Oregon: Bigfoot & Colossal Claude

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories

This episode traces Oregon's cryptid history through a chronological series of eyewitness accounts, focusing heavily on the maritime legend known as Colossal Claude and various Bigfoot sightings across the state's coastal and

Key takeaways

• Lightship crews on the Columbia River reported a 40-foot creature with an 8-foot neck in March 1934, sparking decades of sightings later dubbed Colossal Claude.
• Fisherman Arnie and his nephew observed three level-moving humps in the Columbia Bar swells in April 1951, describing a tan-colored neck and horse-like head that accompanied their boat for minutes.

Main topics

• Colossal Claude maritime sightings
• Columbia River Bar seasonal patterns

Notable quotes

"He could have sunk us with a nudge."

Conclusion

The episode delivers a methodical, archive-driven exploration of Oregon's cryptid reports, prioritizing

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore. Because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Speaker 1 (0:11) Turning dreams into direction. Speaker 1 (0:17) Every journey brings us closer to the life we imagine. Speaker 1 (0:23) So, where will your journey take you? Etihad. Beyond borders. Speaker 2 (0:32) For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace. Some blame wild animals. Others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in. But those who have survived, they know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, dogmen, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out. Others aren't so lucky. Are you ready? Because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember, some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button. Turn on auto downloads and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Speaker 2 (1:32) Five miles off the mouth of the Columbia River, in the middle of March of 1934, a red ship sat at anchor with her name painted down her side in white letters taller than a man. The name was Columbia, and she'd been riding that same patch of ocean since 1909. She was a light ship, which is a lighthouse built on a hull for the places where nobody can pour a foundation. and her whole job was to stay put in some of the worst water on the west coast so that other ships could find the river. The men who served on her lived aboard for weeks at a stretch. They kept the light burning and the fog signal sounding. They chipped rust and painted over it, and they watched the bar, because the bar was the reason any of them were out there. The Columbia River Bar is the place where the biggest river on the Pacific side of North America runs straight into the ocean swell over a shelf of sand that shifts every winter. Around 2,000 vessels have gone down on it or near it since the 1790s, and about 700 people have gone down with them. Sailors named that stretch of coast the Graveyard of the Pacific a long time ago, and nobody's ever come up with a reason to change it. That week in March, a supply tender called The Rose came out from Astoria to trade the light ship's crew for a fresh one. And while the two vessels were working together, something came up out of the water near them. The men said it was about 40 feet long. They said it had a neck that stood 8 feet out of the sea, with a large head on the end of it. And the captain of the tender told a newspaper that it opened its mouth and gaped at the light ship. The crew passed the field glasses around and watched it for several minutes. Some of them wanted to lower a small boat and go after it, and the officers told them no, because an animal that size could put a small boat on its side. Then it went under, and the Rose took the old crew back to Astoria, and within a couple of days, the story was in the papers in Salem and Bend. Welcome back to the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip. The last stop was Oklahoma, where the lakes are warm and brown. and the standing advice is not to swim after dark. From there, the road runs northwest for the better part of 2,000 miles, over the Rockies and down the Columbia Gorge, until the river widens out past Astoria and the highway runs out of land. This is Oregon, 360 miles of cold coastline with fishing ports tucked in behind the river bars and lighthouses on the headlands between them. And for about 25 years in the middle of the last century, The people who worked that water kept reporting the same long-necked animal the lightship men had described. Somewhere along the way, it picked up a name, and the name was Colossal Claude. Oregon has another one, of course, and it's the one the state is known for. It walks upright, it lives in the timber, and Oregon has millions of acres of that. We'll go up into those woods before we head out. But for now, we start on the water, on the bar itself, with a salmon troller coming home. Arnie fished out of Astoria for 41 years, and in April of 1951, he was running a 42-foot troller with his nephew working the deck. The spring Chinook were coming into the river, and the two of them had been outside for three days and were heading in with fish in the hold. A boat that size doesn't cross the Columbia Bar whenever it wants to. The river pours out on the ebb and stacks the incoming swell into