Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: It's the middle of the night the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty four, and five men are barricaded inside a log
Speaker 1: cabin high on the side of a mountain in southwestern Washington.
Speaker 1: The fires burned down to coals. They've got rifles across
Speaker 1: their knees, and out in the dark, out past the
Speaker 1: walls where they can't see a thing, something is throwing
Speaker 1: rocks at the cabin, heavy ones, heavy enough to shake
Speaker 1: the roof and crack off, the logs coming down one
Speaker 1: after another, hour after hour, while the men fire blind
Speaker 1: into the black at a thing they never once get
Speaker 1: a look at. And when the sun finally comes up,
Speaker 1: they grab what they can carry and they walk off
Speaker 1: that mountain, and they leave behind the gold claim they'd
Speaker 1: spent the whole summer working, and they don't come back.
Speaker 1: That's the Ape Canyon Incident, nineteen twenty four Mount Saint Helens,
Speaker 1: and it's one of the oldest and most famous Sasquatch
Speaker 1: encounters in American history. For a lot of people, it's
Speaker 1: the first big modern Bigfoot story that country ever told,
Speaker 1: the one everybody else's story gets measured against. I've spent
Speaker 1: close to forty years on this subject, and sixteen of
Speaker 1: those I spent carrying a badge. So let me tell
Speaker 1: you upfront how I work. I take the woods seriously.
Speaker 1: I've stood in remote country in the dark and felt
Speaker 1: the exact thing these men felt. And I'm not going
Speaker 1: to sit here and laugh at five working men who
Speaker 1: got scared out of their minds one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: But I'm also not going to hand you the legend
Speaker 1: with a bow on it, because the legend and what
Speaker 1: we can actually stand behind are two very different things,
Speaker 1: and the gap between them is the whole reason this
Speaker 1: case is worth an hour of your time. So let's
Speaker 1: go up the mountain. Let's get the war and the
Speaker 1: wind and the who, and then let's get into that night.
Speaker 1: And before we climb one piece of context. I want
Speaker 1: you carrying the whole way, because it changes how you
Speaker 1: hear all of this. In nineteen twenty four, the word
Speaker 1: bigfoot did not exist. Nobody had it. That name doesn't
Speaker 1: get coined until the late nineteen fifties down in north
Speaker 1: in California and the famous film the Patterson and Gimlin
Speaker 1: footage that put the creature on every television in the country.
Speaker 1: That's nineteen sixty seven, more than forty years after these
Speaker 1: men came off this mountain. So when this happened, there
Speaker 1: was no sasquatch craze to slide it into, no shelf
Speaker 1: of paperbacks, no framework at all. The newspapers reached for
Speaker 1: the only word they had, which was apes, mountain devils,
Speaker 1: some of them said gorillas. These men weren't repeating a
Speaker 1: story they'd grown up on because the story didn't exist yet.
Speaker 1: If anything, they helped start it. That's worth remembering when
Speaker 1: somebody tells you they only saw what they expected to see.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty four, nobody expected this. You find Mount
Speaker 1: Saint Helens in the southwest corner of Washington State, in
Speaker 1: the Cascades, and the first thing you have to know
Speaker 1: about it is that the mountain those men knew doesn't
Speaker 1: exist anymore. On the morning of May eighteenth, nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: Mount Saint Helens blew its own Norse face off in
Speaker 1: one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in American history. Flattened
Speaker 1: the forest for miles. Buried Spirit Lake took that picture
Speaker 1: perfect snow capped cone, the kind of mountain a kid draws,
Speaker 1: and turned it into a gray crater that looked like
Speaker 1: the surface of the moon. So when I described the
Speaker 1: country these miners were working, understand that I'm describing a
Speaker 1: place that erased itself inside living memory. The ground this
Speaker 1: story happened on is mostly gone, scoured off, or buried.
Speaker 1: And there are people still alive who picnicked on the
Speaker 1: old mountain and then watched the new one tear itself apart.
Speaker 1: And the canyon at the center of all this is
Speaker 1: a real and specific piece of ground, not just a name.
Speaker 1: It sits over on the southeast side of the mountain,
Speaker 1: a deep cut in the rock, with the timber crowding
Speaker 1: the rim, the kind of place where the bottom stays
Speaker 1: in shadow long after the tops of the trees have
Speaker 1: gone gold in the evening. Down below it, in those
Speaker 1: years lay Spirit Lake, cold and clear and ringed with
Speaker 1: old growth, a postcard of a place that people came
Speaker 1: from miles around just to look at. That's the country
Speaker 1: these men were camped in, beautiful in the daylight, and
Speaker 1: absolutely without mercy after dark. A few acres of human work,
Speaker 1: a cabin and a claim and a cook fire, sat
Speaker 1: down in the middle of more wilderness than a person
Speaker 1: today can really picture. You could stand at the edge
Speaker 1: of that gorge at noon and feel like the luckiest
Speaker 1: man in Washington. You could stand at the same spot
Speaker 1: at midnight and feel like the last man on Earth.
Speaker 1: And Spirit Lake itself, that postcard at the bottom of
Speaker 1: all the beauty, didn't survive either. When the north face slid,
Speaker 1: it poured into that lake and heaved it up and
Speaker 1: choked it with shattered timber. Thousands of dead trees that
Speaker 1: still float on the surface in great gray rafts to
Speaker 1: this day. So even the calm water these men would
Speaker 1: have looked down on at the end of a day
Speaker 1: is not the water sitting there now. I find that
Speaker 1: genuinely hard to hold in my head, that you can
Speaker 1: lose not just a cabin and a trail, but a
Speaker 1: whole mountain and a whole lake, the entire stage a
Speaker 1: story was set on inside one ordinary spring morning. The
Speaker 1: land where Ape Canyon happened took the secret with it,
Speaker 1: and then it took itself back. In nineteen twenty four, though,
Speaker 1: it was about as wild and remote as country got
Speaker 1: in the Lower States. Old growth timber running up the slopes,
Speaker 1: furs and cedars and hemlocks so thick and so tall
Speaker 1: that the light barely reached the ground at noon. Deep
Speaker 1: gorges cut into the side of the mountain where old
Speaker 1: lava and older water had carved them, and no roads,
Speaker 1: none that counted. If you wanted to work a claim
Speaker 1: up there, you walked in or you took a mule,
Speaker 1: and once you got where you were going, you were
Speaker 1: on your own. In a way that's genuinely hard to
Speaker 1: wrap your head around. Now, no phone, no way to
Speaker 1: call for help, and no help to call if something
Speaker 1: went wrong, if a man broke a leg or took
Speaker 1: a fever or got into trouble he couldn't get out of.
