Three Knocks in the Cascades: The Drone Footage I’ll Never Show the World

I never thought I’d be the kind of person who sits down and writes a confession to strangers about something that sounds this insane, but here I am, years later, still waking up at 3:00 a.m. hearing sounds that shouldn’t be there, still replaying grainy, heat-smeared images in my head, and I’ve realized that if I don’t get this out of me somehow, it’s just going to keep echoing inside my skull until the day I die. My name doesn’t really matter, and I’m not going to give you coordinates or exact landmarks, because that’s not what this story is about. What matters is that in September 2016, near the Cascades, right by a narrow riverbank where the water runs shallow and the pines grow close and tall, I saw something I was raised to believe didn’t exist. Worse—my buddy Tom saw it, too. We were there together when the drone picked it up the first time, when the knocks started, when the growling came out of the trees, when it stepped into view, still and impossibly huge, and watched us like we were the ones trespassing. I still have the footage, locked away on an external drive buried at the back of a closet, encrypted and hidden under tax folders and winter clothes, and I know what you’re probably thinking already: if it’s real, if it’s as big as I’m making it sound, why not upload it and become famous overnight? Why not prove it once and for all? But that’s the thing. When you’ve actually stood there and felt that presence staring back at you from inside the forest, when you’ve heard those three knocks in the bones of the trees and in your own ribs, fame is the last thing you want. What you want, if you’re anything like me, is to sleep through a single night without reaching for the deadbolt more than once.

Back then, none of this felt like the beginning of anything. It was just another hunting weekend, one more trip into the backcountry with a friend who knew the land better than I did, a chance to get away from email and traffic and the constant low hum of civilization. It was early September, that sharp-edged time of year when summer hasn’t entirely let go but fall has its fingers on your collar, tugging you toward shorter days and colder nights. The trees were still mostly green, but there was a bitter chill in the air once the sun started dropping toward the ridgelines, and the earth smelled heavy and wet, like damp leaves, river stone, and pine needles slowly rotting into soil. We’d followed a gravel road past Miller’s Creek and kept going until the rushing of the river became a constant, low murmur on our right, the truck bouncing on washboarded patches while loose stones pinged the undercarriage. I remember checking my phone out of habit at some point and realizing I’d lost cell service eight miles back, the bars vanishing one by one like retreating soldiers. Tom just grinned when I pointed it out, hands loose on the steering wheel, and said, “Good. That’s how you know we’re finally somewhere worth being.” He’d been hunting these woods since he was a teenager; to him, every bend in the road and every scarred tree was an old friend. To me, it was just another forest, dark and beautiful and indifferent.

We rolled into a small clearing by the riverbank in the late afternoon, the kind of half-forgotten spot you only find by either growing up there or getting lucky. The Cascades rose gray and jagged in the distance, their peaks still kissed by the last of the summer snow, and the river that cut along the edge of our campsite was low and slow, reduced to a glinting ribbon winding past stones and flattened logs. It was cold enough that each breath came out in a faint puff, especially once the sun dipped behind the trees, but there was something crisp and invigorating about it, the smell of wet earth and smoke and the faint tang of sap from where Tom had hacked at some fallen branches. We set up camp in that routine, wordless way two people develop over repeated trips: tent first, then the little folding table, then the fire pit ringed with stones someone else had scraped into a circle years ago. Tom was practically vibrating with excitement because he’d brought a new toy—a drone with a built-in thermal camera he’d been bragging about for weeks. “Overkill,” I’d called it when he first told me his plan to use it to spot deer, and standing there watching him unzip the padded case, part of me still thought that; but another part was curious. We were supposed to be there for just the evening—fly the drone, get some aerial footage of the valley, maybe catch a few heat signatures around dusk, and then decide if we’d stay the night depending on how things felt. That was the plan. It felt safe. It felt normal.

We spent twenty minutes or so setting the drone up on a flat rock near the fire ring, calibrating compasses and gimbals while Tom muttered to himself and poked at touchscreen menus. The little props spun to life with a high, waspish whine, and the thing lifted gently, climbing above the trees as we watched its shadow shrink on the ground, our faces washed in the pale light of its status LEDs. On the controller screen, the forest looked different from above—less like a place we were standing in and more like the textured surface of some alien world. The canopy was so dense that the ground was barely visible in most places, just a dark, rippling sea of greens and blacks, and the river showed up as a jagged silver scar cutting through it all. The thermal overlay cast the scene in unreal colors: cold areas bluish and green, warmer shapes blooming orange and red against that cool backdrop. I remember thinking how quiet it felt, not peaceful exactly, but empty, like the whole forest had exhaled and was waiting, just waiting, for something to happen.

The first odd thing was small, and if it had been the only thing, I would have forgotten it by now. I was already restless from standing in one spot, so I’d wandered a little down the riverbank, my boots crunching on a thin skin of frost that had formed over exposed stones as the temperature dropped. I bent down once or twice to check for tracks—deer, elk, anything that might justify hauling a rifle up there—and that’s when I heard it: a faint crack from somewhere deep in the trees, like a twig snapping under weight. Now, that by itself isn’t unusual; the forest is full of little noises, and I’ve heard branches break, rocks tumble, squirrels knock debris loose a thousand times. I told myself it was nothing, an elk maybe, or a deer stepping wrong. I straightened up and kept walking, pulling my jacket tighter around my chest as a gust of wind slid off the water and knifed through my clothes. The river mumbled along to my right, the drone buzzed faintly above, and for a minute everything was ordinary again.

