Woman Saved Bigfoot Infant and Fed It for 10 Years, Then It Returned to Save Her – Sasquatch Story
THE CHILD IN THE WOODPILE
A Forks, Washington confession in seven chapters
Chapter 1 — Frost on the Grass, Blood in the Fur
I never believed in Bigfoot— not in a serious way—until the morning I found one dying in my backyard. Even now, years later, I still hesitate when I write the word as if spelling it might invite laughter through the walls. But laughter is easy when you’ve never stood in March frost with two dogs barking like their souls were on fire, staring at something that should not be there.
.
.
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It was early March of 2003, and I lived alone in a small cabin outside Forks, Washington. The nearest neighbor was three miles down a logging road, which suited me just fine. I did bookkeeping from home for local businesses, so isolation wasn’t a punishment; it was a lifestyle. That morning began the way all safe lives begin—coffee, invoices, the familiar click of routines. I let my two dogs into the fenced backyard and settled at the kitchen table to sort receipts. Twenty minutes later, the barking started.
Not the usual alert bark—deer at the fence, raccoon in the brush—this was frantic, high, edged with fear. I went to the back door and looked through the glass. Both dogs were at the far corner by the woodpile, tails tucked, barking and whimpering at something I couldn’t see. I pulled on my jacket, stepped into the cold, and crossed the yard. Frost lay in patches on the grass, and my breath came out in white bursts. The dogs wouldn’t come to me. They just trembled and kept barking into the same narrow space between two stacks of firewood.
When I got close, my brain tried to label what it saw as something ordinary. A bear cub. A sick dog. A mangy animal that wandered in from the woods. But the face was wrong for all of those. Lying in a heap between the wood stacks was a small, furred body—dark brown, thick-haired—curled on its side and shivering violently. It was about three feet tall, too big for a newborn, too small for anything I’d ever heard described as Bigfoot, yet the proportions were unmistakably… humanlike. Hands with fingers, not paws. A flatter nose than a bear’s. Eyes positioned forward in a way that made the face read as aware even with the lids half-closed.
There was dried blood matted along its shoulder and neck. Deep gashes, the kind that looked like claws. The skin beneath the fur was ice-cold when I touched its arm. Its breathing was shallow, ragged, as if each breath had to be negotiated. Whatever this was, it was dying—right there in my yard, in the place my dogs usually chased sticks.
My first instinct was to call someone. But who? Animal control would laugh. The sheriff would arrive with a gun and questions I couldn’t answer. And even if someone believed me, the ending wrote itself: a cage, a lab, strangers in gloves turning a living being into a specimen. I looked down at the small face—unconscious, bruised, too intelligent even in its stillness—and the decision came like a physical sensation, like a door closing behind me. I couldn’t let it die outside. I couldn’t let it be taken.
I took off my jacket and wrapped it around the creature as gently as if it were made of glass. It gave a small whimpering sound, not awake, but alive enough to protest. It was heavier than I expected—sixty or seventy pounds at least—dense with muscle under the fur. I gathered it into my arms and carried it into my house. The dogs followed, still whining, as if they knew the yard had become something else entirely.
Chapter 2 — The House Becomes a Secret
I laid it on the couch and covered it with blankets, turned the heat up, and stared at it like staring might help my mind catch up to reality. The wounds were worse in good light: deep, torn gashes across the shoulder, ragged edges like something had tried to pull it apart. A cougar, maybe. A bear. Or something I didn’t want to imagine. The bleeding had stopped, but the fur around the wounds looked stiff and dark, and the skin beneath felt hot in places—an early warning of infection.
I wasn’t a nurse. I wasn’t a vet. I was a woman who knew how to balance books and split firewood and keep her dogs fed. But desperation turns ordinary people into improvisers. I cleaned the wounds with warm water and what I had—antibiotic ointment, bandages, clean cloth. I moved slowly, speaking soft nonsense without meaning, like my voice might anchor it in this world. Once, its eyelids fluttered open and I saw the eyes—dark brown, glossy, focused for a half-second—then closed again. That brief look hit me harder than the blood. It wasn’t the blank stare of an animal sedated by pain. It was recognition without context, like it knew it was somewhere wrong and was too exhausted to ask why.
For three days it barely moved. I made a bed in the spare room with blankets and pillows, checked on it every few hours, cleaned the wounds, tried to get water into its mouth. It resisted at first, turning its head weakly away, and I thought I might lose it anyway despite everything.
On the fourth morning, I opened the door and found it sitting up, watching me. I froze in the doorway, suddenly aware that I had brought something wild into my house—something unknown, strong even when injured, something that didn’t belong to the human world. It didn’t lunge. It didn’t bare teeth. It made a soft cooing sound, curious rather than threatening, as if sound was the only safe language it could offer.
