He Filmed Bigfoot For 3 Days… Then Nobody Saw Him ...

He Filmed Bigfoot For 3 Days… Then Nobody Saw Him Again

The Man Who Chose the Trees

Jordan Grider was twenty-nine years old, and what mattered most about him was simple. He was not lost. For more than a decade, Jordan had lived outside, not through weekend camping trips or summer hikes, but as a deliberate way of life. He had survived full seasons in Kentucky, moving through the forests of upstate New York, reading rivers, trails, and deep timber the way most people read the street signs in their own neighborhoods. When people called him homeless, he corrected them every time. He was not homeless. He had simply chosen to keep his home outside under the trees, away from walls.

In late September of 2018, Jordan came back to northern New Mexico to see his father and his five brothers. He stayed a few weeks, eating dinner at the family table, laughing, and saying his goodbyes. Then he told them he was heading somewhere incredible, a great camping spot, and that he would be gone for a few months. Nobody worried. This was Jordan. This was simply what Jordan did. None of them knew that the place he had chosen would be the last place anyone would ever hear from him.

In late October of 2018, Jordan drove his pickup truck north into Minnesota. His destination was the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, over one million acres of ancient forest, frozen lakes, and rivers that seemed to vanish into nothing. It is one of the most remote stretches of country left in the entire United States. He parked at a trailhead, walked about a mile and a half deep into the trees far from anyone, and set up camp. He sent photos home and told his family roughly where he was. He seemed fine. On one of those early October mornings, he sent a single photograph of a beaver pond, still water, with thin light coming through the trees. His family glanced at it and thought nothing of it, just another check-in from a man who had done this a hundred times before.

One night, he drove into the nearest town for supplies. A receipt found later among his belongings confirmed it. It was ordinary, routine. He was stocking up, settling in, getting ready for the deep winter ahead. And then the check-ins stopped. A day passed, then another, then a week, then two, a month. The silence grew heavier with every day that no message came. At some point, a Forest Service agent on a routine patrol noticed Jordan’s truck parked in front of a gated road, blocking access to a private cabin area. No person was nearby, there was no note, and no explanation was left behind. The agent had the truck towed to a parking lot, suspecting nothing, just following procedure. That towed truck would become one of the first pieces of a puzzle no one has ever managed to finish.

Blood and No Body

Weeks stretched into months, and investigators had almost nothing to work with. One photograph of a beaver pond. A small team used it as a reference point and pushed into the wilderness to search, but they found nothing—no trace, no campsite, no gear. Then, in early April of 2019, almost six months after Jordan was last heard from, searchers finally located the camp. What they saw stopped them cold.

The site sat on a south-facing slope, chosen by someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Nothing about it was rushed or sloppy. A tarp was strung between two trees, and a hammock hung beneath it. This was not a desperate man improvising in a panic; this was an outdoorsman who had lived this way for ten years. But the closer they looked, the less sense the scene made.

There was blood. Enormous amounts of dried blood coated the hammock, soaked into the sleeping bag, and splattered across the inside of the tarp shelter. The ground beneath was saturated, and yet there was no body, no Jordan, nothing. Then they found the gun. Jordan’s nine-millimeter handgun was still at the scene, still loaded, still chambered. Not a single round had been fired. The meaning of that is hard to overstate. A man with over ten years of wilderness survival behind him, a man who had slept alone in the deep forest for a decade, armed himself and never fired his weapon. Whatever happened to Jordan happened before he could even reach for it.

What unsettled the people who worked that scene most was what was missing from it. The shelter itself was undisturbed. The tarp still hung where Jordan had tied it, and the hammock still held its shape. For all the blood, there was no sign of a fight. No overturned gear, no dragged earth leading away into the trees. It was as if the violence and the silence had arrived in the same instant, and then everything had simply gone still.

The Fragmented Remains

Because the snow was still several feet deep in April, investigators could not run a full search. They documented what they could and came back three weeks later with the snow melting, running grid walks through the timber with twenty or thirty people at a time while cadaver dogs worked the tree lines. What they recovered were twelve bones scattered near the camp—vertebrae, a femur, a possible forearm bone, several ribs, and fragments too small to identify on site. Two more bones turned up farther out during later sweeps. They found his phone, his socks, a shredded jacket, and torn clothing spread across the area.

They never found his skull. The search teams searched and came back empty because the skull simply was not there. If it was somewhere in that forest, then something had carried it to a place no search team was ever willing to follow. In August of 2020, forensic testing confirmed through DNA that the bones belonged to Jordan. The case was resolved the only way the paperwork could resolve it: identity confirmed, cause of death listed as unknown, no foul play suspected, case closed.

