November 1, 2025 • 38 mins
In this chilling episode Fred from Alaska, who brings two haunting accounts from the frozen north—true stories of isolation, terror, and survival in one of the world’s most unforgiving landscapes.The first story follows Bernie, a woman living alone on a remote Alaskan homestead after the tragic loss of her husband. What begins as unsettling noises and strange disturbances around her cabin soon escalates into a harrowing confrontation with hairy, caveman-like beings that emerge from the forest.
Alone and armed only with her courage, Bernie faces the unthinkable as she fights to survive against something not entirely human—and not entirely animal. Fred also shares a second account from Joseph, set in 1987 in Bristol Bay, where a dense fog hides something terrifying in the mist. The encounter that follows defies explanation and adds another chapter to Alaska’s long history of cryptid encounters and wilderness mysteries. These are stories of fear, endurance, and the strange, untamed forces that still roam the edges of civilization.
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Alone and armed only with her courage, Bernie faces the unthinkable as she fights to survive against something not entirely human—and not entirely animal. Fred also shares a second account from Joseph, set in 1987 in Bristol Bay, where a dense fog hides something terrifying in the mist. The encounter that follows defies explanation and adds another chapter to Alaska’s long history of cryptid encounters and wilderness mysteries. These are stories of fear, endurance, and the strange, untamed forces that still roam the edges of civilization.
Get Our FREE Newsletter
Get Brian's Books
Leave Us A Voicemail
Visit Our Website
Support Our Sponsors
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sasquatch-odyssey--4839697/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now one of your pudding. I got a string going
on here. Something just kid my dog.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Something killed your dog, my dog.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
We're flying through the air, over the tree. I don't
know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm really confused.
All I saw was my dog coming over the fence
and he was dead. And once you hit the ground like,
I didn't see any cars. All I saw was my
dog coming over the fence. What are you putting? We
(00:40):
got some wonder or something prowling around out here? Did
you see what it was?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Was?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
It was standing enough. I'm out here looking through the
window now and I don't see anything. I don't want
to go outside. Jesus quiet, you're back or hello? Hit
the body out here?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
What went on out there?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
It's thought of a bit of about sixty fort nine.
I don't know easy of out there? Yeah, the bulking
right head.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Oh hey, greetings is Fred and Alaska. Thanks for joining
me today. What I wanted to share it to you
today comes from Bernadette known as Bernie. It's been fifty years.
It's been a long time. She had a homestead at
one point with her husband. She was a widower at
the time of this incident. The way it went down
was is her husband would commercial salmon fish to offset
(01:36):
the cost of remote living and trying to make a
homestead going. Many years ago, she lost her husband in
a fishing accident, so she was left this homestead with
eight dogs. They didn't have chickens or anything like that.
They just had sled dogs basically to commute back and
forth for their water supply, hunting, and all that kind
(01:56):
of stuff. Now, she was a much younger woman, of course,
and she's still in the throes of mourning. She was
having a really rough go of it. She was pregnant
at the time, but miscarried due to the stress of
losing her husband, so she was not in the best place.
She had mentioned that she was at her most vulnerable
(02:19):
point when these incidents started occurring, which bothers me because
it's not the first time I've heard it. It started
off with small harassments and she didn't know what was
going on. It started off with dogs. Two of her
dogs went missing. The chains were snapped, and she thought
they just got into a fight with a black bear
(02:40):
or something and they broke chains and ran off right.
Things that she was easily dismissing as life in the
wilds of Alaska. A few more weeks go on, there's
other stuff going on. Piles of brush that were piled
up by her husband at one point were scattered. One morning,
she made mention several times at a lot of things
were happening, but she was in the throes of depression
(03:05):
in mourning that she was just dismissing it offhand, not
even taking critical thinking time or none of it. Just Oh,
the wind blew the brush and something ran through. Maybe
a moose with its antlers was rubbing against it or whatever.
Grant you, dogs didn't make a noise, which is odd
because the dogs would always bark at moose or whatever. Again,
(03:26):
she wasn't in her right space as far as paying
attention as she should. A few more weeks go by.
It's salmon season and she has people, of course donating
fish for her because she just lost a baby, lost
her husband, going through it right. So the neighbors that
were five, ten, twelve miles away or whatever, they were
(03:47):
looking out as best they could. She had processed all
the salmon and had it in the smokehouse. She was
tending to it daily. One morning she wakes up to
dogs yelping. They had eight, they're down to six. She
gets up to this yelping and it goes outside to
tell them to knock it off, because there was a
couple of dogs that were fighting for dominance basically since
(04:11):
the other two went missing, which were the two dominant
dogs in that little pack. So these other two had
been at it and she thought it was just them
doing that again. When she goes outside, she sees what
she thought was a very large man at the time
holding one of the dogs. She yells, hey, let go
of my dog, and this thing turns and just walks away, nonchalant,
(04:33):
carrying the dog dog was obviously deceased, just walks off
into the brush like she didn't exist. And so she
was just shocked by it, and she thought maybe she had.
Am I losing my mind? Did that just happen? Kind
of situation? Right? So she retreats back into the house
and she's contemplating, I need someone's help. I don't know
(04:53):
what the hell that thing is, but I need someone's help.
She doesn't know what to do at the moment, so
she decides she's going to stay inside keeping She got
her husband's rifle. She hadn't even thought about guns the
whole time he had been gone or whatever, even though
he told her and taught her how to use it
and everything like that. But so happens her husband had
forty five seventy right lever action old Marlin. So she
(05:16):
went and got that, got the ammal for it, loaded
it up, had it by the door. Now, she went
out and did her smoking stuff for her salmon. She's
processing it, doing her thing, and she made a specific
point to take those guts and go dump them down
at the river, which was quarter mile away. She had
(05:37):
the gun inside right inside the door because she's not
used to it and didn't really want to have to
use it. She kind of just left it alone and
had it nearby just in case because she wasn't thinking
Harry Man when she saw this large man walk off
with her dog. Again, She's going through a lot emotionally,
so she was just like, I don't want to shoot
(05:59):
a neighbor or someone that I didn't recognize in a
moment that may have been helped me out and I
didn't even know it or something. Just trying to dismiss it.
She goes and dumps this bucket of salmon. Carcass's just
flay out salmon or whatever. When she does that, she
hears weird huffing. But it's not like anywhere near she said.
She could hear it back up on a ridge just
(06:20):
above her house, this weird huffing sound. Or she thought bear.
She was like, oh, that's a really big bear. So
she drops her bucket, hauls ass back to the cabin,
gets inside, grabs a rifle. All the dogs were in
their little houses. They normally, with bears, they would be
outside of their houses barking unless the bear came close
and they've retreated inside and harassed the bear or whatever. Right,
(06:43):
they never stopped barking at a bear. Whatever this was,
They weren't barking. They all retreated in their houses, right,
So she doesn't know what to do. She listens for
a while. That huffing noise stops, the dogs come back
out of their houses. Things calm down. She sets the
rifle down and goes intends to her smokehouse. Now, as
(07:04):
she's tending to the smokehouse, she hears her dogs start
growling real, real loud. It was echoing from inside their
little doghouses, right, So she thought it was odd because
they were just all outside of their houses she steps
into the smokehouse less than two minutes, and they're making
all this noise from inside their individual doghouses. So she
(07:26):
sticks her head out of the smokehouse and she doesn't
see anything. It's just quiet. So she gets this eerie
feeling of being watched and retreats back to the house
after shutting the door real quick to her smokehouse. She
gets the house, grabs a rifle, comes back out with
a rifle, and standing there a minute, looking around, just
feeling very out of her own skin. She said she
was scared, but she didn't know of what. She says.
