He Spotted Bigfoot on a Remote Trail, What Happened Next is Shocking – Terrifying Sasquatch Story

Three Knocks in the Gully

Name’s Daniel Hogue. I’m 47 now. This was late October 2014 outside Oakridge, Oregon, up along one of those logging spurs near the Willamette National Forest. Drizzly, low clouds, that flat gray light the Pacific Northwest does so well. I was just a guy with a cheap mountain bike and a small cabin, trying to keep my head straight after the divorce.

That evening ride was nothing special. I remember the smell most of all—wet pine and chain grease, that little click of my rear derailleur every time I coasted. Ordinary, quiet. I shouldn’t be telling this, but it’s been years. People roll their eyes when they hear the word Bigfoot. I used to, too.

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.

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All I can say is: I went out for a ride. I got lost. And on a remote trail, I met a Bigfoot that was crying out for help.

Late October 2014, Oakridge, Oregon. The day had that bluish tint you get right before the rain settles in for the night. I’d finished a late shift at the hardware store, heated up leftover chili, and stood by the kitchen window watching steam fog the glass. The only sounds were the baseboard heater ticking and the little hum of the fridge.

I rode those logging roads most nights back then. It was my therapy. Helmet on the nail by the door, bike leaned against the rail outside. Always a half-empty basket zip-tied to the handlebars for mail or groceries. I checked my phone—5:18 p.m. Enough time for an hour out before dark, I told myself.

My neighbor Carl had been talking Bigfoot nonsense the week before, over coffee and the static of an old AM radio. I’d laughed. “Bigfoot would have to cross three highways just to get here,” I told him. I still believed that as I wheeled the bike off the porch, smelling cold mud and cedar, telling myself the woods were just woods and nothing more mysterious than that.

But the way the trees leaned in, the way the wind died all at once, made me glance back at the porch light and wonder if I should leave it on, just in case something followed me back I couldn’t explain.

The gravel crunched under my tires, each small stone popping like distant firecrackers. My breath came out in little clouds. The divorce papers were still on the kitchen table back home, unsigned, waiting. Out here, none of that mattered. Just the rhythm of pedaling and the soft hiss of rubber on wet stone.

I passed the old Miller place, windows dark, for sale sign leaning in the weeds. Nobody wanted to live that far out anymore. Too quiet, people said. Too much forest pressing in on three sides. I’d always thought that was the point.

The sky was dimming to pewter when I reached the first junction where Forest Road 587 splits off toward the ridge. I could see my breath clearly now, and the temperature had dropped enough that my fingers were starting to go numb inside my thin gloves. That’s when I noticed the silence. No birds, no wind in the branches. Just the ticking of my cooling bike chain and the far-off sound of the Willamette River like white noise played through cheap speakers.

I should have turned back then. That was mistake number one.

By the time I hit the gravel road, Forest Road 587—the one that climbs past the clearcut—the sky was the color of old aluminum. My tires hissed on the damp gravel, every small rock popping under the tread. In the distance, I could just hear the river—a low, steady rush like far-off traffic.

About two miles up, there’s this pullout with a bulletin board. Old notices stapled into splintered wood. Trail closures, fire warnings, a faded hunting safety flyer. Someone had tacked up a photocopied sheet: Possible Bigfoot sightings. Report unusual activity. Grainy black-and-white print of a dark shape between trees.

I remember snorting. “Yeah, okay. Bigfoot hotline,” I muttered. I leaned the bike against the board, took a swig from my water bottle, and smelled that metallic tang of wet staples and damp paper. For a second, the forest went very quiet. No birds, just the drip of water off fir needles onto the plastic of my helmet.

“I don’t believe in Bigfoot,” I said out loud then, mostly to hear a human voice. It sounded small against all that timber.

I wiped condensation off the photo with my thumb. But the face—if it was a face—didn’t get sharper. I told myself it was just shadows and pareidolia and some bored ranger with too much time and a photocopier. The paper smelled like mildew and old ink. The date at the bottom was handwritten: October 18th, 2014—six days ago.

