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A 45-year-old Army veteran recently recalled having a frightening close encounter with Bigfoot in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest in 2020.
Kelly Stolp, an electrician from Montana, says the incident took place on July 17, 2020 at around 3 a.m. as he was camping with his two sons and nephew, along with his friend Mike Palagi and his fiancee Olivia Corbin, along an abandoned logging road.
Stolp says he was sleeping at the remote camp site when he and the rest of his group was startled awake by what he calls a “yeti-like scream.”
“It sounded like a washboard sound, like a brat-tat-tat, but it was so guttural,” he told Oregon Live.
“I don’t know if I thought Sasquatch. I thought fear.”
He says after feeling the ground vibrate as something passed his tent he grabbed his shotgun and went out to investigate, but neither saw nor heard anything.
The next morning they noticed that food that had been left out had been untouched, essentially ruling out the possibility that it was a bear.
“If I were to yell, and there was an elk near my tent, it’s going to crash, it’s going to make sounds getting out of there,” Stolp said. “Bear’s going to do the same thing. They’re not sneaky. Bears are big dumb dogs, and they make a lot of noise. This thing didn’t make any noise.”
The next night at almost the exact same time it happened again.
“It sounded like it ran right past our heads,” Corbin said. “Very heavy footed. We could feel the ground move as it was running past the tent.”
“We both got out, and we’re checking our corners and looking at things and shouting, scared as hell,” Palagi added. “It’s very, very dark, but you could still hear thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. It wasn’t a four-legged thing. It was something on two legs.”
The incident inspired Kelly Stolp’s friend Tanner Hoskins to start the Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Search website.
Since then, they have received over 100 Bigfoot reports including one from a sheriff’s deputy who reported hearing a similar “brat-tat-tat” sound.
Stolp, his friends and those who have made reports to Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Search are far from alone. There have been more Bigfoot encounters in the state of Washington than in any other state in America.