Michigan Sheriff and Deputies Report Bigfoot Encounters in Rural Forest

A sheriff with three decades on the badge, a 61-year-old hunter who hadn't made a single call to the department in four decades, and multiple deputies who saw something they refused to put in writing. That's the kind of case file that makes you sit up straight, and it's exactly what landed on my radar this week from the Bigfoot's Trail channel. The story centers on Sheriff Cutter Hullbrook of Osine County in Michigan's northeastern lower peninsula, a man who had spent 30 years logging everything from stolen quads to wandering hunters, and had made peace with the idea that nothing truly unexplainable would ever cross his desk. Then autumn of 2016 happened, and the ordinary stopped being ordinary. It started small, the way these things always do. A woman driving home late on the county road that skirts the western edge of the state forest phoned to say she'd nearly hit something crossing the pavement. She was calm, which the sheriff remembers because most people who nearly hit a deer are anything but. She said it wasn't a deer. She said it crossed on two legs, upright, in three strides, and cleared the far ditch and a four-foot fence line in a single motion before disappearing into the tree cover before she even finished braking. The sheriff logged it as "animal in roadway" and wrote "deer?" because that's what you write. He went home and didn't think about it for weeks. A week later, a second driver called about the same stretch. A young man hauling a trailer after dark said something had been standing upright in the ditch on the forest side, tall enough that his headlights caught it at the chest. It didn't bolt the way a deer does. It simply stepped back off the shoulder and into the dark, and in his mirror, he watched it cross the road behind him once he'd passed. Still no field response. Still filed and forgotten. Then came the call that broke the pattern. A man named Abner Price, 61 years old, hunting the same leased parcel at the edge of the state forest for nearly 40 seasons, phoned the department a little after dawn and asked in a flat voice if a deputy could come out and sit with him while he came down out of his deer stand. He'd been up there since before legal light. He would not put a boot on the ladder until somebody with a vehicle and a sidearm was standing at the base of that tree. The sheriff took that one himself. When he arrived, Abner was still up in the stand, 16 feet off the ground, and didn't come down until Hullbrook had walked the entire tree line and assured him twice that there was nothing in it. When Abner finally descended, his hands weren't steady. This is a man who field dresses his own animals, who has sat motionless through more freezing mornings than the sheriff has had hot dinners, and his hands weren't steady. What Abner described matches the classic Sasquatch profile that researchers have been documenting for generations. He said the figure stood well over seven feet tall, built more like a heavy, low-browed man than any ape he'd ever seen in a picture. A thick bony ridge above the eyes, a broad prominent nose, and a wide, flat, almost human face with no muzzle at all. The hair was a dark rust brown across the shoulders and back, going nearly to charcoal down the arms, and where the skin showed at the face and backs of the hands, it was a weathered gray-brown like old leather left out in the weather. And the eyes, he said, caught what little light there was and threw it back flat, the way an animal's eyes do in a headlight, except these were set in that wide human face. That eyeshine detail is one of the most consistently reported features across Sasquatch encounters, particularly in the wooded regions of the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest, and it's one of the things that separates these accounts from simple misidentifications of known wildlife. The figure stood in the low ground for the better part of a minute, unhurried, turned its head once, and looked right up the trunk of his tree at the stand. Abner went so still he could hear his own pulse. Then it moved off along the low ground in no particular rush, the brush closed behind it, and Abner Price sat up in that stand for another two hours in the growing daylight because he couldn't make his legs carry him down. The sheriff didn't write "deer" on that one. He sat in his truck at the base of the tree for a long moment, asked the questions you're supposed to ask, and got the answers you don't want to hear. No, he hadn't been drinking. No, it wasn't another hunter in a heavy suit. And when the sheriff suggested it might have been a bear on its hind legs, Abner looked at him the way a man looks at you when you've insulted 40 years of knowing exactly what a bear looks like. What happened next is where this story shifts from a single sighting into something much bigger. The sheriff started quietly asking around, and he discovered that his own deputies had been sitting on reports they never filed. Deputy Sten Renwick finally admitted it in the parking lot behind the department at the end of a shift, in the low voice men use when they're handing you something they've already decided sounds insane. He'd been on a late patrol on one of the forest access roads, the two-track that runs back toward the old logging cuts, and his headlights had swept across something standing at the edge of the road that didn't move out of the beam the way a deer moves. It stood its ground for a second or two, tall enough that his lights caught it across the chest and not the eyes, and then turned and went into the trees in a way Renwick described as deliberate. Not spooked. Deliberate. And he hadn't written it up. When the sheriff started carefully asking the others, he found Renwick wasn't alone. Two more of his people had seen something they hadn't put on paper. One had watched a shape cross the beam of his headlights on the same two-track a month earlier and had told himself it was a bear until Renwick started talking. The other, a young deputy barely a year on, had heard something pace him along the tree line one night while he stood filling out an unrelated report at a mailbox. Heavy footfalls keeping time with his own boots on the gravel. He'd gotten into his car and left without ever putting his light on the trees because he didn't want to know. The reluctance of trained law enforcement officers to file these reports is something that comes up again and again in Sasquatch research. The professional consequences of putting your name on a piece of paper that says you saw a seven-foot figure standing on a forest road at night are real, and it speaks volumes that these deputies chose silence over the official record. The only reason the sheriff ever learned about any of it was that he was standing in a dark parking lot at the right moment and one honest man decided to unload. Once the sheriff put a county plat map up on the wall of his office and started marking every call that fit, going back further than he'd first realized, the pattern became impossible to ignore. All of the incidents had happened within about four miles of one another along the same western edge of the state forest, all of them in the dark, all of them describing the same impossible thing. And once people in that township understood that the sheriff wasn't going to laugh, they started coming forward with things they'd been carrying in silence. This is the kind of case that reminds you why this subject refuses to go away. Multiple credible witnesses, including a sitting sheriff and his own deputies, all describing the same tall, broad-faced, rust-brown-haired figure with reflective eyes and a deliberate, unhurried manner. The kind of pattern that researchers have been tracking for decades across the continent, from the Pacific Northwest to the swamps of Florida to the deep woods of the Great Lakes. Michigan has a long and rich history of Sasquatch sightings, and this account fits squarely within that tradition. The full account is worth your time. Head over to the Bigfoot's Trail channel and give it a watch. It's the kind of story that stays with you.