Muchalat Harry carried off by a Sasquatch (Conuma River, Vancouver Island, 1928)

Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Muchalat Harry was a Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) trapper. Father Anthony Terhaar, the Benedictine missionary who later told his story, remembered him as "a tough, fearless man, of excellent physique." One retelling calls him an anomaly among his fellow Nootka, a man who made long solo trips into the deep woods.

In the autumn of 1928 he paddled to the mouth of the Conuma River, at the head of Tlupana Inlet. He cached his canoe and walked upstream, about 12 miles in one version, about 20 km in another. There he built a camp and set his trapline.

One night he sat dozing by his fire. He wore only his woollen underwear and was wrapped in a blanket. Then he was "picked up and thrown over someone's shoulder." He struggled but could not break free. In the words of Peter Byrne, he had been "picked up by a huge male Bigfoot and carried off into the hills."

Two or three miles on, he was thrown to the ground. First light came. Harry was surrounded by Sasquatches, about 20 in most versions, male and female, of all shapes and sizes. Large bones lay scattered at his feet. He was convinced he would be eaten.

He was not. The creatures stared. Now and then one stepped forward to touch him. Several pulled at his woollen underwear. As full daylight came, they lost interest and drifted away.

Harry ran. He "raced past his own camp, leaving his gun and traps behind, and headed straight for his cached canoe." He paddled out into fog, still in his underwear. At about 3 a.m. villagers and Father Anthony were woken by screaming from the water. By torchlight they found him, barefoot, wet and exhausted.

The priest nursed him for "a full 3 weeks before the terrified Indian regained his strength and sanity." During those weeks, Terhaar said, Muchalat Harry's hair turned to pure white. He never went back for his rifle, his traps or his furs. In Byrne's account he "never left the settlement at Nootka, never went in the woods again for the rest of his life."

The story rests on a single chain. Harry told Terhaar. Terhaar told Byrne, the Sasquatch researcher, who published it in The Search for Big Foot: Monster, Myth or Man? in 1975. No newspaper, police, Indian Agent or church record from 1928 has surfaced.

Sceptics note that hair turning white from fright is a motif found in many urban legends, since existing hairs do not change colour. The retellings have also grown. Large bones became human bones. The run to the canoe stretches from a mile and a half to 12 miles. Even Harry's home village is disputed, Nootka in Byrne's telling, Nuchatlitz in another.

Harry's case is routinely paired with that of Albert Ostman, the prospector carried off in his sleeping bag at Toba Inlet in 1924 and held for about six days by a family of four Sasquatches. Toba Inlet lies about 200 km away on the mainland coast, so the bond is one of theme, not geography. No tracks, hair or photographs exist. Only a trapper who never went back into the woods, and a priest who said his hair turned white.