Bigfoot and Mysterious Deaths and Disappearances

The common image of Bigfoot is that of a shy, elusive creature, a gentle giant more afraid of and wary of us than we are of it. While there are numerous reports of wood knocking, howls, and other intimidating behavior, cases of Bigfoot attacks on people are extremely rare, and it is easy to assume that if they exist they are mostly reclusive and shy. Yet there have been some odd cases throughout the years that show that this might not always be the case, and here we will look at a selection of mysterious deaths and disappearances that, for one reason or another, have been linked to Bigfoot. 

According to researcher Jim Porter, on the site Quora, in the 1920s a Creek Indian man was found dead under strange circumstances in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. The man was found with legs drawn up, hands folded under his head, and some of the party who found him were under the impression that he had not only died in deep pain but also while praying. It would be found that he had died of a severe beating, with terrible blunt trauma wounds to his head and body, and the fact that it seemed as if he had been praying as he had been killed and the area around the man’s body was replete with huge footprints and hand prints as well as indications of a struggle, there were soon spooky stories in the tribe. At the time, a large, hairy beast had been frequently seen in the area, and it was thought that this was a revered sacred forest spirit, so had this spirit, which could be equated to Bigfoot, had killed the man, possibly as he lie prostrate praying to it for mercy. No one knows for sure. Eerily, there would also be found piles of bones in the area including human bones.

Also from the 1920s is the tale of a whole town that was apparently abandoned after a spate of Bigfoot attacks and even some apparent deaths and disappearances attributed to the beasts. Our story here takes us to Port Chatham, also called Portlock, a tiny bay situated on the very far tip of the Kenai Peninsula, in the rough wilds of southern Alaska. A speck of a town populated mostly by Russian and Native fishermen, lumberjacks, and miners, it had been inhabited since the 1700s, although it would not be until the 1920s that a series of strange events sent the town reeling in terror. It began with frequent sightings of a large, hairy “wild man” prowling about out in the wilds, as well as huge footprints and tales of trees completely ripped out of the ground, all of which was enough to get the town on edge, but things would get more ominous.

In 1931, a lumberjack by the name of Andrew Kamluck was allegedly found dead, apparently of having been bashed over the head with a heavy piece of logging equipment, which had then been thrown with great force some 10 feet away from the body. At the time no one could figure out just how this was possible, as it was a very heavy piece of machinery and far beyond what any normal murderer would have been able to achieve. With stories of the hairy giant still doing the rounds and with large footprints found near the body, it was soon being rumored that this monster, which the Natives were calling the nantiinaq, had been responsible. 

Over the years there were reported to be several other dead bodies found in the remote areas and trails around town, usually described as being horribly mangled and in some cases “torn to shreds,” to the point that by the 1940s cannery workers refused to come to work one season and were begged to return the following season with promises of armed guards protecting the camp around the clock. There was even a moose found with its head completely twisted off in a macabre sight that caused the hunters who found it to flee in fright. In the meantime, there were allegedly many mysterious disappearances as well, and by 1949 it seems that the residents had had enough and abandoned the town altogether. So what really happened here?

There seems to be very little in the way of news stories from the time that corroborate these deaths and disappearances, and there is some evidence that some of the Natives may have fanned the fuel of folklore to create this scary urban legend in order to keep outsiders away. Yet, we are still left with the fact that the town did exist and it was abandoned in seemingly great haste, so what happened here? According to Brian Dunning of the site Skeptoid:

So if no facts at all in the Port Chatham Monster story hold up, what then actually did happen to Portlock? Because it's definitely gone now, and it was definitely doing just fine industrially when everyone left. It turns out the death of Portlock had little to do with Bigfoot, nantiinaq, or any other murderous creatures. The abandonment wasn't even related to any decline of Portlock's small but thriving industries. Portlock's death sentence was signed when, along the opposite edge of the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska Route 1 was completed during the 1940s, finally allowing efficient transportation between Anchorage and all of the many towns along the peninsula. These towns boomed. Ships were no longer needed to supply the peninsula, and towns that were inaccessible from the highway — like Portlock — were quickly abandoned. Portlock's small population had only to move but a short distance in order to live and operate their businesses much more conveniently and cheaply. Even to this day, there is only a single unpaved forest road within 10km of Port Chatham. So it turns out the town said to have been abandoned due to violent Bigfoot attacks seems to have never had any attacks of any kind, and was abandoned for entirely non-cryptozoological reasons.