(07:48):
She went over to her smokehouse and opened some of
the vent doors on the side where this fish didn't
get too smokey. So she was tending to that while
being aware of what's going on around her and trying
not to feel like she's losing her mind, because she
was chalking a lot of this up to stress. You're
over exaggerating this because of that. You're over exaggerating this
(08:11):
because of this, because she's missing dogs, and if there's
stuff she's dismissing that, she freely admits she shouldn't have been,
but it was just too much at the time. So
when she gets the little event doors open and stuff,
she said, she retreated back into the house, set the
rifle up against the inside of the door, left the
door wide open, and sat on the four little steps
(08:31):
that came down from the cabin. She said. As she
was sitting there, she just started talking out loud to
her deceased husband, basically putting it out there, Hey, what
do I do? I don't know what to do. I
think maybe I should leave here. There's nothing here for me.
It's too hard and stuff like this. Now you got
to remember, this is fifty years ago. It's been a
(08:52):
while now. As she is doing this talking out loud,
she hears voices off in the distance, off to her left,
which would be down towards the river from the front
of this cabin. She thought, maybe neighbors are coming. She goes, oh, okay,
maybe I'll go greet them, thinking happy thoughts like ah,
(09:13):
maybe my husband and spirit sent some relatives to come
visit or something. Because she was thinking I should have
heard a skiff for something, but she didn't. She just
heard murmuring off in the distance. She thought nothing of it.
She did, however, grab the rifle because of everything that
was going on and feeling watched. She felt unsafe, so
she grabbed the rifle and walks down the trail back
(09:37):
to where she just a little bit ago dumped the
fish guts right into the water. Of course, she didn't
dump them on the ground, but when she gets there,
the bucket was gone. She saw right where she had
dropped all the guts and stuff. It was like a
little bit of an eddye, so the current hadn't swept
it all away. She noticed that the actual flat out
(09:58):
sammon themselves, not necessarily the guts and stuff, those were
all missing, right, And so she's standing there looking around
trying to figure out where the murmuring was coming from.
That she heard that drew her down there. And as
she's doing so, she's holding this gun, and she said
the gun was bigger than her. She's just a little
short at the basket lady. So she decides she'll look
(10:20):
around and start hollering out, hey, I'm over here, I'm
over here, this is Bernie. No one's responding, and then
she hears murmuring back towards her cabin, and she just thought,
what the heck, there's only one trail, and I didn't
hear anybody go and buy me. So immediately she got
very paranoid, and she starts walking back down the trail.
(10:41):
She said, as she was walking, she was trying not
to think about bad stuff. She was just trying to
think happy thoughts, to keep the clouds away, kind of mentality.
And she said, the closer she got, the harder it was.
She said, just as she was coming through the brush
on the trail where it opens up and you could
see where they had cut down trees and all that stuff,
(11:02):
and they had the doghouses and the smokehouse and stuff.
She was walking up. There's just a short little trail
up to the steps of the cabin, she said. When
she got to that little breakoff from the trail, that
ran forward, because she had the small house off to
her left and the short little run to the stairs
off to her right, and the doghouses in front of her.
She said, as she stood there, she froze because what
(11:26):
she was seeing in front of her she couldn't make
sense of right. So what she saw was four individuals,
two very small. She thought they were bear cubs initially,
that's why when she froze, she didn't realize they weren't bears.
The two smaller ones that looked like bear cubs because
they were hunched over on all fours or whatever. They
(11:47):
stood up and then took off into the brush. She
noticed that when they took off running, there was another
dog that was dragged by one of them. So she's
stuck watching this unfold in front of her, trying to
figure out what she's looking at. And the other two,
she said, we're about the same size. She didn't know
how tall they were, but much taller than her, very wide.
(12:08):
She said, they look like cavemen, caveman without winecloths. I
asked if she could tell if those male female, and
she just said they were just there. She had no
other description other than they look like cavemen and their
faces were dark, she said. She stood there for a
second and then slowly was turning the rifle. This rifle
she couldn't fully put up on her shoulder. She had
(12:30):
to tuck it under her armpit because she was too
small to shoulder it properly. So she swung it under
her armpit and faced it towards these two creatures, and
they bolted different directions. Gone. She thought again, she was
losing her mind. She didn't know what to do. She
retreats into the house, shuts the door, drops the gun
on the floor, and retreats into a corner behind the
(12:52):
woodstove and just sits there quietly. She was crying. She
started saying prayers. At the time she was saying these prayers,
it wasn't an actual prayer to Jesus or anything like that.
She was just asking for help, God help me. As
she was sitting there, bam, bam, she starts hearing this
(13:12):
pounding going on, and it sounds like it's opposite side
of the room, on the outside of the cabin. This
banging is happening. She's petrified, she's froze up. And as
she's sitting there, she said that she got the overwhelming
sense that she needed to stand up for herself right.
She says, she doesn't know where it came from. It
(13:33):
was just in that moment. She stood up, walked over,
grabbed the rifle, opened the door, and she said when
she opened the door, one of the taller ones. She
doesn't know which one. She's assuming it was one of
them because that's what she just saw. Moments ago, was
standing by the smokehouse and was halfway in it. She
(13:53):
turned the rifle and bam, fired a shot. The scene
fell to the ground, rolled out of there, stood up,
and took off, running towards the river. Now, when it
took off running towards the river, she heard screaming from
somewhere else. It wasn't screaming from the one she just shot.
She heard screaming from up on the ridge behind the cabin.
And as she's standing there and shock like holy crap,
(14:15):
and she's trying to work that. The lever action sheet
unchambered the round, but she was having a hard time
closing it back up because it was pinched up in
her coat, and so she was working that kind of
looking down at that and not watching totally around her.
And then she heard the dump dump right and as
she's looking, she's just shutting it, putting another round in it,
(14:36):
and this thing runs by, one of the smaller ones,
runs by right, just right through the doghouses, past them,
taking off down towards the river. She didn't know what
to do, but she was emboldened like you better run,
but you better run. She goes down the steps hangs
that left to go down the trail, and as she
does so, she sees the other one coming out onto
(14:58):
the trail and taking the smaller one off to the right.
So the one of the larger ones comes off from
the left, gets a hold of the smaller one running by,
and they move off to the right of the trail
and stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see We'll
be right back. After these messages, and its thick brush,
(15:20):
she can't see what they were doing, and she could
see the one she just shot further down the trail.
It stopped moving, it was just standing there. So she decides,
I'm gonna shoot it again, and starts walking down the
trail that direction. She said, in that moment, all fear
was blocked out. It was like tunnel vision. She was
gonna shoot this one again. That was just in the smokehouse.
(15:43):
She said. She got about two three steps and then
she heard a loud, howling kind of scream coming from
the one down the trail. Now where she stopped was
just where the brush was starting to get heavier, outside
of where they cleared the area for this cabin, And
she said when she stopped there, she got down on
one knee to hold the rifle and try to aim
(16:04):
down the sights, and she was having a hard time
with it because she couldn't quite handle it good enough
to be able to get a good sight picture. So
she said, she stood up and calm me, started walking
that way again. The whole time that's happening. The scream
is happening. This thing is bellowing a scream, real loud.
And as she's going down the trail, she hears off
to her right, she hears the other one with the
(16:26):
little one, and there's weird. She said. It sounded like
you pick, but she couldn't tell what they were saying.
And it was that murmuring again, and she said, she's
listening to that, but she was focused on the ones
she could see, and she wanted to go over there
and shoot it again. So as she's going down the trail,
she said she was very focused to a dumb level.
(16:47):
Those are her words. She said, I was being very dumb.