Speaker 1: It was him, the men with him, and a long
Speaker 1: walk down. And that's not a small detail. It's the
Speaker 1: foundation the whole thing sits on, because fear works differently
Speaker 1: when you know for a fact that nobody's coming. A
Speaker 1: weird noise near a campground with a ranger station down
Speaker 1: the road is a curiosity. The same noise a hard
Speaker 1: day's walk from another living soul with no way to
Speaker 1: reach anybody and no way for anybody to reach you,
Speaker 1: gets into you. It stacks up, it compounds. By the
Speaker 1: third night, it isn't a noise anymore. It's a presence,
Speaker 1: and your mind has already half decided what it is
Speaker 1: before your eyes ever get a vote. And the work
Speaker 1: that pulled men up into that country was hard and
Speaker 1: dangerous all on its own, long before anything strange came
Speaker 1: into it. These were prospectors chasing gold, or chasing the
Speaker 1: belief in gold, which has pulled a certain stubborn kind
Speaker 1: of man into hard country since the beginning. They work
Speaker 1: to claim the way it got worked back then hauling
Speaker 1: tools and timber, digging and blasting and shoring up what
Speaker 1: they doesug living rough for weeks at a stretch, on
Speaker 1: what they could carry in and what they could shoot,
Speaker 1: sleeping in a cabin they'd built with their own hands
Speaker 1: out of the trees standing around them. The claim in
Speaker 1: the tellings gets called the vander White and it was
Speaker 1: the kind of long shot dream that kept men up
Speaker 1: on a mountain past the point where a sensible person
Speaker 1: would have quit. Bodies that did that work in that
Speaker 1: place did not belong to soft men, and that matters
Speaker 1: as this story gets darker, because whatever happened up there
Speaker 1: did not happen to a bunch of green horns who'd
Speaker 1: never spent a night outdoors. The men were gold miners then,
Speaker 1: and the one name everybody knows is Fred Beck. That's
Speaker 1: because Beck is the one who, decades later finally sat
Speaker 1: down and told the whole thing and put his name
Speaker 1: on it. Almost everything we've got, the detail, the play
Speaker 1: by play, the part where it surfaces, and the part
Speaker 1: where they shoot comes from Fred Beck. The other men
Speaker 1: have come down to us a lot thinner. The names
Speaker 1: you'll usually we see are Marion Smith and his son
Speaker 1: Roy and a couple of others, Gabe la Fever and
Speaker 1: John Peterson, five of them, give or take depending on
Speaker 1: which version you're reading. And that wobble right there, the
Speaker 1: fact that the tellings don't even fully agree on who
Speaker 1: was in the cabin, that's your first clue about how
Speaker 1: secondhand all of this is. We're not reading a police
Speaker 1: report filed the next morning. We're reading a story that
Speaker 1: lived in people's mouths for decades before anybody wrote it down. Careful,
Speaker 1: here's what I want you to know about these men,
Speaker 1: because the legend turns them into extras, and that's not
Speaker 1: fair to them. They weren't tender feet. They weren't city
Speaker 1: folks on a camping trip who heard an owl and
Speaker 1: lost it. They were working men who lived in that country,
Speaker 1: who knew the difference between a deer in the brush
Speaker 1: and a bear in the brush, who kept a rifle
Speaker 1: close and a door barred at night, because that's just
Speaker 1: what you did up there. They knew those woods cold.
Speaker 1: Their lives depended on knowing them. And that's exactly what
Speaker 1: makes this thing sit so strange for me, because whatever
Speaker 1: scared these men, it scared men who didn't scare easy men.
Speaker 1: Who's read on the woods. You'd have trusted on any
Speaker 1: other subject without a second thought. If five guys like
Speaker 1: that had come down off the mountain and told me
Speaker 1: a deer spook them, I'd have laughed too. They didn't
Speaker 1: say that, They said something walked upright and threw rocks
Speaker 1: at their cabin all night long. And here's something worth
Speaker 1: putting on the table. Because it cuts both ways. These
Speaker 1: mountains weren't a blank slate when it came to big,
Speaker 1: hairy things in the timber. The native peoples of the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest had told stories about giant wild men in
Speaker 1: the high country for generations, long before any prospector ever
Speaker 1: sank a shovel up. There mountain beings hairy and huge
Speaker 1: that you did not go looking for. Some of those
Speaker 1: traditions are old, older than the towns, older than the
Speaker 1: territory itself. Now a skeptic has to handle that carefully
Speaker 1: because it runs two directions at once. One reading says, look,
Speaker 1: people have been seeing something up in these mountains for centuries.
Speaker 1: That's corroboration that crosses cultures and generations. The other reading,
Speaker 1: the one I lean toward, says the region already had
Speaker 1: a deep groove worn into it for exactly this kind
Speaker 1: of story, a shape sitting there ready and waiting for
Speaker 1: a frightened man's mind to pour itself into. I don't
Speaker 1: think these particular miners were sitting around the fire reciting
Speaker 1: old legends. But the legends were in the air of
Speaker 1: that country the way they're in the air of a
Speaker 1: lot of wild country. And a story like that has
Speaker 1: a way of being available to you in the dark,
Speaker 1: whether you grew up on it or not. It didn't
Speaker 1: start with the attack the way Beck told it. It
Speaker 1: started small, the way these things almost always seemed to
Speaker 1: first the tracks, big ones pressed deep into the soft ground,
Speaker 1: and to men who read the ground for a living,
Speaker 1: a track you can't account for isn't a thrill, it's
Speaker 1: a problem. It's the woods telling you something's here that
Speaker 1: shouldn't be. Then the sounds, a thumping that carried across
Speaker 1: the canyon in the long evenings, like something heavy hitting
Speaker 1: wood or hitting the ground, whistling, by some accounts, a call,
Speaker 1: and then an answer back from somewhere across the gorge,
Speaker 1: like there was more than one of whatever it was
Speaker 1: talking to each other in the dusk. And then the
Speaker 1: feeling the one every one of you who spent real
Speaker 1: time alone in the deep woods already knows the feeling
Speaker 1: of being watched. No proof behind it, none, just the
Speaker 1: certainty climbing a little higher every day that something out
Speaker 1: there had its eyes on the camp and wasn't leaving.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing I've learned from talking to a
Speaker 1: whole lot of people who've had a bad experience in
Speaker 1: the woods. The fear almost never lands all at once.
Speaker 1: It builds, It comes in little deposits, a track, a sound,
Speaker 1: a prickle on the back of the neck that you
Speaker 1: talk yourself out of in the daylight. And each one
Speaker 1: alone is nothing easy to wave off. But they stack,
Speaker 1: and there comes a point where your mind just can't
Speaker 1: keep filing them under coincidence anymore, where the weight of
Speaker 1: all the small stuff tips over into one big certainty.
Speaker 1: That's the slope these men were sliding down across those
Speaker 1: summer days, not one shock, a gathering. And it's worth
Speaker 1: being precise about what Beck said they were dealing with,
Speaker 1: because the modern picture wants to fill in a lot
Speaker 1: that the old account leaves blank. He described big, dark,
Speaker 1: upright shapes, hair all over them, man like, but not
Speaker 1: men He described the sounds carrying across the canyon, that thumping,
Speaker 1: the whistling, calls, and the answers, which is the detail
Speaker 1: that put the idea of more than one into their heads,
Speaker 1: not a lone animal, but a group working the ridges,
Speaker 1: calling back and forth. Now, every one of those details
Speaker 1: is interesting, and not one of them is something you
Speaker 1: can hang A species on. A whistle in the dark
Speaker 1: across a gorge could be a lot of things. A dark,
Speaker 1: upright shape at dusk could be a lot of things.
