Driver’s Disturbing Sasquatch Encounter During Car Crash – Bigfoot Sighting Story

The Night the Road Ended

Chapter 1: The Last Normal Drive

Three years ago, I found out that some nightmares don’t end when you wake up.

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I need you to understand something before I start: every word I’m about to tell you is what I remember. I’ve told this story only once before, to a therapist whose expression slid, inch by inch, from professional concern into something like polite disbelief as I talked. I watched her eyes change when I got to certain parts.

Maybe yours will, too.

I don’t care anymore.

This has been sitting on my chest for three years, like someone parked a truck there and forgot to move it. I have to get it out. You can believe me or not. The creatures don’t disappear just because you decide they don’t fit in your worldview.

Back then, I was the guy who rolled his eyes at Bigfoot specials on TV. I watched the shaky videos, the blurry, thousand‑yard‑away shots of something dark in the trees, and I laughed like everyone else. People see what they want to see, I thought. People make up things to explain the dark.

That’s what I believed—for twenty‑some years.

Then one winter weekend, I lost my best friend to one of those things.

It was supposed to be simple. A weekend getaway in the Cascades: me and my buddy Eric heading up to his family’s cabin. Beer, whiskey, fishing rods we probably wouldn’t use as much as we said we would. Two overworked office guys pretending we still knew how to breathe.

We’d been planning it for months. You know how that goes—screens, deadlines, endless meetings that could have been emails. We kept saying, “When we get to the cabin,” like it was some promised land where all the pressure would evaporate in one long exhale.

The cabin was four hours north, tucked deep in the woods where cell service goes to die. The nearest neighbor was miles away. No tourists. No traffic. Just trees and a lake and the kind of silence that makes your brain remember what quiet is.

Perfect.

We left on a Friday evening. Eric showed up at my place already buzzed, grinning, half a six‑pack down. We loaded the bed of my pickup with coolers, duffels, tackle boxes we probably didn’t need. Stopped at a liquor store on the way out of town—extra whiskey, extra beer, as if we were planning to drink our way through a siege.

I drove. Eric rode shotgun.

The first part of the drive was familiar: city lights fading in the rearview, suburbs thinning into farmland. The highway unfurled under our headlights. Classic rock station came in clear. We rolled the windows down despite the bite in the air, letting cold wind cut through the stale smell of coffee and office corridors that still clung to us.

We talked about nothing and everything. Work. Stupid things coworkers had done that week. Women we’d almost dated but hadn’t. The usual.

As the miles ticked by, the land began to roll, fields giving way to the dark rise of foothills. Traffic thinned. The sky widened, stars pricking through.

We hit the mountain road after midnight.

It was one of those narrow, twisting strips of asphalt that seem to have been draped over the terrain instead of built into it. Guardrails were more polite suggestions than actual safety measures. Dense forest leaned in from both sides, tall pines and firs crowding toward the headlights like they were curious.

Up there, your world shrinks to the tunnel your beams carve through the dark.

Eric cranked up the volume when some old country tune came on—a song we’d heard a thousand times growing up. I don’t even remember the name now. Just the chorus: something about the road, about not looking back.

We sang like idiots, both of us off‑key. He played air guitar on the dashboard. For a stretch of road, it felt like we were eighteen again, riding nowhere in particular with the whole world still in front of us.

That’s the last memory I have of the world making sense.

Chapter 2: The Thing in the Headlights

The song was halfway through its second chorus when Eric stopped mid‑line.

His voice cut off like someone had yanked a plug. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his arm shoot out, his hand grabbing my sleeve hard enough to bruise.

“Watch out!” he shouted.

I turned my head just enough for my eyes to follow his gesture.

There, in the cone of my headlights, maybe fifty feet ahead, something stood in the middle of the road.

At first, my brain tried to make it into things it understood.

Big black bear, maybe, reared up on hind legs. Or a moose misplaced from somewhere farther east. Something big and stupid and in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But even in that split‑second, something in me knew.

This was wrong.

