Original subtitles

Would you believe a man once found himself followed

by a persistent dark cloud?

It is suddenly raining inside the living room.

There's no broken water pipe.

He has no idea where this water is coming from.

What the heck is going on here?

Or that a family was forced to defend their home

against some very unusual invaders.

They hear something scurrying across the roof.

It's a full-scale siege.

There is a panicked

all-hands-at-the-Alamo-type situation here.

How about being taken by a relentless group of strange stalkers?

He gets abducted not three, not four times,

but 11 times.

It gets to the point where Zanfretta doesn't want leave the house

for fear of being taken again.

These are the encounters so hostile, so aggressive,

they are truly unbelievable.

Everyone has had a run of bad luck,

a stretch where nothing seems to go your way.

But for one man in Pennsylvania, it's not just bad luck.

It's something that seems to take over

and follow him wherever he goes.

It's only February of 1983,

and 21-year-old Don Decker is already having a really bad year.

He is spending a few months in jail

for receiving stolen goods,

and now he's gotten word that his grandfather has died.

He gets permission from the warden to attend his grandfather's funeral.

After the funeral, he's going to crash

on his friend's sofa and spend the night there.

He's there in the living room, and he's just kind of overtaken

by this really deep chill,

like colder than cold.

Minutes later, the room around Don

starts to experience a sudden change in forecast.

According to the people who were there,

water starts dripping from the top of this room.

What the heck is going on here?

It is suddenly raining inside the living room.

Don's friend suspects a pipe may have burst,

so he calls the landlord.

The landlord hurries over to the house

because this is his worst nightmare.

So he checks,

but there's no water in the attic, no broken water pipe.

He has no idea where this water is coming from.

Now the landlord is naturally freaking out,

but he doesn't know what to do, so he calls a buddy of his

who is a local cop.

What the police describe is water moving sideways

as if it's being blown by gale-force winds.

But there is no wind, there is no fan,

there's no source from where the water's coming from,

and there's no explanation for what is making it move sideways.

Then they notice that Don is sort of in this really weird, intense trance,

and they don't know what to do about that.

Moments later, the situation takes a startling turn.

Multiple witnesses say that Don...

levitates above the ground.

He's then shoved into the wall backward.

And they can see that he has these claw marks on his neck.

At this point, it's starting to sound like the movie The Exorcist

and they don't know what to do.

So a priest sounds like the best idea.

At a loss, Don's friends enlist the help

of a local minister.

They bring the minister back to the house,

and he prays over Don.

As he's doing so, Don is having these convulsions,

almost like seizures.

When the prayers are finished,

the rain stops.

Don is out of his trance. He seems fine.

Now relieved that finally whatever this is has stopped.

Sadly, Don's relief is as short-lived

as his prison furlough.

When he returns to jail, so does the rain.

The prison guards don't know what to do.

The warden doesn't know what to do.

So they call the prison chaplain.

The chaplain arrives, and he's reading from his Bible.

According to the people that were there,

everything in this jail cell is getting wet

except for this Bible.

After reading through several passages from the Bible,

the water finally stops.

And this time it's over for good.

To the reverend,

it seems like a clear case of demonic possession.

And Don believes he may know exactly which spirit is responsible.

Don believes that this is the work of his grandfather,

who he claims was abusive to Don throughout his entire childhood.

He says this is his grandfather

getting in one last chance to torment him

before heading off to the great beyond.

At least Don's tormentor felt like someone he knew.

The family at the center of this next case wasn't so lucky.

It's August 1977, and we're on the outskirts of London.

North of the city is a town called Enfield.

There's a woman named Peggy Hodgson.

She's recently divorced, living in government-subsidized housing

along with her four children.

And these kids, they range in age from 7 to 13.

The kids are supposed to be almost asleep

while Peggy is tidying up downstairs.

But she hears some horsing around, and she's having none of it.

She goes upstairs, opens the door, flicks on the light,

and she's about to let the kids have it.

When that light comes on and she sees her children's faces,

she sees that they are genuinely scared.

Out of the corner of her eye,

she catches the chest of drawers lurching forward.

And nobody's anywhere near it.

