Bigfoot Has Been Stalking Me For Months, What Should I Do?? – Sasquatch Story

The Night Visitor at Black Hemlock Cabin

I didn’t know where else to turn, so I’m putting this down the only way I can: as a record. Not a campfire tale, not a “creepy thread,” not something dressed up for likes. Just the truth as I lived it—ugly, repetitive, sleep-starved, and real enough that even now, when the sun is up and the windows are bright, I still flinch when the house settles.

For six months something has been circling my cabin every night. Watching. Learning. Testing.

I moved out here because I was broke and desperate. I stayed because I became trapped, and because every time I tried to think my way out, the forest tightened around me like a fist.

I call it a Bigfoot because I don’t have another word that fits the shape I saw. But “Bigfoot” sounds like a joke until you hear your porch groan under a weight no bear should carry and you smell breath through a door and you realize the knocking isn’t random.

It’s deliberate.

It expects an answer.

1. The Cabin I Bought to Disappear

Six months ago I lost my job. Department cut. “Restructuring.” A clean email, a polite HR meeting, and then a calendar suddenly full of empty.

I had savings, but not enough for city rent. Not enough for the slow panic of unemployment in a place where everything costs money just to exist. I told myself I needed a reset. A place where I could live cheap, clear my head, apply for work without the constant drain of rent and commuting and eating out because I was too tired to cook.

That’s how I ended up seeing the listing.

A cabin in the Pacific Northwest, miles from anywhere. The kind of “rustic retreat” people romanticize until they remember they like grocery stores and cell service.

The price was dirt cheap.

No neighbors.

Spotty internet.

No cell service.

Forty minutes of logging roads to the nearest town.

The real estate agent said the last owner died and the family just wanted it gone. I should have heard the warning in that sentence—the way it slid past the details, like the place itself was a burden they didn’t want to touch too closely.

But desperation makes you call warnings “quirks.”

I signed papers, packed my old pickup with everything I owned, and moved in three days later.

The cabin was old but solid. One big room with a wood stove, a tiny bathroom, a loft to sleep in. The forest pressed close on all sides, the kind of trees that make daylight feel filtered, cautious. When the wind moved through the branches it didn’t sound like wind.

It sounded like something whispering above you.

The first few weeks were peaceful. That’s important to say because I know how this reads. People will assume it was immediately a horror movie. It wasn’t.

At first it felt like a fresh start.

I woke to birdsong.

I split wood.

I fixed a leaky sink.

I patched a section of roof that looked tired.

At night I watched stars I’d never seen in the city, stars so sharp and numerous they made the sky look crowded. I told myself I was doing the smart thing—living small, saving money, buying time.

Then the “small stuff” began.

A stack of firewood restacked overnight. Not knocked over like an animal blundering into it. Restacked. Same pieces, different pattern, the split ends facing the wrong direction like someone had rearranged my efforts on purpose.

Tools went missing: a hammer, then a handsaw. They turned up days later in strange places, like on the porch steps or leaning against a tree halfway down the path to my shed.

I blamed people. Kids. Hunters. The previous owner’s family coming back for one more thing.

Then I started hearing footsteps at night.

Heavy steps walking around the cabin in a slow circuit, over and over, like something pacing.

I tried to convince myself it was deer. Elk. The forest had plenty, and I’d seen them grazing in the clearings. But deer don’t move with that weight. Their steps are light, scattered, nervous.

These steps had rhythm.

Deliberate.

As if whoever made them knew exactly where they were going and wanted me to know it too.

One morning I found handprints on my truck hood in dried mud—five fingers, clear palm. The size was wrong. Too wide. Too long. The palm print looked like a dinner plate.

I took pictures with my phone, thinking, Finally. Proof.

When I looked later, the prints were just smudges. Cameras flatten everything. The crisp detail my eyes saw became meaningless brown stains. It was like the world itself was insisting I couldn’t hold onto evidence.

Trash started getting knocked over. But nothing was eaten. When a bear gets into trash, it eats. It leaves a mess because hunger doesn’t care about neatness.

This was different.

Wrappers unfolded and laid flat like someone had opened them carefully to see what was inside.

Cans pried open and sniffed but left untouched.

It looked less like feeding and more like… inventory.

Like curiosity.

