1899 Washington Hunters Discover Giant Footprints and Cabin Siege

A video from The Seeping Dark YouTube channel tells the gripping tale of six hunters who found themselves trapped inside a Washington cabin back in November of 1899. And honestly? This one is hard to shake. The story comes from Tom Russ, who was just 21 years old at the time and working as a tally clerk at a lumber mill outside Castle Rock, Washington. Numbers were his trade — board feet, rail cars, hours, wages. So when he later found 24 smooth river stones on the cabin roof and 23 spent rifle casings and shotgun shells from what he calls "the siege," he counted both piles three times. That extra stone is what finally made him tell the story. Here's the setup: Tom's father, Caleb Rusk, was a timber cruiser — the kind of guy mill owners trusted to walk into a forest tract and tell them what it was worth. He arranged a three-day deer hunt in the upper Toutle country with five other men: Wes Bell from the railroad telegraph office, Merritt Cole the blacksmith, Dr. Edwin Vail, and Deputy Hugh Larkin. Six men total heading into the woods. The trouble started on Tuesday morning, November 21st. They were following fresh black-tailed deer sign along a muddy shelf above Hemlock Creek when Tom spotted a break in the pattern. Something else had stepped across the trail after the deer passed. The print had a heel, a broad forefoot, and five long toe marks. It looked human until you understood the size. Tom set his boot beside it. His boot was just under 11 inches. The print was at least 18, maybe 19 inches. And it had sunk deeper into the saturated ground than any of their horses had on that same patch. Merritt pressed two fingers into the mud beside the heel and compared the depth with his own boot print. "Heavy," he said. When the deputy asked if it was a bear, Merritt shook his head. "Not walking like one." Then Tom's father did something strange. He glanced uphill, not down at the track. And he ordered them mounted and changed their route for the next two hours — pushing west away from the direct line to the cabin, then circling north again. When Tom asked why, he got "better ground" as an answer. But the brass compass told a different story. When they finally reached the cabin clearing, the horses refused to approach. The hitch rail beside the porch had been twisted out of its posts — green hemlock, thick as a wrist, iron-fastened on both sides. One end lay in the mud. The other remained caught under a bent strap. The wood fibers pulled into a long spiral. Merritt crouched over it and checked the iron, then the exposed grain. His hands knew the difference between something cut, something broken, and something forced. "No axe," he said. "No saw." The gouges in the earth showed the rail had been turned the opposite way from what the horses could have pulled. Something strong enough to rotate green timber until the grain separated in long wet strands had reached the cabin first. Now here's where it gets really interesting. Tom's father had spent the whole morning steering around something he wouldn't name. The large track had been miles away, but he'd brought six men to the one cabin where something seemed to be waiting. The question Tom couldn't shake: why had his father chosen this place? The video cuts off mid-sentence at "The door was..." — so you'll have to watch to find out what happened next. What makes this story stand out is the level of detail. Tom Russ was a tally clerk — counting was literally his profession. The 24 stones versus 23 casings detail isn't just flavor; it's the kind of precision that comes from someone whose entire livelihood depended on accurate numbers. And the way his father's behavior is described — the silence, the deliberate route changes, the way he studied the trees around the track instead of the track itself — paints a picture of a man who knew exactly what they were dealing with but refused to say it out loud. Historical accounts like this one are valuable for anyone digging into the long history of encounters in the Pacific Northwest. The late 1800s were a particularly active period as logging crews and settlers pushed deeper into old-growth forest, disturbing territory that had been quietly inhabited for generations. The Toutle River area, where this story takes place, sits in rugged terrain that would later become part of the Mount St. Helens blast zone — remote, heavily forested country that's exactly the kind of habitat where these beings have been reported for centuries. If you're into historical Sasquatch encounters, this one is worth your time. The storytelling is slow and methodical, almost like the man himself — a tally clerk who spent his life counting things and finally decided to count what really mattered.