She tries to push it back to its original position, but she can't.

Then suddenly, all three of them hear this rhythmic noise from inside the walls.

Like something is trying to get their attention.

Peggy panics and calls the cops,

but nothing in the police handbook prepares them for what happens next.

One of the officers is standing next to a living room chair

when she says the chair suddenly slides several feet forward

as if it's been pushed by an invisible hand.

How do you write up a report for this sort of thing?

She doesn't write, "a ghost moved the chair."

She goes with a much more neutral,

"a chair moved without physical contact."

The police can't explain what's happening, let alone stop it.

In the months that follow, the activity escalates

and starts playing favorites.

According to the family, this presence is somehow targeting

the 11-year-old daughter, Janet.

They say that it follows her from room to room,

and sometimes she even reports that she can feel it yanking on her.

Before long, whatever's hanging around Janet

starts to get very chatty.

Eleven-year-old Janet

starts speaking in this gravelly voice.

Yeah.

Eventually, one voice calls itself Bill Wilkins.

Like, can you imagine what it must be like

for one of your kids to start speaking

in this creepy, deep voice, calling herself Bill?

I mean, I don't even know where you would start with that as a mom.

Through Janet, Bill says,

"I fell asleep, and I died in a chair in a corner downstairs."

So investigators look into Bill Wilkins

and find out that, yes, in fact,

he died in that house.

And then later, they confirmed with his son

he did die in his favorite chair.

Keep in mind, this is in the days before the internet.

Either this girl knows how to find the death certificate

and details of a random stranger's death...

or something is speaking through her.

With nowhere else to go,

the Hodgson family is forced to endure the nightmare.

And over the next 18 months, the presence in the house

becomes increasingly hostile.

Small fires start in the kitchen for no reason.

Janet is thrown from her bed multiple times.

The entity even tries to, like, strangle this poor girl with a curtain.

Like, the thing just goes on and on.

Then in 1979,

just as abruptly as the activity began...

...it stops.

Peggy Hodgson remains in the house until her death in 2003.

And to this day, Janet can't explain

why she or her family were taken over in this way.

Eventually, the torment in Enfield comes to an end.

But not every malevolent force takes the hint

or knows when to let go.

Coming up, the curious case of some very persistent aliens.

He gets abducted not three, not four times,

but 11 times.

It gets to the point where Zanfretta doesn't want to leave the house

for fear of being taken.

On paper, being a night watchman sounds simple.

Long shifts, very few surprises.

Unless, of course, you're Italian security guard

Pier Fortunato Zanfretta,

whose routine shift includes a nightmarish surprise

no job description prepares him for.

It's a freezing cold

December night, 1978.

Pier Fortunato Zanfretta makes his way through the icy streets,

towards the villa he's supposed to be guarding.

Zanfretta sees lights that shouldn't be there in the backyard of the villa.

He thinks he spotted some thieves.

He's new to this job and he wants to make a good impression,

so he musters the courage to go and investigate.

He's kind of tiptoeing and he's thinking, "I'm gonna catch these burglars."

Something brushes up against his arm.

According to him, it's a 10-foot-tall being

with scaly skin and a green complexion, yellow glowing eyes.

Zanfretta does what any security guard

with a mere six weeks' training would do.

Runs away, rapidamente.

He reaches his car and then makes the most bizarre report

that headquarters has ever heard.

As he's doing this,

he notices this craft above,

and it's like this triangular thing.

And then bam!

He gets hit with some kind of a flash.

And then it's just good night, Zanfretta.

It's reported in the Italian newspapers

that Zanfretta's backup arrive about an hour later,

and they find Zanfretta unconscious on the ground.

Now, you'd expect him to have the beginning of frostbite.

But no, his face, the top of his head,

the top of the car are all warm to the touch,

which makes absolutely no sense because it is freezing.

The people on the scene are trying to wake up Zanfretta.

And eventually, he comes to.

And they're all thinking he's having some type of episode.

If Zanfretta somehow imagined what's tormenting him,

so did a lot of other people.

In the police report,

over 50 different witnesses

see strange lights over the hills that night.

Zanfretta is willing to do anything to defend his claims.

