11 Men Vanished From 1911 Logging Camp After Strange Grooves Appeared

So I just came across this absolutely chilling video on YouTube that I had to share with anyone who appreciates a good historical encounter story. This one goes way back — all the way to 1911 — and it's got that classic Pacific Northwest setting that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The video tells the story of a timber operation up on the Cascade Ridge in Oregon, where something happened that caused experienced loggers — men who had spent decades in the woods and weren't prone to superstition — to simply walk off the job and never come back. We're talking about 11 men gone in just 9 days, with the camp being completely abandoned overnight by the time a supply train showed up. What really got my attention was the detail about the markings found on felled sugar pine logs. The narrator, a scaler named Henry Leward Bryce, describes finding deep parallel grooves scored into the bark — four of them together, spaced about 3.5 inches apart. Now, for anyone familiar with the subject, that measurement is going to ring a bell. That's right in the range of footprint widths that have been reported in countless encounters over the years. The marks were on the uphill face of the logs, as if something had gripped or tested them. The thing that makes this account so compelling is the credibility of the witnesses. These weren't city folks seeing shadows in the woods. The fallers were Scandinavian timber veterans from Wisconsin and Minnesota. The superintendent was an 11-year company man who believed in board feet and geological surveys. When these men started disappearing from the roster, nobody from the company or county even bothered to look for them. They just vanished from the documentation. The geography described is exactly the kind of terrain that fits the profile — a remote ridge shelf at around 4,000 feet elevation, surrounded by old growth forest so dense that starlight couldn't penetrate it. A single access road that became impassible in winter storms. The kind of place where something could move through the timber completely unseen. The video goes into much more detail about what happened over those weeks in February 1911, including the responses of the different men — the head faller, the saw filer, the Basque rigging foreman — each reacting differently to whatever was happening on that ridge. It's a slow-burn kind of story, but the kind of historical documentation that you rarely come across. Definitely worth checking out for anyone interested in the long history of encounters in the Pacific Northwest. The video is over on the Myrkora Archives channel and runs pretty long, so settle in for it. The ledger entries and firsthand account make this one stand out from typical campfire stories.