In August 1990, 22-year-old Kelly Rhodess disappeared from a campsite in Mount Baker National Forest.
She didn’t just get lost. She was abducted. She was taken at night right from her campsite, leaving behind only a frightened dog and tracks in the wet dirt.
Tracks that didn’t belong to any human or known North American predator. Authorities closed the case, writing it off as a probable animal attack.
But what they documented that night was not an animal. This is the story of what really happened at Hansen Creek and why some files in Watcom County are still kept separate from the public archives.
August 1990, Washington State. This was before GPS trackers were commonplace. Hikers didn’t have satellite phones.
If you went hiking in the Cascade Mountains, you left a note with your route on your car’s dashboard and hoped it would be found if you didn’t return on time.
Communication meant a walkie-talkie with a very limited range or a long drive to the nearest pay phone.
When you left the [music] trail, you disappeared. Kelly Rhodess was 22 years old. She lived in Bellingham, attended college, and knew these woods.
She wasn’t an inexperienced hiker. She had grown up hiking in the foothills of Mount Baker.
It was a short weekend trip just to relax before the fall semester started. She took only the bare essentials and her young Labrador named Roy.
Her destination was the Hansen Creek Trail. It’s not the most difficult route and it’s popular with locals, but once you leave the main trail, you find yourself in a dense old growth forest.
Kelly set up camp on Tuesday, August 14th, in a small clearing about half a mile from the gravel road where she had left her car.
That evening, she was seen by another hiker. He was a man in his 50s who had set up camp lower down the slope about a hundred yards away from her.
He later testified that he saw smoke from her campfire around 7:00 p.m. He passed her camp on his way to the creek to get water.
He described the scene as completely ordinary. The girl was sitting by a small fire, her blue tent behind her.
Labrador Roy was chasing a stick. They exchanged [music] brief greetings. He noted that she seemed calm and in complete control of the situation.
The weather was perfect for August. Cool, clear, and windless. The next morning, August 15th, around 8:00 a.m., the same hiker was packing up his camp.
He passed Kelly’s campsite again. The scene he discovered made him stop. The fire was almost out with only a faint wisp of smoke rising from it.
The blue tent was still there, but the flap was open. An overturned water bowl lay on the grass, but Kelly was gone.
Her dog, Roy, was there. The Labrador sat right at the entrance to the tent.
He didn’t bark. He didn’t run. He just sat there trembling and making a quiet whining sound.
The man called out, “Kelly?” There was no answer. The forest was completely silent. He moved closer, still expecting the girl to emerge from behind the trees.
But the dog kept his eyes fixed on the edge of the forest in the opposite direction from the trail.
The hair on Royy’s neck stood on end. Then the man looked at the ground.
The soil in this area was soft, covered with a layer of damp moss and pine needles, and there were tracks on it.
The first thing that caught his eye was that they weren’t footprints. [music] It was a trail.
A wide furrow in the ground as if something heavy, a sandbag or a body had been dragged from the campfire to the edge of the clearing.
The drag marks were clear. They began about 5 ft from the tent entrance where the ground was trampled as if a brief sudden struggle had taken place there.
Her hiking boot stood neatly at the tent entrance. A flashlight lay nearby, turned off.
The man followed the drag marks, and that’s when he saw other tracks. Next to the [music] furrow, pressed deep into the wet ground, were footprints.
They were unlike anything he had ever seen. They weren’t round like a cougars. They weren’t oval with claws like a bears, and they definitely weren’t hiking bootprints.
In the report he later gave to the deputy sheriff, he described them this way.
They were like feet, very long, maybe 15 or 16 in, but wider than a humans, and the shape was irregular, as if they didn’t have distinct toes, just a compressed mass at the end.
They were pressed into the ground, almost two inches, as if whatever left them was incredibly heavy.
These prints ran parallel to the drag marks dug. They were not random. They were measured, indicating that the creature was walking, not running.