Then came the three knocks.

If you’ve never heard it out there, really heard it, it’s hard to explain just how wrong that sound feels when you’re miles from the nearest paved road, with no cabins or kids or bored teenagers within earshot. It wasn’t the creak of trees bending in the wind or branches scraping each other; it was three sharp, hollow impacts, evenly spaced, like someone had taken a heavy branch and smacked it against a trunk. Knock. Knock. Knock. The sound carried across the river and through the trees, clear and unnatural. I froze mid-step, my breath catching in my throat. My first stupid thought was that maybe there was another hunter out there, someone signaling—but the rhythm of it felt… deliberate, like a pattern, not a random accident. I turned and looked back toward camp; Tom was still hunched over the controller screen, completely focused on the drone, thumb nudging the stick as he panned the camera over the ridge. He hadn’t reacted at all.

I walked back toward him, my boots suddenly loud in my ears, and said, “Did you hear that?” He didn’t look up. “Hear what?” “The knocking. Three hits. Sounded like someone clubbing a tree.” He laughed, that easy, dismissive laugh of his, finally glancing at me over his shoulder. “You and your Bigfoot stories, man,” he said, shaking his head. “All I’m seeing up here is overpriced pine cones and a river that’s too low to fish.” On the tiny thermal screen, little blobs of orange and red moved lazily across the valley: a cluster of deer signatures, a fox nosing through underbrush, maybe a raccoon near the creek. Normal stuff. Harmless. It should have calmed me down. It didn’t.

I drifted back toward the water, trying to swallow the knot of unease building in my chest. The knocking came again about ten minutes later, and this time it was closer. Three clear, hollow strikes from somewhere inside the tree line, maybe a hundred yards away. Knock. Knock. Knock. There was something too perfect about the spacing, like the beat of a drum or a signal tapped out on a wall, and the way the sound echoed through the forest made my skin crawl. I stopped again, listening hard, my eyes raking the wall of trees opposite the river for any sign of movement, but there was nothing—just layers of branches and shadow. No birds calling, no wind rustling leaves, just the faint electric hum of the drone and the quiet breathing of the river.

By the time I walked back into the circle of firelight Tom had started, he was bringing the drone down, guiding it to a careful landing on that same flat rock. The air smelled like wood smoke, cold dirt and battery exhaust. “You look like you saw a ghost,” he said, eyeing me as he eased the drone’s props to a stop. I didn’t answer right away, just stared past him at the dark smudge of trees beyond the edge of the camp. The last of the light was fading fast; the sky had gone from pale blue to bruise-purple, and the first stars were just emerging overhead. The knocking had stopped, but in a way, that was worse—it felt like a breath being held.

The drone still buzzed faintly from cooling electronics, and Tom was already fiddling with the connection to his laptop, eager to pull the footage. I was about to tell him again about the sound when I stepped closer to the river and something on the ground snagged my attention. There, in a stretch of thin snow that had survived the warm day in the shadow of a fallen log, a line of impressions sank deep into the crust, each one big enough to swallow my boot. At first my brain filed them under “boot prints,” maybe from some early-morning hiker, but as I leaned in, that explanation fell apart. They were long and wide, almost obscenely so, and the shape was wrong for shoes: there was a distinct heel, a broad pad, and at the front, five separate toe depressions, spread like a human foot—but scaled up. I dropped to a crouch, my breath fogging the air above the nearest print. “Tom,” I called, trying to keep my voice level. “Seriously. Come look at this.”

He sighed loudly, the way you do when your friend interrupts your new toy, and walked over, wiping his hands on his jeans. I stuck my boot next to the track. I wear an eleven—pretty average—and my boot looked like a child’s shoe next to it. “At least fifteen inches,” I said, more to myself than to him. “And look at the depth.” The snow was compacted hard at the bottom of each step, pressed cleanly down; the edges were crisp. Fresh. No sign of melting or wind erosion. It had come through that morning at the earliest, maybe even while we’d been setting up. “Probably just some old bear prints,” Tom muttered, but the conviction wasn’t there. I shot him a look. “Where are the claw marks then? Bears leave claws. This is… this is a foot, man. A giant foot.” The stride length between each print was at least four feet; I measured it quickly with my boots, heel-to-toe, counting under my breath. Whatever had walked there was tall. Tall and heavy.

The line of prints came up from the river, crossed the snowy patch, climbed the bank, and vanished into the thicket about thirty yards away where the brush grew thick and tangled. Everything in me wanted to follow, to push through the branches and see what lay beyond. Everything in me also screamed not to. My stomach felt like ice. Tom glanced at the tracks a second longer, then just shrugged, retreating back toward the drone. “Some idiot in snowshoes, maybe,” he said. “Or somebody messing around. People do weird stuff out here.” Eight miles from the last cabin, no other vehicles on the road, no other boot prints nearby, and we’re supposed to believe some guy in novelty Bigfoot sandals just took a stroll and disappeared? I didn’t say it. I just brushed snow from my knees and stared at the place where the tracks vanished, trying to imagine a human foot stretching that far. It didn’t fit.

