A Camper’s Terrifying Encounter with Bigfoot—What Happened Next is Unbelievable!

My name’s Ethan Cole, and I’m fifty-one years old, sitting on a sagging porch outside Packwood, Washington, talking into a cheap recorder while the rain drums on the tin roof like restless fingers. I rent this place now—peeling paint, leaning fence, a yard that bleeds straight into tree line—and if you’d told me ten years ago I’d be the kind of guy who whispers about Bigfoot into a plastic brick, I would’ve laughed in your face and bought you a beer for the effort.

I used to laugh at people like that. I used to sit in the diner in town, listen to the old guys swap stories about lights in the sky and tall shapes in the timber, and I’d roll my eyes so hard you’d think they might stick that way. I believed in what you could cut, lift, carry, nail in place. I believed in the sound of chainsaws and the weight of logs and the stink of diesel, in coffee gone cold and backs gone bad and men getting up at 4:30 a.m. because that’s what you do.

Then, one fall, a few knocks in the dark knocked everything out of place.

It really started on a gray September morning in 2015, though at the time I didn’t know it. I was in the corner booth at the Packwood diner, the one with the ripped red vinyl and the crooked view of the road. Drizzle tapped and smeared down the front windows like the sky couldn’t decide if it was rain or fog. The yard siren down the highway wailed 6 a.m. sharp, same as always, and I could practically hear the chainsaws revving up in answer, even through the glass.

Inside, everything smelled like burnt toast and fryer oil. The old radio behind the counter spat out classic rock through a veil of static—some half-dead Zeppelin track crackling in and out. The cook worked the griddle with dead eyes, flipping hash browns and eggs like he’d been doing it since the logging boom of 1973 and never stopped.

Across from me sat Ray—older than me by ten years and twice as worn, hands like split cedar, knuckles gnarled like roots. He sipped his coffee, stared into it like it might answer for his alimony payments, and then said, casual as you please,

“Guy up by the old spur road says he saw a Bigfoot.”

He didn’t say it like a joke. Just a fact. A thing on the list next to “storm coming” and “CEDAR PRICES DOWN AGAIN.”

The booth behind us chuckled. Somebody said something about tourist crap. I grinned, stabbed my eggs with my fork, and said, “Tourist bait. Or there’s a guy in a gorilla suit late on his child support.”

Everyone laughed. Ray did, too, but he just shrugged afterward and went back to his coffee.

“People see stuff,” he muttered. “Up there, you’re alone enough, long enough… stuff looks back.”

I shook it off on the drive home. The wipers squeaked and skipped across the windshield, smearing the drizzle into ghostly streaks. Wet pine filtered in through the cracked window, mixed with the stale smell of last night’s fast food wrappers. I set my dented lunch pail on the kitchen table in my little cabin and told myself, out loud, “People see what they want to see.”

That evening, I stacked firewood behind the cabin, breath steaming in the cold air. Every log thumped in the same place against the wall, bark biting the pads of my fingers. The tree line at the edge of the clearing was already turning to ink, the world beyond my yard fading into that familiar wall of dark trunks and darker spaces.

That’s when I heard three faint knocks.

Hollow. Slow.

Not back-to-back like someone pounding a door. Spread out. One… two… three.

They came from somewhere beyond the stacked wood, maybe fifty yards into the trees. I froze with a log halfway to the pile, listening. The cabin behind me creaked in the cooling air. A bird startled and flitted deeper into the woods.

I decided it was wood settling. Expansion, contraction, all that. Physics. The sound of a branch popping against another. On the walk back to the cabin I said it twice, like if I said it enough it would stop sounding like a lie.

Inside, I locked the door. I always locked it, but that night I turned the bolt and then checked it with my hand again without really thinking about it. The radio sat on the counter in the dim yellow light, dark plastic throwing my reflection back at me like a funhouse mirror.

When I lay down that night, I listened harder than I meant to. I told myself I was listening to the wind. But what I was really listening for was a fourth knock that never came.

A week or so later, the first weekend in October, I packed the orange tent into the bed of my truck like I’d done a hundred times. I’d been doing those solo trips for years, heading up into the woods for a couple nights at a time with some cheap ramen, a little propane stove, and a six-pack if money wasn’t too tight. The cab of the truck smelled like chainsaw oil and old coffee, and the passenger seat held a woven grocery basket half full of canned soup, instant coffee, and a box of crackers.