Then came the branches.

Snapped clean off trees at ten, twelve feet high. Not thin branches either—thick limbs I couldn’t have broken without a saw. I found them stacked sometimes, leaned against other trees in patterns that felt almost intentional.

Messages I couldn’t read.

The worst part wasn’t the physical signs. It was the feeling—the crawling sensation on the back of my neck every time I stepped outside near dusk. That primitive alarm that says eyes on you even when your conscious mind insists you’re being dramatic.

I started timing my trips outside. Chopping wood became a race. Getting water from the well became a sprint. I felt ridiculous—until the night I finally saw it.

2. The First Time I Saw It

It was late evening, the sun slipping behind the tree line and painting everything in orange-gold. I was taking trash to the burn barrel behind the cabin, arms full of bags, thinking only about not dropping them and making more work for myself.

I looked up.

It was standing at the edge of the trees.

Fifty yards away.

Completely still.

Watching me.

It was huge. Eight feet at least. Covered in dark fur that swallowed light. Upright like a man, but wrong in every proportion that makes a man look human—arms too long, hanging past the knees; shoulders too broad; head sitting on those shoulders with barely any neck.

The face was dark and flat, almost ape-like but not quite. The eyes caught the last sun and didn’t look away.

For a few seconds I couldn’t move. The trash bags hung from my hands like they belonged to someone else.

My brain tried to save me by inventing explanations: shadow, tree, trick of light. I blinked hard. Looked away. Looked back.

It was still there.

Solid.

Real.

Impossible.

Then I blinked again and it was gone.

No sound of movement. No crashing through brush. Just… gone, like it had stepped behind the world.

I dropped the trash and ran inside.

My hands shook so badly I couldn’t get the key in the lock. Once inside I checked every window, latched everything, grabbed the biggest kitchen knife I owned like a child with a toy sword.

I sat on the couch staring at the door.

That night I barely slept. Every sound snapped me awake.

Footsteps on the porch—heavy and slow.

Something scratching at the walls—long, dragging gouges like claws on wood.

Breathing outside my bedroom window so close I could hear each inhale and exhale.

I didn’t look out. I couldn’t. I sat frozen in darkness, knife in hand, waiting for dawn.

When the sun finally came up, I went outside and found tracks.

Huge footprints in the soft dirt around the cabin. Eighteen inches long, five toes, heel, arch. Deep enough to hold water. The stride length was four, five feet.

Whatever made those tracks had walked around my cabin multiple times during the night.

That’s when I stopped trying to talk myself out of it.

Something was out there.

And it had decided I was worth watching.

3. Escalation: The Study Begins

After that first clear sighting, everything escalated fast.

It started showing up at dawn and dusk, always at the edge of visibility. At first it stood at the tree line like that first night. Then it appeared near my shed. Then by the woodpile. Each time closer.

It didn’t rush. It didn’t charge. It just stood and watched.

Five minutes. Ten. Sometimes longer.

It watched me split wood, fetch water, carry groceries from the truck. Like it was learning my habits the way a predator learns the route of prey.

I stopped going outside after dark entirely. If I forgot something in the truck, it stayed there. If I needed more wood, I did without. If I heard a noise outside, I ignored it. I didn’t want to feed its curiosity by responding.

But it responded anyway.

At night I heard it circling. That heavy rhythmic tread became familiar, like a second clock. Sometimes I peeked through curtains just enough to see the massive shadow move past windows, blocking moonlight.

Once I saw it standing in my yard, perfectly still, staring at the cabin. I couldn’t tell if it could see me through glass, but I felt like it knew where I was. Like it could sense my attention the way I sensed its.

The knocking started around week six.

Not on the door. Not yet.

Knocks from the woods.

Three knocks. Pause. Three more.

Rhythmic. Intentional. Coming from different directions, sometimes north, sometimes east, like it was moving around my property while announcing its presence—or like there was more than one.

That thought sat in my stomach like cold metal.

I found more handprints—on my truck door, on the well pump, smeared across windows like it had pressed its palm to the glass and peered inside.

Every morning became an inspection: footprints in mud, broken branches, signs of something big moving while I slept.

It didn’t feel like random animal behavior. It felt like attention focused through intelligence.