She got about twenty feet into the thicker brush going
down this trail, and she noticed it was where she
had dropped the bucket not too much earlier. You got
to understand, this isn't just right over there. This is
a good little distance. She could see this thing still
on the trail further down, She got down on her
(17:08):
knee again, picked it up, bam, fired a shot, and
she said, when she shot the second time, this thing
crumpled down, jumped up, frog hopped a couple times, and
jumped into the river. She again was working that action
and held it out a little further away so she
was able to operate it properly. So she got another
round in there, and she heard that movement off to
(17:30):
her right explode the smaller one and one of the
bigger ones takes off across the trail out of you.
She only saw it briefly when it was on the trail,
quickly out of you, and howling sound going on, she said,
when there was a chorus of howling at least three individuals,
and she suspects it was two smaller ones and a
(17:54):
large one just by. Some of it was super high
pitched and the other had more of a bellow to it.
And immediately she froze, turned around and went right back
to the cabin, she said. When she got to the
cabin steps, she was shaking real hard. Everything was so surreal,
she said. The greens and all the different hues of
green seemed to be very vibrant and bright, she felt
(18:16):
herself going into shock. She didn't know what it was
at the time, but being older now and explaining it,
she realized that she was going into shock. At that moment.
She sat down on the second step from the bottom,
and she was holding the rifle between her hands and
she was rocking and crying, not knowing what the hell
to do, she said. She sat there a good while.
There was other noises that happened that were down by
(18:38):
the river, but she couldn't make it out. She would
just hear it, notice it nothing nearby, so she just
went back to what she was doing. She said about
after that last noise she heard that got her attention,
she said, it had to have been forty five minutes
to an hour something like that. She hears the skiffs,
and she hears the skiff coming downriver. The only people
(18:59):
that usually came downriver where some the closest neighbors come
check on her right. So she sat there for a
minute given time, listening for the motor to get closer,
because she wanted to go and talk to somebody, but
she was scared of what just happened. So she gets
up when she assumes she's got time and she'll walk
down and there'll be someone to meet her there. Because
(19:19):
she heard the boat slow down and pulling up by
where they'd tie off skiffs, so she started on down there.
She said, every step she took was heavier than the
last one. By the time she got down by the
river bank, she was using that forty five seventy is
like a crutch to keep herself up, because she said
she felt so so heavy. I personally felt that feeling.
(19:40):
It's hard to fight. So she said, what she got
down there, she recognized one of the neighbors was up
on the river bank. He had a rifle in his hands,
his head of scope. It was his Moose rifle. She
knelt down and was leaning onto this forty five seventy
watching him. The neighbor was pointing the rifle off to
her left and he was just looking through the scope.
And then he turns he sees her, of course, stops
(20:04):
what he's doing and runs over to her. She said.
When he came up, his eyes were real, real big,
and he goes, that thing's over there. That thing's over there, right.
He says, come on, you're coming with me. Come on,
helps her up, and they walked down to where the
skiff is. He took the rifle from her and helped
her because she was going through it. Man, the shock
(20:25):
was sitting in heavy. She was shaking really hard. She says.
She felt so cold but hot at the same time.
That got her to the skiff. Her neighbor's wife helped
her in and their oldest son was with him. They
both were out of the skiff at this point while
she's taking to Bernie asking her what's going on? Them
to get up on the riverbank, she said, and was
(20:46):
out of you. She didn't know what was going on.
She sat there in shock, trying to explain what was
going on, but nothing was coming out. She would continuously
sob A few minutes later, she doesn't know exactly how
much time because she was severely trumize. At this point,
she watches them come back over and they're mumbling to
each other up on riverbanks. She couldn't hear what they
(21:07):
were saying. They jump into the skiff, they fire up,
and they take her up to their house. She said.
When they got to their house, she was coming out
of the fog of trauma. What she heard him saying
was is that when they pulled up they saw one
larger one and two smaller ones helping one of them
(21:28):
off into the brush. And they're having a hard time
because the one kept falling, they said. And they watched
that for a little bit until they were out of sight.
Right now, this isn't all that far from their house,
not that far. They're concerned. As she was sitting there
being doctored by the neighbor's wife and consoled and all
(21:48):
that kind of stuff, they took off again in their
skiff to go down there. When they went down there,
they gathered up some of her stuff, some clothes for her,
some of her personal longings. And what they did was
is they unchained the dogs that were left. There was
like four of them left at this point. Something like that.
(22:08):
Unchained them and had them jump in the skiff. The
dogs followed willingly, all except one. One took off running,
just took off. The other three followed them, got in
the skiff. They brought her belongings back, and they said
when they got back there, when they went to go inside,
the front door had been left open. But they saw
a small set of wet footprints and a large set
(22:32):
of wet footprints, and it smelled real bad inside the cabin.
The stove had been pushed over, and the sink that
was attached to a makeshift counter had been ripped out,
thrown out a window totally destroyed the window. In front
of where the sink area was, there was a dresser
that was knocked over. They had to flip that over
(22:53):
to get her clothes out. The place was trashed. They
didn't know what to make of it. They're like, what
the hell? So she tells him it was a harry Man.
They all have a discussion about the Harryman and stuff.
She had a really hard time. This was fifty years ago.
She had a really hard time expressing some of the details.
(23:14):
To get the details I did, it took a very
long time. You got to understand she's in her eighties now,
she no longer lives in Alaska. It was one of
her relatives had mentioned the channel and it took her
a while to reach out, and then it took a
while to get the complete story. So I want to
thank Bernie for doing that because it was not easy
(23:34):
for her. Again, this former homestead is on the Yukon.
I guess someone else is there now. One of her
distant relatives. She didn't want to say exactly where, but
it's on the Yukon River. She said she had talked
to those same neighbors over the years, off and on.
When telephones came more prevalent and all that kind of stuff,
she reached out and she talked to him, and come
(23:56):
to find out, their oldest son went missing. She said
about five years after the incident, he went out to
go caribou hunting and was gone. She blames herself, like
maybe something she did back then caused him to disappear.
And I was like, well, you don't know for sure.
Don't beat yourself up like that, right, Some of these
(24:18):
things that happen to people out in the wilds is
very hard for the average person to grasp being in
a situation like that until you've been in those shoes.
I'd refrain from passing any judgment as far as I've
heard it before. People like you shot at them, so
you cause problems. That's not necessarily the case when they're
(24:39):
killing your critters and everything talking is done. As far
as I'm concerned, I want to thank Bernie for sharing that.
It wasn't easy for It took quite a few calls
to get that whole experience. When I was sharing with
her what I picked up from her chain of events
and stuff. I was telling her own story back to
(25:00):
her to make sure I had it right. And that
was difficult too, because she kept breaking down crying. She
was essentially reliving it. I want to thank her, bless
her heart, thank her for sharing that wasn't easy. Alaska
got to love it. What I wanted to share with
you today outside of this creepy area, only creepy because
(25:21):
of the fog. What I want to share with you
today comes from Joseph's This happened in nineteen eighty seven.
He was young. He's my age, so he had to
have been eleven twelve ish at thirteen somewhere in there.
He just gained the trust of his dad to use
his dad's snow machine, which was arcticat jag Right. So
(25:43):
he has his own snow machine, which is a Yamaha
Bravo Little three P forty Cci. So he being older now,
his dad gave him the responsibility to go and get
some hair some spruce chickens, basically do a little hunting.
He takes his two younger brothers with them, nine and seven.
(26:04):
They ride the little Bravo. He rides his dad's arcticat.
They're from Bristol Bay. They were west of Portage Creek,
west of Sophie's Landing, basically on the New Shigak River.
Now when they went out, they're good many miles from home.
They had brought gas. He had his dad's eight millimeter
rifle and a couple of twenty two rifles for the
(26:26):
smaller game. The bigger boar rifle was you never know
if a moose is going to attack you kind of thing.
So as they're going along, it's wintertime, of course, and
we don't get a whole lot of daylight. The particular
time of year, you were getting about three hours of
actual daylight and then the rest of the time is
dusk for a couple hours to twilight. On both sides
(26:48):
of that, they were circling these little islands of black
spruce looking for porcupine, and they happened to find one.