I drove up an old logging road until the potholes demanded I slow to a crawl. Gravel crunched under the tires, branches snicked and scraped down the sides of the truck. The forest closed in on both sides, damp and towering, the kind of deep green that always felt like the ocean had decided to grow upward instead of rolling out.

When the creek noise grew loud enough to drown the engine, I pulled over on a small bald patch near the bank. Evening fog was curling low over the water, dragging itself through the reeds like it was tired. I set up the orange tent about twenty yards from the bank, fingers numb from the chill, and got a small fire going.

By the time the light drained out of the sky, the only things left in the world were the crackle of the fire, the murmur of the creek, and the whisper of nylon whenever I shifted in the sleeping bag. The tent walls glowed soft orange with the lantern, skin-thin between me and everything else.

That’s when I heard three knocks again.

Farther this time. Deeper in the trees.

Low. Hollow. Like someone rapping knuckles on a hollow log. One… two… three.

The hairs on my forearms lifted. Smoke from the dead fire clung to my jacket and mixed with the cold, damp smell sneaking through the zipper gap.

“Some Bigfoot nut out there,” I muttered, forcing a laugh. “Playing games with the city idiots.”

Bigfoot still felt like a joke word. Something you throw into a story to make kids giggle or tourists pull over for a wooden cutout. Saying it out loud made me feel a little better, like if I kept the thing in the realm of the ridiculous it couldn’t get closer.

But after the knocks, the forest dropped into a kind of silence I’d never heard before. Not just the usual evening lull. No insects, no owl calls, no rustle of small movement in the underbrush. Even the creek sounded muffled, like someone had put a blanket over the world.

I fell asleep eventually, but it was the kind of sleep where your body shuts off and your brain keeps pacing. Twice I woke up sweating, heart racing, convinced I’d heard something outside, only to lie there hearing nothing but my own breathing and the constant whisper of the creek.

I packed up the next day like it was any other trip and drove home without telling a soul.

Two nights later, back at the cabin, the radio was talking about ghosts and Bigfoot on some call-in AM show. A guy swore a hairy eight-foot thing had stolen his chickens from a coop near Randle. The host laughed, the listeners laughed, and I laughed too, flipping the eggs in the skillet.

“I thought people wanted to believe in something big because their lives are small,” I say now into this recorder, and the worst part is hearing how much younger I sound in my own memory.

I got sick of the radio and flipped it off. The sudden quiet was jarring. The wind hissed along the window frames. The stove ticked while it cooled.

I stepped out onto the porch with my mug of coffee, the porch light throwing a warm circle over the damp boards. The yard beyond was just puddles and grass and the darker smear of the tree line. The smell of rain-soaked earth and pine sap was sharp enough to taste.

Three knocks came again.

Not faint, not distant.

Somewhere beyond the stacked firewood, back where the clearing bled into shadows.

One.

Two.

Three.

I froze with the mug halfway to my mouth, steam curling across my face. The sound wasn’t loud, but it was clear. Measured. Not random cracks from a tree giving way, not the scatterbeat of woodpeckers.

I waited for a fourth knock.

Nothing.

“Loose board,” I said, too quickly, too loud. “Wind in the damn boards.”

I set the mug down and pressed along the side wall of the cabin with my palm, plank by plank, trying to feel something loose. Everything was solid. The wall didn’t so much as shiver.

When I went inside, I locked the door, then I checked it again. I pulled the bedroom curtain shut for the first time in months. Lying there, staring at the ceiling, all I could hear was the tiny creaks of an old house cooling and the little scrapes of branches on the roof. But under that, there was something else—my own mind replaying those three knocks over and over like someone replaying a voicemail they never should’ve erased.

In the morning, I decided I was being paranoid. I pulled on my boots, opened the door, and stepped out into the pale, washed-out light. The ground near the woodpile was soft from the rain.

That’s when I saw the prints.

Big. Bare.

Not a boot tread, not a paw.

Toes.

Five of them, splayed slightly. The stride between prints was longer than I could manage unless I was lunging like an idiot. The impression was deep enough that whatever made them had weight—a lot of it.

I crouched, fingers hovering an inch above the nearest print. My breath smoked in front of me and drifted away.

“Bear,” I told myself. “Just the front pads. Back feet overlapping.”

