Oregon: Bigfoot & Colossal Claude

In March of 1934, the crew of the lightship Columbia and the supply tender Rose watched something come up out of the water near the mouth of the Columbia River. The men said it was about 40 feet long with an 8-foot neck, and the tender's captain told the Salem Capital Journal it opened its mouth and gaped at the lightship. The crew wanted to lower a boat and go after it, and the officers told them no.

Oregon would eventually give it a name, Colossal Claude.

On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian heads to the Oregon coast and the Columbia River Bar, the stretch of water sailors call the Graveyard of the Pacific.

The episode follows the sea serpent through the newspaper record, from the 1934 lightship sighting to Captain Charles Graham of the troller Viv in 1937, the couple who chased a 55-foot animal down the coast highway from Devil's Churn to Heceta Head, and Captain Chris Anderson of the halibut schooner Argo, who said in 1939 that it passed within 10 feet of his boat and ate a 20-pound halibut off his line.

Along the way there's the crowd of more than 30 people at Nelscott, the 1,000-pound carcass called Old Hairy that washed up at Delake in 1950, and Marvin the Monster, filmed by Shell Oil cameras in 1963.You'll also hear from the people who never called a reporter: a salmon troller crossing the bar in 1951, an assistant keeper on Tillamook Rock, a family at the Neahkahnie Mountain viewpoint, a crabber off Clatsop Spit who had something follow his boat for 40 minutes, and a fisherman on the South Jetty in 2012.Then the road turns inland.

Nearly half of Oregon is forest, and the reports of something upright in that timber go back to the wild man of the Sixes mining district in 1904.

Brian covers the 1971 sightings at The Dalles, where a music teacher put a rifle scope on a creature in his headlights and couldn't pull the trigger, along with Peter Byrne's Bigfoot Information Center and the Bigfoot trap that still stands in the Siskiyous.

The episode closes with Sasquatch encounters from the Tillamook State Forest, the Clackamas River, the North Umpqua, Olallie Lake and Bear Camp Road.

If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, email brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.


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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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