging high in a tree, still attached to scraps of muscle and stained with blood. A single Vasque Sundowner hiking boot lay on the ground beneath it. DNA confirmed the bone belonged to Robert. REI records showed he had purchased that exact boot model years earlier.

Investigators who had searched the same ground earlier swore the fishing pole had not been there before. It appeared recently placed. The rest of Robert’s body and gear were never found. The medical examiner noted a disturbing absence of animal bite marks; the muscle tissue looked cleanly stripped rather than torn by teeth. Black bears, coyotes, and cougars inhabit the forest, yet unprovoked attacks on adult humans are rare, and no clear animal sign was found near the remains. Robert had been armed.

The official timeline suggests he pitched the tent, left immediately for night fishing, became disoriented among the interconnected lakes, asked hikers for directions to Serene Lake on July 13, and met his end somewhere near there. The staging of the bone and the deliberate placement of the fishing pole remain unexplained. Online speculation inevitably turns to Sasquatch—Oregon and Washington are the heartland of North American Bigfoot reports—and to the possibility of a territorial display. The facts leave the door open without confirming anything.

Sixteen years later the case is still cold.

The Pattern

Three people. Three remote forests. Three sets of remains or empty camps that refuse ordinary explanation. Selene walked onto a plateau and never walked off. Dale’s phone recorded whistling, a rock thrown in the dark, and a towering figure in the trees. Robert’s leg was cleaned of flesh and hung as if on display, his fishing pole arranged like a marker.

Police speak of sinkholes, exposure, and the simple mathematics of bad luck in hard country. The older accounts—Aboriginal warnings in Tasmania, Puebloan rock-ape lore in Colorado, the dense Bigfoot traditions of the Pacific Northwest—speak of something that watches from the timber, that announces itself with sound, that claims the ones who walk too far alone.

Whether the figures on the Tarkine drones, the shape in Dale’s final photograph, and the force that left Robert’s bone in the tree are the same kind of thing, or whether they are only the human mind reaching for pattern in the face of emptiness, remains unanswered. The forests keep their silence. The files stay open. And every year a few more people step off the marked trail, certain they know the way back.