I Caught Footage of Bigfoot Attacking My Trail Cams, It Knew I Was Watching…

It’s hard to admit this. Hell, it’s harder to even shape the words without my mouth going dry.

But I found something out there—something that either shouldn’t exist at all… or shouldn’t exist anywhere near me.

It was late summer, August 2016, and I remember the day with the ugly clarity you only get from fear. The air in the woods around my cabin was thick and warm, the kind that makes every pine needle smell sharper. Gravel crunched under my boots as I walked up from the tree line with a handful of SD cards in my pocket, already thinking about nothing more serious than deer patterns and the occasional bear.

That’s what the trail cams were for. A hobby. A way to feel less alone without admitting I was lonely.

I had no idea I was already being watched.

The cabin sat forty miles east of any real town, buried in the Cascade foothills where the Douglas firs grow so tight the light feels rationed. By three in the afternoon the shadows start collecting like water in a ditch. I’d moved up there in 2014 after the divorce, after everything in Portland turned to shouting and silence and paperwork. I told people I wanted solitude. The truth was simpler: I wanted the world far enough away that it couldn’t reach me.

I worked remotely—freelance IT consulting—so as long as the satellite internet cooperated and I ran the generator a few hours a day, I could live anywhere. The place wasn’t much: twelve hundred square feet, a wood stove, propane for cooking, and a battered pickup that hated the logging road as much as I did.

My nearest neighbor was an old man named Earl, three miles down the road past a bend that washed out every spring. Earl had been there since the seventies, and when he got whiskey in him he’d tell stories about screams in the night that didn’t sound like any cougar he’d ever heard. I never gave them much weight. Alcohol makes myths grow teeth.

The trail cams were ordinary—four Bushnells, motion activated, infrared at night. I mounted them about fifty yards from the cabin, covering the main approaches: the back trail, the creek cut, the north ridge, the old skid road. Every week or so I’d pull the cards, pour coffee, and scroll through hours of nothing: deer noses in the lens, raccoons like little bandits, a black bear in late summer looking fat and lazy.

Peaceful. Routine.

The kind of routine a man builds when he’s trying to pretend he isn’t waiting for something to happen.

The first strange thing happened on a Tuesday.

I was washing dishes when I heard something moving through the brush behind the cabin—heavy enough that it wasn’t a deer, too slow and deliberate to be a bear. Not the careful pick-pick steps of hooves. Not the purposeful padding of paws. This sounded like weight being placed with intention, as if whatever it was was testing the ground before committing.

I dried my hands and stepped onto the back porch. The motion light snapped on, flooding the clearing with harsh white glare.

Nothing. Just trees and their shadows, swaying in a wind I couldn’t feel.

In the morning I checked the footage anyway, half out of habit, half because my nerves wouldn’t let the moment go.

Camera 3 had triggered at 11:47 p.m.

Most of the clip was the usual—static darkness, grainy infrared. Then, at the edge of the frame, something passed through like a smear of heat. Tall. Upright. Gone in three seconds.

At first I tried to laugh it off. Infrared can do strange things. Angles make fools of people. And I’d been alone too long—long enough for my brain to start inventing threats to feel important again.

So I replayed it.

Six times. Ten. I leaned so close to the laptop screen my breath fogged the glass. The more I watched, the more the shape refused to become anything normal. The shoulders were broad. The stride was wrong. The movement had the smooth economy of something that didn’t need to hurry.

It wasn’t running.

It was passing through.

I closed the laptop and realized my hands were shaking. My coffee had gone cold without me touching it.

That afternoon I hiked out to Camera 3.

The ground around the tree was disturbed—not torn up, but pressed down, as if something heavy had stood there and shifted its weight. I crouched, stared, tried to convince myself I could see a hoof mark, a bear print, anything I could file neatly away in the cabinet of normal.

Nothing clear enough.

The camera itself was fine—still strapped to the pine, still blinking its little red heart. I checked the angle. Tightened the strap. Told myself, out loud, like it would matter:

“Everything’s normal.”

That night I lay in bed with the windows open because the August heat wouldn’t leave, and I heard the steps again—heavy, measured, circling somewhere beyond the treeline.

Then came the smell.

It drifted through the screen like damp breath: wet fur and old earth and something else underneath, a sour note that made my skin tighten. Not skunk. Not rot. Not a bear. Something wild in a way I didn’t have a word for.

Every instinct in my body sat up and started screaming.

The next day—Wednesday—I did what fear always convinces you is smart: I escalated.

I ordered a new camera overnight. A better one. A Rekenics with a faster trigger and higher resolution, the kind of camera people buy when they want proof, not hobbies.

I mounted it on an old-growth cedar about seventy yards out, facing back toward the cabin. If something was circling my property, I wanted its face.

Thursday morning, the camera was gone.

Not fallen. Not missing by accident.