As the sun slid behind the ridge and the temperature dropped, the cold deepened into that kind of bone ache that crawls under your clothes and settles there. Our breath became thicker, swirling pale in the air above the fire. We heated soup from a can, barely tasting it. Usually when we camp, conversation comes easy—stories from work, dumb jokes, plans for future trips—but that night, the words dried up. Every time I started to talk, that sound cut across my thoughts. Knock. Knock. Knock. It came again as we sat with our boots toward the flames, hands stretched out for warmth, the trees just a black wall beyond the glow. Three measured strikes from somewhere just outside the reach of the firelight, off to our right. I looked at Tom. His eyes were fixed on the fire, but I saw the way he flicked a glance over his shoulder when the knocks rolled through the darkness like someone rapping on a door.

“You hear that?” I asked, my voice low. He poked at the fire with a stick, sending a small comet of sparks swirling upward. “Hear what?” “The knocking, Tom. Three hits. Same as before.” He shrugged, but his shoulders were too tight. “Trees fall all the time out here. Branches snap. It’s just the cold making the wood contract.” He gave the explanation to me, but he didn’t look convinced. The knocks came again later, closer. They weren’t random cracks. They were too rhythmic, too deliberate. Three at a time, a pause, then three more ten minutes later. It felt like a pattern, and once I noticed it, I couldn’t unhear it.

When we finally crawled into our sleeping bags, the fire burned down to a bed of glowing coals, the darkness pressed in around our little circle of cleared dirt. The drone was packed away, the laptop shut, but my head was buzzing with the images of those tracks and the phantom sound of wood on wood. I lay on my back staring through the thin mesh at the sliver of sky above us, the stars sharp and cold in their distances. Tom’s breathing was slow and steady beside me, but I could tell it was the kind of “I’m going to pretend to sleep” rhythm more than actual rest. My hand rested on the knife at my belt out of habit; a blade isn’t going to do much against something that leaves fifteen-inch tracks, but it made my brain feel a fraction less helpless. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw those prints again, deep and precise in the snow, and heard the hollow echo of three knocks rolling through the timber. I didn’t sleep so much as drift in and out of jittery half-dreams, waking at every small noise as if something had touched the tent. Around midnight, the knocks stopped, and the silence that replaced them was so complete I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears. That was our first mistake—staying the night.

We broke camp early the next morning, the kind of early where the light is still more gray than gold and your breath hangs thick in front of your face. The world felt thin and brittle, everything coated in a film of frost that glittered on twigs and rocks. The wind had picked up, too, hissing through the tops of the pines and making them creak and groan like old ships at sea. We should have just shoved everything into the truck and left, but Tom, being Tom, wanted to take advantage of the daylight for one more pass with the drone and a short hike along a different path. “Just to see what’s around the bend,” he said. “We drove all the way up here. Might as well.” The uneasy feeling in my stomach argued; my pride didn’t. I said yes.

As we walked away from the camp along a narrow game trail that paralleled the river, we stumbled on a tree that made my skin crawl. It was a pine, maybe eight inches in diameter, nothing special at first glance, but as we got closer, I saw that its bark had been torn away in long, ragged strips that hung down like flayed ribbons. The exposed wood underneath was pale and fresh, still sappy, with no signs of weathering. Whatever had done it had done it recently, maybe even during the night. The wounds on the trunk started about six feet up and extended to around eight feet. I reached up and could barely brush the bottom of the stripped area with my fingertips. “Bear,” Tom said automatically, crouching to examine the marks, but I could hear the thinness in his voice now. Bears do strip trees sometimes, digging for insects or marking, but the pattern here was wrong. The scratches were mostly vertical, long and parallel, like fingers dragging down, not the chaotic slashes I’d seen from claw marks before. It looked more like something with hands had grabbed the bark and ripped it away.

“Bears don’t do it like this,” I said quietly. “Not this high. Not like this.” Tom didn’t argue, but he didn’t agree, either. He stood up quickly, brushed his hands off, and said, “Let’s just get the drone up one more time. Get a scan and we’ll bail.” There’s a line you cross when you’re out there, a kind of invisible threshold between “we’re just camping” and “we are not alone,” and somewhere between those shredded strips of bark and the next set of knocks, we crossed it.

Back at camp, we launched the drone again, its small frame rising steadily, the props cutting through the morning chill with that familiar mechanical whine. I stood behind Tom, peering over his shoulder at the screen. At first, it was just more of the same: the forest spread out below in false colors, the river a darker thread slicing through, a few deer moving like glowing embers near a distant clearing, a fox streaking bright and quick along an unseen trail. Then, as the drone tilted north and swept over another stretch of dense trees, a new shape appeared on the screen. It was a heat signature, larger than the others, an upright smear of reddish orange weaving between the trunks about two hundred yards from our position.

