The Strangest Story Ever Told: Re-Examining Harry Colp’s Thomas Bay Devil Creatures
- Raven Stonegrave
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
The Thomas Bay story sits at the crossroads of three very different ways of seeing the same valley: a Tlingit stronghold with its own spirit map, a gold‑rush wilderness begging to be “discovered,” and a place where the land itself feels wrong enough that panic starts to look like an explanation. Harry Colp’s “The Strangest Story Ever Told” is where those perspectives collide.
This is a long, slow walk through that collision—what Colp actually wrote, the Indigenous history under his boots, and why later readers keep arguing whether he met Kushtaka, a hairy hominid, or the limits of his own nerve.
If you’re interested in a deep dive into cryptid legends of Alaska, be sure to check out my book Cryptids of Alaska. It’s part of the Haunted Atlas: Alaska series.
Devil’s Country Before the Devils
Long before anyone called it “Devil’s Country,” Thomas Bay had a Tlingit name: Taal’kú, often glossed as “Bay of Death.” The name comes from a disaster that hangs over every version of the story. In or around 1750, a massive landslide tore down from the flanks of what prospectors later called Devil’s Thumb and buried a Tlingit village. Estimates in written sources put the dead at more than 500 people, wiped out in minutes and never recovered from the debris.
For the Taal’kweidí clan, that event isn’t just a paragraph in a history book; it’s clan origin material. Oral accounts describe people climbing toward the mountain peaks to escape the flood of earth and water. The peak itself—Tahl—becomes a symbol of survival, while the bay below retains the memory of mass death. That trauma adds a layer of meaning to everything that comes after.
Later prospectors and surveyors latch onto “Bay of Death” and add their own label: “Devil’s Country.” For them, the danger is a mix of rockfall, remoteness, and reports that Native people avoid the area. In their writings, you can see the hand‑off of tone: a Tlingit disaster site and spiritual no‑go zone becomes, in English, a cursed patch of wilderness that must be hiding something worth finding.
All of this happens before we even get to Colp. By the time his friend “Charlie” heads up toward Patterson Glacier, he’s not walking into a blank valley. He’s entering a place that’s already thick with story—Tlingit warnings about Kushtaka and landslides, white prospectors’ unease, a reputation that makes even experienced locals lower their voices when they talk about it.
What Harry Colp Actually Wrote
Most modern retellings of “The Strangest Story Ever Told” are third‑hand: summarized in blog posts, embellished in YouTube scripts, hammered into tight segments for podcasts. To understand why people keep fighting over whether Thomas Bay’s “devil creatures” were Kushtaka, Bigfoot, or something else entirely, it helps to go back to the closest thing we have to an original.
Colp’s account, written in the early 1900s and later circulated around Wrangell, describes an expedition that starts like hundreds of others. Harry and three fellow prospectors—identified only as Charlie, John, and Fred—are in Wrangell when a Tlingit man from Thomas Bay shares a tip: there’s good gold up there, at a half‑moon‑shaped lake near a big glacier. He gives directions, but he also gives conditions. Avoid certain times. Be cautious about the slopes. Don’t ignore bad feelings.
Colp and his friends argue over whether to take the tip seriously. Eventually they send Charlie first, as a sort of scout. In Colp’s telling, Charlie camps his way north—Ideal Cove, Ruth Island, then into Thomas Bay proper—poking around for this crescent‑shaped lake and getting hammered by rain.
The mood shifts when he finally stumbles onto what he thinks is the place. The valley is quiet in a way that feels wrong. The air is heavy. Traditional versions talk about a strange stillness. It’s here that Charlie lays down his pick and starts working the outcrop.
Colp’s “devil creatures” arrive in stages, not all at once. Stones roll down from above. At first it’s easy to blame gravity. Then there are more stones, coming in arcs that feel thrown rather than fallen. Charlie looks up and sees figures on the rocks: “little devils,” as Colp puts it—three or four feet tall, long‑armed, with rough hair, flat faces, and eyes that don’t look right.
As the scene escalates in the written version, more of these things appear between the boulders, forming a loose circle. The smell hits next: a gagging, rotten stench that later writers latch onto as a classic “hairy hominid” trait. Some of the creatures move in a way that suggests both two‑legged and four‑legged motion—scrambling like animals but upright enough to look uncomfortably human.
