“The Newest Bigfoot Footage YOU Haven’t Seen! (100% Real)”

Clickbait. He knew it. His subscribers knew it.

The difference this time was that he wasn’t sure it was a lie.

The shaky video began with his own voice, slightly breathless: “Logan here—Backwoods Truthers. You are not gonna believe what we just caught in Black Hollow…”

The rain outside intensified, blurring the world into streaks of gray. Inside the car, the only light was the screen’s cold glow.

He hit play and watched his life tilt.

1. The Channel That Cried Bigfoot

For five years, Logan Price had made videos about monsters he didn’t believe in.

It wasn’t that he was a total skeptic. He wanted to believe—had wanted to ever since he was ten and his grandfather had told him stories about “the Hairy Man” that roamed the Oregon forests. But wanting and believing were different. Logan had gotten older, found out his grandfather drank more than he should, and learned how easily adults lied.

What he did believe in, almost religiously, were views.

Views meant ad revenue. Ad revenue meant he didn’t have to go back to stocking shelves at the hardware store.

His channel, Backwoods Truthers, had started as a joke. He and his college roommate, Theo, had filmed each other tromping through the woods at night with flashlights and a cheap night-vision camera, whispering about “wood knocks” and “shadow figures” and “definite Bigfoot vibes.” They’d added fake growls in post-production. Theo had even thrown a fur rug past the camera once.

The video had gotten two million views.

“You gave us a jumpscare at 4:13, I literally threw my phone,” one comment read. Another: “Lmao you can see your friend’s sneakers in the ‘Bigfoot’ shot.”

People knew it was fake. That was part of the fun. Logan leaned into it. Every few months, he’d upload another “sighting” that was obviously staged, with just enough plausibility to keep the “what if” crowd engaged.

Then the algorithm began to favor “authentic” content.

Suddenly, the big channels were less about theatrical jump cuts and more about dead-serious men in camo whispering, “I didn’t want to share this, but the truth needs to be told.”

Logan’s views dipped.

Theo got a real job.

Logan doubled down.

He started traveling farther from town. Started annotating his videos with references to obscure First Nations legends he’d actually researched. He stopped adding fake growls.

He wanted one good piece of something. Didn’t have to be Bigfoot. Could be a strange light, a weird sound, even a clear track. Something that would let him look into the camera and say, “Okay, this one… I don’t know how to explain.”

It was ironic, then, that the night he finally got the footage, he almost didn’t bring the camera at all.

 

 

2. Black Hollow

“Black Hollow’s a waste of time,” Theo had said when Logan first mentioned it. “It’s like, ten acres of second-growth forest wedged between a highway and a subdivision. Soccer moms walk their poodles there.”

“Exactly,” Logan had replied. “No one expects it. All the hardcore guys go to remote places. I’ll brand it as ‘Bigfoot in Your Backyard.’ Relatable content.”

Theo had rolled his eyes.

In the end, Theo didn’t come. He had a double shift. Logan went alone.

Well, not entirely alone.

“Come on, Socks,” he said, clipping the leash to the dog’s collar. “You’re co-host tonight.”

Socks—an old, grizzled mutt with mismatched eyes—wagged his tail and sneezed.

It was early October, the air sharp with that particular cold that smells like wet leaves and coming fog. The parking lot at Black Hollow Park was empty except for Logan’s beat-up Subaru and, at the far end, a rusting pickup with a faded “Support Our Troops” sticker.

He checked his gear: headlamp, handheld camera (night-vision capable, thank you Patreon), digital audio recorder, spare batteries. He left the shotgun at home. Bringing a gun would turn the whole thing from “creepy” to “concerning” in the eyes of both viewers and park rangers.

He did bring a small can of bear spray, clipped to his belt. He wasn’t completely stupid.

“Okay,” he said, turning the camera on himself as he stood at the edge of the path. “What’s up, Backwoods crew. Logan here. It’s 11:47 p.m. I’m at Black Hollow, which, if you’re local, you know is basically a glorified dog park by day. But we’re not here for golden retrievers. We’re here for The Hairy Man.”

He tilted the camera to show the dark opening between the trees.

