He Thought His Trail Cam Was Glitching—Until Bigfoot Started Digging a Grave on Screen

1. The Cemetery on the Ridge

It was late spring, 2015, in the Appalachian foothills—up in that green, damp world where the roads turn to gravel and then to dirt and then to nothing.

I was 43, divorced, living alone in the same kind of mountain cabin I’d grown up visiting. My grandfather used to say the land kept you honest. It also kept you quiet. Cell service was patchy; nights were black and full of sound.

The cemetery sat in a small clearing a couple of miles from my place, just past where the county road gave up and the trees took over. Eight graves:

My grandfather
His father
And six others, all family, going back to the 1890s

We kept it simple—wooden crosses and hand‑carved markers, the kind you repaint and re‑stake every few years when the weather chews through them. My father had brought me here as a boy. “We look after our own,” he’d say, hands on his knees, watching me pull weeds.

After he died, it became my job.

That’s why I bought the trail cam.

Not because I expected anything weird—just to see what passed through at night. Deer. Raccoons. Maybe a black bear nosing around the stones.

Sixty dollars at the hardware store got me a no‑frills unit: infrared, motion‑activated, strapped to a pine tree about fifteen yards from the graves. I pointed it toward the clearing, checked the angle, tested the sensor with a few jumps in front of it, and left it.

The forest smelled like wet pine needles and rot that day. Heavy spring air, the kind that sticks your shirt to your back. Everything was overgrown, bright and loud with life.

Nothing felt wrong.

2. The Three Knocks

Three days later, on a quiet evening, I was on my porch with a cup of coffee and an outdated copy of Field & Stream.

Crickets started up around eight. An owl called from somewhere close. The heat bled off the mountain and the air went from oppressive to just barely tolerable.

Then I heard it.

Three knocks.

Not a tree falling. Not a woodpecker.

Thump.

…Thump.

…Thump.

Deep, solid sounds from the direction of the cemetery. They weren’t random. Each one came about two seconds apart—steady, deliberate, like someone striking a hollow log with a bat.

I froze, magazine half‑open.

Woodpeckers rattle. Branches crack. Thunder rolls.

This was none of those.

“Probably a limb falling,” I told myself out loud, as if saying it made it true. “Sound carries weird in these hollows.”

There were no more knocks that night.

I finished my coffee and tried to convince myself it was nothing.

3. What the Trail Cam Saw

The next morning, I took the truck up the old logging road as far as it would go, then hoofed it the rest of the way to the cemetery.

Birdsong. Squirrels in the canopy. Fresh, clean light slanting between trunks.

Everything looked normal.

The markers stood straight. No fresh dirt. No disturbed ground. No tracks.

The little camera blinked its red LED at me, like an eye that couldn’t blink.

I popped the SD card out and slid it into my pocket.

Back at the cabin, I plugged it into my laptop and clicked through the clips.

A doe and her fawn passing through at dusk.

A raccoon making a mess around one of the markers.

A fox trotting across the frame just before dawn, tail high, head down.

I was about to close the program when I noticed a timestamp:

2:47 a.m.

I opened the file.

The clearing appeared in ghostly gray, washed in the camera’s infrared. For a moment, there was nothing—just leaves shivering in a faint breeze.

Then, at the back edge of the clearing, something moved.

A large, dark shape—too big to be a person, too broad to be a bear—was kneeling beside my grandfather’s grave.

Its shoulders hunched, its head bowed.

It was digging.

Not with a shovel. With its hands.

The dirt around the grave mound shifted in small, controlled scoops. The thing’s arms moved in a steady rhythm—scooping, placing the soil aside in neat little piles, like someone carefully opening a box.

I leaned in until my eyes hurt.

The figure filled more of the frame as it shifted position. Even kneeling, it was massive. Hair, long and dark, showed up as a pale, ghostly gray under infrared. The arms were long. The torso wide, blocky, powerful.

I watched it work for almost three minutes.

Then it stopped.

Slowly, it rose to its full height.

On my screen, the creature unfurled like a shadow standing up from the ground. It kept going and going until its head nearly brushed the top of the frame.

Seven feet.

Maybe eight.

It turned slightly, and I saw its profile.

Flat nose. Heavy brow. A jaw that jutted in a way no human mask mimics correctly. The proportions were wrong for a person.

It wasn’t looking at the camera—not directly. It was scanning the clearing, the way a man might glance around to make sure he was still alone.

Then it took three calm, unhurried steps into the trees and vanished.

I replayed it.

Once.

Twice.

Five times.

Each time I hoped for an answer: a costume, some trick of the light, a neighbor screwing with me. Something I could point to and say, “There. That’s where it falls apart.”

But it didn’t fall apart.

Every time, it held.

I had footage of something I’d laughed at my whole life.

Bigfoot.

Digging at my grandfather’s grave.

4. The Footprint and the Smell

I didn’t sleep that night.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that thing rise from the ground and straighten, dirt on its hands. Not hurried. Not frantic. Just… doing a job.

By dawn, I’d made a decision.

I had to see the grave.

The hike felt longer than usual, my mind replaying each second of the video in a loop.

When I stepped into the clearing, golden morning light made the place look softer than it had in infrared. Birds hopped between branches. A squirrel scolded me from a nearby oak.

The graves looked untouched.

No fresh mound. No disturbed earth. The ground over my grandfather’s resting place was smooth, tamped, exactly as I’d left it.

If the creature had dug, it had filled everything back in perfectly. No clods, no messy backfill. Just a flat surface under a thin skin of fallen needles.

I walked the perimeter of the clearing, scanning for any sign.

I found it near the tree line, half hidden in some tall grass where runoff had left a patch of dark mud.

One footprint.

It was enormous.

