Something Huge Follows Me Home—The Sasquatch Story No One Believes

I didn’t move to the mountains to find God or ghosts. I came here because I was broke. The Pacific Northwest cabin was a bargain: no cell service, forty minutes of logging roads to the nearest town, a woodstove that sulked, and a water pump that needed coaxing like an old dog. It was supposed to be quiet, healing even—one room, four walls, a roof to think under.

Then the footsteps started circling the house after dark, and the quiet began to feel like a door closing.

The First Sign

It took a month for me to admit the pattern wasn’t random. At first it was small:

Firewood restacked into different geometric patterns—tight diamonds, long chevrons—like someone was leaving messages in oak and fir.
Tools missing and reappearing in places only a long arm could have set them: my handsaw leaning six feet up against a trunk, my hammer balancing on a porch rail it could never have climbed to by accident.
Trash can knocked over with surgical interest: wrappers unfolded and smoothed flat, cans opened and sniffed, nothing eaten.

Deer don’t do that. Bears don’t lay out candy wrappers like museum placards.

Then the handprints on the truck—five fingers, splayed, each as long as my palm; a palm print the size of a plate pressed into mud on the hood like a signature. Photos turned the detail to smears. The camera panicked where my eyes did not.

I told myself it was a prank. Kids. A neighbor. Anyone but what my grandfather used to whisper about around campfires when the fog sat low and the timber creaked like old ships: something in the trees with hands, not hooves. Something that learned the shape of you by watching.

The First Sight

Dusk paints the woods gold and green until your brain stops trusting edges. I was taking trash to the burn barrel when I looked up and the treeline looked back.

Fifty yards away, upright. Eight feet at least, thick through the shoulders like two men standing shoulder to shoulder inside one coat. Arms long enough that the hands brushed near the knees. Dark fur in layers of brown and black that drank the last light. A head set on shoulders without a neck, face flat and shadowed, eyes catching the sun like wet stones.

It didn’t sway or drool or posture. It watched.

I blinked, and it was still there. I blinked again, and it wasn’t.

No brush crash, no retreating scramble. Just absence, like the forest had closed over a word you weren’t allowed to say.

That night I barred the door with a chair under the handle and a prayer I hadn’t used since childhood. The breathing came first—deep and slow outside my bedroom window. Then scratches on the siding, deliberate, slow drags that carved smooth grooves into seasoned pine. Footsteps on the porch, each creak a weight you could measure in pounds and fear.

At dawn, the prints circled the cabin in a slow, perfect orbit. Eighteen inches long. Five toes. An arch. A stride impossible for human hips. They overlapped where it had lapped the house—more than once.

The part of me that lives in spreadsheets and receipts started counting. The part of me that lives in skin and blood started listening.

The Message

It stayed to the treeline for a week. Then thirty yards. Then twenty.

It watched me split rounds, head tilted, hand touching bark. It handled my axe with a respect that made me afraid in a new way—tested the balance, traced the blade, put it back. It opened my truck door when I forgot to lock it and examined the steering wheel like a wheel was a strange and beautiful idea. It lifted logs and sniffed them, like it was asking why a man cuts a living thing into pieces and stacks them in neat columns against winter.

At night, the knocking started: three knocks, a pause, three more. From the north. Then the east. Then the west. Perfect rhythm. Perfect intent.

That’s not coyote. That’s not wind. That’s someone saying I am here, and I have a rule for you.

The sheriff called it a bear without looking at my phone for longer than a glance. “Get cameras,” he said. I did. They vanished within three nights like the trees ate them.

The Roof

Week fifteen, the generator died at 9:00 p.m. Flames in the woodstove turned the cabin mouth into a dim orange smile. I didn’t light candles. Light is a beacon, and I didn’t want to be a lighthouse.

Twenty minutes into dark, the roof thumped. Not the soft scuttle of raccoons. The single, heavy shock of something its weight deciding the house existed.

Footsteps paced above me, slow and deliberate. The rafters complained. Dust sifted from the ceiling. At one point the chimney pipe rattled like teeth in a metal jaw; it’s held by bracket and stubbornness, not by faith.

I crawled under the bed because humans are children under fear and beds still feel like ships. I lay there breathing shallow, flashlight off, counting panicked heartbeats and the creak of shingles under steps that made my house seem thin and soft.

At four a.m., it jumped down. The ground hit back so hard the floor trembled. Footsteps moved away, cracking branches that had stood there longer than my house.

The prints in the morning were puddles—water pooling in compressed hollows. The chimney bent like a straw. A few shingles turned like loose teeth.

The Eye

Around week nineteen, it came in daylight.

Twenty feet from my porch at ten a.m., full sun wicking off its fur. We made eye contact through the window—the kind you feel in your stomach first, like a drop in an elevator. The eyes were dark, threaded with something that understood pattern and patience. Predator or peer, the look was the same: assessing. Measuring the distance between me and my decisions.

It didn’t break eye contact. Neither did I. Then it turned, slow and certain, and melted into the trees with a rolling gate that made the ground seem too easy.

The breathing at the walls became a daily rosary. The handprints on the windows—flat palms, five fingers—pressed into dust like it had tried to see through wood and failed.