I brought a bowl of warm broth—chicken stock, the simplest thing I could think of—and held it out. It sniffed the air, reached slowly, and took the bowl with hands that had opposable thumbs and fingernails, not claws. It drank like thirst was a command. When it finished, it looked at me again, eyes steady, and made that same soft sound.
Something shifted in me in that moment. Fear didn’t disappear, but it rearranged itself. This wasn’t a monster. It was a child—an injured, orphaned child, stranded in the wrong world. And once you accept that, you can’t un-accept it. You don’t walk away from something helpless that has decided to trust you.
Over the next week it got stronger. The wounds began to knit. I experimented with food, keeping notes like a scientist because guessing felt too dangerous. Apples became a favorite. It ate them whole—core, seeds, stem, all—like the concept of “waste” didn’t exist. It devoured raw vegetables eagerly, but cooked food confused it at first, as if heat was an unnecessary trick. It learned quickly, though. Too quickly. It watched everything I did as if storing it for later.
Chapter 3 — Learning Each Other
Three weeks after I found it, I opened the spare room door and let it explore the house. It moved cautiously, sniffing furniture, touching objects with careful fingers, like it was reading the world through texture. The dogs stayed back at first, uncertain, then gradually settled into wary acceptance. Nobody attacked anybody. Nobody ran. The house became a strange little kingdom held together by mutual curiosity and the fragile truce of shared space.
The television startled it—sound and moving faces inside a box—but after the initial jump, it crept forward and touched the screen with one finger like it expected the images to have warmth. Books fascinated it more. It would sit for hours flipping pages, staring at pictures with intense concentration. Sometimes it would bring a book to me, push it toward my hands, and make a sound that felt like a request: show me.
Communication developed slowly. It didn’t speak, not in any language I recognized, but it had sounds with consistent meaning. Low grunts that seemed to mean agreement. Higher chirps that sounded like refusal. A deep rumble in its chest when content. A sharp bark when alarmed. I started to respond, and it started to understand my words, at least the simple ones: “come,” “stay,” “eat,” “sleep,” “no,” “good.”
The intelligence wasn’t the kind you see in a well-trained dog. It wasn’t obedience. It was comprehension. It watched the way I turned a doorknob and then tested it, patiently, until it learned the mechanism. It watched me flip light switches and then tried it itself, fascinated that the world could be commanded into brightness. It learned the bathroom through observation, which sounds ridiculous until you’re living it and realizing this creature is building a map of human life in real time.
Meanwhile, it was changing physically at a rate that made my stomach knot. By the end of the first year, the three-foot infant was nearly five feet tall and close to two hundred pounds—solid muscle, thickening fur, broadening shoulders. Its face matured: brow ridge more pronounced, jaw heavier, eyes calmer in a way that suggested growing confidence. The spare bedroom was no longer enough. I converted the basement into living quarters, hauling a mattress down in pieces while it lifted the entire thing one-handed like it weighed nothing. I added shelves of picture books. A small TV. A few objects it seemed to like—smooth stones, bits of carved wood, animal figurines.
Evenings became our time. I’d work during the day, then sit on the couch while it lay on the floor or leaned against the wall, watching nature documentaries with a focus that made my skin prickle. Forests. Mountains. Great apes. It watched those landscapes like they were memories trying to surface.
Chapter 4 — The Cost of Keeping It Hidden
The hardest part wasn’t feeding it or cleaning wounds or adapting my house to something that was outgrowing the idea of doors. The hardest part was secrecy. Secrecy isn’t a single lie; it’s a way of living. It reaches into every decision and tightens.
I stopped having visitors. I made excuses until people stopped asking. I became the weird hermit woman in the woods, and that reputation became a kind of camouflage. Delivery drivers learned to leave packages on the porch without knocking. I shopped at odd hours, splitting groceries between stores so no one would notice the volume of fruit I bought. Fifty pounds of apples a week becomes suspicious in a small-town checkout line. I kept curtains closed. I warned the Bigfoot—over and over, with gestures, with words, with the kind of urgency you can’t fake—that people were dangerous. That if anyone saw it, they would take it away.
It understood. Not all at once, but enough. It stayed away from windows. It moved quietly when cars passed. When I jumped at unexpected sounds, it would pause, head tilted, listening harder than I could, then guide me away from whatever it sensed beyond my perception.
The stress was constant. Every knock felt like the beginning of a disaster. Every unfamiliar vehicle on the road made my heart sprint. I started having nightmares about discovery—men in uniforms, cameras, cages, the creature dragged away while it reached back for me with hands that had learned to be gentle. The fear wore grooves in me. It aged me. It made my body smaller while the Bigfoot in my basement grew into something vast.