Speaker 1: The men weren't lying about hearing and seeing what they
Speaker 1: heard and saw. They just couldn't tell you what made it,
Speaker 1: And to their credit in the raws tellings, they didn't
Speaker 1: pretend to. And then a day or two before the
Speaker 1: big night comes the part that probably lit the fuse
Speaker 1: on everything else. Beck said he and Mary and Smith
Speaker 1: were out near the canyon when they saw one of
Speaker 1: them across a distance, out in the open, a big,
Speaker 1: upright thing, dark, covered in hair. And the men did
Speaker 1: what men in that time and that place did when
Speaker 1: something they couldn't explain turned up near their camp. They
Speaker 1: raised their rifles and they fired, and Beck believed he
Speaker 1: hit it, said he saw it drop or stagger fall
Speaker 1: away down into the gorge. Now I've got to slow
Speaker 1: down here because this is where i earn my keep.
Speaker 1: We don't know what they saw. We don't know if
Speaker 1: anything got hit, because nobody ever turned up, no bones,
Speaker 1: nothing anybody could put on a table point at. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. What we've got is one man's memory of
Speaker 1: believing he shot at something, written down more than forty
Speaker 1: years after the fact. And I've taken enough statements in
Speaker 1: my life to tell you that sincere and accurate are
Speaker 1: not the same word. I've watched good, honest people describe
Speaker 1: something they were terrified by with total conviction and still
Speaker 1: get the plain details wrong. So here's what I'll stand behind.
Speaker 1: The men claimed they found strange tracks, heard strange sounds,
Speaker 1: felt watched, and finally fired on a big creature they
Speaker 1: couldn't name. Whether that was a sasquatch or a bear
Speaker 1: stood up in bad light, or something else entirely, I
Speaker 1: can't tell you, and the honest truth is nobody can.
Speaker 1: But I'll give the men this much. People who set
Speaker 1: out to invent a monster usually invent a clean one.
Speaker 1: A good look, a clear description. What these men gave
Speaker 1: was glimpses bad luck, and they weren't even sure what
Speaker 1: they'd hit. That's the texture of real confusion, not the
Speaker 1: shape of a tall tail somebody cooked up to impress
Speaker 1: the boys at the store. And then came the night,
Speaker 1: and the night is the whole reason we're here. The
Speaker 1: cabin was solid. These men built it to last, logs
Speaker 1: chinked tight against the weather, a door that barred, walls
Speaker 1: thick enough to keep the mountain cold out. On any
Speaker 1: normal night, it was a good place to be, a warm,
Speaker 1: lit box of human order set down in the middle
Speaker 1: of a whole lot of dark. On this one, it
Speaker 1: turned into something closer to a box with the lid
Speaker 1: held down, because the same walls that kept them safe
Speaker 1: also kept them blind. Whatever was out there, they could
Speaker 1: hear it and they could feel it, but they could
Speaker 1: not see it, not once, not all night long. And
Speaker 1: there's something about that. I keep turning over, the idea
Speaker 1: that the thing protecting you is the exact same thing
Speaker 1: keeping you from the truth of what you're up against.
Speaker 1: It started the way it's started, in our cold open
Speaker 1: with a rock on the roof in the dead middle
Speaker 1: of the night, then another, then one off the wall,
Speaker 1: a hard, flat crack of stone on log, And then
Speaker 1: they came faster, a rain of rocks against the shakes,
Speaker 1: and the timber thudding into the dirt outside and rolling
Speaker 1: and woven all through it, the sound of something moving, weight,
Speaker 1: brush breaking and springing back, something big working its way
Speaker 1: around the cabin in the dark. And then the way
Speaker 1: Beck told it, the pounding started, not throwing rocks anymore,
Speaker 1: but blows something hitting the logs in the door, leaning
Speaker 1: on it, testing it the way you'd test a thing
Speaker 1: for the place where it gives. And at one point
Speaker 1: something struck at or reached through the chinking between the logs,
Speaker 1: and the men fired right at it. They fired a
Speaker 1: lot that night. And think for a second about what
Speaker 1: that's like inside a small log room, the crack of
Speaker 1: a rifle in a closed space, deafening the flat, lighting
Speaker 1: the whole place up white for half a second, and
Speaker 1: then dropping it back into a dark that's somehow worse
Speaker 1: than before, the smoke building with nowhere to go, until
Speaker 1: every breath is full of it, and your eyes sting
Speaker 1: in the back of your throat goes raw, and they
Speaker 1: couldn't aim, because you can't aim at what you can't see.
Speaker 1: They were firing it sound at a guess at the
Speaker 1: spot the last blow came from, and the dark just
Speaker 1: swallowed every shot and gave them back more rocks. And
Speaker 1: don't forget the other stuff, the stuff that doesn't make
Speaker 1: it into the quick version. The cold, for one, a
Speaker 1: mountain night gets into your bones, and a cabin with
Speaker 1: the fire let die holds almost nothing against it. And
Speaker 1: by now these men had no thought to spare for
Speaker 1: the fire, so they were cold on top of everything.
Speaker 1: Cold and stiff and shaking, and a shaking hand is
Speaker 1: a poor thing to load a rifle with in the dark,
Speaker 1: and the not knowing always underneath all of it. We
Speaker 1: were out there one three. A man hears movement on
Speaker 1: one wall and a stone strikes the other, and his
Speaker 1: mind does the math and lands on more than one
Speaker 1: on something that's working together, and there's no way to
Speaker 1: confirm it and no way to deny it, so it
Speaker 1: just sits in it hour after hour with no answer coming.
Speaker 1: And it didn't stop. That's the part that gets me
Speaker 1: every time. This wasn't a couple of bad minutes. You
Speaker 1: grit your teeth and ride out. It went on for hours,
Speaker 1: the rocks and the pounding and the circling weight, coming
Speaker 1: and stopping and coming again, until time quit meaning anything,
Speaker 1: and there was just the next sound and then the
Speaker 1: next one. I've tried more than once to really sit
Speaker 1: with what hour four of that does to a person.
Speaker 1: Your body's burned through its fear chemistry a long time ago,
Speaker 1: and it's running on fumes. Your eyes ache from straining
Speaker 1: at a dark that never resolves into anything. Some animal
Speaker 1: part of you wants nothing in the world but to
Speaker 1: lie down and sleep, and the rest of you knows
Speaker 1: that sleep might be the last call you ever make.
Speaker 1: So you stay up, You keep the rifle in your
Speaker 1: cold hands, and you wait for a morning that feels
Speaker 1: like it is never going to come. And the door
Speaker 1: is the thing I keep coming back to. As long
Speaker 1: as rocks are coming down on the roof. That's terrifying,
Speaker 1: but it's at arm's length. It's the sky falling on you.
Speaker 1: The moment something starts hitting the door, leaning on it,
Speaker 1: working at the gap between the logs, the whole math changes,
Speaker 1: because now the only thing between five men and whatever
Speaker 1: this is comes down to some timber and a bar
Speaker 1: and the hope that the man who built it built
Speaker 1: it well. Every blow is a question will it hold?
