Track Inspector Vanishes After Bigfoot Encounter on Appalachian Rail Line

Posted Wednesday, August 12, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

Okay, so I just came across a video that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. A YouTube channel called Bigfoot's Trail and Weekly Terror put together a piece about a train worker's body cam footage that allegedly captured an encounter back in 2019, and honestly, this one is hard to shake. The story centers on Roy Deacort, a 51-year-old track inspector who walked decommissioned rail lines through the Nantahala district of the southern Appalachians. On the morning of June 14th, 2019, Roy set out for what should have been a routine day — walking the corridor, flagging bad rail, noting washouts before salvage crews came through in the fall. Standard stuff for a guy who'd been doing this for 30 years. But Roy didn't come back the way he came. Four days later, he was found a mile and a half off the corridor, sitting upright against a stone wall with no memory of how he got there. The only reason any of this is known is because of the clip camera his company had issued him — the kind they started handing out after a man fell through a trestle and nobody could prove where. Roy had worn his for 11 months without thinking twice about it. The recovered footage runs just under 9 seconds. Now, here's where it gets really interesting. The corridor Roy was walking had a reputation among the men who worked it — the kind of reputation that never makes it into any paperwork but gets passed around in truck cabs and at the ends of shifts. The older hands had a name for what walked that section, and the name was Bigfoot. They said it the way men say something they're half-afraid to laugh at, so they laugh instead of having to decide what they really think. Roy had heard the jokes for 30 years. He'd made a few himself. He wasn't a man who believed in anything he couldn't flag and measure. And that's worth keeping in mind, because everything that follows comes from a man who spent his whole life not believing — and who would have given a great deal to go back to not believing. What Roy described to investigators over the months after is genuinely unsettling. He felt watched from the very first mile, before anything had even happened. A jay was screaming somewhere off to his left — the kind of sustained alarm call they make when there's something on the ground they don't like. He thought maybe a bobcat. Then the birds went silent. All at once. The whole corridor went still like a room when a door shuts somewhere behind you. Roy stopped walking without deciding to. He knew the difference between a lull and a silence, and this was the second kind. Before the birds went quiet, he'd passed something that made him stop and stare. On a signal post at a grade crossing — one of the old county lever posts left standing when the line went dead — a whole young deer had been folded and pushed down over the top of it, hanging head-down a