Gone.

The mounting strap was still buckled around the tree trunk like a collar on a body that had been decapitated. I found the camera pieces thirty feet away, scattered across the forest floor like somebody had smashed it against rocks in a rage.

The lens was shattered. The casing split. The circuit board snapped clean.

Three hundred dollars of plastic and electronics turned into evidence of intent.

I stood there in the morning light holding broken parts, trying to reason my way out of what I already knew.

Bears don’t do that. Bears might swat. Bears might knock something loose. Bears don’t unbuckle straps and then systematically destroy an object.

And the forest around me had gone silent.

No birds. No squirrels. No insect buzz.

Just wind in the high branches and my own breathing getting faster.

That’s when I saw the footprints.

Three of them in soft earth near the cedar. Long—maybe sixteen inches—wide across the ball, with the suggestion of five toes. Not claws. Toes.

I took photos with my phone, forced myself to put my size-11 boot beside one for scale. My boot looked like it belonged to a teenager.

Then I noticed the bark.

Deep gouges in the trunk, like something had gripped the tree while it tore the camera apart—marks that weren’t random scratches, but pressure lines. Finger-like. Deliberate.

I should have called someone then.

Sheriff. Fish and Wildlife. Anyone.

But what would I say?

“Something is destroying my trail cameras and leaving giant footprints.”

They’d say bear. They’d tell me to secure my garbage and stop wasting their time.

And part of me—an ashamed part—wanted them to say bear. Wanted a tidy answer that didn’t require me to expand the world into something I couldn’t control.

So I didn’t call.

I went back to the cabin, locked both doors, and loaded the rifle I’d owned for years and never fired.

That night the knocks began.

Three of them, spaced about ten seconds apart.

Deep. Resonant.

Like someone striking a hollow log with something heavy.

Thump.
(pause)
Thump.
(pause)
Thump.

They came from the north side, maybe fifty yards out. I checked the clock without meaning to. 2:43 a.m.

I sat at the kitchen table with the rifle within reach and my heart trying to escape my ribs. The rational part of my brain—good at networks, good at debugging, good at turning chaos into solutions—ran through explanations:

Tree settling. Branch snapping. Woodpecker.

But woodpeckers don’t knock like that at 2:43 a.m. Trees don’t fall in perfect sets of three with perfect intervals.

Ten minutes later it happened again.

Three knocks. Same rhythm.

Closer.

Maybe thirty yards.

The message slid into my mind with a clarity that wasn’t my own thought:

Stop watching. Stop recording. Leave.

I went to the window and peeled back the curtain a fraction. The moon was three-quarters full, turning the clearing into silver and shadow. The treeline stood dark and still.

Nothing moved.

And yet I could feel it out there—presence with weight, attention with intent.

I stood at the window for two hours.

No more knocks.

Just a silence so complete it felt unnatural, as if the forest itself was holding its breath to listen.

Friday morning, Camera 1 had triggered at 2:41 a.m., two minutes before the first knocks.

The footage showed movement at the very edge of the frame—something large passing just outside the camera’s effective range, as if it understood exactly where the sensor could see and chose to remain just beyond it.

Testing boundaries.

Studying my surveillance.

I stood on the front porch with my coffee and looked at the woods that had felt peaceful a week ago. Now they looked like a place designed for hiding—full of gaps where something could watch, plan, wait.

So I escalated again.

I mounted another Reconyx—this time inside a heavy steel lock box, bolted to a thick Douglas fir with lag bolts that would take tools and time to remove. I added a motion-activated floodlight on the cabin’s northwest corner, aimed at the treeline. If anything came within fifty feet, the clearing would light up like a prison yard.

That night I didn’t sleep.

I sat in a dark kitchen with the rifle across my knees and the laptop open to the feeds, as if sight could protect me from what was outside sight.

At 11:47 p.m., the floodlight snapped on.

I was at the window in seconds.

The clearing looked empty. Trees threw long shadows. Nothing in the open.

But at the edge of the light’s reach, a tall dark shape stepped backward into shadow—calmly, like it had walked up to test the sensor and learned exactly where the boundary was.

Thirty minutes later, I heard the knocks again—this time from the direction of the lock box.

I pulled up the feed.

At 12:23 a.m., it moved into frame.

Massive. Upright.

It walked straight toward the camera, and for the first time the image felt less like a blur and more like a fact.

Eight feet tall, maybe more. Broad shoulders wrapped in dark hair. Arms hanging past its knees. The face stayed mostly in shadow, but the eyes reflected the infrared like an animal’s—only positioned too high, too forward-facing.

Not prey eyes.

Eyes that look back.

It stopped five feet from the camera and stared into the lens the way a person stares into another person’s window.

Like it knew I was watching.

Like it wanted me to see.

Then it reached out.

One massive hand closed on the lock box.