So were any of the reports and stories true in any sense at all? Or is this all pure myth infused into real events? Whatever the case may be, there are people who to this day visit the region looking for the mysterious creatures. According to an interview with Native Sally Ash done by journalist Darren Smith:

Portlock was kind of a creepy place. They’d tell us don’t go out on a foggy day. That’s when he’s walking around. You could run into him and you never know what he might do. People come and they’re just jumping around looking around for him. They’ll never find him like that, because he will run away from you and he’s fast ya know… we keep telling people ‘Don’t go looking for him’ and they go and do it anyway. They don’t believe us. He’s never going to show himself like that. When you’re looking for him and thinking you’re going to find him. He’s not hanging around waiting for people. If you follow him he will hide and he could turn into different animals. You can chase him and chase him and suddenly he disappears behind a tree and when you get close enough to see him all you see is a shimmering little mouse — shape-shifting. They would change to different animal;  make you feel sad for them. They said don’t touch them, just leave them alone. And don’t shoot them. You can shoot them but you’ll never kill them. One man tried to do it, but he just took the bullet and pulled it out of his chest.

Whatever the case is with Port Chatham, it still seems to be a very odd place, indeed. At around the same time we have a case from the 1950s, which apparently happened at Mt. St. Helens, in the U.S. state of Washington. Washington has long been a wellspring of reports of the giant, hairy hominid known variously as Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and other regional names. It is practically woven into the lore of the area, with countless sightings and encounters with these creatures logged in from the wilds here. It is perhaps no surprise that the legendary beast has managed to occasionally emerge into the limelight, and on occasion, it has managed to work its way into some real cases of mysterious disappearances and deaths to add more mystery to the already mysterious. 

In May of 1950, 32-year-old Jim Carter came to Mount St. Helens to go skiing in the vicinity of Ape Canyon, along with a group of 20 others. The weather at the time was described as clear and calm, the skiing conditions perfect, and Carter was a seasoned and accomplished skier, so there would have been little reason to think that anything could possibly go wrong that day. As the group was at a landmark called Dog’s Head, at an altitude of around 8,000 feet, they decided to take a breather, and Carter allegedly said he was going to ski ahead and come around to take a photo of them. He was allegedly acting normally at this point and there was nothing strange about it at all, but things were about to take a rather bizarre turn.

After skiing off around to the left towards the timberline, Carter purportedly suddenly broke out into a mad, desperate dash on his skis down the mountain, according to one of the witnesses “taking chances that no skier of his caliber would take unless something was terribly wrong or he was being pursued.” Carter allegedly was supposedly “going like the devil,” jumping over two or three large crevasses and continuing to careen right over the steep canyon wall, much to the bafflement of the other skiers. They would go to the ledge and expected to see Carter down towards the bottom, but he was nowhere in sight. They scoured the bottom of the canyon to find no trace of the missing skier except for a box of film, and so a large-scale search was launched. Things would only get stranger from there.

According to some of the searchers, the whole time they were out there strange things happened. Some of the searchers claimed to have heard odd noises they could not explain or to have seen large, dark shapes looming through the trees. There also seems to have been at least one searcher who would claim that he had been overwhelmed by a horrific stench at one point. One of the searchers was professional mountaineer Bob Lee, who called the entire search incredibly eerie and would come to the conclusion that Carter had actually been kidnapped and perhaps even killed by the legendary Sasquatch. A report on the incident in the Longview Washington Times would say of it:

Carter's complete disappearance is an unsolved mystery to this day," declared Bob Lee, a well-known Portland mountaineer who is a member of the exclusive worldwide Alpine Club, a leader of the 1961 Himalayan expedition, and adviser to the 1963 American expedition. Lee said he had never seen one of the monsters, but that there certainly was evidence "that there was something strange on the high slopes of the mountain." He was convinced of this during the search for Carter, he said."Dr. Otto Trott, Lee Stark and I finally came to the conclusion that the mountain devils got him," said Lee seriously. Lee, a member of the Seattle Mountain Search and Rescue unit at the time, describes the hunt for Carter in Ape Canyon as "the most eerie experience I have ever had." He said that every time he got cut off from the rest of the searchers during the long hunt, he got the feeling that "somebody was watching me. I could feel the hair on my neck standing up. It was eerie. I was unarmed, except for my ice ax and, believe me, I never let go of that.