It was upright. Not just reared. Standing. Its posture wasn’t that precarious wobble you get from an animal briefly balancing on two legs. It was natural vertical, weight settled, shoulders squared.

It was huge. Eight feet tall at least. Maybe more. The road’s centerline came to its thighs. Dark brown fur covered it, the strands catching my lights in a way that turned them into a moving shadow. Its arms hung long, longer than a human’s should, hands hovering near its knees.

The head—

The head is what snapped every frail theory of “maybe it’s just…”

Cone‑shaped. Sloping from a heavy brow ridge up into a crest that no human skull has ever had. Silhouetted against the dark trees, it looked like something that belonged in cave paintings, not on a two‑lane road.

Its eyes reflected my headlights. Not like an animal’s, with that glassy, vacant look. They flashed, then focused.

On us.

The entire encounter, from the moment Eric shouted to the moment we hit it, probably lasted two seconds.

It felt like an hour.

I yanked the wheel right, muscle memory screaming that anything is better than plowing directly into that mass. Tires skidded on cold asphalt. The truck shuddered.

The creature didn’t move.

It didn’t flinch, didn’t lunge, didn’t flee. It just stood there in the center of our lane, watching.

There was no surprise in its face. No panic. No animal confusion. If anything, there was a calm awareness, like it had stepped into the road on purpose and knew exactly what would happen next.

The front bumper hit.

The sound was a combination of crunch and thud, metal and meat colliding. The hood buckled, crumpling like a paper cup. The windshield exploded inward in a flood of safety glass. Airbags detonated with muffled bangs.

For a fraction of a second, the creature’s body was there, in the cab. Fur, mass, a weight that pushed all the air out of the space.

Then everything went black.

Chapter 3: Dragged into the Dark

Consciousness came back in pieces.

Sound arrived first. Distant, then closer. Something like breathing—deep, heavy pulls of air, not human. Each inhale seemed to draw the world in. Each exhale was a low, rumbling growl.

Next came sensation.

Pain throbbed through my skull. My ribs ached, a sharp, stabbing kind of pain on the left every time my chest hitched. Warm wetness trickled down the side of my face, getting sticky in my hair. The acrid smell of deployed airbags and gasoline mingled with the copper tang of blood.

I tried to open my eyes. One lid dragged up grudgingly. The other felt glued shut.

The world swam into a blur of darkness and broken shapes.

The cab was crushed, dashboard shoved inward. The steering wheel was bent at an angle it was never designed for. The windshield was gone entirely. Cold air knifed through the opening where glass had been.

Somewhere outside, snow sifted down in slow white flakes, illuminated occasionally by the flicker of my still‑gasping headlights.

The truck had left the road. I could see the trunk of a tree pressed into what used to be the front end. We’d either slid or been thrown twenty feet off the asphalt, metal wrapped around bark like crumpled foil.

The breathing was closer now.

I turned my head—an effort that sent white pain lancing behind my eyes—and saw it.

The creature was pulling itself up from the ground.

It had been thrown, too. The impact had knocked it backward into the ditch and beyond. It moved slowly, deliberately, as if every muscle complained. But it moved.

Something that big, hit by a pickup going forty, should have been sprawled, broken, still.

It wasn’t.

It got its feet under it, first on hands and knees, then hunched, then standing. In my flickering headlights, I saw the outline again—massive torso, long arms, thick legs. Its fur was matted in places, darker patches that might have been its own blood.

The growl deepened, vibrating in the air, in my chest.

It turned toward the truck.

Even through a crack in my vision, even with concussion fogging my brain, I saw those eyes fix on the cab. On me.

On us.

A wave of blackness washed over me again as the world tilted. For a while, I wasn’t there.

Next time I surfaced, I was moving.

Not on my own.

My body bumped over hard ground. Rocks dug into my back and legs. Roots snagged my clothes. Branches slapped my arms and face. The smell changed: gasoline and hot metal fading into damp earth, rotting leaves, and the deep, cold green of uncut forest.