Charlie panics. He drops most of his gear and runs, pelted by rocks and driven downslope by a scatter of small, howling bodies. By the time he fights his way back to the canoe and eventually to Wrangell, he’s bruised, filthy, and, in Colp’s words, “not right” for days.
Key details to keep in mind from Colp’s text and the close analyses done by Wrangell historians:
The creatures are described as small—child‑sized—not as towering giants.
Their smell, claw‑like nails, and mixed bipedal/quadrupedal movement get emphasized.
Charlie does not call them Kushtaka in the account; “devils” and “things” are his words. Kushtaka connections are layered on later.
That snapshot is what later readers will argue over. Everything else—ottermen, Bigfoot, panic attack—is interpretation.
Kushtaka Country: The Otter People’s Bay of Death
If you zoom in on the Indigenous side of the ledger, the simplest reading is that Charlie blundered straight into the Kushtaka territory he’d been warned about. Outdoor Life’s modern retelling ties Thomas Bay directly to Kóoshdaa Káa lore, noting that prospectors called it “Devil’s Country” and that Tlingit stories already framed land‑otter people as shapeshifters preying on the lost and drowning.
There are a few pieces of context that make the Kushtaka angle compelling:
The landslide myth: Some Tlingit accounts fuse the 1750 landslide with Kushtaka, saying the bay’s mass death is partly the work of malevolent land‑otter spirits punishing people or taking them all at once. That makes Taal’kú a sort of Kushtaka‑saturated place long before gold seekers arrive.
The “Bay of Death” avoidance: South of Petersburg, the bay has a reputation as a no‑go zone in Tlingit memory. Locals rarely hunted or camped there, treating it as spiritually and physically dangerous.
Overlap in traits: Kushtaka are shapeshifters; in some versions they can appear as short, hairy human‑like figures as well as full otters or humans. They are also famously associated with deception, voice mimicry, and fear. In at least one podcast and several blogs, writers suggest that Charlie’s “devils” may have been Kushtaka halfway between forms.
In this reading, Charlie walks into a valley where the Tlingit already assume other‑than‑human beings live, disturbs something, and gets run out. His choice of “devil” is less taxonomy and more theological shorthand. He doesn’t have the vocabulary to call what he saw Kushtaka; he does have the word “devil” ready to fill the gap.
That interpretation dovetails with how Tlingit storytellers today sometimes talk about Thomas Bay. It’s not that they endorse every detail of Colp’s text; it’s that his broad strokes—wrong valley, bad feeling, something driving you out—fit an older frame for “a place where land‑otter people are active.”
Hairy Hominids: Bigfoot Moves In
Fast‑forward a few decades, add Bigfoot to the North American imagination, and the same “devil creature” description gets drafted into a different mythos. One cryptid writer flat‑out argues that “Kushtaka is obviously the same creature we call Bigfoot,” pointing to overlapping details: large hairy biped, flat face, bad smell, dangerous behavior.
In the version promoted by some Bigfoot researchers, Thomas Bay is less about spirit beings and more about a pocket population of hairy hominids that react violently to intruders. The “little devils” become juvenile Sasquatches. The rock‑throwing, encirclement, and intimidation tactics line up with modern Bigfoot lore from other regions. The smell becomes a familiar bullet point in “skunk ape” and Sasquatch sighting catalogs.
There are some problems with forcing Colp’s text into a purely Bigfoot mold:
The size discrepancy: Colp’s creatures are described as three to four feet tall. Classic Sasquatch reports put adults at six to nine feet. Proponents get around that by proposing that Charlie encountered a group of juveniles.
The setting: Thomas Bay’s high, glaciated basins are not improbable habitat for a large mammal, but the valley’s reputation is tightly bound to Tlingit spiritual geography. Bigfoot narratives imported from the Lower 48 sometimes ignore that context entirely.
The shapeshifter element: Indigenous Kushtaka stories allow for a being that is sometimes more otter, sometimes more human, sometimes more monstrous. Bigfoot frameworks tend to assume a flesh‑and‑blood primate.