His mother refused to accept it. She believed wolves had taken him in his sleep on one of those first brutal winter nights. She knew her son; he would not have gone quietly. But investigators pushed back hard on the wolf theory. Fatal wolf attacks on humans in North America are almost unheard of, with only two confirmed across the entire continent in the previous twenty years. Even in Minnesota, where wolves are more common than nearly anywhere else in the lower forty-eight, an attack like that would be extraordinary. If a pack had pulled a man out of a hammock, the scene would have shown it—shredded equipment, a torn-apart hammock, defensive marks on the bones. There was none of that. The hammock was intact. The scene was simply still blood and silence.

His family raised another possibility: Jordan sometimes shaved with a straight razor, perhaps cutting an artery by accident and bleeding out before help could come. But there was no exposed blade at the camp; every knife was sheathed. That theory did not hold either. Cases like this one, the ones official reports quietly close, leave lingering shadows for those who understand the wilderness.

The Footage in the Dark

Years after the case was closed, someone went back through the footage Jordan had recorded in his final days. He had uploaded two videos before he disappeared, and together they are the closest thing to a witness the wilderness ever gave up.

The first opens on nothing a person can see. Black Minnesota forest, deep autumn. The cold has already settled into the ground after dark. The phone’s small light reaches a few feet and then surrenders to a dark that runs back for miles. The trees stand close, and the water somewhere beyond them is going still under the first hard frosts. And somewhere in that dark, there is a sound. Low, drawn out, almost a growl, but not the growl of any bear, wolf, or cat that belongs in those woods. Something closer to a vocalization, lower than a voice, carrying through the cold in a way that does not fit anything that should be standing in that forest at that hour. It is not quite like anything anyone has been able to confidently name.

Jordan turns the camera toward it, holding the light out into the trees, trying to find the shape that is making it. The shape does not come. Whatever is out there stays exactly where the light cannot reach, and it does not move on. That is the detail that should stop everyone cold. Jordan had spent ten years learning the night sounds of a forest. He knew the difference between an elk shifting through brush and a branch giving way under frost. He had heard every ordinary thing a forest does after dark a thousand times over, and none of it had ever moved him to lift a camera. This did. An experienced man alone reached for his phone in the dark to record a sound he could not place.

In the second video, he is inside his tent, the thin fabric the only wall between him and the trees, recording himself listening. The sound returns. Then he says the thing he had never told his family directly. There were handprints on his truck. Huge handprints. Prints that did not belong to him and did not belong to anyone he knew. Whatever had been making that sound at the edge of the light had walked up to his vehicle in the dark, laid its hands flat against it, and left without ever showing itself. He recorded all of it. He sat in a tent in the middle of a million acres of forest, listened to something move just beyond the reach of his light, and described the marks it had left on his truck to a camera instead of to the people who loved him. Then the videos stop, and so does he.

Echoes in Washington State

The pattern does not end in Minnesota. One thousand five hundred miles away, in a completely different forest, the same shape of disappearance had already taken two men, making Jordan’s case look almost simple. Deep in Washington State sits the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, nearly a million acres of dense Pacific Northwest wilderness featuring ancient trees, volcanic rock, and lava beds left by eruptions that predate recorded human history. It is beautiful, dramatic country, but it is also one of the strangest stretches of wilderness in America when it comes to people who walk in and never walk out.

On September 28 of 2013, two experienced cavers, Christopher and his friend Caleb, went to explore the lava bed formations deep inside the forest. Both had years behind them descending into the earth, navigating cave systems, and reading hard volcanic terrain. Around two in the afternoon, the pair split up to cover more ground, each man taking a different opening. For two men who knew that ground, it seemed reasonable enough. Then Caleb turned around, and Christopher was simply gone. Not ahead, not behind, not answering when Caleb called his name.

Caleb searched for hours through that brutal volcanic terrain, calling and looking, and found nothing. Eventually, he had no choice but to hike out and contact the authorities. The Skamania County Sheriff’s Office launched a search immediately. The detective leading it described the terrain as a needle in a haystack, and he was not exaggerating—caves that dead end without warning, lava tubes that drop into darkness, and rock that holds no footprint at all. They searched for days, turning into a week, until they had to accept that Christopher had vanished from a wilderness he was experienced enough to handle. No clothing, no footprint, no sign of what had taken him. The search was called off, and Christopher was gone.