I studied the image closer. Trees—definitely Douglas fir by the bark pattern. A dark mass between two trunks, maybe seven feet tall. Maybe just a shadow. The kind of thing you see in every grainy photo online. The kind that makes people like Carl spend weekends in the woods with night vision goggles.

Still, as I rode on, I kept feeling like that black smudge on the flyer had stepped down off the paper and was somewhere between the trunks, matching my pace where I couldn’t see.

The road climbed steadily. My quads burned with the effort, and I shifted down two gears, finding a rhythm I could maintain. Sweat cooled on my back under the jacket. The light was fading faster now. That sudden dimming you get in deep forest when the sun drops behind the ridge. I checked my watch—5:52 p.m.—and told myself I’d turn around at six.

The trail that night wasn’t one of my usual loops. I’d heard from a guy at the shop about an old spur road. Good climb, quiet, nobody on it. He’d waved vaguely toward the mountains when I asked where exactly.

Around six, a little deeper in, I reached a fork. One side a more used gravel track, the other a narrow mossy lane with grass in the middle, fading tire ruts on either side. The light was thinning to this muted green like the whole forest was underwater. I stopped, one foot on the ground, listening. The ticking of my cooling rims, a crow complaining somewhere above. Way off, a woodpecker—or so I thought then—made three hollow knocks on wood, spaced out: knock… knock… knock.

I told myself it was just a bird or someone practicing with a hammer out by a hunting camp. Maybe a dead branch falling against another trunk, the way they do in old growth when the rot finally wins. Not following some Bigfoot trail, I joked under my breath, tasting the last of my coffee on my tongue. The word Bigfoot still felt like a cartoon, like a brand on a gas station billboard advertising jerky and cheap sunglasses.

I chose the overgrown spur because it looked interesting, because I was stupid about daylight back then.

The smell changed almost immediately. Less dust, more rich rot and wet bark. Moss grew thick on the north side of every tree, and ferns crowded the road’s edge, their fronds brushing my knees as I pedaled. The surface beneath my tires turned softer, less gravel and more compressed earth. My rear wheel slipped once on a patch of wet leaves, and I caught myself with a foot to the ground, heart jumping.

As the sound of the main road faded, I had the brief, stupid thought that those three knocks had been for me, like someone at a door I didn’t realize I’d just opened.

The forest pressed in tighter here. Branches hung lower, draped with pale lichen that swayed in a breeze I couldn’t feel on my face. The temperature dropped another few degrees. I could see my breath clearly now, coming in quick puffs from the climb, and I remember wondering for the first time whether I’d be able to find my way back before the dark figured out I was alone out there.

That should have been my second warning.

Maybe twenty minutes up that spur, the road started to disappear. Grass got taller. Gravel thinned out until I was riding more on slick dirt than anything solid. My back tire slid a little with every pedal stroke. Breath loud in my ears, chain clicking, the faint squeak of my front brake with each squeeze.

I checked my watch—6:27 p.m.—and did the math. Still time, I told myself. Just turn around at the next bend.

Then the mist moved in. Not full fog, just these low wisps curling around the trunks, turning the understory to layers of darker and lighter green. The air smelled colder, like stone and wet fern.

Somewhere a branch cracked. Heavy, not the snap of a squirrel. Bigger.

I stopped, let the bike straddle my legs. “Deer,” I said. The sound bounced back dull from the trees.

I’d heard the stories—Bigfoot crossing up past Salmon Creek, Bigfoot chasing elk. All that local bar talk you hear when loggers have had too many and the jukebox is playing too loud. Thinking of those stories now, standing there in the growing dark, I hated using the word at all.

You don’t believe in Bigfoot, I reminded myself, saying it out loud like a prayer against superstition.

