They Kept a Baby Bigfoot as a Pet — What Happened 10 Years Later Was Terrifying
They Kept a Baby Bigfoot as a Pet — What Happened 10 Years Later Was Terrifying
People in town think my son got hurt during an ice storm.
That’s the story on the EMT report.
That’s what the doctors wrote down.
That’s what we let everyone believe.
But he didn’t fall.
He was stopped.
Stopped the way you yank a child back from traffic—fast, hard, without thinking.
Only it wasn’t a hand.
And it wasn’t human.
We live at the end of a gravel road the county forgets exists when it snows. Three properties, thick woods, and a hollow that stays damp year-round. You grow up here learning what belongs and what doesn’t. Bears belong. Coyotes belong.
We weren’t looking for anything strange.
The day everything changed started with logging—illegal, careless logging. Too close to the ridge. Too much rain afterward. The hillside gave way and carved a raw, ugly wound straight into the creek.
That’s where my kids found it.
Wedged in the mud. Bleeding. Watching us.
At first, my brain insisted it was a man. Hurt. Trapped.
Then it moved.
Its hand—too large, too wrong—came free of the branches, fingers long and dark with mud. It flinched when my husband’s shotgun shifted on his shoulder. Not at him.
At the gun.
That was the moment I knew it understood.
It was smaller than the stories. Not full grown. Gangly. Unfinished. A baby, if such a thing can be said about something like that. One leg twisted under a fallen log, bone snapped or joint ruined. It didn’t attack us.
It just waited.
Waiting is what broke us.
We didn’t decide to keep it.
We decided not to leave it there.
Those feel like different choices until you live with the second one long enough.
We dragged it out on tarps and an old sled. It never fought. Never struck. When the pain hit, it made sounds like a tired animal that didn’t have the strength to scream anymore.
We put it in the old calf stall behind the barn. Four walls. One door. No windows.
Temporary, we told ourselves.
The first night, I couldn’t sleep. I went out there alone. Moonlight cut through the boards just enough to show one eye open, watching.
I told it, “You’re safe.”
I don’t know why.
The next night, my daughter brought it an apple. It took it gently. Carefully. Like it was afraid of breaking the gift.
That was the first lie we told ourselves.
That it trusted us.
Weeks turned into months.
The leg healed crooked, but strong. It learned our footsteps. It learned the sound of the school bus. It learned which of us brought water and which one carried the gun.
It learned our voices.
One afternoon, I heard it mimic the rhythm of my words—not the sounds, but the shape of them. Like echoing speech through a throat not meant for it.
We never named it out loud.
The kids did.
Whispered the name like a prayer when they thought we couldn’t hear.
It grew.
Slow at first. Then faster.
The stall got smaller. We wired in a light. Sealed the drafts. Told ourselves we were being careful.
What we were really doing was adjusting our lives around it.
No visitors. No questions. No leaving town for long.
A secret like that doesn’t sit quietly. It anchors itself to everything.
The bear changed things.
My son was running the ridge when it came out of the brush. Full charge. No warning.
The creature reached him first.
It didn’t rage. Didn’t scream. It worked.
One arm on the bear’s neck. One locked around its chest. A sharp bark directly into its ear.
The bear fled.
My son lived.
After that, we stopped pretending it was just recovering.
We started believing it was protecting us.
That belief was our second mistake.
It began patrolling the yard at night. Learned the edges of the light. Stopped trespassers without touching them. Animals backed away from our fence line like something invisible pushed them.
Trail cameras caught shapes in the trees.
Not one.
Several.
Always watching.
Tree knocks started—far away at first. Then closer. Conversations we couldn’t understand.
Our creature answered sometimes.
Other times, it went still.
Like a child hiding.
The night it went wrong was during the blackout.
Ice everywhere. Power gone. Generator dead.
My son and I went out for gas.
That’s when I felt it.
That pressure. That certainty that we were surrounded.
The knocks started again. Closer. Multiple directions.
The creature stepped into the yard and put itself between us and the trees.
It wasn’t guarding us from them.
It was guarding them from us.
My son stepped sideways—just a step. Curious. Confident. Trusting.
The creature reacted the way it always had.
It stopped him.
One hand to the chest. One shove.
He slid across the ice and struck concrete headfirst.
The sound—
I won’t write the sound.
The woods went silent.
The creature looked at him. Looked at me. Made a sound like apology.
Then it turned away.
Something large placed a hand on its shoulder at the treeline.
And they left.
My son survived.
He walks slower now. Speaks carefully. Forgets things he never used to.
The outbuilding still smells faintly wrong when the wind shifts.
The trees at the edge of our yard are marked with new symbols. Not warnings.
Grief.
We told the truth we could live with.
He slipped.
Ice storm.
Accident.
And sometimes, late at night, I wonder if the most terrifying part wasn’t that it hurt him—
But that, when it had to choose…
It didn’t choose us.
Because it never was ours.