The Door

Week twenty-one, the knocking changed. Not the polite three-three anymore. Middle of the afternoon, hands in dishwater, I heard three heavy knocks on the door at head height. Authority, not inquiry.

I looked through the peephole and saw emptiness. I listened at the wood and heard breathing. I stepped back and waited.

It knocked again. The frame rattled. The hinges complained. My deadbolt held like a friend holding your shoulders when you want to run into traffic.

It left like a teacher leaving after office hours: slow, measured steps down the porch, weight on each stair, then the rolling gate into trees. I looked out and saw it walking away like it had decided something I didn’t get to hear.

That night the cabin took a beating—rhythmic slams on each wall as if it had a route. South, east, north, west. Grunts between hits. A language for anger I couldn’t translate. The dishes I loved—cheap, chipped, mine—shivered themselves to pieces on the floor.

At dawn, the siding was covered in handprints, dozens of them, pressed hard enough to compress grain.

Something very strong wanted me to move or answer. Doors are conversations. Mine became an argument.

Advice I Didn’t Want

The sheriff wanted “evidence of a person.” The sergeant wanted “video.” The social worker wanted me to fit a criterion. Friends wanted me to “get my head straight”—from across the country and without money for gas or food. My brother wanted me to try a therapist. I wanted sleep.

I tried the motel: seventy bucks bought twelve hours of what felt like clouds and forgiveness. I could afford two nights, turning food into blankets and showers and a television talking to me about people who didn’t live where I live.

I came back because I had to. The cabin needs bodies. Hunger needs kitchens. Winter needs wood.

The Line Crossed

It learned me. My hours. My routes to the woodpile. The way I check the perimeter in the morning and touch every window latch twice in the evening. It knew when I lifted a curtain two inches and when I wasn’t brave enough to lift it at all.

Last night, it pressed itself against the door until its fur blocked the peephole. The breathing was loud enough to feel, not hear. The pounding lasted twenty minutes, then moved to the back where it threw my woodpile apart like it was made of cardboard and temper. The axe I fear and need was buried in a trunk at head height, sunk so deep I couldn’t pull it free. The shovel bent like a question. The rake snapped in two.

Territory is a language too. It was speaking in grammar I understood: leave.

What I Know It Isn’t

It isn’t random. The patterns in wood and stone are too clean. The knocks are too regular. The breath appears where breath sees.
It isn’t hungry. It dissects wrappers and sniffs cans. It doesn’t take food. It takes patterns.
It isn’t alone. The knocks move while the breathing stays. Footsteps circle while a shadow stands. I don’t see a group, but I feel a network.

What It Might Want

I’m guessing. That’s all you can do when the only vocabulary you share is fear and ritual.

Contact. The escalation from observation to knocking to pounding feels like a demand. A response. A test.
Territory. When it threw my woodpile like a tantrum, it felt like punishment for ignoring, and claim.
Risk. It’s learning the structure. The door. The roof. The weak points. I feel it building toward a threshold and I don’t know what happens when it crosses.

What I Tried

Cameras: gone within days.
Lights: generator’s unreliable, and floodlight made the cabin feel like a stage.
Motel: a breath, not a solution.
Sheriff: a shrug in uniform.
Family: advice without gas money.
Weapons: none, and every story I’ve heard about nonfatal harm ends with worse visits. You don’t shoot what learns you unless you plan to end it and everyone who loved it.

The Night That’s Coming

I can feel conclusion like weather. I sit with my back to the wall and the knife on the table because it feels more honest to see it and admit it won’t help than to pretend I have a plan. I check the door. I check the windows. I listen. I count knocks. I measure breaths. I write, because words are scaffolding and I need something to lean against.

If I open the door, what happens? If I answer the knock with a knock, what happens? If I leave, what follows me? If I stay, how long until the hinges I trust become a mouth?

The Rules I Made for Surviving Tonight

Do not engage. No knocking back, no shouting, no eye contact through open space. Curiosity is a bridge. Don’t build it.
Harden the perimeter without noise. Silent braces on doors, wedges under windows, interior barricades that don’t advertise themselves.
Control scent and sound. No cooking after dark. No banging pots. Keep shoes inside—don’t leave trace outside that becomes a map.
Daytime work only. Bring in more wood than I need. Stack inside. Accept mess if mess buys me minutes.
Shadow deterrents. If the generator cooperates, use motion lights inside aimed at curtains, so my silhouette isn’t a puppet show. No exterior flood—light draws.
Trail deception. Brush my prints in soft dirt around the house each morning. Leave stray human items (shirt, hat) in odd places as decoys away from doors. It examines. Give it puzzles that don’t involve thresholds.
Safe room plan. Clear a corner away from windows and exterior walls. Create layered barriers inside. Keep keys and boots by that spot for a sprint if a sprint becomes survival.
Anchor a call for help. Pre-write notes with my address for the motel clerk and the hardware store guy—anyone in town who might send someone if I don’t show for two days. Drop them tomorrow. Build human attention patterns the mountain can’t swallow.

The Truth Underneath All the Others

I am not special. I am prey that learned a schedule. I am a man who bought a cabin the forest did not want to share. I do not know if it’s one creature or several or a family with rules and elders. I know only this:

It is patient.

It is learning me.