Alaska Game Warden Reports Antlered Creature Dragging 800-Pound Moose

A 1974 Alaska game warden account has resurfaced, and it's one of the most detailed Bigfoot encounter reports to come out of the Last Frontier in decades. The story comes from a YouTube channel called Bigfoot Den, and if you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go watch it because the details are wild. Back in the fall of 1974, a state game warden named Perry Callahan was posted to the Copper River District of Interior Alaska. He was 51 years old, a year out from his pension, with a wife in Glenn Allen and a daughter at the University of Fairbanks. By his own account, he was not a man who believed in anything supernatural. He'd been a warden for 26 years. He'd seen everything the Alaskan wilderness could throw at a person or an animal. The woods were just a place where things ate other things, and his job was to make sure the eating happened inside the seasons and the bag limits. Then he got a poaching call from a homesteader named Ioni, who ran a trap line along a drainage northeast of the road system. A bull moose had been killed and left to rot, which was the kind of waste that brought wardens out fast. Callahan had written a hundred citations for the same thing. He knew what a poached moose looked like from a distance, the dark heap in the grass, the birds already working it. What he found in that clearing was not a poached moose. The bull was down on its side with its hindquarters opened, and standing over it with one hand resting on the flank of the animal was something Callahan first read as a man in a fur coat, then as a bear risen onto its back legs, and then as neither. It was over seven feet tall. It was covered in dark rust brown hair that shaded to charcoal down the spine. Its face was wide and flat and human in a way that stopped his breath, more Neanderthal than ape, with a heavy bony brow ridge and a broad prominent nose and no muzzle at all. And rising off the top of the skull, branching up and out past the height of a grown man, was a rack of antlers. Now, anyone who has spent time researching Sasquatch encounters knows that antlered Bigfoot reports are not new. There is a long history of Indigenous and frontier accounts describing large, hairy, bipedal figures wearing or growing elk or moose antlers, sometimes referred to in older literature as "Old Sticklyfoot" variants or the antlered forest giants of the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. The Tsimshian, Kwakwaka'wakw, and other coastal peoples have oral traditions about tall, hairy beings crowned with antlers who walked upright through the deep woods. What makes the Callahan account unusual is the source, a sworn state game warden with 26 years of field experience, and the level of anatomical detail he provided. Callahan sat in his truck 200 yards off and did not reach for the radio. The thing turned its head and looked at him with flat reflective eyes. It did not run. It did not charge. It simply watched him the way a landlord watches a tenant who is late. Then it bent and took the moose by a hind leg and dragged 800 pounds of animal into the treeline without any apparent effort at all. He filed the call as a bear predation. That was the word he wrote. Bear. Because there was no box on the form for the other thing, and because he had already decided in the 20 minutes it took him to stop shaking that he was not going to be the warden who wrote down what he had actually seen. But Ioni came to his office and closed the door. She was a Copper River homesteader who had trapped that drainage for 30 years, and her people had trapped it before her. She sat down across from his desk and said, "That was no bear." And when he tried to deflect, she said, "You were closer to it than I was, and you know exactly what it was." Her silence was the only honest answer he gave her. Then she told him the rest. The drainage had gone wrong that summer. Her marten sets had stopped producing in July. She found her marten boxes torn open and not robbed, just torn, opened up and set aside. The creature had been in her valley since the snow left. And the reason there was a dead moose, she said, was not that the thing was hungry. The reason there was a dead moose was that the moose had antlers, and the thing did not like anything else in its country wearing a crown. Callahan thought she was building a story. He admits that openly. It took him until the following spring to believe her, and by then it was much too late to unknow. The second carcass came in November, and it was not a moose. A trapper named Doug ran a line on the far side of the same ridge system. He came into the office to report that he had lost a dog. His wheel dog, the big steady one, had gone into the spruce after something at a rest stop and had not come out. When Doug went in after him, he found the dog 40 feet off the trail, up in the crotch of a spruce tree, 11 feet off the ground, wedged into the branches. Nothing in interior Alaska puts a 60-pound dog 11 feet up a tree. A wolverine cannot. A bear does not. Doug knew that. And Doug had not come to file a predation report. He had come because he wanted the warden to tell him what could do that. The behavior of the working dogs is worth pausing on. Researchers like Dr. Jeff Meldrum and the late Grover Krantz have long noted that domestic and wild animals often react to Sasquatch presence in ways humans cannot detect, refusing trails, becoming agitated, or going completely silent. Doug's lead dog bit through the line to get loose. The other dogs lay down in the traces and refused to move. Whatever was up that valley, the animals knew, and they were not going. Doug moved his line 30 miles south for the rest of the season. He lived. Callahan always believed that not answering Doug's question, that long silence in the office, was the one time he actually saved somebody in the whole affair. On his way out the door, Doug told Callahan something he did not write down for a week because he did not want it in the book. The night before he found the dog in the tree, something had walked the perimeter of his camp. Two legs, he said. Unmistakably two legs. A slow, heavy tread all the way around the outside of the firelight and back again. Over the following 14 months, Callahan would drive out to 11 more carcasses. Every single one was arranged the same way. By the end of that run, he had stopped filing reports altogether because the reports he did file were disappearing out of the district office before the ink was dry. He gave most of his account to a nephew in 1994, four years before he died. The rest was reconstructed from a field notebook his daughter kept. The video on Bigfoot Den walks through the entire account in Callahan's own order, as close to his own telling as it can be put. The narration is slow, deliberate, and gives the story room to breathe. There is one detail that stuck with me long after I finished watching. Callahan mentions that the top of the creature's left ear had a notch torn out of it, an old healed wound, a piece missing clean. He says he would come to know that notch. He would see it again on the worst night of his life. The video does not spell out what that night was, and that restraint is part of what makes the whole piece so effective. If you have any interest in Alaskan Bigfoot reports, Indigenous traditions of antlered forest giants, or credible witness testimony from law enforcement, this one is worth your time. Go give it a watch and see what you think.