Speaker 1: And there's no good answer in there, just the next
Speaker 1: blow and the next, and a door that was built
Speaker 1: to keep the weather out being asked to do a
Speaker 1: job nobody ever designed it for. I think that's the
Speaker 1: part that broke whatever composure these men had left. Not
Speaker 1: the rocks, the door rocks. You can almost talk yourself
Speaker 1: into living with a thing, testing your door in the dark,
Speaker 1: patient coming back to it again and again. You do
Speaker 1: not get used to that. The men talk to each
Speaker 1: other in the gaps between the worst of it, and
Speaker 1: I think that's the one thing that got them through,
Speaker 1: the plain fact of four other men who could tell
Speaker 1: you out loud, yes, you're not losing your mind. I
Speaker 1: hear it too. Every rock of it, there's a kind
Speaker 1: of fear a person can only survive in company, and
Speaker 1: a man alone in that cabin might not have come
Speaker 1: out of it with his head right. And then, finally,
Speaker 1: after a stretch of hours, nobody in there could have
Speaker 1: measured the thing. Every cornered human being since the first
Speaker 1: cave has prayed for the black between the trees started
Speaker 1: slow by the smallest degrees to go gray morning, and
Speaker 1: whatever was out there went quiet, and the cabin had held,
Speaker 1: and the men were alive. Here's what I'll stand behind
Speaker 1: about that night, and here's what I want. What the
Speaker 1: record supports is that the men men claimed a sustained
Speaker 1: attack on their cabin, rocks and physical blows lasting hours,
Speaker 1: which they answered with gunfire. And honestly, that part's pretty
Speaker 1: consistent across the different tellings. What nobody can tell you
Speaker 1: is what was actually out there, how many, how big,
Speaker 1: what it was, because not one man in that cabin
Speaker 1: ever saw the thing he was shooting at, and nobody
Speaker 1: who went up the mountain afterward ever produced it. All
Speaker 1: that certainty you'll hear in the retellings, the exact size,
Speaker 1: the exact number, what they supposedly wanted. That got added
Speaker 1: later by other hands. The five men in the cabin
Speaker 1: never had it, and neither do we. When the light
Speaker 1: came up, they didn't stick around. They grabbed what they
Speaker 1: could carry and they left, and they didn't leave like
Speaker 1: men who planned to come back. They walked off. The
Speaker 1: clane left, the tools left, the work left, the whole
Speaker 1: summer's worth of digging, and the gold they'd been chasing,
Speaker 1: and they went down the mountain. And I want you
Speaker 1: to really weigh that, because these were men with every
Speaker 1: reason in the world to stay. They'd hauled their gear
Speaker 1: up there on their backs, they'd built that cabin with
Speaker 1: their own hands. They'd sunk weeks of brutal labor and
Speaker 1: a season's worth of hope into that ground, and they
Speaker 1: gave all of it up rather than spend one more
Speaker 1: night up there. You can argue all day about what
Speaker 1: they saw. You can't really argue that they weren't scared,
Speaker 1: because scared is what you call a man who walks
Speaker 1: away from money to get off a mountain. And nobody
Speaker 1: ever talks about the walk down. But I think about
Speaker 1: it as much as I think about the siege. No sleep,
Speaker 1: hours of terror behind them, miles of rough, broken ground
Speaker 1: in front of them, every snap twig, a fresh jolt
Speaker 1: straight through the chest, every one of them surely looking
Speaker 1: back over his shoulder the whole way. You don't forget
Speaker 1: a walk like that. The night's the part that gets told.
Speaker 1: But i'd bet money it was the walk down that
Speaker 1: came back to find some of these men in their
Speaker 1: sleep for the rest of their lives. Word got out
Speaker 1: fast once they hit the bottom, the way a story
Speaker 1: with teeth in it always does. The papers picked it up,
Speaker 1: the big one in Portland, and then the wire services
Speaker 1: miners attacked by apes on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens.
Speaker 1: And you have to understand what that headline did. In
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four, there was no Bigfoot to be skeptical about,
Speaker 1: yet so to the public this was something closer to
Speaker 1: a Lost World story, Gorilla's in the Cascades, a little
Speaker 1: piece of the jungle picture shows turning up in the
Speaker 1: American back country. It was strange, and it was fun,
Speaker 1: and it traveled. People came up the mountain to look,
Speaker 1: the curious and the armed, and the board and reporters came,
Speaker 1: and the Forest Service sent men up to walk the
Speaker 1: gorge and sort out whether a crew of prospectors had
Speaker 1: lost their minds or stumbled onto something real. There was
Speaker 1: even talk in some of the accounts of finding big
Speaker 1: tracks up there, though, like everything else in this case,
Speaker 1: that comes to us secondhand and a little blurry, and
Speaker 1: out of all of it. The gorge got its name
Speaker 1: Ape Canyon. It's still on the map today, more than
Speaker 1: one hundred years later, and there's a trail that carries
Speaker 1: the name, and that name is doing quiet work every
Speaker 1: single time somebody reads it, telling them something happened in
Speaker 1: that spot and it had to do with an ape.
Speaker 1: A name on a map outlives the men who earned it,
Speaker 1: and the papers that spread it. Most of these encounters
Speaker 1: leave nothing behind but fading memory. This one carved itself
Speaker 1: right into the geography, and people went up there to
Speaker 1: settle it, which is more than you can say for
Speaker 1: a lot of these stories. In the days after, parties
Speaker 1: climbed the mountain to look, some of them hoping to
Speaker 1: bag a gorilla and get their name in the paper.
Speaker 1: Some just curious. And there were forest service men up
Speaker 1: there too, walking the gorge, looking the cabin over, trying
Speaker 1: to work out whether five prospectors had cracked up or
Speaker 1: stumbled onto something real. And here's the honest result, the
Speaker 1: same results you get every single time. Some came back
Speaker 1: saying they'd found big tracks. Others came back saying they'd
Speaker 1: found nothing but the ordinary, churned up mess of a
Speaker 1: worked over mining camp, loose rock, and all on a
Speaker 1: mountain side that is made of loose rock. Nobody came
Speaker 1: back with the thing nobody came back with a body,
Speaker 1: or a clean track they could cast and keep, or
Speaker 1: a photograph. The mountain got looked at hard by people
Speaker 1: with every motive in the world to find something, right
Speaker 1: when the trail was freshest and it gave up exactly
Speaker 1: nothing you could put your hands on. That early blank
Speaker 1: is one of the quietest and most important facts in
Speaker 1: this whole case, and the legend strolls right past it,
Speaker 1: and the way the papers talked about it tells you
Speaker 1: how unmoored the whole country was from any framework. For this.
Speaker 1: They called the creatures apes, gorillas, mountain devils, whatever played
Speaker 1: best in a headline, and for a little while there
Speaker 1: was loose talk of organizing hunts, armed parties going up
Speaker 1: to bring one back, the way you'd mount an expedition
Speaker 1: for some lost world animal. Nobody knew what to call it,
Speaker 1: because there was nothing to call it. Yet we hear
Speaker 1: Ape Canyon now, and our minds fill in Bigfoot on
Speaker 1: their own the whole modern picture. But in nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 1: the people living it had no such word and no
Speaker 1: such picture in their heads. They were reaching in real
Speaker 1: time for any frame that fit, and the only one
Speaker 1: lying around was the jungle eight from the newsreels. So
Speaker 1: whatever these men actually ran into, they described it with
Speaker 1: the only vocabulary they had, and the rest of us
Speaker 1: have been busy translating it into our vocabulary ever since.