He even agrees to be hypnotized.

And it's during the hypnosis that they find out

this wasn't an alien encounter.

This was an alien abduction.

He describes being brought to a bright, warm place

to be interrogated and examined.

He says the beings forced him to wear a painful translation helmet.

Traumatized, Zanfretta wants to put the incident behind him.

Unfortunately, whatever took him doesn't feel the same way.

Zanfretta says that just a few weeks after this first encounter,

he's patrolling another villa

and once again, alien craft,

another flash of light, and another abduction.

Within a month, shows up to work,

sees a flash of light,

bam, abducted again.

According to Zanfretta, in three years,

he gets abducted not three, not four times,

but 11 times.

Eleven abductions.

It gets to the point where Zanfretta doesn't want to leave the house

for fear of being taken again.

Over the years, Zanfretta is taunted and harassed.

He suffers from the publicity,

and he actually tells his friends that he wishes he'd never gone public.

Zanfretta's encounters may have taken over his life,

but there's another group out there with different kinds of control issues.

Harold Dahl is a harbor worker.

And one Saturday morning, he takes his workboat,

The North Queen, out onto Puget Sound with his teenage son,

two deckhands, and the family dog Sparky.

The intent is to look for stray logs.

This is timber country, logs get loose and they make it into Puget Sound,

and people will actually scoop those up, and then they'll sell that salvaged log.

It's a way to make a little extra cash.

But it's something above the water that catches their attention that day.

They report seeing metallic discs

drifting in from the south moving in formation.

It's worth noting that this situation

takes place two and a half weeks before the Roswell incident,

so nobody even has a concept of what a flying saucer is.

Then one of these donut-shaped metallic discs

starts to lower down

and wobble in flight.

It's absolutely shocking.

And then without warning, it ruptures.

It sprays molten metal down onto Harold's boat.

Harold's teenage son, Charlie,

gets badly burnt on his arm.

Harold panics.

He pegs the throttle and tries to steer the boat out

from under this falling debris, but it's no use.

The molten metal keeps raining down on them.

When Harold actually manages to get the boat back to the slip,

his boss is really mad about the whole thing.

He left with a perfectly good boat,

and he brought it back an absolute mess.

And Harold rushes his son off to hospital.

That's pretty much all he remembers because he's in a state of shock.

Harold Dahl is very unsettled by all of this.

He just decides he's gonna wait

and report this to the authorities the next day,

once he figures out who exactly he should be telling this story to.

But the next morning before Dahl can go to the authorities,

the authorities come to him.

A man in a black wool suit and tie

introduces himself calmly and politely,

and invites Harold to have breakfast at a nearby diner.

Once they're seated,

the mysterious man recounts the entire incident to him.

The discs, the molten metal,

even details Harold hasn't told anyone.

And then the man leans forward

and ruins Harold's appetite by saying,

"You know, bad things often happen to people who talk too much."

Incredibly, Harold Dahl may have just had

the first recorded encounter

with what becomes known as the Men in Black.

This incident starts a pattern.

People known as the Men in Black or MIB show up unannounced.

They seem to know more than they should,

and they threaten you.

According to those who claim to have experienced these encounters,

the modus operandi of the Men in Black is they take control of your story,

they take over your life,

and they threaten severe retribution

if you don't keep your mouth shut.

And for Harold, after that breakfast,

he cannot shake the feeling that he's being watched

and followed 24/7.

Reporters start to pick up this story

because while Harold may be terrified to speak,

his boss is not terrified at all,

and he has been talking to a lot of people.

Journalists just sweep in.

Harold is so terrified,

he tells them that he made the whole thing up.

Even though doing so humiliates him publicly.

But in his take on it,

alive and humiliated is better than whatever might await him

if he crosses this official that he talked to.

The case collapses overnight.

The file on Harold Dahl and his strange experience

is officially declared closed.

Except, unofficially, it isn't,

as revealed when the FBI file is declassified decades later.

One report is written by Agent Jack Wilcox,

who spoke to Harold privately during the original investigation.

In that memo, Wilcox records Harold's true position.

Harold tells him very plainly,

"I stand by what I saw,

but I'll call it a hoax if it'll make them leave me alone."

