Big Foot Does Exist

My encounter happened about 38 years ago in a campground called "Skunk Hollow".  It's about 9 miles out of the town of McCloud situated in Northern California.  My family and I every summer would go and camp out at Skunk Hollow for two weeks out of the year in the month of August.  We discovered this campground due to close family friends that we had and grew up with who lived in McCloud.  At that time, they owned one side of the street in downtown McCloud. They lived above the Mercantile building that they owned and when you looked out of their full sized window, you could see Mount Shasta and it was like you could reach out and touch it.

From the very first time that we went camping there, I had met a man who lived there until the snow came, then he would move out into town until the snow died down.  He was like a real life Grizzly Adams!  Every time you talked to him he would have squirrels and chipmunks running up and down his legs and up on his shoulders and he had a name for each one of them.  His name was Virgil and he was well known by the forestry department.  So whenever there was an abandoned nest of squirrels or chipmunks, they would bring them to Virgil and he would take care of them.

One day a doe and its fawn were crossing the highway and the doe was hit by a car and killed.  So Virgil took in the fawn and fed it by bottle and named the fawn after his granddaughter Julie.  Now of course as my parents and I would listen to his stories, we of course wondered if they were really true or just the ramblings of an old man.

One early morning our dog was being teased by the squirrels and trying to catch them, but of course they always won, but our dog Sabrina had started barking and was pretty insistent about it.  So we looked over in the direction she was barking at and there stood a doe.  So my mom thought maybe this was Julie.,  The doe turned around to walk away when my mom started calling out "Julie, Julie".  Much to our amazement she turned around, responded to her name and came over to say hi.  

We remembered Virgil saying that she loved potato chips, so my mother got out the potato chips and hand fed Julie.  We even have pictures of it.  One where she is eating the potato chips and another where astoundingly Julie got closer to my mom and rested her head on my mom’s shoulder.

One day we woke up to hearing Virgil who had an unmistakable voice that carried and loudly at that.  Virgil was screaming at someone and so we all ran over to his camp site to see what was going on and there stood on its hind legs this huge black bear.  It was roaring at him and there he was this little old man in stature screaming and pointing his finger at this bear.  Given that Virgil lived there, he had a refrigerator outside.  Apparently, this bear had been knocking over his refrigerator and helping himself to the contents, which was generally a lot of fish.  

No matter how tall and scary this bear was, he was no match for Virgil.  With his fingers shaking his voice was yelling, "this is my refrigerator, my food, you go get your own".  Finally, the bear had had enough talking to, got down on all fours roared one last time and walked away.  Had we have not seen it, we never would have believed it.  From that day forward year after year, vacation after vacation, Virgil taught me everything about the forest that he knew.  

He would take me for walks along trails, teach me what the tracks of each animal looked like, what their fecal droppings looked like, what their dens and nests looked like, what the sounds of their calls were and would even take me to the meadows just before dust.  There was a bush that looked like it had pine needles on it like a tree only it was a bush.  Virgil would break off a branch and tie it around my neck like a necklace and the same for him.  He told me that it would kill the human scent.  There were three meadows on three different heights in that section of the forest which covered about 5 different campgrounds in total.  By getting to one right before dust, we would situate ourselves comfortably in the brush and sit quietly and wait as the animals of all kinds, one by one would come to graze and lay in the meadow.  It was awesome.

While Virgil taught me everything he knew, one day as we were walking along, he pointed over to a certain direction and told me to never go up that trail.  I of course being 12 wanted to know why and he would not tell me.  He was just very stern and adamite that I was not to go up that trail, that it was too dangerous for me.  So over the years, I went everywhere and whether or not Virgil was there, I was relatively safe.  He even taught me what to do if I encountered a deer, a bear, a fox, a mountain lion and so on.  

One day however, I was a little bored and I thought to myself that I was quite the expert, so I decided it was o.k. to go up that trail that he had forbidden me to go on.  So I started hiking up the trail and it all seemed just fine.  It wasn't too steep or treacherous, so I really didn't understand why Virgil was so against it.  Suddenly without warning I tripped and fell down.  I hurt my ankle a little but was more curious as to what I tripped over.  I looked around and didn't see a rock or anything, so I stood up and looked around some more. It was then that I realized I had fallen into a pot hole.  Only as I looked at it more closely, it was in the shape of a foot.  It even had toes.  

