Arkansas Timber Cruiser Faces Screaming Bigfoot at Point-Blank Range

Posted Saturday, October 03, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

There's a video that just surfaced online that has the Bigfoot community buzzing, and honestly, it's one of the most unsettling pieces of footage I've come across in a while. A timber cruiser in the Washington Mountains of Arkansas captured something standing just 12 inches from his face, and it screamed at him for 11 seconds straight. The clip is only 11 seconds long, but those seconds will stick with you. The witness, Dale Harges, is a 52-year-old man who had spent 26 years walking the woods of western Arkansas for a living. He wasn't some weekend hiker looking for thrills. He measured pine for timber companies and painted boundary trees. A man who counted things for a living, not a man prone to tall tales. That's what makes this account so compelling. Here's where it gets interesting. The encounter on November 12, 2022, wasn't an isolated incident. Dale had been noticing strange activity on his work site for weeks. Boundary trees he painted at chest height were being scraped clean, but the scrapes were 8 feet off the ground. No ladder marks, no rope, no climbing spurs. Just clean rectangles of bare wood. And at the base of each tree, someone, or something, had stacked chips of white novaculite stone. First three chips, then five. Like it was keeping count. The trail camera footage is where things escalate. Over 28 nights, the same Bigfoot appeared 17 times on a company-issued cellular camera. Each visit came earlier. Each visit came closer. By the second week of November, it stood in the saddle for 31 minutes, staring into the lens for 40 seconds at a time. This kind of escalating behavior is something researchers have noted in other encounters, where Sasquatch seem to test boundaries and observe human reactions before making direct contact. Then came the opening evening of modern gun deer season. Dale was out on the mountain when it walked right up to him. The clip shows him standing 12 inches from something he later estimated weighed close to 800 pounds. His rifle hung from his shoulder, but he never raised it. He never stepped back. His cap got knocked crooked, and he just stood there, frozen. Then it turned and walked away. What happened after is almost as disturbing as the encounter itself. By the next morning, every video that camera had ever sent to the company had been deleted from its account. Five days after the clip, Dale's contract was terminated by email. The company's land manager had already offered him $40,000 for a single SD card. Dale said no. Eleven days after that encounter, Dale's younger brother Lamar walked up that same mountain on Thanksgiving Eve with no weapon. Sixteen days later, a school bus driver found him sitting on a bridge at dawn. He was unharmed, but his hair had turned white. He hasn't spoken a word since. Dale kept a log book of everything he measured on that mountain. Heights, distances, track depths, minutes after sunset. On the last page, written the night of the clip, is one sentence he underlined three times. You'll have to watch the video to find out what it says. His wife Teresa sent three things to the channel that shared this story: an SD card, a 31-page account Dale typed over 11 nights in December of 2022, and a hickory ramrod sealed in a freezer bag. Dale himself has declined to speak publicly. The Washington Mountains and the Ouachita range in western Arkansas have a long history of Sasquatch reports. The dense shortleaf pine forests, the red clay, and those long ridges of white novaculite stone create a landscape that's both beautiful and remote, the kind of territory where something could remain hidden for centuries. Old-timers in these parts have passed down stories about the "wild man" of the ridges for generations, and locals like Opel Reinhardt, the 79-year-old woman Dale bought eggs from, know better than to cut through certain places. Her family never cut the saddle. The county crew built the road around it in 1931. The last outfit that tried to cut through it quit inside of a week. There's one question that nobody who has seen the clip can answer. Why would a Bigfoot scream at a man for 11 seconds and then let him walk away? That's the kind of detail that separates this from your typical sighting. The vocalization, the proximity, the deliberate nature of the encounter, it all points to something intelligent making a choice. If you want to hear Dale's full account in his own words and see the footage described, do yourself a favor and check out the video. It's worth every minute.