At least seventeen inches long, maybe six inches across at the ball.

Five toes. Clear as if it had been cast in plaster. The heel was deep, the toes splayed slightly, suggesting weight and movement, not a stomped fake.

The impression went two inches into the mud.

Whatever made it was heavy.

I took photos from every angle, heart pounding. There were no other prints leading to or away from it—just that single, perfect stamp in the earth, like it had stepped there once and then… not stepped again.

As I turned to leave, a smell hit me.

Thick. Musky. Heavy, like wet fur and damp earth.

I’d been around black bears my whole life. Hunted with my father. But this wasn’t bear. Bear musk has a sour edge, a wild garbage tang when they’ve been in human trash.

This was different.

Stronger. Deeper. Almost… primate.

The hairs on my arms stood up.

I scanned the tree line, slow, trying not to whip my head around like prey.

Nothing moved.

But I could feel it.

Not a ghost. Not a feeling. A presence. Like being in a room with another person whose eyes you can’t see but can feel on you.

I left the clearing faster than I’d arrived.

Back at the cabin, I locked the door and pulled the curtains shut, as if that thin layer of fabric could do anything.

5. The knocks Return

Four nights later, I was on the porch again, beer in hand, pretending to read.

The mountains were in that soft light between sunset and black, when the ridges are silhouettes and the sky still remembers the sun.

Then:

Thump.

…Thump.

…Thump.

Three knocks. Same direction as before. Same deliberate spacing.

But closer.

Not two miles away this time.

Maybe half a mile.

My beer can was suddenly slick in my hand.

The forest went quiet between the sounds, like everything living out there held its breath with me.

Then the regular night noises resumed. Crickets. The faint hum of distant frogs.

I went inside and locked the door. Left the lights off. Sat in the dark living room and listened.

No more knocks that night.

But now the idea that I was alone here—that the cemetery was merely a place of stone and memory—was gone.

Something was using that place.

For what, I still didn’t know.

6. Evidence, and a Promise to No One

The week that followed was a blur of rituals.

Check the cemetery. Check the camera. Listen at night. Pretend everything was normal.

On one visit, I found a small stack of stones on a fallen log near the tree line—five smooth rocks, balanced carefully one atop the other. They hadn’t been there before.

I photographed them and left them as they were.

At home, I made the mistake of going online.

I dove into forums, old threads and new, Bigfoot reports from people all over North America.

Ninety percent of it was garbage: obvious fakes, blurry blobs circled in red, claims about “portals” and “interdimensional beings” from people who’d probably never pitched a tent properly in their lives.

But some posts felt different.

One thread grabbed me by the throat: a hunter in Northern California describing disturbed graves in an old pioneer cemetery. He’d set up cameras. Seen a large figure kneeling by the markers at night. Said he’d destroyed the footage after being called a liar, a hoaxer, a lunatic.

His life had fallen apart once the story got out.

The thread was five years old. Locked. Buried under insults.

I read every word three times.

Then I closed the laptop.

I went outside with a coffee can, a shovel, and a brand‑new flash drive.

I copied the video from my laptop to the drive. Watched the transfer bar crawl across the screen.

Then I erased the original from the hard drive.

Erased it from the SD card.

No cloud backups. No extra copies. No upload.

I put the flash drive in the can, sealed it with duct tape, and buried it two feet down in the backyard, marking the spot only in my own mind.

I had proof.

And I put it in the ground.

That night, the knocks came again.

Louder.

Thump.
…Thump.
…Thump.

It felt, irrationally, like the creature knew.

Like it was telling me it had seen what I’d done.

“I won’t tell anyone,” I said softly into the dark from my porch, voice barely more than a breath. “You’re safe.”

No answer.

Just the forest, and the echo of my own heartbeat.

7. The Basket of Flowers

Summer rolled in heavy and wet.

Thunderstorms boiled up over the ridges nearly every afternoon, hammering the cabin with rain and turning the trails to mud. I spent days with the windows open, fans droning, listening to distant thunder and waiting.

Sometimes the knocks came. Sometimes they didn’t.

The cemetery visits became a habit. Every few days, I’d hike up there, half terrified of what I might find, half more terrified of finding nothing.

Sometimes it was just graves and weeds and wind. Sometimes there were signs:

A new stack of stones.
A faint smell of musk on days when nothing else should smell like that.
Subtle disturbances in the earth near the markers—never enough to call a dig, just enough to know someone had been there.

Then came the storm.

One August night, lightning rolled across the ridge in sheets. The power went out. The cabin creaked under the wind.

Somewhere between thunderclaps, I heard them again:

Three knocks, barely audible under the storm.

I went to the window with my flashlight, searched the chaos of rain and branches, saw nothing.

When dawn came, the world looked scrubbed clean.

I slogged my way up to the cemetery through mud and washed‑out gullies, unsure what to expect.

What I found stopped me in my tracks.

On my grandfather’s wooden marker, someone had left a basket.

Not plastic. Not store‑bought.

It was woven from thin branches and vines, tight and neat, no nails, no twine. Primitive, but beautifully functional. Inside, arranged with care, were wildflowers: black‑eyed susans and mountain laurel, both freshly picked, dew still clinging to their petals.

I approached like you would approach an altar.

The basket felt sturdy in my hands. The weave was clean, symmetrical. Whoever made it had done this before.

And then the smell hit me—strong and close.

That same musky, animal scent, heavy as if whatever carried it had just been here.

I turned in a slow circle, scanning the tree line.

Nothing moved.

But I knew.

It was watching.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling foolish and reverent at the same time. “For the flowers.”

The forest gave no answer.

I took the basket home, stared at it on my kitchen table for an hour, turning it over and over, running my fingers along the woven pattern.

It was real.

Undeniably real.