I couldn’t move my hands. Couldn’t make my legs respond. My arms flopped uselessly against my sides as whatever held me dragged me along.

To my left, something else was being dragged.

I couldn’t turn my head enough to see. I heard it—another body scraping over ground, twigs snapping under weight, the occasional dull thud as it hit something.

Eric.

It had to be Eric.

Some lucid part of my mind tried to scream at the rest to do something. Fight. Claw. Kick. It was like yelling at a statue.

The forest closed around us. The thin, filtered light from the road disappeared behind layers of needles and branches.

Dark swallowed us whole.

Chapter 4: A Body and a Monster

When I finally clawed my way back to full consciousness, I was not in the truck.

I lay on cold earth, the ground uneven beneath my shoulder blades. The air had that wet, heavy feeling of deep woods in winter. The scent of pine and moss wrapped everything. I could hear wind brushing through high branches, small rustles in the underbrush, an owl calling somewhere far off.

No engine noise. No tires on asphalt. No human sounds.

My chest felt like it had been caved in on the left side. Every breath heaved and crackled, pain spiking with each inhale. My head throbbed in time with my heartbeat. Dried blood made my hair crunchy, my face tight.

The darkness wasn’t complete. My eyes, finally adjusting, could make out silhouettes—tree trunks, tangled undergrowth, a faint paler patch of sky far above where the canopy thinned.

I turned my head slowly, one agony at a time.

At the base of a nearby tree lay a shape.

Human‑sized. Human‑shaped. Motionless.

“Eric,” I croaked. My voice came out thin, hardly more than breath.

No answer.

I forced myself up onto my elbow, teeth grinding against the pain in my ribs, and crawled.

Every inch closer made the dread grow.

He was on his side, facing away. His jacket was torn, jeans ripped at the knee. I called his name again, louder.

Nothing.

My hand shook as I reached out and touched his shoulder. His body rolled limply as I turned him toward me.

His head lolled back at an angle that wasn’t right.

Even in that dim light, I could see his eyes.

Open. Staring at nothing. Mouth parted slightly, lips pale. There was a ragged cut across his forehead, dried blood crusted down one temple. His skin under my fingers felt too cool.

“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no…”

Training I barely remembered from a work CPR course blinked on. I tilted his head back, checked his mouth, pressed my ear to his chest, searching for the tiny thump of a heartbeat, the faint whisper of breath.

Silence.

I pressed my fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse that wasn’t there.

Something inside me refused to accept it.

I laced my hands together, positioned them on his sternum, and started compressions. Thirty down, hard and fast, counting under my breath. Two breaths, sealing my mouth over his, forcing air into lungs that didn’t want it.

Again.

And again.

My ribs screamed with every downward push, shards of pain radiating up into my shoulder. My vision blurred. Tears and blood and sweat all tasted the same.

He didn’t come back.

After an eternity that was probably five minutes, my arms gave out. I collapsed beside him, chest heaving, pain roaring in my side.

The forest pressed close around us, indifferent.

That’s when I heard it.

Footsteps.

They weren’t the furtive scuttle of a deer or the light patter of some smaller thing. These were heavy. Each one landed with a thump that shivered the ground, followed by the crunch of snow and the crack of branches pushed aside.

Coming closer.

The growl that followed was low and continuous, like an idling engine made of muscle and anger.

Panic fired every remaining neuron in my system.

There was nowhere to go. No road. No house. No convenient hollow with a door. Just trees and shadows and the brutal fact that I was injured, exhausted, and completely outmatched.

Ten feet away, a tangle of fallen logs and dense brush created a rough hollow.

I crawled.

Later, in therapy, people would ask why I didn’t run at it with a branch, why I didn’t attack, why I didn’t… something.

The honest answer is: I wanted to live.

I slid under the deadfall, branches clawing at my clothes, bark scraping skin. I wedged myself into the tightest space I could find, pressed my face into the damp earth, and held my breath until my lungs burned.

Through gaps in the branches, I saw the shape enter the clearing.

It was the same creature. Or another just like it.

