Two Friends Recall 1972 Sasquatch Encounter on Railroad Tracks

Just stumbled across a really compelling interview over on the Creek Devil YouTube channel that deserves some attention. William Jebning, a two-time witness and field researcher with 43 years under his belt, sits down with an old childhood friend named John to walk through an encounter that dates all the way back to December 1972. The setup is pretty simple. Will and his buddy Mark were bored at Will's house on a cold Saturday and decided to walk through the woods to John's place. Their usual trail was buried under snow, so they took the road to the railroad tracks and followed those instead. About 80% of the way to John's house, they spotted something that stopped them cold - a red line running between the rails. What they found was animal intestines laid out between the tracks, and here's where it gets weird. There were absolutely no footprints in the snow around them. Everything was blanketed in white except the rails themselves. Will notes the brush in the area is thick, so nothing could have dropped them from above. The previous summer, some crude fire access roads had been bulldozed on either side of the tracks, giving them a pretty clear view of the surrounding terrain. Will climbed the embankment to the left while Mark continued up the track. What he found up there made both of them freeze - a whole series of footprints that looked human but were significantly bigger than their own. We're talking 16 to 17 inches long and noticeably wider than a normal human foot. The creepiest detail? The intestines weren't frozen despite temperatures being in the teens that morning. Will's logic was simple: whatever put them there had to be close by because they hadn't frozen yet. The two of them bolted to John's house. When they explained what they'd found, John's dad did something telling - he went into the bedroom, grabbed a gun AND a camera, and followed the kids back down to the tracks. According to John, his dad had apparently heard of Sasquatch before, though he never explained where he got that information. This was apparently the first time Will and John had ever heard the term used. The group found a clear footprint that John's dad photographed with his 35mm camera. Unfortunately, they didn't place anything next to it for scale, but there's a photo showing a hand pointing at the print. Will also mentions finding what appeared to be a knuckle print - he stuck his gloved fist into it and there was roughly an inch of space around his fist to the outside boundary of the marking. This kind of physical evidence from the Pacific Northwest in the early 1970s is exactly the type of documentation that keeps researchers going. The combination of large humanoid footprints, possible knuckle impressions, and animal remains with no tracks leading to or from them fits a pattern that's been reported across the region for generations. What's particularly interesting here is that John's dad had prior knowledge of Sasquatch - suggesting the subject was already circulating in certain rural Washington circles well before terms like "Bigfoot" became household names. The interview itself is worth watching just for the way these old friends recount the experience. You can hear the excitement in Will's voice as he describes finding those prints, and John talks about being in genuine shock, thinking there really are monsters in the woods. It's a firsthand account from someone who was there as a kid, and those kinds of stories are gold for anyone interested in the subject. Definitely worth checking out if you haven't seen it. Creek Devil has a solid library of witness interviews and old case reviews - this one's a good one to start with.