1988 BC Hydro Crew's Terrifying Sasquatch Encounter Named Teddy

There's something about footage that sits in a safe deposit box for 15 years that just hits different. When a recording is hidden away that long, you know whoever made it believed what was on the tape. And when a 41-minute video 8 cassette from 1988 finally sees the light of day, well, that's the kind of thing that makes you sit up straight in your chair. A clip recently surfaced on the Bigfoot's Trail YouTube channel that digs into one of the more haunting encounters to come out of the Pacific Northwest. The story centers on a six-man right-of-way clearing crew working under contract for BC Hydro along the Skina transmission corridor, roughly 40 kilometers north of Terrace, British Columbia, back in October of 1988. What happened to those men on the night of October 19th has been kept quiet for decades, and the details are the kind that stick with you. The foreman was Vernon Quillin, a 39-year-old with 22 years in the clearing trade. Under him were Ivan Soil, the senior bucker at 51, Gil Arseno, 24 and on his second season, Cody Marquetti, 26, a swamper named Roland P., 29, and a fifth hand named Bram Osgood who had already left the corridor by the 9th of the month. Five men in the bush, 40 kilometers of gravel from the last house, and a darkness so thick you could hold your hand in front of your face and lose it. The corridor they were clearing had already taken a life. In March of 1984, a faller named Theodor "Teddy" Ror, just 33 years old, died on that same cutline under a widowmaker, a dead top that let go while he was limbing below it. The BC Hydro incident file records the death. The Terrace coroner's report records the recovery. What neither document explains is why the recovery took four days on open ground in good weather, or why the remains that came off the hill in 1984 were incomplete. That detail alone is enough to make your skin prickle. The crew had a name for whatever was moving through the timber at night. They called it "Teddy." Not out of affection, but out of that old bush habit of naming the thing that scares you after something else so you don't have to think too hard about it. Ivan told Gil the way you'd tell a new man where the outhouse was, no drama in it. Just a fact of life on that cutline. What followed over those weeks was a slow escalation that anyone familiar with Sasquatch encounter patterns will recognize. Bark stripped cleanly off a hemlock in a band about a foot wide, the bottom of it over Gil's head, and he's not a short man. Cody pointed out that bear claws leave five ragged lines. This was pulled, like something had closed its hand around the trunk and walked backward, and the top of the strip was higher than Gil could reach even standing on the skidder step. Then came the tracks. A soft skiff of new snow, just enough to hold a print clean, and Roland found a line of them crossing the corridor where they'd been cutting. They came down out of the timber on the uphill side, crossed the open ground in the dark, and went back into the timber on the downhill side. In a straight line. Like the open ground meant nothing. Gil put his own boot down beside them and tried to step it out heel to heel. He's six feet tall and he couldn't make the stride without jumping it. Whatever left those prints had walked it flat-footed, unhurried, across the one open place in 40 kilometers where the sky could see it. Roland photographed them with the crew Polaroid, but nobody seems to know where that picture ended up. The men filled the prints in with their own boots before Quillin came up the line. Gil admits he doesn't know why they did that. It felt like covering a man who'd done something he shouldn't have, which is a strange thing to feel about a set of tracks. After that, the small things started. A tarp lashed over the saw fuel was moved in the night, not torn, but folded halfway back like something had lifted it to look under and set it down again wrong. A chipper left with the hood up was found closed. Little things you could argue yourself out of if you were alone. But six men all deciding at the same time not to say the thing out loud makes a kind of pressure you can feel. Then came the mimicry. Gil describes shutting down at the end of a fall and hearing a saw still running up on the ridge, off in the timber where nobody was cutting. It would run for a second or two after his quit and then stop. Roland, who had worked timber his whole life, said an echo off a ridge doesn't wait half a beat and then answer you. But they all said echo, because echo was a word you could carry back to camp. The knocking was worse. Lying in your bag at night, off in the timber, something would knock on wood. One knock, a pause, two knocks. The sound of a heavy piece of deadfall swung against a standing trunk. The first night it was off to the north. The second night it was answered, faint, from the south. Two of them knocking to each other across the camp while six grown men lay there pretending to be asleep with their eyes open. Ivan tried to explain it away in the morning. Grouse, he said. There's a grouse up there that drums with its wings and it does sound like knocking if you've never heard both. Gil had heard grouse drum in the spring, and it was October with snow coming. No grouse in the world knocks twice and waits for an answer from the far ridge. But they said grouse and ate their breakfast and went to work. The rock incident is where things really shifted. Cody had a habit of stepping off into the timber to piss rather than use the slit trench, and one evening at dusk a rock came down out of the dark and landed in the duff a foot from him. Not thrown hard to hit. Thrown to land close. Cody came back into the light fast and white, and he never stepped into the timber alone again the whole time they were up there. He tried to make it a joke at the fire, said Teddy had bad aim. Ivan told him quiet that a thing that big doesn't have bad aim, and that if it had wanted to hit him, it would have. It had put the rock down beside him, the same way you'd toss a pebble to get a man's attention across a room. Nobody laughed at that. The radio interference was the final straw. Working off a repeater channel, all on the same handhelds, what came through wasn't something the timber could mimic. The discussion cuts off there, but anyone who's spent time researching Sasquatch encounters in BC knows that radio and electronic interference is one of the most commonly reported phenomena associated with these incidents. Researchers like John Green documented similar patterns going back decades in the Bluff Creek area and throughout the Fraser Valley, and the pattern of escalating contact, mimicry, vocalizations, and then electronic disturbance shows up again and again in credible witness accounts. The contract was terminated 11 days early. Four of the six men never went back to clearing work. Vernon Quillin walked off the corridor on October 20th, quit the industry inside a year, and died in Kamloops in 2011 without once speaking on the record about what happened. The 41-minute video 8 cassette recorded on the night of October 19th sat in a safe deposit box in Prince Rupert from 1989 until 2004. Gil kept the tape after Quillin died and gave it to his daughter that same year, telling her his story in his own words. What makes this footage stand out isn't just the length, 41 minutes is an eternity for a Sasquatch recording, but the context around it. These weren't weekend researchers looking for a headline. These were working men in the bush for the money and the overtime, men who had no interest in finding anything they found. The fact that the tape sat hidden for 15 years, that Quillin never spoke about it before he died, that four of the six men left the industry entirely, that all speaks to something that rattled these men to their core. The Skina Valley corridor has been a quiet corner of Sasquatch research for years, overshadowed by the more famous sightings around Bluff Creek, the Ape Canyon incident, or the Patterson-Gimlin film. But British Columbia has always been hotbed country for credible encounters, and the remote transmission corridors cut through some of the most rugged, least-traveled wilderness in the province. When you combine that isolation with a crew of experienced bushmen who know the difference between a grouse drumming and something knocking twice and waiting for an answer, you get witness testimony that's hard to dismiss. The full clip over on Bigfoot's Trail goes deep into Gil's account, and it's worth every minute. There's something about hearing a man describe what he saw in his own words, decades later, that no amount of secondhand reporting can replicate. If you've got the time, settle in. This one stays with you.