“What the hell is that?” Tom whispered, his tone completely different now, all the joking gone. He zoomed in, trying to get a clearer view, but the resolution at that distance wasn’t great. Still, you could tell it wasn’t shaped like any animal we were used to. Bears on thermal show up as rounded, hunched blobs, their heat clustered in the torso and head, but this was vertical, elongated, with what looked like a head, shoulders, and two long, hanging shapes that could only be arms. The figure moved steadily, then stopped dead, standing motionless for what felt like thirty seconds as the drone drifted overhead. It was as if it knew it was being watched. Then, without warning, it moved again, quicker this time, slipping deeper into the forest until it disappeared entirely from the screen.

We brought the drone back in silence. As it settled onto the rock and the props spun down, I realized my hands were shaking. Tom’s were too; I could see his fingers tremble as he unplugged the controller and started packing it away. “We should go,” I said finally, breaking the spell. “Yeah,” he answered, and that one word carried more fear than anything else he’d said since we got there. We tore down the camp in record time, not bothering with neat folds or careful packing, just stuffing gear into bags, stomping out the last of the fire, and throwing things into the truck bed. The entire time, I kept glancing at the tree line, half expecting to see that upright shape step out and walk toward us. We saw nothing. But we felt it.

On the way back toward the trail that led to the truck, the forest seemed to contract around us, the trees leaning closer, the shadows darker. Near a bend in the creek, I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye—a dark shape slipping between two clusters of pines on the other side of the water. It was too fast to see properly, more suggestion than detail, but it was big. Bigger than a man. My breath caught, and I stopped dead. I didn’t say anything at first, afraid of sounding like I was just feeding both our anxieties, but then Tom froze, too, his eyes locked on the same spot. “You saw that, right?” I asked, my voice strained. “Yeah,” he said, barely audible.

The growl came next.

It wasn’t like any animal sound I’d heard before, and I’ve heard plenty in those woods: the high, eerie bugle of elk, the throaty huff of bears, coyotes yipping and howling, even the scream of a bobcat. This was deeper, lower, a guttural vibration that seemed to come from the ground itself, resonating up through my boots and into my bones. It was almost like a voice trying to push its way through an unfamiliar throat, a rumble that hovered just on the edge of forming something more than sound. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood straight up. Tom’s face drained of color. “That was no bear,” he whispered, and his voice shook in a way I’d never heard before. I didn’t need convincing. Every cell in my body already knew.

The shadow moved again, gliding from one stand of pines to another. It wasn’t running. It wasn’t walking on all fours. It moved upright, a massive shape threading through the trees with a weird, smooth gait that was almost fluid—too smooth for something so big. Even in the brief glimpses we got—a shoulder here, part of a leg there—I could tell it was tall. Taller than any human you’d want to meet in those woods. There was no mistaking it for some lost hiker or prankster in a suit. Tom grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise. “We need to leave. Now.” Part of me agreed, screaming at me to turn and run and not look back. Another part, a stubborn, terrified, stupid part, wanted to see it clearly, to step closer and make out its face, to know for sure what had been knocking and growling and watching us. The rational part of my brain was shouting that none of this was possible, that we were two adults letting ghost stories and internet legends scramble our perceptions. The rest of me knew that was a lie.

The growl came again, closer this time, curling around the trunks like smoke. It had that almost-voice quality again, that sense of shape without words, like a question or a warning delivered in a language we weren’t built to understand. “Go,” Tom hissed, his eyes never leaving the tree line. “Move.” We backed away at first, not turning our backs, our boots finding the crooked path almost on instinct. I could feel eyes on us, like when you know someone is staring from across a crowded room even if you can’t see them. The forest had gone completely silent. No birds. No wind. Just the thud of my heartbeat in my ears and the faint scrape of our boots on roots and rocks.

We grabbed our packs where we’d dropped them near a fallen log, yanking straps over our shoulders with fumbling hands, and started making our way down the trail that led back to the truck. We didn’t talk. We didn’t need to. Every step was fueled by a single shared thought: get out. That’s when the knocking started again. Three sharp strikes from somewhere behind us. Then, a few moments later, three more, off to our left. Then three more, ahead and to the right. It was like something was pacing us just beyond the wall of trees, circling, or paralleling our route, hitting trunks with that deep, hollow resonance. Knock. Knock. Knock. My legs burned as we half-ran, half-stumbled down the uneven trail, the ground a treacherous mix of loose stones, exposed roots, and damp leaf litter. More than once I nearly went down, catching myself on branches and grabbing at tree trunks to steady myself.

When we finally burst out into the small dirt lot where the truck was parked, my lungs felt like they were on fire. We didn’t stop. We threw our gear into the bed in a disorganized heap, flung open the doors, and scrambled inside. Tom’s hands shook as he jammed the key into the ignition, but the engine turned over on the first try, a familiar, comforting roar in all that haunted silence. He slammed the truck into gear and we shot down that gravel road faster than we had any right to, stones spitting out from under the tires, the whole vehicle bouncing and skidding on turns. I kept glancing in the side mirror and out the back window, half expecting to see a towering, dark figure striding into the road behind us. All I saw were trees and the growing distance.

