Missouri Man Captures Bigfoot on Trail Camera for 47 Minutes
Posted Tuesday, September 01, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
Folks, I just came across something that stopped me in my tracks, and I had to share it with you right away. A trail camera video out of the Missouri Ozarks is making waves, and the story behind it is just as haunting as the footage itself.
The video comes from a 68-year-old man named Floyd Sims, who has lived his entire life in Shannon County, Missouri, just outside Eminence. His family has been on that same ridge since 1922, when his grandfather homesteaded the property. Floyd ran Sims Hardware in Eminence for 30 years, a store that had been on that corner since 1931. The man knows that county the way most of us know our own kitchens.
On the morning of October 9th, 2022, Floyd's Browning trail camera captured something that would change how he sees his own land. A Bigfoot walked out of the cedar timber on the ridge behind his property, crossed about 60 yards of open ground in the gray light before sunrise, and sat down directly in front of the camera. Not near it. In front of it. The way a person sits down when they intend to stay for a while. It lowered itself with slow care, pulled its knees up toward its chest, and looked straight into the lens.
It stayed there for 47 minutes and 32 seconds.
Floyd watched the footage three times in a row at his kitchen table. By the third viewing, he had stopped looking for an explanation and started noticing details he had missed before. The Bigfoot never looked away for long.
Two days later, Floyd did something he has regretted every single night since. He wiped the SD card. Standing in his own kitchen with his neighbor Patty Dunlap watching from a chair across the table, he erased the recording. And he has not had a night since that he did not wake up thinking about what he erased.
Now, before anyone jumps to conclusions about why he wiped it, the context matters. Floyd lost his wife Donna to cancer in the winter of 2018. She grew up in the same house they shared for 36 years, and she left him the 47 acres and the memory of a woman who knew her own mind. After she passed and he closed the hardware store in 2015, the days took on a different shape. He walked the ridge more than he had in years. He repaired fences, tended the garden, cut firewood, and sat on the back porch listening to the creek. The man was grieving, and the footage clearly shook him to his core.
What makes this story even more compelling is what led Floyd to put up trail cameras in the first place. In September 2019, his old friend Ray Hullbrook, who runs a cow-calf operation about four miles south, pulled into Floyd's driveway with a problem he could not explain. Ray had been finding cattle injured in a pattern that made no sense. Deep parallel gouges along the rib cage, four to six inches in length, spaced about two and a half to three inches apart. Consistent across animals. Showing up every three or four weeks. His veterinarian looked at the marks and could not assign them to any predator she recognized with confidence.
That conversation is what sent Floyd into the timber with cameras. And what those cameras eventually captured is the kind of footage that researchers in the Ozarks have been whispering about for generations.
For those unfamiliar with this part of Missouri, the Ozark hill country around Shannon County is about as wild as it gets in the lower 48. The Current River and Jack's Fork draw canoe traffic from spring through fall, but once you get a mile or two off Highway 19, the pavement ends and the gravel thins down to two ruts through the timber. The ridges run in long rows covered in post oak, black oak, and shortleaf pine, with cedar-choked hollows between them and limestone springs pushing cold water out of the bluffs even in August. It is karst country, full of caves and sinkholes, with creeks that disappear into the ground and reappear a quarter mile later as springs. The kind of terrain where something could live for centuries without ever being seen by the wrong people.
The Ozarks have a long history with Sasquatch reports. Shannon County and the surrounding region sit in what researchers often refer to as a hotspot for sightings, with accounts going back to the early settler days. The dense timber, the limestone caves, the remote hollows, and the abundant water sources make it ideal habitat. Longtime residents have passed down stories through generations, often dismissed by outsiders but taken very seriously by the people who actually live there.
Floyd's property backs up against the Mark Twain National Forest on the north and east sides. His neighbor Patty Dunlap has been on the adjacent property for nearly 40 years. His son Cody, a civil engineer in Rolla about 90 miles north, has been asking him to move closer to town since his mother died. Floyd has declined with the same quiet firmness he has brought to that conversation for six years now.
The detail that gets me, and I think will get a lot of you too, is the way the Bigfoot sat down. Floyd described it lowering itself with slow care, settling its weight the way a person settles when they intend to stay for a while. That is not the behavior of a startled animal caught on camera. That is deliberate. That is aware. And 47 minutes and 32 seconds is not a fleeting moment. That is a presence choosing to be seen, or at the very least, choosing not to hide.
Floyd mentions he has a book coming out called The Bigfoot Codeex, a compilation of his research and findings. If you want to check that out, the link is in the description of the original video.
I cannot stop thinking about this one. A man who knew every spring on his property, every hollow that stayed wet through August, every sound the wind makes through shortleaf pine versus oak, watched something sit in front of his camera for 47 minutes and then erased it. And he has not slept right since.
Go watch the original video. Let it sit with you the way it has been sitting with Floyd. And if you have ever had an encounter like this, or if you have ever erased something you wish you had kept, you are not alone.