Speaker 1: And think about the timing of it too, The why then,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four, The country was a few years out
Speaker 1: of the First World War, a few years off the
Speaker 1: influenza that killed more people than the war did. People
Speaker 1: had had a long run of bad news, and here,
Speaker 1: out of a mountainside in Washington comes a story that's
Speaker 1: just plain strange, a monster, but a far away one
Speaker 1: that hadn't heard anybody. You knew, the press knew a
Speaker 1: good story when a slow weak handed them one, and
Speaker 1: they fed it, and it grew in the feeding, the
Speaker 1: way these always do. The descriptions got bigger and sure
Speaker 1: the farther they traveled from that cabin. By the time
Speaker 1: the tale had bounced around the country a few times,
Speaker 1: a murky half seen second hand sighting by five tired
Speaker 1: men had hardened into a confirmed attack by confirmed creatures,
Speaker 1: none of it confirmed by anybody. That's the machine. It
Speaker 1: doesn't need new evidence, It needs repetition and an audience
Speaker 1: that wants the thing to be true. But once the
Speaker 1: story left those five men's hands and hit the wire,
Speaker 1: it stopped being theirs and started being everybody's. And a
Speaker 1: story never survives that trip unchanged, because the world will
Speaker 1: always always rather have a monster than a maybe. For
Speaker 1: the men, it had been one bad night they lived
Speaker 1: through and ran from. The telling of that night would
Speaker 1: outlive every single one of them, and the Mount Saint
Speaker 1: Helen's country had a low hum of these stories around
Speaker 1: it before and after, the way a lot of the
Speaker 1: deep Northwest does. The miners weren't the first people to
Speaker 1: come down out of those hills talking about something big
Speaker 1: and hairy, and they weren't the last. That's either a
Speaker 1: sign there's a real animal up there that keeps getting glimpsed,
Speaker 1: or a sign that this particular stretch of country has
Speaker 1: always been good at growing this particular kind of tale.
Speaker 1: I can argue it either way on a given night,
Speaker 1: and so can you. But here's a point that lands
Speaker 1: in the men's favor, and I weigh it more than most.
Speaker 1: For the most part, they didn't cash in. Four of
Speaker 1: these five, didn't spend the rest of their lives on
Speaker 1: a lecture circuit, didn't write books, didn't dine out on
Speaker 1: the story. They went back to their lives and let
Speaker 1: it be somebody else's legend. If you cook up a
Speaker 1: hoax to get famous, you stick around to collect the fame.
Speaker 1: These men mostly walked away from the whole thing and
Speaker 1: wanted to be left alone about it. Beck is the exception.
Speaker 1: And even Beck waited forty years and then told it
Speaker 1: in a way that won him no friends among the
Speaker 1: true believers. That pattern, ordinary men who got scared, told
Speaker 1: it once and then just one it dropped, looks a
Speaker 1: lot more like people who actually went through something than
Speaker 1: like people running a con. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. It doesn't
Speaker 1: tell you what they went through, but it tells you
Speaker 1: something about whether they were lying, and I don't think
Speaker 1: most of them were. And here's the long game version
Speaker 1: of that same point, the one I find hard to
Speaker 1: get around. That country did not empty out after nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty four. People kept prospecting it, kept logging it, kept
Speaker 1: hunting and hiking and camping it for another fifty six years,
Speaker 1: right up until the Mountain blew. If a population of
Speaker 1: big upright animals was living on those slopes, throwing rocks
Speaker 1: at cabins, and pressing tracks the size of dinner plates
Speaker 1: into the mud. You'd expect the decades to pile up
Speaker 1: more of it and better of it. A body hit
Speaker 1: on a road, a clean track and fresh snow, a
Speaker 1: sharp photograph once everybody was carrying a camera. Instead, the
Speaker 1: case mostly just sat there. The one famous night getting
Speaker 1: retold a real breeding animal leaves a trail through time.
Speaker 1: Ape Canyon looks more like a single bright flash and
Speaker 1: then a long quiet, and a single flash is exactly
Speaker 1: what you'd also expect from one strange night that got
Speaker 1: told and retold until it turned into a legend. The
Speaker 1: quiet around it is data too. People forget that the
Speaker 1: dog that doesn't bark is evidence. Now here's where I
Speaker 1: have to complicate the whole thing, and where a lot
Speaker 1: of the people who love this case suddenly get real quiet.
Speaker 1: Because the rich version of Ape Canyon, the detailed one
Speaker 1: everybody quotes, comes almost entirely from Fred Beck, and it
Speaker 1: comes late decades late. Beck didn't lay the whole thing
Speaker 1: out until the nineteen sixties, in a little book he
Speaker 1: put out in nineteen sixty seven. An old man by
Speaker 1: then more than forty years after the night happened. He
Speaker 1: didn't even write it alone. It was put together with help.
Speaker 1: His recollection set down through somebody else's hand, which is
Speaker 1: one more layer of glass between us and the actual night.
Speaker 1: And a huge amount of what people now repeat as
Speaker 1: flat fact about Ape Canyon traces straight back to that
Speaker 1: one late second hand telling two things about that. First,
Speaker 1: the gap a man describing one night of his youth
Speaker 1: and fine detail more than forty years on is doing
Speaker 1: something you have to handle with real care, because memory
Speaker 1: is not a tape you play back. It shifts, it
Speaker 1: fills its own holes, It rounds itself over the years,
Speaker 1: toward the smooth shape of the version you've told one
Speaker 1: hundred times. I'm not saying Fred Beck lied. I don't
Speaker 1: think he lied. By everything I can find, he told
Speaker 1: it exactly the way he remembered it. But remembered and
Speaker 1: accurate aren't the same thing. And forty years is a
Speaker 1: long long time for a story to live in one
Speaker 1: man's head and quietly change on him. And second, the
Speaker 1: part most of the modern retellings very quietly leave out,
Speaker 1: and it's a big one. Beck's own explanation for what
Speaker 1: happened up. There wasn't a flesh and blood animal at all.
Speaker 1: Not in the end. Fred Beck was a spiritualist. Later
Speaker 1: in life he worked as a kind of spiritual healer.
Speaker 1: He believed in psychic experience and other planes of reality,
Speaker 1: and by the time he told this story, he'd come
Speaker 1: to read those creatures not as some undiscovered ape, but
Speaker 1: as spiritual beings, entities that had come from another dimension
Speaker 1: tied up with psychic forces. That's his actual interpretation of
Speaker 1: the whole event, in his own words, in his own book,
Speaker 1: The most famous early bigfoot case in the country, and
Speaker 1: the one witness who carried it for half a century
Speaker 1: didn't think it was an animal at all. He thought
Speaker 1: it was something closer to a ghost. It helps to
Speaker 1: know a little about the man. By then, fred Beck
Speaker 1: had spent a good part of his later life around
Speaker 1: spiritualism and what he understood as psychic healing, working with
Speaker 1: people who came to him for it. So this wasn't
Speaker 1: some one off, strange idea he tacked onto an old
Speaker 1: hunting story near the end. It was the lens he'd
Speaker 1: come to see his whole life through. And when he
Speaker 1: finally turned that lens back on the worst night of
Speaker 1: his youth. This is the picture it gave him back.
Speaker 1: The booklet itself came together late and with help his
Speaker 1: recollections shaped through other hands in the family, the kind
Speaker 1: of project where an old man finally gets the thing
Speaker 1: out of his system before it's too late to And
Speaker 1: I don't bring any of that up to run the
Speaker 1: man down. I bring it up because you cannot weigh
Speaker 1: a witness without weighing where he was standing when he spoke,
Speaker 1: And where fred Beck was standing forty some years on
Speaker 1: was a long way from a prospector's cabin and deep
Speaker 1: inside a worldview that saw spirits and other planes just
Speaker 1: about everywhere it looked. And frankly, this is where I
Speaker 1: get off the bus. I've spent forty years in this field,
Speaker 1: and I've got no patience for the high strangeness stuff,
Speaker 1: the inner dimensional, the psychic, the portals, the woo. I
Speaker 1: think it has done real damage to serious sasquatch research.
