Wisconsin Woman Films Bigfoot 11 Times Before Vanishing

A piece of footage that sat hidden for over three decades has finally come to light, and it's one of the most compelling pieces of evidence to surface in years. The video, posted by the YouTube channel Trail Stories, tells the story of Lorraine Ratky, a dental hygienist from Elkhorn, Wisconsin, who spent the summer of 1986 documenting something extraordinary on the Ice Age Trail. What makes this case stand out isn't just the footage itself, but the way it was hidden, lost, and then rediscovered. Lorraine filmed what can only be described as a dogman over the course of 11 weekends that summer. Not a blur in the distance. Not a questionable shape at the edge of the trees. A tall, bipedal figure with a wolf-like head, dark matted fur, and a notch torn out of its left ear, an old wound that had healed over. It walked on two legs, stood over seven feet tall, and moved with its shoulders forward like a man carrying something heavy. The encounters escalated in a way that doesn't fit the pattern of a hoax. In May, she found a 17-inch, five-toed track in the mud below Bald Bluff. By the end of the month, she filmed a shape crossing a fire lane at 200 yards. In June, it sat down on its haunches and watched her for an hour. By July, it was leaving her food, a dead rabbit placed on a flat rock, the way you leave food for something you've decided to keep alive. Lorraine kept a journal throughout that summer, and her entries read like someone trying to make sense of something that shouldn't exist. She described the figure's face as "wrong in the way that stays with you," with a heavy ridge of bone over the eyes and flat, bright eyes that caught the light like water at the bottom of a well. She talked to it the way you'd talk to a strange dog, low and steady, and it stayed. She wrote that she thought it was lonely, that it wanted company and didn't know how to ask. Then, on November 8, 1986, Lorraine vanished. Her Corolla was found at the Scuppernong trailhead with the doors unlocked. She was never seen again. The footage itself has a complicated history. Three weeks before she disappeared, Lorraine handed 11 tapes to her brother-in-law, a deputy with the Walworth County Sheriff's Office, who said he needed them for review. They were never logged into evidence. They were never returned. For three decades, the sheriff's office insisted the tapes had never existed at all. But Lorraine had hidden one tape and an envelope of printed frames inside the fuse box of her home on Adam Street. Her son Miles found them in 1998 during a thunderstorm when he was 14 years old. He told no one. He was afraid of what it would do to what was left of his family. The seized tapes didn't surface until the summer of 2019, when the county evidence annex flooded and a records clerk pulled a water-ruined box marked "RTK" from a bottom shelf. Eleven destroyed cassettes. One four-minute segment that could still be recovered. And a single Polaroid from 1997 that nobody could explain, showing a sleeping boy leaning his face against something in the dark. This case touches on something that researchers have been pointing out for years. These encounters don't follow the pattern people expect. They escalate. They build trust. They involve food left as gifts, long periods of mutual observation, and a kind of quiet communication that doesn't fit the "wild animal" narrative. Lorraine's account describes exactly that kind of relationship forming over weeks, not hours. For anyone interested in the broader research into these phenomena, the Ice Age Trail in Walworth County has been a quiet hotspot for years. The Kettle Moraine State Forest, with its dense hardwood canopy and glacial topography, provides exactly the kind of cover that a large, intelligent bipedal figure would need to remain unseen. The terrain is rugged, the undergrowth thick, and the trail system extensive enough that someone could spend an entire summer documenting an encounter without crossing paths with another hiker. What makes Lorraine's footage different from so many other pieces of evidence is the length of the relationship she documented. Eleven weekends. Each one closer than the last. She wasn't a tourist who stumbled on something strange and ran. She was a witness who came back, week after week, and let the encounter develop on its own terms. The full video goes deep into Lorraine's journal entries, read by her son Miles to a room of strangers in 2019, and includes the recovered footage and still frames. It's worth the time to watch the whole thing. The details matter, and the way the story unfolds raises more questions than it answers, which is exactly the kind of thing that keeps this research alive. The trail is still there. The dates are real. The names are real. And Lorraine never came back to finish her journal, so someone else had to.