Jeannie Chapman and the Ruby Creek Sasquatch

Ruby Creek was a small settlement in British Columbia, approximately 30 miles up the Fraser River from Agassiz. The Chapmans' cabin and field lay between the railway tracks and the mountain. Jeannie Chapman knew the warnings. Indigenous parents had told her not to go far up certain valleys, and to run rather than struggle if she ever met one.

1941. A sunny, cloudless day, about 3 p.m. Her eldest son, aged 9, ran in, unusually upset. He said "there was a cow coming down out of the woods at the foot of the nearby mountain." Jeannie thought at first it was a big bear among the bushes by the railway tracks. It was a huge man, covered in hair. "This creature advanced directly toward the house."

It stood about 7½ feet tall against the fence and line posts. Entirely human in shape, but immensely thick through its chest. Broad shoulders, exceptionally long arms, a small head on a very short, thick neck. Hair about 4 inches long, pale yellow-brown. Face and hands nearly black.

It reached the near corner of the field. About 100 feet away. Jeannie gathered the children and held a blanket aloft so they could not see the creature, or it them. She backed away to the river, then went downstream to the village. "I used the blanket because I thought it was after one of the kids." Standing between it and them, she had "much too much time to look at it." As they left, "It made an awful funny noise."

Her husband, George Chapman, came home about 6 p.m. Enormous humanoid footprints came down from the potato patch, milled about by the river and went back toward the mountain. The creature had gone through the cabin and battered in the woodshed door. It had dragged a 55-gallon barrel of salt fish out through the narrow door, broken it open and scattered the fish. Long brown hairs were caught in the lintel, above head height.

The tracks came back every night for about a week. On two nights the dogs set up the most awful racket at exactly 2 o'clock in the morning. At night, George heard a strange, gurgling whistle. Then the Chapmans moved out for good.

One retelling says some prints measured in excess of seventeen inches, and that Deputy Sheriff Joe Dunn of Bellingham, Washington, and George's co-worker Esse Tyftin made a plaster cast and traced a print. In 1959 Ivan T. Sanderson interviewed the Chapmans at Yale and published their account in Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life in 1961. John Green, publisher of the Agassiz-Harrison Advance, covered the case in On the Track of the Sasquatch and The Sasquatch File, both in 1968.

Jeannie herself first took it for a bear, then rejected that once she saw it clearly. No specific hoax allegation against the Chapmans has surfaced. Mainstream science treats Bigfoot reports as folklore, misidentification and hoaxes. The details drift between tellings: September or mid-October, 7½ feet or 7 to 8. Sanderson alone adds a dark coda. The three original children died within three years. About a month after his interview, George, Jeannie and their newer children drowned crossing at the same spot late one night.

Today the Skawahlook First Nation presents the story at its Syéxw Chó:leqw Adventure Park. No photograph of the creature has ever surfaced. What remains is a mother's account, a trail of enormous footprints and a barrel of salt fish dragged through a narrow door.