Mysterious Bigfoot Videotape Arrives at Reporter's Desk

There's a piece of footage floating around out there right now that has people buzzing, and honestly, it gave me chills the moment I started watching the breakdown of it. Six seconds. That's all it is. Six seconds of tape that has apparently been sitting in a cardboard box under a reporter's bed for the rest of his life, and the story behind it is the kind of thing that makes you sit up a little straighter in your chair. The footage itself is what makes this so compelling. We're talking about a close-up shot of a Sasquatch, standing over seven feet tall, staring directly into the camera lens. And here's the part that has everyone talking — the face is strikingly human. Not ape-like. Not the kind of creature you might expect from grainy, distant footage. This one has a heavy brow ridge, a broad nose, and a wide, flat face with no muzzle at all. The dark rust-brown hair fades to charcoal along the cheek, and the skin looks weathered, gray-brown, with a pale scar under one eye and a torn notch in the left ear. The lens is so close that whoever was holding the camera had to have been within arm's reach of the subject. And then, in that haunting final moment, the Sasquatch blinks once, slowly, turns away, and walks out of frame past a branch hung with pale lichen. Gone. Just empty forest after that. The story behind how this footage came to light is almost as wild as the footage itself. Back in September 2003, a 34-year-old features reporter named Milo Sandoval, working for a struggling daily newspaper in the Puget Sound region, received a padded envelope with no return address and a Darington, Washington postmark. Inside was a single video cassette and no note. When he played it, he watched it about 40 times that first night. What got him wasn't the size — it was the eye. White around the iris, just like a person's, and it followed the lens the way a man watches a stranger who just walked into his kitchen. Now, here's where things get really strange. Sandoval showed the tape to a photo technician, a retired wildlife biologist, and his editor. None of them called it fake. None of them asked for a copy. When he started calling Darington — the diner, the church, the feed store, the town hall, the motel — every single one of them hung up on him. And they all hung up at the exact same moment: when he said the word "tape." He hadn't even told them what was on it yet. His editor, Lorraine Cole, told him small mountain towns keep their business to themselves and that a reporter with a camcorder would get nothing but closed doors. She gave him five days and a warning that the paper wouldn't pay for his motel. He took the five days. What happened in those five days is the kind of thing that sounds made up, but apparently it's all documented in seven spiral notebooks Sandoval kept for the rest of his life. He drove into Darington, a logging town of roughly 1,000 people sitting under the bulk of White Horse Mountain. The mills had been shrinking for a decade. Main Street held a diner, a hardware store, a feed store, two churches, and a motel with a red vacancy sign that never seemed to go dark. He set the camcorder on the diner counter and played the six seconds for the waitress. She watched the whole thing, said nothing, looked at the door, and within a minute, every customer in the place had left without finishing their food. Eggs going cold. Coffee still steaming in a dozen cups. The waitress turned the sign to closed, locked the door, and told him the coffee was on the house. She told him the town didn't talk about the tape and that he'd be wise to finish his cup and drive home. The pattern repeated everywhere he went. At the feed store, a man didn't even wait for the six seconds to finish — he put his hand over the little screen and asked Sandoval to turn it off. The motel owner, a woman named Dolores Pratt, took two nights of cash in advance before he'd even asked for a room and told him checkout was eight sharp. But there were cracks in the wall. At dusk on his first night, a boy of about 12 stopped his bicycle at the curb across from the motel. The boy didn't look at him. In a flat, low voice, he said this wasn't the first tape. He said his grandfather had put the last one in a wood stove in 1988. Then he pedaled away. Sandoval wrote 1988 in his notebook and underlined it twice. The photo technician back at the desk had spent the night on the tape and reported something that only deepened the mystery. The cassette was professional-grade stock, the kind they'd only ever seen in broadcast cameras. The picture was sharp to the last strand of hair, with a depth of field so shallow that the ear stood crisp while the forest behind it melted. No amateur camera in 2003 produced an image like