This Bigfoot Drowned 7 Fishermen in Under 4 Minutes!\
The River That Keeps Its Dead
Chapter 1: The Last Man Out
This Bigfoot drowned seven fishermen in under four minutes. I know exactly how that sounds. You’re already deciding whether to believe me or dismiss this as another internet horror story, another made‑up campfire tale designed for clicks. I get that. If I hadn’t been there, I’d scroll past it too. But I was there in that canyon on the Okanogan River. I watched seven men die in ways that still wrench me awake, drenched in sweat, four months later.
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.
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My name is Andrew Pritchard, and I’m the sole survivor of what happened on June 17th, 2024. The official investigation says my friends drowned in a “freak river incident”—some sudden current surge that swept us away, inexplicably leaving no bodies and almost no gear. That’s the neat, comfortable lie they wrote in the report. The truth is uglier. What killed them wasn’t the river. It was something that used the river like a weapon—something that understood exactly how to trap us in that narrow gorge where we couldn’t run, couldn’t climb, couldn’t even stand without being knocked into the water. Something that dropped off the cliff above us and started hunting with its hands.
When State Patrol pulled me out of the water nineteen hours later, three miles downstream, I was hypothermic and delirious, clinging to a submerged log like a piece of driftwood that had grown fingers. I couldn’t stop screaming about the hands. Those massive, furred hands I’d watched clamp over Tommy Vickers’ head and shove him under until his thrashing turned to a slow, boneless drift. They sedated me in the ambulance because I wouldn’t stop. They catalogued my injuries—twelve deep lacerations, bruised ribs, a dislocated ankle—and bagged my waterlogged phone. The only surviving file was six seconds of corrupted video: darkness, rushing water, and, faintly, the sounds of men drowning. They never found the other seven. Not Jack’s body. Not Tommy’s. Not even a floating ice chest or a dropped boot. The FBI spent six weeks tearing into every possible angle. Their eventual conclusion boiled down to two options: either I was psychotic from trauma, or I was hiding something. Groups of experienced outdoorsmen don’t just vanish, they said, unless someone makes them vanish.
I’m not hiding anything. I’m telling you what happened because I can’t carry it by myself anymore.
Chapter 2: The Eight Who Went In
We left Spokane on Tuesday, June 12th. Two trucks, eight men, enough gear for a week on the water. I need you to understand who these guys were, because the narrative that we were sloppy or unprepared is the first thing people reach for when they need an explanation. We weren’t.
Jack Breerlin organized the trip. Fifteen years as a guide, half of that specifically on the Okanogan. The man knew those currents better than most people know their own neighborhoods. He could read flow and depth from the way needles spun in an eddy. Tommy Vickers was a paramedic with wilderness first responder certification—had patched up everything from chainsaw accidents to avalanche victims. Dale Henderson trained survival skills to Army Rangers at Joint Base Lewis‑McChord. Levi Morrison was a firefighter. Ray DeAcro worked Park maintenance, which in that part of Washington means chainsawing blowdowns off trails twenty miles from the nearest road. Jake Sullivan did SAR out of Wenatchee. Pete Carver was a high school biology teacher who spent his summers knee‑deep in streams counting fry for salmon studies. And me? I’m a civil engineer who’s spent half my career on remote construction projects in Alaska and Montana. I’ve slept more nights in tents than in apartments.
This wasn’t a bachelor party of drunk weekend warriors. We filed a trip plan with the ranger station in Okanogan—five days on the river, base camp near mile marker 42, fishing downstream, hiking out Sunday. We had Jack’s satellite phone, Tommy’s GPS unit, redundancy in first‑aid kits, extra food, the works. The drive up Highway 97 was smooth, the kind of early‑summer day that makes you think nothing bad can happen under that big, blue sky. Snow still clung to the highest peaks; down where we were, the air was clear, mid‑70s, breeze sliding down the valley like it had someplace better to be.