Even in the low light, it was massive—shoulders like a refrigerator turned sideways, bulk that made the trees seem thinner. It moved with a rolling gait, not clumsy, not lumbering, but solid. Every motion said: I belong here. You don’t.

It went straight to Eric.

For a long moment, it just stood there, looking down at the body.

Then it reached down, wrapped one enormous hand around his ankle, and began to drag him away.

The ease of it made my stomach twist. Eric’s body bumped over roots and rocks, arms and head trailing. His face tilted briefly toward my hiding spot, eyes still open and empty.

Something in my chest broke then that never fully healed.

I bit down on my own knuckles to stop any sound from escaping me—any shout, any sob, any useless plea. Tears soaked into the dirt under my cheek.

The noises of dragging and breaking branches eventually faded into the distance.

Silence spilled in behind them.

Then, from somewhere deeper in the forest, a scream split the night.

Chapter 5: The Hunt

I’d heard people scream before. Humans. Animals. Pain takes a similar shape in the throat regardless of species.

This was different.

The sound started low, a kind of drawn‑out wail. It rose, building on itself, climbing into a pitch that made my teeth ache. Then it fractured into something more complex—layers of tones stacked together, harmonizing in ways no human voice could.

Another answered.

From somewhere else in the darkness, a second call cut in, slightly higher, slightly shorter. Then a third. A fourth. Soon, the whole forest was alive with them, voices overlapping, echoing off trunks and hills, coming from every direction and nowhere at once.

It went on and on, longer than any living throat should be able to sustain.

The screams weren’t random. There was pattern, call and response. Urgency. Anger. Grief. I could feel it in my bones.

They were talking.

About us.

When the last call finally died, the silence that followed felt thick and heavy. Waiting.

Staying hidden forever was not an option. My ribs hurt worse now, each breath a ragged, shallow thing. My head throbbed in a slow, nauseating pulse. I was starting to feel lightheaded, the edges of my vision dimming.

If I didn’t move, I’d die there under the logs. It was that simple.

If I did move, I might die in some other way.

I chose motion.

I clawed my way out of the brush, each movement sending spikes of pain through my chest. The forest looked the same in every direction—trees, undergrowth, darkness. No clue which way led back to the road, to help, to anything.

I picked a direction that felt downhill and started walking.

“Walking” is a generous word. I staggered. I stumbled. I tripped over roots and staggered into trunks. A few times, the world tilted and I found myself on my knees, palms pressed into cold soil, forcing myself back up with curses and prayers mixed on my tongue.

Time became a blur of steps and pain.

Branches scraped my face. Snow clung to my clothes, melting into cold rivulets against my skin. My breath came in ragged pulls, each one sounding too loud in my own ears.

Every noise behind me made my heart stutter.

An hour passed. Maybe more. My sense of time warped.

At some point, the dizziness worsened. The ground seemed to sway under my feet. Blackness lapped at the edges of the world.

I leaned against a tree, chest hitching, vision swimming.

That’s when I heard the footsteps again.

Closer now. Heavy. Slow. Deliberate. Not crashing blindly through the underbrush this time—pacing. Tracking.

I turned my head and saw a darker shape move between darker trunks.

Panic flared like a match dropped into gasoline.

I pushed off from the tree and ran.

It wasn’t much of a run. More of a half‑falling, half‑lurching sprint. My lungs burned. My ribs felt like they were stabbing me from the inside with every jolt. Branches whipped against my face. I didn’t try to be quiet. Quiet didn’t matter anymore. Distance did.

Behind me, the footsteps sped up.

Branches cracked. Something big—and close—pushed through brush with terrifying ease.

I don’t know how long that chase lasted. Ten minutes. A lifetime.

At some point, my body simply refused to go further. My legs buckled. I collapsed behind a fallen log, clutching my ribs, the world tilting.

The footsteps stopped.

The forest held its breath.

Blackness surged in from all sides. Concussion, blood loss, exhaustion—they all dug their fingers in.

The last thing I remember before the world went completely dark was hearing my name.