that. Whoever shot it owned gear worth more than most houses in Darington — or had access to it — in a town where a meal job paid $12 an hour. That was a strange kind of person to hide. The only person who would actually watch the tape with him was a 79-year-old retired logger named Amos Pike, who lived on the last road before the river in a house with a wood pile taller than the porch roof. Amos watched the six seconds twice, then asked Sandoval to play it again and stop it on the ear. He looked at that ear for a long time. He said one word: "Notch." He said that was what the town had always called the Sasquatch since before Sandoval was born, and that Notch had gone gray. He said the eyes had never changed, but the face had. He said the old man was tired. Then he handed back the camcorder, told Sandoval not to come again, and went inside and shut the door. Sandoval returned to the porch the next morning at a quarter to seven, hoping for one more question. The screen door was banging in the wind. The front door stood open. On the stove, a pot of coffee was still warm to the touch. The boots that had stood on the porch the day before were gone. Amos Pike had left no more than an hour earlier. His truck sat in the yard with the keys on the seat. The bed was made. The woodshed was empty. The road in both directions was empty. At the foot of the porch steps lay a paper sack of apples with a wad of pale lichen tucked into the top. A folded sheet of notebook paper appeared under the windshield wiper of his truck at noon. A hand-drawn map, a road name, and the time: 2:00. Nothing signed. The map led him to a farmhouse at the end of a gravel road where a young man named Abel Hargrove waited at the gate with his arms crossed. Abel said his grandmother had asked for the reporter. Sandoval had five minutes in the house. Lucille Hargrove was 81 years old, small, with a walker beside her chair and a house that smelled of wood smoke and canned peaches. She didn't offer coffee. She asked to see the tape. She watched it once, leaning close to the little screen with her lips pressed together. Then she asked him to play it again and stop on the eye. She put one fingertip against the glass. She said "Notch" very quietly, the way a person says the name of someone who has been gone a long time and has just walked into the room. She told him about the winter of 1961. Her son Alvin was six years old. In the first week of February, a blizzard came down off the mountain, and the boy went out the back door after the family dog and did not come back. Her husband and eleven neighbors went into the storm with lanterns. She was told to stay in the house. The discussion cuts off there, but the story doesn't end with that visit. By the end of his five days in Darington, Sandoval had been struck across the ribs with a tire iron in a motel parking lot. Two men in a gray sedan had searched his room and taken one copy of the tape. And on Sunday night, September 14, he stood on a ridge above Darington beside a freshly dug grave surrounded by every person who had refused to speak to him. The grave had been dug for Notch. Everyone standing there had known about it for a long time. Some of them had been waiting for that night since the winter of '61. The Pacific Northwest has always been considered the heart of Sasquatch country, and Darington sits right in the kind of terrain these beings are said to favor — dense second-growth fir and cedar, mountains stepping up behind the town, rivers cutting through old logging roads. The Skagit Valley and the North Cascades have produced more credible sightings than almost anywhere else in North America, and the culture of secrecy in small mountain communities is something researchers have run into time and time again. People who live in these towns know things. They just don't talk about them. What makes this footage different from so many others is the intimacy of it. Six seconds, shot at arm's length, on professional-grade equipment, by someone who clearly didn't want to be identified. The eye contact. The slow blink. The way Notch turns and walks away like a person who has decided the conversation is over. And then the empty forest, with that branch hung with pale lichen swaying in the background. If you haven't seen this one yet, do yourself a favor and go track it down. The footage alone is worth the watch, but the story Sandoval pieced together in those five days — the diner emptying out, the boy on the bicycle, Amos Pike vanishing into thin air, Lucille Hargrove saying "Notch" like she was greeting an old friend — that's the kind of thing that stays with you. Six seconds. A whole town keeping a secret for decades. And a grave on a ridge that nobody wanted to talk about. Some stories don't need to be long to be unforgettable.