West Virginia Trail Cam Captures Man Walking Casually With Two Bigfoot

There's something about trail camera footage that hits differently when it captures a moment nobody was supposed to see, and a recent upload from American Bigfoot Files delivers exactly that kind of moment. The footage in question comes from a site deep in the Cranberry Wilderness of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and what it shows has researchers and witnesses buzzing. The story comes from Wendel Puit, a man who spent over a decade running camera trap surveys across roughly 40,000 acres of high country in West Virginia under contract with the state Division of Natural Resources and the Monongahela National Forest. His job was black bear population monitoring, but what his cameras started capturing went far beyond anything the DNR was paying him to document. At a site he simply calls "Site 14," positioned at about 4,100 feet elevation on a bench below a ridge crest dividing the Williams River drainage from a smaller hollow, a standard infrared trail camera captured something extraordinary. A man in his 60s, walking upright through hemlock shadow, accompanied by two shapes standing close to seven feet tall. The man wasn't fleeing. He wasn't being captured or dragged. He was walking beside the larger of the two figures, matching its stride, and at one point reached out to place his hand flat against its forearm, the way a person might touch a horse to let it know they're there. And the figure allowed it. What makes this footage so compelling isn't just the presence of the tall figures, it's the body language. The trust displayed in that gesture suggests a relationship that goes beyond a single encounter. This wasn't a startled hiker stumbling into something unknown. This looked like routine. Like a Tuesday morning walk through familiar territory with familiar company. The context Puit provides adds layers to the footage. In the 18 months leading up to that capture, his cameras at multiple sites had been knocked off their mounts, and one housing was cracked clean down the seam, not chewed the way a bear would damage it, but split as if compressed in a fist. He found tracks in January snow that measured roughly 16 inches long with a five-toe pattern and a stride that put the next print nearly five feet ahead. He collected scat samples near his camera stations that didn't match anything a black bear produces, too large in volume, containing chewed plant fiber consistent with ramps and trout lily bulbs in concentrations that didn't fit known bear diet patterns. The Cranberry Wilderness itself is one of the largest roadless areas east of the Mississippi River, a fact that takes on new weight once you've spent serious time walking it. The terrain is steep sandstone ridges cut by narrow hollows, red spruce and hemlock on the high ground, hardwood lower down, and laurel and rhododendron thickets so dense in places that a person can disappear into them standing up. It's the kind of country that holds its secrets well, and the kind of country where reports of large, hair-covered figures have circulated among locals for generations. West Virginia has its own regional folklore around these beings, sometimes called the "Wood Booger" or simply "the old ones," and the cultural memory runs deep in Appalachian hollows. Puit's account carries the weight of someone who spent eleven years in that country, someone who knew the difference between a bear track and something else, someone who tried to explain away what he was seeing before he allowed himself to see it. His supervisor at the DNR, a biologist named Carl Ratliff, initially chalked up the strange track to a deformed human bootprint altered by partial melt and refreeze, a reasonable scientific explanation that Puit accepted for four more months before the evidence piled up too high to ignore. The footage itself is worth seeking out. American Bigfoot Files has the full video, and Puit walks through the entire story from start to finish, including the personal details that shaped his years in those mountains, the loss of his wife Darlene, the quiet that drove him deeper into the woods, and the slow realization that he was documenting something the official channels had no framework to receive. It's the kind of firsthand account that reminds you why people keep going back into these places with cameras and notebooks and an open mind. If you've spent any time researching reports from the Appalachian region, you know that West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, and the broader southern Appalachians have produced a steady stream of sightings for decades. The dense cover, the rugged terrain, and the cultural tradition of keeping quiet about what happens in the high hollows all create conditions where something could live alongside human populations for generations without ever being formally documented. Footage like this, captured not by a casual hunter with a cell phone but by a professional surveyor with eleven years of baseline data on the same trail, carries a different weight. The video is worth your time. Watch the whole thing. Let the details settle. And pay attention to that moment when the man reaches out and touches the forearm of the figure beside him, because that single gesture tells you more about what's happening in those mountains than any track or scat sample ever could.