My front tire had rolled into something soft. I looked down and saw a partial print in the mud, longer than my boot, toes splayed, water pooling in the depression. Could have been two overlapping elk tracks, I told myself. Could have been a bear placing its hind foot where its front had been, the way they do when they’re moving slow through thick brush.

But that didn’t explain why I suddenly smelled wet fur, strong like when a big dog shakes after a swim. Except there were no houses, no cabins, nothing for miles. The print was deep, pressed into the mud with the kind of weight that spoke of mass, of something that didn’t move lightly through this terrain. Water had already begun to fill the deepest part, and a pine needle floated there, turning slowly in a current I couldn’t see.

I pushed the bike forward, telling myself I’d examine it closer later, even though I knew the mud would already be filling the edges by then. My hands were shaking just enough that the handlebars rattled, and I hated myself for that weakness, for letting childhood fears crawl back up my spine.

The forest around me held its breath, and I realized I was holding mine, too. The light turned from green to grey-blue as clouds thickened. My headlamp, cheap, dim, threw a narrow cone of yellow ahead of my front tire. Every breath came out in a little puff now. The only sounds were the crunch of occasional gravel and the soft swish of my jacket sleeves.

Then I noticed the fence. Old, half-collapsed barbed wire strung between rotting posts paralleling the road on the uphill side. Wind made the loose bits hum—a low, almost musical whine that rose and fell like someone playing a saw.

About thirty yards in, something had hit that fence hard. The top wire was snapped, curled down in a loop. The post was splintered, fibers splayed like a broken bone. On the splintered wood, in the glow of my headlamp, I saw a smear of dark matted hair stuck in sap.

I leaned the bike against a stump, hand shaking just enough that the reflector rattled. Leaned in close. The hair was coarse, longer than deer, not the short bristle you see on bear in taxidermy shops. Each strand was thick, almost wirelike, and there were dozens of them caught in the rough wood and dried resin.

“Somebody’s cow,” I muttered. “Or a bear. Not Bigfoot.” I heard how thin my own voice sounded, how it didn’t even convince me.

The smell of wet fur was stronger here, mixed with a coppery note. Blood, maybe. I swallowed hard. For a second, I almost called someone. But who? “Hi, Sheriff. I’m out lost by an old fence, and I’m worried a Bigfoot ran into it.” They’d laugh, or worse, they’d send someone out, and I’d be the guy who cried wolf over some elk hair and paranoia.

Another heavy crack in the woods above made me grab my handlebars like they were a railing. This one was closer, maybe fifty feet upslope, accompanied by the sound of something large moving through brush—not running, deliberate, slow.

I told myself again it was just deer moving off. Deer made noise, especially in thick undergrowth. Deer could sound huge when you couldn’t see them.

But the wind shifted then, and the humming wire went silent, like the whole forest was holding its breath with me. In that sudden quiet, I could hear my pulse in my ears, the rustle of my jacket with each shallow breath, the distant trickle of water over rocks somewhere down the slope. No birds called, no insects chirped—just that heavy waiting silence that made every nerve in my body scream at me to leave, to get back on the bike and coast down to the main road and the safety of other humans and artificial light.

I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. Just stood there in the cone of my headlamp, watching the mist curl through the trees, waiting for something I couldn’t name to step out of the dark.

I decided to turn back. Smartest decision I made all night, even though I was too late about it. I swung the bike around, pointed the headlamp back down the way I’d come. The beam lit up the little tunnel of road, mist particles drifting through it like dust in a church. First push down on the pedal—chain slipped. My foot shot to the ground. The derailleur had hopped the cassette and jammed.

I swore quietly, that muttered string of words you save for skinned knuckles and long days. So there I was, half a mountain up, light fading, fingers numb, trying to guide a chain back into place with hands that didn’t want to work. Metallic smell of grease, cold biting into my fingertips even through the thin gloves.

That’s when I heard it. Not a branch, not a woodpecker. A sound like a low whoop—somewhere between an owl and a person saying “woo” from deep in their chest. Twice. Whoop. Whoop.

