New Witness: Bigfoot Warned 1924 Miners of Mount St. Helens Eruption

There's a video floating around YouTube right now that I can't stop thinking about, and if you've ever been fascinated by the 1924 Ape Canyon incident on Mount St. Helens, you need to see this one for yourself. For those who might not know the full history, the Ape Canyon encounter is one of the most famous and thoroughly documented Sasquatch incidents on record. In the summer of 1924, a group of miners working a claim high on the southeast shoulder of Mount St. Helens claimed they were besieged overnight by large, hair-covered beings who hurled rocks at their cabin and battered the walls until dawn. The men fired their rifles into the dark, and when morning came, they fled the mountain and never returned. Newspapers across the country picked up the story, and it's been part of Sasquatch lore ever since. What most people don't know, and what this video brings to light, is that there was a sixth person in that cabin that night. A 14-year-old boy named Halbert "Hal" Ainsworth, brought along to cook and tend the pack mules. His family kept his name out of the papers to protect him, and for 82 years, his account stayed hidden. Hal lived to be 96 years old. In the spring of 2006, just three months before he passed, he finally sat down with an oral history recorder named Dileia Crane and told the part of the story the original miners never shared with the newspapers. Not because they were lying, but because it was something no one in 1924 was prepared to hear. And what he said flips the entire legend on its head. The word Hal kept coming back to wasn't "attack." It was "spared." Six men with rifles in a wooden cabin, surrounded by beings strong enough to throw stones the size of stove lids clean through plank walls, and not a single one of them got so much as a scratch. As Hal put it, "They could have killed us in the first 10 minutes. They chose not to." The video walks through Hal's account in order, and the order itself is what changes everything. The legend begins at nightfall with the rocks. Hal's account begins days earlier, with the mountain itself behaving strangely. The game had vanished from country that had been thick with deer, elk, and smaller creatures. The creek running past their diggings had turned warm, not sun-warm but warm from below, warm at dawn before the sun could touch it. There was a sulfur smell, like struck matches, that came and went. And twice that week, faintly at night, the ground shivered, like the mountain turning over in its sleep. The men chasing a gold seam paid it no mind. But the animals knew to leave, and the men did not. Then came the night the Sasquatch came down out of the higher rocks and surrounded the cabin. Hal described the rocks not as a barrage but as a rhythm, steady like a drum, like someone knocking and knocking on a door that won't open. Underneath the drumming, there was a sound the men could never place, a low sound from all around the cabin at once. Hal described it 82 years later as the sound you make when you're trying to move stock that won't budge. Urgent. Frustrated. Like every rock was them saying the same word over and over: leave, leave, leave. And here's the part that genuinely gave me chills. Hal said he didn't understand why the beings were in such a terrible hurry to drive the men off the mountain until May 18, 1980, when he turned on his television and watched Mount St. Helens erupt. Fifty-six years later, he finally understood what they had been trying to tell them. The video also touches on something that often gets overlooked in the retelling of this story. The indigenous peoples of the Mount St. Helens region didn't regard that mountain as empty wilderness. They regarded it as inhabited, dangerous, and alive. They had long spoken of large beings in its high country, and crucially, they linked those beings to the mountain's own moods. The mountain was known to smoke and shudder. It had erupted within living memory before 1924. The oldest accounts don't treat the wild people of the high slopes and the fire in the mountain as separate facts. They treat them as one country, one danger, one thing. When the wild people came down, you went down with them. And faster. This is the kind of content that reminds me why I love covering this subject. The 1924 Ape Canyon incident has been picked apart for a hundred years, and yet here's a perspective that nobody had, from someone who was actually there. A child at the time, yes, but a witness nonetheless, and one who carried that night with him for over eight decades before sharing what he saw. I don't want to give away too much more, because the video itself does a beautiful job laying out Hal's account and letting the weight of it land. It's worth your time, especially if you've ever stood at the base of Mount St. Helens and wondered what really happened in that gorge a century ago. Go find it. Watch it. And then come back and tell me what you think, because I've been turning this one over in my head for days.