West Virginia Trapper's 1986 Bigfoot Rescue Sparks Family Standoff

# A Veteran West Virginia Trapper's Night with a Bigfoot Family That Will Stay With You Came across a story on YouTube the other night that I haven't been able to shake. It's told in the first person by a man named Roy Dixon, a 36-year veteran trapper from Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and it involves one of the most detailed juvenile Bigfoot encounters I've ever heard described. The video runs long, but every minute is worth it. Definitely add this one to your watch list. ## The Setup: Pocahontas County, 1986 Roy Dixon grew up trapping the high country around the Williams River and Tea Creek drainages, hard against the edge of the Cranberry Wilderness in what is now the Monongahela National Forest. The Cranberry Wilderness was officially designated in 1983, closing off more than 35,000 acres to roads and machines, which pushed fur-bearing animals toward the edges where Roy worked his line. Red spruce country at over 4,000 feet, with yellow birch, beech, and hemlock choking the hollows below. Snow comes early and stays late. There are laurel thickets so thick a man has to crawl through them on his belly. Roy had been running trap lines since he was 12 years old, taught by his father during the winter of 1950. By the time of his story, he had 36 years of experience and ran close to 60 sets over about 11 miles of drainage, checking them daily as required by law. He carried his catch out on a homemade ash-frame toboggan his father had built in 1961. ## The Strange Happenings Begin About 10 days into the season, Roy started finding his sets dug up. Not sprung by deer or robbed by raccoons, but excavated. The whole set flipped over, jaws snapped shut on air, and the dirt laid aside in a neat pile, "the way a man spades a garden." He blamed a poacher at first, but poachers leave boot tracks, and there were none. Plus, a poacher usually takes the trap, which was worth eight or nine dollars new. The bait stations were stripped clean, and the wire holding the bait down was unwound, not chewed through. A 70-pound drag stone he'd wired to a bobcat set was moved 40 feet up a bank and placed on top of a stump. His redbone hound Duke, a dog that had bayed bears, refused to come up the bank and sat at the creek edge with his ears flat and a low growl rolling in his chest. ## The Knocking The third week of November, Roy started hearing wood knocks while finishing his line at dusk. A single hard knock from up on the ridge, wood on wood, sharp as a maul on a fence post. A minute later, another would answer from the far side of the drainage. Two knocks, then quiet. He told himself it was hunters signaling, though buck season hadn't opened and he never cut a boot track. He told himself it was trees popping in the cold, though the cold wasn't hard enough yet to pop timber. The pattern was the part he couldn't explain. The knocks moved when he moved, ridge to ridge, all the way down to where his truck sat at the gate. ## The Tracks The first real snow fell on November 29th, four inches of dry powder. The next morning, half a mile up Tea Creek, Roy cut a line of tracks that stopped him the way a wall stops you. Barefoot tracks, five toes, a wide heel, a flat arch pressed better than an inch deep into snow that his own boots barely dented. He carried a cloth tape in his pack basket for measuring pelts, and he laid it along the clearest print with shaking hands. Seventeen inches heel to toe. Almost eight inches across the ball. The stride, track to track, ran 54 inches on level ground. Roy wears a size 10 boot and stands 5'10". When he stretched his legs to match that stride, he nearly pulled a muscle and still came up short. ## The Rescue A few days later, Roy came across something that changed everything. A young Bigfoot, about 4.5 feet tall, covered head to heel in chestnut hair, black eyes wide with pain, caught by the ankle in an illegal bear trap. Not his trap. His were smooth-jawed foothold sets sized for fox and bobcat, run clean and legal for 36 years. This was a toothed bear trap, 40 pounds of rusted steel with a jaw spread wider than his two hands, the kind outlawed in West Virginia since before he was born. Roy pried the steel open while the juvenile screamed against his shoulder. Then he hauled the young one home through falling weather on his fur toboggan because he didn't know what else to do. ## By Nightfall By full dark that night, Roy's cabin, four rooms at the end of a dead-end hollow off Route 39, stood surrounded on three sides by the family. He doesn't go into great detail about what he saw or felt in that moment, but the implication is clear. They came for their young one. ## The Cultural Context Roy mentions that he wasn't the first in his county to know about these beings. The old men of his father's generation, the ones who logged the virgin spruce off those mountains in the 1920s with steam and oxen, had their tales told low around stoves after the women went to bed. Wood knocks that answered the mill whistle. A smell in certain hollows that turned the horses. Camp cooks up on Cheat Mountain who'd wake to find the biscuit stores gone and tracks in the mud too big for any man in camp. The old people called them "wood boogers," and they spat when they told it, half in fun and half not. Roy's own father, who feared nothing Roy ever witnessed, wouldn't run a line up one drainage off the Williams River. When Roy asked him why at age 13, his father told him that some ground was spoken for, and a smart trapper honored other folks' lines. ## Why This One Matters What makes this account stand out is the level of detail from someone with 36 years of daily experience in those mountains. Roy knew every track, every scat, every sound in that forest. He knew what a poacher leaves behind, what a raccoon does to a trap, what a bear drag looks like. And he knew that what he was seeing didn't fit any of those categories. The manipulation of the traps, the unwinding of wire, the placement of a 70-pound stone on a stump, the coordinated wood knocks that moved with him, the 17-inch tracks with a 54-inch stride, these are the kinds of details that researchers pay attention to. And the fact that the family came for their young one at nightfall, that's the kind of behavior that suggests these beings have family structures, they care for their injured, and they know exactly where their young ones are. The video is worth every minute. The storytelling is excellent, and Roy's voice carries the weight of a man who lived this and is telling it straight. Highly recommend watching the full thing. --- *Have you had any encounters in the Appalachian region? Drop your stories in the comments. Squatchable always wants to hear from witnesses.*