BIGFOOT CAUGHT BREAKING INTO AND DESTROYING A HOUSE! “THIS WAS SHOCKING” and STORY GOES VIRAL

Chapter 1 — The Man I Used to Be

Four months ago, if someone had walked into my favorite supply shop in Granville and told me they’d caught a Sasquatch on camera studying their hunting camp, I would’ve bought them a beer, laughed until my eyes watered, and blamed the story on too many lonely nights in the mountains. That used to be my default setting—skepticism worn like a warm coat. I’m not proud of it, exactly, but it kept me grounded. It kept me from turning every snapped branch into a mystery.

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Now I’m the one telling the story, and I still don’t like how it sounds when I say it out loud.

My name is Thomas Webb, but everyone calls me Web. I’m fifty-three, third-generation Idaho, and I’ve spent more than thirty-five years tracking and hunting through these ridges. I know the Clearwater country like I know my own hands—the creases, the scars, the way the weather changes the feel of the skin. I can tell you where elk migrate in October, which saddles hold mule deer when the snow comes early, and where the black bears like to den when the wind turns mean. I’ve guided hunters, fought wildfires, and slept more nights under open sky than in any motel. I’m not the kind of man who gets spooked by shadows.

That’s why I’m writing this. Not to convince you, not to sell a legend, not to join the chorus of people who want the wilderness to be magical. I’m writing it because it happened, and because my cameras recorded it, and because I learned something I didn’t want to learn: you can know a place for decades and still not know what lives in it.

My cabin sits roughly seventy minutes northeast of Elk River, tucked on twenty-two acres of steep, timbered mountainside between 4,800 and 5,400 feet. It’s lodgepole pine, Douglas fir, western red cedar, and thick undergrowth—huckleberry, mahogany, everything that grabs your pants and refuses to let go. A small creek cuts the eastern edge and drops into a ravine like a secret slipping away. Winter closes the road most years. From November through April, you can go days without seeing another human being, and weeks without hearing an engine.

I built this place after my wife died.

Patricia passed in May of 2017, cancer taking her the way fire takes a dry hillside—too fast, too complete, leaving a silence that doesn’t feel natural. We’d always talked about a cabin deep in the mountains, a place where the world couldn’t follow you. After she was gone, I didn’t just want that escape, I needed it. I sold the house in Lewiston, stripped my life down to the essentials, and put everything into this log cabin: sixteen by twenty-four feet, metal roof, wood stove, propane, solar panels, satellite internet so I could keep working as a freelance outdoor writer. The inside is utilitarian—one open room, a sleeping loft, a small bathroom addition. The walls hold old rifles, a few mounts, and Patricia’s oil paintings of mountain landscapes that look calmer than any real mountain ever is.

It’s not much. But it’s mine. And for a while, it saved me.

Chapter 2 — The Cameras, the Dog, the First Wrong Note

I’ve always been evidence-based. Growing up in Idaho, you hear the stories—big tracks by creeks, strange howls, something tall moving through timber at dusk. My father guided in these mountains for forty years and dismissed all of it as city nonsense. I inherited that attitude. Every mystery had a known explanation if you knew wildlife and weren’t hungry for myths. Cougars can scream like people. Bears can stand upright and look disturbingly human for a heartbeat. Shadows stretch wrong under infrared flash. Mountain acoustics play tricks.

So when I installed trail cameras in early 2018, it wasn’t for monsters. It was for patterns. I wanted to see what moved through my property when I wasn’t looking, the way a hunter studies a drainage before season. I used good units—Reconyx Hyperfire models, fast trigger, clean low-light photos, fifteen-second video clips when motion hit. One watched the approach to the cabin. One covered the creek crossing. One aimed at the woodpile and generator shed. One watched the north timber line where cover was thick. One looked into the clearing behind the cabin. And one covered the game shed where I hung meat during season.

For a year and a half, the cameras showed exactly what you’d expect: bears in spring, ragged fur and hungry manners; elk cows and calves in summer; bucks rubbing velvet in August; coyotes mousing; a mountain lion slipping past the creek camera in November, eyes glowing green under infrared. I’d review footage with coffee, sometimes saving a clip for an article, usually just enjoying the quiet confirmation that the ecosystem worked the way it always had.

Then Duke came along.