The feed went dark.

Saturday morning, I found the steel peeled open like a sardine can. The metal twisted, torn, bent back. The lag bolts were still embedded in the tree—meaning it hadn’t removed the box, it had ripped it free.

Inside, the camera was pulverized. Not just broken—destroyed in pieces, each component crushed with a kind of thoroughness that looked… personal.

Something had taken time.

Something had been methodical.

Something had wanted to make sure I understood.

Footprints churned the ground around the tree. Multiple sizes, too many to count at a glance. I measured the clearest print: sixteen and a half inches long, seven inches wide at the ball. Stride over six feet where the soil showed it cleanly.

I went back to the cabin and did what I should have done earlier: I searched online.

Aggressive Bigfoot encounters. Cascades. Cameras destroyed. Knocks.

The results were worse than I expected—campers describing tents circled at night, hikers followed for miles, researchers describing equipment destroyed as if by design. One post from 2012 ended with a single line:

I left. Whatever’s out there, it won’t be documented by me.

A pattern ran through the accounts like a thread: the more someone tried to record, the more aggressive the response became. Cameras were targeted. Photos invited pursuit. Three knocks came up again and again as a warning.

I closed the laptop and stared at my own reflection in the dark screen.

The smart thing was to take down the remaining cameras, pack up, and leave.

But pride and curiosity are poison together.

I wanted proof. Wanted to be the one who finally documented what everyone else only whispered about. Wanted a story that would make my loneliness mean something.

Sunday I stayed inside with the doors locked and reviewed the past three months of footage—hundreds of hours, time-lapsed into flickers.

And I found it.

Not just one blurred pass.

Dozens.

The creature had been on my property for months, always at night, always near the edges of the camera’s range, always positioned like it understood exactly how much it could show without giving itself away.

In June: seventeen appearances.
In July: twenty-three.

In every clip where the shape was clear enough to register as more than a shadow, it looked directly at the camera.

It knew.

It had always known.

Then I found the moment that turned my blood to ice: footage from August 1st, two weeks before the first camera was destroyed.

The creature walked up to Camera 4.

Not violently.

Curiously.

It reached out and touched the camera—almost gentle—then gripped it and twisted, changing the angle. The feed went dark for a moment, then returned aimed at a different section of forest.

It hadn’t destroyed it.

It had manipulated it.

That was the moment it stopped tolerating surveillance and started countering it.

The destruction came after warnings I’d been too stubborn—or too stupid—to recognize as mercy.

That night something hit the north wall of the cabin. Not a knock—an impact, like a thrown rock or log. The whole structure shook. Then another hit. Then another, moving around the cabin: west wall, south wall, east wall.

It was circling the house and tapping it like an object, making sure I understood that locks and boards meant nothing if it decided they meant nothing.

Monday morning I drove twenty miles down the mountain to get cell reception and called the sheriff.

The deputy sounded bored before I’d finished my first sentence. When I said the thing was bipedal and eight feet tall, there was a pause full of judgment, then the bear speech: secure garbage, remove attractants.

When I insisted I had footage—clear footage—he cut me off.

“If you’re claiming Bigfoot, sir, call Fish and Wildlife.”

Then he hung up.

I sat on the side of the logging road with my hands shaking, realizing the truth with a kind of cold clarity:

No one was coming.

Not because they couldn’t.

Because they wouldn’t.

And if that thing decided to come through my door, it would be just me and whatever weapons I had against something that could peel steel apart.

That night, I sat on the porch with the rifle and a spotlight, waiting.

At 2:43 a.m., the knocks came again—three deep thumps from the north. I swung the beam and found nothing.

Then I heard movement behind me.

I turned, and there it was—caught at the edge of the spotlight, standing at the treeline fifty yards out.

Massive. Dark. Still.

We stared at each other for ten seconds.

My finger rested on the safety. I didn’t raise the rifle. Something in me—older than logic—said that firing would end the warning phase and begin something neither of us could undo.

Finally it turned and melted back into the forest.

As it left, I heard a low rumble, almost like a growl.

Angry.

Not at fear.

At defiance.

Camera 7—my last one—lasted eighteen hours.

By Tuesday evening it was smashed while still attached to the tree, crushed in place like the creature couldn’t be bothered to pull it down anymore. And above the wreckage, carved into the bark about seven feet up, were four deep parallel gouges.

A mark.

A signature.

A statement:

You are the intruder.

That was when I started packing.

Not half-heartedly. Really packing. Essentials. Food. Water filter. First aid. The revolver. If I had to walk forty miles to town, then I’d walk.

Then the calls started.

Not knocks—vocalizations.

Low whoops that rose and fell in patterns that sounded almost like language. One from the ridge above the cabin, maybe two hundred yards out. Another answered from the east. Then a third from the south.

Three distinct voices.

Three separate creatures.

