66-Year Bigfoot Tradition Ends as Michigan Hunter Vanishes

There's a video floating around YouTube right now that I can't stop thinking about, and if you haven't seen it yet, you're going to want to clear your evening. It tells the story of a Michigan man named Dwayne Hika, a 67-year-old retired paper mill worker who vanished from his deer camp in November 2019 under circumstances that are, frankly, haunting. Dwayne had spent every November of his life at a one-room cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, built by his grandfather back in 1953. The cabin sat on 40 acres of hardwood ridge with a cedar and tamarack swamp stretching north behind it toward the Seney National Wildlife Refuge. For decades, the Hika family had been doing something unusual at that swamp, something most hunters would never dream of. Every November, without fail, they left a fresh deer heart on a split white pine stump at the edge of the cedars. And every year, it was gone by morning. The tradition started with Dwayne's great-grandfather, Arvo Hikila, a Finnish immigrant who bought the land in 1953 with money he'd saved over 40 years working logging camps. Arvo's handwritten log, kept in a coffee tin under the cabin floorboards, documents an "agreement" between the family and the tall, broad-faced residents of the swamp. The log spans 66 years of contact, with one word appearing again and again in the entries: "taken." The footage itself is what makes this story land so hard. In the week before he disappeared, Dwayne had been shining the swamp at night with a handheld spotlight, zip-tying a small camera underneath so whatever the beam touched would be recorded. In one of those clips, something steps out of the cedars and into the light. It's brief, but it's unmistakable. The figure stands over seven feet tall beside a buck pole Dwayne built in 1987, with its head clearing the six-foot crossbar easily. The description matches what Arvo wrote in 1953 almost word for word: a heavy bony brow ridge, a broad prominent nose, a wide flat human-like face with no muzzle, dark rust-brown hair shading to charcoal over weathered gray-brown skin, and flat reflective eyes that throw the spotlight back. There's a torn notch in its left ear, the same notch Arvo noted on a younger one he saw watching him from the cedars 66 years earlier. And then it does something no startled animal would do. It walks straight toward the light. Three days after that footage was captured, a Michigan DNR conservation officer named Keith Rodio found Dwayne's truck parked at a back gate on the far side of the property. The engine was still running. The fuel needle sat on empty. The spotlight lay on the passenger seat, still switched on. Boot prints led from the driver's door into the swamp, and right beside them, stride for stride, was a second set of tracks. Bare. Roughly 17 inches long. The two sets of prints walked into the cedars together, side by side. Neither came back out. Dwayne's daughter Jolene, who has the log book and the footage, recounts the family history in the video. She describes the communication between the Hikila men and the swamp's residents, a ritual of three knocks from the cedars met with three knocks from the stove poker against the cabin's log wall. She describes her grandfather Toyo walking out to the stump at dusk with his hat off, standing in silence, then walking back without looking over his shoulder. She describes the year 2016, when Dwayne stopped leaving the offering, and what happened after. This isn't a story about a monster in the woods. The Hikila family never treated the swamp's residents that way. For three generations, they kept an agreement, a quiet exchange of respect between people who shared the same stand of cedars. The knocking wasn't aggression. It was acknowledgment. The neat stacking of Arvo's woodpile wasn't a threat. It was a reply. What happened to Dwayne Hika in November 2019 is still officially a missing persons case. The tracks tell one story. The log book tells another. The footage tells a third. Put them together, and you're left with something that doesn't fit neatly into any box, which is exactly why this video deserves your attention. Go watch it. Then come back and tell me what you think.