She Spoke to Bigfoot – This Woman Captured SHOCKING Footage of a Talking Sasquatch
Three Knocks in the Cedars
My name’s Aaron Beckett. I’m 48 now. I wasn’t then. This is about Skamania County, Washington. October 2015. Fog sitting in the cedars like breath. It was a Tuesday with early rain, the kind that beads on your jacket and never lets go. I was a night shift custodian at the elementary in Carson. A single mom with a secondhand Subaru and a porch light that burned out every other week.
Ordinary.
.
.
.
I shouldn’t be telling this, but it’s been years and the clip still lives on my old phone in a shoebox with the charger I never toss. One ordinary thing turned wrong. A child’s laugh that wasn’t my daughter’s, just past the alder line. After midnight, the sound was thin, like a cassette stretched too many plays.
And there was a smell. Wet dog and fern rot coming through the screen. I know what people think when they hear Bigfoot. I did, too. Wind in the stovepipe, a blue night, rain hissing on the porch bulb. Carson, WA. Late October 2015, my girl asleep with one leg out of the blanket, her stuffed otter under her chin. I’d gone out to shake the welcome mat and check the propane gauge. Just habit.
There was the creek, high from the week’s storms. There was the neighbor’s motion light flicking on for nothing. And there was me with a chipped mug of peppermint tea cooling in my hand. Normal.
Then three small stones clicked across my gravel like polite knuckles on a door. And the raccoon I’d been cursing all month went quiet mid-rustle. I told myself wind. I told myself a branch. The smell of wet cedar thickened, got sweet in the wrong way. Like a barn left shut too long. I felt watched but gentle. Like a question.
You’re tired, Aaron, I said. No Bigfoot. Go inside.
Early October 2015. Carson Elementary lunchroom. Midday drizzle painting the skylights gray. Trays clatter across stainless steel, and a country station cuts to the local call-in show. A logger named Tom swears he saw something tall cross Rock Creek Road at dawn, moving through the mist like it owned the pavement. I’m mopping near the milk cooler. Bleach sharp in my nose. Floor machine humming like bees trapped in a jar.
More Bigfoot talk, Marcy says from the front desk, rolling her eyes, stapler clicking in rhythm. I laugh with her because I need to. I stack chairs in neat rows. I tell myself people see what fills their heads when the woods get too quiet. I’m a mother, not a mystic. Bigfoot is a word for bored men in long winters, for campfire stories and beer.
Still, the radio crackles mid-sentence, and for a second, the hum drops out completely, like the room is listening back. I check the clock twice. I lock the supply closet twice. When I drive home that evening, the fog hangs low over Highway 14, headlights a soft cone that barely cuts fifteen feet. At the driveway, the porch light flickers once, then steadies into that reliable amber glow. I breathe easy.
Somewhere past the alder line, a jay scolds once, sharp and annoyed. I file it as nothing, yet I keep the radio on low all through dinner and beyond. Strange how the silence felt like an answer, I thought. And then I heard nothing more that day.
October 12th, 2015. My porch at dawn, blue cold light creeping through the cedars. Kettle rattles on the stove. Refrigerator hums its morning song. On the railing sits a single black and white feather, barred, clean, bone dry, though the rail is soaked from overnight rain.
My daughter June tilts her head like a curious sparrow.
A gift, she says, fingers hovering above it.
I sniff coffee, the steam cutting through the damp like a knife. I tell her a crow dropped it. Simple as that. I prop the feather in a jelly jar beside the wicker basket of apples we picked last weekend at the orchard.
Bigfoot doesn’t live in a feather. That’s silly talk, kid logic. But I wipe rain off the rail with my sleeve and see a smudge of mud the size of my palm. Splayed wide like someone leaned there to peer through the kitchen window. I wipe it once, then again, harder. I check the back door lock twice, rattling the handle.
June’s school bus wheezes up the gravel drive. Diesel hangs in the air like a low cloud as it pulls away. Red lights blinking. The woods go quiet. Too quiet. Then a single knock somewhere deep in the treeline like wood striking wood with intention.
Wind, I say aloud to the empty porch, to the feather. The feather leans slightly in its jar as if nodding in agreement. I told myself it was a bird, yet the railing felt watched all morning and I caught myself glancing at it every time I passed the window.
October 18th, 2015. Edge of our yard. Low clouds pressing down. Late afternoon light the color of old newspapers. A wicker basket of apples left by our split rail fence for the deer. My dad’s old idea to keep them from destroying the garden tomatoes. The grass holds that cold iron smell that comes before real winter.