“There have been three reports in the last six months of a ‘large, upright animal’ crossing this trail at night,” he went on. “Two dog walkers and one jogger. All described it as ‘taller than a man,’ ‘covered in hair,’ and this is my favorite: ‘moving like a linebacker with a fur coat.’”

He grinned.

“So, obviously, I had to come check it out.”

He clicked off the headlamp, letting the camera’s night vision take over. The world turned into a grainy landscape of greens and blacks.

“Let’s go see if Black Hollow lives up to the hype,” he whispered.

He and Socks stepped into the trees.

The first half hour was uneventful.

Crickets chirped. A distant owl hooted. Socks sniffed everything with the slow, thorough enthusiasm of an old dog.

Logan did a few bits to camera, whispering about how “liminal” the place felt, referencing the fact that the park used to be a homestead in the 1800s before the house burned down. The usual spice.

He did some wood knocks—three sharp hits with a thick branch against a tree trunk—and waited.

Nothing answered.

“Okay, clearly the local Bigfoot are ignoring me,” he said for the camera. “Rude.”

He was about to turn back. The parking lot was a good fifteen-minute walk, and he preferred not to get slapped with a “park closed” fine.

Then Socks froze.

Logan almost tripped over him.

“What is it, buddy?” he whispered.

Socks’ ears were up, tail straight, body rigid. A low growl vibrated in his chest.

Logan felt the hair on his own arms rise.

“What do you hear?” he breathed.

A sound drifted through the trees.

At first, he thought it was the wind. But there was no wind. The leaves were still.

It was a low, rhythmic thudding. Like something heavy walking. Not the sharp, crisp crunch of a human foot in leaves, but a dull, padded impact.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Getting closer.

Logan’s heart rate jumped.

“This is… weird,” he murmured to the camera, which he’d instinctively lifted. “We’ve got something big moving out there. Could be a deer. Could be an elk. Could be… I don’t know.”

Socks’ growl deepened.

Then, from somewhere ahead and to the right, came another sound.

Not quite a howl. Not quite a grunt. A… whoop.

A deep, resonant “Hooo-OOOP” that vibrated in Logan’s chest.

Every Bigfoot documentary he’d ever watched flashed through his mind. Wood knocks. Whoops. Vocalizations.

He swallowed.

“Okay,” he whispered. “That’s… that’s interesting. I didn’t add that in post, folks.”

The thudding stopped.

Silence fell like a dropped blanket.

“Hello?” Logan called, because his brain was scrambling between rational and irrational, and rational insisted that saying something might make it less scary.

Branches rustled.

Something stepped into the narrow path twenty yards ahead.

Logan’s world shrank to the green-black image on his camera screen.

The figure was tall.

For a split second, he thought it was a person—some guy in a hoodie trying to prank him. But the proportions were wrong. The shoulders were massive, the arms hanging lower than any human’s would. The head sat directly atop the shoulders, no visible neck, crowned with a ridge of shaggy hair.

It moved.

One, two steps.

Smooth. Heavy. The way big animals move when they’re not in a hurry.

The camera auto-adjusted, sharpening.

Logan forgot to breathe.

The figure filled the frame.

It was covered in hair—a dark, matted pelt that looked thick even in night vision. The chest was barrel-shaped. The arms were long, ending in hands, not paws.

For the briefest of moments, the face turned toward the camera.

Logan saw a prominent brow ridge, a flat, wide nose, a mouth that was neither ape nor human but something in between. Eyes that caught the infrared and flashed.

Then the figure stepped off the path and vanished into the trees.

The whole thing lasted maybe three seconds.

“What the—” Logan choked.

He realized only then that he’d been holding his breath. He sucked in air that tasted like wet soil and adrenaline.

Socks barked once, sharply. Then, to Logan’s surprise, the dog backed up and pressed against his legs, tail low.

“That’s… that’s not normal,” Logan whispered. “He doesn’t spook easy.”

He replayed the last few seconds of video, thumb trembling on the tiny screen.

There it was.

Not a shadow. Not a trick of the light.

Something big. Something upright. Something that fit every description he’d ever mocked on his channel.