Seventy-five people apparently searched for five days straight for the missing man, but no sign of him or his equipment was ever found. Lee would tell the Longview Washington Times that the area had had Bigfoot attacks in the past, and the report continues:

Lee, who has lived in the Northwest most of his life, recalls there are about 25 different reports of people attacked by "apelike men" in the St. Helens and Cascade areas over a 20-year period. One was a group of Boy Scouts from Centralia, he said. Couldn't we check on that story? As near as he could remember, several of the boys who were taken off the mountain were hysterical after being attacked by the "mountain devils." Director Dick Whitney of the regional Boy Scout office in Olympia, Wash., promised to look for a record of the incident. To our surprise he called back to say that he had located the name of the leader and the troop involved in the incident. "It was a troop under the late Scoutmaster Pease from Centralia, “ he said. Miners, scouts, Indians, mountaineers and most recently an editor and other reliable Portland residents, the list of persons who have seen the Hairy Apes of Mt. St. Helens is very impressive.

It is hard to say what to make of this case. What happened to Jim Carter and was it in any way related to the reports of Bigfoot and even Bigfoot attacks in the area? Who knows? Another case that is often linked to Bigfoot is a mysterious death covered by missing person investigator David Paulides, in his Missing 411 series of books. Our case here revolves around an experienced hunter, outdoorsman, bear expert, and wildlife biologist by the name of Bart Schleyer. He was a very respected outdoorsman and animal expert, having worked for the for Fish and Game and the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, as well as the Grizzly Bear Recovery Project in Yellowstone National Park in the 1980s putting telemetry radio collars on the bears to monitor their activities, before moving north to Alaska, and he was also considered to be one of the world's foremost experts on capturing, radio-collaring and tracking tigers, having spent months in Russia working to help save endangered Siberian tigers. Schleyer was also a master survivalist, during his fieldwork often staying out in the remote mountains on his own for months at a time, and he knew everything there was about the wildlife of these places, so he is perhaps one of the last people one would expect to turn up dead in the wilderness under suspicious circumstances. 

In September of 2004, Schleyer arrived by floatplane at an isolated lake in the Reid Lakes area, on the southern slope of the Selwyn Mountains of Canada’s Yukon Territory for a bow hunting excursion. It was just about as remote as you can get, with no roads leading in, no settlements, and only accessible by floatplane. The plane’s pilot dropped him off there in that cold expanse, and although Schleyer was alone, considering his vast experience in the outdoors no one really thought anything of it at the time. He had made countless trips like this, it was routine for him, and he was also very well-equipped, with enough food for at least 2 weeks and top-of-the-line clothing and camp gear such as a tent and an inflatable boat, so when the pilot returned to the base camp three days later it was a little odd that Schleyer was nowhere to be seen. A cursory search of the camp showed it to be mostly in order, with a half-eaten meal set out and the rest of the food all there, but there was no sign of Schleyer himself. Since his bow, the inflatable boat, and some of his gear were gone, the pilot assumed he was just out hunting, although it was a bit odd that he had left his backpack, bear spray, a knife and a VHF radio behind. The pilot waited, but Schleyer never did come back for his scheduled flight out, and so the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were notified. 

The RCMP launched a comprehensive search of the area and soon found the inflatable boat abandoned on the shore of the lake about a mile and a half from the camp, and up a path about 60 yards into the trees they found the missing man’s bow and arrows in a handmade buckskin quiver carefully leaned up against a tree. Next to the bow was a dry-bag full of various miscellaneous gear, which looked like he had probably been sitting on because it was located on flat ground next to a thicket of trees. It was thought that he had set up a spot to call moose in, but there was no sign of Schleyer himself. At the time, it was thought that he had just gotten lost or had possibly made the long trek through the wilderness towards the highway, but those who knew Schleyer insisted that he would have never wandered off without his bow or other stuff. What was going on here?

The search continued, and they came across the curious sight of Schleyer’s hunting pants unceremoniously lying on the ground, oddly turned inside out as if they had been peeled off and discarded. Soon after this they located a baseball cap, a camera, and a balaclava and camouflage mask he had been wearing, all strung along as if he had just walked along and tossed them aside as he went. The searchers then came across the morbid sight of part of a skull and just a few small bones, but the rest of the body was nowhere to be found. It was now obvious that Schleyer was dead, but what had happened? 

