(Historic) Ruby Creek Incident

Chapman Cabin close up view

Chapman Cabin distance view

Chapman Cabin distance view

Ruby Creek Incident Footprint Drawing Courtesy of John Green

Stories about the Sasquatch have been appearing in print from time to time since the 1860s, and I have clipping in my files from almost every year since the early 1920s. But the modern history of the Sasquatch really dates from September 1941, when one of these creatures paid a visit — in broad daylight — to an Indian family named Chapman. While the Amerindian stories have usually been dismissed as legend, or laughed off because Indians are not supposed to be reliable, this experience was accompanied by too much physical evidence to be ignored. The Chapman family consisted off George and Jeannie Chapman and children numbering, at my visit, four. Mr. Chapman worked on the railroad, and was living at that time in a small place called Ruby Creek, 30 miles up the Fraser River from Agassiv, British Columbia, in Canada's great western province.

It was about 3 in the afternoon of a sunny, cloudless day when Jeannie Chapman's eldest son, then aged 9, came running to the house saying that there was a cow coming down out of the woods at the foot of the nearby mountain. The other kids, a boy aged 7 and a little girl of 5, were still playing in a field behind the house bordering on the rail track.

Mrs. Chapman went out to look, since the boy seemed oddly disturbed, and they saw what at first she thought was a very big bear moving about among the bushes bordering the field beyond the railway tracks. She called the two children who came running immediately. Then the creature moved onto the tracks and she saw to her horror that it was a gigantic man covered with hair, not fur. The hair seemed to be about four inches long all over, and of a pale yellow-brown color. To pin down this color Mrs. Chapman pointed out to me a sheet of lightly varnished plywood in the room where we were sitting. This was of a brown-ochre color.

This creature advanced directly toward the house and Mrs. Chapman had, as she put it, "much too much time to look at it" because she stood her ground outside while the eldest boy — on her instructions — got a blanket from the house and rounded up the other children. The kids were in a near panic, she told us, and it took two or three minutes to get the blanket, during which time the creature had reached the near corner of the field only about 100 feet away from her. Mrs. Chapman then spread the blanket and, holding it aloft so that the kids could not see the creature or it them, she backed off at the double to the old field and down on to the river beach out of sight, and then ran with the kids downstream to the village.

I asked her a leading question about the blanket. Had her purpose in using it been to prevent her kids seeing the creature, in accord with an alleged Amerindian belief that to do so brings bad luck and often death? Her reply was both prompt and surprising. She said that, although she had heard white men tell of that belief, she had not heard it from her parents or any other of her people whose advice regarding the so-called Sasquatch had been simply not to go further than certain points up certain valleys, to run if she saw one, and not to struggle if one caught her as it might squeeze her to death by mistake.

"No," she said, "I used the blanket because I thought it was after one of the kids and so might go into the house to look for them instead of following me." This seems to have been sound logic as the creature did go into the house and also rummaged through an old outhouse pretty thoroughly, hauling from it a 55-gallon barrel of salt fish, breaking this open, and scattering its contents about outside. (The irony of it is that all those three children DID die within three years; the two boys by drowning, and the little girl on a sickbed. And just after I interviewed the Chapmans they also were drowned in the Fraser River when a row-boat capsized.)

Mrs. Chapman told me that the creature was about 7½ feet tall. She could estimate its height by the various fence and line posts standing about the field. It had a rather small head and a very short, thick neck; in fact really no neck at all, a point that was emphasized by William Roe and by all others who claim to have seen one of these creatures. Its body was entirely human in shape except that it was immensely thick through its chest and its arms were exceptionally long. She did not see the feet which were in the grass. Its shoulders were very wide and it had no breasts, from which Mrs. Chapman assumed it was a male, though she also did not see any male genitalia due to the long hair covering its groin. She was most definite on one point: the naked parts of its face and its hands were much darker than its hair, and appeared to be almost black.

George Chapman returned home from his work on the railroad that day shortly before 6 in the evening and by a route that by-passed the village so that he saw no one to tell him what had happened. When he reached his house he immediately saw the woodshed door battered in, and spotted enormous humanoid footprints all over the place. Greatly alarmed — for he, like all of his people, had heard since childhood about the "big wild men of the mountains," though he did not hear the word Sasquatch till after this incident — he called for his family and then dashed through the house. Then he spotted the foot-tracks of his wife and kids going off toward the river. He followed these until he picked them up on the sand beside the river and saw them going off downstream without any giant ones following.

Somewhat relieved, he was retracing his steps when he stumbled across the giant's foot-tracks on the river bank farther upstream. These had come down out of the potato patch, which lay between the house and the river, had milled about by the river, and then gone back through the old field toward the foot of the mountains where they disappeared in the heavy growth.

Returning to the house, relieved to know that the tracks of all four of his family had gone off downstream to the village, George Chapman went to examine the woodshed. In our interview, after 18 years, he still expressed voluble astonishment that any living thing, even a 7-foot-6- inch man with a barrel-chest could lift a 55-gallon tub of fish and break it open without using a tool. He confirmed the creature's height after finding a number of long brown hairs stuck in the slabwood lintel of the doorway, above the level of his head.

George Chapman then went off to the village to look for his family, and found them in a state of calm collapse. He gathered them up and invited his father-in-law and two others to return with him, for protection of his family when he was away at work.

The foot-tracks returned every night for a week and on two occasions the dogs that the Chapmans had taken with them set up the most awful racket at exactly 2 o'clock in the morning. The Sasquatch did not, however, molest them or, apparently, touch either the house or the woodshed. But the whole business was too unnerving and the family finally moved out. They never went back.