“Oh my God,” he breathed. “We got it. We actually… We gotta go.”

He didn’t run. Running triggered predators. Every nature documentary said so. But he walked very quickly back toward the trailhead, glancing over his shoulder more than once.

Nothing followed.

The parking lot was still empty when he emerged, heart finally slowing.

He sat in the car, locked the doors (as if that would help), and watched the footage again.

And again.

By the fifth viewing, the skeptic in him crawled out of the corner where adrenaline had shoved it.

“Could be a guy in a suit,” he muttered. “Some local pulling a joke. Could be… some kind of bear with mange. Could be pareidolia.”

But his gut…

His gut said otherwise.

“Upload it,” he told himself. “Let the hive mind tear it apart. They’ll see what you missed.”

So he did.

He slapped on the clickbaity title he’d always used as a joke—“The Newest Bigfoot Footage YOU Haven’t Seen!”—wrote a description heavy on disclaimers and a little light on the fear he’d felt, and hit publish.

He expected the usual cycle.

He didn’t expect what came next.

3. The Video That Broke the Internet (Almost)

It took an hour for the first comments to appear.

“Looks fake ngl.”

“At 6:13 you can see the hook where the mask connects. Nice try.”

“Bro, that’s just a tall dude in a ghillie suit.”

Standard.

Logan replied to a few with his usual mix of snark and winking ambiguity.

But then the view count started climbing faster than usual.

1,000.

2,500.

10,000.

By midnight, it had hit 50,000 views.

By morning, it was at 300,000.

Someone posted the clip to Reddit, in r/HighStrangeness and r/Cryptozoology. Someone else slowed it down, stabilized the footage, enhanced the contrast.

That’s when the tone of the comments shifted.

“Okay, I roast fake videos for a living. This one… I’m not so sure. The leg movement is weirdly fluid. Hard to fake that without a super expensive suit.” — @FX_Analyst

“I work with bears. That’s not a bear. The proportions are off. Also bears don’t walk like that.”

“Look at the forearm length compared to the torso. That’s more like a chimp or gorilla proportion, not human.”

“Anyone else notice the way the head moves? It tracks the camera for a second. That’s… unsettling.”

A well-known skeptic YouTuber, Cassie from Debunked & Done, did a reaction video.

She watched it three times, pausing, zooming.

“I hate this,” she said finally. “I hate that I don’t immediately see the wires. Either this guy just raised the bar on hoaxes or… this is the most convincing Bigfoot footage I’ve seen in years.”

Her video hit a million views in a day.

Logan’s subscriber count doubled in seventy-two hours.

His email exploded.

Brands wanted to talk sponsorships. A cable channel reached out about licensing the footage for a “Top 10 Cryptid Caught on Camera” special. An investigator from a serious-sounding organization, the North American Primate Research Group, wanted to know the exact GPS coordinates.

Buried among the spam and media requests was an email with no subject line, from an address he almost deleted as junk:

[email protected]

The message was short.

I saw it too.

Not just on your video.

Meet me at Black Hollow. Tomorrow. Midnight.
Come alone.

– J

Logan stared at it, a cold knot forming in his stomach.

“Come alone,” he read aloud. “Yeah, that’s not ominous or anything.”

He almost ignored it.

Almost.

But curiosity, that stubborn engine that had kept his channel alive through algorithm changes and burnout, revved.

If it was a troll, he’d waste an hour.

If it wasn’t…

He typed back before he could overthink it.

How will I know it’s you?

The reply came two minutes later.

I’ll be the one who’s not surprised.

4. Midnight in the Park (Again)

Theo thought it was a bad idea.

“That’s how horror movies start,” he said, waving a slice of pizza for emphasis as they sat in Logan’s kitchen. “Mysterious email, midnight meeting in the woods, ‘come alone.’ Next thing you know, your channel’s posting found footage of you getting axe-murdered.”

“I’ll keep my camera rolling,” Logan said. “Content is content.”

“Not funny,” Theo said. “Bring me, at least.”

“The email said alone.”

“Yeah, well, the email can suck it.”

In the end, they compromised.