Since it seemed as if he had been caught off guard and ambushed by something very large and powerful, the first and most obvious explanation first proposed was that he had been attacked and dragged off by a large bear. There were found bear tracks and excrement in the general vicinity, but some experts disputed this. It was argued that if it had been a bear or wolf attack, then there would have certainly been signs of some sort of a struggle, torn fabric everywhere, and a lot of blood. The area was pristine, with even the coating of soft, easily disturbed moss intact, there was no sign of fabric, and only a tiny spot of blood found on the camouflage mask. His discarded pants were also undamaged, with no blood on them, and looked as if they had been willfully removed, so how did that fit in with a bear attack? Friends also pointed out that Schleyer was an expert outdoorsman who was very experienced with dealing with large predators in the wild and an expert hunter, so it seemed strange that something would catch him off guard and so quickly and decisively drag him off, without even giving him time to reach for his bow, and to leave the ground so completely undisturbed. An autopsy of the skull and bones would later also show no signs of damage from a predator’s teeth. 

Other ideas included that he had died suddenly from a heart attack and then scavengers had done the rest, but Schleyer had been in peak physical condition and had no history of health problems, so this seems unlikely. It could also have been foul play, but who else would be all the way out there in the middle of nowhere, and why would they attack him but not steal his expensive bow, boat and other gear? It doesn’t make sense, and police have ruled it out. Considering the rather bizarre circumstances, of course, it has been speculated that he was attacked and perhaps carried off by a Bigfoot, as such a creature might be able to sneak up on him and would certainly be powerful enough to subdue him and incapacitate him without leaving much blood or signs of a struggle behind. It seems if this were the case there would have been found footprints to that effect, but the area behind his was apparently grass and brush so perhaps it didn’t leave prints behind because it attacked from there? What happened here? What is the meaning of the peeled-off pants and the lack of any blood or struggle? There is no way to know, and the death of Bart Schleyer remains a perplexing mystery. 

Moving on in the 1980s we have the curious case of 16-year-old Theresa Ann Bier. On June 1st, 1987, Theresa went off on a camping trip to the rather remote area of Shuteye Peak, in the scenic Sierra Mountains approximately 25 miles northeast of Bass Lake. Her companion on this particular trip was a 43-year-old Russell Welch. It was well known at the time that Welch was an avid Bigfoot enthusiast, in fact a self-proclaimed expert on the elusive creature, and the two allegedly had embarked out into the wilderness on a quest to find the legendary beast. This is not so strange in and of itself, as the Sierra Nevada Mountains are quite the hotspot for Bigfoot activity, with Welch even claiming he had seen them several times in the region, but it was a bit weird that he believed he was in actual continuous contact with a whole group of them, and also perhaps a little odd that Bier’s parents would let her go off alone on a camping trip alone with a much older man on what many would have considered to be a crackpot quest. Nevertheless, they went off on their adventure and only one of them would come back.

When Welch returned to Fresno several days later without Bier in tow and the girl made no effort to contact her family, he was considered a person of interest in her possible disappearance. When he was questioned by authorities about what had happened to Bier, things got rather strange. Welch at first told police that she had run away from him out into the wilderness, but then he would change his mind and decide to tell them what “really happened,” which would prove to be perhaps far weirder than any of the law enforcement personnel present could have possibly imagined.

Welch claimed that during their camping trip, they had gone out on a hike to look for the elusive Sasquatch and that at some point Bier and him had become separated in the thick forest. At that point, Welch claimed that one of the massive creatures had swooped in to grab her and carry her off into the wilderness. It may come as no surprise whatsoever that police found this all pretty hard to swallow, even though the suspect himself seemed to truly believe what he was saying, and sensing that they had a kidnapping or potential murder on their hands the police immediately descended upon the area where the two had been camping, yet a full and comprehensive search of the surroundings turned up no trace of Theresa Bier. When authorities grilled Welch again to try and glean more information he stood by his story that she had been dragged into the wilds by a Bigfoot, adamant that that this was what had really happened.