They dispatched. They harvest the porcupine. He was teaching his
little brothers shot placement, all that for proper harvesting, because
they use the quills for a native bead work. The
meat's not bad. It's kind of like really greasy chicken
in my opinion, not a huge fan, but it's not bad.
(27:11):
So they're sitting there. He's shown them how to properly
stow it without getting quills all in your hands. And
so as he's doing so, the nine year old brother says,
there's a fox. He says, get it, turns and looks,
and he's watching with his own eyes this fox running
towards another group not that far away of black spruce.
They're like little islands because they're basically driving around on
(27:33):
the tundra, on the snow machines, and you got little
outcroppings which are black spruce mixed in. So the reason
I call them islands is because it's they're usually oblong
shaped and they're just a patch of black spruce and
some wool alders and stuff in there. So his little
brother shoots at the fox and it runs off. He
missed it. They continue on with the porcupine. He says,
(27:54):
once we're done with the porcupine, follow me. We'll see
if we can find out where that fox is hiding.
Maybe you can get another shot on it, or maybe
it's after rabbit and we'll see some rabbit. No harm,
no foul, Live and learn. As he's talking to his
second youngest brother, The very youngest brother, who was seven
at the time, says, what's that over there? They turn
(28:15):
and look and they don't see anything. At this time,
there was a warm front moving into the cold air,
so that creates very dense fog and it was rolling
in off of Bristol Bay. So he sees this fog
bank coming and realizes, well, in that fog bank, it's
going to be hard to see, it's gonna be hard
(28:35):
to hunt. We should just pack it in, which is
Why's choice. So as they're doing this, he was doing
a couple of last minute things, refueling gas for both machines,
just stand on top of it. Being the smart young
man his dad raised, he gets done. He's teaching his
brothers what he can and as they're sitting there and
(28:57):
he's discussing what he's doing and why and just pointing
out certain things to his brothers that fog bank has
moved in on them. Now they knew the trail, they
knew the area, but in really dense fog makes it
hard to navigate. So keeping that in mind, he was like,
we'll wait a minute and then we'll just take our
time on the trail. We're refueled on gas. We're good.
(29:20):
They decide, they fire up the machines. They are going
to go over to a larger little band of black
spruce and willows and check for rabbits, since they're right
there now. He knew he had about an hour or
so before it started getting dark and had to really
be beaten feet home, so he figured he'd kill that
time looking for rabbit. They get over there, he tells
(29:41):
his little brothers, you guys, go on your machine, circle around,
come back around and meet me and tell me if
you see any fresh sign. But yes, they agree. May
he hears, and he listens, and they're going slow out
of sight, and he's guestimating at this point on the
other side of this little island of black spruce. He
hears the machine power up and sees them tearing away,
(30:06):
and stay tuned for more sasquatch out to sea. We'll
be right back after these messages not coming back towards him,
so he chases after him, cuts him off, gets them
to stop, and they're panic. They're like, there's a Harry
Man over there in the fog over there in the
trees is right over there. We saw it it was
standing right there. So he's a calm down. You probably
(30:28):
just saw a group of cluster of trees. Let's go
take a look. They wanted no part of it. They
were freaking out there crying. He had his dad's eight millimeter.
That's a powerful rifle. He goes over there by himself.
He tells him stay put, takes their key so they
couldn't be scared, and take off without him. Rips back
(30:48):
over there, and as he's getting to where he assumes
they picked up speed, he notices movement in the black spruce.
He's aow. That must be a moose because it had
a brown tens to it. Now, what he was looking
at was the shoulder of this creature. At his angle,
it looked like the rump of a moose. We don't
(31:10):
need a moose, but if it's a good moose, maybe
i'll harvest a moose. He thought about it for a
minute and was like, nah, I probably shouldn't do that.
It's getting too close to dark, and my little brothers
are too small to really pack quarters out. So he
opted against it and decided he would flush it out
and see how big it was. So he circles around
and starts cutting a trail through the black spruce. They
(31:33):
were tight, but he was on his dad's new articat.
He was tearing through there, making a whole bunch of ruckus,
makes it all the way through, doesn't see the moose again,
and as he clears and comes out on the other side,
he's looking off to where his brothers are. He goes
over there, hands them to the key and says, it
was a moose. It was a moose, And they're pointing
(31:56):
back at the trees on his trail, just inside the
tree line that he just came out of. This thing
was standing there, swaying back and forth. And as this
is going on, the fog is getting thicker, it's getting
harder to see. They just see a dark shadow moving
back and forth, and he was really trying his best
to wrap his mind around what he was actually seeing.
(32:18):
He was trying to wrap his mind around what the
hell was happening just approximately not even fifty yards away,
just like right over there. He hands the key to
his little brother says, start it up, go to the
main trail and wait right there. I'm gonna use a
faster snow machine and try to get a better look
at it without getting too close, and they're like, don't
(32:40):
do it, don't do it. He wasn't gonna listen to
his little brothers. They take off for the trail and
he starts cutting back. This thing has been standing there
the whole time, just inside the black spruce, kind of
swaying back and forth. Fog is thick. He could still
see the dark shadow as he's getting closer, because he's
trying to gain speed to make a sharp year just
(33:00):
to get a closer look and still stay up to
speed without slowing down. As he's getting closer, and the
headlight starts to get closer as well, and starts penetrating
the fog a little bit. It moves, and it starts
moving away from him, but just inside the tree line,
so he parallels it as it's going through the trees,
(33:22):
and he's just looking over to his left watching this thing,
and then it really starts moving. It bolted, he said.
He track speed was probably fifty or sixty miles an hour,
and this sing just took off, sped past him, cut
across and went back across the open tundra into the
(33:43):
fog towards that other little island. They've just harvested the
porcupine at right, not all that far away, so he's
just intrigued. He needs to go back that same direction
to catch up with his brothers, and that dawns on him.
His little brothers are that way too. No longer worried
about this thing, he wants to get to his little brothers,
so he starts hauling ass as fast as he can.
(34:05):
As he passes that little island of trees where they
harvested the porcupine, he notices, just off into the fog
off to his left, still this thing was still there.
He could just barely make out the shadow of it
as it was moving. He couldn't tell how fast because
he was moving fast, but he was guestimating it. It
(34:25):
had to have been moving about the same speed he was.
He was a little panic stricken, worried about his little
brothers hauling ass. Once he gets up and catches up
catches trail of his little brothers, he follows their tracks.
He followed them all the way back to where it
meets up with the Noushigak River more towards the mouth,
(34:45):
and then they had to go upriver to cross and
all that kind of stuff. But that's where he met
up with them. Now, when he caught up with them,
they were sitting there waiting on him. They were panic stricken, scared,
where's our brother? So they were relieved when they I
saw him. When he got up to him, they kept
pointing at him, and he goes, yeah, I'm here, I'm here.
He hits the kill switch and they point and start
(35:08):
driving away. He turns around and looks. This thing is
in the trail behind him, approximately maybe sixty feet at
the most, swaying back and forth watching him. He said
he could hear the gurgled breathing. It wasn't breathing hard,
it was just big and breathing. He said. He fired
up the snow machine. He was so shaken up he
(35:28):
could barely hold the throttle, and he followed his little brothers.
He didn't look back for a long time, and he
didn't see anything. So they ended up going following the
wood river back on up to Elecnigig, through the trail
and all that stuff. They end up going home from there.
