Mysterious Smell Halts Man's 1993 Suicide Plan on Mount Hood

There's a video floating around YouTube right now from the Cryptid's Den channel that stopped me in my tracks. It's a first-person account from a man named Glenn Hatcher, and the circumstances surrounding his encounter are some of the most extraordinary I've come across in a long time. Back in October of 1993, Glenn was a 38-year-old construction company owner living outside Sandy, Oregon. He had built his business from a one-man framing operation into a six-crew outfit doing custom homes across the western flank of Mount Hood. But when a developer named Howard Vance out of Lake Oswego went bankrupt and left Glenn on the hook for nearly $300,000 across three completed homes, two foundations, and a permit package, everything collapsed. He refinanced the house, took out a second mortgage, and still couldn't keep up. By October, he was eight weeks behind on the mortgage and six weeks behind on equipment leases, with foreclosure paperwork sitting unopened on his desk. Glenn had kept all of this from his wife Patty, a former bookkeeper who would have seen through the numbers in an hour. And that's the detail that really gets you. He was protecting her from the truth while planning something unthinkable. On the morning of October 11th, 1993, Glenn drove out of Sandy at 4:45 AM with a length of climbing rope and a half-empty bottle of bourbon. He had scouted the location for three weeks using topographic maps, settling on a stretch of old-growth Douglas fir about a mile up the Hemlock Creek drainage in the Mount Hood National Forest. The trees there were 600 to 700 years old, standing when Lewis and Clark came down the Columbia. He figured the bears would get to him first, and by the time anyone found what was left, he'd just be bones in a clearing. Bones don't have to explain themselves to anyone. The plan was meticulous. A man goes up to scout a job site. A man falls. A man hits his head. The bourbon was there because he had read that a high blood alcohol level makes a body less likely to be examined closely for evidence of self-harm. The rope was a backup. He even left the keys in the ignition to suggest a man who had walked away expecting to come back. But about two-thirds of the way up the slope, something changed. Glenn describes a smell that came down the mountain at him around 7 AM. He knows timber. He knows what black bears smell like in the fall gorging on huckleberries, what a bear den smells like after the snow melts, what elk musk smells like during the rut, what a fresh kill smells like when coyotes have been working it. This was none of those things. He describes it as heavy and warm and organic with a deep musky base note, something he only ever encountered one other time in his life, years later at the Portland Zoo standing downwind of the gorilla enclosure on a hot July afternoon. But it wasn't gorilla. It was something else. And the smell had a quality he can only describe as deliberate, as if it had been placed in his path rather than simply carried on the wind. The forest around him wasn't the same forest he had been walking through five minutes earlier. Now, I want to pause here because the Mount Hood area has a long history when it comes to Sasquatch reports. The Pacific Northwest is essentially the heartland of Bigfoot country, with the Mount Hood National Forest being a known hotspot for sightings going back decades. Old-growth timber like that Hemlock Creek drainage provides exactly the kind of secluded, ancient habitat that these beings are reported to favor. The fact that Glenn was a lifelong timber man who knew that forest intimately makes his description of the shift in atmosphere all the more compelling. What happened next, according to Glenn, is that he encountered a female Sasquatch. And this encounter, whatever its nature, completely altered his trajectory. He came back down that mountain three days later as a different man. He didn't go through with his plan. He went home to Patty, and he spent the next 32 years loving her, raising their daughter Bobby, and carrying this secret like a stone he learned to walk with. He held Patty's hand when her sister Loretta died of cancer in 2008. He sat by her hospital bed in Portland when a stroke took her in March of this year. He told her he had loved her every day of his life, which was true. And he didn't tell her about the woman on the mountain, which was also true, but in a different way. Glenn says he kept this secret for 32 years to protect Patty, and he's only sharing it now because she's gone and there's nobody left to hurt with the truth. The Cryptid's Den video runs long, and Glenn tells this story in his own words with the kind of plain, deliberate cadence of a man who has lived with something heavy for a very long time. There are details in there I haven't even touched on, and honestly, the way he describes the encounter itself is something you really need to hear in his own voice. It's one of those accounts that lingers with you long after the video ends. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go track it down. Stories like this don't come along often, and the way Glenn tells it, you get the sense that every word has been weighed and measured over three decades of silence.