Theo would come, but stay in the car with the doors locked, parked where he had a clear view of the trailhead. He’d keep his phone on, ready to call the police if Logan didn’t return in an hour.

“Or if you start screaming and something big and hairy drags you into the bushes,” Theo added helpfully.

“Thanks,” Logan muttered.

They arrived at Black Hollow at 11:45 p.m.

The parking lot was emptier than the first time. The rusting pickup was gone. Streetlights from the nearby subdivision cast a faint orange glow along the treeline, but the path itself was a dark tunnel.

“Seriously,” Theo said, eyeing the trees. “This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done. And that includes trying to monetize Flat Earth debates.”

Logan adjusted his camera strap.

“If I’m not back in an hour, you can have my subscriber count,” he said. “It’ll be like I died and left you my NFT collection.”

“Your NFT collection is worth negative money,” Theo said darkly. “Be careful.”

Logan turned on the camera.

“What’s up, Backwoods crew,” he whispered, half for his eventual audience, half to steady his nerves. “Logan here. Yes, we are back at Black Hollow, and yes, I’m being an idiot. I got an email from someone claiming they’ve seen what I saw. They told me to come alone at midnight. So, obviously, I brought Theo.”

He panned the camera to show Theo flipping it off. Then, more seriously, he added, “He’s staying at the car. If this is a troll, we’ll all laugh about it. If it’s not… well. Let’s find out.”

He stepped onto the path.

No Socks this time.

Somehow, that made him feel more exposed.

The woods swallowed him.

Every sound seemed amplified. The crunch of his boots on the damp path, the distant rush of highway traffic, the occasional drip of moisture from leaves.

He walked to the spot where he’d filmed the footage.

The air felt… thicker here.

He checked his phone. 11:59 p.m.

“Okay, mystery emailer,” he murmured. “You’ve got sixty seconds.”

At exactly midnight, a voice spoke out of the darkness.

“You came.”

Logan spun, camera jerking.

A figure stood a dozen yards away, half-hidden in shadow between two trees.

It was… smaller than he’d braced for. Not the hulking, mask-wearing man he’d pictured, but someone maybe five foot six, wearing a dark hoodie, hands in pockets.

“Yeah,” Logan said carefully. “You must be J.”

The figure stepped forward into the beam of his headlamp.

She was a woman. Maybe late twenties, early thirties. Pale, with a sharp nose and tired eyes. Her hair was buzzed short on one side, longer on the other. Mud caked her boots.

“You’re Logan,” she said. “Backwoods Truthers.”

He exhaled slowly.

“Guilty,” he said. “And you are…?”

“June,” she said. “I live… near here.”

“Okay, June-who-lives-near-here,” he said, keeping the camera trained on her. “You said you saw it too. When?”

“About a month before you did,” she said. “Not here. A little deeper.” She tilted her head toward the darker mass of trees beyond the official trail.

“You’re sure it was the same… thing?” he asked.

She gave him a flat look.

“Tall, hairy, walked like a linebacker in a fur coat?” she said. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

A chill ran down his back.

“You didn’t film it?” he asked.

“I’m not a YouTuber,” she said dryly. “I’m a dog walker. My hands were full of leashes and panic.”

“Fair,” he admitted. “So why email me? Why now?”

She hesitated, scanning the darkness around them as if checking for eavesdroppers.

“Because your video…” she began slowly. “It showed exactly what I saw. The same slope of the shoulders. The way it moved. It wasn’t fake.”

He opened his mouth to deflect, to say something self-deprecating.

She cut him off.

“I’ve watched your other stuff,” she said. “You’re a clown. No offense.”

“Some taken,” he said.

“But this one,” she went on, “you sounded… different. Scared. Not the performative kind. The real kind.”

He swallowed.

“So you wanted to… compare notes?” he asked. “We can do that by email. Why drag me out here at midnight?”

“Because there’s something you need to see,” she said.

She turned and started walking deeper into the trees, off the main path.

Logan hesitated.

“That’s not ominous at all,” he muttered.

He glanced back the way he’d come.

He couldn’t see the parking lot anymore, but he knew Theo was there, watching the entrance like a lifeline.