Jack had scouted that stretch the year before. Deep pools, good bank access, not much pressure. The river there runs between hills draped in Douglas fir and ponderosa, banks of round river rock and pockets of sandy flats just big enough for tents. When we stepped out of the trucks and the smell of sun‑heated pine and cold water hit me, it felt perfect. Clean. Right.
There’s a database, I’ve since learned, that says otherwise. A quiet set of search‑and‑rescue logs showing that in the past twenty years, seventeen people have disappeared without a trace in the Okanogan–Wenatchee National Forest. No bodies, no gear, no answers. Experienced hikers who filed plans and didn’t come back. Hunters you’d trust to find their way in a whiteout vanishing on clear days. The official explanations all say the same thing: exposure, falls, possible drowning. But if you read the details, what you see over and over is “no remains recovered.” Seventeen ghosts. I didn’t know any of that when we waded out into the current and laughed about who’d get the first fish.
Chapter 3: Signs
The first two days were good. Better than good. We woke with the sunrise, breath fogging in the cool air, cast into water that steamed faintly where the light hit it. The river ran full but not dangerous—no heavy snowpack that year. By nine a.m. the banks were warm, the rocks hot under bare feet. We caught rainbows, a few steelhead, even a small chinook that Ray fought for twenty minutes, grinning like a kid the whole time. We measured, admired, and let it go. Camp life settled into the easy rhythm that happens when competent people share the load without needing to talk about it. Somebody always had coffee going. Somebody always had a knife out, filleting.
The first wrong note came the third night, June 14th. We were around the fire, last beers in hand, when Dale stopped mid‑story and raised his palm. The whole circle went quiet. At first, all I heard was river. Then underneath it, from somewhere upstream, came a hollow clack. Rock on rock. Then again. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Too regular to be random stones tumbling. Too sharp to be anything but deliberate.
“Current’s not strong enough for that,” Jack murmured when Pete suggested shifting boulders. The sound went on for half a minute, then stopped. Thirty seconds later it started again, only now it was downstream, across the river. We turned as one, eyes straining toward the black silhouette of the opposite bank. No flashlights—we were all too seasoned to blast the night with light without reason. In the end, it stopped like a switch flipped. We made jokes about river ghosts and bored beavers, but nobody laughed hard. That night, in my tent, every creak of branch and splash of water had teeth.
Next morning, Levi came back from taking a leak with his eyebrows halfway up his forehead. “You all need to see this,” he said. We followed him fifty yards downriver to a soft mud patch at the edge of the water. One print. Big. Sixteen inches at least, seven wide at the ball. Five toes, clear as day. No claw marks. The impression sunk deep, deeper than any of us would have made.
Dale, who could tell elk from deer in half a track, squatted. He measured stride to a second, partial impression leading out of the mud and into underbrush. “Six feet apart,” he said finally. “Bipedal. Heavy.” Pete photographed it from every angle, muttering measurements under his breath. Jack said “deformed bear” like someone suggesting “loose cable” when the radio crackles. Nobody believed it. You spend enough time outside, you get a feel for real versus staged. The soil displacement, the pressure ridges—whoever did this, if it was a joke, knew biomechanics. None of us thought it was a joke.
We found two more prints leading upslope. Tommy wanted to follow them. Jack shut him down. “We came here to fish,” he said. “Not play Scooby‑Doo. We don’t know what made those. If it’s a bear, we don’t corner it. If it’s not, we definitely don’t corner it.” That was Jack all over—cautious, professional. We hung our food higher. We set watches. The forest, for its part, watched us back.
Late that afternoon, Ray hooked into something that nearly yanked him off his feet. Eighty‑pound test line sang as whatever was on the end of it cut sideways against the current with a force that bent his rod double. Ray leaned back hard, muscles cording, boots sliding in the mud. For a second I thought he’d ride right into the river. Jake sprinted over and wrapped him in a bear hug, bracing.
“This is a monster,” Ray grunted. “Get the net, get—”
The line went slack. Ray wound frantically. The lure came back minus the lure. The steel hook was bent out almost straight.
