Fourteen Men Vanish From Oregon Camp, Leaving Giant Footprints Behind
Posted Tuesday, July 28, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
There's something about old timber country stories that just hits different, and this one from The Seeping Dark is no exception. If you haven't checked it out yet, you're in for a slow-burn that builds into something genuinely unsettling.
The setup is October 1904, deep in the Oregon coast range. A timber scaler named Gideon Pike walks into Camp 12 expecting to find fourteen loggers getting ready for supper. Instead, he finds an empty camp where everything was left exactly as it was. Coats on pegs. Boots under bunks. Beans hardened in the pan. Coffee still black in the cups. A rifle leaning against the wall. No blood. No struggle. No trail leading out. Just one set of tracks behind the bunk house, pressed deep into the mud, nearly eighteen inches long, shaped like a barefoot man's print except the toes were spread wide and bent slightly inward.
If you've spent any time looking into Sasquatch reports, you already know that footprint detail is practically a signature. Eighteen inches is right in the range that comes up again and again in credible sightings across the Pacific Northwest. The midfoot length, the wide toe spread, the depth of the impression in soft ground, all of it lines up with what witnesses have described for generations.
But the detail that really got me was the Douglas fir. The bark had been peeled from the trunk six feet off the ground. That's not bear height. That's not any animal that typically marks trees in the region. And when Deputy Thomas Shaw was standing there looking at it, the camp bell rang once from inside the empty bunk house. Nobody moved until the rope stopped swinging.
The rest of the video walks through the investigation in this really atmospheric, methodical way. Pike, Shaw, a guide named Silus Dobbins who knew the coast range back when there weren't proper roads through it, and a young wagon hand named Amos Re who carried a wooden whistle he'd bought for his little girl back home. They head up the mountain and start noticing things that don't add up. A hemlock broken rather than cut, with a rope tied in a way that wouldn't have done anything useful. Whistles coming from the timber that mimic the camp signal perfectly except the last note stretches out into something breathy and wrong. A voice from the bunk house that sounds exactly like the foreman, Ezra Vale, except every word comes out too even, too flat, without any of the irritation or surprise a real man would have waking up to find strangers in camp.
The pacing is what makes it work. It's not jump scares or dramatic music. It's just a man who knew timber and knew the country trying to explain something that didn't fit into any category he had. Pike even says it himself, his skills measuring trees and reading the land didn't help him understand what happened at Camp 12.
This kind of historical account is honestly some of the most valuable material out there for anyone serious about the subject. The Pacific Northwest timber industry pulled thousands of men into remote country in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and a lot of those crews had encounters they never reported officially because there was no framework for it. Stories like this one circulated by word of mouth for decades before anyone thought to write them down. The fact that this one is being told in such a grounded, detailed way, with specific names, distances, and equipment, makes it worth sitting with.
Do yourself a favor and go watch the full thing. It's the kind of video that stays with you after.