Speaker 1: I think it's why a lot of people can't take
Speaker 1: the subject seriously. And I think the flesh and blood question,
Speaker 1: which is a real and answerable question, deserves a lot
Speaker 1: better than to get tangled up in ghosts and other dimensions.
Speaker 1: So when the single most important witness in the most
Speaker 1: famous early case in the whole field turns around and
Speaker 1: tells you the thing was a spirit from another world,
Speaker 1: I can't just quietly set that aside to keep the
Speaker 1: story clean and exciting. And here's the part the believers
Speaker 1: really don't like. You don't get to keep fred Beck
Speaker 1: when he says the thing you want to hear and
Speaker 1: toss him the second he says something you don't. Either
Speaker 1: the man's word carries weight or it doesn't. And if
Speaker 1: it carries weight, it carries all of it, including the
Speaker 1: part that takes the whole flesh and blood reading and
Speaker 1: blows its sideways. So lay it all out on the table.
Speaker 1: A real event in nineteen twenty four, a real name
Speaker 1: on a real map, a primary account that's vivid and
Speaker 1: detailed and also late secondhand in the writing, and filtered
Speaker 1: through one aging man's memory and one aging man's belief
Speaker 1: in another world. And no body, no bones, no photograph,
Speaker 1: no physical proof of any kind that ever survived. A
Speaker 1: hard look. That's a powerful, genuinely moving human story sitting
Speaker 1: on top of almost no hard evidence. And I'll tell you,
Speaker 1: after forty years, that's the shape just about every one
Speaker 1: of these famous old cases takes the minute you stop
Speaker 1: letting the legend do your thinking for you. So what
Speaker 1: was actually out there that night? Start with the easy
Speaker 1: one misidentification. The men fired at shapes they could barely see,
Speaker 1: first in failing light and then in full dark, And
Speaker 1: black bears live all over that country. A bear up
Speaker 1: on its hind legs at a distance in bad light
Speaker 1: can read to a startled eye as something huge and
Speaker 1: man shaped, because a scared mind is a pattern machine,
Speaker 1: and it'll hand you the shape you're already braced for.
Speaker 1: It's very possible that the daytime sighting was a bear
Speaker 1: badly misjudged, and the whole night got built right on
Speaker 1: top of that first bad read. And bears do a
Speaker 1: lot more than just look wrong in the dark. A
Speaker 1: bear will circle a cabin it smells food around, lean
Speaker 1: its weight on the walls, paw at the door, knock
Speaker 1: stuff over, make a racket way out of proportion to
Speaker 1: whatever it actually wants. A bear working a camp in
Speaker 1: the dark in front of men already convinced something monstrous
Speaker 1: was hunting them could account for a whole lot of
Speaker 1: the movement, and the weight and the blows with no
Speaker 1: ape anywhere in the picture. I'm not telling you it
Speaker 1: was a bear. I'm telling you a bear fits an
Speaker 1: uncomfortable amount of this, and an honest man has to
Speaker 1: sit with that instead of waving it off. And here's
Speaker 1: a thing that feeds every one of these cases, the
Speaker 1: human thing. People are terrible at judging the size of
Speaker 1: something that scares them, and they're worse at it in
Speaker 1: bad light, and worse still when the thing is out
Speaker 1: across a distance or down in a gorge with nothing
Speaker 1: next to it to give you scale. I've interviewed a
Speaker 1: lot of witnesses over the years, sat across the table
Speaker 1: from a lot of sincere shaken people, and I'll tell
Speaker 1: you the size always comes in big. A shape in
Speaker 1: the trees at dusk is never five feet tall. In
Speaker 1: the telling, it's eight. The thing felt enormous, and felt
Speaker 1: is the operative word, because fear has its thumb on
Speaker 1: the scale the whole time. Now, take a real animal,
Speaker 1: whatever it was, put it in failing light, put a
Speaker 1: gorge under it so there's nothing to measure it against,
Speaker 1: run it through five frightened men, and then forty years
Speaker 1: of retelling and a national press that wanted it bigger,
Speaker 1: and you do not need a single liar anywhere in
Speaker 1: that chain to end up with a monster. The size
Speaker 1: grows on its own. That's not people deceiving you. That's
Speaker 1: just how fear and memory and repetition work on a thing.
Speaker 1: Nobody ever got to measure and lean on the sourcing
Speaker 1: for a second, because it matters more here than people
Speaker 1: like to admit. That dramatic daytime sighting the creature out
Speaker 1: in the open, the shot the thing dropping away into
Speaker 1: the gorge, that comes down to us essentially from one man,
Speaker 1: Fred Beck, decades after the other four didn't leave us
Speaker 1: their own careful, independent accounts of that moment. So the
Speaker 1: single most cinematic beat in the whole case, the part
Speaker 1: every documentary reaches for, rests on one memory, one voice,
Speaker 1: one telling, set down forty years on. That's not nothing,
Speaker 1: but it's a long way from five men swearing to
Speaker 1: the same thing under oath, and the retellings tend to
Speaker 1: present it like it was exactly that. And on the
Speaker 1: physical side, there's just a hole. No track ever got
Speaker 1: cast and kept, no photograph of the creature exists, which
Speaker 1: is less damning in nineteen twenty four than it would
Speaker 1: be today, since a prospector wasn't hauling a camera up
Speaker 1: a mountain. But a zero is still a zero. One
Speaker 1: hundred years of people wanting this to be true, and
Speaker 1: the entire physical record of Ape Canyon comes down to
Speaker 1: a name on a map and some rocks on a
Speaker 1: mountain side made out of rocks. Then there's the question
Speaker 1: of who or what actually through the rocks, and there's
Speaker 1: a real candidate that isn't an animal at all. People.
Speaker 1: Years later, a man named Rant Mollins came forward and
Speaker 1: said that he and some buddies had rolled rocks down
Speaker 1: toward that canyon back in those days, and had carved
Speaker 1: big fake footprints too, as a prank. Now, a confession
Speaker 1: that shows up that late deserves its own pile of skepticism.
Speaker 1: I'll grant you that, and I don't take it as
Speaker 1: the final word, but it stands there as a reminder
Speaker 1: that a few young guys goofing around on a dark
Speaker 1: mountain can make damn near the exact noises those miners described,
Speaker 1: and the men sealed up blind inside that cabin would
Speaker 1: have had no way on earth to tell the one
Speaker 1: from the other, and the canyon itself plays tricks with sound.
Speaker 1: Noise bounces strange and steep rock country. A sound from
Speaker 1: one direction comes off a rock face and hits your
Speaker 1: ear from another. One source can seem like three. A
Speaker 1: small noise gets amplified by the stone, and then amplified
Speaker 1: all over again by fear, until it feels like you're
Speaker 1: surrounded on every side. The very land they were sitting
Speaker 1: in could have been quietly turning a handful of ordinary
Speaker 1: sounds into the feeling of a siege coming from everywhere
Speaker 1: at once. And then there's the one I find the
Speaker 1: most convincing of all, which is just panic and the
Speaker 1: way fear feeds on itself. And I like it precisely
Speaker 1: because it lets me respect these men completely and still
Speaker 1: doubt the literal story. The tracks put them on edge,
Speaker 1: the sounds wound it tighter. The daytime sighting whatever it
Speaker 1: really was, convinced them something dangerous was out there, and
Speaker 1: worse that they'd gone and provoked it. Then full night
Speaker 1: drops on men who are already primed, exhausted, frightened, armed,
Speaker 1: and cut off from any hope of help. And in
Speaker 1: that state every normal sound of the night becomes a threat.
