This happened when the witness was seven-years-old. He remembers everything vividly, even his age when he saw the Hairy Man.

When he was a young boy, “John” and his family were at fishcamp near Kwethluk. One fine day, John and his friends were out swimming and playing a game of “Not-it” when he ran around a corner of a beach and brush along the river. Suddenly, John stopped running when he saw a Hairy Man standing motionless less than 100 feet away looking at him.

Illustration by AI

The creature and John stared at each other for a long moment. Then John looked back behind him to see if his friends were there and seeing the creature too, but they weren’t there. When he turned around to look at the Hairy Man again, it was gone.
John then quit playing with his friends and went instead to his family’s camp where his mother met him. She asked why he seemed so anxious, and John told her he had just seen a “carayak,” not knowing how else to call the Hairy Man. (Carayak is the Yup’ik name for “beast,” often for the brown bear.)
John’s mother then told his father what happened. Then John and his dad left to inspect what he was talking about. All they saw were these strange tracks in the grass, which appeared to have been spun around at a point where the Hairy Man was standing and ran off. John’s father followed the tracks for a short way but didn’t see what made them.

To this day, John remembers the Hairy Man as a tall creature – about 8-9 feet high – and while standing its arms extended past its knees. It was hairy all over, the color being light brown. Its face looked like a cross between an ape and a man. Its eyes were small on a grey face, and its nose seemed flat. The creature’s chest, although hairy, showed a pinkish skin color beneath it.
John said he didn’t feel any fear at the moment when he saw the Hairy Man, which it was standing just in front of the trees when he saw it. But his mother later told John he appeared pale and perplexed when he came home after that moment of seeing the animal.

To this day John, now an adult, has never seen anything like it again. However, whenever he’s out alone in the wilderness and remembers his Hairy Man encounter, the hair on the back of his neck start to stick out a little.