A Bigfoot Story
As we drift into the middle of autumn and the nights begin to leak into what was once daylight, shadows start to creep around the edges of everyday life. Leaves change, hot cider begins to fill mugs, the skies darken, and the proverbial veil between worlds becomes a little less thin. As the darkness settles in, so too do the stories of both the scary and strange. I love a good scary story; as a matter of fact, I have a few of my own that I’ve relayed to both friends and strangers over the years. And so, in honor of the spookiest time of the year, I’m offering to you, the reader, one of my many strange personal experiences.
Stories of a large, bipedal, ape-like creature lumbering through mysterious forests can be found in every corner of the Pacific Northwest. The existence of sasquatch, or Bigfoot as many like to call it, has been a topic of debate among people far beyond the PNW, where sightings are frequent. The northwestern part of the country isn’t the only place where sasquatch sightings occur, however; I know this from experience. What you’re about to read is a true story.
It was a dark and spooky night…
I grew up in rural North Carolina in a small town along the Appalachian Trail. My home wasn’t in town proper (if you could call it a town); we lived several miles outside of the city limits near the base of a large swath of national forest. Because of this, one of my regular activities as a youth was wandering into the woods to explore. Our neighbor farmed tobacco on a hillside in the woods, and the road up to it was maintained enough to allow a tractor to make it up. Past that though, the trail was quickly swallowed up by brush, leaving little more than a path wide enough for an ATV. Several members of my family would walk the path fair regularly together when the weather allowed. It was a pretty walk, and only about half a mile to a strange locale; a cabin built deep in the woods.
The cabin was old. It had been abandoned long before I had even been born. Whoever had built it had mostly cleared the trees around it for about 40 yards on all sides, so it was easily accessible for anyone to wander through. The top was out of reach, but inside the bottom floor were bits of ephemera—an old Pepsi can; layers of peeling wallpaper; newspapers from decades past; the type of abandoned home that made for a perfect scary story.
During the summer between 8th and 9th grade I had spent several weeks with my aunt, who had introduced me to a slew of horror movies. Although we do not speak much today, I have her to thank for my lifelong obsession with all things scary. After I returned home I was still searching for more terrifying experiences, and ended up doing the classic “teenager in rural America” activities of watching videos of hauntings on youtube, walking to the local graveyard with friends, and, of course, exploring the woods at night. On one particular evening, as the moon began to rise over the mountains, I was sitting on my grandma’s porch with a few members of my family. These included my brother and father, my aunt, and our cousin. The conversation began to drift into the paranormal and occult, as it often did in the presence of my aunt, and at some point I chimed that it would be a great night to check out the old cabin in the woods (I know this sounds like a trope, but once again, this is a true story). Everyone liked the idea, and so half an hour later all five of us were walking toward the forest.
By the time we hit the road to the woods it was already dark, and we spent most of the walk riling one another up. On the way, we passed a dilapidated house that had also been abandoned years earlier—rural Appalachian is chock-full of these types of places—claiming to hear strange sounds from inside. It was all fun (sort of), and we laughed out our nervous energy. But, as we entered the woods, things became quiet. The brush began to take over the road, and soon we were walking single file towards the cabin.
It wasn’t a long hike, if you could even call it that, but the nighttime had started to make me, my brother, and my cousin a little more tense. My father and aunt were still chatting, trying to make things worse. The brushy trail started to open, and walking past the final bend we saw the cabin, dressed in moonlight. It was fully visible to us, and there was nothing between us and its door. We started to head towards the entrance, but were stopped by what happened next.
We had approached the cabin and were about halfway through the clearing when we saw it. It walked out from behind the cabin, its head nearing the bottom of the roof line. Under the moon, the fur on its body shimmered. It walked perpendicular to us, its long arms swinging down by the knees. We all watched, silent, as it took four long steps out from behind the building, its profile heading towards the trees to our right. Then, it stopped and turned towards us. My aunt yelled at us to run, but I froze. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I knew I couldn’t stay, but my legs weren’t working. It was looking at where we were, and I was looking back; and in a small, triangular patch of furless skin, I could make out two small eyes. It took two steps forward toward me. For a moment I was transfixed, the image burning into my memory. Seconds later, my legs caught up with my brain. I promptly turned to make a quick exit, and as I turned to run I caught my final glimpse of what I can only describe as a large, bipedal, ape-like creature lumbering through the woods.
In 2019 I returned home from my travels out west with my wife for the first time in six years. I spent two weeks there catching up with friends and exploring old haunts. On one of those days, I decided to take her and go see the cabin again. We entered the clearing without incident, and made our way to the building, now even older and more decrepit than it had been. It was still standing, however, which gave me a chance to measure its height. It was something I had wondered about for a long time, but never went back to do as high school wore on and I got older. That day, we did it.
From the ground to the bottom of the roof line, we measured nearly 13 feet.
The cabin in the woods.
Over the years the events of that night were the subject of many debates in my family. We went back shortly after it happened to see if we could find any evidence of what had happened, with no luck. My father was the longest holdout; he denied what he saw for a long time, but eventually even he had to admit that what we had seen was out of the ordinary. As for me, I knew what we had seen: bigfoot. Shortly after our experience, a group of people spent a week in town on the hunt for a sasquatch, and found nothing. If I had been a little older I might have approached them and told them the story. But I was young, and I didn’t. So, they never knew about the trail, or the cabin, or what five people saw together one night in the woods just a few months before their arrival.