He was a Plott hound, trained for blood tracking and big game, a dog built to move through rough country and keep his nerve when the world smells like danger. He arrived in January 2019 and fit my life like he’d been born for it. He wasn’t reckless; he was confident. Bears, cougars, deer—he reacted the way a trained dog should: alert, controlled, sometimes interested, never fearful. That matters, because what happened later wasn’t Duke “acting weird.” It was Duke acting like something had rewritten the rules.

The first wrong note came on October 27th, 2023.

I was at my desk around 10:30 p.m., editing an elk-rut article, when Duke stood up and went to the door. That alone wasn’t unusual. But instead of looking back at me, tail wagging, he just stared at the door like it was a problem he couldn’t solve. Then he stepped backward and whined low, his tail tucked just enough to raise the hair on my arms. His hackles came up in a ridge along his spine. I opened the door and the motion-sensor floodlight snapped on, turning my porch and the immediate yard harsh white. Beyond that circle of light, the forest was a wall of black.

I stood there scanning, listening. Nothing. No crunch of feet, no branch snap, no bear huffing in the dark. Just wind high in the pines and the creek whispering in the ravine. I closed the door. Duke paced for an hour, stopping to stare at the walls as if something moved just beyond them.

The next morning, a light dusting of snow showed tracks.

They were big—bigger than my size-twelve boots—and they came in a pattern that bothered me immediately. Bipedal. Long stride. No matching front paw prints. No claw marks like you’d expect from bear sign. The prints circled the cabin twenty to fifty feet out, then slipped back into the timber. I measured, photographed, told myself it was a bear upright for a stretch, and still couldn’t make my gut accept it.

Over the next week, Duke refused to go outside after dark. I had to push him out to relieve himself, and he’d do it fast, eyes pinned to the treeline, then scramble back inside like the night was a trap. More tracks appeared irregularly. The musky smell arrived around November 2nd—wet dog and rot and something alive underneath it, strongest on the north wall where the tracks favored.

And then came the noises: heavy footfalls on gravel, weight on porch boards, soft scraping against logs. Each time I checked the lights, nothing was there. Each time I told myself it was my mind filling in gaps. Yet Duke trembled on his rug like his instincts were seeing what mine refused to name.

On November 7th, I finally pulled the SD cards. I hadn’t checked them in two weeks, buried in deadlines. When I started clicking through the images, my hands went cold.

Something had been visiting.

Chapter 3 — The Visitor on the North Line

The first frame that made my spine tighten was timestamped October 28th, 11:47 p.m. A dark shape at the edge of the north camera’s range, partially blocked by a tree trunk. My initial reaction was anger at the camera angle—frustration that it wasn’t clearer. Then I clicked forward.

More frames. More nights. The shape returning between 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m., always approaching from the timber, always moving with slow deliberation, always keeping to the perimeter like it was measuring the boundary of my life. On October 29th it was clearer. Upright. Massive. Hair-covered. Not a bear. Not a man. It stood seven or eight feet tall, shoulders broad, arms hanging too long, hands too large.

By November 1st, it had approached within thirty feet of the cabin. In one photo it stood in three-quarter profile, slightly hunched forward like it was leaning to look at something. The proportions were wrong for a human. The torso was too thick, barrel-chested. The head sat forward on the shoulders with little neck visible. The arms hung to mid-thigh, the hands oversized in a way that made me think of strength I didn’t want to imagine.

And the posture—God, the posture—wasn’t the startled freeze of an animal caught by a flash. It was controlled. Deliberate. As if it knew where it was, what it was doing, and why.

I went through all six cameras. The thing appeared on multiple angles over multiple nights, circling, pausing, turning its head as if listening or tasting the air. On November 3rd, the game-shed camera caught it running its hands along the shed walls, exploring the padlock with what looked like… curiosity. Not brute force. Not frantic hunger. Investigative touch.

The hands were the detail that made me swallow hard and sit back from the screen. They were not paws. They were not bear claws. Five fingers. Thick. Powerful. An opposable thumb. Humanlike in a way that felt wrong, like seeing a reflection that moves half a second behind you.

I’ve worked with trail cams for decades. I know the tricks. I know how a deer at a strange angle can fake a “humanoid” silhouette. I know how infrared creates shadows that lie. This wasn’t that. This was a real entity, moving through my property like it belonged there.

The video clips made it worse. Fifteen seconds at a time, enough to show gait and intent. The creature moved with remarkable stealth for its size, placing its feet carefully, ducking under branches, slipping between trunks without a crash. It paused, turned its head, listened. That alone was unsettling. Animals listen, yes—but this felt like assessment, like tactical checking.

