‘I’m a Logger and Bigfoot Terrorized Us’

I was a logger for most of my adult life, and like every man who works deep in the woods, I learned early not to believe in fairy tales.

Bigfoot, Sasquatch, cryptids—those were stories for tourists and late-night radio shows. In real forests, you worried about falling trees, bad weather, and machines that could crush you without warning. That was real danger. Everything else was noise.

That belief shattered in Northern California in the fall of 1993.

Even now, more than thirty years later, I still wake up some nights drenched in sweat, my ears ringing with a sound I can only describe as a freight train made of muscle and rage tearing through the forest. I hear metal screaming as it’s twisted apart. I see dark eyes watching me from the trees—eyes that were intelligent, calculating, and very much alive.

We were twelve men, hired for what seemed like a dream job: double pay to clear a massive section of old-growth forest about sixty miles northeast of Eureka. The trees were ancient—redwoods and Douglas firs that had been standing long before America was even an idea. The company had permits, equipment, trailers, everything ready when we arrived, as if they’d been planning this for years.

That should have scared us.

The first week went smoothly. Too smoothly. The forest was beautiful, almost reverent in its silence, like a cathedral made of living wood. I remember thinking how wrong it felt to cut something so old, but the money made it easy to ignore that feeling.

Then the woods started watching us back.

It began with sounds—heavy footsteps where no one should have been. Not the four-beat rhythm of a bear, but something upright. Something deliberate. Our skitter operator was the first to admit it scared him. He said it felt like something was following him, staying just out of sight.

We laughed. Called it bears. Called it nerves.

That laughter died quickly.

One of our climbers saw it from sixty feet up—a massive, dark figure moving between the trees, walking like a man but far too tall, far too broad. Others saw shadows on ridgelines. Found footprints too big to belong to any animal we knew. Then someone—or something—forced open the cab door of a feller buncher during the night, bending steel like it was aluminum foil.

By the time the mess hall was torn apart, we all knew.

Whatever was out there wasn’t an animal.

It understood doors. It understood food storage. It understood where we slept.

The handprints it left in the steel refrigerator door were bigger than anything human. Fingers long. Thumbs opposable. Pressed deep with a strength that made my stomach turn cold.

The forest no longer felt empty. It felt occupied.

We started working in groups. Set up night watches. Men who had spent decades alone in the woods now refused to walk ten yards without someone beside them. At night, we heard trees being ripped apart—not snapping in storms, but slowly torn, as if something was showing us how strong it was.

Then came the day it stopped hiding.

I was running the loader when the forest went silent. No birds. No wind. Just my engine and my heartbeat. I felt it before I saw it—that sensation of being watched, heavy and suffocating.

When it stepped out of the trees, my knees nearly buckled.

It was enormous—at least eight, maybe nine feet tall, covered in dark hair, standing fully upright. Its arms hung past its knees, its chest broad and powerful. But it was the face that haunted me. Human, but not. Ancient. Intelligent.

It looked at me like I was trespassing.

It roared.

The sound punched the air from my lungs. I ran, and behind me I heard metal tearing like paper. When I looked back, it was ripping my machine apart with its bare hands—twisting steel, snapping hydraulic lines, destroying thousands of pounds of equipment with terrifying ease.

That was when the others came.

Six of them. Maybe more. Moving with coordination. Surrounding us. One of them—bigger than the rest—picked up a forty-ton feller buncher and pushed it down a hillside, watching centuries-old trees snap beneath it.

They weren’t attacking us.

They were sending a message.

This was their forest.

We fled. Left everything behind. Trucks screaming down the mountain road as if hell itself was chasing us.

What followed was almost as terrifying as the encounter.

We were interrogated for days by company officials, insurance investigators, and men who never showed ID. When we mentioned the creatures’ camp—tools, shelters, human belongings—the tone changed instantly.

We were told the truth, or at least a version of it.

The logging operation had been a cover. The area was under federal protection. The creatures were a rare, intelligent primate species. Classified. Protected. Dangerous to public knowledge.

We were paid to forget.

A year’s salary each. Non-disclosure agreements thick enough to ruin our lives if broken. Quiet warnings about what happened to people who talked.

Most of us took the money and scattered.

I did too.

I bought a farm far from old-growth forests and tried to live a normal life. But you can’t unsee something like that. You can’t unknow the truth that we are not alone, that something older and stronger than us has been watching from the shadows all along.

What haunts me isn’t fear anymore.

It’s guilt.

We invaded their home. We cut their forest. And when they defended it, they were labeled a problem to be managed, a secret to be buried.

They weren’t monsters.

They were families.

And one day, as wilderness shrinks and humans push deeper into places we don’t belong, the truth won’t stay hidden anymore.

When that day comes, I hope we remember that the woods were never truly ours.

We were just visitors.