1998 Bigfoot Encounter Leaves One Survivor in British Columbia Backcountry

There's a story floating around YouTube right now that I can't stop thinking about, and if you haven't come across it yet, you're going to want to set aside some time for this one. A channel called Midnight Terror Tales recently posted a recounting of one of the most haunting Sasquatch encounter stories I've ever heard, and it comes from a man named Ellis Warick. He's 61 years old now, and he's the only one left to tell it. Back in October of 1998, five men headed into the Kuribo back country of British Columbia, northeast of Gwennel, up past where the logging roads give out and you have to finish on foot. They were scouting unclaimed timber for Gordon Pike, a 44-year-old outfitter who knew the country best. Gordon brought his brother Terrence, 39. A welder from Prince George named Vaughn Ashby, 51, came along because he'd bought a new rifle and wanted an excuse to use it. And then there was Isaac Ren, just 26 years old, a kid Gordon was mentoring. Ellis was the fifth. The first couple of days were ordinary. They glassed slopes, saw fresh moose sign, plenty of bear scat, and one grouse that Isaac somehow missed twice. But Ellis started noticing things he didn't say out loud, because you don't say things like that without becoming "the man who says them." The birds quit early one afternoon, all at once, like a hand had come down over the whole basin. A smell drifted through camp, wet dog and rot with something else underneath that Ellis couldn't name. And on the third morning, he found a print in the mud at the creek's edge. Longer than his boot by a hand's width. Five toes. A heel pressed deeper than his own weight would press. By the third night, rocks were being thrown into camp from the dark beyond the firelight. Not at them, just among them, so they'd know. Then came the fourth day. In the last hour of light, the men were strung out along a game trail on a north-facing slope when Gordon spotted something low and dark in a pocket of alders. He thought it was a bear on a kill. A dangerous thing to walk up on. He raised his rifle, and the thing stood up. It kept going up. Past bear height. Past any height that made sense. Seven feet, and then more. And it turned its head. Ellis saw the face for less than a second. Broad, flat, a heavy shelf of bone over the eyes, a wide flat nose, no muzzle, no snout. A face too much like a person's and too far from one at the same time. Dark rust-colored hair, skin the color of wet ash where the hair thinned at the cheeks. And it was holding something against its chest. Gordon's rifle went off. The thing dropped and didn't get up. What they found in the alders beside it is the part Ellis has never been able to tell the same way twice. The creature Gordon had killed hadn't been feeding alone. There was a young one with it. Half its size, maybe less. Same broad face, same dark hair, thinner and softer. The proportions all wrong, the way a child's proportions are wrong compared to a grown thing. And it was hurt. Ellis still doesn't know if Gordon's bullet passed through and struck it, or if it was already injured before they ever came upon the scene. It was lying on its side making a soft, high sound that Ellis had heard earlier and thought was a bird. Its breathing was wrong. Its eyes were open and moving. Isaac wanted to help it. He was 26 years old and he wanted to do something. Gordon told him to get back. Vaughn was saying they had to leave right then. Terrence just stood there with his rifle pointed at nothing, shaking. And while they argued, the young one died. It took a few minutes. Then it went still. In the silence that followed, something out in the dark timber began to answer. Not a howl. Ellis knows what wolves sound like, and this wasn't that. It was a long, low sound that seemed to come up out of the ground itself. And it was joined by another, and then a third, spaced around them in the dark on three sides. Not moving closer. Not moving away. Just letting the men know they were there. Gordon made a decision that night that Ellis has replayed in his mind ten thousand times over the last 27 years. He said they were taking the big one out. He said nobody would believe them without proof. And the four men who carried that decision with them are gone now. I don't want to give away the rest, because the way this story is told deserves to be heard in full. The pacing, the silences, the way Ellis describes the sounds in that forest, it all lands differently when you let it unfold. Go find the video on the Midnight Terror Tales channel and give it your full attention. Bring a blanket, maybe. And maybe don't watch it alone in the woods. Stories like this one stay with people for a reason. They remind us that the deep timber still holds things we don't understand, and that some encounters carry consequences far beyond what the people involved ever bargained for.