84-Year-Old Logger Recounts 1962 Bigfoot Sighting Near Patterson-Gimlin Site

A deathbed confession from a logger who spent six decades carrying a secret is the kind of story that stops you in your tracks. A YouTube channel recently shared the testimony of a man known only as "Ry," an 84-year-old former bear hunter and logger from Northern California who, with less than three weeks to live, finally recorded what happened to him in the autumn of 1962. Ry wasn't a believer. His own son said he changed the channel whenever Bigfoot shows came on. He was a practical man, a working hunter who had taken 11 bears in his lifetime and skinned every one. So when he sat down with a handheld recorder in a hospice room and spoke for 49 minutes about the night he fired a rifle at something standing upright in a clearing, it wasn't because he wanted attention. It was because he needed to get something off his chest before he died. The setting matters here. Ry was hunting in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, the same drainage system where, just four years earlier in 1958, a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew found those enormous footprints at Bluff Creek that put the word "Bigfoot" into American newspapers for the first time. And just five years after Ry's night in the woods, in October 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin would ride into a creek bed about 40 miles from where Ry was hunting and capture the most analyzed piece of footage in cryptozoological history. Ry's encounter sits right in the middle of that window, in the same logging country, on the same kind of spur roads. What Ry described is specific and consistent across multiple tellings on the tape. He heard a sound first, a whoop that came down, not a yell or a bark, something that started high and dropped and then repeated from a different position. Then, in his words, "It came out into the open like it wanted me to see it." He estimated 70 yards. He said it stood upright the entire time, that the arms hung wrong, too long, swinging past where a man's fingers would end, and that the head sat down into the shoulders with no real neck. The detail that finally convinced his own son, who had never believed a word of these stories until he heard the tape, was that the figure stepped over a downed log without breaking stride. Ry had walked that clearing in daylight. That log was waist-high on a grown man. Not climbed. Stepped over. Like a curb. Ry raised his rifle. He is very specific on the recording that he did not fire a warning shot. He shot to kill because, as he put it, "I was scared and I was 31 and I thought that's what you do." He heard the impact. He knew the difference between a bullet cracking off into timber and one landing in mass. He heard a hit. The figure did not fall. It turned. It looked directly at him. And it made a sound he refused to describe for the next six decades. Ry didn't go look that night. He sat in the dark until the sky went gray, rifle across his knees, and didn't sleep. At first light he walked down into the clearing and found blood, not a smear, a spray on the wet grass, then a trail leading toward the creek with distance between the marks. The spacing of something walking, not crawling. He counted the tracks. He measured the stride against his own boots, heel to heel, and got nearly five feet between steps. He followed that trail for what he guessed was 300 yards. Then he stopped, turned around, went back to his truck, drove home, and told his wife the hunting was bad. Here's where the story stops being a simple sighting and becomes something else entirely. Ry addresses directly why he stayed silent for 60 years, and it wasn't fear of being laughed at. He says he could have taken ridicule. The real reason, in his words: "I didn't quit because I was scared of it. I quit because about 200 yards in, I figured out it was bleeding and still walking straight and it hit me what I'd done. I shot somebody's." He doesn't finish the sentence. On the tape you can hear him stop, his daughter say his name, and then nine seconds of nothing. This confession fits a pattern that rarely gets made into documentaries because it isn't exciting on the surface. But if you spend enough time in this material, you start noticing how consistent the shooting stories are. The witness fires. The witness reports a hit. The subject doesn't drop. It leaves upright under its own power. There's often blood at the site, and there is never a body. And afterward, the shooter doesn't behave like a man who bagged a trophy. He behaves like a man who did something he regrets. He stops hunting. He stops going to that drainage. Sometimes he stops going into the woods at all. In nearly every account, the subject looks at the shooter after being hit, not fleeing first, not dropping, but turning, locating the source, and holding the look. Whatever else that is, it isn't the behavior of an animal running on pure panic. It's the behavior of something identifying who did it. Ry never hunted again. Thirty-one years old, a working rifle in the closet, a family that ate what he shot, and he never took it out again. His son thought his father had gotten religion. The last coherent thing on the tape is this. His daughter asks if he ever went back to that clearing. He says yes. Once, in 1998, 36 years later, an old man with a bad hip and no rifle, walking a skid road that had grown over so completely he almost couldn't find the cut bank. She asked him why he went. He said, "To tell it I was sorry in case it was still up there." There is no body. There is no film. There is no lab report, no hair sample, no institutional confirmation of anything this man described. A deathbed account is testimony, not evidence. But consider what it cost a man like Ry to make it. He gained nothing. He sold nothing. He didn't want his name used. He waited until he was three weeks from dying to say a thing he'd been carrying since Kennedy was president. And the thing he most needed to get out of his chest wasn't "I saw a monster." It was an apology. The full recording is worth sitting with. It's quiet, slow, and full of a dying man losing the thread and finding it again. Find it on the Sasquatch Cases channel and give it the 49 minutes it deserves.