Sasquatch

All right. '93.

‐ Um‐‐

How old were you again?

‐ Twenty‐three. I was 23 years old. Yeah.

And I was visiting a good buddy

working on a cannabis farm up in Northern California.

The drive up 101 to Mendocino,

I remember it was really foggy,

and it was raining hard.

And it would continue to rain almost non‐stop

for my entire time in Mendocino.

Like, just constant hard driving cold rain.

As soon as you cross the line into Mendocino County

out of wine country,

the trees are just huge.

They're so tall that the canopy, it cuts out the daylight.

I got to the town of Branscomb.

and my friend came and met me in a jacked‐up 4‐by‐4 truck.

It was the first time I had been on the back roads.

Every property there is gated.

Most of the properties had posted "no trespassing" for a reason.

You know, locked gate after locked gate, the roads get smaller and gnarlier

until we finally get to the cannabis farm.

And my friend had set up shop

and was laying his head in sort of an outbuilding.

It had no heat, no electricity, no water, nothing like that.

The next day, I put in a little work on the farm.

And interacting with other workers on the farm,

they were all

telling stories about how there was this Sasquatch running around,

that was threatening people in backwoods cannabis patches.

They're, like, growling at people from the tree line

and bluff charging.

Running at somebody, then skittering off into the distance,

or hurling rocks, like big rocks just come chunking down

from ridge lines.

And I was like, are these people fucking with me?

Like, is the, like, fuck with the outsider new guy,

trying to scare me?

Accounts varied. Sometimes it was the same Sasquatch.

Sometimes it was a tribe of Sasquatch that were like all riled up

because they were starting to put cannabis farms too far out

in Bigfoot territory.

And that's when things got even a little weirder.

The second night I'm there,

the guy that owns the place, he was rolling joints.

He got a phone call.

The conversation was a little tense.

I mean, I remember him saying like, "You guys on a run?

Have you got everything sorted?"

And then he was like, "Okay. Okay."

And like, "All right, but keep him mellow.

You gotta keep him mellow."

About 15, 20 minutes later,

I see headlights of a truck outside.

These two guys come in, they're soaked,

they're muddy,

and one of them was... talking a mile a minute.

His eyes were like the eyes of a panicked horse,

you know, they're rolling around.

I was sketched out enough by this guy's presence

that I was just kinda trying to become one with the couch.

The owner of the farm is trying to calm him down.

He's like, just be cool, be cool, be cool.

And his voice got up, and he said,

"No, it wasn't a fucking rip‐off.

"All the weed's still there.

"It's ripped up, it's all over the place, but all the weed's still there.

This wasn't a rip."

The guy that owned the farm... said,

"You sure they're dead?"

He's like, "Are you fucking not listening to me?

"Yes, I'm sure they're dead.

They're mangled."

And then the other guy that was with him was like, "Yeah, man, they're mangled."

And the guy was like repeating over and over.

He was like, "We have to warn everybody. We have to warn everybody."

He believed he had just seen three bodies

dead, mangled, torn to pieces.

He started to say something loud

and was shushed.

And then he said, "I'm telling you, man,

a Bigfoot killed those guys."

It was just before dusk,

uh, we heard this screaming cry.

And I've heard every animal that lives in the locality,

and it wasn't any of those.

‐ Everything was just dead quiet afterwards.

It made the hair crawl on the back of your neck.

The odor of this animal

after I rolled the window down

was so offensive that I couldn't remain there any longer.

Now, this thing truly scared me.

‐ This is the sign that the creature struck,

leaving these indentations, or scratch marks.

‐ Many sightings have revealed this creature to be

between seven to nine feet tall

and 600 to 900 pounds.

He had the most knowing look on his face.

His eyes‐‐

I remember the eyes I think more than anything else.

‐ The way it went up the mountain, the way everybody describes Bigfoot,

that's the only thing I can think it was,

because a bear just don't do things like that.

I looked at that mountain,

I knew I didn't want to be around it.

I knew something was there or something was watching me.

I don't think

that I had ever told anybody that story.

I mean, I got plenty of stories,

that like, sitting around, like, shooting the shit with people.

Like, I'll, I'll lay out there things that I experienced.

I don't think‐‐ That's never been in my repertoire

of, like, stories that you share about,

well, here's a crazy fucking thing that happened to me.

It just seems unbelievable.

I wasn't even sure at first if I was completely misremembering this.

So, square one, I looked at missing persons reports.

Nothing matched.

There was no, like, three males

that went missing that were last seen

anywhere in either of those counties,

like, in the right timeframe.

As an investigative journalist,

I believe that the truth is never told in the nine‐to‐five hours.

I realized pretty early on in my career that I had a knack

for immersing myself

in different worlds.

Embedding with Chicano street gangs on both sides of a turf war,

running dope with drug mules,

staying up for 72 hours with crystal meth heads,

going undercover as a neo‐Nazi skinhead, that kind of shit.

Those are kind of stories I went after and how I went after them.

Stalking monsters was a recurring theme for me.

If I decided you were a monster, I was coming for you,

and nothing was gonna turn me aside.

You were done.

I've borne witness to a lot of crazy fucking stories.

But the one about a Sasquatch wasting three dudes in dope country

is bar none the craziest, all right.

And for a quarter‐century and then some, I had just been carrying it with me,

keeping it close.

It's not in my nature to just set it down and walk away and forget about it.

Because, sure, maybe it's just a ghost story,

maybe there's nothing to it.

Or maybe somebody got away with murder.

And maybe I can find out who and how and why.

Yeah. Nobody‐‐ Nobody ever talked about it.

We never talked about it.

It's like what, 26 years ago?

I reached out to my buddy

who, uh, had the same experience that I did in the cabin that night.

I was trying to figure out whether my memories were

accurate, at all.

Did you hear them say Bigfoot? Yeah.

'Cause it was loud.

And that's when I heard about the bodies.

Right? You know, like the way they were all torn up.

‐ I'm like, okay, he remembers too, you know.

At the time, I was scared shitless.

Man, I was scared shitless the whole time I was up there.

I wanted to see

if he knew how to get a hold of the guy that owned the farm.

But he's not telling me shit about how to get a hold of the guy,

except he gave me a couple names that I already had

of people that might have his number.

I'll bet you went into town when you left the next day or whatever

and started asking questions.

Fuck, no, I didn't want any part of that.

So why do you want to do it now?

He's like, why are you doing this?

You know. It set me back on my heels for a minute.

Just like, "Whoa, why am I doing this?"

Because it sounds ridiculous on the face of it.

A Bigfoot... murdered three guys... on a dope farm.

But... once you peel back the first layer of that

and you get the first glimpse of the truth

behind that crazy fucking story,

it's hard not to just keep peeling back layers

to try and really get at it.

The region's called the Emerald Triangle

because there's three counties:

Trinity, Humboldt, and Mendocino County.

All three counties are famous worldwide

for producing very high‐grade bright green cannabis plants.

It's only once you're in

the deep redwoods in Mendocino County or Humboldt County

that this story of Sasquatch, this legend

that has been passed down,

starting with the indigenous people of the region for hundreds of years,

starts to feel like less of a frivolous legend.

Those woods are a spooky place,

and it does feel, in those woods, like you're being watched.

Okay? You find yourself twitching a little bit.

There's a dark history to this place.

A lot of blood's been spilled beneath those redwood trees

and going back at least as far as the 1860s

with the California Gold Rush,

you know, you got hordes of white frontiersmen and plunderers