“Fine,” he called after June. “But if you murder me, my ghost is going to haunt your Netflix recommendations forever.”

She didn’t turn around.

“Keep filming,” she said. “You’ll want this.”

5. The Clearing

The ground grew softer underfoot as they left the path.

June moved with the ease of someone who’d done this walk a hundred times. Branches seemed to part just before she reached them.

“How often do you come out here?” Logan asked, ducking a low limb.

“Enough,” she said.

“Enough for what?”

“To know when something changes,” she replied.

They walked in silence for a while.

The sound of the highway faded. The trees thickened, their branches knitting overhead. The darkness felt heavier.

“Here,” June said finally.

They stepped into a small clearing.

Logan’s first thought was that it was the most ordinary place in the world—just a shallow depression ringed by ferns, a few low bushes, a deadfall log.

Then he saw the stones.

They formed a rough circle in the center of the clearing. Not cut or carved, just natural rocks, but placed with intention. Some were fist-sized, some as big as a human head. Dirt packed around them formed a low mound.

He felt something in his chest tighten.

“What is this?” he asked softly.

June’s face was unreadable.

“A grave,” she said.

The word landed like a stone.

“A… grave,” he repeated. “For what? A pet?”

She looked at him, eyes sharp.

“For what you filmed,” she said.

He laughed, a short, disbelieving sound.

“You buried Bigfoot,” he said.

She flinched.

“Don’t call it that,” she snapped.

“What else am I supposed to call it?” he shot back. “You buried… one of them? How? Why? When?”

“Slow down,” she said.

She stepped closer to the mound and knelt, brushing a leaf off one of the stones.

“I came out here late,” she said. “Too late. There was blood, a lot of it. And… parts. Like something had been hit. Or attacked.”

“Hit by what?” he asked, filming despite himself.

“Truck, maybe,” she said. “Hunters. I don’t know. I just know it was dying. It crawled here.” She pointed to a smudge of old, dried blood on a nearby trunk. “I stayed with it.”

“You stayed with it,” he echoed. “Like a… forest hospice nurse.”

“It was scared,” she said. “And angry. And… tired. I’ve seen that look before.”

“In people?” he asked.

“In dogs,” she said. “In deer I’ve had to put down after cars hit them.” She swallowed. “In my dad, when the cancer started eating his bones.”

Something in her voice made him quiet.

“It talked to me,” she said softly.

The words snapped him back.

“It what?” he asked.

“Not in words,” she said quickly. “Not like English. But… images. Feelings. Like someone pressing memories into your head.”

He stared.

“What did it… show you?” he asked.

She looked at the mound.

“Lots of trees,” she said. “Old ones. Places that don’t have roads. The smell of wet fur and mud and… something else. It was like seeing the world from… a different height. A different… shuffle.” She huffed a humorless laugh. “And fear. It was afraid of dying here. Of what would happen to its… body.”

“Hunters,” Logan said, remembering the emails. “Trophies. Autopsies.”

“Exposure,” she corrected. “It didn’t care about itself. It cared about… us finding it. Finding proof. It showed me… images of screens. Our faces lit up. Crowds. Blinding lights in the woods. Guns. Traps. It… knew if we had proof, we’d come looking for more.”

“Of course we would,” Logan said. “Isn’t that the point? Proof? We’ve been chasing this for—”

“For what?” she cut in. “For the truth? Or for views?”

The question stung.

He thought of his video title. The thumbnail with a big red arrow and a circle around the creature.

“I buried it,” June said. “Because it asked me to. Because sometimes the kindest thing you can do is not show the world what it’s not ready for.”

He knelt slowly opposite her, the camera lowering.

“How does this connect to my footage?” he asked quietly.

She held his gaze.

“You didn’t stage it,” she said. “I’ve watched it frame by frame. I’ve seen enough bad costumes to know. That was real. And close. Too close.”

He swallowed.

“I thought maybe it was the same one,” he admitted. “The one you buried.”

She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I buried this… two weeks before your video. Whatever you saw was another.”

His stomach dropped.

“So there were at least two,” he said. “Maybe more.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“And now… one less,” he added, looking at the mound.

They were quiet for a moment.

