Maine Forester Recounts 2004 Sasquatch Encounter in Old-Growth Forest

There's something about a firsthand account from a man who spent 43 years walking straight lines through the deep woods of northern Maine that hits different. Leland Doullette isn't your typical witness. He's a retired timber cruiser and consulting forester who knows every township, ridge, and bog in the North Maine Woods better than most people know their own neighborhoods. And what he shared in this video is the kind of story that stays with you. Back in June of 2004, after nearly two decades of quietly observing a Sasquatch in a specific area he'd been watching since the late 1980s, something remarkable happened. The subject stood up out of the brush about 90 feet from Leland and made a sound. Not just any sound, though. Leland had heard this individual's vocalizations around 40 times across 17 autumns. Two notes, low, the first rising and the second dropping off. But this time, the second note came a half-beat late. Then the proper call. Then the late one again. Back and forth, four times, standing in the open where Leland could see his mouth move. What he was doing, Leland realized, was teaching. A being who had never spoken a word to him was showing him the difference between two sounds that are nearly identical to the human ear. One was his own. The other was something else entirely. Something that lives inside a 40-acre stand of old-growth trees in a region where every other acre has been cut two or three times over since the Civil War. And here's where it gets really interesting. Leland's kind, as he refers to them, will not walk into that stand. They will not call out loud within a mile of its edge. After 22 years of standing at that boundary and watching what comes out of it, Leland says they are right to avoid it. And he believes he now knows why. The story goes back even further. In April of 1976, his father Armand, a woods boss born in 1923 in Fort Kent, pulled Leland over at a landing and unfolded a township map on the hood of the truck. He pointed to a blank patch of green in the northeast quarter of Township 11, Range 10, an unnamed brook running out the bottom. His instructions were simple. When you cruise this township, run your lines around that patch. Do not put a line through the middle. If anyone asks why, tell them the ground is bad. That was the entire conversation. About 90 seconds. Leland thought his old man was being superstitious. He was 22, had a forestry degree from Orono, and figured he knew how the world worked. It took him 11 years to see one with his own eyes, and another nine years after that to understand he had been looking at the wrong problem the entire time. The stand his father pointed at isn't where they live. It's where they will not go. What makes this account so compelling is the detail. Leland describes the abrupt edge of the old growth, where regeneration comes up to a line and simply stops. Red spruce with butts you couldn't get your arms around. Yellow birch peeling gold curls at 80 feet. White pine with limbs as thick as a waist, growing sideways the way a pine only grows when nothing has ever crowded it. Pit and mound terrain, the fingerprint of forest that has never been cut. Those root plates stay in the soil for 300 to 400 years. He also had a cruising partner named Hollis Plourde, who had been working since 1951 and taught Leland the trade in about six weeks. Hollis taught him to keep a second notebook, separate from the plot cards that went to the company. At every plot, after counting the trees, Leland would write down what else was there. Birds, tracks, scat, browse lines, squirrel middens, lungwort on the maples. Over 43 years, that habit produced 109 little notebooks in a milk crate in his cellar. Evidence he didn't even know he was keeping until he was 50 years old. This is the kind of grounded, methodical witness account that doesn't rely on grainy footage or shaky claims. It's a man who spent his life measuring trees and counting plots, and who happened to share his woods with something he never set out to find. The vocalization lesson alone, a Sasquatch actively teaching a human the difference between his own call and the call of whatever predator shares that territory, is one of the most fascinating behavioral details to come out of the woods in a long time. Do yourself a favor and watch the full video. Leland's voice and the way he lays out the geography of his encounters make this one worth sitting with. The way he describes the old growth, the boundary, and the 22 years of watching what comes out of that stand will have you looking at your own woods a little differently.