Three Bigfoot Encounters: Virginia, Alaska, and Wisconsin

There's something about a collection of witness stories that just hits different, and a recent video put together by the Buckeye Bigfoot channel delivers exactly that. Five encounters are featured in the compilation, and three of them stand out as particularly gripping accounts that deserve a closer look. The first story takes place in Western Virginia back in November 2007. A deer hunter found himself alone on private land during a steady rain that had been falling most of the morning. By noon, he gave up on his stand and started heading back to camp, but the rain picked up hard, forcing him to take shelter beneath a shallow rock overhang. After about ten minutes of waiting out the weather, he noticed movement below him through a gap in the trees. At first, he figured it was a bear, but when the figure stepped beneath another rock ledge roughly 60 yards away and stood upright, everything changed. What he saw was very tall, covered in dark hair, with extremely wide shoulders and arms that hung well past the waist. The creature seemed to be using the same ledge for shelter from the rain. When it turned its head, the witness got a clear look at the face: a heavy brow ridge that protruded outward, a broad flat nose, and a head that appeared to sit directly on the shoulders with no visible neck. The moment of disbelief was real, but so was the realization that followed. He was looking at a Bigfoot. What makes this encounter so fascinating is the calm standoff that unfolded. The two watched each other for a couple of minutes in the pouring rain. The Sasquatch even leaned a shoulder against the rock, almost casual in its awareness. When the witness finally stood and picked up his rifle, the creature straightened up too, watching carefully. The hunter backed away uphill, and when he glanced back one last time, the figure was still there, watching him. Only after he continued on did it move off through the trees on two long legs. Coincidences like two beings choosing the same rock overhang during a downpour are exactly the kind of detail that makes these stories stick with you. The second story comes from the interior of Alaska in 2003, and it involves a father and his 16-year-old son on a fishing trip. On their second afternoon, they hiked upstream looking for a new spot and came across a broad flat covered in wild blueberry bushes. That's when the son pointed and froze. Something was sitting in the berries about 60 yards away, and at first glance, it looked like a bear. Then it reached out with what appeared to be a hand and began plucking berries from the bushes. The arm was too long, and the movements looked wrong for a bear. Through binoculars, the witness saw a creature sitting with its legs bent in front of it, covered in dark brown hair, but with a mostly bare face that had no protruding muzzle and no rounded ears. The nose was shaped more like a human's, just wider, with visible nostrils that flared slightly as it breathed. The hands were unmistakably humanlike, picking berries finger by finger and popping them into a mouth. Then things got even more interesting. A second figure stood up farther back in the flat, much smaller, probably hidden by the larger one until that moment. When it rose, it apparently made some kind of sound, and the larger creature immediately stood. It was massive, well over seven feet tall with broad shoulders and long arms hanging close to the knees. The smaller one looked to be around four feet tall. What happened next is the kind of behavior researchers talk about when they describe protective postures in Sasquatch encounters. The larger one moved to block the smaller one behind it, taking a defensive stance without advancing. The father told his son quietly that they needed to leave, and they backed toward the timber while the big one watched them the entire time. The witness was convinced that one wrong step would have triggered a charge. They never got closer than 40 or 50 yards the whole time. The family has returned to that area and traveled all around Alaska and into the Yukon many times since, but they have never seen another Sasquatch. The father summed it up perfectly when he said some things should stay hidden from man forever. The third story comes from Northern Wisconsin in November 2014, and it is the kind of encounter that will stay with you. Two brothers were deer hunting on private timberland, and one of them shot a buck about half a mile from camp. They field dressed it where it fell and dragged it back before dark. About 15 minutes after returning to camp, the hunter realized he had left his knife by the gut pile, so he headed back alone to retrieve it. That is when he saw something very big and dark crouched over the remains of the deer. Like so many witnesses before him, his first thought was bear. But when the creature lifted its head, the face he saw was not a bear. The eyes had an intelligence to them, an expression that felt distinctly human. The center of the face was mostly bare, and the rest of the face had a leathery quality rather than skin. What he had assumed were paws turned out to be hands with visible fingers, lifting and sorting through the gut pile. He estimated the creature at close to eight feet tall, heavily built and powerfully muscled, possibly weighing around 800 pounds or more. For a long moment, neither of them moved. Then the Sasquatch dropped what it was holding and took a stance that the witness did not like at all. The body language was clear, and he was reading every bit of it. The discussion cuts off there, but the tension in that moment speaks for itself. Coming face to face with a creature at a gut pile, just 20 to 25 yards away, with nowhere to hide and the sun going down, is the kind of scenario that separates casual curiosity from genuine understanding of what these witnesses go through. Encounter stories like these are the backbone of Sasquatch research. They come from ordinary people, hunters, fishermen, fathers and sons, brothers, who had no intention of seeing anything unusual that day. The consistency in the physical descriptions across these three accounts, the heavy brow, the wide shoulders, the long arms, the humanlike hands, the lack of a visible neck, lines up with thousands of other reports collected over the decades. Researchers like Dr. Grover Krantz and John Green documented these patterns extensively, and modern organizations continue to log similar details in their databases. If you want to hear these stories told in full, along with the other two encounters featured in the video, it is worth carving out some time to watch the whole thing. Buckeye Bigfoot put together a solid compilation, and the production style lets the witnesses do the talking, which is exactly how these stories should be shared.