Spoken in a voice I knew better than my own.

Chapter 6: A Ghost in the Pines

“Hey, man. Get up.”

The voice was clear. Warm. So familiar it cut through the haze like a knife.

Eric’s voice.

My eyes snapped open.

Above me, the trees were silhouettes against an ink‑dark sky. My breath fogged the air. For a second, I wondered if I was already dead. If this was it—some hallucination my mind had conjured to make the end easier.

Then I saw him.

He stood about ten feet away, leaning casually against a tree. Same jacket. Same jeans. Same stupid beanie he’d been wearing in the truck. His face was relaxed, lit by a faint glow that didn’t seem to come from anywhere.

He smiled.

“Come on,” he said. “We gotta move.”

I stared.

“I… I watched you die,” I whispered. My voice cracked. “I tried—” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

He shook his head slightly. “You can yell at me later,” he said. “Right now, they’re still looking.”

He turned and started walking deeper into the trees.

Everything rational in me screamed that this wasn’t possible. That I was on the ground with a head injury, hallucinating. That following phantom friends into the dark is how horror stories end and bodies get found in spring thaw.

I pushed myself up anyway.

I followed.

He never got far enough ahead to lose me. Every time I slowed, he slowed. When I stumbled, he stopped and watched, patience in the set of his shoulders.

Behind us, somewhere out in the forest, I could still hear movement. Not close enough to see, but close enough to feel in the hair on the back of my neck.

Eric—or the thing wearing his shape, if you prefer your nightmares cruel—led me to a muddy creekbed. Spring runoff or snowmelt had collected there, forming a shallow pool of dark, organic muck.

He pointed to it, then at me, then mimed rubbing something on his arms.

“Hide your smell,” he said.

It made sense in a way that bypassed the “how are you here?” questions entirely. Whatever they were, they’d found us easily enough. Scent could have been part of that.

I knelt at the edge of the mud and scooped it up in handfuls, smearing it over my face, neck, hands—anywhere skin showed. The mud was frigid, seeping through clothes as I worked. It smelled of rot and wet leaves and the secrets of things that had been buried for a long time.

He nodded approvingly.

We walked in the creek itself for a while, water icing my feet through my ruined shoes. Every step in that freezing sludge made my ribs protest, but the idea of throwing scent off was like a lifeline; I clung to it.

As we moved, the sounds of pursuit changed. The calls grew more distant, more scattered. At one point, I heard a frustrated roar, the sound ripping through the trees. Voices answered from different angles, patterns shifting.

We reached a point where the creek petered out into saturated ground. Eric led me uphill through thicker brush. After a few minutes, he stopped abruptly and pulled me down behind a massive fallen log.

He pressed a finger to his lips.

Through a gap in the wood, I saw it.

Not twenty feet away, another of the creatures stood in a small clearing.

This one was even bigger than the first. Nine feet, maybe more. The hair on its shoulders was tangled and matted, thicker than the rest, giving it an almost cloaked appearance. Its chest rose and fell in slow, controlled breaths, steam curling from its nostrils.

It wasn’t charging. It wasn’t flailing. It was listening.

Its head turned slowly from side to side. You could almost see it sorting sounds, separating wind and animal and—

It took in a deep breath, testing the air.

For ten agonizing minutes, we lay there while it searched. It walked a few paces in one direction, paused, sniffed, listened. Moved again. Each step was careful, measured, deliberate. When it passed within fifteen feet of our hiding place, I could hear the faint rasp of its fur brushing against branches, could smell that thick musk under the blanket of mud and berry juice.

Eventually, it let out a short grunt and moved off.

We waited until the sounds of its passage had completely faded before Eric gave the all‑clear.

The next hours blurred into a strange, disjointed sequence of survival lessons.

He showed me how to step on rocks instead of in mud, to leave less trace. He pointed out which branches would snap loudly if brushed and guided me around them. He had me crawl through a dense thicket of wild blackberry bushes, ignoring my curses as thorns tore at my clothes.

