Ruby Creek Incident: The Chapman Family Sasquatch Encounter

Ruby Creek is a small locality on the Fraser River in British Columbia, on the mainline of the Canadian Pacific Railway. In 1941 a railway worker, George Chapman, lived there with his wife Jeannie and their three children. The railway tracks and bush lay above their cabin. A creek and a potato patch were nearby, and the river was below. The Skawahlook First Nation notes that the word Sasquatch comes from the Salish se'sxac, "wild men."

Early September 1941. About 3:00pm on a sunny, cloudless day. The eldest boy, aged 9, ran in saying there was a cow coming down out of the woods.

Jeannie Chapman saw what she took for a bear, moving among the bushes beside the railway tracks. Then it reached the tracks. It was "a gigantic man covered with hair, not fur." Judged against the fence and line posts, it stood about seven and a half feet tall. It was "immensely thick through its chest," with long arms and a small head. It had "really no neck at all." Its hair was light brown. Its face and hands were almost black. It made a strange gurgling whistle.

She sent the boy for the other children and a blanket. The creature was about 100 feet away. She held the blanket up with the children behind it and backed toward the river. "I used the blanket because I thought it was after one of the kids and so might go into the house looking for them instead of following me." She had "much too much time to look at it." The family fled toward the village.

It did not follow. The shed door was smashed inward. A 55-gallon barrel of salted fish was hauled out and ripped open. George came home about two hours later and found the tracks. The humanlike prints were nearly 17 inches long. They crossed the potato patch and a four foot high barbed wire fence, then forded the creek into the forest. For about a week, fresh prints appeared around the house each morning. The dogs were "very over excited at night." Then the Chapmans left for good.

George's coworker Esse Tyfting and Deputy Sheriff Joe Dunn of Bellingham, Washington, examined the site. They measured the tracks, made a plaster cast and traced one of the better prints. Dunn's inquiry appears to have been personal, not official. No RCMP inquiry is on record.

In 1957 John Green re-interviewed the Chapmans and Tyfting and found Dunn's tracing again. The case convinced him. He settled in Harrison Hot Springs and began some 60 years of research. In 1959 he introduced the family to Ivan T. Sanderson. Sanderson was blunt: "I absolutely refuse to listen to anybody who might say they were lying."

No one ever accused the Chapmans of a hoax. The only ordinary explanation on record is Jeannie's own first thought, a bear. She dropped it once the creature stood on the tracks. Criticism fell instead on how the evidence was handled later. Green claimed the Ruby Creek tracing matched prints from Bluff Creek within half an inch. Loren Coleman attacked that claim and blamed comparison drawings by Bob Titmus.

Then there was talk of a curse. Green wrote that for "an Indian to see a Sasquatch was believed to be bad luck, in fact the observer was in danger of dying." Accounts of the family's fate conflict. The drownings are dated anywhere from about a month to some 18 years after the sighting. A plainer reading points to hard, isolated rural life, where drowning was an everyday hazard.