Vietnam Veteran Left Family in 1974 to Live With Sasquatch

A story surfaced recently on YouTube that stopped me in my tracks, and I have a feeling it's going to do the same to you. A woman named Faye Coleman, born and raised in Trinity County, California, sat down to share something her family has carried in silence for over fifty years. Her brother Glenn walked out of their mother's kitchen in June of 1974, announced he was going to live in the mountains with a Sasquatch woman, and never came back to normal life. He's still out there. He's seventy-eight years old now. The channel that posted it is Bigfoot Sightings Canada, and the account itself is one of the most remarkable first-person family testimonies I've come across in a long time. Faye tells it the way mountain people tell things, plain and steady, with the kind of detail you can't fake. She walks you through the whole Coleman family history, starting with her grandfather Chester, who came up into Trinity County from Oklahoma in 1932 during the Depression to wash gold out of the creeks. He filed a placer claim on a little creek west of Hyampom, in that steep country that drains toward the South Fork of the Trinity River, and built a one-room sugar pine cabin with a rock chimney. The cabin burned in 1948, but the chimney still stood, and it became the family's weekend spot for fishing, camping, and raising two kids who had no idea what was waiting for them in those woods. Glenn was the quiet type, the kind of boy who would watch something for an hour before he said a word about it, and when he finally spoke, you listened because he'd already seen more than you had. He could name every bird on that creek by its call before he was ten. He could track a deer across bare rock. Their father used to say Glenn had been born about a hundred years too late and should have been raised by trappers. The first strange thing happened in the summer of 1957. Glenn was nine, Faye was six, and their dad had them camped at the old claim. In the middle of the night, Glenn shook his sister awake and told her to listen. Three hard knocks rang out up the slope, like someone hitting a tree trunk with a baseball bat. Then silence. Then, far across the canyon, three knocks answered. Glenn whispered that somebody was talking. Their dad laughed it off in the morning and told him to eat his eggs. But Glenn never forgot it, and later in life he told Faye it was the first time those people ever spoke to him, even though he didn't know that's what it was at the time. That knocking pattern, three knocks answered by three knocks across a canyon, is something that comes up over and over in credible Sasquatch encounter reports across the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. Witnesses have described it for decades, sometimes as communication, sometimes as a territorial signal, and researchers like Dr. Grover Krantz and John Green documented similar patterns in their fieldwork. The Trinity County area, especially around Hayfork and Hyampom, sits right in the heart of what many consider prime Sasquatch habitat, dense conifer forest, steep drainages, plenty of water, and very few people. It's the kind of country where a family could spend a weekend and never see another soul, which is exactly what the Colemans did. Glenn grew up, graduated from Hayfork High in 1965, and went straight into the logging woods setting chokers, which is the dangerous work of scrambling down steep slopes to wrap steel cable around logs while a yarder drags them uphill. He loved it. Then in the spring of 1967, his draft notice came. He went to Fort Ord, then infantry school, and by November he was in Vietnam. He came home in November of 1968, thirty pounds lighter, with a scar through his left eyebrow he never explained, and unable to sleep inside a house with a roof over him. He'd lie down, and within twenty minutes he'd be up pacing, then out to the porch with a blanket. When it snowed in December, he slept on the porch in a sleeping bag with snow blowing in under the eaves. Their father, a Navy man himself who had seen buddies come home from Okinawa, told their mother to leave him be. By the spring of 1969, the porch wasn't far enough. Glenn went back to logging, but on Fridays he'd fill his pack with coffee, flour, bacon, and rifle shells and head out to Grandpa's old claim. At first it was weekends. By the summer of 1970, he was taking a full week at a time. His logging boss, a man named Hank Rogers who had been at Guadalcanal, let him do it without a word. Hank understood too. When Glenn came back from a week at the claim, he was himself again. His shoulders came down. He'd tease his sister at supper. He'd help his dad with the fence. The woods did something for him that no doctor, no preacher, and no amount of his mother's cooking could do. Then came Tuesday, June 11, 1974. Glenn sat down at Edna's kitchen table and told his family he was going to live in the mountains with a Sasquatch woman. He said it in the same flat voice he'd use to tell you the price of gas. Their mother set her coffee cup down so hard the saucer cracked in two. Faye laughed because she was twenty-three and figured he was pulling their legs. He wasn't. He looked right at her and said, "They're human, Faye. They're people, same as you and me, and I'm done pretending they're anything else." Then he kissed his mother on the top of her head, picked up his pack, and walked out across the pasture toward the hills. Faye didn't see his face again for five years. This past spring, sitting on a rock beside a creek she says she'll never name, Glenn asked Faye to finally tell people what he told them that morning, and why he has never once taken it back. The discussion cuts off mid-sentence, but the part that's there is enough to make the hair on your arms stand up. Faye mentions that at Glenn's wedding in June of 1972, when he hugged her at the back of the church, she caught a scent coming off his hair that she couldn't place, even though he had bathed and shaved and their mother had pressed his shirt. Whatever that detail leads to, you'll have to hear it from her. The idea that Sasquatches might be human, or a parallel branch of humanity, isn't new. Some researchers, including the late Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum of Idaho State University, have pointed to anatomical evidence, the footprints, the dermal ridges, the muscular structure, that suggests something more than just an unknown primate. Native traditions across the Pacific Northwest and Northern California have long described the people of the forests as relatives, as another people with their own families, their own languages, their own ways. The Sts'ailes people of British Columbia, the Yurok and Hupa of Northern California, and many others have stories that don't describe a monster in the woods. They describe neighbors. What makes this account different is the timeline. Glenn didn't have a fleeting encounter. He didn't see something and run. He walked out in 1974 and never came back. He's been out there for fifty-one years. He's seventy-eight. And according to his sister, he is more certain now than he was the morning he left that kitchen table. If you want to hear Faye tell it in her own voice, with all the family detail, the Vietnam years, the Trinity County Fair where she met her husband Bobby Ward, and the moment her brother made his announcement, go find the video on the Bigfoot Sightings Canada channel. It's worth every minute of your time. Bring a cup of coffee. You'll want to sit with this one for a while.