On the other side, he pointed to my sleeves and pants, now festooned with bits of leaves and twig and berry juice.

“Camouflage,” he said. “And more scent.”

We moved when we could, hid when we had to. Sometimes we crouched in depressions in the ground while voices moved just yards away. Sometimes we lay flat behind moss‑coated logs as silhouettes passed against a slice of dim sky.

Twice, we watched what looked like planning meetings.

In one clearing, three of the creatures stood facing each other, exchanging sounds and gestures. One—the largest—seemed to give directions, pointing, grunting, making those strange clicks with its tongue. The others nodded—actually nodded—and moved off in different directions.

I’ve seen fireteams brief before missions with less coordination.

Eric’s instructions grew more urgent as time wore on.

“On your toes,” he whispered at one point. “Less sound. Breathe quieter. In through your nose. Don’t cough out loud.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked, my voice rasping.

He smiled sadly. “You know I always paid attention,” he said. “Even when you didn’t.”

Somewhere in there, doubt clawed at me. Between hiding and moving and the constant pressure of pain and exhaustion, there were cracks where my brain remembered that I’d felt his cold skin under my hands. That I’d seen his dead eyes.

How was he here?

Before the question could fully form, the forest answered with another chorus of calls.

These were different.

Long, rising, almost melodic, overlapping in a way that made the air vibrate. They came from higher ground, from multiple directions, weaving together into something that sounded almost like a song.

We hit the ground behind a cluster of boulders. Eric’s hand pressed between my shoulder blades, holding me down.

“Stay down,” he whispered. “Don’t look.”

The calls went on. And on.

They had a rhythm. A structure. I couldn’t understand it, but I could feel it. Ceremony. Lament. Something bigger than a hunting pattern.

Something died tonight, I thought. Something they cared about.

We were trespassers in more ways than one.

When the last call faded, the silence rang in my ears.

Eric waited longer than usual before motioning me up. When we moved, we gave that hillside a wide berth.

All the while, my chest hurt worse. Breaths came shorter, shallower. Each cough burned and tasted like metal. The forest tilted occasionally, the ground coming up to meet me faster than it should have.

“Just a little further,” he kept saying.

“Where?” I asked finally, voice barely more than air.

“Out,” he said simply. “Where they don’t go.”

Chapter 7: Edge of the Wild

We climbed.

Ridges rose under our feet, one after another. The higher we went, the thinner the trees became. Gaps appeared in the canopy. The sky showed itself in narrow wedges—faintly lighter than the darkness under the branches.

Every step felt like dragging concrete blocks tied to my ankles. My lungs crackled wetly. More than once, blackness blurred the edges of my vision and I had to stop, leaning heavily against trunks that felt insubstantial.

Eric never lost patience.

He’d appear in front of me when I faltered. Sometimes he’d reappear behind me, pushing gently between my shoulder blades. When I collapsed to my knees beside a small stream, he sat opposite me, letting me splash cold water on my face, watching me with eyes that knew more than they should.

“Almost there,” he said quietly. “You’re doing good.”

At some point, dawn began to stain the sky somewhere beyond the trees. The light trickled down, making the forest greyscale instead of stark black and silver.

We crested another ridge—and there, through the trunks ahead, I saw it.

Light.

Not moonlight. Not the diffused glow of dawn. Artificial light, white and sharp, cutting through bare branches, moving in a predictable, linear way.

Headlights.

A road.

I don’t remember making a conscious decision to move faster. My body did it on its own, lurching toward that glow as if pulled by gravity. The ground underfoot changed, becoming less treacherous, the incline gentler.

We were within a hundred yards of the treeline when Eric slowed.

He looked at me, really looked, and for the first time since this impossible version of him had appeared, his voice wavered.

“You remember the song?” he asked.

It took me a second to realize what he meant.

The song on the radio. The country tune we’d been shouting along to right before the impact. I hummed the chorus, the melody shaky but recognizable.

He joined in.

For a few moments, we walked through that thinning strip of forest, both of us singing under our breath. It felt absurd and right at the same time—like the universe was trying to stitch the beginning of the night to the end.