By the time I reached the footage dated November 9th, my skepticism had stopped feeling like strength. It felt like denial.

Because that was the night it came to the porch.

Chapter 4 — The Porch Light and the Face in the Glass

That day I’d processed an elk I’d harvested two days earlier. The meat hung in the game shed, clean and aging. It was hard work, dawn to dusk. Duke had been on edge even in daylight—clingy, growling softly at the treeline, forcing me to look up again and again at a forest that looked normal and somehow didn’t feel normal.

I went to bed around 9:30 exhausted. Duke lay on his rug but faced the door instead of curling into sleep. I fell under fast.

At 11:15 p.m., Duke’s growl pulled me out of sleep like a hook. Not his alert bark. Not the aggressive rumble he used when confronting known threats. This was a low continuous vibration from deep in his chest—fear held back by discipline. He stood rigid beside my bed, staring at the door, trembling like he was trying not to run.

Then I heard the steps.

Deliberate weight on porch boards. Careful placement, not stomping. Something walking on my porch that understood noise.

I grabbed my phone and opened the feed from the newer security cameras I’d installed—the ones with live view, one covering the porch, one the back deck. The porch light had snapped on, and the screen showed a figure standing six feet from my front door.

Clear. Lit. Unmistakable.

It was at least eight feet tall, maybe more. Covered in dark brown, nearly black hair, matted and thick. The hair was longer on the head and shoulders, shorter on limbs. The build was enormous—shoulders close to four feet across, arms hanging to mid-thigh, legs thick as logs. The feet looked oversized even for that body.

Then it turned its head and I saw the face.

A heavy brow ridge. A flat wide nose. Skin visible beneath shorter facial hair, leathery-looking. The eyes reflected the porch light like an animal’s, but they were set in a primate-like skull, and there was something in the way the head moved—slow, deliberate scanning—that made my throat tighten.

It reached out with one huge hand and tested my door handle. Pulled. Released. Moved to the window and pressed its face close to the glass as if trying to see through the curtains. I watched frozen, rifle within reach, and felt something primal in me insisting that silence was safer than bravery. Not because I was a coward, but because my body knew what my mind was still catching up to: if this thing decided to come in, no lock on earth would matter.

It stepped off the porch and moved along the north wall, one hand trailing across the logs like it was reading the texture. It stopped to examine the propane tank, the utility entry points, the gaps where a smaller animal might squeeze. It wasn’t panicking. It wasn’t thrashing. It was learning.

At the back deck it stopped and looked toward the game shed. I realized then that the elk meat was probably the loudest scent on my property, even through walls. The creature stood still, head slightly angled, as if weighing options.

Then it looked straight into the back-deck camera.

Not a glance. A stare.

It saw the camera. It understood the camera. And it knew there was a human on the other side of it.

In that moment, through the clean digital image, I felt the same thing I’ve seen in smart predators up close—cougars, bears, wolves—only amplified: assessment. Calculation. Not hunger. Not panic. A mind.

It turned and walked toward the game shed. The camera there caught it up close: it examined the padlock, pulled, tested. When the lock held, it moved to the side window and tugged at the wire mesh. Then it stepped back, and instead of forcing entry, it sat down against the shed wall.

Sat.

Like a person waiting.

For forty-five minutes it stayed there, motionless except for occasional head turns, scanning the forest and then back toward the cabin. Once it scratched its shoulder in a gesture so familiar it made me flinch. Around 1:15 a.m., it stood and returned to the cabin. It tested the handle again, pushed as well as pulled, checked each front window, breath fogging the panes, and then—three soft taps on the glass, polite as a visitor.

Duke’s growl climbed toward a bark. I put my hand on his head to keep him quiet. Finally, the creature stepped off the porch and walked toward the timberline, disappearing beyond the lights. Only then did I realize I’d been holding my breath like a man underwater.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. I sat with my rifle and my phone and watched the feeds like watching could change anything. When dawn came, I felt older. Not just tired—altered.

I spent the day documenting tracks. Eighteen-inch prints. Eight inches wide. Deep impressions suggesting something in the six-hundred-pound range. Stride length between forty-eight and fifty-four inches. Five toes aligned like a human’s, not splayed like an ape’s. Heel and ball pressure points. And in the cleanest prints, what looked like dermal ridges—skin patterns, like fingerprints for the sole.

I found coarse dark hairs snagged on bark where it brushed the cabin corner. Hand smudges on windows, massive palms, five fingers. The musky smell still lingering hours later. All of it said the same thing in different languages: something real had been here.