“Why bring me here?” he asked finally. “If you didn’t want this found. If you buried it for a reason. Why show me the… grave?”

She stood, brushed dirt off her knees.

“Because you already changed the game,” she said. “When you uploaded that video, you didn’t just get clicks. You sent a signal. To people like me. To people like—” She gestured vaguely upward. “Them.”

“Them?” he repeated.

She gave him a look.

“You really think Bigfoot is the only weird thing in these woods?” she asked. “You’ve lived here your whole life.”

He thought of childhood camping trips, the way sometimes the forest had felt… crowded even when he couldn’t see anyone. Of his grandfather staring into the treeline, going quiet mid-story as if listening.

“I thought that was my imagination,” he said.

She snorted.

“Maybe the line between ‘imagination’ and ‘observation’ isn’t as thick as you think,” she said.

He rubbed a hand over his face.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s say I believe you. It asked you to bury it, to keep it secret. And I… blasted its cousin all over the internet. What now? Do I delete the video? Pretend it never happened?”

She looked at him, expression sharp.

“Can you?” she asked. “Even if you wanted to? How many people downloaded it? Clipped it? Mirrored it? You can’t put Santa back in the bag, Logan.”

He grimaced.

“Metaphor needs work,” he said. “But yeah. I get it.”

She stepped closer, dropping her voice.

“You have a choice,” she said. “You can double down. Milk it. ‘I’ve got proof! Come join me! Merch link in bio!’”

He winced.

“Or?”

“Or,” she said, “you can change the way you talk about it. You can stop poking at things you don’t understand for laughs. You can treat them like… neighbors instead of content.”

“Neighbors,” he repeated, skeptical. “That thing I filmed could tear me in half.”

“So could a bear,” she said. “So could a truck. So could a human with a gun. You still live with those. You adapt. Learn rules. Don’t get between a mother and her cub. Don’t stand in the middle of a freeway. Don’t pick fights in bars.”

He stared at the mound.

“What are the rules for… them?” he asked.

She smiled, but there was no humor in it.

“We’re still learning,” she said. “Rule one: They don’t want to be seen. Rule two: If you see them, don’t chase. Rule three: If they hurt you, it’ll be because you broke rule one or two.”

He thought of his footage. How the figure had looked toward him, then stepped away.

“It could have charged me,” he murmured. “But it didn’t.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe because it remembered this.” She nodded at the grave.

A thought struck him.

“You said it… showed you things,” he said. “Memories. Images. Did it show you… me?”

She hesitated.

“Not clearly,” she said. “Faces are hard. But… it showed me someone with a camera. Someone following. Someone who didn’t pull the trigger. It was… disappointed. And protective. Like it wanted to scare you, not hurt you.”

Logan let out a shaky breath.

“So I’m… what, on their radar now?” he asked. “A known… idiot with a channel?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe you’re on someone else’s radar.”

“Someone else,” he repeated. “There are levels to this?”

“You really did just think this was about clicks, huh,” she said.

He almost laughed.

“Yeah,” he said. “Until about… thirty seconds into that footage.”

They stood there, the mound between them.

“What do you want from me, June?” he asked finally. “You didn’t drag me out here just to give me a guilt trip.”

She looked at him steadily.

“I want you to decide what kind of storyteller you want to be,” she said. “You have an audience. They listen to you. They trust you more than they should. Use that. Not to hype fear. To… make space.”

“Make space for what?” he asked.

“For not knowing,” she said simply. “For wonder. For… respectful curiosity instead of poking a stick at the dark and laughing when it growls back.”

He thought of his own thumbnails. The red arrows. The fake shocked faces.

“I don’t know how to… pivot that,” he admitted.

“Start with this,” she said. “When people ask if your footage is real, don’t make it a binary. Tell them what you felt. The fear. The awe. The fact that you don’t have all the answers.”

“‘I don’t know’ isn’t exactly a viral tagline,” he pointed out.

“You’d be surprised,” she said. “People are tired. Tired of certainty. Tired of being screamed at by confident idiots. You give them someone who says, ‘I saw something and I’m still processing it,’ they might… breathe a little.”

He looked around the clearing.

