A husband and wife, John and Betty, agreed to house-sit for close family friends along the highway north to Fairbanks. To deter local equipment thieves while their friends were away, the couple parked their fifth-wheel camper jackknifed across the driveway. After spending a quiet evening by an outdoor fire pit behind the house, they were walking back to the camper when they heard a bizarre, guttural gurgling sound coming from the darkness.
A family vacation took a terrifying turn when Walter, Bernice, and their adult son Michael were towing a 16-foot toy hauler up the remote Taylor Highway. Approaching the bridge over the Mosquito Fork of the 40-Mile River, they spotted three massive figures crossing the road ahead. Initially mistaking them for fly fishermen dragging rod tubes, the family was shocked to realize the figures were nearly nine feet tall—and appeared to have thick, four-foot-long tails.
Three years ago, two friends, Jack and Eric, launched their kayaks near the Denali Highway to caribou hunt down the remote Maclaren River. After setting up a spike camp downriver, they awoke to a deafening, unnatural silence. While hiking the tundra in the lifting morning fog, Eric spotted a dark shadow pacing them laterally just inside the mist.
In 1978, Eric and two friends from the Tongass National Forest cruiser team took their two-week leave to camp and explore the pristine wilderness around Powers Creek, located in the ominous Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness of Southeast Alaska. On their second day, the peacefulness of their trip was shattered by a hellacious scream originating further down the Endicott Arm inlet. Dismissing it at first, the three unarmed men returned to camp to find their belongings strangely shifted and toyed with.
About 25 years ago, a fly fisherman named Daniel paid to be dropped off by a guide service on the first big bend of the Tikchik River. Armed with a .480 Ruger revolver, he fished for hours before sitting down by the riverbank willows for a snack. As the autumn wind rippled the leaves, he suddenly spotted a massive, towering dark shadow lurking just inside the brush. Thinking it was a grizzly bear, Daniel drew his hand cannon and fired a warning shot into the willows, only to be met with an eerie, low, humming vocalization.
While prospecting for gold veins along the remote King Salmon River (north of Dillingham), Ivan and his younger brother set up a small spike camp on the riverbank. On their third night, their quiet evening was shattered by a scream from across the river that sounded like a woman being murdered. Grabbing their rifles, the brothers crossed the river in their 18-foot skiff to investigate. Finding nothing in the small stands of black spruce, they heard splashing back across the river—and turned to see a dark figure running into the brush exactly where they had just left their camp.
Brian was driving up the Richardson Highway toward Delta Junction in the dead of winter to help a friend fix a broken snow machine track. Along the long, snowy route, he noticed a strange black dot far out on the tundra, initially writing it off as an out-of-season black bear. The next morning, while driving back south, a sudden wave of severe, unexplained nausea forced him to pull his truck over near the river. While stopped, he spotted another dark figure moving swiftly across the distant, snowy marsh.