And it had chosen not to hurt me.

That wasn’t comfort. It was a different kind of fear.

Chapter 5 — The Knock That Felt Like a Sentence

Over the next week, it came back four times.

Each visit began between 10:00 p.m. and midnight. Each time it moved with the same measured circuit, the same testing of boundaries, the same periods of stillness where it simply watched. The spacing was irregular—two days, then three, then one, then four—no pattern I could predict. Duke deteriorated at night, refusing to go out, whining, trembling. During the day he clung close as if proximity to me meant safety. For the first time since I built the cabin, the isolation I’d sought began to feel like exposure.

I did what I always do when reality stops fitting my assumptions: I researched.

I expected nonsense. What I found instead was a bleak kind of validation. Hundreds of reports from the Pacific Northwest describing the same features: large bipedal, hair-covered, avoidance of direct conflict, curiosity toward camps, circling structures, testing doors, leaving without violence. The descriptions of footprints matched what I measured. The behavior matched what I watched. Even the timing—late night, pre-dawn—matched.

On November 18th, I reached out for help because I couldn’t keep living in a loop of adrenaline and denial. I contacted Dr. Sarah Chen at the University of Idaho, an anthropology professor who studied unexplained wildlife encounters with a methodical, evidence-based approach. She responded quickly, asked for my footage, my written account, coordinates. I sent everything.

Her reply the next morning was short enough to make my stomach drop: what I’d documented was extraordinary, and she wanted to visit with her team.

They arrived November 23rd—Dr. Chen, two grad students, and a tracking expert named James “Bear” Hutchkins, nephew of my neighbor Bill. They watched the footage multiple times, pausing on gait, proportions, hand movement. No one laughed. No one tried to “debunk” it with lazy explanations. They treated it like data.

In the field, Bear examined the tracks and said plainly, “These weren’t made by any animal I know.” He pointed to the foot structure, the gait pattern, the depth, the lack of bear indicators. The grad student specializing in biomechanics mapped stride, joint angles, center of gravity and concluded the locomotion wasn’t replicable by a human in a costume without violating basic physics. The other student focused on behavior and kept returning to the same word: learning. Methodical testing. Restraint. Investigation rather than aggression.

Dr. Chen didn’t declare it “Sasquatch” like a headline. She said something more unsettling: an unknown primate-like biological entity fit the evidence better than hoax or misidentification, though definitive identification required DNA or a specimen.

Before leaving, she gave me protocols, a satellite phone, and the most careful reassurance she could offer: the creature’s behavior showed avoidance of confrontation, restraint when barriers held, investigation rather than attack. Powerful, yes. Dangerous if provoked, possibly. But not behaving like a direct predator.

Three days later, November 26th, it came one last time.

I was awake, monitoring feeds, when it walked straight to the porch instead of circling. It stood directly in front of the door, motionless. Then it knocked—three solid, deliberate knocks that echoed through my cabin like punctuation.

Duke exploded into barking for the first time during any encounter. The creature stopped, tilted its head as if listening, then took one step sideways and looked directly at the camera above the door—one of Dr. Chen’s new units.

It held eye contact for five minutes.

Not with me exactly, but with the lens that represented me. Focused, unwavering, intent. And in that stare, all my old rational explanations collapsed. I wasn’t looking at a hungry bear or a curious animal. I was looking at an intelligence that understood attention, understood observation, understood that something on the other side could see.

Then it raised its hand and placed it flat against the camera lens, covering the view. Thirty seconds of palm lines and ridges in infrared close-up—eerily human in detail, impossibly large in scale. When it lowered its hand, it stared one more time, then walked away into the timber, paused at the treeline as if to look back, and disappeared.

It hasn’t returned since.

I still live in the cabin. The terror has thinned into something stranger: wonder mixed with caution, humility mixed with unease. Duke is mostly himself again, though he still listens hard at dusk. Sometimes I step onto the porch on clear nights and stare toward the northern timberline, imagining that massive figure moving silently between trunks, a neighbor I never asked for and can’t deny.

I don’t know what that last gesture meant—hand on lens, deliberate silence, departure. Maybe nothing. Maybe I’m reading meaning into animal behavior. But it felt like communication. Like an acknowledgment of boundaries. Like a message written in the only language it trusted: presence.

If my old self heard me say that, he’d laugh and buy me a beer.

I don’t miss that version of me as much as I thought I would.