I started keeping a journal. Not because I thought I could solve it, but because writing it down was the only way to keep myself sane.

I wrote times. Sounds. Locations. What I ate. Whether the moon was full. Whether the wind was up.

If there was a pattern, I couldn’t find it. The only constant was that it came every single night.

4. The Door Handle Night

Week eight was when fear became something physical, something that lived in my muscles.

I woke around 2:00 a.m. to scratching on the cabin walls—not the skittery sound of small animals, but deep gouging drags, slow and heavy, like claws pulled down wood with force.

The scratching moved around the cabin methodically, wall to wall, stopping and starting as if testing for weak points.

Then the footsteps came onto the porch.

The boards creaked and groaned under that weight. My porch is thick pine; it doesn’t complain easily. That night it sounded like it was being asked to hold up a truck.

The footsteps paced from one end to the other and back again in a slow loop. A patient patrol.

I sat in bed, knife in both hands, too afraid to turn on a light. I didn’t want it to know I was awake.

Then came the breathing—right outside my bedroom window.

Steady. Slow. Too close.

I could hear the air moving through massive lungs. Sometimes the breathing sped up slightly, like excitement or frustration, then slowed again as if it was listening for my response.

I couldn’t look.

I just sat there, stiff as wood, waiting.

Then the door handle jiggled.

Soft at first. Testing.

Then harder, rattling in the frame.

I had locked it and wedged a chair under it like I’d started doing every night. The jiggling stopped. I heard movement on the porch, like it was searching for another way in.

Then pressure on windows—testing, one by one.

When it found them all locked, it went back to the door and tried again, harder. The door shook but the deadbolt held.

I didn’t sleep after that.

At dawn I found five deep parallel grooves gouged into the door frame—claw marks a quarter-inch deep, a foot long, cut clean into seasoned pine.

This wasn’t a bear trying to reach food.

This was something trying to reach me.

5. The Sheriff, the Cameras, the Vanishing Proof

That morning I drove into town. Forty minutes of logging road felt like hours. I needed an authority, a witness, another human face to anchor me.

At the sheriff’s office I reported a trespasser. I didn’t say Bigfoot. I said someone had been around my cabin at night, trying the door, leaving footprints, damaging property. I showed photos of the claw marks.

The deputy looked at me like I was wasting oxygen.

He asked if I’d been drinking. If I took medications. If I had mental health issues. He glanced at my photos for two seconds and said it looked like bear damage.

I insisted it didn’t.

He shrugged and suggested security cameras.

That was the moment I realized how alone I was. Not just physically, but socially. If you live far enough out, people assume whatever happens to you is either your own fault or not real.

I bought two trail cameras anyway. Battery powered. SD cards. Cheap enough that I could afford them without skipping groceries that week.

I mounted them on trees facing the cabin.

Within three nights, both cameras were gone.

Not broken. Not smashed.

Gone.

I searched everywhere. Nothing.

It felt like the forest had swallowed them.

Or like whatever was watching me understood cameras.

That thought made my skin crawl.

I did the math on leaving. My account was thin. I’d spent almost everything on the cabin, repairs, supplies for winter. I had enough for a few tanks of gas and a couple weeks of food.

Not enough for rent somewhere else.

Not enough to relocate.

Not enough to sell quickly, even if anyone would buy.

Properties this remote can sit on the market for years. Who wants a cabin with no cell service and a “bear problem” that dents siding with hands?

I checked into a motel in town for one night. Seventy bucks. Flickering lights, old carpet, but solid walls and a door that locked.

I slept twelve hours.

When I woke I realized how dangerous my cabin life had become—not just because of the thing outside, but because of what sleep deprivation does to your mind. It frays you. Makes you fragile. Makes you mistake shadows for movement and movement for certainty.

But I couldn’t afford the motel. Not more than a few nights.

So I drove back.

Back into the trees.

Back into the silence.

Back to the place where my door was the only boundary between me and something that wanted a response.

6. Daylight Curiosity

The first time I saw it in full daylight, my stomach dropped as if I’d missed a step.

I looked out my kitchen window one afternoon and it was standing next to my truck.

Not hiding. Not halfway behind a tree.

Standing in sun like it didn’t care what the world believed.

