Bakken Oil Workers Report Bigfoot Encounter in North Dakota

Three oil field workers in the badlands of northwestern North Dakota had an experience back in the fall of 2019 that still gives one of them pause to this day. The story was recently shared in a video on the YouTube channel The Northern Dogman, and it's one of those accounts that sticks with you long after you hear it. The setting is the Bakken formation, one of the most active oil plays on the continent, stretching from Saskatchewan down through Montana and into North Dakota. By 2019, the infrastructure out there was dense. Pipelines, pump stations, compressor stations, metering buildings, all spread across the prairie in grids that follow the resources underground rather than the lay of the land. It's a lonely kind of isolation out there. Not wilderness isolation, but managed prairie isolation. The kind where you check the same equipment every night, walk the same fence lines, and know the same roads until they're burned into your memory. Marcus had been doing night security for a small independent operator called Zenith Petroleum for almost four years by that point. He was 34, originally from Williston, with a wife and two kids on the north side of town. His relief man, Derek, was 26, from Minot, and had been on the job for about two years. They knew each other well enough to make conversation during handoffs but not so well that they socialized outside of work. That's standard night shift life. The third man, who I'll call Garrett (not his real name), was a contractor who came out to the sites every couple of weeks to do maintenance on the computerized monitoring systems. He was in his late 40s, technical, quiet, the kind of guy who understood how the whole operation fit together. On October 15th, 2019, a Tuesday, Marcus was halfway through his shift around 2 a.m., walking the perimeter of the compound to check the fence line and gate. The compound was about 80 yards by 80 yards, surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. Beyond the fence was open prairie in every direction. The nearest neighbor was three miles away. Williston was about 40 miles south. The temperature was dropping, probably around 38 degrees, with a clear sky and no wind. The stars were thick that night, and Marcus remembers thinking about how clear they were, how you don't see stars like that in town anymore. That's when he heard something behind him, maybe 20 yards back. Something heavy moving through the grass. Not running, walking, but heavy. He turned around with his flashlight and swept the beam across the prairie behind the fence. He saw it standing in the light for less than two seconds. Marcus described it as standing on its hind legs, covered in coarse dark fur that looked almost black in the flashlight beam. The height was wrong. He had to look up at it. He estimated seven feet, maybe seven and a half. The proportions were off. The legs were very long and very straight, nothing like a bear's rear stance. The arms hung at its sides. And the face, he said, was the part that made his stomach drop. It was lupine, long-muzzled, with forward-pointing ears, but not an animal face. Not a wolf. The bone structure was too complex. The way the jaw was set, the angle of the skull, something about it suggested intelligence looking back. Marcus swung the flashlight, but the figure had already moved. It was gone back into the dark of the prairie in a few long strides. He didn't chase it. He stood there breathing hard and radioed Derek. Derek grabbed a handheld spotlight and went out to the north side of the compound. He didn't see anything either, just prairie and no movement. But he said there was a smell. Musky. Not like a farm smell. Not like livestock. Something older, something that made him uncomfortable in a way he couldn't articulate. They didn't call anyone that night. They weren't even sure what they'd seen or smelled. Marcus figured it was a bear that had wandered in from the mountains or a very large elk that was more curious than usual. Then the tracks started showing up. Contractors from a Bismarck-based company found deep four-toed prints in the soft ground along the maintenance road on the east side of the fence. They took photos and sent them to the site manager, David Chen, who thought they were probably bear tracks but noted in his report that they seemed deeper than a bear print should be and the toe spacing was unusual. He didn't follow up. The North Dakota Game and Fish Department eventually sent someone out, but by then the tracks had been walked on and degraded by weather. The official said it was probably a bear, though he couldn't identify the species with certainty. No bear warning signs were put up. No wildlife control was called. Things escalated on November 12th when Garrett came out for an evening troubleshoot. Derek was already on shift. Around 8 p.m., Derek stepped outside to grab something from his truck and heard something outside the fence on the east side, moving through the prairie. He told Garrett it sounded like something heavy moving through dried grass, something large, making a low sound almost like a growl but not aggressive. Just present. Around 2 a.m., Garrett finished his work and told Marcus he wanted to check the fence on the east side before he left to see if there were any new tracks. Marcus said this was unusual. Contractors don't generally do that kind of thing. But Garrett seemed intent. They walked the fence together. The ground was hard, frozen in places. No new tracks visible. They didn't find anything. But something found them. Marcus said they were about halfway along the east fence when they heard the sound. The same sound Derek had reported. A low growl. But this time it was close. Very close. Maybe 30 feet away on the far side of the fence. The video cuts off there, but you can probably guess where this is going. Three credible witnesses, physical evidence in the form of those unusual four-toed tracks, and a wildlife official who couldn't definitively identify what made them. The Bakken oil fields have been a hotspot for strange sightings over the years, and stories like this one from North Dakota only add to the growing body of reports coming out of remote industrial sites where workers spend long, isolated nights surrounded by nothing but prairie and darkness. If you're into accounts like this, the full story is worth checking out over on The Northern Dogman channel. The witness descriptions are detailed, the timeline is laid out clearly, and the physical evidence is documented. It's the kind of encounter report that makes you wonder what's really out there in those wide-open spaces where the stars are thick and the nearest neighbor is miles away.