Except bears don’t make prints like that. I knew bear tracks the way you know your own signature. These weren’t bear. And the more I stared at them, the more the word I’d made fun of in the diner started creeping into the back of my skull and refusing to leave.

Bigfoot.

I didn’t say it out loud that time.

Instead, I stood up, walked to the truck, and went to work. I didn’t mention it to anyone. What was I supposed to say? That something barefoot and huge had walked past my cabin while I was asleep ten feet away?

Two weeks later, I ignored every blaring instinct inside me and took the tent out again.

If you’ve never lied to yourself, really lied, here’s how it works: you tell yourself that the last weird thing was a fluke, and the only way to stop thinking about it is to prove to yourself it was nothing. So you go back to the place that scared you. You walk straight into the part of the forest that made your skin crawl. You call it “getting over it” so you don’t have to call it what it is—tempting whatever’s out there to show itself again.

I drove farther that time, up past where they’d graded the road last, onto the older, rougher track that picked its way along a steep slope near Gifford Pinchot. Snow dusted the gravel in a thin layer, not enough to stick, just enough to ghost the edges of the world.

I found a little flat shelf by a rusted guardrail that clung uncertainly to the edge of the road. Below, through a gap in the trees, I could hear the hiss and gurgle of a creek in a narrow ravine. The air smelled like cold metal and damp moss and exhaust cooling off.

I pitched the orange tent, fingers going stiff, breath puffing white. Out of habit, I picked five smooth stones from the roadside and set them in a tidy little circle near the fire ring. My dad had taught me that as a kid on camping trips back before the industry and the divorce and everything else. “Marks your place,” he’d said, his big hand closing around mine. “Lets the forest know you’re a guest, not a thief.”

The sky dimmed from gray to a bruised blue. Snow turned from dust to flakes. I watched them turn the top of the orange tent polka-dot white while I warmed my hands over the tiny fire.

Somewhere up on the ridge, a sound rose.

High. Long.

A whoop that didn’t sound like any owl or coyote I’d ever heard, too big for a human voice, too long for a bark. It climbed and then trailed off, swallowed by distance.

I went cold under three layers of clothing.

A few heartbeats later, from another direction—a different ridge, or deeper in the basin—three knocks.

One. Two. Three.

Not as faint this time. Not as far.

I laughed. It came out thin and wrong.

“Okay, Bigfoot,” I said into the dimming air. “You got me jumpy. Happy now?”

The forest answered with more snow.

By full dark, I’d zipped myself into the tent, lantern turned low. The nylon walls glowed like the inside of a jack-o-lantern, my shadow huge and distorted when I moved an arm or rolled over. I kept the flare gun tucked inside my jacket, the cold metal a small, ridiculous comfort pressed against my ribs.

Wind rattled the branches above, then thinned and faded away. The creek’s voice rose to fill the silence, burbling over unseen stones. The air in the tent was thick with my own breath, damp nylon, and the ghost of instant noodle seasoning.

At some point, that sound—that constant soft rush of water—seemed to recede, like someone turning the volume dial down.

And in the quiet that followed, I heard footsteps.

Slow. Heavy.

Not the patter of raccoons or the clumsy thump of a deer stumbling around a human camp. Each step had weight, pressing into the wet ground with a faint, disgusting squelch I could hear through the foam sleeping pad.

The footsteps circled the tent.

Left side. Behind. Right side. Front.

Each time they passed the corner, the tent stakes trembled in the ground. I could hear shallow brush swiping against the outer fabric, limbs bending rather than snapping.

Something stopped on the right side of the tent.

Then breathing joined the soundscape.

Not mine.

Not the quiet, wet breathing of a curious dog.

Deep. Chest-heavy. Rhythmic. Each inhale and exhale a slow tide.

The tent wall dipped inward an inch right over my face. The nylon chilled where it nearly touched my nose. In the amber glow I could see the faint impression of something pushing in—broad, not a finger poking, more like the curve of a palm or a muzzle.

“Bear,” I whispered, more to fill the air than because I believed it.

Bears don’t walk in circles like that. They don’t move with that deliberate three-beat cadence. They don’t knock on wood.

Three hollow knocks rang out from a tree just yards away.

They slammed through the air like someone driving a sledge into a hollow trunk. The tent poles thrummed. My chest vibrated with the sound.

The smell came back then, stronger than ever.

