78-Year-Old Logger Recounts Bigfoot Rescue After Bear Attack

A story out of Harlan County, Kentucky is making the rounds, and it's one of the most remarkable firsthand encounters I've come across in a long time. A logger named Hobart Sloan, now 78 years old, has finally come forward with what he says is the real story behind a bear mauling he survived back in October 2005. According to Sloan, he was working alone on the north slope of Pine Mountain when a black bear caught him at dusk and tore him up badly — bitten clean through the shoulder, thigh ripped open, scalp peeled. The official hospital record says he crawled three-quarters of a mile to a landing where his brother-in-law found him the next morning. But Sloan says that record is a lie — one he told himself. The truth, as he tells it, is that a giant figure came out of the dark and roared the bear off him. Behind that figure came a female with warm hands, and behind her a young one that whistled like a bird. The three of them — a Sasquatch family — carried him into their own rock house and kept him breathing through the coldest night of the fall. Before first light, they moved him to a spot where his brother-in-law would find him. Sloan worked these mountains his whole life. His daddy cut timber before him, and his grandfather hauled logs out with mules when the coal camps at Lynch and Benham were running three shifts. He started logging in 1966 and only stepped away for two years when the market went bad. By 2005, he was running his own small outfit with his brother-in-law Arley Cordill and a young fellow named Lonie Seismore. The job that changed his life was a 200-acre boundary on the north slope of Pine Mountain, up a hollow he won't name. The land belonged to a widow named Shirley Napier whose husband Woodrow had passed in 2002. The timber was beautiful — big white oak on the benches, poplar in the cove, and old hemlock up along the sandstone. But strange things started happening on the job long before the attack. There was knocking on the ridge that didn't sound like limbs popping. There were huckleberry bushes stripped clean at seven and eight feet, with no broken branches — picked carefully, not wallowed down like a bear would do. There were 16-inch tracks in the mud of the gas well road, five toes, no claw marks, pressed in deep. And twice in October, right at quitting time, the hollow went dead quiet in a way Sloan had never heard in 50 years of woodswork. Every bird and squirrel shut off at once, like a breaker thrown. Sloan mentions that his grandfather called them "wood boogers" and gave them the same flat voice he used for copperheads and slick roads — a thing you minded, not a thing you argued about. There's a long tradition of this kind of talk in the Appalachian mountains, and Pine Mountain in particular has always had its stories. Brother Estil Creech, dead now 40 years, used to swear that a giant hairy man walked the ridge above his daddy's still in the 1920s and never troubled it. The still men left meat scraps on a stump after that, every run, for luck. The interesting thing about Sloan's account is that he didn't want to believe any of it. He ran the skidder over the 16-inch track because he didn't want it to be there. A man his age, in his trade, in that county, couldn't afford for it to be there. But the bear attack changed everything, and now at 78, he's done lying. For context, rock houses — natural rock shelters formed in sandstone — are common throughout the Cumberland Plateau and the Appalachian Mountains. They're exactly the kind of shelter a Sasquatch family would use, and there's been plenty of anecdotal reports over the years of unusual habitation signs in these formations. Pine Mountain itself runs more than 100 miles unbroken from Tennessee up toward Virginia, and the north face holds timber that never got cut hard because the ground is too steep and rocky to make money at it. The kind of country where something could live undisturbed for a very long time. The full story is worth hearing in Sloan's own words. The video goes into much more detail about the lead-up to the attack, the strange signs on the job, and the night itself. It's a remarkable account from a man who spent 47 years in those mountains and clearly knows the difference between a bear and something else entirely. Check it out when you get a chance — it's the kind of story that stays with you.