Oregon Man's Deathbed Confession: 43 Years Feeding a Young Bigfoot

There's a video floating around YouTube right now that stopped me in my tracks, and if you haven't seen it yet, you need to carve out some time for it. It's the kind of account that reminds you why this subject matters on a deeply human level, not just a cryptozoological one. The story centers on Virgil Straoud, a 76-year-old retired power line repairman from Tiller, Oregon, a tiny speck of a community deep in the Umpqua country where the pavement runs out and the timber takes over. Virgil lived alone on 40 acres for most of his adult life, kept to himself, and was known around town mostly as a quiet fixture. But in March of 2024, with only three weeks left to live, he started talking. And what came out wasn't the usual fog-and-morphine rambling you get from dying men. It was precise. Consistent. The kind of detail that doesn't drift over four nights of telling. A hospice nurse named Annette Coyle, who was working the night shift, started recording him on her phone. What she captured wasn't a confession of sin. It was a set of instructions, because Virgil wasn't afraid of dying. He was afraid of what would happen to a young Bigfoot he'd been feeding every single month for 43 years once he was gone. The story goes back to October 1981. Virgil was 33, walking a cut below the north ridge on his property where a logging outfit had been through. He smelled something wrong, heavy and wet and animal, and found a female Bigfoot lying under a slash pile. She'd been shot. Two clean holes in the chest, the work of someone who knew what they were doing. Poachers, probably, who got a look at what they'd actually killed and ran. Beside her was a young one. Small, dark, maybe the size of a big dog, hunched against its mother's body, keening. Not roaring. Keening. The sound a child makes. When Virgil stepped on a branch, that young one came off the body faster than anything he'd ever seen and broke his forearm like kindling. Both bones. He drove himself one-handed to the clinic in Canyonville and told them he fell off a pole. And then he did something that changed the next 43 years of his life. He went back with food. What follows in the video is one of the most remarkable long-term interaction accounts I've ever come across, and there have been a few whispered stories over the years about loggers, trappers, and hermits in the Pacific Northwest who left offerings and kept their mouths shut. Virgil's account fits that pattern but goes further. He describes learning the rules the hard way. No eye contact. Never walk toward it. Leave the food, turn your back, walk away slow, and never look over your shoulder. He wasn't taming it. He was teaching it, one weekend at a time, that this one human meant food and then leaving. By 1985, the deer on his property had accepted the young Bigfoot before Virgil had. He describes coming up at dawn and finding blacktail grazing 20 feet from it, ears soft, unbothered. The deer knew what Virgil was still learning: this wasn't a predator. It was part of the country. Virgil stood there with a sack of apples and understood he was the outsider on that hillside. The video also covers a near-disaster in 1989 when a timber survey crew came onto the north ridge and something stalked their camp for three days, screaming. One of the crew walked into the store in Tiller white as a bedsheet, saying the woods were haunted. Virgil doesn't spell out exactly how he handled it, but the implication is clear. He knew what was up there, and he knew what fear could make humans do. What makes this account hit so hard is Virgil's reason for finally talking. He wasn't looking for forgiveness. He was looking for a witness. He was terrified that when he died and the monthly truck runs stopped, the young Bigfoot would get hungry and afraid in the same winter, and people would hunt it through the timber, calling it a monster. And they would be wrong. The way everyone is always wrong about them. He kept a spiral notebook on the seat of his truck for 43 years. Dates, weights, weather. Every name is real, the video says. Every place is real. And somewhere above Tiller, on a slope where the deer graze easy and unafraid, something is waiting for the 15th of the month. For anyone who's spent time in Bigfoot country, especially the Umpqua and the drainages that feed into it, the geography Virgil describes will sound familiar. The slash piles, the north-facing benches, the blacktail wintering grounds. This is classic Sasquatch habitat, the kind of steep, broken, second-growth timber with old-growth remnants that researchers like Dr. Grover Krantz and the late Ron Morehead have talked about for decades. The Umpqua has had its share of reports going back to the early settlement era, and the area around Tiller sits right in the middle of a corridor that connects the Cascades to the coastal range. What Virgil describes, the long-term feeding relationship, also echoes other accounts from the region. There have been stories out of northern California and southern Oregon for years about rural residents who left food out and noticed their offerings were taken in ways no cougar or bear would manage. Apples disappearing overnight. Venison stripped clean. Tracks that didn't match anything in the field guides. Most of those people never talked. Virgil did, only because he was running out of time. The video is long, and the pacing is deliberate, almost hypnotic. Whoever put it together lets Virgil's words do the work, and the production leans into the weight of what he's saying rather than sensationalizing it. There's no thumping soundtrack trying to scare you. There's just an old man telling the truth because he couldn't take it into the ground alone. If you've ever wondered what a 43-year relationship between a human and a young Sasquatch might actually look like, told by the only human who ever had one, do yourself a favor and go find this one. It's the kind of account that stays with you. And if you're anywhere near the Umpqua this month, keep an eye on the north ridge. Just in case.