Oregon Man's Grief Exchange With Bigfoot Captured in 8-Second Footage

Eight seconds. That's all Harland Teague got before the figure raised a hand—palm out, the universal signal for "hold on"—and vanished back into the timber of Douglas County, Oregon. Eight seconds of footage that would eventually make its way onto the internet, get mirrored off a hunting forum, and disappear within nine hours of being posted. Eight seconds that led to a subpoena from the Douglas County Sheriff's Office served eight months before the clip ever surfaced publicly. You don't subpoena footage of nothing. The story behind those eight seconds is one of the most unusual accounts to come out of the Pacific Northwest in recent memory, and it was pieced together in a video that recently surfaced on YouTube. What makes it stand out isn't just the footage itself—it's the years of strange, deliberate exchanges that preceded it. Harland Teague spent 31 years as a millwright at the plywood mill in Dillard, Oregon. He married Lois in 1979, and the two never had children. When Lois passed away in September 2013 from an aggressive cancer, Harland retired that same fall. Left alone in the house on the edge of Riddle with an old orchard of Gravenstein apple trees behind it—trees planted by Lois's father before the war—he couldn't stand watching the fruit rot in the grass every September. It felt like a second funeral happening every day. So in the spring of 2014, he drove up to an overlook in the South Umpqua country called Martin Creek, a spot he'd elk hunted for two decades, and scattered Lois's ashes into the wind and timber. When the apples came in that fall, he couldn't throw them out. Instead, he started carrying them up the mountain in a canvas feed sack and leaving them on a flat-topped cedar stump below the lip of the overlook—the way another man might leave flowers. He thought he was feeding the deer. What happened next is the kind of detail that makes even seasoned researchers pause. In October 2014, Harland returned to find the apples gone and a fist-sized piece of rose quartz sitting dead center on the stump. Clean. No dirt, no moss, no weathering. It had been carried there and placed deliberately in the exact spot where the apples had been. The exchanges continued. In May 2015, a hubcap—scoured so clean it looked dipped in acid—appeared on the stump, even though Harland hadn't left apples that month. In November 2015, a deer skull, every scrap of tissue removed with museum-like precision, set facing outward toward the overlook, toward the exact drop where Harland had let Lois go. That one made his hands go cold. A folding knife with a bone handle and a blade worn thin from decades of sharpening appeared in February 2016. Eagle feathers arranged in a careful fan—largest to smallest, quills pointing the same direction—showed up in June 2016. And then in September 2016, the detail that erased all doubt: a work glove Harland had lost while clearing blowdown four miles and two ridges away from the overlook. It was folded, set flat and square in the center of the stump, waiting. Whatever was leaving these gifts wasn't a scavenger stumbling onto an easy meal. It tracked him. It ranged across a territory the size of a county. And it had decided, for reasons Harland couldn't begin to guess, that the two of them had an arrangement. On September 24, 2016, Harland finally saw it. Standing upslope of the overlook in the shadow of a stand of red alder, perfectly still, watching him. Over seven feet tall. The kind of scale that rearranges the surrounding trees around the shape of it once your eye finally accepts what's there. Then came the morning of October 12, 2019. Harland had his phone up. He got eight seconds before it raised that hand and was gone. The Douglas County Sheriff's Office served a subpoena on Harland Teague in June 2020 for the memory cards out of every trail camera he owned. By the time the clip surfaced online, Harland had stopped answering his phone. The only man who could explain those eight seconds had gone silent. Accounts like this one are rare for a reason. Most encounters are fleeting—a crashing in the brush, a shadow slipping between trees, a sound that doesn't match anything in the known animal catalog. What makes Harland Teague's story different is the years of documented, repeated, deliberate contact leading up to a filmed sighting. The spiral notebook on the workbench where he logged every gift and every date. The retired timber cruiser, Otis Yandel, who told him never to touch the stump because he didn't choose it—whatever left those gifts did. The South Umpqua country has long been part of the broader tapestry of reported activity in Oregon, a state with one of the deepest histories of encounters in the country. From the famous Ape Canyon events near Mount St. Helens to the countless sightings logged in the Cascades and Coast Range, Oregon sits at the heart of the cultural geography of this subject. What Harland describes fits a pattern that researchers have noted for decades: not aggressive encounters, but curious ones. Not beasts hunting prey, but intelligences making contact on their own terms. The video that tells this story in full is worth sitting down with. It runs through the timeline in detail, including the strange detail about the sheriff's subpoena and the rapid deletion of the footage from the hunting forum. There are questions it raises that don't have easy answers—why would a county sheriff's office serve a subpoena on a retired millwright's trail cameras eight months before any footage went public? What was on those memory cards? And what happened to every Sasquatch in the state of Oregon, as the video's framing suggests Harland eventually came to believe? Eight seconds of footage. A folded glove on a cedar stump. A hand raised in the universal gesture for "wait." Something was waiting. And it knew exactly where to find him. The video is up on YouTube now, and it's one that deserves a full watch. Bring a notebook. You'll probably want to take notes.