We didn’t say a word for the first ten minutes. The only sounds inside the cab were the rattle of gear, the rumble of the engine, and our breathing. My hands had cramped around the oh-shit handle above the door; I had to force my fingers to relax. Eventually, as the road smoothed into something more manageable and we edged back toward cell coverage, Tom exhaled in a jagged sigh. “We’re not talking about this,” he said finally, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Not to anyone.” I didn’t answer. I just stared out the window at the passing trees, each one looking suddenly less like scenery and more like a potential hiding place. The rest of that day passed in a blur—town rushing up too fast, gas station coffee in paper cups we barely drank, an awkward handshake in a parking lot before we went our separate ways, both of us unsteady on our feet as if we’d just stepped off a ship onto land that wouldn’t stop moving.

That night back at my apartment, I turned on every light in the living room and still couldn’t shake the feeling that someone—or something—was standing just beyond the edges of the illumination, watching. The knocks and growls replayed in my head on a loop. Every time the building’s old pipes creaked or a tree rubbed a branch against the exterior wall, I flinched. I checked the front door lock twice, then three times, then again an hour later, as if a deadbolt was going to matter against whatever had followed us down the mountain in my memory. Eventually, I sat on the couch with my laptop on my knees and forced myself to do the thing I’d been half-dreading, half-yearning to do since we left the forest: I opened the drone footage.

The recording started the way you’d expect—some static, a bit of interference from the motors, the disorienting spin as the drone first lifted off, then smoothed out as Tom stabilized the controls. The forest rolled beneath us in a dreamlike tilt, the river a darker ribbon, the thermal overlay painting everything in false color. I scrubbed through quickly—deer, fox, raccoon, nothing unusual—until I hit the segment where we’d seen it. My stomach clenched when the large heat signature came into frame. There it was again: a vertical smear of red and orange weaving through a cluster of trees, taller than the deer, hotter, moving with purpose. I froze the frame, zoomed in as far as the resolution would allow. The image broke apart into blocks of color, but the basic shape held: a head at the top, broader than a human’s, a wide, solid torso, long arms hanging down its sides. The proportions were wrong for a person. The height, when I measured it against the known size of the nearby trees, was wrong for everything. I did the crude math in my head—height of the pine, distance from drone, relative scale—and came up with a number I didn’t want to believe: at least eight feet tall, maybe more.

I called Tom at two in the morning, my hands clammy around the phone. He sounded groggy when he picked up, like he’d been pretending to sleep as badly as I had. “You need to see this,” I said. “See what?” “The footage. The thermal. You can see it. The shape.” He was silent for a moment, the kind of silence that feels like someone holding their breath. “I don’t want to see it,” he said finally. That stopped me. “What?” “I said I don’t want to see it,” he repeated, more firmly now. “I don’t want to know more than I already do. We went out there. We saw something weird. We left. That’s the story. If we start digging into this, if we start showing people that video, our lives are going to change, and not in a way I want. We’ll become those guys. The Bigfoot guys. Every time someone hears the word, they’ll think of us. I’ve got a job. I’ve got a family. I can’t have that hanging over me.” I wanted to argue, tell him that ignoring it wouldn’t make it less real, that pretending we hadn’t seen what we saw wouldn’t make the knocks stop echoing. But part of me understood. Maybe too well.

“So what do we do?” I asked after a long pause. “We delete it,” he said. “We forget it happened.” I stared at the frozen, pixelated frame on my screen, the blurry, towering shape standing among the false-color trees. I imagined hitting delete and felt a strange kind of grief, like I’d be burying something important. “I can’t just delete it,” I said quietly. “Then keep it,” he replied. “But don’t show anyone. Don’t post it online. Don’t talk about it. Just let it go.” We hung up not long after, both of us saying we were tired, both knowing sleep wasn’t coming anytime soon.

I didn’t delete it. I couldn’t. Instead, I did the next best thing: I encrypted the file, renamed it something boring and forgettable, moved it to an external hard drive, and then boxed that drive up with old documents and junk I’d been meaning to sort through “someday.” I placed the box on a shelf in my closet and stacked other boxes on top of it until you’d never know there was anything in there worth looking at. Out of sight, maybe, but definitely not out of mind. Every time I opened that closet afterward, I was aware of that little black rectangle buried under outgrown clothes and dusty folders, like a secret pulsing faintly in the dark.

In the days that followed, I tried to go back to my normal routine. I made coffee, answered emails, went to work, pretended to listen in meetings, went grocery shopping under fluorescent lights while people argued about cereal brands in the next aisle. But there was a crack in the world now, a hairline fracture in the way I saw things. I found myself glancing out windows more often, watching the tree line beyond the apartment complex like I expected to see something huge step out and stare back. At night, the knocks came back in phantom form; I’d lie in bed and hear them in my head, three sharp hits, over and over. Sometimes, I’d think I could hear them faintly through the walls—maybe the neighbor dropping something heavy, maybe a branch tapping the siding—but my brain always twisted them into that same hollow rhythm. Knock. Knock. Knock.

Like any idiot who’s just had his worldview shaken, I turned to the internet for answers. Late one night, with the glow of my laptop the only light in the room, I typed “three knocks bigfoot” into a search bar and fell headfirst into a hole I didn’t know existed. Forums, recountings, blogs, anonymous stories—people from all over the Pacific Northwest and beyond describing the same things: three knocks carrying through otherwise silent forests, massive humanlike footprints in snow and mud, shadows moving between trees, deep, chest-resonant growls that didn’t sound quite like any known animal. Some of the tales were obviously embellished or just trolling—over-the-top theatrics, CGI “evidence,” dubious photos—but others had that quiet, reluctant tone that rang uncomfortably true, the same tone I knew was creeping into my own thoughts: I wish this hadn’t happened, but it did.