June hums something from school, collecting small smooth stones along the fence line, dropping them into her coat pocket. Save some apples for pie, I say, watching her.
A logging truck passes on the county road in the distance. Tires hiss on wet asphalt, then fade.
Mom, your Bigfoot will like these, she jokes, grinning with gap teeth.
And I wag a finger at her. No Bigfoot. Just raccoons being raccoons.
At dusk, I step out again to bring the basket back inside. The apples are rearranged into three small stacks of two, balanced carefully like a child’s attempt at math or architecture. My neighbor’s yellow dog gives a low woof from his yard. Then nothing, like someone cut the sound.
I crouch down, touch the top apple with my fingertips. It’s warm. Not warm like human hands, but not the deep chill of the others either. My skin prickles from neck to wrists. I stand very still, the porch bulb casting amber light over wet grass and the black line of trees beyond. I listen until my ears ache from the effort, until the silence becomes a physical thing.
I slept that night with the TV on low. Old sitcom laughter hiding the pulse in my throat. June’s breathing steady in the next room.
October 21st, 2015. 1:23 a.m. Rain drumming on the roof like impatient fingers. Window a black mirror reflecting only me. June sleeps in her narrow bed. The bathroom fan drones its white noise. I’m folding towels on the couch. The cotton rough from too much detergent and hard well water.
Then three knocks from the treeline, spaced evenly. Polite. The sound of knuckles on a hollow door asking permission. The smell slides in through the cracked window. Wet fur matted with crushed fern. Thick and animal.
No, I whisper to the empty room. There’s no Bigfoot doing Morse code. I click off the bathroom fan with shaking fingers. The house breathes with me. Every creak amplified.
I don’t move for a full minute, maybe longer. I check the back door lock twice, then a third time, then once more, because three isn’t enough. Out by the alders, a shape of deeper dark shifts against the regular dark. Or maybe that’s my guilt about leaving the apples. My imagination filling in what fear suggests.
The refrigerator kicks on suddenly, and I flinch hard in my own kitchen, hand to my chest. I wake June deliberately.
Bathroom, I say just to see her move, alive, present, real. She stumbles down the hall, half asleep, and I stand guard. The knocks do not come again that night.
I heard the creek louder than usual after midnight, as if it had swallowed the sound to keep it safe, to hide what shouldn’t be heard.
October 24th, 2015.
Rock bar behind the house. Morning fog lifting in ragged strips through the firs. The creek has dropped low enough to show the gravel bar and the smooth silt between stones. On the silt, a line of impressions leading upstream, broad, impossibly long, each toe a soft crescent, edges already slumping inward as water seeps back.
I kneel in the cold mud, jeans wicking icy water up to my knees. My breath goes white in the still air.
Boots, I offer weakly to the empty morning. But boots have tread. Treads have patterns. These don’t. I press my hand beside one of the prints. My palm looks small and childish against it, fingers barely reaching halfway.
I don’t take a photo. I don’t want to feed the word. Don’t want to become one of those people online.
Don’t start with Bigfoot, I tell myself firmly, standing up too fast, head spinning.
A blue jay screams twice from the canopy, harsh and accusing. The smell of riverstone and wet moss swallows the barn-sweet smell from nights before, scrubbing it clean. My father’s voice floats up from an old winter visit when I was young: Don’t go giving names to the dark if you want to sleep, Aaron.
I follow the prints upstream until they vanish in cobble and current. A low whoop rises far off in the forest, like a person trying not to be heard, trying to be careful. All day I kept tasting iron—the way fear tastes, when you bite your tongue without meaning to, when your body knows before your brain does.
October 26th, 2015. County store on the edge of Carson. Late morning, propane heater ticking in the corner. I mention the knocks to Deputy Hail while buying two gallons of kerosene for the backup lamp.
Bear, he says, not unkind, pen tapping against his ticket book. Coffee breath, badge catching the overhead light. Probably after your compost bin.
You and your Bigfoot stories. The clerk laughs from behind the register, ringing up my purchase. I smile because it keeps the world level, keeps me from being the crazy woman at the end of the gravel road.
Rain strings off the aluminum awning outside. A delivery truck backs up, beeper faint and rhythmic. I buy an extra porch bulb, the long-life kind. I buy a box of three-inch nails for no reason I can name.
At home, I shore up the back window with a pine board that creaks like an old knee when I hammer it into place. June rolls her eyes, but helps anyway, handing me screws like a nurse assisting surgery, small palms smudged with dirt from playing outside.