And by "they," we have to assume he means the Men in Black.

In movies, the Men in Black are charming.

But those who've really met them say

these are guys you don't want in your life.

And the only thing Hollywood got right was the suits.

Coming up, unwelcome party crashers

turn game night upside down.

There is a panicked

all-hands-at-the-Alamo-type situation here.

They're doing everything to stop these things,

but they realize that their bullets do nothing to harm them.

A good party can attract all kinds of attention,

even a few guests you didn't invite.

But for one rural Kentucky family,

the crashers that show up don't come to mingle.

They come to menace.

It's August 21, 1955, at the Sutton Farmstead,

which is in Kelly, Kentucky, where Elmer Lucky Sutton,

his wife and two of their friends,

Billy Ray and June Taylor,

are visiting Lucky's mother and siblings.

There are 11 people in total at this gathering,

and they're all hanging out.

But the night is about to get a little bit strange.

Billy Ray runs inside the house

and tells everyone that he thinks he's just seen

a flying saucer.

They all kind of laugh it off for a second,

but then they realize, well, this guy saw something.

He's obviously pretty upset about this.

After the Roswell incident of 1947,

rumors of flying saucers are spreading fast.

But rural Kentucky is a world apart.

This isn't a place running hot with UFO fever

or looking to believe anything too otherworldly.

A lot of people here, including the Suttons,

don't have a television, a telephone, or a radio.

Lucky thinks that Billy Ray must be mistaken,

that he was just seeing an aircraft or a comet or something like that.

But Billy Ray is adamant.

He says that this was moving clearly under control,

and that it actually came and hovered over the house.

Lucky is a good friend, he's cool.

He says, "It's nothing to worry about.

Let's go outside together and we'll take a look around and see what we see."

They get outside, they scan the sky,

they scan the tree line,

and they find nothing.

As they turn back to the farmhouse,

they say they both see something very strange,

and it starts to come out of the shadows.

They're scared.

They go right into the house.

And then tell the rest of the group what they saw.

Just then, they hear something scurrying across the roof.

That's when they realize they may be surrounded.

And then they see something outside of the windows.

Seeing more of them, they become convinced that they're under attack.

Are there three of them out there or are there as many as 30?

For the Sutton family, surrender isn't an option.

So they hold their ground,

even though they're not quite sure against what.

According to the Kentucky New Era newspaper,

it's a full-scale siege.

There is a panicked

all-hands-at-the-Alamo-type situation here.

The news accounts say that they shoot through the walls

and the windows and the screens.

They're doing everything to stop these things.

But they realize that their bullets do nothing to harm them.

They say that when they strike the creatures,

that they hear a metallic thump,

that they actually see sparks from where the bullet is striking the body.

Sometimes they fall back, but then they just seem to disappear.

No blood, no sign that you've hurt them.

At this point, it's nearly midnight.

They're almost out of ammo.

And they realize they just have to head to their cars

and get the hell out of there.

So all 11 of them run outside,

hop into two separate cars

and floor it all the way to the local police station.

The police chief takes this unbelievable tale

of an extraterrestrial attack so seriously,

he not only sends state police,

he calls in the US military.

Investigators find what looks like a battlefield.

There are shell casings, there are holes in the walls,

shattered windows.

But there's no sign of these strange creatures.

The experience leaves the Suttons deeply shaken.

Within days, they abandon their homestead and never come back.

People were fighting for their lives, but against what they cannot say.

Within days, the story spreads across the entire country

and it is known as the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter.

Decades later, Steven Spielberg discovers the story

while researching close encounters.

What began as a potential horror film

ultimately becomes E.T.

Next up, a much different kind of close encounter,

one that Hollywood hasn't made into a movie.

At least not yet.

It's October of 1982.

This is decades into the Cold War

at a Soviet nuclear missile base that's in Ukraine.

And, of course, there's gonna be a lot of security at a base

that has missiles that can cause huge destruction.

This is a complex system designed to prevent mistakes.

Keys and codes and sequences that back each other up

so that no one can press the big red button by mistake.

It's a system so perfect and routine,

guarding it almost seems boring.