The witness followed them with his eyes. The tracks and the drag marks led straight to a wall of thick brush and young fur trees at the edge of the clearing about 50 yards, and then they just stopped.
It wasn’t that they became less distinct. They simply vanished as if the creature dragging Kelly had entered the impenetrable thicket and no longer touched the ground.
The man returned to the dog. Roy was still whimpering, refusing to move or look at him.
He was in shock. The man realized this was no accident. He ran. He ran half a mile to his car and drove 15 miles down a gravel road until he [music] reached a pay phone at a store on Mount Baker Highway.
The first call to the Watcom County Sheriff’s Office came in at 9:40 a.m. By 11:00 a.m., two sheriff’s deputies and a Forest Service ranger were on the scene.
They were skeptical. It was a common occurrence. A hiker had gone to the bathroom and gotten lost.
But the campground told them a different story. They immediately noted two key facts. The first was the dog.
Roy was young and [music] healthy. If a bear or cougar had attacked the camp, the dog would have either fought back fiercely and probably been injured or killed or run away.
Roy was not injured, not a scratch. He was simply paralyzed with fear. The second was the tent.
It had not been torn. Kelly’s sleeping bag was neatly spread out inside. Her backpack was there, too.
The food was in the container, untouched. This was not an attack by a predator looking for food.
The sheriff’s deputies documented the tracks. They made plaster casts. In their official report, they tried their best to remain objective.
They described the prince as unidentified, possibly human, distorted due to soft soil. But a ranger who had worked in these woods for 20 years told them unofficially that this was not the case.
He had seen the tracks of poachers, the tracks of bears, the tracks of everything that walks these [music] mountains.
These tracks were different. Their depth indicated a weight of at least 400. Maybe even 500 lb.
But the narrowness of the prince compared to their length did not match any known animal.
They called in a search and rescue team. By lunchtime, more than 20 people were combing the forest.
Starting from the place where the tracks ended. They brought in sniffer dogs. The dogs behaved strangely.
They picked up the trail at the tent, followed it along the furrow to the wall of bushes, and stopped.
They whed, backed away, and refused to go any further. They circled around, confused. The trail, which had been so clear in the clearing, simply vanished into thin air at the edge of the trees.
The searchers pushed through the brush. Inside there were no broken branches, no signs of a struggle, no blood, nothing.
Kelly roads and whatever had taken her were gone. The search operation expanded over the next 48 hours.
On Thursday, August 16th, volunteers from Bellingham and local loggers, people who knew these woods like the backs of their hands, joined the search and rescue team and sheriff’s deputies.
A command post was set up at the start of the Hansen Creek Trail. But from the outset, the operation faced a fundamental problem.
They were looking for a lost hiker or a victim of a cougar attack. But the evidence at the scene did not match either scenario.
The tracking dogs brought in on the morning of the 15th proved useless. They picked up Kelly’s trail confidently at the tent, followed the drag marks for those 50 yards to the thick brush, and then stopped dead in their tracks.
Dog handlers described it as a sensory wall. The trail, which was sharp and fresh in the clearing, simply ceased to exist at the edge [music] of the trees.
They tried bringing the dogs in from different directions and using different animals. [music] The result was the same.
This meant that search teams had to work blind, combing the area in a grid pattern.
This is a painfully slow process in the Cascade Mountains. The terrain around Hansen Creek consists of steep slopes, deep ravines, fallen trees, and thick, almost impenetrable underbrush.
Meanwhile, the plaster casts made by the sheriff’s deputies were sent to the regional office of the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The response, which arrived a day later, was discouraging and brief. The experts were unable to identify the prince.
They confirmed that it was not a bear, neither black nor grizzly, or a cougar.
The morphology of the foot was inconsistent with known North American fauna. They noted its abnormal length, almost 16 in, and great depth, indicating enormous weight.
But the strangest detail was the absence of distinct toes. The report described this as constant pressure across the entire front of the foot.