My scalp prickled under the helmet. Every hair on my arm stood up. That primal response that bypasses logic and goes straight to the part of your brain that remembers being prey. “Bigfoot people are always talking about whoops,” I thought. And I hated myself for knowing that—for watching those stupid shows late at night when I couldn’t sleep, when the empty cabin felt too large and the divorce papers glowed in the dark like accusations.

The woods went quiet after the second call. No answer, no echo, just the tiny pinging of my cooling spokes and the whisper of wind high in the branches that never reached the ground. I could smell that wet fur scent again, faint, riding on the damp air, closer than before, strong enough to make me gag a little, to taste it at the back of my throat. Musty, wild, alive.

I got the chain back on, but I didn’t climb on right away. I just stood there, one foot in the leaves, one hand on the saddle, listening for anything that might tell me if I was being watched. The headlamp beam caught movement at the edge of its reach. Just a flicker too fast to identify. A branch swaying maybe, or something stepping back behind a trunk. Nothing answered.

That silence said more than a scream would have. It was the silence of a predator waiting, or of something deciding whether I was worth the effort, or of a creature intelligent enough to know that silence itself was a message.

I mounted the bike and started coasting. Not fast, not panicking, but with purpose. The chain clicked rhythmically. My brakes squeaked. And behind me, somewhere in the darkening forest, I heard one more sound. Knock. Just one. Sharp, deliberate, like a door closing or opening.

I don’t know why I didn’t just coast down then. Stubbornness maybe. Or that stupid curiosity that makes people open doors in horror movies. The kind of curiosity that insists on knowing, even when knowing might be the last thing you ever do.

I walked the bike a little, letting the headlamp play over tree trunks and salal bushes. The fog thickened, dulling the beam to a short yellow fan that barely penetrated ten feet. Water dripped from the canopy in a constant, irregular patter like fingers tapping on a table.

Then I heard the cry. It started low, almost like a moan, then rose up, cracking in the middle, stretching longer than any human breath I’d ever heard. It wasn’t a cougar scream. I’d heard those before—that sharp, almost childlike shriek. This had no sharp edge. It was pained, desperate.

My knees went loose. I braced on the handlebars, which suddenly felt like the only solid thing in a world gone liquid and strange.

“That’s not Bigfoot,” I whispered, though nobody had accused me yet. Saying Bigfoot felt like accusing the dark of something, like naming a fear that was better left unnamed. “Somebody’s hurt. Maybe a hunter. Someone fell, broke a leg, can’t get out.” I clung to that thought because the alternative meant everything I knew about the woods was wrong. It meant the stories weren’t stories. It meant Carl wasn’t crazy and the bulletin board wasn’t a joke. And the print in the mud wasn’t just elk.

The sound came again, a little shorter this time, choked off at the end like whoever was making it had run out of air or lost the will. Then quiet. Just my pulse in my ears, hammering against my skull like it wanted out. The smell of wet fur came on strong in a sudden gust, mixed with the mineral scent of turned earth like something had been digging. Richer than before, unavoidable, filling my nose and mouth until I could taste it.

I argued with myself out loud. You go toward the person who might be hurt. That’s what you do. If you heard a man cry like that, you wouldn’t bike away. And Bigfoot isn’t real. Bigfoot isn’t real.

So, I propped the bike against a mossy stump, noted the way the headlamp beam hit the trunk so I could find it again—three branches spreading like fingers, a patch of white lichen shaped like a hand—and stepped off the road into the undergrowth. Every step on wet needles sounded too loud. Each snapping twig felt like a signal flare, announcing my presence to whatever was out there in the dark.

I kept thinking over and over that if I was wrong about it being human, I was about to walk straight into the story everyone jokes about but nobody really wants to live. The story where you go into the woods and don’t come back the same—or don’t come back at all.