I’d been focused on one. I hadn’t considered a group. A family. A territory with boundaries I’d been violating without knowing.

The calls went back and forth for five minutes.

Then the forest fell silent again.

Heavy.

Ominous.

That night, the knocks came from every direction at once—north, south, east, west—coordinated, patterned like a conversation happening around my cabin about me. Three from the north, answered by three from the south, then east, then west.

For an hour.

And I didn’t understand the language, but I understood the intent:

Leave. This is the last warning.

Wednesday morning I walked outside and found my truck tires slashed. All four sidewalls cut clean.

I stood in the driveway staring at them, morning cold seeping through my jacket, and realized the warnings had turned into control.

They weren’t just telling me to leave.

They were deciding when I could.

I locked myself in and inventoried supplies like a man preparing for siege. Food for weeks if I rationed. Propane for a month. Water from the well. Weapons that suddenly felt like toys.

At dusk I heard them gathering—heavy footfalls circling, more than three now, five or six distinct sets of steps. Whoops closer, deeper. The cabin shuddered with impacts again, harder this time, testing structure. A boarded window cracked.

Then they stopped.

And the silence was worse.

At 11:15 p.m., I heard footsteps on the roof—slow, deliberate, crossing from one end to the other. The ceiling groaned under the weight. It stopped directly over where I stood.

For thirty seconds, nothing.

Then a low rumble filtered through the planks.

It knew exactly where I was.

Then a heavy thump outside as it dropped back down.

I didn’t sleep.

Thursday morning my generator was destroyed—not tipped, dismantled. Panels removed. Components scattered. Fuel tank punctured. Gasoline soaking into dirt.

No power meant no laptop, no internet, no lights.

They weren’t just frightening me anymore. They were isolating me in layers:

First the cameras—no documentation.
Then the truck—no escape.
Then the generator—no connection.

Intelligent, coordinated pressure, applied with patience.

That afternoon I tried to hike out anyway. Made it a mile down the logging road before I heard them pacing me through the trees—never visible, always parallel. When I stopped, they stopped. When I moved, they moved.

A herding behavior. A message without words:

You can walk, but we’ll follow.
You can run, but we’re faster.
You leave only if we allow it.

I turned back because I understood I was being guided like livestock.

Thursday night the knocks changed.

Instead of three, I heard five from directly in front of the cabin.

Then seven.

Then nine.

Escalating.

Building.

At some point it reached fifteen in rapid succession, then silence so sharp it felt like a blade.

In that silence I heard breathing outside the front door—slow, heavy breaths like an engine idling.

The doorknob rattled once.

Testing.

The lock held.

More breathing, then footsteps moving away.

I stayed in my corner until morning with the rifle in my lap and my mind empty from exhaustion.

Friday morning, the front door stood open.

Not broken.

Open.

I knew I’d locked it.

I knew it the way you know your own name.

But there it was, wide to the morning air, and I was alive.

They had been inside.

And they had chosen not to harm me.

On the kitchen table, placed neatly in the center, was my laptop—closed, undamaged.

When I opened it, my stomach fell through the floor.

Every file deleted. Every clip. Every photo. Every backup.

The drive wiped clean with a thoroughness that wasn’t random.

Not a smash-and-rage animal act.

A deliberate removal of evidence.

The kind of thing that should require knowledge—menus, folders, storage, intent.

I stepped outside.

The clearing was empty. No new prints. Birds were singing again for the first time in days, as if the forest had returned to normal on purpose.

The oppressive feeling of being watched was gone.

They’d made their point.

I had no proof. No footage. No evidence. Only memory.

And the message was clearer than any knock:

Leave now while you still can—while we still allow it.

So I packed for real, shouldered a hiking pack, and walked out.

It took three days.

When I reached town, I told the sheriff my truck broke down and I had to hike. I told Earl I was done with cabin life. I told anyone who asked that isolation had gotten to me.

Nobody questioned it.

I sold the cabin at a loss to the first buyer who made an offer—a retired couple from Seattle looking for quiet.

I thought about warning them. I really did.

But what would I show them? A wiped laptop and smashed cameras? Tire damage? A story?

They’d look at me the way the deputy did—with boredom and a smirk.

And maybe that’s part of how this stays hidden.

Not because it can’t be found.

Because when someone finds it, the evidence doesn’t survive.

I live in Seattle now, ground-floor apartment, never far from other people. I sleep with lights on more nights than I want to admit. And sometimes—late, when the city is quiet enough to hear your own thoughts—

I still hear three knocks.

Faint. Distant.

Like an echo from a place that taught me something I can’t unlearn:

We share those mountains with something that doesn’t want to be known.

Something intelligent enough to understand our technology.

Powerful enough to erase it.

And careful enough to leave us with nothing but stories—because stories are easy to dismiss.

That’s the point.

That’s how it survives.