Washington Man's Peanut Butter Bait Reveals Bigfoot Fingerprints

So I just stumbled across this fascinating episode over on The Cryptid Podcast, and honestly, it had me hooked from the very first clip they played. We're talking about a researcher named Tristan Yolton out of Washington State who has had some seriously compelling experiences, and the audio evidence he captured back in 2015 is the kind of thing that makes you lean in a little closer to your speakers. The story starts with Tristan's dad. At 4 a.m. one morning in February 2015, while taking out the trash before heading to work, he heard two distinct whoops echoing up from a hill behind their property. They live surrounded by woods and mountains, so this wasn't exactly out of the ordinary terrain-wise, but the timing and the sound definitely were. As he drove down the road to work, he came across a herd of elk just standing in the middle of the road, all staring up at that same hill. He had to swerve around them. The wild part? He didn't mention this to his family for weeks until they happened to be watching a Bigfoot show together, and he casually brought it up. You can imagine the reaction at home—"What? You didn't tell us about this sooner?" Naturally, Tristan and his mother headed up that hill the very next day. They brought along a brand new jar of peanut butter, some peanut butter crackers, and an old Sony audio recorder (no USB capabilities, just classic analog style). Tristan strapped the recorder to a stump near a creek running down the hill, reasoning that if anything was traveling that route, the waterway might be a natural pathway. They left everything overnight and returned the following morning. What they found was wild. The peanut butter jar had been opened, and inside were what Tristan believes could be dermal ridges—finger impressions pressed into the peanut butter itself. The crackers were gone too, but here's the thing that really got me: they weren't ripped open. Whoever—or whatever—opened them did so neatly, almost like using a fingernail to carefully slice the packaging. That's not typical bear or raccoon behavior. Bears, as Tristan pointed out, tend to destroy these things. They chew them up, scratch them, sometimes carry them off entirely. This was something different. Then there's the audio. And this is where it gets really interesting. About an hour after Tristan and his mother left the site, the recorder captured something remarkable. It starts with this strange humming feedback sound—loud and almost otherworldly—followed by what sounds like eating. You can hear the crackers being opened and consumed. Then comes a deep, guttural growl, and the sound of something fumbling with the recorder itself. The recording just stops after that. No footsteps walking away, no rustling, nothing. Just silence. Tristan mentioned that this humming sound has apparently been documented by other researchers too. Some have speculated it could be a kind of purring, maybe contentment from whatever was enjoying the peanut butter. It's one of those audio anomalies that keeps popping up in Sasquatch research, and nobody has a definitive answer for what it is yet. Now here's the part that really got to me. Tristan still has that peanut butter jar. It's been sitting in his freezer for about ten years now, never analyzed for DNA. At the time, he didn't know anyone in the field who could test it, and it honestly didn't even occur to him that analysis was an option. Ten years of potential evidence just waiting in a basement freezer. That's the kind of thing that keeps researchers up at night. After that initial encounter, Tristan and his mother connected with Barb Shoup out of Greenwater, Washington, and started attending campouts organized around the state. One of those campouts in October 2015 took them to Bumping Lake, a spot near Mount Rainier sitting at about 3,000 feet elevation. If you know anything about Sasquatch hotspots in the Pacific Northwest, Bumping Lake has a reputation. It's the kind of location that comes up again and again in witness reports, and Tristan had never even heard of it before that campout. The episode cuts off right as Tristan is about to get into more details about the Bumping Lake encounters, which is honestly frustrating because the buildup is incredible. There's clearly more to this story, and the audio clip alone is worth the listen. If you're into firsthand accounts from people who've put in the time in the field, this is one of those episodes you don't want to skip. The Cryptid Podcast has the full conversation, and trust me, you'll want to hear that audio clip for yourself.