At the edge of the trees, we stopped.

The road lay just ahead, a dark ribbon with a double yellow line, wet with melt and catching the first real light of morning. No traffic in that instant, but further down, I saw a glow crest a distant bend—a car coming.

Eric put a hand on my shoulder.

“Go,” he said. “You’re out of their territory now. They don’t like the road.”

“You’re coming with me,” I said. It came out more desperate than I meant it to.

He smiled.

“I already did,” he said.

My throat closed.

The headlights down the road were closer now, growing, cutting twin beams through the thinning fog.

Eric nodded toward them. “Wave,” he said. “Fall where they can see you. Don’t try to make it look good.”

I stumbled forward.

The asphalt under my boots felt jarringly smooth after hours of uneven forest floor. My legs were liquid. Each step was an argument.

The car was close enough now that I could see the outline. I raised my arms, waving them, trying to shout. My voice came out like sandpaper.

The world went sideways.

My knees buckled. I dropped at the edge of the pavement, vision tunneling, headlights flooding my world with glaring white.

I remember tires squealing, brakes slamming. Doors opening. Voices shouting.

Then nothing.

Chapter 8: The Story No One Wanted

Hospital light is different from all other light.

It’s flat, too bright, unforgiving. It makes everything look more fragile than it should. I woke to that light painting the ceiling above me in clean, sharp lines.

My chest was wrapped tight. Breathing hurt, but a slightly duller hurt than before. An IV line snaked into my hand. Machines hummed, beeped, whispered to themselves nearby.

A nurse noticed my eyes open and hurried over, relief softening her face.

“Hey there,” she said. “Welcome back.”

She explained, in the practiced cadence of someone who’s given this speech many times, that I’d been found on the side of a mountain road by a couple heading home at dawn. I’d been barely conscious, hypothermic, bleeding. I had three broken ribs, a concussion, multiple lacerations. I’d lost a fair amount of blood.

“But you’re lucky,” she said. “You’re going to be okay.”

Lucky.

The word sat wrong in my chest.

When the doctor came in later, I asked the only question that mattered.

“My friend,” I said. “Eric. Is he okay? Where is he?”

The doctor frowned slightly, confusion wrinkling his forehead.

“You were alone when you were found,” he said. “The couple who brought you in—there was no one with you.”

I laughed.

It bubbled up from somewhere hollow, sounding wrong even to my own ears.

“No,” I said. “No, he was with me. In the truck. We crashed. The—the thing hit us. It dragged us—into the forest. He was dead. I tried CPR. Then it… it took him. Later he came back—he helped me. He was with me.”

The doctor’s expression slid into something I’d already seen once in a therapist’s office. Professional concern edged with a careful neutrality.

“You’ve been through significant trauma,” he said gently. “Head injuries can cause confusion. Memory issues. Sometimes the brain fills in gaps.”

They brought in the couple who’d found me—kind faces, worried eyes. They repeated the same thing.

“You were lying at the edge of the road,” the woman said. “We almost didn’t see you. There was no one else. No crashed truck. Nothing.”

No wreck. No skid marks. No twisted metal hugging a tree. No blood on asphalt. No sign that our last normal minutes had ever existed.

The police came. They asked where I’d been, what I remembered. I told them.

All of it.

The road. The creature. The impact. The dragging. The forest. The hunt. The ghost of my friend leading me out.

You could feel the temperature in the room drop as I talked. Not literally. But in the way their posture shifted, the way pens paused over notebooks, the way eyes narrowed just slightly.

They were patient. They were kind. They wrote things down. But they didn’t believe me.

They checked missing person reports. Confirmed that yes, Eric was missing. That yes, we’d left town together. That yes, his parents hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

Search and rescue teams combed the mountains where I said we’d been. No crash site. No debris. No tracks. No sign of a body dragged into the woods.

In the absence of evidence, people defaulted to the stories that made sense.