That happened in nineteen eighty seven. He shared this with
me a while ago. I've been waiting for a little
(35:50):
bit of fog. It's starting to you can see it's
still a little fog is starting to lift now. I'm
gonna thank Joseph for sharing that with me. Outside of
him and his little brother's talking about it every once
in a while, we're the first to hear his whole experience,
and I thank him for sharing. There is a lot
of stories of the little people I'm going to be
sharing here in the near future. For every hairy Man's
(36:12):
story I get when I talk to people, nine times
out of ten, the next thing out of their mouth
is I got some little people experiences too, So we'll
be delving into that as well. His friend Alaska, thanks
for joining me. I'll catch you guys on the next one.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
They say, you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
I don't want to be world outen.
Speaker 4 (37:00):
Means chot this job, that chid every day came, get back,
pry back the joy for me, joy, stay right, you.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Come in right away.
Speaker 5 (37:21):
Steps steps instead set steps, do.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Don't talk about the games.
Speaker 5 (38:19):
Steps us still states gas Stass
Now one of your pudding. I got a string going
on here. Something just kid my dog.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Something killed your dog, my dog.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
We're flying through the air, over the tree. I don't
know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm really confused.
All I saw was my dog coming over the fence
and he was dead. And once you hit the ground like,
I didn't see any cars. All I saw was my
dog coming over the fence. What are you putting? We
(00:40):
got some wonder or something prowling around out here? Did
you see what it was?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Was?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
It was standing enough. I'm out here looking through the
window now and I don't see anything. I don't want
to go outside. Jesus quiet, you're back or hello? Hit
the body out here?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
What went on out there?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
It's thought of a bit of about sixty fort nine.
I don't know easy of out there? Yeah, the bulking
right head.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Oh hey, greetings is Fred and Alaska. Thanks for joining
me today. What I wanted to share it to you
today comes from Bernadette known as Bernie. It's been fifty years.
It's been a long time. She had a homestead at
one point with her husband. She was a widower at
the time of this incident. The way it went down
was is her husband would commercial salmon fish to offset
(01:36):
the cost of remote living and trying to make a
homestead going. Many years ago, she lost her husband in
a fishing accident, so she was left this homestead with
eight dogs. They didn't have chickens or anything like that.
They just had sled dogs basically to commute back and
forth for their water supply, hunting, and all that kind
(01:56):
of stuff. Now, she was a much younger woman, of course,
and she's still in the throes of mourning. She was
having a really rough go of it. She was pregnant
at the time, but miscarried due to the stress of
losing her husband, so she was not in the best place.
She had mentioned that she was at her most vulnerable
(02:19):
point when these incidents started occurring, which bothers me because
it's not the first time I've heard it. It started
off with small harassments and she didn't know what was
going on. It started off with dogs. Two of her
dogs went missing. The chains were snapped, and she thought
they just got into a fight with a black bear
(02:40):
or something and they broke chains and ran off right.
Things that she was easily dismissing as life in the
wilds of Alaska. A few more weeks go on, there's
other stuff going on. Piles of brush that were piled
up by her husband at one point were scattered. One morning,
she made mention several times at a lot of things
were happening, but she was in the throes of depression
(03:05):
in mourning that she was just dismissing it offhand, not
even taking critical thinking time or none of it. Just Oh,
the wind blew the brush and something ran through. Maybe
a moose with its antlers was rubbing against it or whatever.
Grant you, dogs didn't make a noise, which is odd
because the dogs would always bark at moose or whatever. Again,
(03:26):
she wasn't in her right space as far as paying
attention as she should. A few more weeks go by.
It's salmon season and she has people, of course donating
fish for her because she just lost a baby, lost
her husband, going through it right. So the neighbors that
were five, ten, twelve miles away or whatever, they were
(03:47):
looking out as best they could. She had processed all
the salmon and had it in the smokehouse. She was
tending to it daily. One morning she wakes up to
dogs yelping. They had eight, they're down to six. She
gets up to this yelping and it goes outside to
tell them to knock it off, because there was a
couple of dogs that were fighting for dominance basically since
(04:11):
the other two went missing, which were the two dominant
dogs in that little pack. So these other two had
been at it and she thought it was just them
doing that again. When she goes outside, she sees what
she thought was a very large man at the time
holding one of the dogs. She yells, hey, let go
of my dog, and this thing turns and just walks away, nonchalant,
(04:33):
carrying the dog dog was obviously deceased, just walks off
into the brush like she didn't exist. And so she
was just shocked by it, and she thought maybe she had.
Am I losing my mind? Did that just happen? Kind
of situation? Right? So she retreats back into the house
and she's contemplating, I need someone's help. I don't know
(04:53):
what the hell that thing is, but I need someone's help.
She doesn't know what to do at the moment, so
she decides she's going to stay inside keeping She got
her husband's rifle. She hadn't even thought about guns the
whole time he had been gone or whatever, even though
he told her and taught her how to use it
and everything like that. But so happens her husband had
forty five seventy right lever action old Marlin. So she
(05:16):
went and got that, got the ammal for it, loaded
it up, had it by the door. Now, she went
out and did her smoking stuff for her salmon. She's
processing it, doing her thing, and she made a specific
point to take those guts and go dump them down
at the river, which was quarter mile away. She had
(05:37):
the gun inside right inside the door because she's not
used to it and didn't really want to have to
use it. She kind of just left it alone and
had it nearby just in case because she wasn't thinking
Harry Man when she saw this large man walk off
with her dog. Again, She's going through a lot emotionally,
so she was just like, I don't want to shoot
(05:59):
a neighbor or someone that I didn't recognize in a
moment that may have been helped me out and I
didn't even know it or something. Just trying to dismiss it.
She goes and dumps this bucket of salmon. Carcass's just
flay out salmon or whatever. When she does that, she
hears weird huffing. But it's not like anywhere near she said.
She could hear it back up on a ridge just
(06:20):
above her house, this weird huffing sound. Or she thought bear.
She was like, oh, that's a really big bear. So
she drops her bucket, hauls ass back to the cabin,
gets inside, grabs a rifle. All the dogs were in
their little houses. They normally, with bears, they would be
outside of their houses barking unless the bear came close
and they've retreated inside and harassed the bear or whatever. Right,
(06:43):
they never stopped barking at a bear. Whatever this was,
They weren't barking. They all retreated in their houses, right,
So she doesn't know what to do. She listens for
a while. That huffing noise stops, the dogs come back
out of their houses. Things calm down. She sets the
rifle down and goes intends to her smokehouse. Now, as
(07:04):
she's tending to the smokehouse, she hears her dogs start
growling real, real loud. It was echoing from inside their
little doghouses, right, So she thought it was odd because
they were just all outside of their houses she steps
into the smokehouse less than two minutes, and they're making
all this noise from inside their individual doghouses. So she
(07:26):
sticks her head out of the smokehouse and she doesn't
see anything. It's just quiet. So she gets this eerie
feeling of being watched and retreats back to the house
after shutting the door real quick to her smokehouse. She
gets the house, grabs a rifle, comes back out with
a rifle, and standing there a minute, looking around, just
feeling very out of her own skin. She said she
was scared, but she didn't know of what. She says.
(07:48):
She went over to her smokehouse and opened some of
the vent doors on the side where this fish didn't
get too smokey. So she was tending to that while
being aware of what's going on around her and trying
not to feel like she's losing her mind, because she
was chalking a lot of this up to stress. You're
over exaggerating this because of that. You're over exaggerating this
(08:11):
because of this, because she's missing dogs, and if there's
stuff she's dismissing that, she freely admits she shouldn't have been,
but it was just too much at the time. So
when she gets the little event doors open and stuff,
she said, she retreated back into the house, set the
rifle up against the inside of the door, left the
door wide open, and sat on the four little steps
(08:31):
that came down from the cabin. She said. As she
was sitting there, she just started talking out loud to
her deceased husband, basically putting it out there, Hey, what
do I do? I don't know what to do. I
think maybe I should leave here. There's nothing here for me.
