West Virginia Father and Stepson Encounter Large Bipedal Creature

A Class A sighting out of the southern coal fields of West Virginia is getting some serious attention, and for good reason. This one stretches far beyond the usual "glimpse through a windshield" type of encounter. We're talking about a daylight sighting that lasted three to five minutes, in open timber, with two witnesses, and it left behind physical evidence anyone could walk up and touch. The report, number 74981 in the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization database, comes from a 33-year-old outdoorsman with a degree in counseling who has spent his entire life in the woods of Wyoming County, West Virginia. On October 17, 2015, around 4:00 in the afternoon, he and his 13-year-old stepson were four miles off any trail digging ginseng on Bolt Mountain. The sky was clear, the temperature was in the low 70s, and the conditions were, as the witness put it, perfect to be in the woods. They had dropped off a ridge into a dark hollow full of big hardwood timber. The shade was so thick under those old trees that the ground had gone over to moss and mushrooms. Visibility was actually good, though. No thick brush, just some smaller trees scattered around. That's when things started getting weird. The first sound was something that resembled laughter, low but echoing. They heard it five or six times and figured it was an unusual bird. Then came a low growl that didn't match any bear or coyote the man had ever heard. He did what any experienced woodsman would do. He shouted, "Hey bear, you get out of here." What came back was a loud, siren-like sound with more depth than a typical vehicle siren, something that rang throughout the woods. Then a few seconds of guttural huffing. Now here's where it gets really interesting. About 60 yards away, the tops of the smaller trees started swaying violently. We're talking beech, maple, and hickory between 8 and 24 inches in diameter. Only the smaller ones, the ones a person could just about get their arms around, were moving. Their crowns were banging into each other. The man looked around and checked the obvious. There was no wind. Nothing else in that hollow was moving at all. Occasionally, they caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a large creature on two legs, approximately 6 to 7 feet tall, brownish-black in color, moving from one smaller tree to another and shaking them hard enough that the tops banged against each other. This went on for three to five minutes. And here's a detail that stands out: it always positioned itself on the back side of the tree. It kept the tree between itself and them. After about 30 seconds of complete silence, quick footsteps moved through the leaves. The two of them tried to get an angle and saw a large, brownish-black bipedal figure moving fast between the trees, putting distance between itself and them. The investigator who worked this report interviewed the man at length and kept up communications over a full week. He found him believable and compelling. There's a small disagreement in the file worth noting. The witness described heavy steps, while the investigator wrote that even with all the leaves on the ground, it made much less noise than you'd expect for something of that size. Both memories could be true. Heavy when it ran, quiet when it walked. The witness waited seven years to submit this report, finally writing it down on September 25, 2022. He had only just told his wife for the first time. His stepson is afraid to be in the woods. What makes this report stand out from so many others in the database is the duration and the physical evidence left behind. A row of broken trees, all lying the same way, pointing downhill. That's not a fleeting glimpse. That's something a researcher could document, measure, and analyze. The investigator worked hard to rule out ordinary explanations. The huffing could be a nervous black bear, and the witness had harvested two bears with his stepson, so he knew exactly what bear warnings sound like. The laughter-like sound has a candidate in barred owls, which cackle and whoop in ways that often fool people into thinking they're hearing monkeys or even people laughing. The siren sound is harder to pin down. Coyotes can produce group howls that rise and fall together, but the witness himself named coyotes and ruled them out. The trees themselves tell their own story. Only the smaller ones, 8 to 16 inches through the trunk, were shaken. None of the larger timber moved. Whatever was doing this had the strength and reach to grab those trees and shake them hard enough to slam the crowns together, repeatedly, for several minutes, while staying hidden behind them. This is the kind of detailed, well-vetted report that gives researchers real material to work with. The full breakdown over on Treeline Files is worth every minute of your time. Grab some coffee, settle in, and give it a watch.