Maybe we’d argued. Maybe he’d wandered off. Maybe I’d been drunk and crashed alone, hit my head, gotten disoriented.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Trauma‑induced hallucinations, one therapist suggested.

Concussion‑related false memories, said another.

Stress, exhaustion, guilt weaving themselves into an elaborate delusion.

Everyone had a framework to fit me into. None of them matched the shape of what really happened.

I got better, physically. Bones knit. Headaches faded. Cuts hardened into scars.

The other wounds—the ones the x‑rays couldn’t show—never really closed.

Eric’s parents look at me differently now.

They don’t say it out loud. But I see it in their eyes when we cross paths. You were the last one with him. You’re the only one who came back. Where is our son?

I don’t have an answer they can live with.

“Your son was taken by something no one believes exists” is not a sentence any parent should be asked to swallow.

So I say as little as possible. I let them cling to whatever story lets them sleep at night.

He disappeared. He got lost. He had an accident.

The case file sits somewhere, stamped cold. No foul play. No evidence. Just absence.

At night, when the house is quiet and my wife’s breathing has settled into the even rhythm of sleep, I sometimes hear those screams again.

The overlapping voices. The hunting calls. The mourning song on the hillside.

Sometimes I dream I’m back on the forest floor, mud on my skin, breath catching, branches clawing overhead. I feel hands close around my ankles and start to drag.

Sometimes, in the worst dreams, I’m not the one being dragged.

I’m the one watching, helpless, as something massive and impossible takes my friend away into the dark.

Chapter 9: What I Know

People ask why I don’t go back.

Why I don’t organize searches. Why I don’t lead some expedition into the Cascades with cameras and plaster and long guns to bring back proof.

The answer is simple.

I don’t ever want to see one of those things again.

I survived one encounter through a combination of luck, mud, and whatever walked beside me wearing my friend’s face.

I don’t believe I’d get that lucky twice.

You can call them Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Forest giants. It doesn’t matter.

They’re real.

They’re not blurry shapes in fan videos or friendly woodland hermits who trade berries for snacks. They are large, intelligent, territorial predators.

They’re not afraid of us.

We’re the ones who should be afraid of them.

The hardest part of all of this isn’t the fear. It’s the helplessness.

Knowing Eric’s body is still out there somewhere. Knowing his family will never have a grave to stand at. Knowing that every time someone in our region goes missing in the mountains and doesn’t come back—no body, no trace—there’s a possibility, however small, that the thing that took my friend took them, too.

I don’t camp anymore. I don’t hike. I don’t take scenic drives through heavily forested areas. When the GPS suggests a “beautiful mountain route,” I ignore it.

I live my life close to streetlights now.

People love to romanticize the wild. They talk about “getting back to nature” and “unplugging.” They want to believe that the worst thing in the forest is a hungry bear or a cold night.

There are things out there that do not care about our stories.

There are things that existed long before we named them and will exist long after we stop telling ourselves we’re alone at the top.

I don’t expect you to believe me.

It’s easier, in a way, if you don’t. It means your world gets to stay the size it is. Your woods can still be just trees and trails and maybe the occasional coyote.

But if you ever find yourself driving a narrow mountain road at night, forest pressing in, music up, laughing with someone you love, and you see something step into your headlights that your brain can’t categorize—

Don’t assume it’s going to move out of the way.

If you ever wake up on the forest floor with pain in your chest and the knowledge that something dragged you there, and you hear heavy footsteps in the dark—

Hide.

If, in your darkest hour, you hear the voice of someone you lost, calling your name, leading you forward—

Maybe that’s your brain keeping you alive. Maybe it’s something else.

Either way, follow it.

Because some part of you wants to live. And sometimes, in the deepest places, that’s the only ally you’ve got.

This is the story I carry.

It doesn’t make me feel better to tell it. It doesn’t bring Eric back. It doesn’t change the fact that somewhere, under those tall pines and firs, creatures we have no language for are still moving, still hunting, still singing to each other in the dark.

But now it’s not just in my head.

Now it’s yours, too.

What you do with it is up to you.