1997 Oregon Loggers Report Mysterious Knocking and Stacked Rocks

A logging foreman's 14-year-old secret has finally surfaced, and it's one of the most disturbing Sasquatch encounter stories to come out of the Pacific Northwest in decades. The footage, which appeared on the YouTube channel Weekly Terror and JustAlexFoot, centers on events from October 14, 1997, in the remote timberlands of Clackamas County, Oregon. What started as a routine logging contract on a 40-acre unit turned into something that ended a young man's life and shattered the career of the foreman who tried to warn everyone. Dale Merrick, a 44-year-old logging veteran with 21 years in the timber industry, took the contract knowing something was off. The job came in late and cheap, no one walked the ground first, and the map came with a strange addition: a hand-drawn, hatched area covering about six acres at the bottom of the drainage, labeled in block letters "unmapped hazard, no operations." When Merrick called the office to ask what it meant, the site manager had an answer ready before he even finished the question. "Cut around it." The crew consisted of four men: Merrick himself, Tom Ruiz (29, faller), Jim Sandoval (51, equipment operator), and Nathan Prior, a 22-year-old first-season choker man whose mother had asked Merrick to give him a chance. Nathan was small for the work at about 160 pounds, but he never stopped moving and never complained. He carried a disposable Kodak camera in his vest pocket because he wanted to show his mom the equipment. Then the strange things started. On September 11th at exactly 5:04 PM, after the saws went quiet for the day, something down in the drainage hit a tree. Three strikes, evenly spaced about a second apart, then a pause of eight or nine seconds, then three more. It sounded like a man swinging a maul into a standing snag. Sandoval called it a woodpecker, but everyone knew better. A pileated woodpecker drums fast, like a machine gun. This was slow and deliberate. The sounds continued for nine days, always within minutes of 5 PM, never twice from the same position. Merrick started marking them on his map. By the end, he had 11 dots, and when he connected them with a ruler, they formed a pattern. Whatever was making the sound had walked the outside of his unit 11 times in 9 days, and it had never once come inside the boundary of the work they'd done. Then the rocks started appearing. Smooth, round river rocks the size of grapefruits, stacked in a column on the fuel drum at the edge of the landing. There is no round river rock on that slope. The nearest water capable of producing stones that smooth was the creek 1,100 feet below, inside that off-limits zone. Something had gone down into the bottom, picked up three stones, carried them up 1,100 vertical feet through blowdown in the dark, and balanced them on the fuel drum. On October 14th, Nathan Prior was reported dead at the site. The timber company recorded the cause of death as "struck by falling timber." The paperwork was completed in under nine hours. The body was recovered by company personnel rather than county search and rescue. The family was advised to hold a closed casket. Merrick refused to sign the incident report and was terminated 11 days later. He never worked timber again. The footage comes from an Hi8 video cassette Merrick bought partway through the contract and handed to his daughter 14 years later with instructions not to watch it. The story is drawn from that footage and from a spiral field notebook Merrick kept on the job. This is the kind of case that makes you wonder what really happens in the deep woods when no one's watching. The Clackamas County area has a long history of Sasquatch sightings, and the behavior described here, the perimeter walking, the rock stacking, the sounds timed to the end of the workday, fits patterns reported by researchers for decades. The "unmapped hazard" on the map is particularly chilling. Someone knew what was down there, and they wanted the timber crew to stay away from it. The full video goes into much more detail, including what was on that Hi8 tape. It's worth watching if you want to understand what might have happened to Nathan Prior.