“Snagged and popped,” Pete said. But his voice lacked conviction. The rest of us had seen the way that line had cut across the river: not snag, not hang, but directional intent. And the hook—if a fish had done that, it was bigger than anything that should have been in that stretch.
We might have chalked all of that up to weird but explainable, if not for the tree.
It was evening, June 16th, sky turning amber, when Jack noticed it. A ponderosa about forty feet from camp, trunk maybe eighteen inches thick, with the top fifteen feet twisted ninety degrees around its own axis. Not snapped by storm or rot. Twisted, fibres spiraled like a rag someone had wrung out. The wood at the twist was fresh, pale, not weathered.
Wind doesn’t do that. Lightning doesn’t do that. You don’t just torque living timber that size without equipment—or hands capable of exerting incredible force. We stood there staring, the way you do when the world refuses to behave like it’s supposed to.
Jake was the first to say it: “Maybe we should pack up and hike out now.”
We looked at the darkening trail, four miles of forest between us and the trucks. Headlamps, uneven ground, tired legs. It was purely a comfort calculation. “First light,” Jack said. “We’re all tired. We move better in daylight. We’ve got watch rotations. We’ve handled worse than weird trees.”
We hadn’t. But we wanted that to be true. So we stayed.
That night, we didn’t really sleep. We kept the fire high, the beams of our headlamps close, the tents untouched. Around midnight, the rock‑clacking started again. Then the screams.
I don’t have words that do them justice. I’ve heard cougars scream—a sound like a woman being murdered. I’ve heard elk bugle, wolves howl. This was none of those. It started so low it was more vibration than sound, then climbed into a pitch so high it felt like it was slicing the inside of my skull. It came from uphill, maybe a hundred yards out. It lasted ten seconds, then cut off. We sat frozen, every muscle locked. Then another scream, this time from farther east. Another, west. Another, south. Four angles in under two minutes. Either there was more than one, or it could move like lightning.
By the time the sky began to lighten at 5:23 a.m. on June 17th, we’d already decided: we were leaving. No breakfast, no lingering. Pack. Move. Go.
Chapter 4: The Ambush
We were on the trail by 7:15 a.m., eight packs, eight men. Jack in front, Dale in back, armed, everyone else tight between. The path paralleled the river for two miles, then cut inland. Morning wrapped us in its usual lie—blue sky, birdsong, glinting water. It felt like we’d made it through the bad part. We hadn’t.
Half an hour in, a massive pine lay across the trail where none had been three days prior. Fresh fall. The exposed heartwood at the break bright and clean, no rot. Jake examined the rupture. “Not wind,” he said. “No rot, no disease. Something pushed this.”
“Or it just fell,” Jack said automatically. “Trees do that.” He stood on the trunk and stepped over. One by one, we clambered across. I was in the middle, straddling bark, when I glanced left into the trees.
It was there. Fifty yards off, between two firs, still as a statue. Dark reddish‑brown fur, shoulders that would have filled a doorway, arms that hung too low. For a heartbeat, I thought it was a stump, a trick of light, a pattern my fear was imposing. Then its chest rose. It shifted its weight. Its head turned and those eyes—dark, deep, aware—locked on mine.
I couldn’t speak. My throat closed. We held each other in that horrible, silent line, me half over a log, it half concealed by trunks, until it stepped away, unhurried, walking upslope with a rolling stride that swallowed ground. Then it disappeared.
“It’s here,” I managed to croak once both boots hit dirt. “In the trees. It’s been watching us.”
Jack looked over. Saw nothing. His jaw tightened. “Let’s move,” he said. “We get to the trucks. Then we talk monsters.”
We tried to. The trail turned inland, away from the river, under a canopy that dimmed the light and muffled sound. After ten minutes, Dale said quietly, “It’s following.” None of us looked back at first. Finally I did. Nothing on the path. “Parallel,” Dale said. “Keeps pace, about a hundred yards off. I see it between trunks. You don’t need to turn. Just know it’s there.”