“You talk like someone who’s been doing this a lot longer than I have,” he said.

She shrugged.

“Some of us didn’t start with cameras,” she said. “We started with… encounters. With the understanding that not everything you see belongs to you.”

He nodded slowly.

“You’re going to keep coming back here,” he said, more observation than question.

“Yes,” she said.

“To… talk to it?” he asked, nodding at the grave.

“To remember,” she said. “Because if we forget, we start acting like the world is small. And that’s when we become dangerous.”

Dangerous to them, he thought.

And then, uncomfortably: Dangerous to ourselves.

6. The New Video

He didn’t delete the original upload.

It was too late for that.

Instead, two days after his midnight walk with June, he posted another video.

The thumbnail was plain: a still from the clearing, the stone circle in soft focus. No arrows. No red circles.

The title was simple:

“About That Bigfoot Video (What I Didn’t Tell You)”

He sat in his living room, no creepy lighting, no dramatic music. Socks snored on the couch behind him.

“Hey, Backwoods crew,” he said. “It’s Logan. This is not the video I thought I’d be making this week.”

He took a breath.

“A lot of you have seen the clip from Black Hollow by now,” he went on. “Some of you think it’s fake. Some of you think it’s the smoking gun. Some of you just come for the comments, which… fair.”

He smiled briefly.

“I’m not here to argue with any of you,” he said. “I’m here to say something I haven’t said on this channel before, because honestly, I didn’t think I’d ever have to: I’m scared.”

He let that hang.

“When I started Backwoods Truthers,” he said, “it was mostly for fun. We faked stuff. Everyone knew it. We all winked at each other through the screen. Lately, though… things have been different. Not just with me. With a lot of people. More sightings. More weirdness. More stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into ‘lol that’s obviously your buddy in a mask.’”

He glanced off-camera, remembering the massive silhouette stepping into the path.

“What I filmed that night…” He shook his head. “I don’t know what it was. It fits every Bigfoot description you’ve ever heard, sure. But being there, in that moment, camera in hand, dog at my feet, hearing it… it was more than that. It was like… watching the forest grow eyes.”

He took another breath.

“I met someone after I posted the video,” he said. “Someone who saw something similar. Someone who asked me a question I want to pass on to you: What happens if we actually get the proof we’ve been asking for?”

He leaned forward.

“I mean that,” he said. “Really think about it. What happens if tomorrow, we get a body on a slab, clear as day: ‘Here’s Bigfoot.’ Does that make the world better? Safer? Do we suddenly respect the woods more? Or do we swarm them with guns and cameras and money?”

He let the silence stretch.

“I went back to Black Hollow,” he said softly. “I saw something I’m not going to show you. Not because I want to hoard the truth, but because sometimes… the kindest thing you can do with the truth is hold it gently instead of throwing it on a viral bonfire.”

He saw the comment section in his mind, already warming up.

“You don’t have to agree with me,” he said. “You can call me a sellout, a coward, whatever. But here’s where I’m at: I’m still going into the woods. I’m still pointing cameras at the dark. But from now on, I’m not doing it to prove that I’m right or that monsters are real. I’m doing it to… listen.”

He smiled, wry.

“That might sound woo-woo,” he admitted. “I don’t care. Something is happening. The line between ‘normal’ and ‘weird’ is getting thinner. We can either crash that line with both fists or we can… approach it like a neighbor’s fence. Maybe ring the bell before we climb over.”

He paused, then added:

“If you’re here for easy answers, I don’t have them. If you’re here for someone to scream ‘FAKE!’ or ‘100% CONFIRMED REAL!’ every week, I might not be your guy anymore. If you’re here because you’ve seen stuff you can’t explain and you don’t know what to do with that… pull up a chair.”

He reached down and scratched Socks’ head.

“The woods are bigger than we think,” he said. “So are the things in them. So are we. Let’s try not to make everything smaller just because we’re scared.”

He ended the video there.

No outro music. No “smash that like button.”

He hit upload and sat back.

7. The Reactions

The comments were… mixed.

“Wow, you got soft.”

“So you admit it was fake and now you’re pivoting to philosophy?”

