Back in the late 1990s, Joseph was staying alone overnight to guard supplies at an unfinished family cabin along the remote Nushagak River. The cabin was still under construction, lacking finished window panes and leaving open, rough-framed cutouts directly into the wilderness. As dusk fell, Joseph heard an unsettling, unusually loud howl echoing miles away that sounded like a poor imitation of a wolf. Within an hour, the unnatural howling had closed the distance, sounding less than 200 yards away from the cut bank before falling dead, unnervingly silent.
Retreating inside the windowless cabin, Joseph lit a hissing Coleman lantern and kept his rifle close. While pumping the lantern, a flash of reflective eye shine caught his peripheral vision from the upper corner of an opening—a vantage point that stood 10 to 12 feet off the exterior ground. Terrified, he backed into a corner, only to spot a pair of glassy, black eyes with a heavy brow ridge and an ashen-gray face peering directly over the left windowsill. When he shouted into the dark, a massive, hair-covered silhouette blacked out an entire four-by-five-foot window opening, followed by concussive, wall-shaking slams that rattled the heavy log walls like exploding artillery.
Overwhelmed and emotionally breaking down in the center of the cabin, Joseph collapsed to his knees and desperately began crying out in prayer. The unseen entities relentlessly toyed with him, throwing a small rock through an opening that struck him square in the back. After cutting the lantern to hide in the pitch black, Joseph was horrified to hear a voice roughly twenty feet outside mimic his own frantic sobbing back at him in a taunting cadence. Firing a shot that splintered the windowsill, he heard an answering wail that mixed a wolf howl with a screaming woman, prompting Joseph to pray directly for deliverance until the footsteps finally retreated into the timber.
