Fishermen Photographed Something Walking Along Table Rock Lake

On July 4, 2013, a group of people fishing on Table Rock Lake in Missouri reportedly spotted something unusual moving through the trees along the shoreline. It was dark, stood upright, and appeared to be walking on two legs. One of the fishermen grabbed a camera and managed to take several pictures.

The pictures showed a broad, dark figure partly hidden by the vegetation. Its head appeared low between its shoulders, and its arms looked unusually long. As the group watched from the water, the figure seemed to move through the trees before disappearing from view.

Nobody in the boat knew what they’d seen. But when the pictures reached a paranormal investigator a few days later, they quickly attracted attention from people interested in Bigfoot sightings.

The Pictures Reached a Paranormal Investigator

The pictures were reportedly taken near Kimberling City, a small community on Table Rock Lake in the Ozark Mountains. The area is surrounded by wooded hills, with countless coves and stretches of shoreline that can be difficult to reach except by boat.

Paranormal investigator Angelique Christensen, who was associated with a group called Paranormal Distraction, shared the images online after obtaining permission from the photographer. She said the man had been fishing with family or friends when they spotted the figure. According to the account she received, several people witnessed it.

Christensen didn’t publicly identify the photographer, but she wanted others to examine what he’d captured. The images soon reached The Crypto Crew, a website devoted to Bigfoot sightings and other unexplained encounters.

On July 11, just a week after the reported sighting, The Crypto Crew published the pictures under the title New Possible Photos Of Bigfoot. The post included three images, along with enlarged versions that allowed readers to get a closer look at the figure.

Three Pictures of Something Moving

One interesting feature of the pictures was that the figure appeared in different positions. The images seemed to show it moving along the shoreline rather than standing in one place. The third picture was described by The Crypto Crew as showing the figure walking away.

The figure’s appearance immediately caught people’s attention. It seemed to have broad shoulders, a relatively small-looking head, and arms that hung down beside its body. Its dark outline was similar to the familiar descriptions of Sasquatch, although the surrounding branches made parts of its body difficult to see.

There was also the unusual setting. The witnesses were apparently watching from a boat rather than standing on a nearby trail. If the figure was a person, that raised the question of what somebody was doing walking through a heavily wooded section of shoreline.

Christensen had wondered about that herself. When she originally shared the pictures, she pointed out that someone staging the encounter would have needed to reach the shore somehow. The fishermen’s account suggested that the group hadn’t been expecting to find anyone there.

The Ozarks Have Their Own Bigfoot Stories

Table Rock Lake sits in a region that has produced unusual creature reports for decades. The wooded hills of the Ozarks offer enormous stretches of rough terrain, with steep slopes, thick vegetation, and remote valleys. It’s the kind of countryside where something moving between the trees can disappear remarkably quickly.

Years before the fishermen’s pictures appeared, another Table Rock Lake resident reported hearing strange calls from the woods near his property. He also described finding an unusually large barefoot-looking track in a muddy area near a lake cove. The account was investigated by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization in 2008.

That encounter wasn’t connected to the 2013 pictures, but it showed that stories about unusual creatures around the lake weren’t new. Other residents had described strange sounds coming from wooded areas, sometimes late at night.

For people familiar with those reports, the fishermen’s pictures offered something they rarely got to see. Instead of another account of something heard in the woods, there were pictures showing a figure moving through the trees.

The Pictures Started a Debate

When The Crypto Crew published the pictures, readers quickly began offering different opinions about what they showed. Some thought the figure looked remarkably like Bigfoot. Others wondered whether someone wearing dark clothing or a costume could have produced the same appearance.

The figure also looked smaller than expected when compared with some of the nearby bushes. Thomas Marcum of The Crypto Crew noted that detail in his original post, although estimating its actual height was difficult without knowing how far away it stood.

The photographer never became a public figure in the case, and the original camera files weren’t released for detailed examination. That left the online discussion centered on the three pictures themselves. Readers could study the silhouette, compare the frames, and debate its proportions, but nobody had a clear view of its face or hands.

Interest gradually faded as other unusual sightings began attracting attention. The Table Rock Lake pictures remained online, occasionally resurfacing whenever someone discovered the old posts.

But in April 2022, almost nine years after the fishermen’s encounter, the pictures unexpectedly attracted another wave of attention.

The Creature Turned Up in Ohio

A story began spreading on Facebook about a possible Bigfoot sighting near Stonelick Lake in Ohio. The accompanying pictures showed a dark figure moving through a wooded area. According to the new account, the local sheriff’s department had supposedly validated the pictures, and investigators from the television series Finding Bigfoot were being sent to the location.

The story soon reached Reddit, where people began discussing the pictures and the claims surrounding them. Some commenters thought the images looked familiar. Others questioned the supposed involvement of law enforcement and television investigators.

One person recognized the pictures and traced them back to their original appearance online. The images weren’t from a recent Ohio encounter at all. They were the same pictures published in July 2013 from Table Rock Lake, Missouri.

Someone had apparently taken the old images and attached them to a completely different sighting, complete with a new location and claims about an official investigation. The person who shared the Facebook post on Reddit acknowledged that the pictures weren’t original.

The fishermen’s encounter had now acquired an unexpected second chapter, nearly a decade after the pictures first appeared.