An Idaho deer hunter near St. Maries heard loud knocking from a creek bed, then got hit by a smell of death that had no source he could find.
The sighting is BFRO Report 83680, rated Class B, and it covers something that happened on Tuesday, October 20, 2026 in Benewah County, about 10 miles southeast of St. Maries. The hunter filed it the same day. He never saw anything, but it is the kind of report that gets logged as a possible Bigfoot encounter anyway. OutKick, part of Fox News, wrote it up on November 3, but the original report has a few details the news story left out, like the weather and where the hunter usually hunts.
Knocks, a Voice, and a Smell With No Source
The hunter was on an evening deer hunt, walking down a trail in the mountains around 5 p.m. The report lists dusk, calm winds, and clear skies, with the setting described as a creek bottom in thick pine forest. From a creek bed he judged to be 200 to 300 yards away, he heard loud knocking on a tree. A super strong smell of death followed right behind it. He called the odor overpowering, “as if you were standing right on top of a carcass.”
The knocking kept up for five to ten minutes. He went looking for something dead that could explain the smell and found no carcass and no sign of any dead animal near him. At one point he also heard a deep voice for a short time. He could not make out any words and says it sounded like gibberish.
He checked for people, too. He saw no human footprints and no sign of anyone on the trail or in the general area, and his was the only truck he saw all day on the road leading to the drainage.
A Hunter Who Says This Is New to Him
The hunter lists himself as the only witness. He says he usually hunts in Bonner County and that in all his years as an outdoorsman he had never had what he would call a possible sasquatch encounter before this one.
BFRO sorts reports by how clearly the witness could tell what was happening, not by how believable the person is. A report where nothing was seen is always Class B, even in the most compelling sound-only cases, because sounds and smells are easier to misinterpret than a clear view. As of November 6, the report page also does not include a follow-up interview from a BFRO investigator.
Where This Fits
Knocks and smells both show up a lot in this kind of report. BFRO director Matthew Moneymaker has said in past press interviews that knocks are harder to misinterpret than vocalizations. Odor is less common. The team behind Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot has said roughly 10 to 15 percent of witnesses report a smell, and it is often described as rotting meat.
Fall hunters have filed knock reports before. A deer hunter near Hyatt Lake, Oregon reported loud wood knocks in October 2025, and an archery hunter near Collinsville, Oklahoma reported a distinct knock on a tree in October 2020.
Benewah County does not have a deep file. The BFRO database lists only three reports there, including this one. The other two are a Class B report from June 2019 about wood knocks and vocalizations followed by something hitting the side of a remote cabin, and a Class B report from October 1972 in which a man described a daylight sighting his father, an elk hunter, had near Clarkia.
The Skeptic’s Side
I will go about 70 percent open on this one, mostly because the hunter is not asking anyone to believe much. He did not see anything, he reports what he heard and smelled, and he checked for a carcass and for people before he filed. That is the kind of witness I like to hear out.
The other 30 percent has real questions. Sound and smell are easy to misread, and a creek bottom at dusk is a tricky place for both. Cooling evening air tends to settle into low spots, which can carry an odor a long way from where it started, so a carcass out of sight in thick pine forest is a fair guess. The knocking could come from a person working somewhere in the drainage, since sound bounces around canyons and he only saw one truck. A deep voice heard briefly could be a faraway human voice or an animal call, and gibberish is often what distant speech sounds like when the words do not carry.
Each ordinary explanation has a gap, but each one also has a plausible way to close it. A follow-up interview from the BFRO would help, especially on how close the smell was to the knocking and whether the hunter walked toward the creek bed.
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