Kentucky Logger Claims Bigfoot Family Saved Him From Bear Attack

Posted Wednesday, September 23, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

A story out of Harlan County, Kentucky just stopped me in my tracks. An old logger by the name of Hobart Sloan came forward with a tale that's been eating at him for nearly two decades, and it's one of the most remarkable encounters I've come across in a long while. Back in October 2005, Hobart was working a timber job on the north slope of Pine Mountain, a stretch of Appalachian wilderness that runs more than 100 miles from Tennessee up toward Virginia. He was alone at dusk when a black bear caught him and absolutely mauled him. Bitten clean through the shoulder, thigh ripped open, scalp peeled back. The kind of injuries that don't usually come with a happy ending. The official hospital record says Hobart crawled three-quarters of a mile to a landing by morning. Tough old logger story, right? Well, Hobart says that record is a lie, because he never crawled a foot. According to him, something came out of the dark and roared that bear off him. A giant. And behind that giant came a female with warm hands, and behind her a young one that whistled like a bird. The three of them picked him up and carried him into their own rock house, a shelter up in that steep, rocky country, and they kept him alive through the coldest night of the fall. Before first light, they carried him out and laid him down where his brother-in-law Arley would find him. Now, this isn't just some random claim. Hobart comes from serious Appalachian timber stock. His daddy logged before him, and his granddaddy hauled logs out with mules back when the coal camps at Lynch and Benham were running three shifts. He spent 47 years cutting timber in Harlan County. He knows those mountains the way you know your own living room. And the thing is, the signs were already there. Months before the attack, he and his crew started noticing things that didn't add up. Knocking sounds off the ridge, dry and clean, struck sounds, not the soft pop of a warming limb. Huckleberry bushes stripped clean at seven and eight feet high with not a broken branch in sight. A 16-inch track in the mud of the gas well road, five toes, no claw marks, pressed in deep as if a loaded pickup had stood on one foot. The old folks in those mountains have always had their own name for what's out there. Hobart's grandfather called them "wood boogers," delivered in the same flat voice he'd use for copperheads and slick roads. A thing you minded, not a thing you argued about. There was even a man at their church, Brother Estil Creech, who swore a giant hairy man walked the ridge above his daddy's still back in the 1920s and never troubled it. The moonshiners took to leaving meat scraps on a stump after that, every run, for luck. That Appalachian tradition runs deep. The Cherokee carried stories of large, hairy wild men through these mountains long before settlers ever showed up, and "wood booger" is just one of many regional names that have followed them through the centuries, alongside the Yahoo, the Wild Man, and a dozen other local monikers depending on which holler you grew up in. Pine Mountain itself, with its unbroken ridgeline, sandstone outcrops, and remote coves where the soil runs black as coffee grounds, is exactly the kind of country where these beings could pass through unseen for generations. Hobart says he's 78 years old now and he's done lying. He wants the record straight. The bear didn't finish him because something else stepped in, something tall, something strong, something that whistled like a bird and had warm hands. You really need to hear this one in his own words. The video is over on the Cryptid's Den channel, and it's worth every minute. Hobart's voice carries the weight of a man who's held this story close for almost 20 years and finally decided to set it down.