It's too hard and stuff like this. Now you got
to remember, this is fifty years ago. It's been a
(08:52):
while now. As she is doing this talking out loud,
she hears voices off in the distance, off to her left,
which would be down towards the river from the front
of this cabin. She thought, maybe neighbors are coming. She goes, oh, okay,
maybe I'll go greet them, thinking happy thoughts like ah,
(09:13):
maybe my husband and spirit sent some relatives to come
visit or something. Because she was thinking I should have
heard a skiff for something, but she didn't. She just
heard murmuring off in the distance. She thought nothing of it.
She did, however, grab the rifle because of everything that
was going on and feeling watched. She felt unsafe, so
she grabbed the rifle and walks down the trail back
(09:37):
to where she just a little bit ago dumped the
fish guts right into the water. Of course, she didn't
dump them on the ground, but when she gets there,
the bucket was gone. She saw right where she had
dropped all the guts and stuff. It was like a
little bit of an eddye, so the current hadn't swept
it all away. She noticed that the actual flat out
(09:58):
sammon themselves, not necessarily the guts and stuff, those were
all missing, right, And so she's standing there looking around
trying to figure out where the murmuring was coming from.
That she heard that drew her down there. And as
she's doing so, she's holding this gun, and she said
the gun was bigger than her. She's just a little
short at the basket lady. So she decides she'll look
(10:20):
around and start hollering out, hey, I'm over here, I'm
over here, this is Bernie. No one's responding, and then
she hears murmuring back towards her cabin, and she just thought,
what the heck, there's only one trail, and I didn't
hear anybody go and buy me. So immediately she got
very paranoid, and she starts walking back down the trail.
(10:41):
She said, as she was walking, she was trying not
to think about bad stuff. She was just trying to
think happy thoughts, to keep the clouds away, kind of mentality.
And she said, the closer she got, the harder it was.
She said, just as she was coming through the brush
on the trail where it opens up and you could
see where they had cut down trees and all that stuff,
(11:02):
and they had the doghouses and the smokehouse and stuff.
She was walking up. There's just a short little trail
up to the steps of the cabin, she said. When
she got to that little breakoff from the trail, that
ran forward, because she had the small house off to
her left and the short little run to the stairs
off to her right, and the doghouses in front of her.
She said, as she stood there, she froze because what
(11:26):
she was seeing in front of her she couldn't make
sense of right. So what she saw was four individuals,
two very small. She thought they were bear cubs initially,
that's why when she froze, she didn't realize they weren't bears.
The two smaller ones that looked like bear cubs because
they were hunched over on all fours or whatever. They
(11:47):
stood up and then took off into the brush. She
noticed that when they took off running, there was another
dog that was dragged by one of them. So she's
stuck watching this unfold in front of her, trying to
figure out what she's looking at. And the other two,
she said, we're about the same size. She didn't know
how tall they were, but much taller than her, very wide.
(12:08):
She said, they look like cavemen, caveman without winecloths. I
asked if she could tell if those male female, and
she just said they were just there. She had no
other description other than they look like cavemen and their
faces were dark, she said. She stood there for a
second and then slowly was turning the rifle. This rifle
she couldn't fully put up on her shoulder. She had
(12:30):
to tuck it under her armpit because she was too
small to shoulder it properly. So she swung it under
her armpit and faced it towards these two creatures, and
they bolted different directions. Gone. She thought again, she was
losing her mind. She didn't know what to do. She
retreats into the house, shuts the door, drops the gun
on the floor, and retreats into a corner behind the
(12:52):
woodstove and just sits there quietly. She was crying. She
started saying prayers. At the time she was saying these prayers,
it wasn't an actual prayer to Jesus or anything like that.
She was just asking for help, God help me. As
she was sitting there, bam, bam, she starts hearing this
(13:12):
pounding going on, and it sounds like it's opposite side
of the room, on the outside of the cabin. This
banging is happening. She's petrified, she's froze up. And as
she's sitting there, she said that she got the overwhelming
sense that she needed to stand up for herself right.
She says, she doesn't know where it came from. It
(13:33):
was just in that moment. She stood up, walked over,
grabbed the rifle, opened the door, and she said when
she opened the door, one of the taller ones. She
doesn't know which one. She's assuming it was one of
them because that's what she just saw. Moments ago, was
standing by the smokehouse and was halfway in it. She
(13:53):
turned the rifle and bam, fired a shot. The scene
fell to the ground, rolled out of there, stood up,
and took off, running towards the river. Now, when it
took off running towards the river, she heard screaming from
somewhere else. It wasn't screaming from the one she just shot.
She heard screaming from up on the ridge behind the cabin.
And as she's standing there and shock like holy crap,
(14:15):
and she's trying to work that. The lever action sheet
unchambered the round, but she was having a hard time
closing it back up because it was pinched up in
her coat, and so she was working that kind of
looking down at that and not watching totally around her.
And then she heard the dump dump right and as
she's looking, she's just shutting it, putting another round in it,
(14:36):
and this thing runs by, one of the smaller ones,
runs by right, just right through the doghouses, past them,
taking off down towards the river. She didn't know what
to do, but she was emboldened like you better run,
but you better run. She goes down the steps hangs
that left to go down the trail, and as she
does so, she sees the other one coming out onto
(14:58):
the trail and taking the smaller one off to the right.
So the one of the larger ones comes off from
the left, gets a hold of the smaller one running by,
and they move off to the right of the trail
and stay tuned for more sasquatch out to see We'll
be right back. After these messages, and its thick brush,
(15:20):
she can't see what they were doing, and she could
see the one she just shot further down the trail.
It stopped moving, it was just standing there. So she decides,
I'm gonna shoot it again, and starts walking down the
trail that direction. She said, in that moment, all fear
was blocked out. It was like tunnel vision. She was
gonna shoot this one again. That was just in the smokehouse.
(15:43):
She said. She got about two three steps and then
she heard a loud, howling kind of scream coming from
the one down the trail. Now where she stopped was
just where the brush was starting to get heavier, outside
of where they cleared the area for this cabin, And
she said when she stopped there, she got down on
one knee to hold the rifle and try to aim
(16:04):
down the sights, and she was having a hard time
with it because she couldn't quite handle it good enough
to be able to get a good sight picture. So
she said, she stood up and calm me, started walking
that way again. The whole time that's happening. The scream
is happening. This thing is bellowing a scream, real loud.
And as she's going down the trail, she hears off
to her right, she hears the other one with the
(16:26):
little one, and there's weird. She said. It sounded like
you pick, but she couldn't tell what they were saying.
And it was that murmuring again, and she said, she's
listening to that, but she was focused on the ones
she could see, and she wanted to go over there
and shoot it again. So as she's going down the trail,
she said she was very focused to a dumb level.
(16:47):
Those are her words. She said, I was being very dumb.
She got about twenty feet into the thicker brush going
down this trail, and she noticed it was where she
had dropped the bucket not too much earlier. You got
to understand, this isn't just right over there. This is
a good little distance. She could see this thing still
on the trail further down, She got down on her
(17:08):
knee again, picked it up, bam, fired a shot, and
she said, when she shot the second time, this thing
crumpled down, jumped up, frog hopped a couple times, and
jumped into the river. She again was working that action
and held it out a little further away so she
was able to operate it properly. So she got another
round in there, and she heard that movement off to
(17:30):
her right explode the smaller one and one of the
bigger ones takes off across the trail out of you.
She only saw it briefly when it was on the trail,
quickly out of you, and howling sound going on, she said,
when there was a chorus of howling at least three individuals,
and she suspects it was two smaller ones and a
(17:54):
large one just by. Some of it was super high
pitched and the other had more of a bellow to it.