It ran its hands over the hood almost gently, like it was petting it. Then it opened the driver’s door—I’d forgotten to lock it—and leaned in, touching the steering wheel, the seats, the dashboard.

Examining.

Learning.

I watched through glass, frozen.

It was bigger than I’d thought. Eight and a half feet maybe. Four hundred pounds of muscle. The muscles in its shoulders moved under its fur as it leaned. Its hands—God, the hands—wrapped around my steering wheel like it belonged to it.

Another day it stood by my chopping block and picked up my axe. Turned it over. Tested the weight and balance.

For a terrifying moment I imagined it using the axe on my cabin, splitting my walls like firewood.

Instead it ran a finger along the edge—carefully—then set it back down like a person respecting a tool.

It sniffed logs. Picked them up. Put them down.

It wasn’t vandalizing. It was studying.

And that was worse.

Because a hungry animal can be predicted. A curious intelligence is harder. Curiosity can become obsession.

I started leaving the cabin less. I checked windows before stepping outside, scanned tree line, sprinted to get wood and sprinted back.

Even inside I felt watched.

Sometimes it mirrored me. If I moved from kitchen window to bedroom window, it shifted its position too, as if keeping me in sight.

It felt like being hunted by something in no hurry. Something that had all the time in the world.

7. Roof Night

Week fifteen my generator died at 9:00 p.m., sputtered out and left the cabin in darkness.

I had candles. Flashlights. But I didn’t light them. I didn’t want to announce I was awake.

I sat in the dark listening to my own breathing.

Twenty minutes later something landed on the roof.

A heavy thump that shook the cabin and sent dust drifting from rafters.

Then footsteps pacing above my head.

The roof creaked and groaned under that weight. I could trace each step as it moved from one end of the cabin to the other, slow and deliberate, beams flexing, shingles scraping.

At one point something started scratching at the chimney pipe, rattling it back and forth. The pipe isn’t secured the way it should be. I listened in horror imagining it ripping free, rain and debris pouring into the cabin, or worse—the whole roof collapsing.

I crawled under my bed, flashlight off, breathing through dust.

I thought about running for my truck, but the truck was twenty feet away across open ground. In darkness. With that thing on the roof.

If I opened the door, it would hear.

If it jumped down, it would be faster than me.

So I stayed.

Around 4:00 a.m. it jumped down beside the cabin with a thud so heavy I felt it through the floor. Then it crashed away into the forest, branches snapping under its weight.

I stayed under the bed until sunrise.

In the morning I saw the roof damage: shingles displaced, cracked. Chimney bent at an angle.

It had stood right above me for hours.

Not attacking.

Not leaving.

Just… being there.

A presence heavy enough to bend my world.

8. Family Calls and the Bitter Realization

In desperation I called my brother. I told him about footprints, handprints, the creature I’d seen.

He listened two minutes before interrupting.

He suggested therapy. Suggested isolation was making me see things. Suggested I was having a breakdown from losing my job and apartment.

When I insisted it was real, he got frustrated. Told me to go stay with him “to get my head straight” but didn’t offer money or help getting there.

He hung up.

I didn’t call again.

I called my dad. He listened longer, more patient. But I heard doubt in his voice too. He wanted me in Florida, safe, examined, “helped.”

I didn’t have money for gas to cross the country. I didn’t have money for food on the road.

Even if I did, leaving meant abandoning the only asset I had left. It meant bankruptcy, foreclosure, homelessness.

And it meant doing exactly what the thing seemed to want: vacating the cabin.

I started wondering if that was the point. If it wasn’t hunting me for food, but for territory.

Or if it wanted something else.

Something more complicated.

9. The Knock

Week twenty-one, it knocked on my door for the first time.

It was mid-afternoon. I was washing dishes. Hands in warm soapy water. Ordinary life pretending to exist.

Three heavy knocks on the front door.

Not timid. Not casual.

Authoritative. Expectant.

Three more knocks.

My heart sprinted. I dried my hands slowly and moved to the door like a man walking toward a cliff.

I looked through the peephole.

Nothing. Empty porch. Forest beyond.

But I could hear breathing on the other side of the door. Close. Alive.

Three more knocks, hard enough to rattle the frame.

The knocks were at my head height.

Meaning the thing’s hand was roughly where my face would be if I opened.

I backed away and sat on the couch, staring at the door.

