Former Nurse Recalls 1964 Bigfoot Sightings at Family Homestead

There's something about a story told by someone who lived it that hits differently than any secondhand account ever could. A video recently surfaced on YouTube from the channel A Friend In The Pines featuring a 79-year-old retired nurse named Harriet Voss, and what she has to share is the kind of testimony that stays with you long after the screen goes dark. Harriet spent 31 years working as a licensed practical nurse out of the Dease Lake Nursing Station in the Northwest of British Columbia. Before that, she lived with her father Walter Voss on a homestead roughly 12 miles northeast of Telegraph Creek, where her father ran a trapline. It's rugged, isolated country, the kind of place where the wilderness doesn't politely wait at the edge of your property line. It just shows up. The story begins in the late autumn of 1964. Harriet was 26 at the time, unmarried, sharing a four-room cabin with her father and a 15-year-old liver and white pointer named Goose, who was described as the most unflappable dog imaginable. Nothing startled this animal, not bears, not a bull moose in rut, nothing. That summer, Walter had ventured farther east than usual, following a creek recommended by his trapping partner, an older Tarlton man named Philip Knowl. He came back in August with a decent catch and a quiet that Harriet noticed but didn't comment on. Her father wasn't a man who welcomed observations about his interior weather. Then, in the first week of November, after the snow had settled in, Walter finally spoke. He told Harriet something was using the east lean-to. Not a bear, he clarified, because bears don't leave things behind. This one left a grouse, hung on the hook where he kept his snares, neck broken the same way he would have broken it. Harriet suggested it might be someone running Philip's old ground. Her father shook his head. He'd checked three times. No boot prints, no moccasin prints. And the prints he found didn't belong to anything he recognized in 50-plus years of working that country. Three weeks later, in the last days of November, the first gift appeared at their own home. Harriet found it before her father did. A haunch of moose meat, roughly 20 pounds, from a young animal by the look of the fat. The leg had been separated at the joint cleanly, no wrapping, no blood on the step, arranged the way you might set a dish down in front of someone you were trying not to wake. Goose sniffed it and sat down beside it with mild interest but no alarm. What happened next is what makes this account stand out from so many others. Walter had already been paying attention for months. He had noticed a pattern. When the porch light was on, nothing appeared. When it was off, gifts would be left. Two spruce hens on the gate post one morning. A moose haunch on the porch step another. Harriet realized, from two data points and no other evidence, that her father had been quietly tracking this behavior since August, three months, without saying a word to her. When she asked if he had seen anything, he was quiet for long enough that she knew the answer before he spoke. Once, briefly, at the edge of the yard near the wood pile. The night was clear and there was enough moon. His description was spare and careful: very large, upright, not in any manner he needed to explain further. The discussion cuts off there, mid-sentence, mid-thought, which is its own kind of haunting. Harriet Voss is still speaking, still trying to finish what she started, and the wait for the rest of her story feels almost unbearable. What strikes me most about this account is the behavior being described. This isn't a fleeting sighting or a distant glimpse through trees. This is a sustained, months-long interaction with a resident entity that understood the rhythms of the household, knew when the lights were on, knew when the dog was sleeping on the step, and adjusted its behavior accordingly. The careful placement of meat, the clean breaks, the deliberate avoidance of disturbance. These are not the actions of a mindless creature. These are the actions of someone who knows they are being watched and is trying to communicate. For anyone who has spent time in the remote country of northern British Columbia, none of this is as far-fetched as mainstream science would have you believe. The Telegraph Creek area sits in a vast stretch of wilderness that includes the Stikine region, one of the most rugged and least-traveled landscapes in North America. The Tahltan people have lived in this territory for thousands of years and have their own rich oral traditions about the large, hairy beings who walk the mountains. Harriet's account fits within a much larger tapestry of Indigenous and settler testimony from this exact region. The video is worth every minute of your time. Harriet's voice, her precision, her refusal to embellish, and her insistence on speaking plainly all carry the weight of someone who has spent most of her life wishing she could forget what she knows. The fact that she is finally speaking, at 79, after her sister's passing released her from a long-held promise, adds a layer of poignancy that no fictional account could ever replicate. Go find this one. Sit with it. And pay attention to what isn't said as much as what is.