And immediately she froze, turned around and went right back
to the cabin, she said. When she got to the
cabin steps, she was shaking real hard. Everything was so surreal,
she said. The greens and all the different hues of
green seemed to be very vibrant and bright, she felt
(18:16):
herself going into shock. She didn't know what it was
at the time, but being older now and explaining it,
she realized that she was going into shock. At that moment.
She sat down on the second step from the bottom,
and she was holding the rifle between her hands and
she was rocking and crying, not knowing what the hell
to do, she said. She sat there a good while.
There was other noises that happened that were down by
(18:38):
the river, but she couldn't make it out. She would
just hear it, notice it nothing nearby, so she just
went back to what she was doing. She said about
after that last noise she heard that got her attention,
she said, it had to have been forty five minutes
to an hour something like that. She hears the skiffs,
and she hears the skiff coming downriver. The only people
(18:59):
that usually came downriver where some the closest neighbors come
check on her right. So she sat there for a
minute given time, listening for the motor to get closer,
because she wanted to go and talk to somebody, but
she was scared of what just happened. So she gets
up when she assumes she's got time and she'll walk
down and there'll be someone to meet her there. Because
(19:19):
she heard the boat slow down and pulling up by
where they'd tie off skiffs, so she started on down there.
She said, every step she took was heavier than the
last one. By the time she got down by the
river bank, she was using that forty five seventy is
like a crutch to keep herself up, because she said
she felt so so heavy. I personally felt that feeling.
(19:40):
It's hard to fight. So she said, what she got
down there, she recognized one of the neighbors was up
on the river bank. He had a rifle in his hands,
his head of scope. It was his Moose rifle. She
knelt down and was leaning onto this forty five seventy
watching him. The neighbor was pointing the rifle off to
her left and he was just looking through the scope.
And then he turns he sees her, of course, stops
(20:04):
what he's doing and runs over to her. She said.
When he came up, his eyes were real, real big,
and he goes, that thing's over there. That thing's over there, right.
He says, come on, you're coming with me. Come on,
helps her up, and they walked down to where the
skiff is. He took the rifle from her and helped
her because she was going through it. Man, the shock
(20:25):
was sitting in heavy. She was shaking really hard. She says.
She felt so cold but hot at the same time.
That got her to the skiff. Her neighbor's wife helped
her in and their oldest son was with him. They
both were out of the skiff at this point while
she's taking to Bernie asking her what's going on? Them
to get up on the riverbank, she said, and was
(20:46):
out of you. She didn't know what was going on.
She sat there in shock, trying to explain what was
going on, but nothing was coming out. She would continuously
sob A few minutes later, she doesn't know exactly how
much time because she was severely trumize. At this point,
she watches them come back over and they're mumbling to
each other up on riverbanks. She couldn't hear what they
(21:07):
were saying. They jump into the skiff, they fire up,
and they take her up to their house. She said.
When they got to their house, she was coming out
of the fog of trauma. What she heard him saying
was is that when they pulled up they saw one
larger one and two smaller ones helping one of them
(21:28):
off into the brush. And they're having a hard time
because the one kept falling, they said. And they watched
that for a little bit until they were out of sight.
Right now, this isn't all that far from their house,
not that far. They're concerned. As she was sitting there
being doctored by the neighbor's wife and consoled and all
(21:48):
that kind of stuff, they took off again in their
skiff to go down there. When they went down there,
they gathered up some of her stuff, some clothes for her,
some of her personal longings. And what they did was
is they unchained the dogs that were left. There was
like four of them left at this point. Something like that.
(22:08):
Unchained them and had them jump in the skiff. The
dogs followed willingly, all except one. One took off running,
just took off. The other three followed them, got in
the skiff. They brought her belongings back, and they said
when they got back there, when they went to go inside,
the front door had been left open. But they saw
a small set of wet footprints and a large set
(22:32):
of wet footprints, and it smelled real bad inside the cabin.
The stove had been pushed over, and the sink that
was attached to a makeshift counter had been ripped out,
thrown out a window totally destroyed the window. In front
of where the sink area was, there was a dresser
that was knocked over. They had to flip that over
(22:53):
to get her clothes out. The place was trashed. They
didn't know what to make of it. They're like, what
the hell? So she tells him it was a harry Man.
They all have a discussion about the Harryman and stuff.
She had a really hard time. This was fifty years ago.
She had a really hard time expressing some of the details.
(23:14):
To get the details I did, it took a very
long time. You got to understand she's in her eighties now,
she no longer lives in Alaska. It was one of
her relatives had mentioned the channel and it took her
a while to reach out, and then it took a
while to get the complete story. So I want to
thank Bernie for doing that because it was not easy
(23:34):
for her. Again, this former homestead is on the Yukon.
I guess someone else is there now. One of her
distant relatives. She didn't want to say exactly where, but
it's on the Yukon River. She said she had talked
to those same neighbors over the years, off and on.
When telephones came more prevalent and all that kind of stuff,
she reached out and she talked to him, and come
(23:56):
to find out, their oldest son went missing. She said
about five years after the incident, he went out to
go caribou hunting and was gone. She blames herself, like
maybe something she did back then caused him to disappear.
And I was like, well, you don't know for sure.
Don't beat yourself up like that, right, Some of these
(24:18):
things that happen to people out in the wilds is
very hard for the average person to grasp being in
a situation like that until you've been in those shoes.
I'd refrain from passing any judgment as far as I've
heard it before. People like you shot at them, so
you cause problems. That's not necessarily the case when they're
(24:39):
killing your critters and everything talking is done. As far
as I'm concerned, I want to thank Bernie for sharing that.
It wasn't easy for It took quite a few calls
to get that whole experience. When I was sharing with
her what I picked up from her chain of events
and stuff. I was telling her own story back to
(25:00):
her to make sure I had it right. And that
was difficult too, because she kept breaking down crying. She
was essentially reliving it. I want to thank her, bless
her heart, thank her for sharing that wasn't easy. Alaska
got to love it. What I wanted to share with
you today outside of this creepy area, only creepy because
(25:21):
of the fog. What I want to share with you
today comes from Joseph's This happened in nineteen eighty seven.
He was young. He's my age, so he had to
have been eleven twelve ish at thirteen somewhere in there.
He just gained the trust of his dad to use
his dad's snow machine, which was arcticat jag Right. So
(25:43):
he has his own snow machine, which is a Yamaha
Bravo Little three P forty Cci. So he being older now,
his dad gave him the responsibility to go and get
some hair some spruce chickens, basically do a little hunting.
He takes his two younger brothers with them, nine and seven.
(26:04):
They ride the little Bravo. He rides his dad's arcticat.
They're from Bristol Bay. They were west of Portage Creek,
west of Sophie's Landing, basically on the New Shigak River.
Now when they went out, they're good many miles from home.
They had brought gas. He had his dad's eight millimeter
rifle and a couple of twenty two rifles for the
(26:26):
smaller game. The bigger boar rifle was you never know
if a moose is going to attack you kind of thing.
So as they're going along, it's wintertime, of course, and
we don't get a whole lot of daylight. The particular
time of year, you were getting about three hours of
actual daylight and then the rest of the time is
dusk for a couple hours to twilight. On both sides
(26:48):
of that, they were circling these little islands of black
spruce looking for porcupine, and they happened to find one.
They dispatched. They harvest the porcupine. He was teaching his
little brothers shot placement, all that for proper harvesting, because
they use the quills for a native bead work. The
meat's not bad. It's kind of like really greasy chicken
in my opinion, not a huge fan, but it's not bad.
(27:11):
So they're sitting there. He's shown them how to properly
stow it without getting quills all in your hands. And
so as he's doing so, the nine year old brother says,
there's a fox. He says, get it, turns and looks,
and he's watching with his own eyes this fox running
towards another group not that far away of black spruce.
