Woman Raised by Sasquatch Family Shares Her 12-Year Story

There's a video making the rounds on YouTube that stopped me in my tracks the moment I hit play. It's a first-person account from a woman named Hazel Puit, and if her story holds even a fraction of what she claims, it might be one of the most extraordinary Sasquatch encounters ever put on record. Hazel says she was born in October 1961 in Pollock, Idaho, a blink-and-you-miss-it town in the mountains of central Idaho. Her mother, Loretta Puit, was just 19 years old, working as a waitress at a roadhouse called the Pine Bow. When Loretta left her partner in the summer of 1962, she did what a lot of desperate women in those mountains did back then. She disappeared into the wilderness. She took baby Hazel up to an empty family cabin on the South Fork of the Salmon River, deep in what was then called the Idaho Primitive Area, now known as the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. We're talking about one of the most rugged, roadless stretches of country in the lower 48, the kind of place where a person can vanish if they're willing to be cold and hungry and alone. Loretta survived out there for about two months. Then one afternoon in late August, while foraging for camas root with 10-month-old Hazel strapped to her in a sling, she slid down a scree slope and snapped her femur. She was a mile from the cabin. The cabin was 11 miles from the nearest road. The nearest road was 22 miles from the nearest house. She tried to drag herself back, couldn't make it, and made the most heartbreaking decision a mother could make. She wrapped Hazel up warm, set her on a flat rock, and started to push herself away to try to reach a horn back at the cabin. That's when she felt the ground change. She described it to Hazel years later, sitting outside the rock shelter where the family kept her in summer. She said her body knew before her eyes did. The hair on her arms stood up. Then came the smell, dense, warm, earthy, old. The kind of smell Loretta's grandfather Wendell had warned her about when she was a little girl. He used to tell her there were things in that country that were not bears and were not men, and that you should never, never, never speak about them, because to speak about them was to call them. Standing about 20 feet up the slope was a female. Somewhere between seven-and-a-half and eight feet tall. Dark sable hair, almost black, with a band of silver running down the front of her chest and along the inside of her arms. Broad face. Deep-set eyes so dark they looked black. And those eyes weren't looking at Loretta. They were looking at the baby. The female came down the slope sideways, the way a person moves down a steep grade with bad knees. No crashing through the brush. No hurry. The sound she made coming down was no louder than a breeze in the lodgepoles. She stopped about six feet from Loretta, looked at Hazel again, and made a sound. Low and short. A question. Loretta knew it was a question because the inflection went up at the end and the female's head tipped slightly to one side. Loretta, with her leg shattered beneath her, said out loud in a voice she could barely keep steady, "I broke my leg. I cannot carry her. I am going to die up here." The video cuts off there, but Hazel goes on to explain what happened next, how the female took her in, how Loretta was allowed to visit for the first three years until she couldn't make the trip anymore, and how Hazel lived with the family until a man named Wayne Hulcom stumbled onto her on the south face of Burgdorf Mountain in the autumn of 1973. Wayne had been tracking what he thought was an animal for two days. When he realized the small figure in the elkhide wrap was a child, he froze. Hazel was 12 years old, weighed 71 pounds, had never cut her hair, and didn't speak a word of English. She also mentions a man named Earl Castleman, a packer and hunting guide out of Riggins who worked the country for over 50 years and who, in 1978, sat her down on his porch and told her what he'd seen one September afternoon years before. She promises to get to Earl's account in the video. What makes this story stand out, beyond the obvious, is the level of detail. The geography is real and verifiable. Pollock, Idaho. The South Fork of the Salmon. Burgdorf Mountain. The Frank Church Wilderness. The Pine Bow roadhouse. These are all real places, and the cultural history of that country is steeped in stories about the long-armed people who lived in the high country. Indigenous tribes throughout the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies have oral traditions about exactly these kinds of beings, and settler families in remote areas like the Salmon River drainage passed down their own warnings, just like Loretta's grandfather Wendell did. Hazel is 65 now. She retired three years ago from stocking shelves at a hardware store in Riggins. She lives alone in a single-wide on the South Fork of the Salmon River, and from her front porch, she can see the ridge where Wayne found her 53 years ago this coming October. She says she's told this story exactly twice in her life, once to a county social worker in 1973 who wrote down approximately none of it, and once in pieces over seven years to her husband Glenn before he passed in 1998. Glenn told her she owed it to the family that raised her to make sure somebody knew they existed, that they were not what the world thought they were. She's speaking it out now because Glenn was right, and because she's not going to live forever, and because the woman who carried her into the high country in 1961 didn't deserve to have her memory disappear into the same silence the world keeps trying to bury her under. This one is worth every minute of your time. Go watch it.