Hunters Terrified as 7-Foot Figure Stalks Them in Remote Mountains

A story out of the Nantahala back country in North Carolina is making the rounds, and it's one of the most detailed hunter encounters I've come across in a while. A YouTube channel called Creatures Protocol recently shared an account from two hunters who claim they had a multi-day encounter with a Sasquatch that ended with them killing it on a remote ridge — and what happened after is just as unsettling as what led up to it. The channel protected the identities of the two men, referring to them only as Walt, an older hunter with over 20 years of experience on that particular stretch of mountain, and his nephew, who had been hunting with him for six of those years. Both knew the terrain intimately — where the cell signal died, which switchbacks to avoid, and how to navigate the ridges and creek beds that make up that wilderness. The trouble started on the third morning of a five-day rifle season trip. A deer carcass they'd hung high between two trees, out of a bear's reach, was gone. But the rope wasn't broken. It had been untied, unhooked, and neatly rehung over the same branch. Empty. Whatever took the deer paused long enough to put the rope back the way it found it. Then they checked their trail cameras. One was fine. The other had been turned 90 degrees on its mount — not knocked down, not chewed up — and was now pointed directly at their camp. Something had figured out what the camera was and aimed it at them. That alone should have been enough to walk out. But Walt talked himself into staying one more night. He told his nephew he'd never seen sign like that in two decades, and he wanted to know what it was before he gave up the ground. What followed over the next 48 hours reads like a checklist of behaviors researchers have reported for years — the kind of intelligence that doesn't fit neatly into the "feral animal" category. A small cairn of stacked rocks they built at the edge of camp was rebuilt overnight in a different shape, using the same rocks. Their blue tick hound, Scout, refused to range out past camp anymore. He stayed pinned to Walt's leg, staring at a stretch of laurel thicket down the slope, making a low sound the nephew had never heard from him before. Then came the voice. Right at last light, the nephew heard his own name called from down near the creek — in Walt's voice. He turned to answer and Walt was standing three feet behind him at the fire, looking at him. Walt hadn't said a word. By the fourth morning, they'd decided to pack up and cut the trip short. The trail out required crossing a saddle between two ridges. When they got there, four full trees had been snapped at the base and laid across the path in a line — not storm damage, not splintered, just placed there like a fence. They took the longer route down, a steeper path Walt knew well. Two hours in, he stopped and admitted he didn't recognize where they were standing. A man who had hunted that mountain for 20 years and never gotten turned around. That's when the nephew said the line that has stuck with me since I heard it: "It's been walking us somewhere the whole time." Every trail that had felt safest, every clearing that had looked like good ground to camp — looking back, all of those choices had funneled them in the same direction, deeper and further from the truck. Then they heard movement on both sides of them in the trees. Not one thing. Two directions, moving in step with each other, pacing them like a gate closing. They ran until they hit a rock outcrop with a wall of stone at their backs and open ground in front — the one defensible position on that stretch of mountain. And Walt knew it because he'd hunted from it years before. They got their backs against the stone, rifles up. That's when Scout bolted 20 feet out into the open like something had called him by name. One yelp, and he was gone. Full dark came on fast. That's when they finally saw it. It came across the open ground upright on two legs, easily seven feet tall, walking slow — not rushing them, just approaching like it already knew they couldn't go anywhere. Dark, heavy through the shoulders, arms hanging well past where a man's would. The smell hit before anything else did, the nephew said — wet and rank and wrong. It stopped 40 feet out and stood there looking at them. Not through them. Not past them. Right at them. Walt fired first. Center mass. They both heard it connect. It didn't go down. It didn't even flinch the way anything living should. It made a sound neither man could describe as animal, and it came at the outcrop. Both of them opened up as fast as they could work their rifles — round after round, point blank by the time it closed the distance. And it kept coming through hit after hit that should have dropped a bull elk in its tracks. Right at the end, staggering, already dying on its feet, it dropped all the way down sudden like it was finished. The nephew let his rifle drop an inch for half a second, thinking it was over. It wasn't. It used that half second to close the last 10 feet in one motion nobody was ready for. Walt put one more round into it at almost no distance at all. It went down for the last time three feet from the stone. Standing over it in the daylight, the nephew said the hands, the teeth, the sheer size of it up close was the moment he understood that everything it had done over the previous three days — the rope, the camera, the cairn, the voice, the fallen trees, the wrong trail — all of it had been the plan of something that thought the way a person thinks. Within an hour of first light, they heard the first howl come back off the ridge above them. Then a second from a completely different direction. Then a third, calling back and forth across the mountain. Whatever they had just killed had not been out there alone. And the one still up there now knew exactly what had happened to it. They left everything and ran for the truck. Something paced them the entire way down — off in the trees, first one side, then the other, never showing itself, the same slow patient rhythm it had used from the very start. Right up until the last ridge before the trailhead, where it simply stopped. Both men felt it stop at the same moment, the way you feel a room go quiet. The full account, including the final moments of the story, is worth hearing in the original telling. Creatures Protocol did a thorough job laying out the timeline and the emotional weight of what these two men went through, and the way they pieced together the pattern of behavior after the fact is exactly the kind of detail that matters when you're trying to understand what's actually happening in these woods. The Nantahala is a vast, rugged stretch of wilderness that runs along the North Carolina–South Carolina border, and it has a long history of unusual sightings — everything from strange vocalizations to structures that don't match anything cultural in the region. Stories like this one don't come along often, and the level of detail these two hunters were willing to share is rare. Definitely worth the time to listen to the whole thing.