Until one day when it's not.

A strange white light is seen near the bunker.

Officials can't really identify it.

They see this light in the air and they're thinking at first, is it like a flare?

Is it-- What is that thing?

But then the unthinkable takes place.

Switches begin turning on, codes begin entering by themselves.

The staff is completely blown away.

What the hell's going on here?

The nuclear weapons are being activated.

They are preparing to launch.

This is not a drill.

If for any reason a missile is launched from their facility,

it gets picked up by a satellite, the US will counterattack,

and then the Soviets have to get other missiles in the air

while they have a chance.

One missile leads to 100 nuclear missiles.

This is the entire northern hemisphere incinerated.

Three to four billion people dead.

These Soviet operators are down there,

and they are freaking out.

Their faces are just pale white, their hearts are pounding.

It's not taking their codes.

They're trying everything they can, but nothing's working.

You just keep pushing the button and it still won't abort.

The guards are convinced that they have a front-row seat

to the end of humanity as we know it.

But then...

the moment that the UFO light disappears...

countdown stops, no more overriding of the control panels.

Just everything just goes back to normal.

The crisis may be over, but for Soviet officials,

the real mystery is just beginning.

They take apart the control room.

They dismantle the panels all the way down to the wires,

trying to see is there some evidence of what happened?

Is there some evidence they've been tampered with?

The Soviets expect a technical explanation,

but what they get is far more disturbing.

The official report comes to the conclusion

that this was no accident.

And whatever caused this was not of this earth.

The report reads as if some form

of invisible intelligence

understood every aspect

of the nuclear weapons launch codes.

It was almost as if it wanted the technicians to know

that they were not in control.

Decades later, investigative journalist George Knapp

testifies before US Congress,

and he says that this remains the most dangerous,

well-documented case of non-human interference

with the nuclear weapon system.

Luckily, whatever activated the missiles

seemed more intent on scaring us than destroying us.

At least for now.

Coming up, Britain's most infamous prison

may be overrun with something scarier than inmates.

There have been tales of this spectral bear attacking people.

Not once, not twice, but multiple times.

For nearly a thousand years,

the Tower of London has survived sieges, executions, and rebellions.

But its most terrifying takeover may not have been human.

So in 2013, Dr. Alden Gregory becomes the new curator

of the Tower of London.

He's expecting that this is going to be an awesome first day.

This is his dream job.

What he's not expecting is that one of the yeoman warders pulls him aside

and with a very straight face, looks at him and says,

"If you see the bear,

you are not long for this world."

Now, at first, Alden thinks,

"Okay, get it. New guy, Tower of London, hazing ritual.

I get it. That's funny, that's cool."

But he's looking at the guard that tells him this information,

and he's not seeing a hint of a smile.

The tower may be well known for tales of lost princes,

headless queens, and prisoners who never escaped.

But bears?

As he goes through the history books,

he finds that there is this story of a spectral bear

that has taken over residence of the Tower of London.

There have been tales of this spectral bear attacking people

not once, not twice, but multiple times.

According to the Tower records,

the mysterious beast first bares its fangs in 1782.

A sentry is guarding the Jewel House,

and then he sees something really strange manifest.

The guard describes this huge, hulking, furious beast

coming out of the darkness with supernatural speed.

The guard pushes his gun forward with his bayonet,

and it goes right through him

like he's stabbing at a misty fog.

And he's found five or six yards away from his post,

on the ground covered in blood.

And the next day, he's dead.

The more Alden uncovers,

the stranger and darker the stories become,

including another chilling account, from 1816.

There's something in the vicinity of about 450 people

who are living in the Tower of London.

And among these people are Sir Edmund Lenthal Swifte,

who is the keeper of the Crown Jewels.

Edmund is in his apartment,

and then he sees this mist form in the room.

He said the mist then goes under the door

and out into the courtyard of the Tower of London.

The guard's reaction outside is immediate.

He sees this thing, screams, drops to the ground,

and then dies two days later.

With a string of dead guards in its wake,

one has to wonder why a phantom bear would claim the Tower in the first place.

