I befriended a Sasquatch’ Woman’s Strange Bigfoot

I Befriended a Sasquatch – The Secret I Kept for 41 Years

I’m seventy-one now, with silver hair, stiff joints, and a heart that beats a little slower than it used to. Age has a strange way of peeling back the layers of fear a person carries. And for the first time in four decades, I think I’m ready to tell the truth about the creature that saved my life—and changed the course of it forever.

Back then, in 1984, I was thirty years old and freshly divorced. I spent my weekends hiking the deep woods of northern Washington, trying to remember who I was before my marriage had turned my world small. Nature was the one place where I never felt broken or judged. Trees don’t ask why you failed. Rivers don’t care if you cry.

That October, a cold snap had settled in early. A thin layer of frost glittered on the ferns as I set out at sunrise, following an unmarked trail I’d found on an old forestry map. I carried little more than a daypack, a compass, and the kind of naive confidence only a seasoned hiker can have.

The air smelled like pine sap and wet earth.

By noon, clouds had rolled in fast. The sky shifted from pale blue to steel gray, and before I knew it, sleet was slicing sideways through the treetops. I turned back—smart enough to know mountain weather wasn’t something to challenge.

But the storm turned the steep trail slick. Halfway down a ridge, my boot hit a patch of frozen moss. One heartbeat I was upright, the next I was sliding—then falling.

The crack came first.

Then the pain hit like a wildfire.

My leg twisted beneath me at an angle no human leg should. I cried out, clutching my calf, barely able to breathe. When I finally forced myself to look, my stomach churned. My shin was swelling so fast it looked like something was trying to burst out from underneath my skin.

I tried to stand. I collapsed instantly.

That was the moment real fear set in. The trail was abandoned, the sleet was turning to ice, and no one—not a single soul—knew exactly where I’d gone hiking that day.

I remember thinking, as my breath fogged in the cold air:
This is how people die out here.

Then I heard it.

A bellow. Deep and resonant. Not a bear, not a cougar—something else. Something that vibrated through the ground and snapped every nerve in my body awake.

Another bellow. Closer.

My numb fingers scrambled for the small pocketknife in my pack. It was pathetic, but it was all I had.

Branches snapped. Heavy steps moved through the brush. And then… silence.

“Get it over with,” I whispered, absurdly angry at the universe.

The creature emerged from behind a cluster of cedars so silently I didn’t understand how something that large could move without sound. Eight feet tall at least, draped in dark, rain-soaked hair that clung to its massive shoulders. Not a bear. Not anything I’d ever learned about.

Its eyes—God, I still dream about them sometimes—were a deep, warm amber. Not wild. Not mindless. Studying me.

I lifted the knife anyway, though my hand shook like a leaf in a storm.

“You stay back,” I choked out.

It didn’t.

It stepped toward me—but slowly, carefully, like one might approach a wounded dog. I expected teeth, claws, violence. Instead, the creature knelt. The ground trembled when its weight settled beside me.

It extended one huge arm—not to grab me, but to hover above my shattered leg, like it was asking permission.

“I… I don’t understand,” I whispered.

The creature made a low, rumbling sound. Not threatening. Almost… reassuring.

Then, with impossible gentleness, it slid one arm beneath my back, another under my knees, and lifted me as if I weighed nothing. My knife slipped from my hand.

Being carried by something that defied everything I believed about the world should’ve terrified me. But the strangest thing happened—my fear began to fade. The creature held me like I was something fragile, something it refused to let break any further.

We traveled through the storm, the sleet biting at my exposed skin while the creature shielded me with its body. It moved with deliberate, practiced expertise. It knew the woods. It knew where it was going.

Eventually we reached a rocky overhang hidden behind low-hanging spruce. A shallow cave. The creature ducked inside and set me on a bed of dried grass and cedar boughs, arranged with care.

Then it disappeared into the storm.

For twenty minutes I lay there shaking, wondering if it had abandoned me. But it returned with fistfuls of plants, roots, and a bundle of moss. It pressed a warm, resin-smelling poultice around my leg. When it touched me, the pain dulled almost instantly. Not gone, but softened—like warm water poured over aching skin.

I must’ve passed out, because when I opened my eyes again, a small fire crackled in the center of the cave. The creature sat beside it, knees drawn up, watching me with those amber eyes.

We stayed in that cave for two nights.

It brought me berries, water scooped from a stream in cupped hands, even strips of fish dried over the fire. It checked on my leg often, each time with a tenderness that contradicted its terrifying size.

On the morning of the third day, it lifted me again and began walking. I didn’t ask where. I didn’t have to.

When the forest finally opened onto a recognizable trail, sunlight streamed through the pines like a spotlight. The creature set me gently on the ground.

I turned toward it, tears springing to my eyes—grateful, overwhelmed, heartbroken at the thought of never seeing it again.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

The creature rumbled softly. Then—so subtly I almost missed it—it raised its hand in a slow, deliberate farewell.

I watched it disappear into the trees, swallowed by the same wilderness that had nearly taken my life.

I never told anyone.

Who would believe a thirty-year-old divorcée claiming she’d been rescued by a Sasquatch? I would’ve lost my job, my credibility, maybe my sanity.

But I know what I saw.
I know what held me.
I know what saved me.

People talk about monsters in the forest.

I met one.

And it was the kindest soul I’ve ever known.