Bigfoot Colonies Abandoned as Land Sinks and Brine Water Rises

There's a video I came across the other night that I keep coming back to, and if you've ever spent any time in the southern woods at night, it's going to stick with you too. A fellow named Harlon Pru has been keeping tabs on Bigfoot colonies across three parishes down in the southern U.S. for over a decade. Eleven years, to be exact. Nine sites total, none of them marked with anything a curious person could stumble onto. Just fishing line strung chest-high between saplings with a wrap of orange tape in the middle, so from a hundred yards out on a clear morning he can tell whether something heavy pushed through. The rest of it is his ears, a monocular he rented in June and never got around to returning (the shop called twice and then gave up, which honestly I find hilarious and very relatable), and a lifetime of pattern recognition that most researchers would envy. What makes this video worth your time is what started happening this year. Harlon describes one particular night at a pipeline cut called Bearehead, somewhere between 2 and 3 in the morning, where he counted 19 of them crossing in a strung-out file with one big one out front. Now, anyone who's spent time observing these folks knows they usually hang back at the last of the cover for two or three minutes, letting the wind tell them things. These didn't. They came out of the black timber like men late for a shift and walked across 60 feet of open mowed grass without breaking stride. In the thermal, they were bright and shapeless, more heat than form, each one pulling a little smear of warmth behind it off the cold ground. That detail alone gave me chills. But here's where it gets strange, and where the video really pulls you in. Site 4 went quiet in April. He wrote it off to high water. Site 7 went in May. Site 2 went the first week of June, and Site 2 had been occupied every single time he'd checked it since 2019. By the middle of August, he'd lost seven of his nine colonies. And they hadn't just left. They'd all gone northeast. Same heading. Every single one. A line you could draw with a straight edge from the coast up to the state line. Now, I want to pause here because this is the kind of coordinated movement that researchers have whispered about for years. Colonies aren't supposed to operate on a synchronized schedule. They're family groups, loosely connected, with their own home ranges and their own quirks. When they all start moving in the same direction at the same time, something is pushing them. And Harlon knows it. He says it plain: "Seven colonies do not leave the only ground they know because they got restless. Something had a hand on them." What he finds when he drives south to his last occupied tract is going to haunt me for a while. The logging road he'd always used to access the site doesn't end where it's supposed to end anymore. It goes on another 60 feet and goes under, and where the road belonged, there's water. Flat, brown, dead still, standing in among the trunks as far back into the timber as he can see. The pines are still green up top, which means the whole thing is new, because pine won't stand in water and keep being pine for long. He crouches down, puts two fingers in, touches them to his tongue. Salt. He's 90 miles from any water with a right to be salty, and better than a hundred feet up from where the map puts the salt. What's standing in the tract is brine. The colony that used this bottom had held a 40-acre hump of high ground through two hurricanes and one bad freeze. If there was anything in 11 years Harlon hadn't learned to doubt, it was that hump. But the hump sat only 8 or 10 feet above everything around it. Whatever was coming up under the other seven sites had been coming up under this one too, all along, at the same rate. It just had further to fall. So it went last instead of first, and he'd spent the spring congratulating himself on an anomaly that was only arithmetic. When he gets to the hump, the brush on the far side is pushed over and hasn't begun to lift yet. The ground has that packed-down look a place gets when weight has been living on it and then the weight goes somewhere else. There's a place in the yopon torn open eight feet across at chest height, wide enough for a crowd. They left together. They left in a hurry. They left going northeast. A survey crew on the parish road confirms what his gut already told him. The ground is going down. Half an inch a week, some weeks better. The whole shelf, near as they can figure. Not a sinkhole. Nothing to see. It just gets lower, and the water comes and finds it. I don't want to spoil the rest, because the way Harlon puts the pieces together in the final minutes of the video is the kind of quiet, matter-of-fact reckoning that stays with you. There's a personal thread running through it too, about his brother Denny who was taken in the fall of 2016 out of a creek bottom on the Whiska Chidto, nine miles from pavement, while Harlon was 800 yards downstream hearing the whole thing happen without understanding a single second of it. Four years he spent looking for the one that did it. Then somewhere around the fifth year, the looking turned into something else. He still goes out. He still keeps the sites up. He's just quit believing in the ending he was walking toward. It's a strange, heavy, beautiful piece of work, and it doesn't lean on music or jump scares or any of the usual tricks. It's just a man who's spent eleven years learning where they stay and how long they stay there, telling you what happened when the ground itself started moving. Do yourself a favor and go watch it. Bring a thermos. Leave it on the fender. Think about it the whole time.