Year two, year three, year four passed in routines that felt almost normal if you didn’t look too closely. Breakfast at the table—me with eggs and toast, it with mountains of fruit and raw vegetables. Late-night excursions outside when the world was asleep. The Bigfoot needed movement, space, air that didn’t smell like drywall. I’d take it out at two or three in the morning. I’d stumble with a small flashlight while it moved with perfect confidence, running and climbing trees with a silent grace that seemed impossible for something so massive. It was in those moments that I remembered the truth I tried not to admit: it belonged to the wild, not my basement.
Yet it never grew rough with me. It learned to modulate strength the way you learn to keep your voice soft around a sleeping baby. It could bend metal coat hangers like they were wire, snap thick branches like toothpicks, lift furniture with one arm, but it picked up eggs without breaking them. Turned doorknobs without ripping them off. It moved around me with careful attention, as if it understood my fragility the way I understood its danger.
By year six, the chronic stress showed up in my body as if it had been waiting for permission: fatigue, chest pain, spells of dizziness. I ignored them, because caring for it felt more urgent than caring for myself. But it noticed. It watched me when I moved slowly. It hovered closer. It started bringing firewood without being asked, carrying heavy loads, doing the physical chores as if trying to remove weight from my life by force.
Chapter 5 — The Goodbye I Didn’t Want
The diagnosis came the way bad news always comes—clinical words delivered by someone who can go home afterward and not carry your secret. Heart problems. Likely hereditary, worsened by years of chronic stress. Medication. Lifestyle changes. Reduce stress immediately, the doctor said, as if I could set my life down and pick up a calmer one. I drove home with the prescription in my pocket and the bitter taste of irony on my tongue.
I took the medication, and I tried, in the limited ways available to me, to reduce strain. I let the Bigfoot do more. It became protective in a way that wasn’t possessive, but vigilant. It began sleeping at the foot of my bed instead of the basement, curled on the floor like a living wall between me and the world. Some nights I’d wake and see its eyes reflecting moonlight, watchful, alert, as if it could hold my failing heart together by attention alone.
I started thinking about what would happen when I was gone. That thought was worse than death itself. Who would care for an eight-foot creature nobody believed in? Who would protect it from the world that would destroy it through curiosity? I wrote notes anyway—pages of feeding habits, warning signs of sickness, routines, basic survival advice—because writing is what humans do when they can’t control outcomes. I set aside money in an account with vague instructions that made sense only if the reader already knew the impossible truth. Mostly, I tried to prepare the Bigfoot emotionally for separation, which was like trying to teach a storm not to rain.
It bonded too deeply. It waited by doors when I left rooms. It looked distressed when I tried to increase distance. It leaned against me with a quiet desperation that made my throat close. During one of our last long night walks, I took it deeper into the forest than we’d ever gone, to a clearing with a spring and berry bushes. I sat on a fallen log and tried to explain that this could be a safe place someday. It rested its head on my shoulder and made soft, sad sounds like a lullaby turned inside out.
Year nine was almost all bed. It brought water, fruit, blankets, shifted pillows, sat beside me for hours. It began disappearing into the forest for longer stretches, returning with a sadness in its eyes that told me it was learning to be wild again. One morning it came back holding a small carved piece of wood shaped like a heart, smooth edges made by patient work with stone. It placed it in my hand the way you place something sacred, and made the same cooing sound it had made as an infant, back when everything between us was new. I cried until my chest hurt. The heart was a goodbye you could hold.
When spring arrived again, the Bigfoot grew restless. It stood by windows, staring out, making long mournful calls that echoed through the house. I realized it wasn’t just restless—it was calling. Calling for others of its kind. The isolation that had kept it safe was now a prison. It needed a life beyond my walls.
On a warm April morning, I called it to my bedside and told it, as simply as I could, that it was time to go. It resisted at first—distressed sounds, shaking its head—then finally went still, as if it understood the truth beneath my words. That night, we sat together for hours. I ran my hands through its thick fur. It held my hand with careful gentleness. At dawn, it stood, turned back once to meet my eyes, and disappeared into the forest.
The silence after it left was a physical thing. The house felt hollow. I told myself I’d done the right thing. But righteousness doesn’t keep you warm when you’re alone.
Chapter 6 — The Heart Attack and the Return
Three weeks after it left, my heart tried to end me. It happened in the afternoon, around three, in the quiet that comes when you’ve sent help away and convinced yourself you can die on your own terms. The pain struck like an iron spike through my chest, twisting, radiating down my arm, up into my jaw. I couldn’t breathe properly. I couldn’t move without making it worse. The phone sat on the nightstand three feet away—an impossible distance.