breakers. So the small boats wait offshore for the flood tide and then come in on it. And that's what Arnie did. It was the middle of the afternoon under a low gray sky with a swell running about 10 feet and a chop on top of it. And he came in between the jetties with the tide behind him and his nephew standing on the back deck holding on to the rigging. He was watching the swells on his left side because that's where trouble comes from on that crossing. And in the trough between two of them. About 40 yards off, he saw three humps. They were dark brown and wet, and each one was about the size of a skiff turned bottom up. They were in a line, evenly spaced, with maybe six feet of water between one and the next, and they were moving toward the river mouth the same way the boat was. Arnie said later that what held his eye was the way they rowed. Everything else on that bar was going up and down with the swell. The boat and the buoys and the birds sitting on the water. And the humps weren't. They stayed level and went through the swells. And the water broke white around the front of the first one, the way it breaks around a piling in a current. His nephew had seen them too. He came forward along the rail and into the wheelhouse and stood next to his uncle without saying anything. Then the net came up ahead of the first hump. Arnie said it was as big around as a dock piling and it rose about six feet. leaning forward with a bend in it near the top, and the head on the end of it was long and blunt and held level with the water. He said the head looked like a horse's head with the ears taken off. The hair on the neck was short and coarse and lay flat with the water running out of it, and the color was lighter there than on the humps, more of a tan. The head turned toward the boat. Arnie could see one eye, large and dull, about the size of a saucer. set back on the side of the head and he said the animal held its head that way for as long as it took the troller to climb one swell and slide down the back of it then Speaker 1 (7:03) it faced the river again it Speaker 2 (7:05) stayed with them for most of the length of the south jetty arnie didn't change his speed or his heading because on the bar there isn't anywhere else to go and for four or five minutes the boat and the animal went in over the bar side by side with 40 yards of gray water between them His nephew counted the humps out loud twice and got three both times. Somewhere short of buoy 10, the neck went down, forward and under, and the humps went down after it one at a time from front to back. Arnie said the last one left a slick on the surface that the chop took a while to break up. They tied up at the cannery dock in Astoria that evening and sold their fish, and Arnie told the buyer what they'd seen coming in. The buyer finished writing the ticket and told him the light ship crews had been seeing that thing for years, and then he asked whether Arnie wanted cash or credit on the ice. Arnie crossed that bar a few thousand more times before he quit fishing in the 1980s. His nephew bought his own boat and fished out of Warrington. Neither of them saw the animal again, and Arnie's family says he never came in past the South Jetty without turning his head to look at the water on his left side. The first report anybody can put a date on is the one from the light ship, and the newspapers that carried it don't agree with each other on every point. The Salem Capital Journal ran the story on March 16, 1934, and the Bend Bulletin ran it the next day. The Capital Journal's source was Captain J.F. Jensen of the Tinder Rose, who told the paper that every member of the crew had seen the animal, that it had a neck about eight feet long, with a large head, and that it had opened a huge mouth and gaped at the lightship. The Bend paper carried a description from a crewman who said the head was underwater when he looked, but that he could see the long body and that it appeared to be at least 40 feet in length. The quote that got repeated for the next 90 years came from a mate named L.A. Larson. He said it was about 40 feet long, with a neck some 8 feet long, a big round body, a mean-looking tail, and what he called an evil, snaky look to its head. Some later writers have Larson serving as mate on the light ship, and at least one, the Oregon historian Finn J.D. John, has him as first mate of the Rose. Either way, he was there. Captain Jensen, for his part, told the Portland Morning Oregonian that the head looked more like a camel's than a snake's. So within a week of the sighting, there were already two heads on the animal, a snake's and a camel's. from two men who'd watched it at the same time from decks a short distance apart. The Oregon papers didn't make much of it. The story ran for a few days and then dropped out. About three months later, a carcass washed up on the Long Beach Peninsula on the Washington side of the river mouth, and there was some talk in print that it might be the animal the lightship crew had seen. But nothing more was published about it, and nobody recorded what the carcass turned out to be. Three years went by. Then, in 1937, Captain Charles E. Graham, who ran a salmon troller called the Viv, reported that he'd seen the animal near the river mouth and that it had come close enough to get