Back in medieval times, like the 1200s,

kings and queens would gift each other exotic animals

because, like, what do you get for a king who has everything?

In 1252, King Henry III is given a white bear

by the King of Norway.

The animal is housed inside the tower grounds,

where its size and appetite quickly become impossible to ignore.

This is a big 1,500-pound bear.

And bears eat a lot.

As a matter of fact, it takes about 12,500 calories a day

just to sustain a bear.

The bear's actually not well taken care of.

Henry III doesn't give a very good budget to the people who keep these animals.

So the way that they feed this bear is they put chains on it

and they lead it to the Thames,

and they allow it to catch its own fish.

Now imagine you're out rowing in the Thames

and up comes a polar bear next to you.

Imagine what that would look like.

Well, that was what was actually taking place in London at this time.

Problem is, there's not enough fish in the River Thames

to keep this big bear's belly full.

So this bear becomes malnourished

and eventually wastes away and passes away.

And they believe that this bear is the bear

that has taken ownership of the Tower of London

and stalks its halls even today.

The moral of the story, if you're going to keep a bear in a medieval fortress,

maybe don't skimp on the groceries.

Coming up, one unlucky salesman

really takes his work home with him.

He is just about to fall asleep when the bed starts shaking.

Whatever it is seems to be violent, too, because he wakes up several mornings

with scratches all over his body.

Lots of life's mishaps are simply the result

of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Maybe a shopping cart rolls into your new car,

or a bird poops on your favorite hat.

But nothing matches the bad luck experienced

by one unfortunate salesman.

It's 2002 in Arlington, Texas,

and Bill Vaile, who's a technician, has just started a new job.

He's working as a water filtration salesperson.

Bill has just a regular life.

He comes home after work, eats like a lonely meal

in front of the TV and goes to sleep,

and just repeats the same day every day.

One night, Bill's watching TV in the living room

and there's a full bottle of water on the table behind him.

When it suddenly flies off the table and almost hits him right in the head.

He's living alone.

There's no real explanation for why this happens.

But he just tries to kind of shake it off and forget about it.

It's strange to say the least,

but soon Bill experiences something

far more disturbing than liquid projectiles.

He's really exhausted.

He is just about to fall asleep when the bed starts shaking.

Uncontrollably. It's really scary to him.

He's very spooked by the experience, even after it stops.

He's awake, so he knows it's not a dream.

So either he is hallucinating and is not there,

or something is taking over his body at that moment.

All sorts of other strange events start to happen.

Lights flicker on and off.

Mysterious voices speaking in languages he doesn't recognize

cut into his phone calls.

Bill is rational enough to know

that this could be something that's actually wrong with him.

So he goes to the doctor, he gets a full workup,

he has a physical and mental evaluation

and he comes away from that with a clean bill of health.

There's nothing anybody can find wrong with him.

Despite the clean bill of health,

Bill can't shake the feeling that something is terribly wrong.

Then one night, he gets the kind of validation doctors can't give him.

One night, Bill invites his brother

and sister-in-law over his house for a nice dinner.

Bill has them do this thing

where if they sit in the right spot in his living room

and look at the television, in their peripheral vision,

they can see what look like small, roughly two-foot-high entities

moving around, and they both see this.

Bill's family gets so freaked out that they just take off and leave.

But Bill considers his experiment a big success.

So imagine feeling absolute relief

that your dinner guests can confirm that this stuff's not just in his head.

It could very well be real.

So months and months of this weird phenomena

start to take a toll on his health.

Sleep is impossible. He reports hearing voices.

He's having cluster headaches.

Whatever it is, seems to be violent, too, because he wakes up several mornings

with scratches all over his body.

Bill racks his brain to determine why he's being targeted.

That's when he remembers a very strange sales call.

Now, he's been told to ring the doorbell

at exactly 5:00 p.m., but nobody answers.

He's hearing very strange things from inside.

He hears a woman's voice yelling.

In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you.

Peculiar, sure.

But Bill needs the sale, so he knocks again.

The door opens.

And inside, he can see three men,

and the woman hovering above them.

And she's yelling, "Get out! Leave these people!

In the name of Jesus Christ, leave these people!"