They're like little islands because they're basically driving around on
(27:33):
the tundra, on the snow machines, and you got little
outcroppings which are black spruce mixed in. So the reason
I call them islands is because it's they're usually oblong
shaped and they're just a patch of black spruce and
some wool alders and stuff in there. So his little
brother shoots at the fox and it runs off. He
missed it. They continue on with the porcupine. He says,
(27:54):
once we're done with the porcupine, follow me. We'll see
if we can find out where that fox is hiding.
Maybe you can get another shot on it, or maybe
it's after rabbit and we'll see some rabbit. No harm,
no foul, Live and learn. As he's talking to his
second youngest brother, The very youngest brother, who was seven
at the time, says, what's that over there? They turn
(28:15):
and look and they don't see anything. At this time,
there was a warm front moving into the cold air,
so that creates very dense fog and it was rolling
in off of Bristol Bay. So he sees this fog
bank coming and realizes, well, in that fog bank, it's
going to be hard to see, it's gonna be hard
(28:35):
to hunt. We should just pack it in, which is
Why's choice. So as they're doing this, he was doing
a couple of last minute things, refueling gas for both machines,
just stand on top of it. Being the smart young
man his dad raised, he gets done. He's teaching his
brothers what he can and as they're sitting there and
(28:57):
he's discussing what he's doing and why and just pointing
out certain things to his brothers that fog bank has
moved in on them. Now they knew the trail, they
knew the area, but in really dense fog makes it
hard to navigate. So keeping that in mind, he was like,
we'll wait a minute and then we'll just take our
time on the trail. We're refueled on gas. We're good.
(29:20):
They decide, they fire up the machines. They are going
to go over to a larger little band of black
spruce and willows and check for rabbits, since they're right
there now. He knew he had about an hour or
so before it started getting dark and had to really
be beaten feet home, so he figured he'd kill that
time looking for rabbit. They get over there, he tells
(29:41):
his little brothers, you guys, go on your machine, circle around,
come back around and meet me and tell me if
you see any fresh sign. But yes, they agree. May
he hears, and he listens, and they're going slow out
of sight, and he's guestimating at this point on the
other side of this little island of black spruce. He
hears the machine power up and sees them tearing away,
(30:06):
and stay tuned for more sasquatch out to sea. We'll
be right back after these messages not coming back towards him,
so he chases after him, cuts him off, gets them
to stop, and they're panic. They're like, there's a Harry
Man over there in the fog over there in the
trees is right over there. We saw it it was
standing right there. So he's a calm down. You probably
(30:28):
just saw a group of cluster of trees. Let's go
take a look. They wanted no part of it. They
were freaking out there crying. He had his dad's eight millimeter.
That's a powerful rifle. He goes over there by himself.
He tells him stay put, takes their key so they
couldn't be scared, and take off without him. Rips back
(30:48):
over there, and as he's getting to where he assumes
they picked up speed, he notices movement in the black spruce.
He's aow. That must be a moose because it had
a brown tens to it. Now, what he was looking
at was the shoulder of this creature. At his angle,
it looked like the rump of a moose. We don't
(31:10):
need a moose, but if it's a good moose, maybe
i'll harvest a moose. He thought about it for a
minute and was like, nah, I probably shouldn't do that.
It's getting too close to dark, and my little brothers
are too small to really pack quarters out. So he
opted against it and decided he would flush it out
and see how big it was. So he circles around
and starts cutting a trail through the black spruce. They
(31:33):
were tight, but he was on his dad's new articat.
He was tearing through there, making a whole bunch of ruckus,
makes it all the way through, doesn't see the moose again,
and as he clears and comes out on the other side,
he's looking off to where his brothers are. He goes
over there, hands them to the key and says, it
was a moose. It was a moose, And they're pointing
(31:56):
back at the trees on his trail, just inside the
tree line that he just came out of. This thing
was standing there, swaying back and forth. And as this
is going on, the fog is getting thicker, it's getting
harder to see. They just see a dark shadow moving
back and forth, and he was really trying his best
to wrap his mind around what he was actually seeing.
(32:18):
He was trying to wrap his mind around what the
hell was happening just approximately not even fifty yards away,
just like right over there. He hands the key to
his little brother says, start it up, go to the
main trail and wait right there. I'm gonna use a
faster snow machine and try to get a better look
at it without getting too close, and they're like, don't
(32:40):
do it, don't do it. He wasn't gonna listen to
his little brothers. They take off for the trail and
he starts cutting back. This thing has been standing there
the whole time, just inside the black spruce, kind of
swaying back and forth. Fog is thick. He could still
see the dark shadow as he's getting closer, because he's
trying to gain speed to make a sharp year just
(33:00):
to get a closer look and still stay up to
speed without slowing down. As he's getting closer, and the
headlight starts to get closer as well, and starts penetrating
the fog a little bit. It moves, and it starts
moving away from him, but just inside the tree line,
so he parallels it as it's going through the trees,
(33:22):
and he's just looking over to his left watching this thing,
and then it really starts moving. It bolted, he said.
He track speed was probably fifty or sixty miles an hour,
and this sing just took off, sped past him, cut
across and went back across the open tundra into the
(33:43):
fog towards that other little island. They've just harvested the
porcupine at right, not all that far away, so he's
just intrigued. He needs to go back that same direction
to catch up with his brothers, and that dawns on him.
His little brothers are that way too. No longer worried
about this thing, he wants to get to his little brothers,
so he starts hauling ass as fast as he can.
(34:05):
As he passes that little island of trees where they
harvested the porcupine, he notices, just off into the fog
off to his left, still this thing was still there.
He could just barely make out the shadow of it
as it was moving. He couldn't tell how fast because
he was moving fast, but he was guestimating it. It
(34:25):
had to have been moving about the same speed he was.
He was a little panic stricken, worried about his little
brothers hauling ass. Once he gets up and catches up
catches trail of his little brothers, he follows their tracks.
He followed them all the way back to where it
meets up with the Noushigak River more towards the mouth,
(34:45):
and then they had to go upriver to cross and
all that kind of stuff. But that's where he met
up with them. Now, when he caught up with them,
they were sitting there waiting on him. They were panic stricken, scared,
where's our brother? So they were relieved when they I
saw him. When he got up to him, they kept
pointing at him, and he goes, yeah, I'm here, I'm here.
He hits the kill switch and they point and start
(35:08):
driving away. He turns around and looks. This thing is
in the trail behind him, approximately maybe sixty feet at
the most, swaying back and forth watching him. He said
he could hear the gurgled breathing. It wasn't breathing hard,
it was just big and breathing. He said. He fired
up the snow machine. He was so shaken up he
(35:28):
could barely hold the throttle, and he followed his little brothers.
He didn't look back for a long time, and he
didn't see anything. So they ended up going following the
wood river back on up to Elecnigig, through the trail
and all that stuff. They end up going home from there.
That happened in nineteen eighty seven. He shared this with
me a while ago. I've been waiting for a little
(35:50):
bit of fog. It's starting to you can see it's
still a little fog is starting to lift now. I'm
gonna thank Joseph for sharing that with me. Outside of
him and his little brother's talking about it every once
in a while, we're the first to hear his whole experience,
and I thank him for sharing. There is a lot
of stories of the little people I'm going to be
sharing here in the near future. For every hairy Man's
(36:12):
story I get when I talk to people, nine times
out of ten, the next thing out of their mouth
is I got some little people experiences too, So we'll
be delving into that as well. His friend Alaska, thanks
for joining me. I'll catch you guys on the next one.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
They say, you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
I don't want to be world outen.
Speaker 4 (37:00):
Means chot this job, that chid every day came, get back,
pry back the joy for me, joy, stay right, you.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Come in right away.
Speaker 5 (37:21):
Steps steps instead set steps, do.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Don't talk about the games.
Speaker 5 (38:19):
Steps us still states gas Stass
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