Still, the hairy hominid angle persists in documentaries and online discussions. It appeals to audiences who prefer cryptids to spirits: a tangible monster you might catch on thermal cameras rather than a shapeshifter that slips between worlds. In that sense, “Bigfoot of Thomas Bay” is less an interpretation of Colp than a mirror of modern cryptid culture’s tastes.
Panic in Devil’s Country: A Human‑Centered Reading
The third major reading pulls the lens tight around one person in a high‑stress environment and asks how much story you really need to explain what happened.
Consider the ingredients in Charlie’s trip that have nothing to do with Kushtaka or Bigfoot:
Isolation: He goes in alone, despite warnings, into a valley that already carries a reputation.
Environment: Heavy rain, slick rock, steep slopes, and recent landslide scars. The 1750 slide isn’t just history; the terrain is visibly unstable.
Silence: Accounts emphasize that unnatural quiet in the basin—no birds, no small animal sounds—something many experienced outdoorspeople will tell you can spike adrenaline fast.
Confirmation bias: He’s been primed to expect “something wrong” by both Tlingit warnings and prospectors’ “Devil’s Country” talk.
In that context, an ordinary rockfall can start to feel personal. A goat dislodging stones above him becomes “they’re throwing rocks.” Shadows between boulders resolve into “little devils” at the exact moment his brain is looking for a culprit. The smell might be real (rotting vegetation, sulfurous glacier mud, a dead animal nearby) or a stress‑amplified detail. By the time he’s sprinting downslope, the encounter is no longer a list of physical stimuli; it’s a narrative his mind has locked onto: the devils of Devil’s Country have come for him.
Modern psychologists who look at wilderness terror talk about “panic scripts”—ready‑made stories the brain drops into when fear overwhelms rational parsing. If you’re a Tlingit hunter, your script might be Kushtaka. If you’re a gold‑rush prospector steeped in fire‑and‑brimstone Christianity and ghost stories, your script might be devils.
This doesn’t mean nothing unusual happened in that valley. It means that, in a place already named Bay of Death, marked by a clan‑level trauma, and whispered about by locals, you don’t need ten unknown species to produce the Strangest Story. One spooked man, one bad basin, and a stack of expectations will do.
Why the Story Still Works
A century after Colp wrote his account, Thomas Bay continues to attract exactly the kind of attention you’d expect: skiers seeking untouched lines under Devil’s Thumb, paranormal podcasts, YouTube channels promising to reveal “what really happened” in Devil’s Country. Locals still talk about a sense of dread in certain parts of the valley, about weather that drops faster there than elsewhere, about the feeling of being watched from the treeline.
Part of the story’s staying power lies in how it sits at the intersection of several overlapping fear systems:
Geological fear: A bay that has literally buried a village. Visible slide scars. The knowledge that the ground can move in catastrophic ways.
Cultural fear: Tlingit warnings about Taal’kú, Kushtaka’s presence in local myth, a clan’s origin tied to survival on those slopes.
Frontier fear: Prospectors moving into a landscape whose rules they half know, whose spiritual layout they mostly don’t, and whose valleys mock their maps.
Colp’s “little devils” give all of that a focal point. Whether you frame them as Kushtaka, juvenile Sasquatch, or the externalization of a panic attack, they let people talk about a deeper unease: this place is not for everyone. Some valleys do not want you there.
For modern readers and viewers used to thinking in categories—cryptid vs. hoax, spirit vs. animal—the ambiguity is half the draw. Each camp can find what it wants in the same paragraphs. If you love hairy hominids, the smell, stones, and claws are catnip. If you care about Indigenous context, the Taal’kweidí story and Kushtaka lore make Thomas Bay feel like a textbook case of colonizers walking into someone else’s horror story mid‑sentence. If you’re interested in psychology, Charlie’s flight down that scree slope looks like a human mind under extreme stress doing what minds do.
The “strangest” part isn’t necessarily the creatures themselves. It’s that all three readings can be partially true at once. A human can panic in a place that a culture already calls cursed, in a valley shaped by real geological violence, while overlaying that fear with whatever monster vocabulary they have on hand. Devil’s Country doesn’t care which explanation you pick. It only cares whether you notice the feeling that tells you it’s time to leave.
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