a good look at. His description is the most exact one in the whole record. He said it was a long, hairy, tan-colored creature with the head of an overgrown horse, about 40 feet long and with a four-foot waist measure. A few months after Graham's report, A married couple named White were standing above Devil's Churn, which is a narrow slot in the rock on the central coast south of Yahats where the surf drives in and explodes. It's about 120 miles down the coast from the Columbia. The Whites said that just offshore, they watched a hairy animal with a neck and a maned head standing 15 feet out of the water, and they guessed its whole length at 55 feet. When it turned south and started moving along the shore, the two of them ran back to their car and drove down the coast highway after it, a dozen miles or so to Husita Head, where the lighthouse stands. They got there, and by their account, the animal did too. They watched it a second time from the headland, and then it turned west and swam out to sea. The closest sighting came on April 13, 1939, and it came from a halibut schooner called the Argo, working just off the Columbia. Her captain, Chris Anderson, said the animal passed within 10 feet of the boat with its head and neck standing 10 feet above the water. One of his crewmen grabbed a boat hook and went to the rail to poke at it, and Anderson stopped him. Anderson's statement ran in the Oregon papers that week, and the Eugene Guard put it under a headline about a baffled fisherman and a snaky serpent. He said, He could have sunk us with a nudge. His head was like a camel's. His fur was coarse and gray. He had glassy eyes and a bent snout that he used to push a 20-pound halibut off our lines and into his mouth. In another version of his account, he gave the size as 10 feet through the body and 50 feet long. That same year, there were two more. In September, two steamship line employees named Robert O'Donnell and Vern Harms reported a large-headed, thick-necked animal 40 miles off Tillamook Bay. And at Nelscott, A beach town that's part of Lincoln City now, more than 30 people stood on the shore and watched a 30-foot animal with a slender neck and a snake-like head moving through the water offshore. There were others down the coast, with fewer details attached. At Bandon, people described an animal 12 and a half feet long with a bulbous nose and a body like a cow's covered in brownish hair. There were reports out of Newport and out of Empire on Coos Bay. The Oregon Encyclopedia, which is published by the Oregon Historical Society, sums them up by saying that most described a head like a camel's or a horse's, and that the body was covered in scales or smooth skin or fur, depending on who was telling it. In 1950, something did come ashore. A mass of hair and flesh weighing about 1,000 pounds washed up at Dee Lake near Nelscott, and the town marshal... Andy Allum described it as hair covered with a body like a cow's. The locals called it Old Hairy. A specialist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York thought it was a whale shark. The state's wildlife agency thought it was whale blubber, and a professor at the University of Portland thought it was some kind of cartilaginous fish. It was never positively identified. The name Colossal Claw doesn't show up with the first reports. According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, it came into use for the animal seen at the mouth of the Columbia and south of it mostly during the 1950s, when light ship crews and passing fishermen were still reporting it from time to time. Nobody has ever established who came up with it. In 1967, a writer named Peter Cairns pulled the whole history together for the Sunday Oregonian under the headline, Colossal Clawed and the Sea Monsters. and that article is where most later accounts get their material. Cairns wrote that the once-familiar sea serpent hadn't shown itself since the middle 50s. There's one more piece. In 1963, a crew from the Shell Oil Company was searching for oil off the Oregon coast and running underwater cameras, and the cameras recorded an animal about 15 feet long with barnacled ridges along its body, moving through the water with a corkscrew motion. It got the name Marvin the Monster. Scientists who looked at the film offered several different identifications and never settled on one. And some people on the coast decided Marvin and Claude were the same animal. Though a ridged 15-foot thing that swims in a spiral doesn't match much in the earlier descriptions. Finn J.D. John, who went back through the 1934 newspaper files, noticed something about the calendar. The lightship sighting was in the middle of March, and the Argo sighting was in the middle of April. And that's when the spring Chinook come home to the Columbia, the first big salmon run of the year, all of it funneling through a river mouth a few miles wide. The light ship that started it left the station in 1939, the same year as the Argo report, and a newer ship took her place. The newspapers lost interest. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Speaker 1 (15:36) For many of us, going further isn't a choice. It's a feeling we can't ignore. Because ambition has a way of outgrowing where it began. Speaker 1 (15:47) Turning dreams into direction. Speaker