The Second Disappearance

A few years later, the same forest took someone else. John Hopkins was sixty-ine, a lifelong outdoorsman from Seattle who had been hiking for decades. When he parked at a trailhead lot and walked in, nobody was alarmed. He had done this his whole life. He never came back out. When his family grew worried and called for help, investigators found his car right where he had left it, but something was wrong immediately. All of John’s equipment was still inside the vehicle—his gear, his supplies, everything he would have needed to actually survive out there was sitting in the car. He had walked into that forest carrying almost nothing.

The search was exhaustive: every accessible trail, every slope, every clearing. And like the search for Christopher years earlier, it produced nothing—not a footprint, not a scrap of clothing, not one clue. As winter closed in and temperatures dropped to dangerous levels, the search had to be suspended. The snow came and buried whatever the forest was keeping. For years, both men simply did not exist in any findable sense. Their families waited, their files stayed open, and the Gifford Pinchot stayed quiet until it didn’t.

In 2023, two hunters came across something they never expected: personal items belonging to John Hopkins, not near where he was last seen, but about a mile and a half northeast of that lot, deep in a section of forest that had already been searched. The items were just sitting there as if placed, left behind on purpose in a spot that should have been found years before. How those belongings ended up so far from where he was last seen, no one could say. Whether he had gone deeper than anyone realized or had been moving away from something, the forest gave no answer.

The Forest Surrenders Its Secrets

In September of 2024, the sheriff’s office mounted another full surge, determined to finally give the family some closure. This time, the forest gave something up. They found human remains, and DNA confirmed they belonged to John Hopkins. After all those years, he had been found. But the discovery explained almost nothing—not how he died, not what happened to him, and not why he had been impossible to find for so long.

What came next changed the shape of both cases. Just days after John’s remains were recovered, a hiker moving through the same lava bed zone found a human skull lying on the ground. He marked the spot and called it in. A deputy came out, collected the skull, and swept the immediate area, finding nothing else that day. But the hiker could not shake the sense that something about the scene was wrong, and he asked the deputy to return the following day.

This time, the forest cooperated. They found more remains, multiple pieces, and the deputy collected everything for analysis. The results came back: the remains belonged to Christopher, the caver who had vanished in 2013, found at last in 2024, eleven years later, in the same stretch of forest where John Hopkins had turned up just days before. Two missing men, different years, different circumstances, their remains surfacing within days of each other in the same patch of trees.

The Undisclosed Force

The bones do not explain the mystery. The details that followed were the ones investigators could not easily explain away. No bite marks were found on any of the recovered bones in the Washington cases. If animals had scavenged or scattered those remains, there would be evidence—gnaw marks, tooth impressions, the biological signature medical examiners are trained to spot on site. There was none. The bones appeared to have been moved and distributed by something that left no animal trace behind.

In Minnesota, the femur had been snapped, not fractured the way a fall fractures bone, but snapped cleanly. That distinction matters because it points to applied force, not impact, not scavenging. In all three cases, the remains were spread across a wider area than a simple fall or collapse would produce. In all three cases, the men were genuinely experienced, not confused tourists, not people who wandered off a marked trail with no preparation.

The Washington timeline is stranger still. Two men lost eleven years apart in roughly the same volcanic terrain. One surfaces first, his belongings already carried more than a mile from where he was last seen, dropped in ground that had been searched before. Then, within days of recovering him, a hiker finds the other man’s skull lying on open ground. Two separate searches across two separate decades had turned up nothing, and then the forest surrendered both men almost at the same moment.

The Boundary Waters and the Gifford Pinchot are separated by roughly fifteen hundred miles. Different ecosystems, different elevations, different wildlife, different terrain entirely. They are connected by exactly one thing: men who knew how to survive went in, and pieces of them came back out, scattered in ways that no predator and no clean accident fully accounts for. Three files, three families still without real answers, three investigations that all reach the same quiet conclusion: cause of death unknown, cause of death undetermined.

The records list these deaths as unexplained, and nobody has ever shown what moved those bones. But that is exactly what keeps the cases from staying closed. The skull that was never recovered in Minnesota. The remains scattered without a single bite mark. The bone that was snapped instead of gnawed. The loaded gun that was never fired by a man who knew better than anyone how to use it. The handprints on the truck too large to belong to anyone he knew.

The last clear record of Jordan Grider is not a body, and it is not a grave. It is a few minutes of video. A man alone in a tent holding a small light against a dark he could not see into, turning his camera toward a sound that never answered and never showed itself. Whatever he was filming in those final days had already walked up to his truck and laid its hands against the metal. Soon after, it took him so completely that the forest gave back only scattered bone and never his skull. The footage is still out there. So is whatever he was pointing the camera at.