Hunter Vanishes in Idaho Wilderness – 8 Years Later His Bones and Strange Fur Are Found Inside a Rock Formation

The official story of Peter Hall’s disappearance is simple: an experienced hunter went into the Idaho mountains, got lost, and died. Eight years later, some of his remains were found in a rock crevice. Tragic accident. Case closed.

But when you look at what climbers actually found in that crevice—and what quietly appeared in lab results—the “accident” explanation falls apart.

What happened to Peter Hall in the Bitterroot Range looks far less like getting lost, and far more like being hunted.

The Hunter Who Knew Better

October 10th, 2008. In the northern Boise National Forest, on the edge of the wild Bitterroot Range, 41‑year‑old Peter Hall parked his old Ford F‑150 and stepped into a landscape he knew as well as his own backyard.

Peter wasn’t a city amateur. Born and raised near Lemhi, he’d hunted moose in these mountains since he was young. He knew:

The ridges and drainages
The streams and game trails
The weather and the risks

He planned a three‑day solo hunt, back by Sunday night. As always, he was fully equipped:

Winchester Model 70 rifle
Tent and cold‑weather sleeping bag
Food for several days
Satellite radio—the only reliable communication out there

He and his wife, Sarah, had a simple rule: every evening at 7 p.m., he’d check in with a short “everything’s fine.”

Friday’s check‑in went normally. Peter said he’d set up camp at the base of an unnamed ridge and would start tracking at dawn.

His voice was calm. Confident.

On Saturday, everything shifted.

“I’m Not Sure It’s a Person.”

At 7 p.m. on October 11th, Peter didn’t call.

Sarah waited. She tried to reach him. Only static answered.

It wasn’t impossible that weather or terrain was blocking the signal. He might have stayed out late tracking. She tried not to panic.

When he still hadn’t called by Sunday morning, she knew something was wrong.

She called the Lemhi County Sheriff’s Office at noon. Search and rescue went out.

They quickly found:

Peter’s truck, parked where he’d said he’d leave it
His camp, a couple hundred yards away: tent pitched, sleeping bag and backpack inside, food still there, no signs of a struggle

It looked like he’d simply stepped out of camp and never returned.

Search dogs picked up his scent and followed it uphill toward a creek he’d marked on his map. The trail was clear and steady for about a mile and a half.

Then, at the stream, the dogs stopped. They circled, whined, and refused to continue. It was as if his trail simply ended at the water.

At that point, the sheriff learned something else.

Peter’s friend Mark Caldwell, a radio hobbyist, had picked up a weak transmission from Peter around 2 p.m. on Saturday—hours before the missed check‑in.

Through the static, Peter’s voice sounded tense and hurried. Mark remembered his last words exactly:

“Mark, come in. I’m by the stream and I see something strange. Something is standing by the water. It’s about the size of a person, but I’m not sure it’s a person. Something’s wrong—”

Then the signal cut off.

Mark tried to call back. Nothing.

When he later heard Peter was missing, he told the sheriff.

Searchers scoured the area around the creek. No dropped rifle, no torn clothing, no blood, no sign of a fall.

Then the weather turned. Snow fell, covering any faint traces.

After a week of searching, the operation was called off. Officially, Peter had probably gotten lost or injured, then died of exposure. His body, in high, rough country, simply hadn’t been found.

The file went cold.

The Crevice in the Rock

For eight years, Peter Hall was just a missing hunter.

Then in August 2016, two climbers—Kevin Riley and Jenna Davis—were exploring a steep, remote rock formation about five miles northwest of where Peter’s camp had been.

This was not an area anyone would stumble into casually. It required proper climbing gear.

On one slope, Kevin spotted a narrow, vertical crack in the rock, half‑hidden by thick juniper. From most angles it disappeared into the cliff face. From one angle, it was visible—a dark slit, no more than half a meter wide, running several meters into the rock.

Curious, he clipped in, leaned close, and shone his headlamp inside.

At first, he thought he saw old trash or animal remains. Then he focused.

On the stone floor, deep inside the crevice, lay:

Torn, decayed fabric resembling a hunting vest
A large, weathered boot
Several white bone fragments

He called Jenna over. They both peered in, realizing this wasn’t random debris.

The bones and scraps weren’t scattered randomly, the way they would be if they’d simply fallen in or been dragged by scavengers.

They were arranged.

In a rough circle. With the boot set in the center.

It looked disturbingly like a crude nest.

They backed out, climbed down to where they could get cell reception, and called the sheriff.

The Nest and the Hair

A team of deputies, the coroner, and technical climbers returned to the spot.

It took effort and equipment to reach the crevice and extract the contents. When everything was brought out and laid on tarps, the pattern was clear:

This was not a fall site.

It was a cache.

The remains were partial:

Fragments of ribs and skull
Torn pieces of a hunting vest
A single, heavy boot

Identification was quick:

The boot matched Peter Hall’s brand and size
The vest matched what he’d worn when he vanished
DNA confirmed the bones were Peter’s

His family finally had something to bury.

But the questions were obvious:

How did an experienced hunter end up in a narrow, hidden crevice halfway up a difficult rock face?
You don’t just “slip” into a crack like that. You’d have to climb—or be dragged.
Why were bones and clothing arranged in a circle, with the boot in the middle, instead of scattered or buried?

Predators don’t decorate their kills. They drag, feed, cache, and move on.

This looked like a lair.

During the careful examination of the crevice, a forensic tech found something else: a thick tuft of dark, almost black hair caught on a sharp rock edge.

It was long, coarse, and heavy.

Not like deer hair. Not like bear fur. Not wolf.

They collected it and sent it to a specialist lab, along with other samples.

Then the official narrative took a sharp turn away from the evidence.