We eat grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup. The television murmurs about the incoming weather system. Rain for another week straight. A loud thump on the metal compost lid and I jump hard, heart climbing into my throat.
Just raccoon, I tell myself. Just raccoon. The board holds firm against the window. I tell myself I’ve made a fortress out of light and daily habits and reasonable explanations.
That night, the house settled louder than it ever had before, and I counted each pop and crack like I was keeping watch, like I was on guard duty in my own home.
October 28th, 2015. 12:11 a.m. Windless and still, fog thick enough to taste, lamp casting amber through the curtains. I’m on the couch with a pile of laundry ignoring me from the basket. The old phone charges on the scratched coffee table, its case cracked along one corner.
The refrigerator cycles off, sudden quiet that makes my ears ring.
Then three knocks again. The exact same rhythm, but nearer this time, maybe only thirty yards out. The smell is back, but gentler somehow. Not barn-sweet, more like wet wool and crushed salal berries.
I stand on unsteady legs and say through the screen door, You need to go. My voice trembles, and I hate that weakness. There’s no Bigfoot here, I add, as if that changes anything, as if saying it makes it true.
June appears in the hallway behind me, hair flattened on one side, whispering, Mom.
I press a finger to my lips, the universal sign for silence. Silence answers from outside. A small stone taps the porch once, gently, as if to be careful, as if to apologize.
I feel something like courtesy, which is worse than fear because it asks you to answer back, to acknowledge.
I left the porch light on until morning. Moths beat themselves against it until they fell dumb and exhausted. And I couldn’t sleep even when June did, even when the sky began to lighten to gray.
October 30th, 2015. Porch steps, 5:47 a.m. Frost forming halos on fallen maple leaves. I sit with the old phone angled toward the treeline, video rolling, red light tiny in the pre-dawn dark. My breath comes out white and hangs. A crow yanks the sky open with noise. Then silence rushes back in.
Nothing moves in the frame. Then the low whoop again, closer, rounder. A shape of sound that vibrates through the wooden railing under my hand. I whisper, Hello, and immediately feel foolish. The phone mic hisses static.
And then I know exactly how this sounds. I know what people will think. There’s a syllable that is not bird and not wind and not creek. A strained ho—me, like a throat borrowing a word it heard once through a window, trying to shape it.
I freeze completely, tea mug turning cold fast in my grip. I don’t believe in Bigfoot talking, I say to the phone, to myself, to the recording.
Silence stretches long and then the smallest scrape of wood on wood out near where I left the apples. My hands shake hard enough that the video shakes. I film nothing but fog and fence and gray light for two minutes more, waiting.
When I watch it back inside, the faint syllable lives in the digital noise like a fish moving under ice. There and not there. I save the clip to the phone’s memory and slide the phone into the shoebox that afternoon and the box into the pantry behind the flour canister where I keep things I don’t want to see every day.
October 31st, 2015, 11:39 p.m. Propane lantern hissing on the kitchen table. Power out from high wind. June sleeps in my bed because the dark feels too big tonight. I keep the lantern low, that soft camp yellow glow that makes hands look older than they are. The house ticks and creaks with cooling ductwork.
From the black yard beyond the window, three knocks for the third time in ten days. Same spacing, same impossible patience.
I stand in the doorway with the screen between me and whatever waits. Lantern in one hand, the other steadying myself against the frame.
I know you know we’re here, I say, and my voice sounds like I’m speaking to a neighbor I trust. I am past pretending this isn’t happening. What do you want?
The smell comes with the breeze, but softer again, like wet pine needles warming in sun, like earth after rain.
A shadow of deeper dark leans and unfolds near the alder line, taller than the brush. I don’t look straight at it. I look beside it the way we do with stars to see them clearly.
Bigfoot, I say, and the word leaves my mouth like an apology, like a confession.
There is a low whoop, then a hush, as if the forest is waiting to see if I will answer in kind, if I will meet it halfway.
The lantern hisses louder. A rain gust rattles the eaves hard. And I feel something out there decide to stay back, to respect the line.
I close the door gently, not slamming, and turn the lock with a soft click.
November 1st, 2015. Gray dawn, mist lifting in slow bands through the Douglas firs, porch bulb buzzing faintly. I leave three apples on the rail, placed carefully side by side, palms open and empty afterward to show I mean no harm.
June sleeps inside, safe and warm. I stand very still on the wet grass, breath quiet and measured. Across the distance, maybe forty yards out, a shape like a man’s height, no taller, shifts behind the thick salal and stops as if the ground draws an invisible line for both of us to respect.
