Surveyor's Terrifying Encounter with Nepal's Migo Wild Man
Posted Sunday, July 12, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
So there's this video that just popped up on YouTube from a channel called Error 199, and honestly, it's one of those stories that sticks with you long after you've finished watching. It's a first-person account from a man named Alex, a Canadian surveyor engineer who was part of a four-person expedition back in October 2015, working in the remote Lapurna (Annapurna) region of Nepal on a preliminary survey for a hydroelectric project. What was supposed to be a routine mapping job turned into something none of them could have prepared for.
The team consisted of Alex, his geologist buddy Ben, a Sherpa guide named Tensing, and a young porter in his late teens. They flew from Kathmandu to Pokhara, then took a small plane to Jomsom before heading east toward the Dhaulagiri massif and into a little-frequented valley tucked between the Annapurna foothills. No tourist trails, no cozy guesthouses, just mountains and sky.
The first few days went smoothly. Then around day five or six, camped at roughly 4,200 meters, Alex woke up to a sound he couldn't place. Not wind, not a night bird. Something low, guttural, almost like it was coming from the earth itself. Ben was already awake, sitting by the fire with a rifle across his knees. They carried weapons in case of snow leopards, but this was something else entirely.
The next morning, Tensing called them over to look at something in the snow. A strip had melted overnight, and in it were tracks. Massive, barefoot prints with five clearly defined toes, but the shape was bizarre, wide, with a big toe that jutted out to the side almost like a primate's. And they were deep, suggesting whatever made them was incredibly heavy. The tracks came from the rocks, passed a couple dozen meters from their camp, and disappeared into the scree slope. Tensing was whispering prayers in his language, working his Buddhist rosary beads. He called it a "Migo," which translates to "wild man." Now, the Yeti is the famous name most people know, but Migo is another term used in Himalayan folklore for these reclusive beings, and the description tracks with what witnesses across cultures have reported for centuries: large, bipedal, heavily built, with non-human foot structure.
Things escalated from there. The following day they found the remains of a mountain goat, and this is where the story gets genuinely unsettling. The animal had been torn apart, but not in any way consistent with a predator. No wolf tracks, no leopard signs. The bones were twisted, the ribcage opened, the viscera consumed. But the head had been carefully separated from the spine and placed several meters away, with the horns deliberately woven into a pattern using dwarf willow branches. That kind of intentional arrangement isn't animal behavior. That's ritual. That's communication. Researchers who've studied anomalous primate activity in North America have noted similar patterns with deer and other animals found in Sasquatch territory, where carcasses are sometimes found arranged in ways that suggest deliberate placement rather than feeding.
The sounds came back that night, closer, angrier. Alex describes it as more than just a low rumble, there was fury in it. The roar hung over the gorge, sometimes fading, sometimes swelling. Nobody slept. They huddled around the fire, throwing everything they could into it, knowing it was probably the only barrier between them and whatever was out there in the dark. Tensing wasn't praying anymore, just staring into the blackness with a look Alex describes as heavy and condemned. The young porter was shaking so hard his teeth were chattering.
When dawn broke, the sound stopped like a switch had been flipped. They packed in silence and pushed forward, hoping to reach their endpoint, grab their measurements, and get out. The trail narrowed through a gorge with a glacial stream at the bottom, walls pressing in close, and the feeling of being watched became almost unbearable.
Then they found the nest. A shallow cave at the base of a rock face, and inside was a structure about three meters across, layered with thick moss and dry grass mixed with tufts of coarse, grayish-white wool. The wool is interesting because it suggests the inhabitant had access to or contact with livestock, or possibly shed its own coat. In the center of the shelter was Ben's radio, the one he'd lost two days earlier and assumed had fallen during the trek. It wasn't just broken, it had been methodically crushed, twisted into a mangled piece of plastic and metal. And next to it, a neat little pyramid of small bones, possibly rodent or bird, stacked with precision.
The discussion cuts off there, but the title of the video tells you the rest. One of them didn't make it home. The official story was a mountain accident, an avalanche. Insurance paid out, the case was closed, and the survivors were forced to sign NDAs to protect Nepal's tourism image. But Alex knows what really happened up there on those slopes, and he's carried that knowledge ever since.
What makes this account stand out is the combination of physical evidence, tracks, the nest, the destroyed radio, the ritualistic goat kill, paired with consistent behavioral descriptions from multiple witnesses, including Tensing, a man who grew up in those mountains and knew every legend and warning they contained. The parallels to Sasquatch encounters in North America are hard to ignore: the territorial displays, the vocalizations described as guttural and angry, the apparent intelligence behind the arranged remains, the destruction of human objects as some kind of message.
Whether you connect this to the Yeti, the Migo, or a broader category of relict hominid that may exist in remote wilderness regions worldwide, it's a story worth sitting with. The video runs longer than the discussion suggests, so definitely check it out for the full account. Error 199 has the whole thing uploaded, and it's the kind of testimony that makes you wonder just how much is still out there, hiding in the places we've convinced ourselves we've already explored.