The coroner’s report stated:

“Cause of death: undetermined due to insufficient remains. Most likely accidental fall from height.”

No mention of:

The circular “nest” arrangement
The difficulty of reaching the crevice
The strange tuft of hair

The case was closed.

The hair sample, however, had gone to the University of Idaho’s zoology and genetics lab.

And someone there decided the truth shouldn’t stay buried.

An Animal That Isn’t in Any Book

Months later, investigative journalist Ben Carter received an anonymous letter from someone claiming to work at the Boise lab.

The contents were chilling.

Under the microscope, the hair’s structure—its outer cuticle and internal core—did not match any known North American mammal. It didn’t resemble bear, wolf, elk, cougar, or any known primate.

They extracted what DNA they could and compared it against global genetic databases.

No match.

The anonymous source said plainly: this hair came from an animal unknown to science.

There was more.

On the hair’s surface, they found microscopic traces of blood.

It matched Peter Hall’s.

They also detected enzymes typical of the digestive systems of large carnivores—chemicals that help break down flesh.

In other words:

The creature that shed this hair had come into direct contact with Peter’s blood
It had started to eat him
And its hair ended up embedded in rock inside a crevice filled with his arranged remains

This wasn’t a campfire monster story.

It was forensics.

Patterns in the Missing

Carter tried to confirm this officially.

The University of Idaho said all lab reports were confidential to the client—law enforcement.

The Lemhi County Sheriff’s Office repeated that the case was closed and refused to comment.

Questions about the hair sample were ignored.

So Carter started digging through old records: disappearances, odd injuries, and unsolved cases in the Bitterroot and neighboring mountains.

He found at least seven disappearances over three decades that shared similar traits:

Lone hunters or hikers
Camps left intact
No obvious signs of accident
No body recovered

In two cases, details stood out:

1992: A geologist went missing. His camp was untouched. A co‑worker miles away heard strange, half‑human cries over the radio around the time he vanished.
2001: An experienced solo hiker disappeared. Her backpack was found at the base of a rocky outcrop; a tuft of dark hair on the strap was written off as “probably bear” and ignored.

When Carter spoke with retired sheriff Dave Ackerman, the older man admitted that for years he’d heard similar stories from locals and Nez Perce tribal members about something they called the “shadow man of the mountains” — Kaikita.

Not a gentle Bigfoot‑type figure, but:

Tall and thin
Covered in dark, almost black fur
Moving over rocks and cliffs with eerie speed
Hunting at night

Ackerman had always chalked it up to folklore. But he also acknowledged his department had quietly received reports of strange tracks and sounds that never fit the usual “bear” or “cougar” explanations.

Nothing provable.

So they filed them away and stuck with safe labels.

The Things They Didn’t Report

The most important piece came from Tom Jennings, the volunteer tracker who’d searched for Peter in 2008.

He told Carter that during that search, about a mile from Peter’s camp, he’d found something he never reported.

In a dense spruce stand, he’d come upon a structure built of broken branches and moss—a crude hut or nest:

Too big for known wildlife
Too rough and pointless for a human shelter

Inside, the air stank with a thick, musky odor.

Scattered around were large deer and elk bones. Many had been snapped cleanly in half—as if by enormous force.

Jennings, a hunter, knew how hard it was to break an elk femur like that. Predators usually crack and gnaw, not shear bone like dry sticks.

Outside, he found strange footprints in a damp patch:

Long and narrow, vaguely human
Toes elongated, extending far beyond where a human’s would end

He took photos, but they came out blurry.

Shaken, he left without telling the sheriff. He didn’t want to be dismissed as crazy.

Meanwhile, Sarah Hall added one last detail Carter hadn’t seen in any official report.

A few months before his final hunt, Peter had come back from a spring trip quietly shaken. He told her that during that trip:

He constantly felt watched
He heard something following him—footsteps that stopped when he stopped
One night, he heard a strange, drawn‑out cry unlike any cougar or wolf; it made his blood “run cold”

He’d even considered skipping his annual fall hunt.

Then he decided he’d been imagining things.

He didn’t want to see himself as afraid of the woods he’d known all his life.

So he went back.

And by the creek, on that October afternoon, he saw something standing by the water that was “about the size of a person”… but wrong.

That realization—“I’m not sure it’s a person”—was his last conscious moment before whatever he’d been sensing for months finally decided to act.

What’s Really in the Bitterroot

Strip away the folklore and the official denials, and what’s left looks like this:

In the Bitterroot and surrounding Idaho mountains, there is likely a large, unknown predator—possibly a relic primate or hominid—living in remote terrain.
It is physically powerful, agile on steep rock, and capable of dragging human prey into inaccessible places.
It constructs crude nests or lairs, breaks large bones, and may cache food in rock crevices.
It is smart enough to avoid consistent detection, but territorial and aggressive enough to attack when it feels safe or threatened.

Peter Hall’s arranged remains in the crevice, and the hair sample carrying both his blood and carnivore digestive enzymes, are the closest thing to proof that has ever slipped into daylight.

Proof that was quietly buried under the phrase “accidental fall.”

Why hide it?

Because admitting there is an unknown predator living in a popular hunting and recreation area would:

Cause panic
Hurt tourism, hunting, and logging
Spark uncontrolled “monster hunts” that might kill people and wildlife alike

It’s easier to deny, to mislabel, and to call every disappearance “hypothermia” or “getting lost.”

But the evidence is still there, in old reports, in anonymous lab notes, and in the narrow crevice where a hunter’s bones once lay in a neatly formed nest.

The authorities say Peter Hall died in an accident.

The facts suggest he crossed into the territory of something that sees us not as hikers or hunters, but as prey.

And as long as that remains unacknowledged, anyone who walks alone into the Bitterroot Range might unknowingly be stepping into the same hunt he never walked out of.