The air felt heavy, charged like before lightning. Every footfall sounded too loud. Every snapped twig might as well have been a gunshot. Nobody joked. Nobody talked. When the trail began to angle back toward the river, we all felt the tiniest relief, as if the open bank would help. Instead, we walked into the kill box.
The river pinched into a narrow canyon here, rock walls rising fifteen feet on either side, water funneled into a twenty‑foot throat of white rage. The trail dropped steeply to the left, skirting that channel via a jumble of boulders between cliff and water. Above us, the walls overhung slightly, moss and ferns dripping. Once we entered, there was no side exit. Forward or back. That was it.
I stepped onto the first boulder and felt the rock vibrate, a faint shudder under my boots. Another. From above. I tilted my head back.
It stood on the rim, silhouetted against bright sky—twice as wide as any man, cloak of dark fur, arms slightly spread as if balancing. For a fraction of a second, everything went slow. The roar of the water muted. The world narrowed to the cut of its outline against blue. Then it jumped.
The impact shook the entire canyon. Stone under my feet bucked. The creature landed on a flat rock ten yards behind Tommy with a wet, meaty sound, absorbing the drop like a gymnast sticking a dismount. Tommy spun, lost his footing, and pinwheeled backward into the river. The current took him before anyone could grab his hand.
“Tommy!” Pete lunged, blind from bark injuries sustained the day before, tripped on a rock, and went in after him. Ray, one arm clutched to his broken collarbone, took one step toward them. The creature’s stride gobbled the distance. One hand slammed into his chest; the other clamped on the back of his head. I heard his neck break even over the water.
Everything disintegrated. The canyon became a blender of splashing and screaming and the thunder of bodies and boulders colliding. Jack swung his rifle up, fired. I saw a puff of fur blow off the creature’s shoulder. It bellowed—not in pain, more in outrage—and drove into him. Jack flew backward, hit stone with a crack that sounded like someone dropping a bag of dry kindling. The creature’s hand engulfed his skull. There was a brief, obscene crush. Then Jack was a loose thing, dangling.
Someone—Dale, I think—fired again and again, bullets sparking off rock. Another shape moved on the canyon rim opposite, smaller but still huge, skittering down like a bear on a vertical log. We were between two fires, stone on one side, water on the other, monsters behind and above. There was no plan. Only instinct. Mine screamed at me to get out of the canyon. And the only way out was the water.
I dove.
Chapter 5: The Hands
The river hit me like a car. It was meltwater‑cold, fifty degrees at best, and so hard it stole the breath from my chest. The current grabbed me and spun me sideways, slamming me into submerged rock. I didn’t know which way was up. Foam and bubbles and flashes of sky and boulder swirled around me. For an instant, I surfaced, saw the cliffs closing, heard someone shout “And—” and went under again.
A human body is not built for this. You think you’re strong, you think you’re tough, and then you’re in moving water and you’re a leaf. My shoulder hit stone; something in my ankle went with a bright, tearing pain. I got an arm out, fingers scraping rock, then lost the grip. I remember the white roar and the way the canyon walls flickered past. I remember thinking, this is going to be fast. Then the channel widened, the water deepened, and the current eased just enough that I could get my lungs above the turmoil.
I surfaced in a deep pool downstream from the gorge. The cliffs dropped back; the banks here were steep gravel bars. I coughed, spat river, paddled toward the nearest shore. The cold had knifed deep into my joints; my muscles were shaking with every stroke. I reached shallows, clawed onto the stones, and lay there, panting, vision blurring at the edges.
The surface of the pool was disturbed. At first I thought it was just my wake, but the pattern was wrong: a concentrated V coming from near the canyon mouth, cutting toward me. Something big was swimming.
I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked. The water bulged. A form rose—a head, one massive shoulder, hair dripping, water sheeting off like a dark waterfall. The creature moved forward with powerful, economical strokes, chest just under the surface, forearms pulling water like paddles. It covered thirty feet in seconds. When it was barely ten yards away, it planted its feet on the riverbed and stood.