Wet fur. Rotting leaves. And under it, cutting through like a blade, the metallic tang of iron—rust, blood, something that scraped against memory in a place older than language.

My hand found the flare gun under my jacket. I wrapped my fingers around the grip so hard they started to tingle. The smooth notch of the safety dug into my thumb.

Everything outside went still.

No more footsteps. No more breathing I could separate from my own. Just the faint electric buzz of the lantern and the relentless drum of my heart in my ears.

I stayed like that for what felt like hours. Eyes wide, throat dry, muscles burning. Sleep didn’t so much claim me as sneak up behind me and hit me with a pipe.

When I unzipped the tent at dawn, the gray morning light on the snow made everything look like it had been scrubbed with bleach.

The prints were everywhere.

Big, bare impressions in the mud and snow around the campsite. Circling the tent. Near the fire ring. By the guardrail. Deeper, headed toward the ravine. They were cleaner than before—each toe visible, the edges of the prints sharp where they cut into the softened ground.

And on a pine just a few yards away, about seven feet up, three fresh gouges in the bark. Still weeping sap.

No claw rake above or below, just three deep, precise scores in a line—like someone had driven a curved metal hook into the tree and dragged down hard three times.

I packed up in ten minutes, hands clumsy and frantic. Shoved the tent—still damp from my breath—into the truck bed in a wet ball. I didn’t bother to fold the camp chair. I didn’t even fully stamp out the fire pit ash.

On the way down the road, my hands shook so bad on the wheel I had to pull over twice to breathe and wipe my eyes.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” I say into the recorder now, watching my breath curl in the damp air of the porch. “Who would I tell? That something with feet bigger than mine walked circles around me all night and decided not to rip the tent open?”

Back at home, things got worse.

One overcast afternoon in early November, I had a deer carcass hanging from the beam in my backyard, ready to butcher in the morning. The smell of blood and cold meat hung in the air like a curtain. I’d hoisted it up with rope, triple-knot, the way my father had taught me.

I drove into town for coffee and bread, thinking about nothing more mystical than whether I had enough freezer space. When I came back, the rope was snapped. The hook dangled sideways, still giving a lazy swing in the breeze.

The deer was gone.

Not dragged. Not torn to pieces. Gone.

The dirt beneath the beam was disturbed, but not like you’d see with coyotes or dogs. No drag trail leading off. No scattered tufts of fur. Just deep, odd prints around the post.

The same prints I’d seen by the creek.

I crouched and ran my fingers over the broken rope fibers. They were frayed high up, around seven feet off the ground, the strands splayed in a way that said one quick, powerful jerk. I looked for claw marks on the beam, on the post. There were none.

That evening, I called the sheriff’s office and made a hesitant half-joke about some Bigfoot nut stealing my meat. The deputy on the line snorted. “Maybe it’s that Bigfoot finally paying taxes,” he said, then steered the conversation to whether I’d seen any suspicious trucks.

I hung up and stepped out onto the porch. The beam was still bare, the rope swaying slightly like a pendulum. The woods beyond the yard were turning to silhouette.

Three knocks sounded from somewhere past the last line of firs.

Slow. Heavy.

The smell of musk and wet bark slid down the breeze like an invisible animal. Every hair on my arms stood on end.

I did something I hadn’t done since I moved into that cabin: I shut off the porch light and stood in the dark looking out at the darker.

Nothing moved. The trees were just soft vertical shadows, layered one behind the other until they faded into black. An owl hooted once and went quiet.

I went inside and checked every lock, then checked them again, hands a little sweaty against the cold metal. I took a baseball bat into the bedroom, leaned it within arm’s reach of the bed.

Somewhere around three in the morning I heard slow, heavy footsteps move along the side of the house. Snow squeaked under weight. A board creaked under long-neglected strain.

I got up, walked to the window, and pulled the curtain back an inch. I saw nothing but my own scared face reflected in the glass. But the smell was there again, faint through the wood and caulk—wet fur, rust, something wild and old pressing against the edges of my life.

I sat on the edge of the bed until dawn, baseball bat across my lap, listening to my house creak and settle.

You can only sit with fear for so long before you either break or try to face it.

Late November, with the first real snow starting to stick, I told myself one more trip would fix my head. One more time alone in the trees would prove that the knocks and prints and smell were just stress and poor sleep stapled onto a noisy forest.