Five minutes off the road felt like fifty. The ground sloped down, soft and treacherous, my boots sliding on damp duff. Salal leaves brushed my knees, catching on my jeans. A branch slapped my cheek, leaving cold water on my skin that trickled down to my collar.

The crying stopped. That was almost worse.

I turned off my headlamp once just to see how dark it really was. The sky was a dim quilt of gray between the branches, barely lighter than the forest floor. No stars, no moon. The forest around me was a mass of almost black shapes within shapes. Depth impossible to judge. I could hear my own breath—a small, shaky thing that didn’t sound like it belonged to a grown man.

Somewhere uphill, a tree creaked under its own weight, long and low. A sound like a ship settling at anchor.

When I turned the headlamp back on, the beam fell into a shallow gully maybe twenty feet ahead. Mud, ferns, fallen branches arranged in ways that might have been random or might have been purposeful, and something larger, half-curled, pressed against a mossy log. I couldn’t see the whole shape, just the curve of a massive shoulder, matted with dark, wet hair that caught the light like wet moss. The rise and fall of it, slow, strained. Each breath sounded like a bellows pulled through mud, labored and painful.

The smell hit me like a wall. Wet fur, sweat, something earthy and sour like old leaves left to rot under spring snow. My eyes watered. I had to breathe through my mouth.

My brain did this ugly stutter-step. First word: bear. Second: no. Third: Bigfoot. I hate that I’m even thinking this. I remember whispering so quietly the words barely disturbed the air. Bigfoot isn’t—you’re not—

The word just hung there, unfinished, too big to say and too obvious to avoid.

I took one more step and a small rock slid under my boot, tumbled down the slope, and hit something hollow down in the gully. Knock. A pause, maybe two heartbeats. Knock. Another pause. Knock. Three dull, deliberate-sounding knocks—like someone tapping a warning on the underside of a table, or like the sounds I’d heard on the road, the ones I’d told myself were woodpeckers or falling branches or anything but what they actually were.

The shape shifted. I saw a long arm—longer than any man’s, maybe seven feet from shoulder to fingertips—drag awkwardly along the ground, fingers curling around the fallen branch beside it. Not reaching toward me, just bracing the way you do when you’re hurt and every movement costs.

Whatever I was looking at was a Bigfoot. I knew it then. The way you know when someone you love is in pain before they say a word, before they show you anything but their back and the defeated slope of their shoulders.

And the terror I felt wasn’t that it would kill me. It was that I’d walked in on something already hurt and cornered, and we were both in trouble here.

I should have run. Any rational person listening to this is thinking that right now. You’re thinking, “He’s got a bike. He’s got light. Just get out of there.” Maybe you’re right. But the way that Bigfoot was breathing, the way its back hitched on each inhale, pulled something up in me that had nothing to do with logic. Same feeling as when my daughter fell off her bike the first time and the sound she made wasn’t angry or embarrassed, just shocked and hurt and looking to me to fix it.

I edged closer along the slope, boots sinking into cold mud that squelched with each step. The gully walls smelled like wet clay and iron. My headlamp shook in my hand, the beam jittering over the form below. I angled it to the side so I wasn’t shining it straight into whatever face might be down there.

That’s when I saw the fence. The broken stretch of barbed wire I’d noticed up by the road sagged into the gully here, half buried in mud and rotting leaves. One loop was wrapped tight around a thick ankle, biting deep into flesh. The Bigfoot’s leg—God, I hate how casual that sounds, like I’m talking about a deer or a dog—was swollen above the wire, hair matted with blood and mud and something else, something yellow-green that might have been infection.

The Bigfoot let out another sound, shorter this time, more like a forced exhale through clenched teeth. Its hands spasmed against the log, bark crumbling under its fingers, pieces falling like ash.

“Okay, okay,” I whispered, like I could calm both of us with the sound of a human voice. “You’re caught on old fence, that’s all. Bigfoot or bear or whatever, you’re stuck.” Talking kept me from screaming, from running, from acknowledging what I was actually seeing.

