Three Outdoor Workers Share Close Bigfoot Encounter Stories

# Three Hunters, Three Close Calls: A Compilation Worth Your Time Came across a video on YouTube the other night that stopped me in my tracks. It's a collection of firsthand accounts from five different men who had encounters while out doing what they normally do — hunting, fishing, working their trap lines. The channel that put it together, Buckeye Bigfoot, lets the witnesses tell their own stories in their own words, and that's what makes it hit so hard. No narration, no music cues, no dramatic reenactments. Just regular guys describing something that absolutely did not belong in their world. Here's a taste of what you'll find in it. ## The Louisiana Bow Fisherman This one takes place in the Atchafalaya Basin — the largest swamp in the United States, a maze of cypress-tupelo sloughs, backwater lakes, and bayou off the main channel. It's exactly the kind of terrain where you'd expect reports to come from, and this witness knows it better than almost anyone. He's been running his bow fishing rig through these cuts for six years, sometimes 200 nights a season. Solo, in a johnboat, with a generator-powered light bar mounted on the bow sweeping the banks for carp and buffalo fish. On a warm June night, his light caught something crouched at the water line about 12 feet off his bow. Hands down in the water, head low — like it had been drinking or working at something in the mud. Then the light hit it full and it straightened up onto two legs. The witness describes the way generator lights work — everything they illuminate is harsh white with deep, hard shadows, and there's not much wiggle room to mistake what you're seeing. For one second at 15 feet, with the light square on it, he says there was nothing about the size or shape that gave him any room to see it as anything other than what it was. He circled back. The bank was empty, but the mud was disturbed at the water line, and there was a drag mark going back into the tupelo where the light couldn't reach. He sat out there for ten minutes before heading straight for the landing. He still runs the basin — it's his living — but he doesn't run that particular cut after dark anymore. And if he has to pass near it, he keeps his speed up and his lights moving. ## The Maryland Trapper The second account comes from the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay, marshland country — sitka spartina and fragmite stands cut through with tidal guts too narrow for anything but a johnboat and a pushpole. This witness has trapped that water for 11 seasons. What happened to him happened on a low tide morning in January, gray light, no wind, total silence. He came around a stand of fragmites — reeds that run eight or nine feet tall, thick enough you can't see through them — and the channel dog-legged hard around the base. When he came out the other side into open marsh, there was something standing right in the middle of it, in about 18 inches of water. Hunched forward at the waist, both hands down in the mud, working at something below the surface. Patient. Careful. The way you'd work at trying to untie a knot with a blindfold on. His boat wake slapped the bank. It heard him. It lifted its head and looked right at him. The light was behind it, so he didn't get a clean look at the face — just a silhouette. But they looked at each other long enough that he lost track of the pushpole in his hands and the boat started drifting sideways in the current. Then it straightened up out of the crouch, full height, and that's when he got the real sense of how big it was. It turned into a break in the reeds on the far bank and was gone in 20 seconds, the reads closing up behind it as if it had never been there. He moved his fourth trap set a quarter mile downstream the next week. He hasn't run a trap past that bend in the reeds since. ## The Washington Falconer The third account starts in the Palouse Hills of Washington — grass country cut through with steep folds and draws, open enough to see a flush coming but broken enough to hold rabbits. The witness is a falconer who hunts with a passage red-tailed hawk he trapped four years ago. The video cuts off mid-story during his third flush of the morning, so this one you'll have to hear for yourself. ## Why These Accounts Matter What stands out about all three of these stories is the same thing that stands out about the best witness reports — these aren't people looking for something. They're people doing their jobs, working their trap lines, running their hunting birds, and something inserted itself into their routine that didn't belong there. None of them wanted a second look. None of them went looking for it afterward. They just adjusted their routes and kept working. That reaction — the quiet, almost reluctant acknowledgment that something was there, followed by a permanent change in behavior — is something researchers have noted in credible encounter reports for decades. People who know their territory and know what belongs in it are often the most reliable witnesses, because they have a baseline to measure against. A bow fisherman who's run the same cut 200 nights knows when something is off. A trapper who's worked the same marsh for 11 seasons knows when something doesn't fit. The video is worth the watch. The witnesses do their own talking, and there's something about hearing a person's voice when they describe something like this that you just can't get from a written report. Five men, five stories, three different landscapes — and the same feeling running through all of them.