After five minutes the footsteps moved across the porch, down the steps, and into the trees. When I dared look through the window I saw it walking away, not hurried, not threatened.

Like it had performed a test.

And recorded my response.

That knock changed something in me. It took the situation from “being watched” to “being addressed.”

It wanted interaction.

It wanted me to answer.

And I didn’t know whether ignoring it was safer than responding.

10. The Battering Night

Week twenty-two was the worst night.

Worse than the roof.

Worse than the door handle.

I woke to the entire cabin shaking.

Something slammed into the exterior wall with massive force, rhythmic and powerful like a battering ram. Dishes fell from shelves and shattered. Windows rattled like they might break.

The slamming moved around the cabin—south wall, then east, then back, then north—over and over in deliberate sequence.

Between impacts I heard deep grunts and huffing noises, almost conversational in rhythm, like it was talking to itself or speaking toward the cabin.

The sounds felt angry.

Demanding.

I grabbed my keys and jacket, ready to run. I stood by the door with my hand on the deadbolt, planning the sprint to the truck.

But each impact shook my courage loose. Each time I imagined opening the door, I imagined it waiting for exactly that—driving me outside so it could do whatever it wanted in the open.

After over an hour the slamming stopped.

Footsteps moved away fast, crashing through underbrush, snapping branches.

I waited twenty minutes before moving. Sat on the floor with my back against the wall, keys clutched in my fist, listening for return.

At dawn I went outside and saw handprints covering the walls.

Dozens of them pressed into the wood siding at different heights. Some pushed so hard they left dents, compressing the grain.

It had been striking the cabin with hands.

Not claws.

Hands.

That detail—hands used like tools—made my blood run cold.

11. The Porch Standoff

Now it’s week twenty-four. Six months in. The thing comes every night without exception.

As soon as the sun starts to go down, I hear movement in the woods. Circling. Pacing. Positions shifting.

Some nights it stands at the tree line. Some nights it comes right up to the cabin. Sometimes it stays minutes. Sometimes hours.

Yesterday it stood on my porch for ten full minutes.

I watched through the peephole, terrified to breathe.

It faced the door so close I could have touched it if there hadn’t been wood between us. I could see individual hairs in its fur, dark brown and black mixed coarse and thick. I could see its chest rising and falling. I could see its hands hanging at its sides, fingers long and strong.

I knew it understood I was watching.

It wanted me to watch.

A message: The only thing separating us is this door.

And doors don’t last forever.

The intelligence in its eyes is what scares me most. This isn’t a dumb animal. It plans. It experiments. It learns. It tests boundaries like a person testing a lock.

Every week it escalates.

Every week it comes closer.

It destroys objects—woodpiles, tools—not like a bear searching for food but like an angry, communicative act. Last night it pounded on my door continuously for twenty minutes. Aggressive, demanding pounding. Then it went to the woodpile and threw logs like toys. This morning my woodpile was ruined, logs scattered thirty feet away. Tools thrown. Shovel bent. Rake broken.

My axe was buried in a tree trunk at head height, blade sunk so deep I couldn’t pull it out.

Not an accident.

A demonstration.

It felt territorial, like it was punishing me. Or driving me away. Or forcing a response.

And this is the part that people who haven’t lived it won’t understand: the pattern of fear changes you. It makes you smaller. It turns your day into preparation for night. It erodes your decision-making until even simple choices feel like threats.

That’s how it traps you. Not by physically restraining you, but by making every possible exit feel unsafe.

And yet, eventually, something did change.

Not because I got brave.

Because the situation forced my hand.

12. The Journal Becomes a Map

Three days after the battering night, I did what the sheriff suggested without caring if it made me look insane.

I rebuilt the cameras—improvised, not purchased. I couldn’t afford more trail cams, and I didn’t trust they would survive anyway. So I got creative with what I had.

My phone didn’t have signal, but it had a camera. I had an old laptop. I had a cheap USB webcam from my city apartment. I had extension cords, a half-repaired generator, and a car battery I could rig as backup.

I set up inside the cabin, pointed out through cracks in curtains and a small gap between boards in the loft. I recorded overnight to local storage.

It wasn’t elegant, but it was something.

The first night I got nothing but darkness and my own whispered breathing.

