The Missouri Footage That Refuses to Die

“My God… that’s its face.
The eyes are shut. It’s not moving.”

.

.

.

The voice trembles as the camera pulls back, struggling to capture the full scale of what lies on the forest floor.

“I’m going to back up so you can see how big this thing really is. Look at the shoulders. The arms… from head to toe. Eight, maybe nine feet easy. It’s giant.”

That grainy video clip—showing what appears to be the body of a dead Bigfoot somewhere in the Missouri wilderness—has haunted me since the first time I saw it online. The hunter who filmed it vanished from the internet shortly after posting, leaving behind nothing but a short video, a handful of screenshots, and a mountain of unanswered questions.

This is my attempt to understand what happened, why this footage exists at all, and what it might mean for anyone who has ever wondered whether Sasquatch is real.

The video itself is short, less than a minute. The footage shakes as if the person filming had just pushed through thick brush or climbed over fallen logs. You can hear heavy breathing—controlled, but tense. The camera pans across the forest floor, and then suddenly, there it is.

The body.

Dark fur, matted and dirty, pressed into the leaves. One massive arm lies stretched out to the side, the other tucked beneath the torso. The shoulders are impossibly broad—far wider than any linebacker I’ve ever seen. The cameraman mutters under his breath, repeating the same thought again and again: how big it is, how this changes everything.

And then the footage cuts out.

I’ve watched that clip hundreds of times. Every viewing reveals something new. The way the fur shifts slightly in the breeze. The sheer width of the back. The unnatural length of the arms. Most striking of all is how the body sinks into the soil, like real dead weight—not the stiff outline of a foam costume holding its shape.

If this is a hoax, it’s an extraordinarily expensive one. We’re talking about a custom-built suit costing tens of thousands of dollars, with proportions that don’t match any gorilla costume on the market. But if it’s real, then the question that has plagued Bigfoot researchers for decades comes roaring back:

Where did the body go?

The footage was originally posted on a hunting forum several years ago, in late autumn. The username has since been deleted, the account completely scrubbed. I managed to save the clip before it disappeared, along with a few screenshots of the original post.

According to the limited information available, the hunter claimed to have found the body while tracking deer somewhere in southern Missouri, likely within the vast expanse of the Mark Twain National Forest. The post included rough GPS coordinates, but when other forum members attempted to investigate, they found nothing. No body. No bones. No disturbed soil. No signs of scavengers.

What struck me most about the original post was how ordinary it felt.

The hunter didn’t claim to be a Bigfoot expert or a cryptozoology enthusiast. They simply said they were following a blood trail from an injured buck when they came across this massive body lying in a ravine. They filmed it on their phone, posted it online to ask if anyone knew what it was, and then—apparently—thought better of it.

Within seventy-two hours, the entire account was gone.

That brief window is all we have. Everything else is speculation.

I want to be clear about something. I don’t know if this footage is real. I want it to be—but wanting something doesn’t make it true. What bothers me most isn’t the video itself. It’s the complete lack of follow-up.

Think about it. If you stumbled across a dead Bigfoot in the woods, you would do one of two things. You’d either contact every news station, university, and research organization you could find… or you’d keep quiet out of fear.

This hunter chose a strange middle ground: post the video online, then vanish.

Why?

One theory is that the hunter got scared. Maybe law enforcement contacted them about disturbing a potential crime scene. Maybe they received threats from people who wanted the location kept secret. Another theory suggests they planned to sell the footage—but if that were true, documentaries and streaming services would have been fighting over it by now.

The most unsettling theory is that something happened to the hunter after filming.

People disappear in national forests all the time. Every year, hundreds vanish in wilderness areas without a trace. Search and rescue teams find abandoned campsites, empty vehicles, scattered belongings—but no bodies.

Could the hunter have gone back to the site and encountered something dangerous? Could there have been other Sasquatch in the area, protective of their fallen companion?

I reached out to the moderators of the original forum. They confirmed the account was deleted voluntarily, not removed by administrators. The IP address traced back to Missouri, but that’s where the trail ended.

No one saved the hunter’s previous posts. No cached pages survived. It was as if the account had never existed.

I grew up hunting in Missouri. I know those woods. My father taught me how to read tracks, how to move quietly through dense underbrush, how to listen when the forest goes still. By the time I was sixteen, I’d spent more nights camping outdoors than sleeping in my own bed.

Missouri wilderness is beautiful—but unforgiving. The Mark Twain National Forest alone covers over a million acres of rugged hills, limestone caves, and deep hollows that can swallow you whole if you’re careless.

And over the years, I started hearing the stories.

Hunters talking about wood knocks echoing through valleys at night. Massive footprints near campsites. Gear rearranged while they slept. Food stolen without bear sign. Most people laugh these stories off—but I started paying attention.

I never saw a Bigfoot myself. But I experienced things I couldn’t explain.

One night, camping alone, I woke to the sound of something massive moving through my campsite. Not crashing—stepping carefully, deliberately, as if it knew exactly where everything was. Heavy breathing circled my tent. I lay frozen, listening, until the footsteps retreated into the dark.

In the morning, I found tracks in the mud—nearly eighteen inches long, five distinct toes, a stride suggesting something walking upright.

I’ve heard too many stories like that to dismiss them all.

An old trapper once told me about finding a dead Sasquatch in the snow after what appeared to be a brutal fight with a black bear. The body was gone when he returned weeks later, the snow carefully smoothed over.

“Some things,” he told me, “are better left alone.”

That’s the thought that keeps circling back to me when I think about the Missouri footage.

Maybe the hunter realized they’d stumbled onto something dangerous—or sacred—and walked away. Maybe others came back for the body. Maybe this is just another elaborate hoax designed to live forever in the gray space between belief and doubt.

All I know is this: alleged Bigfoot bodies always disappear.

And until one doesn’t, until someone brings back undeniable proof, the mystery will remain.

The Missouri footage haunts me because it feels so close. Close enough to believe. Close enough to doubt. Close enough to change everything—if only it could be verified.

Maybe that’s the nature of Bigfoot itself.

Always just out of reach. Always leaving us with more questions than answers.