I remember thinking, very calmly, that this was how I would die. Alone in an empty house, miles from help, with nobody to hear me. I felt my vision narrowing, darkness closing in like a tunnel, and my last coherent thought was of the Bigfoot in the forest. I hoped it had found its own kind. I hoped it wouldn’t blame itself for leaving.
Then everything went black.
When awareness crawled back, pain still crushed my chest, but something was different: heavy breathing close to my face, movement in the room, floorboards creaking under enormous weight. I forced my eyes open and saw a massive dark shape leaning over me. For a confused moment I thought it was hallucination, the mind’s final cruelty. Then it moved, and I recognized the silhouette—broad shoulders, familiar head shape, arms like thick branches.
It had come back.
Its huge hands touched my face carefully, checking me like it had checked me during nightmares, eyes wide with something I’d never seen in them before: fear. Real fear, not territorial aggression—fear of loss. It made urgent, distressed sounds and then disappeared. I heard crashing in the kitchen—drawers opened and shut, objects shifted. Moments later it returned holding my phone like an offering. It remembered. It had watched me use it for years and understood that this small device was the human way of summoning help.
My hands shook too badly to do anything. I fumbled. The Bigfoot watched, agitation rising, then took the phone back and started pressing buttons—random at first, thick fingers not suited for touchscreens—until, impossibly, a voice spoke: “911, what’s your emergency?”
I don’t know how it did it except the only way it ever learned anything: watching, storing, trying, refusing to stop. I managed to gasp my address and “heart attack” before strength left me again. It picked up the phone and held it near my face so I could hear the dispatcher telling me help was on the way.
Then it lifted me—carefully, as if I were fragile glass—and carried me through the house to the front porch, laying me where I’d be visible from the road. Sirens grew in the distance. The Bigfoot heard them too and made an anguished sound. It stood torn between leaving and staying, eyes flicking from forest to me. With all the air I had, I forced one word: “Go.”
It leaned down and pressed its forehead to mine for a single heartbeat of contact, then ran—vanishing into the trees just as the ambulance came into view.
Chapter 7 — The Gift That Restarted the Cycle
I spent two weeks in the hospital. Doctors called my survival a miracle. They assumed I’d called 911 myself and somehow made it to the porch, though they couldn’t explain how. I didn’t correct them. The truth would have been filed under delusion, oxygen deprivation, grief. The lie was easier for them to hold. It was easier for me too, because the truth had teeth.
When I came home, I could feel it out there sometimes—the heavy quiet in the trees, the occasional branch snap too slow to be deer, the sense of presence that made the hair on my arms rise. The Bigfoot never came inside again. I think it understood that the chapter of living under my roof was over. But it didn’t abandon me. Gifts appeared on the porch: berries in summer, neatly stacked firewood in fall, once a deer carcass butchered with an efficiency that made me look away. It cared for me from the edge of the world, the way you care for someone you can’t safely touch anymore.
I got stronger slowly. I followed medical advice because I owed my life not to luck, but to loyalty. I kept the carved wooden heart on my nightstand. I wrote down everything I could remember from those ten years—not for fame, not for proof to strangers, but to keep myself from being gaslit by the impossible.
Then, one day, the gifts stopped. No berries. No wood. No night sounds. Weeks passed with nothing, and worry ate at me until I could hardly sleep. Had it been killed? Had it moved on to others of its kind? The thought of it living free should have comforted me, but grief is selfish that way.
And then, just after dawn one morning, I heard heavy footsteps on my porch. I opened the door carefully and my breath caught hard in my throat. There, wrapped in soft leaves and moss, lay a small Bigfoot infant—maybe a year old—sleeping like a gift placed gently in human hands. Its fur was lighter than its parent’s had been, brown instead of near-black, its face softer, its chest rising and falling in peaceful rhythm. Beside it was the carved wooden heart I’d once given back during our farewell.
I looked toward the forest, and I knew it was watching. I picked up the infant—warm, solid, undeniably real. It made a small cooing sound, the same sound its parent had made long ago in my spare room. I carried it inside, already preparing blankets, already feeling the familiar weight of responsibility settle into my bones.
From the trees came a long, mournful call—goodbye, thank you, and something else tangled in it, something like trust. At the forest edge, a massive dark shape raised one hand in what might have been a wave, then turned and disappeared into the wilderness.
I’m older now. My heart isn’t what it used to be. But the infant sleeps in the next room, safe and warm, and I know the adult is out there listening. The cycle has started again—not because I asked for it, but because I was chosen. Not by government, not by science, not by myth. By a creature the world refuses to acknowledge, offering me the most dangerous gift imaginable: trust.