It was even bigger up close. Eight, maybe nine feet. Fur clung heavy and dark to its torso. Its chest was barrel‑thick, muscles roping under hair. Scars ridged its arms and ribs, pale palimpsests of old fights. Its face was neither ape nor man but some unsettling blend: broad nose, deep‑set eyes under a heavy brow. Those eyes were what froze me. Not anger. Not animal panic. Calculation. The look a butcher gives a side of beef, deciding where to cut.
It took one step closer, water swirling around its thighs. I could smell it: wet fur, musk, something faintly rotten underneath. Its hands flexed. Each was the size of a dinner plate, fingers thick and blunt‑tipped. I’d seen those fingers around Jack’s head. I knew what they could do.
Shaking, I dragged myself further up the bank, stones biting into my belly. My ankle wouldn’t hold if I tried to stand. There was nowhere to go anyway. Climbable trees? None. Cover? None. Just me, a strip of rock, and the water.
I don’t think I decided what to do so much as shut down. Something old and deep in me went limp. I stopped scrambling. Stopped flailing. Stopped making sound. I lay back on the stones, arms limp, head rolled to one side. I let my jaw slacken. I made myself dead.
There’s a thing you learn on job sites in bear country: sometimes, if they think they’ve finished you, they move on. They don’t waste energy. I gambled that an eight‑foot relic hominid might share that trait. It was the only chip I had.
The creature stepped out of the water. Stones crunched under its weight. I felt, more than saw, its shadow fall over me. The smell intensified, heavy and rank. Something touched my boot—pressure around my ankle, not gentle, not crushing. Those fingers. They wrapped around bone and flesh, squeezed. The pain was electric, but I clamped down on every impulse to jerk away. My body screamed to thrash, to kick, to fight. I did nothing.
The grip shifted, testing, like someone checking if a fish is still alive after it stops beating against the deck. It let go. I felt that presence move, massive and close, water dripping onto my face in cold pinpoints. Another sound layered over the river: distant voices, faint, echoing down the valley. Human. Shouts.
The creature froze. Its head turned toward the noise. For one infinite heartbeat, I stared up through half‑lidded eyes at the underside of its jaw, the slope of its chest, the scars along its ribs. Then it stepped away. I cracked one eyelid a fraction. I watched it wade back into the pool, watched the water close over its shoulders, watched the ripples move toward the far shore. It hauled itself up onto the opposite bank, vaulted the rock edge in one fluid motion, and disappeared into timber without a backward glance.
Only then did I let myself breathe like a living thing again.
Chapter 6: The Man Who Lived
They found me hours later—late morning, sun high, heat finally beginning to sink into my bones instead of suck them dry. I’d staggered away from the pool until I found a small tributary that fed into the main river, water shallow and marginally warmer. I remember crawling into that creek and lying there while it flowed over me, a human piece of debris. At some point I dragged myself out and collapsed in mud between drift logs. That’s where voices found me.
At first I thought I was hallucinating. The shouting seemed to come from miles away and from inside my own head at the same time. I tried to call back; what came out was a rasp. A flash of color moved through the trees—a hi‑vis vest, a helmet. Then people. Park rangers in green, SAR volunteers in orange, a sheriff’s deputy. One of them swore. “We got one! We got one alive!”
Everything after that came in flashes. Thermal blanket. Needle in my arm. The thump of helicopter blades. The smell of antiseptic. Hospital white. Questions.
“How many in your party, Andrew?”
“Where did you last see them?”
“What happened to your gear?”
“Was anyone armed?”
I tried to answer, but the story came out in fragments—rock, tree, scream, hands. They nodded, wrote it all down, traded looks over my head. My temperature was 93.1. My muscles were seizing. My brain was layered in fog and static. In that state, a giant ape drowning my friends was just one more symptom.
They launched a massive search. Dogs, helicopters, sonar in the river. The command center sprawled across the ranger station parking lot, maps taped to walls, red strings tracing last known positions. For six weeks they combed that forest and that water. They found nothing. No bodies. No backpacks. No firearms. No tents. No coolers. No twisted tree the chainsaw crews hadn’t already cut up “for safety.” Nothing.
