Granddaughter Reveals Grandmother's Secret 1951 Yukon Bigfoot Encounter

# The Woman Who Said She Had a Sasquatch Husband: A 70-Year Yukon Secret Finally Told There's a story floating around YouTube right now that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about. It's the kind of account that makes you sit back and reconsider everything you thought you knew about the boundaries between our world and theirs. The video comes from the channel **Beyond The Treeline**, and it features a 53-year-old school teacher named Natalie Pellerin Cote, sitting in her grandmother's kitchen in Whitehorse, Yukon, with a small recorder on the oilcloth table and a winter pressing against the window. She's breaking a 31-year promise because her grandmother has finally been laid to rest — on February 14th of this year, a date Natalie refuses to call Valentine's Day because, as she says, her grandmother would have laughed at her for it. What follows is one of the most extraordinary first-person accounts of a long-term relationship with a Sasquatch that has ever been publicly shared. ## The Story of Marguerite Pellerin Marguerite Pellerin (née Bolduc) was born in Chicoutimi, Quebec in the summer of 1930. She came to the Yukon in June of 1949 with her first husband, Edward Pellerin — a 26-year-old redheaded mechanic who believed a man could make a real living in the north if he was willing to work seriously and without complaint. He worked seriously. He went into the Burwash Creek drainage with a small prospecting outfit, and Marguerite built a life in a two-room log cabin 12 kilometers outside a settlement of maybe 40 souls. Edward was dead by the spring of 1951. A rockslide on April 4th took him on a creek shelf six kilometers into the drainage. The men who brought the news stood in her doorway with their hats in their hands, rehearsing words they already knew wouldn't do. Marguerite made them coffee anyway. She did not leave for Quebec. Her family asked. Her mother came up in June of 1951 and spent three weeks and left understanding. Marguerite stayed because Edward was buried in Yukon ground, and she intended to stay near him. That was true. It was not the whole truth. ## The Thursday That Changed Everything Five months after Edward died, on a Thursday in September, Marguerite walked into the forest because she could not sleep. She went farther than she usually went, far enough that she was no longer near the sound of anything human, and she sat down on a deadfall spruce and let herself cry — something she had not permitted herself to do in front of anyone. She was not aware of being watched. She insists on this point. She was not afraid. She was not sensing danger. What she became aware of, eventually, was a stillness in the forest around her that was different from the ordinary stillness of a pre-dawn September. A listening quality to the dark. A quality of attention, as though the space between the trees had acquired an orientation toward her. She looked up. He was standing 40 feet from her, uphill, in the open ground between two large black spruce. By her estimate, he was a foot and a half taller than any man she had encountered, and broad in a way that made her think not of width but of substance — of weight distributed over the earth with a kind of authority that was not aggression but was simply mass. The authority of a large old tree in a stand of younger ones. His fur was dark chestnut brown, almost charcoal in poor light. She could not see his face clearly. She saw his eyes. She said they were calm. She was afraid. She is honest about that. Her first clear thought was: *remain exactly where you are and do not move.* That thought lasted perhaps 30 seconds. In those 30 seconds, the figure did not move and did not make a sound and looked at her with what she could only describe as attention — not aggression, but the way a person looks at someone they recognize from a distance and is awaiting to see whether the other person will recognize them in return. Then the cold in her body changed into something else. She spent the rest of her life looking for the word for what it changed into. The nearest she came, she said, was **recognition** — though that did not entirely make sense to her, because she had never seen this being before in her life. ## What Happened Next She stood up slowly. He did not move. She took one step toward the trail and he made a sound — low and resonant, a single descending note that was not a warning. Nothing in it that her body read as warning. It was more like the sound of acknowledgement. The sound a person makes when they are saying, *Yes, I see you. I see that you are here. I am not preventing you from going.* She walked back to the cabin. She went back the following Thursday. She told no one she was going. She took the same trail to the same deadfall and sat down and waited. He came within 20 minutes, from the same direction uphill, and took the same position between the same two trees. She had half believed she had imagined the first encounter — that grief had manufactured a presence out of darkness and shadow. When she saw him again, she felt something release in her chest that she had not known was clenched. They were present together for perhaps an hour. Then he withdrew into the trees without sound. ## Why This Account Matters What makes this testimony so compelling — and so different from the typical "I saw something in the woods" account — is the duration and the consistency. Natalie describes a relationship that spanned decades. Her grandmother stayed in that cabin. She never remarried a human. She never left the Yukon. And the way Natalie tells it, the reason was not only Edward buried in Yukon ground. It was also the being she met that Thursday in September of 1951. The Yukon has long been considered one of the more active regions for Sasquatch encounters in North America. The vast, sparsely populated drainage systems around Burwash Creek, the Kluane region, and the surrounding boreal forest have produced numerous reports from trappers, prospectors, and First Nations communities over the decades. The Tlingit and other Indigenous peoples of the area have their own longstanding oral traditions about the large, hairy beings who walk the ridges — beings they do not consider animals at all, but relatives, or at least neighbors with their own laws and territories. What Marguerite's account adds to that body of testimony is something rarely articulated so plainly: the possibility of sustained, peaceful, repeated contact between a human and a Sasquatch over the course of a lifetime. Not a fleeting glimpse. Not a startled encounter at a distance. A relationship. ## A Promise Kept for 31 Years Natalie says she kept this secret for 31 years because her grandmother asked her to. She was the one her grandmother chose to remember. Now that her grandmother is in the ground, Natalie is saying what she knows — completely, correctly, and without any desire to be believed. She is speaking because she promised. The video runs long. The discussion cuts off mid-sentence, with Marguerite still sitting with the pale gold of the Yukon — but what's there is enough to leave you staring at the ceiling for a while. If you've ever wondered what it would actually look like if a human and a Sasquatch built something together across the span of a human lifetime, this is the closest thing to an answer I've ever come across. Go watch it. Sit with it. And then ask yourself what you would have done if you'd been Marguerite, sitting on that deadfall spruce on a Thursday morning in September, 1951, with the cold in your body suddenly turning into something else. I think I know what she would have done. She already did it.