I even started drafting my own post one night, fingers flying over the keys as I laid it all out in brutally simple detail: the trip, the tracks, the shredded tree, the knocking, the thermal signature, the shadow, the growl, the feeling of being watched, the panic as we ran for the truck. I described the drone footage, how the figure had looked on the screen, how tall it must have been. I sat there staring at the block of text for a long time, my cursor blinking at the end like a question. If I hit submit, it wouldn’t just be my story anymore. People would demand proof. They’d want the video. And if I showed them the video, they’d want to know where it was taken. They’d go looking. Hunters, skeptics, researchers, thrill seekers. That forest would change. That thing’s life would change. Maybe it would be cornered. Maybe it would lash out. Maybe it would disappear forever. Maybe people would die. And for what? So the internet could argue in the comments? I highlighted the entire post and deleted it.

For a while, I thought that would be the end of it. We had our experience. We had our secret. The world kept spinning. Then, a few days after the trip, Tom called me in the middle of a workday, his voice tight in a way that made my heart jump. “You want to go back?” he asked. I almost dropped the phone. “What?” “Back to the woods. Back to where it happened. I can’t stop thinking about it. I need to know. I need to see if it’s still there. If there’s any sign.” This was the same man who’d told me to delete the footage, who’d sworn we should forget it and move on. Now he wanted a round two. Part of me recoiled instantly. Another part, the part that lay awake at night deciding whether the knocks I heard were real or imagined, understood exactly how he felt. That gnawing uncertainty was worse than fear in some ways; at least fear has an object. Uncertainty is just a void.

We agreed on a compromise: we’d meet at the same trailhead the next day, hike in during full daylight only, bring better cameras, more batteries, no overnight gear, no fire. We’d go in, see what we could see, and leave before the sun thought about touching the ridge. A surgical strike, we called it, trying to pretend we weren’t going back because something ancient and enormous had already claimed that place as its own.

The drive up felt different this time. The same gravel road that had seemed ominous and endless on the way out now just looked like a forest road, sunlight dappled on the hood, pines and firs standing straight and tall on either side. In the bright morning, it would have been easy to chalk everything that had happened up to tension and shadow. If not for the footage. If not for the footprints. If not for that growl. We parked in the same little turnoff, the air colder than before, frost still wrapping around the grass in the shadows. Our breath billowed in front of us in soft clouds as we geared up—daypacks, water, cameras, knives we both knew wouldn’t really matter. I remember the way the forest felt as we stepped off the road and onto the trail. Not hostile exactly. Just… aware, like the trees themselves had eyes.

We passed our old campsite. The fire ring was still there, the stones blackened, the ash cold and scattered. Our bootprints from days earlier were fossilized in a patch of drying mud, ghost traces of our first encounter. Everything looked heartbreakingly normal. The river whispered by. A bird called once from a distant branch. If you didn’t know better, you’d think this was just another nice hiking spot in the Cascades where nothing particularly remarkable ever happened. Then the knocks came.

Three sharp strikes from the ridge above us, rolling down through the trees in a way that made my teeth ache. Knock. Knock. Knock. Tom and I looked at each other at the same time. His face had gone pale again, lips pressed thin. I’m sure mine matched. “Maybe this was a mistake,” he said quietly. I nodded, but we’d already stepped over that threshold. We were here now. Turning back without at least trying to see the source felt like walking out of a movie before the ending. Stupid logic, maybe. But there it was.

We started climbing toward the ridge, not running but not exactly taking our time either, moving with a kind of careful urgency. The knocks sounded again every few minutes, always three, always from somewhere slightly ahead or to the side, like it was guiding us or pushing us away. I couldn’t decide which. My mind conjured up every horror story I’d ever heard about people being lured off trails by unexplained sounds. I kept my eyes on both the ground and the trees, looking for tracks, damaged bark, any sign that something massive had passed through recently. The forest felt thicker now, the trunks closer together, the light dimmer even though it was barely past noon.

We were walking along a stretch where the trail curved back toward the river when it happened. There was a rustling in the brush ahead, not the light, skittering noise of a squirrel or bird but the heavier, deliberate movement of something large. I stopped so abruptly that Tom almost bumped into me. The sound paused. Then, from behind a cluster of pines about thirty yards ahead, something stepped out. Not fully. Not dramatically. Just enough that I could see it.

At first, my brain tried to force it into something familiar: a bear standing on its hind legs, maybe, or a very tall man in heavy clothing. But even as those options formed, they crumbled. The figure was too tall—easily seven and a half, maybe eight feet even from that distance. Its shoulders were massive and sloped, its chest broad and barrel-like, its entire body covered in dark hair that hung in uneven lengths, thicker around the shoulders and hips. The head sat directly on those shoulders with little visible neck, and it wasn’t round like a person’s; it rose into a slight cone shape, the brow jutting out over deep-set eyes. Its arms hung long, much too long, reaching past where its knees would be. It stood upright, balanced, not swaying or wobbling the way bears do when they rear up. It wasn’t quite facing us, more turned slightly, as if it had been walking parallel to the trail and had just eased out enough to look.