Sasquatch or not, Welch was charged with child stealing and a trial was set. While he was waiting to go to court for quite serious charges, Welch was offered the opportunity to sign a waiver allowing prosecutors to pursue a murder charge in the event that the body was found in exchange for a light, one-year prison sentence in the meantime. Welch, still apparently believing that Bier had been truly in fact abducted by a giant hairy hominid, promptly refused the deal. In response to this, as well as the lack of any concrete physical evidence at all to link him to the vanishing, the charge was dropped just three days before the impending trial in order to avoid defying the law of “double jeopardy,” which forbids a suspect from being charged twice for the same crime, in this case meaning his release would allow authorities to later charge him with the more serious charge of murder in the event of a discovery of the body. It was thought that a trial for kidnapping at that time could not be won on such flimsy evidence and even if the body was not found, the child-stealing charges could eventually be reinstated, although he would likely only get a maximum of 4 years for this lesser crime if they could even make it stick at all.

Since no body has ever been found, and indeed Bier has never been heard from again, and no real evidence other than suspicions exists to hold Welch, he remains a free man. As to the victim herself, there has been absolutely no sign of what has become of her, and oddly Welch has always maintained that she was really in fact kidnapped by a Sasquatch, which of all the wild stories and excuses he could attempt to weave seems like an odd choice at the very least. Indeed, his insistence on this outlandish tale has caused some people to wonder if there is any chance he could possibly be telling the truth. Welch must have known that not only would no one believe him, but that this far-out yarn would cause him to look even more suspicious, but he stuck to his surreal version of events anyway. Why would that be? He could have simply told police that Bier had wandered off hiking and never come back or that she had been injured, so why turn it into a bizarre tale of a Bigfoot abduction? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Of course, the most likely scenario is that she either got lost in the woods and perished or was the victim of foul play at the hands of Welch, but in either case, it does seem quite unusual that he should so wholeheartedly take the Bigfoot angle in his defense in the aftermath. Perhaps he was so far gone into his obsession with Bigfoot that he sincerely believed the fantasy but it is hard to tell. No matter what the truth may be, it certainly seems that Welch knows what really happened to Bier, or at least more than we know, although whether we will ever really know what that may be is debatable.

The whole sordid mystery has raised all kinds of questions that do not seem to have been satisfactorily answered. Just what was the relationship between Welch and Bier, and why would he be allowed to go out camping alone with someone so much younger than himself in the first place? What exactly happened when they arrived? If Welch did not have anything to do with the vanishing then just what really did happen to the missing girl? Did she really vanish while they were separated hiking and if so did she yell out for help? Did she get lost or injured and he is hiding this information for some reason? If so, why? Did he kill her and if so why? Was she really abducted by Bigfoot, as crazy as that may seem? Why did he always insist on that version of events? These seem to be questions whose answers we are doomed to never know. The only thing we know for sure is that Theresa Ann Bier went out into those rugged mountains and never came back, and the case remains unsolved.

Another case that may or may not have anything to do with Bigfoot is that of 29-year-old Jordan Girder, who in 2018 made his way out to northern Minnesota with a plan to camp through a winter in the rough and rugged Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Not long after he arrived, his truck was flagged by conservation officer Sean Williams, from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources because it had been illegally parked in front of private property. However, a search for Girder to ask him to move his truck could find no sign of him and indeed no trace of where he had even entered the woods. As a matter of fact, it would seem as if Girder had simply walked off the face of the earth. For 6 months there was no word from Girder and no sign of what had happened to him, with massive searches turning up nothing. It would not be until April of 2019 that his camp would be found in a very remote area on a south-facing slope of the mountain. As soon as the site was found it was immediately eerie and alarming, and Williams says of it:

It’s in a super-remote place. If you were looking for a spot to avoid contact with people, he really did find it. We were kind of just taking it in, myself and the agent, a visual inventory. We noticed a large amount of blood everywhere.

The campsite featured blood on the tent and sleeping bag, as well as some oddities such as a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol in the hammock with two loaded magazines outside the gun and a cellphone that held no messages of distress or anything amiss. Indeed, there was really no sign of struggle in the campsite at all, except for the blood, and there was no sign of Girder himself. Later ten bones would be found thought to belong to Girder, but no skull was ever located. 

