Winnipeg Men Discover Bigfoot on Island Locals Avoid

Posted Monday, August 31, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

A video surfaced on YouTube recently that has the Sasquatch community buzzing, and for good reason. It details a 2009 encounter on a remote island in northern Manitoba that checks just about every box on the list of things researchers hope to find and fear to stumble upon. Two men, a forbidden island, tree markings, structures hidden in the spruce, and a curious Sasquatch standing over their only way home. It's the kind of story that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, and it deserves a closer look. The account comes from Quinn Thawn and Courtland Weir, both from Winnipeg, who were running on fumes after eleven straight weeks of mandatory overtime. They wanted the furthest, emptiest place two days could reach, and they found it. They drove north to Cross Lake, a community in northern Manitoba, and arranged a boat rental from a man named Sipco, who was around sixty and careful with his words. When they showed him the island they had in mind, well north and east of the community, he told them to choose a different one. He didn't raise his voice or tell a story. He simply said the island was not for going to, that the people there knew to leave it alone, and that the two of them should as well. Then he rented them the boat anyway. That detail alone says a lot. Sipco understood something the two younger men didn't, which is that some people cannot be told a thing. They have to be shown. What Thawn and Weir found on that island is the kind of evidence that researchers have been piecing together for decades. The silence hit them first. A hundred feet in from the shore, the small sounds of a living forest simply stopped. No birds, no movement in the brush, no answer to the wind in the lower branches. Anyone who has spent serious time in the bush knows exactly how wrong that feels. Then came the markings. Bark stripped in bands around spruce trunks, chest high, with patterns of lines pressed into the bare wood beneath. Not carved, not cut, but scored by something with no edge to it, as though the wood had been rearranged by a very strong hand. There were stone arrangements set into the moss, too deliberate to be nothing and too strange to be a trail marker. Northern Manitoba has long been a hotspot for Sasquatch reports. The boreal forest, the thousands of lakes, and the remote communities that dot the region create the perfect conditions for a population of reclusive hominins to remain hidden. Indigenous communities across the province have carried stories of these beings for generations, often referring to them by names that translate roughly to "wild men" or "forest people." The warnings Sipco gave weren't superstition. They were tradition, and tradition like that doesn't survive unless there's something behind it. Thawn and Weir also saw structures through the trees, set back where the spruce grew thickest. They didn't approach. The fear had changed shape by then, from the empty forest kind to something with a face. But the structures were there, and the markings were there, and the silence was there, and that combination is exactly what researchers mean when they talk about a habitation site. Then came the encounter at the shore. As they made their way back to the boat, Thawn saw a shape standing over the hull, bent at the waist, looking down into it. It was over seven feet tall, even folded over the way it was. The hair was a dark rust brown going to charcoal down the back and arms. The skin that showed was a weathered gray-brown. There was a heavy bony ridge above the eyes, a broad flat nose, and a wide, human-like face with no muzzle to it at all. A torn notch was visible out of the left ear. It wasn't angry. It was curious. It had found the boat and was studying it the way a person studies a thing never seen before, turning its head, reaching down once with a hand the size of a dinner plate to touch the rail, and then drawing back. That description matches the broader pattern of Sasquatch reports across North America remarkably well. The brow ridge, the flat nose, the lack of a muzzle, the dark coloration, the height. Witnesses from Washington to Florida to the forests of Ontario and Quebec have described variations on the same basic morphology for centuries. When independent accounts converge like that, it's worth paying attention. The two men pressed themselves into the cold ground about fifty feet from the water while the Sasquatch examined their only way off the island. When it finally straightened to its full height and walked up the shore into the trees without hurry, they made for the boat. But the motor turned over and caught and then died. Turned over and died again. They understood with a flat certainty that the day was not going to let them leave. Taking a boat that might quit at any moment out onto a lake that size in that cold in the dark was simply another way to die. So they ran the boat back up onto the rocks and spent the night on the island they had just watched a Sasquatch walk out of. They didn't build a fire. A fire, Weir said, felt wrong. Neither man has ever gone back. Neither has ever told the whole of what they found. The location of the island itself doesn't appear in the account and won't appear here, and that's exactly how it should be. Some places deserve their privacy, and some witnesses deserve theirs. This is the kind of story that reminds you why people keep going back into the woods. Not to prove anything, not to win an argument, but because the evidence keeps accumulating in places where nobody is looking for it, told by people who had no reason to make any of it up. Thawn and Weir were just two burned-out guys from Winnipeg who wanted silence and got something else entirely. The full account is worth the time. Settle in and give it a watch.