Everything in me locked up. My heart hammered so hard I could feel it pounding in my throat, but my legs refused to move. I heard Tom suck in a breath beside me, a harsh, shocked sound. There it was. Not a shadow, not a blob of color on a screen, not a line of footprints in snow. A massive, living thing standing in the filtered afternoon light, watching us. “Bigfoot,” I whispered, the word spilling out of me without permission. It felt small and almost childish compared to the reality of what I was seeing, like calling a hurricane “a bit of weather.” But there was no other label for it that fit.

The creature tilted its head slightly at the sound of my voice, just a small, curious angle, and in that movement I saw its eyes clearly. They were dark, but not dull—there was something unmistakably intelligent there, a depth that hit me like a physical blow. This was not a dumb animal running on pure instinct. This was something that thought. Something that weighed and decided. For a split second, looking into those eyes across thirty yards of air and brush, I had the bizarre impression that it was trying to figure us out just as much as we were trying to figure it out. Who were we? What did we want? Were we a threat?

It raised one huge hand slowly, the hair along its forearm shifting as muscles flexed underneath, and for the briefest heartbeat I had the insane thought that it was going to wave. Instead, it turned slightly and brought the side of its hand down against the trunk of the nearest tree. The sound that followed was unmistakable. Knock. A second strike. Knock. A third. Knock. The same three knocks we’d been hearing for days now, only this time I could see the source. It was deliberate. Communicative. Not random wood noises. A signal.

Tom fumbled with his camera, his fingers clumsy and shaking so badly he could barely get the lens cap off. He finally raised it and tried to focus, but the creature’s gaze flicked to him, watching the movement. For a second, it just observed him attempting to capture it, and then it took a step backward into the trees. I thought that was it, that it would just melt away. It paused once more, looking back at us over its shoulder, and I swear—I know how this sounds—I swear there was something almost… understanding in its expression. Not friendliness. Not fear. Just a kind of “I see you. You see me. That’s enough.” Then it turned fully and walked into the forest.

It didn’t crash through the underbrush or snap branches or make a big performance of leaving. It just moved between the trunks with a smoothness that didn’t seem possible for something its size, each step quiet and efficient, its body blending with the shadows until there was nothing left to see but the sway of a few disturbed branches and the memory of where it had just been. The brush didn’t even rustle much. One moment it was there, filling the clearing with its presence. The next, it was part of the trees again. Gone.

Tom slowly lowered his camera, letting it hang from its strap around his neck. We stood there in stunned silence for what felt like an hour but was probably no more than a minute or two. I could feel my pulse in my fingertips, feel the cool air burning in and out of my lungs in ragged gulps. “Did you—did you get that?” I finally managed, my voice raw. He shook his head, eyes still wide, face drained. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t get it in focus,” he stammered. “My hands…” He held them up and they were trembling uncontrollably. I realized mine were too. In that moment, the idea of having calmly lifted a camera, adjusted settings, and composed a shot felt absurd. All I’d been capable of doing was standing there and absorbing the reality of it, trying not to fall apart.

“Nobody’s going to believe us,” Tom said quietly after a long time. The weight of that truth settled over us like another layer of frost. I nodded. “I know.” But belief from others suddenly felt secondary. We had just seen something that most people only ever hear about in jokes and campfire tales. Seen it. Felt it. Heard it knock on a tree as if to say, “Yes, this is me.” There was no room left for doubt in my mind. The fear that had been gnawing at me for days shifted into something else—awe, maybe, or a kind of humbled respect. This thing, whatever you want to call it, could have done anything it wanted to us. It had the size and power to end our story right there. Instead, it had shown itself, communicated in its own way, and then chosen to leave without harming us.

We sat down on a fallen log because our legs didn’t seem interested in holding us up anymore. The forest around us felt different. Not less wild—if anything, more so—but less empty. It was as if some hidden layer had been peeled back, revealing a truth we’d been walking past our whole lives. The knocks, the footprints, the shredded tree, the thermal blob on the drone screen—they were all puzzle pieces, but this was the finished picture, sitting in our heads now whether we wanted it there or not. My mind kept replaying the way it had looked back at us, the way its eyes had focused, the way its hand had struck the tree three times. That wasn’t random. That was language, of a sort.

Eventually, the sun shifted enough that the light filtering through the branches turned from bright white to a softer, more golden hue, reminding us that time was passing and we didn’t want to be there when the shadows got long. We gathered ourselves slowly, both of us moving like people recovering from a shock, and we made our way back down the trail toward the truck. The forest seemed to watch us go, every creak and rustle now loaded with possibility. We didn’t hear any more knocks. There were no more growls. Just the normal sounds of a mountain afternoon returning little by little as if whatever had held its breath was finally exhaling.

Back in town, we sat at a corner booth in a diner with coffee cooling untouched in front of us. The clatter of dishes, the murmur of other conversations, and the hiss of the grill felt weirdly too loud, like the volume on the rest of the world had been turned up after spending too long in the hush of the trees. Tom stared into his mug like it held answers. “We can’t tell anyone,” he said finally. “I know.” “They’ll think we’re crazy. Or lying. Or they’ll want proof. And even if we showed them the drone stuff, they’d say it was fake.” “I know,” I repeated. “But we saw it.” He looked up at me then, something like resignation and wonder mixed in his eyes. “We know,” he said. “We know about Bigfoot. That’s enough.”