I picked a new spot—a little farther, a little deeper, like a genius. The old logging road was more ice than gravel near the top, the truck slipping just enough to keep my palms sweaty on the wheel. I parked near the rusted guardrail, the one I’d seen in better weather earlier that month, and told myself the drop beyond it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

By full dark, the orange tent was up and the sky was a blank, low ceiling, leaking slow flakes. I dimmed the lantern to a faint butter smear of light and lay stretched out in my sleeping bag, boots still on, jacket zipped to my throat. The air inside the tent tasted like damp plastic and my own nerves.

Wind rattled the trees, then died. The creek below whispered and then also seemed to lessen, as if the whole forest was pulling its sound in tight.

The first three knocks slammed into the earth beside the tent like someone driving a piling.

The stakes jumped. The poles groaned. Dust that had been trapped in the seams shook loose and drifted down.

It wasn’t a tree this time. You can tell the difference between sound carried through wood and sound punched straight into dirt. This was ground-deep, right outside, close enough that my ribs felt each knock like a second heartbeat.

The smell poured in.

If fear had a scent, it would be that mix of wet fur, old earth, and sharp metallic tang. It filled the tent in one breathless rush.

Something exhaled just beyond the fabric, and the wall bowed inward over my chest like a slow hand pressing. The nylon brushed my jacket. I could feel the cold through all the layers.

And then—this is the part that still turns my stomach—that low sound came.

Not a roar.

Not a growl.

A low, resonant hum.

It vibrated through the tent poles, through the foam pad, through my bones. It wasn’t animal nonsense. It wasn’t random. There was shape to it, cadence, like someone trying out a word they’d never spoken before. It sounded almost… confused.

My body overruled my brain.

I ripped the zipper up halfway, shoved the flare gun out into the night, and fired.

The flare screamed out with a violent whoomp, bathing the campsite in red so bright it burned the color into my vision. Snow and bark exploded away from whatever it hit.

For one fraction of a second, the forest wasn’t made of shadows anymore.

A towering shape reared back, arms lifting. Not a bear, not a man in a suit, not anything that fit inside the labels I’d spent my life believing in. A mass of fur and muscle and height, too big and too upright and too wrong to be anything I had a box for. Then it vanished into the dark beyond the flare’s reach, crashing uphill through the trees with a speed that didn’t make sense for something that large.

What froze my blood wasn’t the way it moved.

It was the sound it made.

A low, broken moan tore out of the dark, deep enough to vibrate in my teeth. Not furious. Not purely angry.

Wounded.

Confused.

Like something that had reached out to touch a strange, glowing insect and gotten its hand burned off.

It echoed through the trees, up the slope, down into the ravines.

I don’t know how long I lay there after that, staring at the melted flap of the tent while smoke from the flare drifted in, smelling like fireworks and regret. At some point, the cold worked its way through terror and into my muscles, and my body decided it had to move or freeze.

I crammed my feet into my half-laced boots, grabbed the flashlight with numb fingers, and staggered out into the snow. The tent flap drooped like a torn eyelid behind me.

The forest was dark again, the flare spent somewhere beyond the tree line.

Nothing chased me. No footsteps pounded after me as I scrambled toward the road. That somehow was worse. It meant whatever I had just shot at had decided not to follow.

I made it to the broken stretch of logging road, lungs burning, leg throbbing, flashlight beam bouncing wildly over the snow and ruts. Every few steps my foot slipped, and each time I half expected to feel a hand close around my ankle and yank me backward.

Somewhere behind me, on the slope, a branch snapped. Slow, heavy footfalls began to follow. Not rushing, not running me down. Just… accompanying.

I didn’t look back.

The road curved near the rusted guardrail, and the snow had covered the edge in a smooth, false invitation. In the swinging circle of my flashlight, the road looked solid ahead. My brain, rattled and afraid, accepted it completely.

Three sharp knocks rang out from the metal of the guardrail itself.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

The sound was so sudden, so close, that my heart stuttered. It vibrated in my teeth, in the cartilage of my ears.

I stopped on instinct. My next step would have taken me straight over the edge.

Ahead, just past where the light of my flashlight faded, the snow dipped suddenly, revealing black air and the faint glint of water far below. The ravine. Twenty feet down, maybe more.

A small rock bounced to a stop near my boot. Not thrown hard. Not hurled at my head. Dropped. Placed.

I turned slowly, shaking, and raised the flashlight just enough to catch the edge of something at the fringe of the beam.

