1998 Oregon Logging Crew Captures Bigfoot Silhouette on Camera
Posted Wednesday, August 05, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
There's a video that recently surfaced on a Spanish-language channel called Miedo Salvaje that tells one of the most unsettling Sasquatch encounter stories to come out of the Pacific Northwest in years, and honestly, it's the kind of footage and testimony that keeps researchers up at night.
The story centers on a logging operation in Oregon's Lane County back in 1998. A veteran foreman named Bans, who had 23 years in the timber industry, took a contract on a hillside about 40 minutes off the main road down a gravel track nobody had maintained in years. Right away, things felt off. The contract paperwork included a clause he'd never seen in two decades of work, explicitly excluding the first eight acres from the bottom of the ravine upward from insurance coverage. When he called the zone manager, Curtis Bohem, to ask about it, the answer came back suspiciously fast, like the man had been waiting for exactly that question.
The crew included a 23-year-old choker setter named Caleb Whitfield, the youngest of the group and the only one who kept pushing back about why those eight acres were off-limits. Caleb asked about it at least eight different times over the following weeks. He never got a real answer.
Then the strange stuff started. Nine days into the logging, a crane operator named Dutch Bellami found three young trees marked with deep, parallel grooves at a height well beyond what any person standing with arms raised could reach. These weren't saw marks or machinery marks. Four parallel lines sunk several centimeters into the bark, like a full claw dragged down with force. Over the next week, more marked trees appeared, and Bans started plotting them on a pocket map. By the end of the week, he had 14 marks, and when he sat down to look at the whole pattern, something clicked that made his neck go cold. Not a single mark fell inside the active work zone. Every single one ringed the perimeter of where his crew was operating, almost like a boundary line being drawn around them.
The marks themselves were photographed with a ruler for scale, and the grooves measured over 3 centimeters deep into living wood, something even a dull chainsaw can't do without leaving splinters and loose bark around the edges. These cuts were clean, like they were made in a single motion.
Then the circles started. Chains from a spare chainsaw kit, normally locked in a box inside Bans's truck, were found arranged in a perfect circle on the ground around a freshly cut stump. The box was still locked. Nothing had been forced. Over the next two weeks, the same thing happened three more times, each time around a different object, including the front wheel of Bans's truck and Caleb's work boots left outside the trailer where the crew slept during the week.
Bans pulled a camera from his glove compartment, one he'd bought months earlier to catch whoever had been stealing tools from another job site, and rigged it to a post near the trailer, pointing at the clearing where the chains had appeared. He left it running every night on a spare battery. For three days, nothing. On the fourth night, something walked around the trailer for over an hour with a slow, steady, two-legged gait. At one point, the metal wall on Caleb's side of the trailer sounded like something had leaned its full body weight against it. In the morning, there was a massive hand print on the window, far wider and higher than any human could leave.
The camera file from 1:14 a.m. showed a bipedal silhouette crossing the clearing without any hurry, shoulders far wider than any man Bans had ever worked with. In the last second of the clip, the figure turned its head directly toward the lens, as if it had known exactly where that camera was from the moment it was installed.
What makes this story hit differently from a lot of the usual reports is the layering. The claw marks forming a perimeter, the deliberate placement of objects in circles, the way the figure on camera seemed aware of being watched, and the title of the video itself suggests that a logger was taken during this operation. The circumstantial evidence of the insurance exclusion, the young crew member who kept asking questions about the off-limits zone, and the way the activity intensified around him all point in a direction that researchers have heard before in cases across the Northwest.
Lane County, Oregon, sits in a region with a long documented history of Sasquatch sightings, particularly in the dense forested areas of the Cascades. The behavior described, marking territory boundaries, leaving deliberate arrangements of objects, and exhibiting awareness of human surveillance, aligns with patterns reported by other loggers, hunters, and forest workers in the region over the decades. What sets this case apart is the camera footage and the photographic evidence of the claw marks with measured depth.
The full story, including what happened after Bans called Bohem again from a high point where he could get a cell signal, is worth hearing in the original Spanish narration. The video runs through the timeline in detail and includes the kind of specific, grounded details that make a story like this hard to dismiss outright. If you're into Pacific Northwest encounters, this one deserves your attention. Check it out on the Miedo Salvaje channel and see what you make of it.