My multi-tool was in the small bag under my saddle, back up by the road. I remember thinking, “You have to go back up. You have to ride away. You have to pretend you never saw this and live the rest of your life wondering if it was real.” Then another part of my brain answered, “If that was a hunter, you’d go back for the tool and you’d help. You wouldn’t leave someone to die in the mud because you were scared or because it didn’t make sense.”

I backed up the slope, slipped twice, hands grabbing cold ferns that came away in my grip. At the top by the road, everything sounded wrong. Too open, too bright, even in the darkness. The hum of the barbed wire was faint here, the woods quiet except for one owl calling, distant and lonely.

As I dug in the saddle bag for the tool, I realized I was shaking so hard my bike was lightly rattling against the stump, reflectors clicking like nervous fingers drumming on wood.

“Bigfoot,” I mumbled. “I’m about to go cut a Bigfoot loose from a fence.” Saying it made it real in a way that almost made me drop everything and leave.

I didn’t. I went back down.

The Bigfoot didn’t move when I slid down the gully again. Not beyond the slow, rough pumping of its chest. I kept my eyes mostly on the wire, on the immediate problem. It felt like if I took in the whole shape, height, breadth, the reality of what I was kneeling beside, it would break something in me I couldn’t tape back together.

Up close, the smell was overwhelming—wet fur, rusted metal, the sharp iron scent of blood, and underneath it all a musk like damp bark and earth and something else I didn’t have words for. My hands were slick with sweat inside my gloves despite the cold.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said, voice barely more than breath. The words came out in puffs of vapor that hung in the beam of my headlamp. “I’m just going to cut this. Okay, Bigfoot.” The name came out soft, apologetic, like I was mispronouncing someone’s real name, but there wasn’t a better word available to me.

I don’t know if it understood. Probably not. But when I edged closer to the trapped leg, the Bigfoot shifted just enough to give me room. Not away from me, just adjusting, redistributing its weight the way you do when you’re letting someone help you. When you’ve decided to trust, or at least to stop fighting.

Barbed wire looks small until it’s in your hand. Until you’re trying to cut it with cold fingers and inadequate tools. The metal was cold enough to burn my fingers through the thin gloves. I wedged the multi-tool’s wire cutter around the first strand, squeezed hard. The handles bit into my palm. The wire resisted, then gave with a sharp ping.

The Bigfoot made a sound with each cut. Not quite a groan, more like a forced sigh. Air pushed through teeth in a rhythm that might have been anticipation or pain or relief. I couldn’t tell which.

After the last strand gave, the tension snapped out of the wire with a twang that rang in the gully like a guitar string. The leg jerked free a few inches, then settled. Blood welled in the grooves the barbs had left, dark rivulets running down into the mud.

I stumbled back, fell on my butt in the mud, heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat, in my temples, in my fingertips. The multi-tool dropped from my hand, and I didn’t reach for it.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Just rain starting to fall through the canopy, soft at first, then steadier, each drop making tiny dark spots on the log and raising little eruptions in the mud around us.

Then the Bigfoot’s hand—huge, with fingers like thick branches, knuckles the size of walnuts—reached out, not toward me, but toward a small alder trunk beside it. With a slow, shaking movement, it wrapped its knuckles against the wood.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Three soft, measured knocks. Not loud, not threatening—more like acknowledgment, like thank you in a language that didn’t need words, in a gesture older than speech.

I sat there, mud soaking through my jeans, multi-tool limp somewhere beside me in the leaves, realizing I’d just helped a Bigfoot, and that the two of us were sharing the same wet, cold air, like a secret neither of us knew how to keep or tell.

I didn’t see it stand up. I didn’t want to. Some part of me understood that seeing it fully, seeing the complete shape and size and reality of a Bigfoot rising in front of me would make it impossible to ever pretend this had been a misunderstanding or a particularly vivid dream.

