Texas Gas Station Attendant Vanishes After Bigfoot Sightings

Posted Wednesday, July 08, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

There's a case out of western Texas that's been quietly haunting researchers for decades, and a recent video dives deep into the strange disappearance of a gas station attendant who may have gotten a little too close to something he shouldn't have. The story centers on Larry Holt, a 33-year-old man who took a job at the Red River Gas station on Old Highway 90 in Val Verde County back in 1988. The station sat about 22 miles east of Del Rio, right near the Mexican border, in a stretch of desert that's about as isolated as it gets. Larry lived in a metal trailer behind the station as part of his pay, and he liked it that way. He was a quiet guy, divorced, kept to himself, and didn't mind the solitude. For three years, everything was fine. Then in the spring of 1991, Larry started telling the station's owner, Garrett, about something he'd been seeing at night. A dark figure standing motionless in the distance beyond the station grounds. At first, Garrett figured it was coyotes or migrants passing through, which is pretty common in that part of Texas. But the sightings kept happening, and the figure kept getting closer. By late June, Larry was finding strange footprints in the sand near his trailer. Large prints, longer than a human foot, with what looked like three toes instead of five. The tracks led from the trailer out into the desert and just stopped. Larry also reported hearing slow, repetitive scratching on the metal of his trailer at night. The last time Garrett saw Larry was on July 18, 1991. Larry told him the figure had been standing just 50 meters from the store, right on the edge of the lit area. He described it as being over two meters tall with shoulders that were too broad and arms that were too long. The proportions were wrong, Larry said. And here's the detail that really stands out: when Larry shined his flashlight directly at the figure, it didn't cast a shadow. Two days later, on the morning of July 20, a truck driver named Ray Tollson pulled into the station to fuel up and grab some coffee. The store door was wide open, the lights were on, the radio was playing, and the air conditioner was humming. But there was no one behind the counter. A cup of coffee sat on the table, still warm. The cash register was closed. The last log entry was made around 6:00 a.m. In the back room, the landline phone receiver was off the hook and ringing continuously, indicating a busy line. Larry Holt was never seen again. The case was officially closed as a noncriminal disappearance. No body, no signs of a struggle, no witnesses, just an open door and a half-finished cup of coffee. The video also mentions that there was a recording from the station that showed Larry leaving the store, stopping, and never returning. Something strange appears on the tape, a shadow that covers part of the screen for a few seconds, before the recording itself disappeared from police custody. For anyone who's spent time researching sightings in the Texas-Mexico border region, this kind of report isn't entirely unusual. Val Verde County sits in a corridor that's produced numerous encounters over the years, and the terrain, with its thick mesquite, rocky desert, and remote stretches of highway, is exactly the kind of habitat these beings tend to favor. The description Larry gave, tall, dark, wrong proportions, no shadow, tracks with three toes, matches a pattern that researchers have documented across hundreds of separate incidents throughout North America. What makes this case particularly chilling is the timeline. Larry wasn't a guy who was out looking for something. He was just doing his job, working the night shift at a lonely gas station in the middle of nowhere. Whatever he was seeing came to him, and it kept coming closer until one morning he simply wasn't there anymore. The full breakdown of this case, including more details about the timeline and the missing recording, is worth checking out in the video itself. It's one of those stories that stays with you.