Son Finds Father's Hidden Bigfoot Journal Beneath Cabin Floor

Posted Saturday, August 22, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

There's a story making the rounds on YouTube right now that has completely captured my attention, and I have a feeling it's going to do the same for anyone who spends time in the deep timber country of the Great Lakes. A channel called The Deep Forest Tales recently shared an account that reads like something straight out of a seasoned researcher's field notes, except it's all coming from a man named Byron Truit, who inherited not just a cabin but an entire six-decade legacy of documentation from his late father Edgar. The setting alone is enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck. We're talking about Michigan's western Upper Peninsula, that wild, forgotten stretch of land hanging off the bottom of Lake Superior where the Ottawa National Forest sprawls across nearly a million acres. Byron's father bought 40 acres of cutover woods back in 1958 for back taxes and built a cabin on it with his own hands over three summers. The property sits at the end of a dead-end gravel road, bordered on two sides by national forest and on the third by a cedar swamp a mile across. For anyone familiar with the UP, you already know that's prime, untouched habitat, the kind of country where the deer outnumber the people a thousand to one and even the bear hunters walk around the swamps instead of through them. Byron inherited the cabin in 2019 after his father passed away at 87. The land came with a strict condition written into the will, never to be logged, subdivided, or sold outside the family. Edgar had even placed the property in a family trust decades earlier, which Byron admits made him wonder if taxes were really the whole reason. When Byron finally made the drive north to open the cabin for the first time as its owner, he expected to grieve, clean things out, and decide whether to sell. What he found instead changed everything. Hidden under the floorboards of the back room, beneath planks that lifted out as a unit, was a green steel army surplus foot locker. Inside, wrapped in one of Edgar's old buffalo plaid shirts, was a plaster cast of a footprint measuring 17 and a half inches long and 7 inches across at the ball. Five toes, no claws, a flat wide heel, and along the outer edge a deep clean ridge where the weight rolled. Byron measured it himself that first afternoon with his father's tape, and he makes a point of saying it's not a bear. He's shot and dressed bear his whole life. He also notes the skin detail runs across it in fine ridged lines like the print of an enormous finger, and that his father simply did not possess the skill, the tools, or the character to fake something like that. Under the cast were four bundles of photographs, mostly of the woods, with a few showing shapes at the tree line that could be argued about. But one photograph from the 1980s, judging by the color stock, shows plainly and without argument a dark upright figure crossing the beaver meadow south of the cabin, caught mid-stride, arms swinging, far taller than the speckled alder it was passing. The discussion cuts off there, but the story Byron tells is that his father left behind hundreds of dated entries in careful handwriting going all the way back to 1962, cross-referenced notes about a family of Sasquatch living in the cedar swamp behind the cabin. What makes this account stand out from so many others is the nature of the man behind it. Byron spends considerable time describing his father as quiet, steady, completely without drama, the kind of man who never exaggerated a fish or a hand of cards in 62 years. When a man like that leaves behind 300 pages of meticulous documentation, you can't just wave it away. Byron himself sat with it for three days before he could even speak of it aloud to his wife, and by then he had stopped asking whether his father was a liar and started asking what it meant that he wasn't. On the last page of the journal, in the shaky letters of Edgar's final winter, was a message addressed to Byron by name. It told him they already knew he was there. It told him what to do on the night of the first hard frost. And it told him not to bring a light. Byron followed those instructions, and by morning, everything he believed had changed. The Upper Peninsula has long been considered Sasquatch country by those who pay attention to such things. The dense forests, the swamps, the isolation, and the harsh winters create exactly the kind of environment where a reclusive population could remain undisturbed for generations. Researchers like to point out that the UP sits along a natural corridor of wilderness stretching from Canada down through Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the Ottawa National Forest in particular has produced more than a few credible sightings over the years. What Byron Truit describes, a multi-generational family group living in a cedar swamp and observed carefully over six decades, fits the pattern that many longtime witnesses have reported across the continent. The Deep Forest Tales channel has done an excellent job presenting this account in Byron's own voice, and the production quality really lets the story breathe. There's a weight to it that you don't often find in Sasquatch content, partly because of the physical evidence on display, the cast, the photographs, the journal itself, and partly because of the obvious grief and sincerity behind every word. Byron isn't trying to convince anyone of anything. He's simply passing along what his father left him to keep. This one is absolutely worth sitting down with. The video runs long, but every minute of it adds another layer to a story that feels like it could only have happened in that particular stretch of Michigan timber. Pour a cup of coffee, turn the lights down, and let Byron Truit tell you about the family that watched his father's cabin for sixty years.