The woman then looks at Bill with an unsettling stare.

Without a word, she closes the door and immediately starts screaming again

without skipping a beat.

Bill, at this point, thinks that there is no commission that is worth this.

So he heads right back to his van,

he calls the office and he tells them he is never visiting this house again.

He's now convinced that what he was witnessing there was an exorcism.

In the name of Jesus Christ, leave these people.

And that whatever was released out of those men leapt straight into him.

Now that he knows what it is, enough is enough for Bill.

One night, the entity starts bothering him again.

And by now, he's sick and tired of all the health issues,

the headaches and scratches and living in fear all the time.

He tells what he is calling a demon,

"You and I are going to hell today.

So manifest yourself and let's have a fair fight."

He tracks the crashes all throughout the house,

repeating this challenge.

Turns out the entity's bark is bigger than its bite.

After Bill's confrontation, it backs down entirely.

It's almost like the dark forces have released him,

and his life basically starts turning back to normal.

DIY exorcisms aren't for everybody,

but it sure beats demonic roommates.

Coming up, a gold hunt turns into a fight for survival.

All of a sudden, there's this massive pounding

on the outside of the cabin wall.

The guys are all going, "What the hell was that?

We need to get out of here as soon as possible."

In 1924, a group of prospectors set out near Mount Saint Helens,

hoping to hit the jackpot.

Instead, they discover they may have trespassed

into something else's territory.

Fred Beck, Gabe Lefevre, Marion and Roy Smith

and John Peterson have been prospecting

in the mountains here for a couple of years.

They have a cabin. It's at the end of a narrow gorge.

It's really out in the middle of nowhere, but it's of course near their gold claim

where they're digging gold.

On this particular day, Roy is walking not 40 feet from the cabin

to get some water from the spring

when something huge scares the absolute crap out of him.

He sees a seven-foot-tall human-shaped animal.

He's scared, so he fires a few shots at the creature.

The other guys hear this, and they come rushing outside.

And then they all see the creature.

They describe this as being covered in a thick black hair,

but they say it's not a bear

because when a bear walks,

it drops and walks on four legs.

This is walking on two feet.

It's coming right for them.

Panicked, the men raise their rifles and open fire.

They'd fire a few more shots at it and actually succeed in killing it.

The guys are all going, "What the hell was that?

We need to get out of here as soon as possible."

But it's already getting dark.

"We have to wait till tomorrow."

As night falls, the anxious crew struggles to sleep.

All of a sudden, there's this massive pounding

on the outside of the cabin wall.

So hard it's shaking.

Rocks start showering down on the roof of the cabin itself.

One hit on the outside of the cabin removes the chinking in between the logs,

so the men can actually look out at these figures

running back and forth outside the cabin.

There have to be several of them. It's hard to tell.

Every time that they attack, the men open fire at these things.

And they just keep coming back.

So the men are now asking themselves,

when do these things get tired and leave, and leave us alone?

Then that leads to another question.

Are we gonna get out of this alive?

The siege goes on for five hours,

and when the last rock is thrown and the rifles are empty,

the forest goes eerily silent.

Finally, they get the courage to poke outside

and see if any of these things are still lying in wait.

What they find when they go outside are footprints,

a lot of them,

and they look like human footprints

except for the fact that they're about 18 inches long

and they're pressed down deep into the dirt,

as if whatever made them was very heavy.

What they don't find, which is maybe just as surprising,

is any sign that they have injured any of these creatures.

There's no blood.

After all the rounds they shot, they must have wounded something.

But they can find no evidence of it.

Rattled by fear and low on ammo,

the crew realizes dead men can't spend gold.

So they hightail it out of there.

All the miners vow never to tell anyone else about it.

But whiskey has a way of breaking promises.

And just a few days later,

several newspaper reporters and local police officers

return to the site with just two of the miners.

The rest of the miners absolutely refuse to go back, period.

Over time, this story has earned a place

in weird history

as one of the very first Bigfoot attacks

to ever take place in America.

From malevolent spirits to menacing visitors in black suits,

to creatures that turn remote cabins into war zones,

these are the takeovers so aggressive,

so terrifying,

they are truly unbelievable.