After a long chat about this and other matters, Mrs. Chapman suddenly told us something very significant just as we were leaving. She said: "It made an awful funny noise." I asked her if she could imitate this noise for me but it was her husband who did so, saying that he had heard it at night twice during the week after the first incident. He then proceeded to utter exactly the same strange, gurgling whistle that the men in California, who said they had heard a Bigfoot call, had given us. This is a sound I cannot reproduce in print, but I can assure you that it is unlike anything I have ever heard given by man or beast anywhere in the world.

To me, this information is of the greatest significance. That an Amerindian couple in British Columbia should give out with exactly the same strange sound in connection with a Sasquatch that two highly educated white men did, over 600 miles south in connection with California’s Bigfoot, is incredible. If this is all hoax or a publicity stunt, or mass-hallucination, as some people have claimed, how does it happen that this noise — which defies description — always sounds the same no matter who has tried to reproduce it for me?

These were probably the last words on the Sasquatch that the Chapmans uttered and I absolutely refuse to listen to anybody who might say they were lying. Admittedly, honest men are such a rarity as possibly to be non-existent, but I have met a few who could qualify and I put the Chapmans near the head of the list.

Ivan T. Sanderson, True Magazine,March 1960

From: On the track of the Sasquatch; John Green (Agassiz, British Columbia: Cheam Publishing Ltd. 1969, p. 1-8.)

Until the Harrison Sasquatch Hunt hit the headlines I had never heard of this incident, although Ruby Creek is only twelve miles up the Fraser River from Agassiz. But with all the publicity going on, the subject of Sasquatches tended to come in many conversations, and it did so when my wife and I were visiting Jack Kirkman, game guide at Harrison Hot Springs, and his wife Martha, who is an Indian.

Martha Kirkman told us the story of the Sasquatch at Ruby Creek as it had been told to her by her cousin Jeannie Chapman, (not Chadwick), the woman who saw the creature. Mrs. Kirkman also said that when she was young there were places, in the woods the children were not allowed to go because the Sasquatches were there. She did not say that she herself believed such creatures existed, but she did impress on us very strongly that Mrs. Chapman was serious in telling her story, and indeed had suffered a shock that changed her whole life.

On the same weekend, Bill Rae, a printer who worked for me, was told the same story by Esse Tyfting, the head custodian of Agassiz High school, who had lived at Ruby Creek at that time. He had not seen the creature itself but was one of many local people who had studied the footprints it left behind, and had found that the tracks confirmed Mrs. Chapman's account of the creature's movements.

Thoroughly intrigued, I went to see, Mr. Tyfting, who repeated his story and drew an outline of the footprint for me on the floor of a room he was building. His story, and the size of the print he drew, were impressive. He was a man whom I already knew, and whom I knew to have a good reputation in the community. When he said that he had actually seen these huge footprints I had no grounds to doubt him. Through him, I was also able to locate half a dozen more people who had been present at that time and had seen the prints. Their recollections varied considerably, but all but one agreed that the prints could not have been made by any man or known animal. The lone exception insisted it must have been a bear, but he agreed with the others that it had walked on its hind legs and had stepped over a four-foot fence. I also went to see Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, and talked to them on two occasions, and I visited the Chapmans' house - which had stood abandoned since that time.

Mrs. Chapman told me that one of her children hid come to the house shouting about a "big cow coming out of the woods." She looked out the window and saw a manlike creature about eight feet tall and covered all over with fairly dark hair. It was walking across a field towards the house. She did not see its face from close up, but she was sure it had a flat nose not a snout like a bear. Bears were very common around Ruby Creek At that time, and she was thoroughly familiar with their appearance. Although terrified, Mrs. Chapman was still able to think clearly. She took the children and led them out the front door, keeping the house between her and the creature. They crossed a stretch of field and got down to the river, where a high bank shielded them from view. She didn't know if the Sasquatch saw them but it did not try to follow. The tracks later showed that the creature had circled the house and entered a shed where there was a barrel of salt salmon. He sampled this - there was some disagreement about whether he had lifted and dumped it, but in any event there was torn fish scattered around. Then he went down to the river, perhaps to wash the salt out of his mouth, and returned to the mountain. I did not consider her story reliable as to detail, particularly as it was not entirely consistent, and I have since read accounts in which she is quoted as having said things that do not agree with some of the things she said to me.

I have noticed since that time that some people with scientific training tend to reject an entire story if they can find fault with something in it - even a detail that has nothing whatever to do with the subject at hand. Several years as a reporter covering court cases have given me a more realistic view of the average person's ability to remember. No two witnesses, however impartial, ever have the same recollection of details of the same event, and it is rarely that a witness who is testifying at any length gives precisely the same information at the trial that he gave at the preliminary examination.

On the other hand most people (some politicians excepted) do not lie very convincingly under questioning, and I was quite certain Mrs. Chapman believed what she told me.

Later I talked to a son of the late Joe Dunn, a deputy Sheriff of Whatcom County in Washington, who had investigated the Ruby Creek incident at the time. Apparently Sheriff Dunn was already interested in the subject through experiences of his own. At his home I found a report written by him generally confirming what I had learned myself and was able to copy a tracing of a footprint. By that time I had also been in touch with William Roe and Albert Ostman, and had heard two or three more reports of sightings of something that was more like an erect ape than the giant hairy Indians of the Sasquatch stories.

Interviewing people and gathering facts is my regular occupation, and if I were being fooled very often my readers would be bringing it to my attention. These stories rang true to me, but I took the additional step of having them legally sworn to. In the case of Albert Ostman. and the people involved at Ruby Creek, I even had them cross-examined by the local magistrate, formerly a trial lawyer of considerable reputation. I took what I had gathered to the University of B.C., expecting that scientists would want to investigate the matter. I still had a great deal to learn.