The second night I got sound.

Low grunts. Knocks from the woods. Footsteps on the porch.

The third night I got a shadow crossing the yard. Too tall. Too wide. A moving bulk blocking moonlight.

It was proof enough for me, but I knew it wouldn’t convince anyone. Still, it gave me something more valuable than proof: it gave me timing. It gave me a rough schedule.

The thing arrived reliably at twilight, circled for hours, and most aggressive behaviors clustered around two time windows: late night between 1:00 and 3:00, and pre-dawn.

That meant if I was going to leave, my best chance wasn’t midnight. It was midday.

Which sounds obvious, but fear makes you forget obvious things. Fear makes you wait for “the perfect time” until there is no time left.

I started preparing during the day like a man planning to evacuate a war zone.

I packed only essentials: clothes, cash, documents, food, water, spare blankets, my journal, the laptop with recordings.

I checked my truck every day—fuel, battery, tires. I kept the keys on my body at all times.

I didn’t tell myself I was leaving. I told myself I was ready to leave if I had to.

Then came the morning it stood twenty feet from my porch in full sunlight and stared at my door like it was waiting for me to open it.

We made eye contact through glass.

Thirty seconds. Maybe less.

In that stare I felt something I hated admitting: not just fear, but recognition. It felt like being evaluated by a mind that could choose patience or violence.

Then it turned and walked back into the woods, powerful gait swallowing distance.

That day I made the decision I’d been avoiding.

I wasn’t waiting for the bank. Or a buyer. Or the sheriff.

I was leaving.

Not because I wanted to lose everything, but because the alternative was losing myself—or dying.

13. The Attempt

I chose a day when the sky was clear and the wind was up, because wind makes sound and sound makes cover.

I left at noon. Broad daylight. Truck packed. Door locked. Cabin left as if I might return, because part of me couldn’t bear the finality of abandonment.

As I started down the logging road, the forest felt different. Not quieter—wind still moved, branches still rubbed together—but focused, like attention had turned toward me.

I told myself I was imagining it.

Ten minutes down the road I saw it.

Not in the woods.

On the road itself, ahead of my truck.

It stepped out from the trees with the calm confidence of something that knew it was larger than my vehicle in the way that mattered. Not larger physically, but larger in authority. Like the road belonged to it.

It stood sideways at first, letting me see its width. Then it turned to face me.

For a second my hands went numb on the wheel.

My foot hovered over the brake.

It didn’t charge. It didn’t roar.

It raised one hand—not a wave like a person, not an attack, but something else: a slow, deliberate lift of the palm, fingers spread.

Stop.

Or wait.

Or listen.

The gesture was too controlled to be random.

I stopped the truck without meaning to.

We stared at each other through windshield glass. Its eyes were deep set, dark, not animal-bright. Not reflective like deer eyes.

Intentional.

It took a step closer, then another, slow enough that it felt like negotiation rather than threat.

My pulse hammered. My mind screamed at me to put the truck in reverse, to hit the gas, to do anything except sit there.

Then I remembered the battering night. The dents. The axe buried in a tree.

If it wanted to flip my truck, it could try.

If it wanted to break the windshield, it might.

But it hadn’t, not yet. It had been testing and pressuring, not outright killing.

So I did the only thing I could think of that didn’t involve escalation.

I turned off the engine.

The silence inside the cab was enormous.

The creature stood in front of the truck, breathing slow. Then, to my horror, it leaned forward and placed its palm on the hood.

The hood dipped slightly under the weight.

It moved its hand as if feeling vibration, as if reading the truck like a living thing. Then it tilted its head and made a low sound—not a roar, not a scream, but a layered grunt that carried modulation, like speech shaped by a throat not designed for human vowels.

I didn’t understand it, but my body understood the tone.

It wasn’t rage.

It was insistence.

Then it did something that broke my certainty.

It turned its head toward the trees, listening.

A knock came from the forest. One sharp crack. Then another, farther away.

The creature looked back at me, then stepped to the side of the road, clearing the path.

It didn’t retreat fully. It stood at the edge, watching.

Letting me pass.

My brain struggled to hold both realities at once: a thing that terrorized my nights was now stepping aside like a gatekeeper granting permission.

I turned the engine back on with shaking hands.