A shape that the light could barely understand—it seemed too big for the space it was in. Shoulders wider than any man’s. A head higher than the top of the guardrail. The suggestion of arms held slightly away from its sides, like it was balancing itself on the slope.

I couldn’t see details. Just bulk and height and the suggestion of fur soaking in the snow.

The breathing was there again. Deep. Laboured. A little… uneven.

It could have stepped forward. Could have closed that distance faster than I could scream.

Instead, it stood between me and the ravine, blocking the path I’d been about to walk, and stayed there until headlights swung around the bend.

The roar of another truck engine cut through the silence. White light washed over the guardrail, the road, the snow, my own scared face.

And in that instant, the presence veered up and away, breaking uphill through the trees with a crash of branches and the fading rhythm of those impossible footsteps.

The other truck slid to a stop. A young guy in a flannel popped his head out the window, his face pale and eyes wide.

“You okay, man?” he shouted over the engine. “You’re bleeding!”

I looked down. My shin was torn, blood mixing with melting snow in a pink smear, my jeans sliced by whatever rock I’d hit when I stumbled earlier.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I… I fell. Animal. Spooked me.”

I almost said the word. It sat on my tongue like a live coal.

Bigfoot.

But I swallowed it, and he helped me into his truck and drove me down the mountain toward the glow of town lights.

At the ER, under humming fluorescent tubes, surrounded by the antiseptic smell I’ve always hated, I told the nurse a wild animal had charged my camp. She nodded, wrote “wildlife encounter” on her chart, and didn’t ask more.

A deputy came later. He sat in a plastic chair in the corner of the exam room, pen scratching on a form. The printer outside whined and sputtered. Every so often someone laughed at a joke I couldn’t hear.

I told him about the knocks. The breathing. The guardrail. The ravine.

“I think…” I said, hating the way my throat closed around the word, “I think it was a Bigfoot.”

His pen paused. His eyes flicked to the partially open door of the adjoining office, then back to me.

“We’ll just put ‘bear,’” he said softly. “Bar attack. Okay?”

I stared at him. He stared back. Then I shrugged. “Bear,” I echoed.

I pulled out my old phone and opened the gallery with shaking fingers. “I have video. Just… just look. I hit record before the flare. You can hear everything.”

He took the phone, thumbed through to the clip, watched. Shaky tent walls. The sudden boom of knocks. My own panting. That moan—the wounded, confused sound that still crawls under my skin. A half-frame of something huge at the edge of the red glare.

His face drained.

“Sheriff,” he called. “You should see this.”

The sheriff came in smelling like cologne and authority, heavy boots hitting the tile in even beats. He plugged the phone into a desktop, clicked, squinted. The reflection of the screen flashed faintly in his glasses.

“Huh,” he said. “Must not’ve saved right.”

He unplugged the phone and slid it back to me. I opened the gallery. The clip was gone.

“It was there,” I said. “You saw it. It’s gone.”

“File corruption happens all the time,” the sheriff said, already half turned toward the door. “Old phones. We’ll note it down. You get some rest, Mr. Cole. Bear encounters can rattle a man.”

On his desk, in a stack of forms, I caught sight of my own incident report. A red stamp across the top already read: CLOSED.

Outside, limping to my truck, I passed a young deputy leaning against his cruiser. He tapped three times on the hood with his knuckles—slow. Deliberate.

Our eyes met. He looked away like a kid caught doing something he didn’t understand but had been taught.

You can call me paranoid. Might as well; I’d have called you the same ten years ago. But I know I hit record, and I know that video existed for at least five minutes. Somebody decided it shouldn’t anymore.

At home, I plugged the phone into my beat-up laptop and ran a recovery program I’d once used to salvage family photos from a corrupted SD card. It took hours. The computer wheezed and clicked like an old smoker.

Eventually, buried deep in the deleted file index, there it was. A corrupted thumbnail, half gray, half black. I clicked it, and the clip sputtered to life, missing its first seconds but still intact where it counted.

Three knocks.

My own strained breathing.

The moan.

The shadow.

I copied it to a hidden folder, encrypted it with a password nobody else knows, and then I pulled the SD card from the phone and put it in the back of a kitchen drawer under a nest of takeout menus and old receipts.

I’ve never uploaded it. Never shown anyone.

Not because I don’t want people to believe me.

Because I know what happens when people believe.