“Dude I came here because my grandma saw something in 1978 and has been terrified for 40 years. Hearing you say ‘I don’t know’ actually made me feel less crazy.”

“New era Logan is the only Logan I’m subbed to now.”

“This is the first time I’ve heard a cryptid channel talk about not exploiting the thing they’re chasing. Respect.”

He lost subscribers.

He gained others.

His email filled again.

This time, most of the messages weren’t from brands or TV producers.

They were from people with shaky hands and long, rambling stories.

From a woman who’d seen something step over her backyard fence when she was seven and had never told anyone.

From a park ranger who’d heard “whoops” in a canyon where no one else was supposed to be.

From a trucker who’d seen a tall, hairy shape at the edge of his headlights on a mountain road at 3 a.m. and had never been able to shake the look in its eyes.

“I don’t need you to believe me,” many of them wrote. “I just needed to tell someone who might not laugh.”

He read every one.

He replied to as many as he could.

He printed a few and put them in a shoebox, on top of a handwritten note that read:

REMEMBER WHAT YOU OWE THE WOODS.

He still went out with his camera.

He still titled some videos more dramatically than they deserved. The algorithm was still the algorithm.

But there was a difference now, subtle but real.

He stopped faking things.

He started filming more trees than shadows.

He let the silences stay in.

Sometimes, he turned the camera on himself in the middle of the woods and just… sat there, breathing, listening, letting his audience see how small he looked against the trunks.

Those videos never went truly viral.

But they did something stranger.

They lingered.

People came back months later and commented, “I don’t know why this calms me,” and “This made me go outside for the first time in a while,” and “For some reason I cried watching this and I don’t know why.”

He still watched the Black Hollow footage sometimes.

Alone, late at night, laptop glow washing his face.

The figure still walked into frame, massive, impossible, real.

He still didn’t know exactly what he’d filmed.

He probably never would.

But sometimes, when the clip paused on that one frame—shoulders hunched, head turning, eyes reflecting infrared—he thought he saw something in the way it looked toward the camera.

Not animal fear.

Not predatory hunger.

Recognition.

And, absurdly, a kind of weary patience.

As if it were saying, Fine. You’ve seen me. Now what are you going to do with that?

8. What You Haven’t Seen

Months later, his Black Hollow video appeared in a compilation on a major streaming platform: “The Newest Bigfoot Footage YOU Haven’t Seen!” complete with dramatic music and a narrator who called him “an intrepid explorer of the unknown.”

He laughed at that.

They showed the clip three times. Once at full speed, once slowed down, once with a red circle and an “enhanced” zoom that somehow made it look more fake.

They never mentioned June.

They never mentioned the grave hidden in the trees, where stones slowly settled deeper into the earth.

They never mentioned the question he’d started asking himself, and his viewers, every time the word “proof” came up:

“Proof… for what?”

On a damp spring evening, as mist curled low between the trunks, Logan went back to the clearing.

He came without a camera.

Socks trotted beside him, older now, moving a little slower.

The mound was there, stones moss-touched, a few ferns growing from cracks.

He stood in the quiet.

“Hey,” he said softly. “It’s Logan. The idiot with the camera.”

He felt foolish for a moment.

Then, faintly, from somewhere deeper in the woods, he heard it.

A low, distant whoop.

Not close. Not threatening.

Just… present.

He smiled.

“I’m trying,” he said. “To do this right. Probably screwing it up. But… I’m trying.”

The trees swayed.

A breeze brushed his face, smelling of wet bark and leaves.

He could have sworn, just for an instant, that it felt like a hand resting briefly on his shoulder.

Then it was gone.

He walked back to the trail, dog at his side, mind already turning over a new video idea—not about monsters, but about how it feels to stand in a place where something impossible once breathed.

He knew most people would click away after thirty seconds.

That was okay.

If even a few stayed, if even a handful heard the wind in his mic and thought, Maybe the world is bigger than I’ve been told, that was enough.

After all, he thought, the newest Bigfoot footage you haven’t seen isn’t always on a screen.

Sometimes, it’s in the space between what you can explain and what you’re willing to respect.

And that, he was beginning to realize, was where the real story lived.