West Virginia Woman Shares 59-Year Honey Exchange with Sasquatch

A 76-year-old West Virginia woman has been exchanging gifts with a Sasquatch every October for nearly six decades, and the story of how it all began is as heartbreaking as it is fascinating. The video in question comes from The Deep Forest Tales on YouTube, and it tells the story of Doris Reed, who lives in a hollow along the upper Williams River in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Doris is now 76 years old, and for 59 of those years, she has made a pilgrimage into the Allegheny Mountains on October 14th to leave a gift on a flat gray limestone rock her late father called "the sitting rock." The tradition started in 1966, four months after Doris's father, Floyd Perry, was killed by a falling white oak while working a timber contract. He was 44. Doris was just 16. The grief was so overwhelming that on the morning of what would have been her father's 44th birthday, she slipped out of the house before dawn with two apples from the Red Delicious tree her father had planted behind the house and walked three miles up the mountain to the sitting rock, a place her father had taken her every year since she was seven. What happened next changed everything. Doris left her gift on the rock, and by morning, something had been left in return. And it has continued every single year since. 59 years. Not once missed. In the most recent October exchange, Doris left a jar of sourwood honey on the flat rock. By morning, the honey was gone, and in its place sat a hand-formed clay jar with a lid that fit so tight she had to work it loose. Inside was wild honey, darker than hers, with bits of comb floating in it. She raised the jar and smelled beeswax, pine resin, and what she describes as the faint musk of something that does not belong to any known animal in those mountains. Doris describes the being as standing close to eight feet tall, with eyes that carry a patience that only something truly old can carry. She has watched those eyes watch her back from the edge of a hemlock grove, and she has no doubt about what she is dealing with. The Monongahela National Forest covers nearly a million acres around her hollow, and the old-growth Eastern Hemlock stands around the sitting rock, some of those trees pushing 300 years old or more. Doris believes the forest itself remembers things people forget, a phrase her father once told her that she now understands in a way he probably could not have said out loud. What makes this account stand out from the typical encounter story is the longevity and the consistency. This is not a single sighting or a fleeting glimpse. This is a 59-year relationship built on mutual gift-giving between a human and a Sasquatch, conducted on the same night, at the same spot, without a single missed appointment. The Forest Service, Doris notes, has tried to find what lives in those mountains and has never laid eyes on it. West Virginia has long been considered Sasquatch territory by those who know the subject. The Appalachian Mountains, with their dense rhododendron thickets, old-growth forest, and remote hollows, provide ideal habitat for a reclusive species that prefers to remain unseen. Pocahontas County in particular sits in the heart of some of the most rugged and least-traveled terrain in the entire Monongahela, and reports from that part of the state tend to describe encounters with beings that are unusually tall and unusually patient, exactly as Doris describes. The video itself is worth watching for the full emotional weight of Doris's telling. She speaks with the plain, steady cadence of someone who has lived her entire life within 11 miles of where she was born, and who has carried this secret for nearly six decades. Her husband Glenn has been gone four years now. Her son Bobby lives in Elkins. The hollow where she grew up has only one other occupied house on it, and the woman who lives there does not come outside between November and April. Doris is alone in a way she was not alone for most of her life, and what she has carried since she was 16 has settled into her joints the way cold settles into those mountains in January. It does not leave. You just learn to move with it. The Deep Forest Tales video runs long, but it is the kind of account that rewards the time spent listening. Doris Reed is not selling anything, not promoting a book, not asking for attention. She is simply telling what has happened on October 14th of every year since 1966, and asking that you believe her.