1994 Yukon Trail Camera Captures Tall Upright Figure at Tree Line

There's something deeply unsettling about footage that gets seized and buried for decades, only to surface in fragments years later. A recent video dropped by the Weekly Terror channel on YouTube dives into one of those stories, and honestly, it's the kind of tale that sticks with you long after the video ends. Back in October 1994, a 57-year-old line cutter named Neil Pelky walked out of a survey camp on a tributary of the Stewart River in the Yukon Territory and didn't speak for two days. He was part of a six-man crew contracted for a mineral survey along a cut corridor. By the end of the season, one crew member was changed and silent, another vanished entirely, and every foot of film the crew had recorded across three weeks disappeared within a week. The corridor remains closed to survey to this day. What makes this story so compelling is the source material. The details come from two places: Pelky's own field log, recovered from a duffel the company never collected, and the file of a claims investigator named Margaret Vesseli, brought in months later when the insurer refused to close the loss. Pelky's log entries read like a man slowly unraveling as he writes. The crew was running trail cameras down the corridor as part of an environmental file to log animal movement. Grizzly, caribou, whatever crossed the cut. The cameras were motion-activated, firing in the dark on their own. Nobody was aiming them at anything. As Pelky wrote, "We were not looking for it. It found the cameras." And here's where things get really interesting. Before they even cut a foot of line, locals started refusing the job. A packer named Selby Voran quit on the spot when he saw the corridor coordinates. A father and son team hired to help stake the line turned their truck around in the lot and left, with the old man telling the foreman it was "the wrong valley to be cutting line in." A float plane pilot refused to shut his engine down during offloading and was gone before anyone could talk to him. Every subsequent pilot was different, none ever returned. As Pelky noted, it was as if flying into that camp was something a man did once and then arranged never to do again. The first week was ordinary. Cold, wet, long days. The cameras caught the usual suspects: a grizzly sow, caribou at a crossing, a fox that sat and stared into the lens for the better part of an hour. Pelky's biggest worry that first week was a bear getting into the food cache. Then things started changing. A camera was pulled clean off its stake, not knocked over but deliberately turned to face the dirt. A 40-yard stretch of corridor developed a strange, warm, wet animal smell that came and went. A camera vanished from its stake, strap and all, only to return three days later, re-strapped exactly as it had been, while the replacement camera disappeared in its place. Whatever was out there was running its own swap rotation alongside the crew's, learning their schedule and mirroring it back at them. The card from that returned camera was full of frames showing the inside of somewhere dark and close. The crew argued it was hide. Pelky thought it was the inside of something and didn't say so. Another card came back blank, fired frames at intervals all night, as if something had moved in front of the lens over and over for hours and left no shape on a single frame. Then came the 3 a.m. frame. One camera down the corridor caught something at the very edge of the frame where the flash barely reached. Too tall. Too wide at the shoulder. Standing in a way a bear doesn't stand for that long. Pelky wrote "bear" in his log. He admits that was the last easy word he put in the book. The knocking started that same week. One knock, then quiet, then a knock from somewhere else. Wood on wood. Any man who's spent a lifetime in the bush knows the difference between a tree cracking in the cold and a hand striking wood. This was a hand. It moved around the camp in a slow circle across the dark, pacing the edge of the light and testing the trees as it went. The video cuts off right as Pelky begins to describe Denny Ashworth, the youngest crew member at 24, but the implication is clear. Something walked into that valley with those men, and not all of them walked out. What makes cases like this so fascinating is the trail camera angle. These weren't blurry handheld shots or distant silhouettes. These were automated, unattended cameras doing exactly what they were designed to do, capturing whatever moved in front of them without human bias or interpretation. When a motion-activated camera fires hundreds of times at something that leaves no visible shape, or captures the interior texture of what appears to be a living creature that took the camera and kept it for three days, that's not a case of mistaken identity or pareidolia. That's data. The Yukon has a long, quiet history of encounters that rarely make the news. The territory's vast, largely unpopulated wilderness makes it exactly the kind of place where something could exist for generations without being documented, and where a small crew of men working a remote corridor could stumble into territory that's been quietly avoided by locals who know better. The Weekly Terror video goes deeper into Pelky's log entries and the aftermath, including the investigation by Vesseli and the eventual seizure of all the footage. It's worth the watch, especially if you're interested in how institutional responses to credible witness testimony often look a lot like containment rather than investigation. Check it out when you get a chance. This one has all the hallmarks of a case that deserves a second look.