Speaker 1: You answer a rock that slides loose off a slope
Speaker 1: on its own becomes a rock that got thrown at you.
Speaker 1: The wind moving through the timber becomes something circling the walls.
Speaker 1: One man fires that first shot, and now everybody's committed,
Speaker 1: and the gunfire itself fills the dark with smoke and
Speaker 1: noise and confusion that makes the whole thing feel ten
Speaker 1: times worse, and the fear feeds the fear around and
Speaker 1: around for hours, until five capable men have spent a
Speaker 1: whole night fighting off a siege that was half out
Speaker 1: there and half built inside their own heads. And that
Speaker 1: doesn't make them liars, It doesn't make them fools. It
Speaker 1: makes them human beings dropped into a situation practically engineered
Speaker 1: to do exactly that to a person, and whatever did
Speaker 1: happen out there, forty years of retelling finished the job.
Speaker 1: Because a story like that one gets a little bigger
Speaker 1: and a little sharper every single time it's told. The
Speaker 1: rocks heavier, the creature's larger and surer, the gaps filling
Speaker 1: in with the details, and audience leans forward to hear.
Speaker 1: Until the version that finally hit paper stood a long
Speaker 1: way off from the met see half seen real night,
Speaker 1: and it got there without anybody ever telling a single
Speaker 1: deliberate lie, and none of that's proof either. I'll hold
Speaker 1: myself to exactly the same standard. On this side. I
Speaker 1: can't tell you it was definitely a bear, or definitely
Speaker 1: a prank, or definitely just panic, because I wasn't there,
Speaker 1: and neither was anybody alive today. These are possibilities, not
Speaker 1: a verdict. The honest skeptical position was never I know
Speaker 1: what happened up there. It's only that the ordinary explanations
Speaker 1: fit the known facts at least as well as the
Speaker 1: extraordinary one does. And you've got to rule those ordinary
Speaker 1: ones out before you go reaching for something that rewrites
Speaker 1: the natural world. And nobody has ever ruled them out here.
Speaker 1: But ruling them in as live possibilities is not the
Speaker 1: same thing as mocking these men, And I won't mock them,
Speaker 1: not ever, Because whatever moved out there in that dark,
Speaker 1: five working men were scared badly enough to abandon a
Speaker 1: claim and walk off a mountain and carry that night
Speaker 1: with them and for the rest of their lives. And
Speaker 1: that earns respect even from a hard skeptic. Doubt isn't contempt.
Speaker 1: You can hold back your belief and still treat a
Speaker 1: man's fear as the real thing it was. So here's
Speaker 1: my verdict, and I'll give it to you the way
Speaker 1: i'd give it under oath. I think something happened on
Speaker 1: that mountain I do. This is exactly the kind of
Speaker 1: remote country encounter I take seriously, and I'm not going
Speaker 1: to pretend five capable men hallucinated a whole night out
Speaker 1: of thin air. But I cannot tell you it was
Speaker 1: a sasquatch because the evidence you'd need to say that
Speaker 1: just isn't there, and it never was. What I can
Speaker 1: tell you is that whatever started it, the thing that
Speaker 1: came down to us, got inflated by fear, by reputation,
Speaker 1: by one hundred years of retelling, and by one old
Speaker 1: man's sincere belief in another world, until it became something
Speaker 1: that probably never quite matched the actual night the encounter
Speaker 1: might have been real. The monster everybody pictures now, the
Speaker 1: confirmed sigh, the confirmed number, the inner dimensional ape. That's
Speaker 1: the part I can't follow anybody to stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: And the gap between those two between what might have
Speaker 1: happened and what we all say happened. That's where this
Speaker 1: whole legend actually lives. And I'll tell you how I
Speaker 1: land there, because it comes straight out of sixteen years
Speaker 1: of taking statements for a living. In that work, you
Speaker 1: learn fast that a witness can be completely honest and
Speaker 1: completely wrong at the same time, that fear and darkness
Speaker 1: and time are not friends of accuracy, and that the
Speaker 1: absence of physical evidence is itself a piece of evidence
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to ignore just because the story's good.
Speaker 1: I also learned that you don't call a man a
Speaker 1: liar without cause, and I see no cause here. So
Speaker 1: I do with Ape Canyon exactly what I do with
Speaker 1: any statement that came across my desk. I believe the
Speaker 1: men were sincere. I believe something frightened them badly. And
Speaker 1: I noticed that one hundred years later, there is still
Speaker 1: not one thing I could enter into evidence, not a bone,
Speaker 1: not a cast, not a frame of film. And I
Speaker 1: let that silence count for as much as the testimony does.
Speaker 1: That's not me being cold about it. That's ME being
Speaker 1: fair to it, which in the end is the only
Speaker 1: kind of respect a case like this can actually use.
Speaker 1: And maybe that's the honest place to leave the question
Speaker 1: of what it was not solved, not laughed off, filed
Speaker 1: the way an old open case gets filed, with everything
Speaker 1: we can actually stand behind, written down, nothing invented to
Speaker 1: fill the blanks, and the cover left open on purpose
Speaker 1: because closing it would mean claiming a certainty that nobody
Speaker 1: walking this earth has earned. And yet it lasts one
Speaker 1: hundred years on. People still know the name, they still
Speaker 1: drive out toward that country, they still tell the story
Speaker 1: around a fire, and just about every book ever written
Speaker 1: on this subject gives Ape Canyon its own chapter near
Speaker 1: the front, because it's the keystone, the one that was
Speaker 1: already old by the time the rest of the field
Speaker 1: showed up. And that head start cuts both ways too,
Speaker 1: because once the modern Sasquatch story took its shape in
Speaker 1: the late nineteen fifties and the sixties, people went back
Speaker 1: and pulled Ape Canyon forward into it, read the old
Speaker 1: account through the new lens, and started describing those nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty four creatures with all the confidence of the modern picture,
Speaker 1: the exact height, the gate, the whole package, none of
Speaker 1: which the original sources actually pinned down. That's backreading, and
Speaker 1: it's a trap I watch people fall into constantly. You
Speaker 1: take what you believe now, and you painted onto a
Speaker 1: blurry old account until the old account looks like it
Speaker 1: confirms you, when really all you did was decorate it
Speaker 1: with your own expectations. I try hard not to do
Speaker 1: that with this case. The men in nineteen twenty four
Speaker 1: did not have our picture of Bigfoot in their heads,
Speaker 1: so I'm not going to hand them our picture and
Speaker 1: then acts surprised that it fits. What they actually had
Speaker 1: was apes in the dark throwing rocks, and that's all
Speaker 1: I'm going to let the record say they had. And
Speaker 1: it's worth asking why it holds the way it does,
Speaker 1: because it sure isn't the evidence. The evidence is thin,
Speaker 1: and you know it by now. What keeps it alive
Speaker 1: is older than evidence. Strip the Bigfoot off it for
Speaker 1: a second, and just look at the bare shape of
Speaker 1: that night, people alone, way past any help, in the dark,
Speaker 1: inside a shelter they built with their own hands to
Speaker 1: keep the wild out. And the wild comes anyway and
Speaker 1: leans on the walls, and they can't see it and
Speaker 1: they can't stop it, and all they can do is
Speaker 1: wait for the light that underneath everything is not a
Speaker 1: story about an unknown animal. That's the story of every
Speaker 1: night our ancestors spent at the mouth of a cave
Speaker 1: with the fire burned low and something moving just past
Speaker 1: the edge of it. It's older than this country. It's
Speaker 1: older than the word for fear. We built our towns
Speaker 1: and strung our lights and locked our doors mostly to
Speaker 1: push that old dark onto the other side of the
Speaker 1: wall for good. And most of us pull it off
Speaker 1: so completely that we'll go our whole lives and never
Speaker 1: once feel the real thing, the alone, no help coming,
Speaker 1: nobody even knows your out here thing. But it never
Speaker 1: actually left us. It just went to sleep down inside
Speaker 1: us somewhere, and a story like Ape Canyon reaches all
Speaker 1: the way down and wakes it back up for a
Speaker 1: few minutes. And that's the real power of it. When
Speaker 1: you put yourself in that cabin and the first rock
Speaker 1: comes down on the roof and the men go still.
