In 1975, He Shot a Bigfoot and Hid the Body in His Barn — What Happened Next Shocked Everyone | Sasquatch Story

For ten years, I lived with a secret humming quietly in the back corner of my barn.

Every morning, before the sun had fully cleared the Rocky Mountain Front, I walked past the old chest freezer on my way to feed the cattle. Every evening, after the last gate was latched and the herd settled, I passed it again on my way back to the house. The sound it made was ordinary—just the low, steady buzz of a compressor doing its job—but to me it sounded like a heartbeat. A reminder. A warning.

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That freezer held something that should not have existed. Something that, if discovered, would unravel everything I knew about my life, my land, and myself.

My name is Jerry Bishop. In the summer of 1985, I was fifty‑two years old, a cattle rancher in rural Montana, about sixty miles west of Great Falls. I had inherited the land from my father in 1968: four hundred acres of grassland and pine forest, with the mountains visible from the porch on clear days. I raised eighty head of cattle and enough hay to keep them alive through winters that could kill a man who wasn’t careful. My wife, Ellen, and I had raised three children here. By 1985, they were grown and gone. Two daughters in Seattle, a son working construction in Billings. It was just Ellen and me now.

The quiet suited us.

Life, for the most part, was simple and predictable. I drove a 1978 Chevy pickup with more than 140,000 miles on it. We watched the evening news on a television with rabbit ears and ate dinner at six sharp every night. Ronald Reagan was in his second term, the Cold War still loomed in the background of the world, but out here people worried more about cattle prices and rainfall than nuclear missiles.

Everything was ordinary.

Except for the freezer.

The secret began on October 23rd, 1975.

I was forty‑two then, strong and capable, still very much in my prime. That year had brought an early snow—unusual for October—and I’d been riding fence along the high pasture that bordered the national forest. Mountain lions had been taking calves, three lost already in September, so I carried my Winchester Model 70, .30‑06 caliber. Not for hunting. For insurance.

The sun was setting fast, the temperature dropping with it. I was following an old game trail through the pines, heading back to my truck, when I heard something moving in the brush.

It wasn’t elk. It wasn’t deer.

Whatever it was, it was heavy. Deliberate. And it was getting closer.

I stopped, raised the rifle, clicked the safety off, and waited.

Then it stepped into a small clearing about thirty yards ahead of me.

At first, my mind refused to understand what my eyes were seeing. The shape was wrong. Too tall. Too upright. It stood on two legs, towering more than seven feet tall, covered in dark brown fur that looked almost black in the fading light. It wasn’t a bear—its posture was too human, its movements too intentional. And yet it clearly wasn’t human either.

It hadn’t seen me. It was looking off to one side, focused on something beyond the clearing.

I had maybe three seconds to decide what to do.

Part of me told myself it had to be a man in a costume. A prank. A trick of the light. But the part of my brain shaped by decades of hunting, ranching, and surviving in the Montana wilderness recognized danger. Something large. Unknown. Thirty yards away. Dusk falling.

I made a choice.

I pulled the trigger.

The rifle cracked like thunder through the trees. The creature spun toward me, and for one terrible moment I saw its face clearly—not human, not animal, but something in between. The eyes were dark and intelligent, filled with awareness.

Then it fell.

I stood frozen, rifle still raised, heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. Seconds stretched into what felt like an hour, but it was probably less than half a minute. The creature didn’t move.

When I finally approached, every muscle in my body was ready to run.

At ten feet away, the truth hit me with crushing force.

This wasn’t a bear. This wasn’t a man in a costume.

I had shot something that, according to everything I’d ever been taught, did not exist.

The creature lay on its side, massive and still. Male, unmistakably. Later I would measure it: seven and a half feet tall, close to six hundred pounds. Its fur was coarse, dark brown fading lighter on the chest. The hands were enormous but eerily human, with five fingers and opposable thumbs. The feet were at least eighteen inches long.

But it was the face that haunted me.

Flat and wide, with a heavy brow ridge, broad nose, and powerful jaw. Even in death, there was an expression there—something almost human. Almost aware.

Darkness fell completely as I stood there, trying to understand what I had done.

I could walk away. Leave it for scavengers. Pretend none of this had happened.

But if someone else found it, they would know it had been shot. And it was on my land. My fence line.

I could report it. Call the sheriff. Call the state. Let the authorities handle it.

And then what?

Scientists. Government agents. Media trucks. My farm overrun. My family dragged into a nightmare. I would be remembered forever as the man who killed something legendary. A hero to some. A villain to many.

So I made another choice.

I went back to my truck, drove home, and hooked up the hay trailer. I told Ellen I was going to retrieve a bale that had fallen earlier. She didn’t question it. She trusted me.

I returned to the clearing, loaded the body using a come‑along, covered it with a tarp, and drove back in the dark with my hands shaking on the wheel.

The chest freezer sat in the back corner of the barn. We’d bought it years earlier for storing meat after butchering. Seven feet long. Three feet wide. Deep enough.

It took four hours to get the creature inside. I had to bend the limbs carefully. It barely fit.

When the lid finally closed and the padlock snapped shut, I plugged it in, turned the dial to its coldest setting, and went inside.

Ellen asked why I was late.

“Fence work took longer than I thought,” I said.

It was the first of thousands of lies.

The next morning, I checked the freezer to make sure I hadn’t imagined it all. The creature lay frozen, preserved.

And I realized I had a problem I didn’t know how to solve.

Weeks turned into months. Months into years.

The longer I kept the secret, the harder it became to reveal it. How could I explain waiting days, then weeks, then years? So I kept quiet. I put a heavy padlock on the freezer and told Ellen it held valuable elk meat from a friend.

She never questioned it.

Every few months, I checked the freezer. Made sure it still ran. Made sure the secret stayed buried.

Ten years passed.

And then, in July of 1985, a routine livestock inspection brought a stranger into the back corner of my barn.

Dale Hutchinson from the state wanted to look inside the freezer.

When I opened the lid, the secret finally escaped.

What followed unraveled my marriage, summoned the media, drew in scientists and federal agents, and ended with the freezer being loaded into a refrigerated truck under armed supervision.

They charged me with federal crimes. They classified the specimen. They took it away.

Ellen left, unable to forgive ten years of silence.

The barn stands quiet now. The freezer is gone, leaving only a rectangle of dust on the concrete floor.

Sometimes, early in the morning, I still hear the hum of that compressor in my mind.

And I wonder if telling the truth sooner would have saved anything at all.