The Wildman of Valdez Island: the Pitcock (Pidcock) family's encounters at Quathiaski Cove, 1905

1904 and 1905. Vancouver Island and its neighbouring islands were full of a strange story. Newspapers called the hairy wild men reported in the woods "Mowglis," after Kipling's jungle boy. Mike King had told of one at Campbell River, and hunters at Horne Lake had reported another. James Kincaid had seen one too.

This account is set on Valdez Island. In 1905 that name still covered what is now Quadra Island. An Admiralty chart of 1862 had labelled Quadra, Sonora and Maurelle together as one "Valdes Island," and the name Quadra was only adopted for the southern part on 1 March 1904. The family the papers called Pitcock was very probably the Pidcock family of Quathiaski Cove, where the Pidcock Bros had built a salmon cannery in 1904.

Mid-October 1905, about 10 p.m. The family was sitting down to a late supper. A face appeared at the window. "The face was covered with black hair," the account ran, "only a small portion of skin being visible." The figure uttered a diabolical scream and vanished.

The men took their rifles and went out. In the flower bed under the kitchen window they found large footprints. Twice more that night, the family heard screams. In daylight they found naked footprints along the creek that runs past the house.

The second night the men kept watch from behind a haystack. At about 10:30 p.m. yells came from the creek, and they waited about an hour. Then two of the boys went up the creek with storm lanterns, about half a mile upstream. The lantern light found "a tall man, who was entirely naked, except for a few rags hanging from a belt at his waist." Long hair covered his body.

One of the boys raised his rifle. The man "threw himself into the creek, swam to the opposite shore, and cried, 'Don't shoot!'" Then he was gone into the bush.

A few days later, two men of Alert Bay claimed to have seen the same man. The Pitcock boys were firm that it could not have been a bear.

An unnamed traveller told it at Ladysmith, and it appeared in the Nanaimo Daily News. The Vancouver World is cited as carrying it on 29 November 1905. The Boston Daily Globe printed it on 31 December 1905, placing Valdez Island "near Comox, B.C." A short follow-up ran in the Vancouver Daily World on 2 January 1906, and no police or government inquiry into the sighting is known.

The figure's own words point somewhere human. A man in rags on a belt, shouting in English, suggests a hermit, a fugitive or a destitute castaway living rough. During the wave, others offered their own theories. Captain Owens thought of a missing shipmate. Police picked up and released an elderly beachcomber from Kuper Island in August 1905. Mike King suggested the offspring of a gorilla escaped from a shipwreck. Even the island is uncertain. It may have been the smaller Valdes Island near Nanaimo. Hammerson Peters has suggested an island farther west, near Alert Bay, about 70 miles from Quadra.

No casts, measurements or photographs were reported. The case rests on newspaper retellings from 1905 and 1906. Hammerson Peters retold it as "The Wildman of Valdez Island" for Mysteries of Canada in 2025, and The Scribes tied it to the Pidcocks of Quathiaski Cove. It remains one of the strangest chapters of the Mowgli wave. A hairy face at a kitchen window, and a voice from across the creek, asking not to be shot.