Speaker 1: The thing that grabs you by the spine isn't a
Speaker 1: question about what species walks around the cascades. It's the
Speaker 1: much older thing, knowing exactly what it would be to
Speaker 1: be small and soft and alone in the dark, with
Speaker 1: something just outside that you can't see and can't understand
Speaker 1: and can't make stop. And that's also why this one
Speaker 1: outlasted a thousand stories just like it, that you've never
Speaker 1: heard those scary knights in the woods die where they happen.
Speaker 1: Somebody tells it at the store a few times, and
Speaker 1: it fades because there's no hook to hang it on,
Speaker 1: nothing to keep it from blurring into every other campfire tale.
Speaker 1: Ape Canyon got three things most of them never get.
Speaker 1: It got a date and a place in names, so
Speaker 1: it felt like history instead of rumor. It got the
Speaker 1: press at exactly the right moment when a tired country
Speaker 1: wanted a strange story to chew on, And it got
Speaker 1: a name carved into the map, so that the land
Speaker 1: itself keeps telling the story to people who never heard
Speaker 1: it from a human mouth. Take away any one of
Speaker 1: those three, and you and I are not talking about
Speaker 1: it tonight. The encounter might have been no stranger than
Speaker 1: one hundred others. The legend is what it is because
Speaker 1: of what happened to the story after the men came down,
Speaker 1: not just because of what happened to the men on
Speaker 1: the mountain, And that isn't a knock on it. Every
Speaker 1: legend that lasts works that way. The night is the seed,
Speaker 1: but the seed isn't the tree. What actually grows is
Speaker 1: made out of the soil. It lands in the date
Speaker 1: and the names, and the newspapers, and the gorge that
Speaker 1: kept the name, and one hundred years of people needing
Speaker 1: the dark to mean something. Ape Canyon grew a tall tree.
Speaker 1: And that tells you about us, at least as much
Speaker 1: as it tells you about whatever stood out past the
Speaker 1: lantern light that night. And then the mountain went and
Speaker 1: did something almost too perfect to believe. In nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: it blew itself apart May eighteenth, the whole north face
Speaker 1: gone in a single afternoon, the forest flattened for miles,
Speaker 1: Spirit Lake, buried under the slide, and the old cabin,
Speaker 1: sight and the trails in any trace at all that
Speaker 1: night might have left up there, all of it very
Speaker 1: likely scoured away or buried under a new and dead
Speaker 1: and gray landscape. The mountain took its own evidence with
Speaker 1: it when it went, and it didn't go quietly on
Speaker 1: that side of the mountain either. When the top let loose,
Speaker 1: the heat and the melting snowpack sent wall of mud
Speaker 1: and rock lahars roaring down the drainages, scouring the canyons out,
Speaker 1: including the country right around Ape Canyon. So the very
Speaker 1: ground that gave this story its name took the mountains
Speaker 1: punishment twice, once in the blast and once in the
Speaker 1: flood that came chasing after it. If there was ever
Speaker 1: a single splinter of that old cabin still lying up there,
Speaker 1: a rusted can or a spent shell or an axe
Speaker 1: notch and a fallen log, the odds that lived through
Speaker 1: all that are about as close to zero as the
Speaker 1: natural world gets. So now you couldn't go and check,
Speaker 1: even if you wanted to, because the place itself, the
Speaker 1: way it was, is just gone. The name survived, the
Speaker 1: canyon's still there on the southeast side, and people still
Speaker 1: hike it. But the mountain those five men knew, the
Speaker 1: green cone with the old growth running up it, that
Speaker 1: mountain died in nineteen eighty, And maybe that's part of
Speaker 1: why this one holds on the way it does. You
Speaker 1: can't solve it. You can't drive out and stand on
Speaker 1: the exact spot and let plain daylight chase the whole
Speaker 1: story off, because the spot, the way it was isn't
Speaker 1: there anymore. It only really exists now in the one
Speaker 1: place it always lived strongest. Anyway in the telling, and
Speaker 1: there's a strange kind of grace and how it all
Speaker 1: ends up. The men are long gone, every one of them.
Speaker 1: The mountain's gone. What's left is a name on a
Speaker 1: map and a story that gets handed down, and the
Speaker 1: worst night of five working men's lives somehow turned into
Speaker 1: one of the cornerstones of a whole field that I've
Speaker 1: given mine to. I don't think Ape Canyon proves Bigfoot.
Speaker 1: I want to be clear about that all the way
Speaker 1: to the end, the same as I was at the start.
Speaker 1: But I've come to think that proof was never really
Speaker 1: the point of why it matters. The men believed it.
Speaker 1: They believed it enough to walk away from everything they'd
Speaker 1: carried up that mountain, and whatever the truth of the
Speaker 1: night was, their fear was real, in real time, on
Speaker 1: a real mountain, with nobody watching and nothing to gain.
Speaker 1: I can't give you the creature, but I can give
Speaker 1: you that the fear was real, the night was real,
Speaker 1: and the men were real. So let me take you
Speaker 1: back up there one last time before I let you
Speaker 1: go back up the mountain that doesn't look like that anymore.
Speaker 1: Back in through the timber, the firs and the cedars
Speaker 1: and the silent hemlocks back into the kind of dark
Speaker 1: and the kind of quiet we just don't really have anymore,
Speaker 1: to a small cabin with one low lantern burning and
Speaker 1: five tired men inside who are not asleep because they've
Speaker 1: already learned the hard way what these hours can bring.
Speaker 1: The fire's down low, the colds coming up through the floor,
Speaker 1: and somewhere out past the logs, out past the last
Speaker 1: of the lantern light, out in that old and patient dark,
Speaker 1: something shifts its weight and picks up a stone and waits.
Speaker 1: We'll never know what it was. The men who could
Speaker 1: have told us are gone, and the mountain that kept
Speaker 1: the secret is gone, and all that's left is the
Speaker 1: name and the story and the long echo of one
Speaker 1: bad night a hundred years behind us. But close your
Speaker 1: eyes for just a second before you go, and listen
Speaker 1: for it the way those men listen for it. The
Speaker 1: lantern and the cold and the held breath, And then
Speaker 1: the first stone hitting wood in the dark bl