In the summer of 1995, two teenage girls headed into the woods near Carmacks, Yukon, looking for a little privacy. They crossed a gravel road and followed a trail leading toward a small lake, eventually finding a place to sit among the trees. It was broad daylight, reportedly sometime around two in the afternoon, and there was nothing particularly frightening about the afternoon. At least, not at first.
The first indication that something was unusual wasn’t something they saw. It was something they smelled.
A powerful and unpleasant odour drifted through the area. Years later, one of the girls would describe it as resembling the smell of a burning dump. At the time, however, she wasn’t frightened. She jokingly blamed the smell on her friend and teased her about needing a shower.
Then her friend’s behaviour suddenly changed.
According to the witness, her friend told her there was a Sasquatch behind them. She initially assumed it was a joke. Then her friend jumped up and ran.
Realizing that something had genuinely frightened her, the girl turned around to look.
For only a couple of seconds, she reportedly saw an enormous, hairy, human-shaped figure running across the trail behind them before disappearing into the surrounding woods. Her view was limited mostly to the lower portion of the figure’s body, and she was so frightened that she never stopped to look upward toward its face.
Even from that brief glimpse, however, she remembered being struck by its enormous size. She later claimed that the creature’s waist appeared to be roughly level with her own height. Its body was covered with hair that she remembered as brown with streaks of grey, perhaps an inch and a half long.
She didn’t stay around to investigate.
The two girls fled back toward the house, leaving whatever they had encountered behind them in the forest.
The following day, they reportedly returned to the area and searched for footprints or some other indication that something large had crossed the trail. They found no tracks. No photographs were taken, and no hair or other physical evidence was recovered. Whatever had passed behind the girls had apparently left nothing behind that could later be examined.
The story might have ended there, but the witness claimed that strange experiences continued around the nearby lake.
She recalled occasionally walking near the lake at night and hearing what sounded like footsteps following her. What made the experience especially unsettling was that the footsteps seemed to match her movements. When she walked, something appeared to walk behind her. When she suddenly stopped, the other footsteps seemed to stop moments later.
Eventually, she reportedly brought friends along who were skeptical of what she had been describing. According to her account, some of them heard the unexplained footsteps as well.
Years later, when discussing the encounter, the witness also revealed that stories of strange happenings in the wilderness were already part of her family’s history. She recalled hearing accounts from her mother, grandmother and aunt about unexplained encounters in the bush. One story involved someone throwing a rock toward an unseen presence in the trees, only to apparently have a rock thrown back. Another involved something mysteriously following a person through the wilderness.
These family stories cannot be independently verified, and they shouldn’t automatically be treated as evidence that they were connected to what happened near Carmacks. But to the witness, her own encounter seemed eerily reminiscent of experiences that members of her family had described before her.
The Carmacks encounter wasn’t reported to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization until 2005, roughly a decade after it allegedly occurred. An investigator later interviewed the witness, and the organization classified the incident as a Class B report – essentially an encounter in which circumstances or limited observation prevent the sighting from being considered a clearer visual encounter. The passage of approximately ten years before the account was formally documented also means that the story depends heavily upon the witness’s memory.
Yet it remains an intriguing little piece of Yukon cryptid history.
Two teenagers went into the woods on an ordinary summer afternoon. An inexplicable foul smell appeared. One girl suddenly saw something that frightened her enough to run. Her friend turned around and, for perhaps two seconds, saw an enormous hairy figure racing across the trail and disappearing into the wilderness.
Whatever crossed that trail in the summer of 1995 was never identified.
And according to the witness, sometimes afterward, when she walked beside that lonely Yukon lake, it felt as though something in the darkness was still walking with her.
Sources: Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) and Yukon Government historical records.
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