Missing Idaho Girl Found Alive in Cave with Sasquatch Father

Posted Wednesday, September 23, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

A story just surfaced on YouTube that has the entire Sasquatch community buzzing, and honestly, it's one of the most extraordinary missing person cases tied to a Bigfoot encounter that has ever been told. The video comes from the channel Cryptid's Den, and it recounts an experience that stretches across decades of silence, broken only recently by a letter in a mailbox. The storyteller is Glenn Hollis, a 76-year-old retired road worker from Sandpoint, Idaho, who finally received permission to share what he and his hunting partner Roy Picket stumbled upon in the fall of 1991. What they found in a cave high above the Priest River drainage in the Selkirk Mountains sounds like something straight out of folklore, except Glenn insists every word of it is true. The story centers on Connie Hollister, a little girl who vanished on December 11, 1976, at the age of 11. Her father, Earl Hollister, had taken her up Forest Road 402 to cut a Christmas tree, a family tradition they had carried out every year of her life. A blizzard rolled in faster than expected, dropping nearly three feet of snow in 14 hours. Earl's 1971 Ford F-250 slid off a switchback between mile markers 7 and 8, leaving the truck wedged against a cedar tree at a 20-degree tilt. Earl made the gut-wrenching decision to walk four miles down to the Bracker family's hunting cabin for help, leaving Connie wrapped in a wool blanket with the heater running and a thermos of hot chocolate. He made it, barely, with frostbite on three fingers and frozen eyebrows. But by the time rescue crews reached the truck two and a half days later, Connie was gone. The wool blanket was gone. The thermos was gone. No footprints, no clothing, no trace. Search and Rescue worked the drainage for nine days with dogs and a helicopter. They found nothing. The official conclusion was that she had wandered off into the cold and died of exposure, her body likely to be found in spring, or never found at all. Spring came. Summer came. No body was ever recovered. Fifteen years later, Glenn and Roy, who had been hunting and scouting the Priest Lake country since 1970, walked into an unnamed drainage they had explored at least a dozen times before. This time, something was different. At the head of a draw that "nobody had any business finding," they came across a cave. Inside, sitting cross-legged on a bed of pine boughs in front of a small fire, was a 26-year-old woman with dark hair. It was Connie Hollister. She was not alone. She had three daughters. The oldest was about eight. The youngest was barely old enough to walk. And at the mouth of the cave, when the light was almost gone and the cold had settled into the bottom of the draw, stood a 7.5-foot-tall male covered in dark hair from head to foot. He did not run. Glenn and Roy did not raise their rifles. Connie stepped between them and said one sentence that has stayed with Glenn every day since: "Please do not hurt their father." Glenn and Roy made a promise that third evening, after eating with Connie's family, sleeping on the cave floor, and watching her oldest daughter braid grass into a cord with hands that were already too strong for a child of eight. They would never speak of what they had seen until Connie gave them leave. She gave them leave six months ago, through a letter she had been sending twice a year since 1992. This time, at the bottom, she wrote that her oldest daughter wanted the story told. The tragedy woven through this account is almost unbearable. Earl Hollister never knew his daughter was alive. He sold the dairy in 1979, moved to a smaller place in Coolin, lost his wife Fay to cancer in 1984, and passed in his sleep in 1993, two years after Glenn and Roy found Connie. Connie wrote Glenn in the spring of 1994 that she had known the day her father died. She had been gathering huckleberries in a meadow above the cave when something went still inside her, and she sat down on a fallen log and cried for an hour. She did not explain how she knew. Glenn says she did not have to, because by then he had spent enough time with her family to understand that the world she lived in operated on channels we do not have words for. Roy Picket, the only other person who carried this secret, died of a heart attack in his garage in 2007. Glenn's wife May passed in 2009. He lives alone now in a small house outside Sandpoint, carrying the weight of this story the way he has carried it for 34 years, in silence, with the kind of weight that bends a man's shoulders by degrees over the course of decades. What makes this account stand out in the long history of Sasquatch encounter reports is the depth of relationship described. This is not a fleeting glimpse or a set of strange tracks. This is a multi-generational family unit, with children who braid cordage, gather huckleberries, and display physical strength beyond their years. Researchers who have studied Sasquatch reports for decades often point to exactly these kinds of details, the domestic arrangements, the child-rearing, the integration of a human into a family structure, as some of the most compelling evidence that these beings live in stable, social groups rather than as isolated individuals. The Selkirk Mountains, which straddle the Idaho-Washington border, have long been considered prime Sasquatch habitat, with dense old-growth forest, rugged terrain, and a long history of credible sightings from loggers, hunters, and Forest Service employees. Glenn tells the story plainly, without embellishment, the way a man tells something he has lived with so long it has become part of the furniture of his memory. He does not ask anyone to believe him. He simply tells it the way Connie asked him to tell it, however he needed to tell it. This one is worth sitting with. The video runs long, and Glenn's voice has the cadence of a man who has rehearsed this in his head for decades, choosing each word carefully. Pour a cup of coffee, settle in, and give it the time it deserves. Stories like this do not come around often.