They go looking with guns.

Years passed. The logging yard laid me off in 2017. Too many injuries, too many cheap imports, too many people like me whose backs had more scar tissue than muscle. I started working odd shifts at the hardware store in town, ringing up nails and paint and listening to the radio chatter about politics and weather and whatever else filled the space between songs.

I stopped camping alone.

The orange tent hangs in my shed, a melted scar along one seam. I’ve tried to throw it away four times. It always ends up back on the shelf.

I still live near the same tree line. The cabin became a rental when money got tight and I had to move into something cheaper, but I didn’t go far. My new place has the same view—wall of firs, ridge rising beyond, cloud line dragging low in winter.

On cool evenings, I walk to the edge of the yard carrying a plastic bag of apples. I set them on an old stump just where the grass ends and the leaf litter begins, right where the forest feels like it’s drawing a line in the dirt and daring you to cross.

I stand there for a minute or two, feeling half stupid, half like I’m saying grace.

“I don’t know if you remember me,” I sometimes mutter under my breath. “The idiot with the flare gun.”

In the mornings, when I go to check, the apples are gone.

Sometimes there are raccoon tracks. Sometimes there are none. Sometimes there are three smooth stones stacked neatly on the stump where no stones were the day before.

On those mornings, there’s a faint smell in the air.

Wet fur. Moss. A hint of rust.

Familiar now.

Old.

Not scary the way it was. Just… present.

In my kitchen drawer, next to an expired fishing license and a packet of soy sauce that leaked sometime in 2019, lies that old phone with the recovered video. The battery’s dead now. The body’s cracked. But the SD card is still in it.

Sometimes I sit at the table with it in my hand, thumb resting on the dead screen, and think about what would happen if I posted that clip online.

Within a week, there’d be expedition types stomping through the forest with night-vision goggles and thermal drones and rifles “just in case.” There’d be YouTube thumbnails with red circles and yellow arrows. There’d be people blaring calls through loudspeakers and banging on trees, desperate for three knocks back.

Most of all, there’d be someone who didn’t understand the difference between a curious animal and a threat. Someone who’d see something huge and unknown and decide fear and bullets were the only reasonable answers.

So the clip stays where it is.

Now it’s late November 2024. The yard is slick with rain. The trees loom like dark teeth against a low, unbroken sky. I sit on this sagging porch, tin roof rattling under the steady drum of another storm rolling down off the ridge, and I talk into a recorder like it’s a confessional.

I still don’t like the word Bigfoot. It sounds fake. Like a cereal mascot. Like something on the side of a gas-station souvenir mug.

But when I use it now, my voice does this thing I can’t quite control—drops low, soft, like I’m saying the name of someone who might hear it.

Whatever that thing was—whatever they are—it hit my tent hard enough to make the poles bounce and the stakes jump, and then it walked behind me in the dark to keep me from stepping off a cliff.

I used to think fear was what defined that whole stretch of my life. Fear of the unknown. Fear of being mocked. Fear of realizing the world wasn’t the neat, mapped-out thing I’d thought it was.

Now, sitting here with my joints aching in the damp, I think guilt is the truer word.

Guilt that the first real contact I had with something bigger, older, and smarter than me was me firing a flare into its face.

Guilt that somewhere in these woods there’s a scarred creature with one more reason to flinch at any light we bring.

Rain softens to a misty hiss. The refrigerator hum inside the house is a dull baseline under the storm. Through the curtain of water, the tree line is just a darker blur.

I click the recorder off, set it on the little metal table beside the chair, and lean forward, elbows on my knees.

That’s when I hear it—distant, almost swallowed by the rain.

One knock.

Pause.

Two.

Pause.

Three.

Slow. Heavy.

Measured.

I don’t move for a long time.

It could be a branch slamming in the wind. It could be memory. It could be my heart trying to put sense to random noise.

Or it could be exactly what it sounds like: something big and quiet and old, standing just inside that wall of trees, letting me know it’s still there.

I don’t go to the edge of the yard tonight. Don’t grab a flashlight or a camera or the phone with the video on it.

Instead, I sit back, let the chair creak under my weight, and stare into the dark where the knocks came from.

“I hear you,” I whisper finally, barely louder than the breath that carries the words.

There’s no answer.

Just rain.

Just the hum of the fridge.

Just the forest breathing at the edge of everything I understand.

That’s enough.