Army vet, 45, reveals terrifying encounter with 'Bigfoot' while camping along abandoned forest road... and the very scary sound the creature made

A US Army veteran-turned-Sasquatch hunter has opened up about his terrifying encounter with 'Bigfoot' while camping along an abandoned forest road. 

Electrician Kelly Stolp, 45, has been searching for a Sasquatch ever since he heard one screaming in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington, four summers ago. 

An avid outdoorsman from Montana, Stolp has come across many a wild animal, but nothing like what he saw on the night of July 17, 2020. 

He was camping with his two sons and nephew, along with an old Army buddy, Mike Palagi and his fiancée when they experienced what he calls 'the founding incident'. 

Stolp said it was around 3am when they were woken by the yeti-like scream. 'It sounded like a washboard sound, like a brat-tat-tat, but it was so guttural,' he told Oregon Live.

'I don't know if I thought Sasquatch,' he added. 'I thought fear.'

Stolp grabbed his shotgun and yelled to his campmates. But they had finished a bottle of Pendleton whisky and did not immediately wake up. 

The next night, around the same time, the experience repeated itself.  

'The next night, let's just say I was out of Pendleton,' Palagi, 38, told Oregon Live. 'So, I did hear the croak. It seemed to be elevated, not on a ground level.'

Palagi's fiancée, Olivia Corbin, also said she heard the noise. 'It sounded like it ran right past our heads,' she said. 'Very heavy footed. We could feel the ground move as it was running past the tent.'

The two Army veterans got out of the tent to scour the area, and Palagi admitted they were 'scared as hell'.  

'It's very, very dark, but you could still hear thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. It wasn't a four-legged thing. It was something on two legs,' he told Oregon Live.

And then it disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. 

Stolp said he only confided in his wife and a small circle of close friends about the  incident because he didn't want people to think he was crazy. 

One of his confidantes included Tanner Hoskins, 31, who wanted to get to the bottom of the mysterious experience. 

In August 2020, they ventured back to the scene of the sighting, but the Bigfoot did not return. 

Determined to find out more, Hoskins launched a website called the Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Search to crowdsource more information.

'We started getting reports almost right off the bat,' Hoskins told Oregon Live.      

A sheriff's deputy reported hearing an identical brat-tat-tat sound near Saddle Mountain in northwest Oregon, while another camper said they saw a hairy two-footed creature outside Vernonia. 

The website was flooded with more than 100 reports of otherworldly sights and sounds. 

'It brought magic back into my life in a way,' Stolp said of the 2020 encounter which sparked their quest. 

'Mystery came back, because it didn't exist before that. It's like being a kid again.'

Washington, with 713 sightings all-time, leads the way with the most Bigfoot reports, according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. California was the next most common at 461 and Florida was third at 339.