Virgil never taught me about an animal track that looked like this and from the size of it, it would have to be a pretty big animal and the shape of it was too human like.  So I looked next to it expecting to find another footprint but there wasn't one.  So I just dismissed it as some kind of fluke and continued on the trail.  Then all of the sudden there was another footprint but when I looked back at the first footprint and saw the distance it had to have been about 6 feet or so apart from each other.

I honestly didn't know what to think at this time, my curiosity was sure peaked enough that I wanted to continue to see if I could find more.  As I continued on and spotted another footprint but one that was going off the trail into the more brushy area, all of the sudden I heard this large snap, like a tree branch snapping but even louder than an average sized tree branch snapping or breaking and it startled me, so when I looked up and over into the direction I heard it come from, all of the sudden I found myself standing about 20 feet or so away from the most enormous sized hairy creature that I had ever known to exist.

The creature stood there staring at me.  It attempted to hide itself behind the tree it was standing by, but really with as enormous as the width of that tree was, it only hid about one third of the girth of his body and his head and neck towered above the lowest branch on the tree.  Apart from the shear enormousness of this creature, I was more intrigued with its face.  Its face was leathery weathered and skin like and its eyes were more human looking than animal looking.  

I was in total shock to say the least.  Whenever I have been in a situation of complete fear, I tend to just freeze.  I can't move.  I kept running through my mind everything that Virgil had taught me about what to do when I encountered any kind of animal but none of them was this creature.  When I could no longer think of things that Virgil had taught me I just kept thinking that this was the day that I was going to die and my family wouldn't even know where to find me because I had gone up a trail that I wasn't supposed to be on. I remember glancing down to the ground as I was taking in his entire body and stature and I saw a log, not a branch but a log snapped in half by the weight of this creature.  So all that ran through my mind at that moment was that he was going to just pick me up and snap me in half like that branch.

The entire encounter of the two of us just standing there staring at each other must have lasted about 5 minutes or more.  When finally, I guess he or it decided that I posed no threat to it, to say the least, so he turned his body around and briskly walked away with his head turned back looking at me the whole time.  There was a large clearing of trees that he walked through, and at the edge of the clearing was an even larger treed area that he just disappeared into.  

When I say that he briskly walked away, I don't mean that he ran, for him it was like an average stroll as his 6 to 8 inch long hair swayed back and forth and his stride was so big that it took literally maybe 30 seconds for him to cross this large clearing on into the treed area.  If I were to run through that same area, it would have taken me at least 5 minutes to make the kind of ground he made in only a matter of seconds.  

Once he was gone from sight, I could hear my heart pounding in my head and I finally came out of this frozen position and fell to my knees in absolute amazement that I survived this. I finally started to relax when it dawned on me that if there was him, how many others were there, and were they currently as close to me as he was.  I got really frightened again and just ran as fast as I could all the way back to camp.

When i got back to camp my parents could tell something was really wrong, they kept asking me questions and all I could do was breathe fast and cry, so I dropped to the ground and started drawing this foot, then I ran over to my dads tool box and grabbed his hammer and started pounding the ground down inside of the footprint.  I finally was able to speak and really fast I told them everything.  They didn't believe me, because I told them that I thought it was a bigfoot.  The town of McCloud and Mt. Shasta were no strangers to bigfoot storie.  In fact, it was said that they inhabited the mountain of Mt. Shasta itself.  That many people would see them going into and out of the mountain.

My parents had a radio going and they were listening to the news.  About a half hour later there was another sighting of bigfoot just 30 miles down the road of where we were, and in the direction that he had headed when he disappeared into the woods again.  So then my parents did believe that it must have been a bigfoot that I saw.   For me, I have no question about it.  The only thing that I question, is why he didn't kill me.  I'm glad to be alive, that is for sure.  

Renata Espanata