Immediately there were theories as to what had happened to him. Foul play was ruled out for having no evidence to support it, and suicide was ruled out during the investigation, too, because the gun hadn’t been used and Grider’s cellphone located at the scene didn’t include anything resembling depression, cries for help, or suicidal ideation of any kind. One idea was that he had been surprised by a pack of wolves, but not only would the probability of a wolf attack be, according to one wolf expert “infinitesimally rare,” but it would also have left behind more signs of a struggle and torn and shredded clothing everywhere, more blood and viscera, as they are not neat predators, and there were also found no rips in the tent or the hammock Girder had set up. Police would eventually rule out an animal attack. Another idea was that he had accidentally fatally stabbed or cut himself and then bled out and was then subject to the work of scavengers, but there is little evidence to support this and the knives in the campsite were sheathed and without any blood on them. He also might have been murdered, but why, and who would have gone all the way out there to do it? Then of course there has been the theory floating about that he was attacked and killed by a Bigfoot. What happened to Jordan Girder? We may never know for sure, and it remains unresolved. 

Some other miscellaneous mysterious deaths and disappearances related to Bigfoot have been catalogued by longtime Bigfoot researcher Jeff Cox, who relates a string of bizarre occurrences on the site Quora. He writes:

Bigfoot researcher Tim "Coonbo" Baker told a story during an Internet radio show of a first person account he was given by someone who claims to have witnessed a bigfoot killing someone. Apparently two men, a hunter and a guide, we're in rural Arizona or New Mexico (can't remember which) back in the 80's. During their hunting excursion they sited a bigfoot creature. Evidently, the hunter decided to get famous and took a shot at the creature. However, instead of killing it, all it did was piss him off. The creature attacked the men, knocking the hunter's head off with a swipe of his hand. When he turned to the guide, the guide dropped his rifle and backed away, and managed to escape with his life.

The guide reported this event to law enforcement, and took them to the location where it occurred. There was blood scattered about and the hunter's body and severed head were lying there as the witness had reported. Even though huge footprints were everywhere and the witness clearly stated that it was a bigfoot that did it, the law enforcement officer stated at the time that his report would theorize that it was a bear attack. Coonbo states that he spent some time researching this to see if any official report of the "death by bear attack" had been filed those years ago, but he was unable to locate any such report in the archives of the county where this supposedly took place.

A story from Canada tells of a couple of friends who were camping or trapping in the sticks. During their trip they had returned to their campsite on a couple of consecutive days to find that something or someone had gone thru their belongings, opened containers that required hands and fingers to open, and found some of their food had been eaten. Both men got spooked as it was getting dark and decided to end their trip early. One started packing up camp while the other went to go get their vehicle. When he returned 30 min or so later, he found his friend dead and headless. The victim had finished up packing and was sitting on a log facing the fire, and some kind of creature set upon him, killing him before he could react. The surviving friend seemingly missed the melee by mere minutes. He jumped in his vehicle and left the area, and his camping gear, where it sat.

Brenda Harris of the new Mexico shadow seekers, on the Bigfoot Outlaws Internet radio show, told the audience about a report she investigated in a small community on the Pueblo reservation earlier this year. An elderly couple were sitting in their home one day, when a huge sasquatch creature just barged into their house through the front door without warning (or an invitation). They grabbed brooms and other household implements and tried shooing the creature out of their house, but it grabbed the man and tore both his arms off and beat him to death with his own arm. A few days later a similar event took place a couple blocks away, when another elderly man was attacked and killed in his home by some sort of powerful creature.

Tim "Coonbo" Baker was on that radio show, and after hearing these accounts postulated that it's at least possible that heavy metal run off from those huge epa caused mine spills may be the cause. The mines leaked millions of gallons of polluted water into the river system, and since the rivers there drain into river systems near the Pueblo reservation, this pollution could possibly be the cause for this creature snapping and becoming a murderous monster. One final story I recall off the top of my head took place in New Mexico. A border patrol officer was thrown off a cliff by what a witness reports to be a tall hairy manlike creature. Although there was a witness to the death, and it was common knowledge by local border patrol that creatures had been sited prior to this, their official report stated that the cause of the officer falling off the cliff was undetermined.

In most of these cases, it seems reasonable to presume that there was some rational explanation, including foul play or animal attacks, mixed in with spooky stories and lore. Yet what if there is more to it? Is there any way any of this could be connected somehow to the Bigfoot phenomenon, and if so just what might those connections be? Whatever the case may be, if there is anything to that hypothesis, then it might show that these are not always the gentle giants they are presumed to be, and they are some damn creepy cases nonetheless.