Seven men went into that canyon and didn’t come out. Eight, if you count me. I came out wrong.
The FBI sent agents from their missing persons unit. They interviewed me in an office that smelled like stale coffee and printer ink. They asked about arguments. Insurance. Debt. Any reason anyone in the group might want the others gone. They asked about my childhood, my mental health, my drinking. My answers didn’t fit any box they wanted to check. In the end, they wrote down “probable drowning event, bodies unrecovered” and “subject’s description of ‘creature’ likely result of trauma‑induced hallucination.”
I sat there reading the final report over a plastic hospital tray, my arm in a sling, bruises blooming under my gown, and laughed once—a sound that made the nurse outside my door flinch. Because I understood. If I’d been them, I’d have written the same thing. Monsters are easier to believe when they’re currents and hidden rocks than when they stand eight feet tall and squeeze your friend’s skull like a rotten melon.
Chapter 7: The Warning
It’s been four months. I don’t work in the field anymore. The idea of crossing a stream on a construction site makes my heart race. I moved out of my ground‑floor apartment because I could hear the building’s pipes at night and imagined them as distant rapids. I live now on the seventeenth floor of a concrete tower, city noise drowning in HVAC hum, skyline visible in all directions. There are no trees within fifty yards of my windows.
My therapist says I have PTSD, survivors’ guilt, complex trauma. She’s not wrong. I wake at 3:17 a.m. more nights than not, the time stamped on the last semi‑coherent text I sent just before we entered the canyon—“almost back to trail, talk later.” In dreams, the canyon never ends. The water never warms. The hands never quite reach me, but they’re always there, just below the surface.
I’ve tried to tell this story in a lot of ways—face‑to‑face, in forums, in interviews that never aired. I’ve watched belief die in people’s eyes as I talk. They nod politely. They say “that must have been awful.” Then they tell me about a cousin who saw UFOs once, or they gently suggest that memory is unreliable under stress. The kind ones say it doesn’t matter if it was “real” as long as talking about it helps me heal. The cruel ones ask if I did something out there I can’t live with.
I can live with what I did. I ran. I hid. I played dead. I did what prey does when the predator is something it can’t fight. What I can’t live with is the way the world closes over events like this, smoothing them into forgettable statistics. “Eight men camping, tragic accident.” End of story.
So here’s mine, in full, for what it’s worth. Take it however you will. I don’t need you to believe every detail. I just need you to understand the shape of it: we went into those woods thinking we were at the top of the food chain. We were wrong. We stumbled into a territory that already had an apex occupant, something that had been there long enough to learn our patterns, our weaknesses, and the limits of our arrogance. It used terrain and water and fear the way we use lures and rifles. It killed seven men in a day, and it could have killed eight.
The only reason it didn’t is because, standing on that gravel bar, ankle crushed in its grip, eyes half‑closed, I convinced it I was already finished. It let me go because, in its calculus, I wasn’t worth the energy. Because as long as I remained the kind of man who writes this sort of story on the internet, no one will treat me as a threat.
If you’re planning a trip to the Okanogan–Wenatchee, to any deep river valley where the cliffs close in and cell service dies, remember that something can be real even if science hasn’t named it yet. Remember that experience and gear and numbers don’t count for much if you walk blind into someone else’s hunting ground. Remember that when the woods go very quiet and you see impossible tracks or hear rocks knocking where no one should be, leaving right then may be the only smart choice you ever make.
If you ever find yourself in cold water in a narrow canyon, feeling fingers close around your ankle from below, don’t fight. Don’t thrash. Don’t give it a show. Go limp. Take the one chance prey sometimes gets when the predator is bored.
Proof isn’t worth your life. I learned that the hard way. I’m not asking you to hunt what I saw or to prove it exists. I’m asking you to let my failure at proof be enough, to accept that maybe, just maybe, this one river, this one stretch of forest, belongs to something else.
Because whether you believe me or not, it’s still out there. And it doesn’t care if you think it’s real.