After those three knocks, I scrambled up the slope. Every root suddenly a handle to grab, every foothold an escape. Behind me, I could hear movement—the slow, careful rustle of something testing a newly freed leg. No crashing, no charge, just the sound of weight shifting, branches brushing heavy shoulders, the rain pattering harder now on fur and leaves alike.

Back at the road, I grabbed the bike and didn’t even brush the mud off the saddle. The headlamp beam jittered wildly as I pushed off, making the trees dance and sway in ways that had nothing to do with wind. Gravel spat under my tires. My breath came in sharp bursts, clouding in the cold air. Each exhalation a white ghost that dissolved behind me.

Half a minute down, I heard it again. Far behind me and a little above, muffled by trees, but unmistakable.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

I didn’t look back. I didn’t stop. My hands cramped on the brake levers, but I didn’t care. Didn’t ease up. Just kept the pressure steady and let gravity and terror do the rest.

By the time I saw my porch light—warm amber, a little halo in the drizzle like a lighthouse marking safe harbor—it was full dark. My hands were cramped from gripping the brakes for miles. The only sounds were my tires crunching onto the driveway and the distant rush of the river, familiar and human and normal.

Inside, the cabin smelled like leftover chili and damp wool and all the small domestic scents that meant safety and civilization and walls between me and whatever was out there in the forest. I stripped off muddy clothes with shaking hands, left them in a pile by the door, and drew the curtains without meaning to, without thinking about it until they were already closed.

I sat at the table with a towel around my shoulders, listening. The fridge hummed its eternal song. The clock on the wall ticked out seconds. The baseboard heater pinged and settled. My phone buzzed—a text from my ex, a picture of our daughter with a missing tooth, grinning at the camera with that gap-toothed pride only a seven-year-old can manage. I stared at it, thinking how close I’d come to not seeing another one of those pictures. How close I’d come to becoming one of those stories people tell about someone who went into the woods and never came back.

I typed, “Got stuck late at the store. Roads were messy. I’m fine.” Nowhere in that message did I write the word Bigfoot.

Later, I checked the locks twice, turned the porch light on, then off, then on again. Not sure which made me feel safer—advertising my presence or hiding it.

I’m telling you this now from the same table eleven years later. Different chair, same scratched surface, same hum from the fridge that never quite goes away. The woods outside are darker than they used to be. Or maybe that’s just me getting older, my eyes adjusting slower to the transition from light to shadow.

For months after, I couldn’t ride past that spur road. I’d slow the truck near the bulletin board—someone had taken down the Bigfoot flyer, replaced it with a lost dog notice—and feel my palms sweat on the steering wheel. Eventually, I started driving a different way into town. Longer route, more traffic, safer.

There’s an old phone in the kitchen drawer beside me. Screen cracked, battery swollen, won’t even hold a charge anymore. On it, there’s a file, a short, shaky video I didn’t mean to take. I’d strapped the phone to my handlebars that night to track my ride. One of those fitness apps that maps your route and counts your calories like any of that mattered. It recorded sound when I went into the trees. If you play it, you can hear my breathing, the mud under my boots, the snap of the wire cutters, and—faint but there, unmistakable if you know what you’re listening for—that long, strained cry and the three knocks in the gully. I don’t show it to people.

It’s November 2025 now. The porch boards are older. So am I. Sometimes I bring an apple out and set it on the railing. By morning it’s always gone. I still talk myself down. Could have been a bear. Some weird echo. Guy playing a prank. But when I get to the end of the list, there’s still that one word waiting.

Bigfoot.

Last week, sitting here with the light off, I heard it again somewhere beyond the treeline. Knock. Knock. Knock. I didn’t go inside. I just sat there, hand on the rail, letting the silence say everything words couldn’t.

I realized I’m not afraid of Bigfoot anymore. What keeps me up is knowing that somewhere out there, something learned once that a human could be more help than harm.

I still hear those three knocks. I just can’t tell if they’re coming from the trees or from the part of me that never came back down that gully.