The authorities did not make this information public. The official version for the few media outlets that took an interest in the case remained missing tourist, possibly disoriented.
On the third day of the search, Friday, August 17th, two events occurred. First, the volunteers report, which was later mentioned in the rangers closed reports, was received.
The group was combing the area about a mile north of Kelly’s camp in the direction where the tracks theoretically led.
One of the volunteers, a local hunter, contacted base camp by radio. He reported hearing a sound.
He described it as a low, guttural roar, [music] which he initially mistook for a bear, but the sound repeated itself, once very loudly, echoing through the canyon.
According to him, it was unlike a bear’s growl or a cougar’s roar. It was deeper with a vibrating quality.
When the group descended into the gorge, they found no tracks. The radio message was logged, but no active action was taken on it.
The second event was much more significant. Another search party was working in the sector east of the camp.
This direction was considered unlikely. It went uphill through very dense vegetation. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, one of the searchers noticed something blue.
It was not a backpack or a tent. Something was stuck high up in a tree, an old Douglas fur.
The object was at least 25 ft, about 8 m, above the ground. It was firmly wedged in the fork of thick branches.
It was a small nylon bag. Kelly’s camera bag. This discovery shocked the searchers. First, it was more than half a mile from her camp in the completely opposite direction from where the drag marks led.
Second, the height. A person couldn’t climb up there without special equipment, and there were no signs that anyone had climbed the trunk.
The bark was undamaged. Third, if Kelly had climbed the tree herself to escape something, she would have screamed.
And why would she have left her bag behind and disappeared? If a bear had dragged her away, the bag would have been torn to shreds.
But the bag was intact. It had simply been left there. A Forest Service employee had to be called in to retrieve the bag with climbing equipment.
Inside, to their surprise, was Kelly’s 35 mm camera. This changed the course of the investigation.
The search team leader immediately halted all operations in that sector. He gathered his people and took them back to camp.
In his report, he cited unsafe conditions. But in private conversations, people said that the atmosphere in that forest was wrong.
The feeling that they were being watched became unbearable. The bag with the camera was taken to the sheriff’s office.
The film was immediately sent for urgent development. That evening, investigators sat in a dimly lit office and laid out the fresh prints on the table.
There were 24 frames on the roll. The first 20 were ordinary tourist shots. Kelly smiling by her car, her dog Roying from Hansen Creek.
A few landscapes. The 21st shot was taken in the evening by the campfire. It showed Roy curled up by the tent.
Photos 22 and 23 were almost completely black. It looked like she had tried to photograph something in the dark, but either the flash didn’t work or the subject was too far away.
But frame number 24, the last frame on the roll was different. It was blurred.
The camera had jerked violently at the moment of exposure. The flash had gone off.
It had illuminated something very close. The photograph had been taken from inside or just outside the tent entrance, and it was directed into the darkness toward the forest.
Most of the frame was taken up by a dark, out of focus mass. At first, it looked like a wall of fur or wet leaves, but when the investigators looked closer, they could make out the details.
On the right side of the frame, taking up almost a third of the space, was part of a massive shoulder and arm.
It was covered with thick, tangled fur of a dark, almost black color. The proportions were wrong for a bear.
It was the shoulder of a creature standing upright. The arm, or what was once an arm, was incredibly thick, muscular, and ended in something the camera couldn’t focus on.
But that wasn’t the creepiest part. In the upper left corner of the frame, barely visible but distinguishable, were two dim reflective spots.
The flash caught them. They weren’t the eyes of an animal glowing green or yellow.
They were dim red, and they were looking straight into the lens. This photo was not published.
It was immediately removed from the case and placed in a separate archive because now they had more than just a missing person case.
They had proof that the tracks in the clearing and the creature that left them were real and it was still out there somewhere in the Mount Baker forest.
What do you think about this story? Do you believe it or not? Could the creature have dragged the girl away or is it all just madeup details?
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
