These shares involve children as witnesses or present in the party—kids on trips, at cabins, or in villages when the story involves the young as well as adults.
Common threads are mixed-age groups, parental fear, and memories that stick from childhood. Browse these shares if you want reports where children saw, heard, or were in the middle of the event.
An indigenous village hunter embarked on a multi-day backcountry moose hunting trip miles away from his community. On the third or fourth morning, while scanning the open landscape, he spotted a large brown form moving on all fours across the tundra, initially assuming it was a bear. Through his binoculars, he watched the creature travel over several tundra ridges until it suddenly stood completely upright and continued down a slope, leaving only its massive head and shoulders visible over the crest.
Around February 15, 2019, an experienced outdoorsman and former law enforcement officer named Mark Frank was exploring a remote seismic trail roughly five and a half miles down Oil Well Road near Ninilchik. Glassing through his binoculars in a low-horizon winter landscape with four feet of snow, he spotted what initially appeared to be a hunter crossing the path 150 yards away. Mark gave a friendly hand wave, and the entity immediately mirrored the identical gesture with its right hand.
Over seventy years prior to 2023, an elderly witness named Grandma Ruby was a young girl living in a remote village along the Yukon River. Following a large salmon harvest that was hanging in the family smokehouse, she walked to a trail corner near the dense tree line to sit on a doghouse belonging to her sled dog companion, Blackie. While wearing a newly tailored, rabbit-fur-lined kuspuk hood and practicing traditional native drum dance songs, she heard movement behind her in the thicket.
An Ahtna tribally enrolled woman named Mary recalled a profound historical account from her childhood in Chitina during the early 1970s, where a village elder shared an encounter from his youth on the eastern side of the Copper River. While hunting deep inland on an open flat situated directly above Horse Creek, the hunting party experienced an intense, creepy atmospheric dread and followed a strange chattering sound up a ridge line.
In the fall of 2019, just before the pandemic, a local high school senior named Jane was babysitting five young cousins (ranging in age from roughly five to twelve) at a federal HUD housing unit in a remote northwest coastal village of under 500 year-round residents near the Bering Sea. After coming indoors, the two youngest children were caught staring out a bedroom window, giggling and waving at a 'silly man' standing inside the immediate willow and scrub brush lines. Assuming it was an overactive imagination, Jane dismissed the event.
Some thirty years prior to 2023, a Bristol Bay native woman named Julie experienced an encounter as a young girl during a combined moose hunting and salmonberry harvesting trip up the Kvichak River channel with her grandfather (Uppa), father, and uncle. Landing early before sunrise, Julie and her Uppa combed the tundra slopes for blueberries and blackberries.
Following a successful solo caribou hunt the year prior, an Anchorage resident named Doug brought his wife Claire and their 15-year-old son back to the North Fork of the Gulkana River, traversing a steep, frosted trail past Swede Lake down to the river crossing. Seeking to avoid a crowded hunter 'shanty town' near the foothills, Doug steered his four-wheelers and an equipment trailer Due West along a rough, overgrown river slough trail, eventually establishing a 'glamping' site on a flat shelf at the base of a prominent tundra shale-rock Butte.
In the autumn of 2011, a Yup'ik villager named Vincent Wasley, his sister Grace, and a cousin traveled by skiff up the Kayugajak Lake River system near Nunapitchuk for a moose hunt. Stepping onto the riverbank, Vincent walked 200 feet onto the open tundra to forage a local berry patch, where he was suddenly halted by a colossal, booming cow-moose call imitation that echoed powerfully around the entire lakebed. Recognizing that the extreme acoustic volume and length exceeded human or animal capabilities, Vincent retreated to the skiff in shock.
Around 2012, a man named Oscar returned to his family's traditional native homelands along a remote tributary channel feeding into the Copper River near Chitina. While harvesting fireweed blossoms for an elder auntie a quarter-mile from their rural cabin, Oscar witnessed a large brown form performing a series of strange, vertical bouncing movements through a 6-foot tall grass slough 30 yards out. Armed with a .357 handgun and believing it was a maimed, trapped bear that posed a community safety risk, he returned to camp to recruit his elder uncle, who brought a 12-gauge shotgun.
In the winter of 1987, an 11-to-13-year-old native youth named Joseph gained permission to drive his father's Arctic Cat Jag snowmachine, leading his two younger brothers (ages nine and seven) on a Yamaha Bravo 340 into the remote tundra islands west of Sophie's Landing along the Nushagak River. Armed with a heavy 8mm rifle and two .22s to harvest small game, the boys successfully dispatched a porcupine on an oblong island of black spruce trees. While processing the harvest, a dense, blinding winter sea fog rolled in rapidly off Bristol Bay.
An experienced interior wilderness trapper with twenty years on the Kuskokwim River drainage abruptly terminated his business after a terrifying multi-day encounter loop. While running his 10-mile oval line on a Skidoo Tundra snowmachine, he discovered several traps systematically sprung with zero target catches; strangely, the surrounding snowpack had been meticulously scrubbed with fresh spruce boughs to purposefully erase any track marks.
While managing a salmon subsistence set-net site on the Wood River drainage above Dillingham near the McClung River mouth, a man named Keith, his wife Danielle, and their three young children (ages twelve, nine, and five) were targeted by an unusually bold entity. While stacking gear and mending twine on the riverbank, Keith's 12-year-old daughter pointed out a 'man' inside the 12-foot shoreline willow brush who was actively waving and smiling at her. Keith investigated with a shotgun, firing a warning blast into the air to deter what he assumed was a routine bear.
In a village panel recording, a Dillingham-born Yup'ik woman named Hillary detailed the traditional, generational safeguards and encounters surrounding the communities of the Nushagak River drainage, including Ekwok, Portage Creek, Stuyahok, and New Koliganek. Raised under strict elders' warnings that stepping into the dark sloughs or river bluffs would cause children to be abducted or eaten by the 'hairy man,' Hillary noted that the presence of inverted, root-up spruce tree markers cleanly jammed into the soil was a routine sight in the region.
In the 1990s, a Kenai Peninsula resident named Kathy provided field testimony regarding a violent, point-blank raiding campaign executed against a nearby homestead where a mother was left alone with her young children while her husband worked the North Slope. Following a terrifying 45-minute screaming siege that occurred during a heavy rainstorm, the panicked mother recruited Kathy to investigate her layout.
Around 2014, two brothers, Kyle and his younger sibling (spaced less than two years apart), were foraging wild berries along a remote backcountry trail roughly a mile and a half deep from any actual road system on the outskirts of Fairbanks. After picking berries, they detected an unsettling, low-frequency 'grumbling' acoustic pattern that seemed completely constant and unceasing within the thicket, prompting them to pack their buckets.