I drove forward slowly, keeping it in sight through the driver’s side window as I passed.

It didn’t follow.

It just watched me go.

In the rearview mirror, it stood at the tree line, tall and still, until the road curved and the forest swallowed it.

I didn’t stop driving for two hours.

I didn’t breathe normally for two hours.

When I finally reached town, I pulled into a gas station and sat in my truck with my forehead pressed to the steering wheel, shaking. The relief was so intense it felt like pain.

I checked into the same dingy motel, paid for two nights with money I couldn’t spare, and slept like a dead man.

14. What the Forest Taught Me

On the second day in town, I did what I should have done earlier: I played the recordings for someone who couldn’t laugh me out of a station because they weren’t law enforcement.

I found a wildlife researcher at the small community college—someone who studied bears and cougars and anything else that moved through the timber. I didn’t say Bigfoot. I said I’d been harassed by something large and intelligent. I showed the dents, the claw marks, the footage of shadow movement, and I played the audio: knocks, grunts, heavy footfalls.

He didn’t tell me it was Bigfoot. He didn’t validate my word.

But he didn’t laugh either.

He listened with a face that grew more serious, and when I finished he said something I will never forget:

“Whatever this is,” he told me, “it learned that you’re responsive to pressure.”

That sentence hit like a slap. It reframed everything: the knocking, the pacing, the testing of windows, the escalation. Not random haunting. Behavior shaped over time.

He asked me questions I hadn’t asked myself:

Had I ever left food out?

Had I ever fired a gun?

Had I ever confronted it?

Had I ever changed routines?

I answered honestly: I’d tried to hide. I’d tried to ignore. I’d done everything to avoid contact.

He nodded slowly.

“Then it was escalating to force contact,” he said. “Not necessarily to kill you. To control you.”

Control.

That word made my stomach twist.

Because control explained the road moment. The hand on the hood. The clearing of the path.

It could block me.

It could permit me.

It had been teaching me that the cabin was its decision.

My leaving was its decision.

That truth was worse than any horror-story version, because it meant my fear had been part of the mechanism.

The researcher gave me practical advice—how to report threats, how to document properly, what agencies might take a wildlife harassment complaint seriously if the evidence showed a large unknown animal. He told me to avoid returning alone. He told me to stay in town. He told me to treat it like a dangerous predator even if it behaved like something else.

But I didn’t return to the cabin.

Not immediately.

I couldn’t.

I stayed in the motel until my money forced me out, then I slept in my truck in a friend’s driveway—someone I barely knew from the hardware store, a man who believed in “weird things” enough to offer a place to park.

Winter came early that year. Snow dusted the mountains, then thickened.

Some nights, when the wind hit the motel’s thin walls just right, I thought I heard footsteps on the roof.

I’d sit up, heart racing, until I realized it was just weather.

Just weather.

Those words became my prayer.

15. The Last Entry

I’m writing this now because I understand something I didn’t understand when I was trapped: silence isn’t safety. Silence is how things like that thrive. Not because the creature itself is magical, but because isolation makes you easy. Makes your story unbelievable. Makes your evidence vanish.

I don’t know what it wanted from me. Territory, control, curiosity, a response. I don’t know if there was more than one. I don’t know if it would have broken in eventually or if it would have continued indefinitely, tightening pressure until I snapped.

What I do know is this:

It watched me. For months.

It learned my patterns.

It tested boundaries like a thinking thing, not an animal.

And when I finally left, it stood in the road and chose not to stop me.

That choice—its choice—haunts me more than the scratching, more than the slamming, more than the dents in my cabin wall.

Because it means my safety was never fully mine.

It was granted.

And if you’ve never felt what it’s like to live under the attention of something you can’t reason with and can’t report without being laughed at, then you won’t understand why I’m writing this.

This is my record. My warning.

If you’re thinking about buying a cheap isolated cabin because you want peace and quiet and a fresh start, remember this: some quiet is not empty.

Some quiet is inhabited.

And if you ever find yourself in the woods and the forest goes still in that unnatural way—no birds, no small sounds, just your own breathing—don’t tell yourself you’re being dramatic.

Listen to your body.

It might be telling you what my mind learned too late:

You’re not alone.

And something out there might be deciding what you’re allowed to do next.