Physical Contact

A terrifying share from Donovan, from spring of 1978, who had to deal with a sasquatch attempting to snatch him from the kitchen window and continued to terrorize the family over a period of a time.

An encounter shared by an Athabaskan couple, Alvin and Myrna, occurred in February 2020 while hiking the Devil's Creek Trail near the Kenai Peninsula with their nine-month-old Tibetan Mastiff, Skippy. While navigating an uphill stretch on a packed snowmachine trail, Alvin was walking slightly ahead of Myrna, who was admiring the scenery further down the path. Suddenly, a voice perfectly replicating Myrna's exact pitch and tone called out the dog's name from a thick patch of snow-covered willow shrubs directly ahead of Alvin.

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.

In the mid-1970s, a 10-year-old boy named Dan, who had recently relocated to the Gulkana River drainage region, wandered off into the timber alone. After navigating a trail where he was actively paced and eventually cut off by a large, intimidating hair-covered figure 15 yards out, he retreated. Eight months later in May, during a torrential rainstorm, Dan became profoundly lost in the remote backcountry wearing only a t-shirt and jeans.

In the late 1970s, retired oilfield worker Johnathan and his then-wife were travelling down the AlCan Highway in their RV and decided to pull over at a rest stop, where a Sasquatch began to open the roof and reach into the vehicle.  With is wife hiding under the bed, Johnathan began to look for his machete to hack at the arm.  After a loud whistle in the distance, the Sasquatch attacking the RV stopped and left, along with footsteps of others who were also outside.

In the winter of 1970, Thomas traveled to Kaltag along the Yukon River to help his recently widowed niece with house repairs. Hyper-vigilant from his past terrifying encounters, Thomas spent his afternoons scouting the nearby valleys on a snowmachine. His worst fears were realized when he spotted a Hairy Man sprinting up a mountain and disappearing into a cave. For weeks, he desperately tried to keep his niece’s two young children close to the house, but his refusal to explain exactly what was out in the woods caused a bitter rift between them.

Four years after the terrifying standoff in the Tongass National Forest, Thomas traveled deep into the remote Copper River Valley to help his friend build a cabin on a Native allotment plot. The peaceful construction project took a dark turn when Thomas discovered his friend had been casually dumping food scraps behind the tree line, inadvertently feeding and habituating a local Hairy Man. Thomas immediately warned him about the extreme danger of creating dependency, but the warning came too late.

Stranded and broke on Prince of Wales Island after being denied logging work in 1961, Thomas and his two friends set up a survival camp in the towering old-growth timber of the Tongass National Forest. Their desperation deepened when a massive arm reached from behind a tree, ripped down the rope holding their freshly hunted black-tailed deer, and vanished into the 200-foot canopy above. Upon returning from a day-labor job the next evening, they found a towering entity rummaging through their camp before it effortlessly scrambled up a massive Douglas fir.

I share an encounter I had with a hunting guide and his client who was looking to bag a Hairy Man after an experience he had years prior. Spoiler alert: he changed his mind.

I share an experience from Eric S that occurred near Cantwell, south of the Denali Highway, with his then-fiance in late August of 2017.