We paid the bill, left cash on the table, and walked out into the fading daylight, each of us heading back to our own carefully constructed normal lives with a crack running through them now that no one else could see. After that, we didn’t talk much. We texted occasionally about work or family or mundane things, but the subject of the Cascades sat between us like a sleeping animal we didn’t want to poke. The footage stayed on my hard drive, the external one buried in my closet. I never pulled it out for anyone else. Every now and then, alone and restless, I’d plug it in and stare at that thermal frame, the blob of heat weaving between the trees, and feel that same mixture of dread and gratitude wash over me.

It’s been years now, and I still hear it sometimes. Not literally, maybe. Or maybe literally. Every time I wake up at 3:00 a.m. and the house is too quiet, I swear I can hear three faint knocks somewhere in the distance. Sometimes it’s the neighbor closing a cupboard or someone in the building dropping something heavy, and my rational brain rushes in to explain it away. Sometimes I’m not so sure. When I pass a stand of trees in a city park and catch the smell of damp earth and pine after rain, I’m right back there on that riverbank, watching a dark shape move between trunks. When branches scrape against my window in a storm, for a heartbeat it sounds like knuckles on wood.

People laugh when they hear the word Bigfoot. They think of blurry photos, hoax videos, guys in costumes stumbling through ferns. I used to laugh, too. I’d roll my eyes at every “documentary” that showed the same old clips and promised new evidence. Now, I just go quiet. I don’t need anyone else to believe me. I don’t need to convince the world. What I saw out there, what we both saw, changed something fundamental in me. It expanded the borders of what I consider possible. It reminded me that the maps we draw, the names we give things, are just thin skins stretched over a world that is much older, much stranger, and much less interested in our approval than we’d like to think.

Tom and I both moved on geographically, too. About a year after that last trip, I took a job in another state. New city, new apartment, new routine. Different trees outside my window. Different river down the road. But that doesn’t matter. The memory came with me. Sometimes, when the wind hits just right and rustles the branches in a way that sounds too much like something tapping, I’ll pause, listening, and a small, private smile will tug at the corner of my mouth. Not because it’s funny. Because it feels like a reminder. A quiet, distant “I’m still here.”

Last year, Tom called me out of the blue. He’d been hiking in a different part of the Cascades with some coworkers and said that at one point, when they’d fallen silent to take a break, he heard three knocks carrying through the trees. No one else in his group seemed to notice. He did. “Brought everything back,” he said. We ended up talking for hours that night, replaying the whole experience, filling in details we hadn’t said out loud before. It was like picking at a scar, painful and weirdly relieving at the same time. At one point he hesitated, then asked, “You still have the footage?” “Yeah,” I said. “You ever think about releasing it?” I was quiet for a long time, staring at the dark rectangle of my closet door. “No,” I said finally. “Me neither,” he replied. “I think it’s better this way.” And I agreed. Because at the end of the day, that’s what this really comes down to—not proving something to scientists or skeptics or internet commenters, but protecting something that clearly does not want the spotlight.

If we’d gone public—posted the video, dropped the coordinates, given interviews—those woods would be crawling with people by now. Not just researchers with notebooks, but hunters with rifles, YouTubers with clickbait thumbnails, guys with beer guts and night-vision goggles crashing through underbrush looking for their fifteen minutes. The thing we saw, the one that knocked three times and stared at us with knowing eyes, would lose its anonymity. Maybe it would retreat deeper. Maybe it would be killed. Maybe some panicked human would get hurt. Nothing about that scenario feels right. The forest gave us a glimpse, just long enough to rearrange our sense of reality. Then it closed the curtain again. I’ve come to see that as a kind of gift, and you don’t repay a gift like that by dragging the giver onto a stage.

So we keep our silence. Not out of fear of being mocked—though that would surely happen—but out of respect. Respect for something that has managed to remain hidden this long in a world that thinks it has seen everything. Respect for a creature that had every opportunity to harm us and chose not to. Respect for a mystery that is maybe better left partly unresolved. I don’t expect you to believe me. If I were you, I’d probably be scrolling through this thinking “great story” and mentally sorting it alongside all the other strange things the internet produces. That’s fine. I’m not here to convert anyone. I’m here because the weight of not saying anything at all finally grew heavier than the risk of being dismissed.

If you want to think of this as just another story, a long, rambling campfire tale translated to text, go ahead. But if you ever find yourself out in the woods, far from the last bars of cellphone coverage, with the wind holding its breath and the trees standing too still, and you hear three hollow knocks roll through the silence—once, then again, then again—you might remember this and feel a shiver crawl down your spine. Maybe you’ll write it off as dead branches clacking together. Maybe you’ll laugh and tell your friends. Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll feel the weight of unseen eyes on you and realize that the forest doesn’t always belong to us, that sometimes we are simply visitors in someone else’s living room.

Either way, if you hear those three knocks, I’d suggest you listen. And then, if you’re smart, you leave them unanswered.