My old phone records from the kitchen window, red light tiny as an eye. I try a sound because words haven’t worked—two soft whoops because that’s what I have. That’s the only language offered.
There’s a long minute where nothing happens and I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. Then that borrowed word comes again, better formed but still strained, still learning. Oh—me.
It’s not a trick of the creek or wind. It lands in my chest and my ribs feel the shape of it.
This is our home, I say back. Not loud, just clear. Yours too. I guess we stand with that truth between us. I don’t cross the line drawn in dew and shadow. Neither does it.
I understand in that moment, this is not a stage. There is no audience to perform for. It was a Bigfoot, no question in my mind, but it was terrified, too. I hear myself say later on the tape when I play it back.
A jay drops a feather that spirals down beside my boot. Black and white. I don’t pick it up. I leave it there as an answer.
November 3rd, 2015. Night frost settling in. Stars ragged and bright between the fir crowns. Porch light steady and reliable. No knocks tonight. No smell carried on the wind. Just the creek running over stones and a distant logging truck on Highway 14.
I stand on the porch with a thermos of coffee, the metal lid tapping against my finger in a nervous rhythm. I’ve hidden the phone deep in the pantry. I’ve told no one what I heard, what I saw.
Protectiveness sits heavy in my chest. Over June, yes. But also over whatever stands on the other side of that invisible line we both respect.
You can go, I say into the trees, and I mean it in both directions. Go away from us. Go deeper into safety.
In the dark, a single step in wet leaves, deliberate and slow. Then a second step placed carefully. No third. The low whoop comes from far off now. Almost kind, almost grateful, and a hollow thud, like a forehead pressed against bark. Gentle, like goodbye, like thank you.
Bigfoot, I say again, quieter this time, tasting the word like a name I’m not supposed to know, like a secret I’ll carry.
The porch light hums in its socket, a thin insect note barely audible. I feel something in me unclench, and then clench back tighter because nothing is fixed, nothing is resolved.
A wind moves through the alders and they sound like cloth being folded carefully by patient hands. I stand until my toes ache from cold, until the stars blur, until I’m sure it’s gone.
November 2017. My kitchen, rain threading down the window. Propane heater set low to save money. Years later, two full years, I find the shoebox while looking for emergency candles in the pantry. Phone, tangled charger, the feather still in its jelly jar, a folded note from June with a wobbly crayon heart.
I plug the phone into the wall. The battery icon crawls back from red to green over twenty minutes. The clip plays when I press it. Tape hiss, fog, fence rails. Then that syllable again. No crisper with time. No clearer.
Oh—me.
I pause it with my thumb like I can stop history from moving forward.
I won’t share it, I say to the empty room, to the pantry, to the idea of men with cameras. I don’t want anyone judging my child’s yard, turning it into spectacle. They don’t get to own this moment. I whisper Bigfoot like a prayer, not to make anyone believe, but to remember who stood outside our life and didn’t break it when it could have.
The refrigerator hums its steady song. I check the door locks even though it’s noon and bright outside. I put the phone back carefully, wrap the cord, tuck it deep behind the flour again. That night, I swore I heard a low whoop in a dream and woke with my hand open on the pillow, like I’d been handing someone an apple across the distance.
Late September 2024. New rental house closer to town. Porch light colder and more efficient. Traffic a faint hum two blocks over. I’m older in the bathroom mirror, lines deeper around my eyes. June’s at a college two states away, studying environmental science, calling every Sunday.
I sit on the small back deck with a mug of tea and the window cracked open. Rain smell clean on wet asphalt instead of forest loam. And then again, impossibly, three knocks from the narrow ribbon of trees behind the apartment complex. Same spacing, same careful patience.
I laugh once, a short bark of disbelief, then put my hand to my mouth.
I hear you, I say, soft enough that no neighbors can hear. I remember.
The word Bigfoot feels like saying a person’s real name after years of nicknames. Careful, exact, weighted with history. I don’t film this time. I don’t move toward the sound. The knocks do not repeat. A single feather is caught in the window screen when I close it an hour later. Barred, black and white, a little frayed at the edges. I leave it there, pressed against the mesh.
The refrigerator clicks on in the kitchen. A car door slams two buildings over. Someone’s dog barks twice. Normal life ropes me back into its current, but the pattern plays in my head like a song I can’t forget.
Three knocks, two whoops, one word.
I still keep the porch light on every night. I still hear the three knocks sometimes in that space between sleep and waking. And I let the silence be my answer.
