Bigfoot Spotted Crossing Family Farm Through Open North Gate

A first-person account from a grieving son who returned to his late father's farm in northeastern Washington has surfaced on YouTube, and it's one of the more unsettling Sasquatch encounter stories to cross my desk this month. The video, posted by the channel Watchtower Files, recounts what happened when Daniel Mercer, 36, came back to settle his father Owen's estate at Mercer Ridge Farm just 19 days after Owen's death at 69. What makes this story stand out isn't just the sighting itself, though the description is vivid. It's the buildup. Mercer describes arriving at the property, finding his father's pickup gone but its clean rectangle still visible on the gravel, and noticing how quickly an empty house begins to feel "supervised by its objects." There's a moment where he writes "We need to drain the garden line" on his legal pad, then crosses out "We" and replaces it with "I." That correction, he notes, "looked unnecessarily dark on the page." It's the kind of small, human detail that makes the rest of the story land harder. The encounter happens at night. Mercer is watching from a dark room when a figure emerges from the willows along Alder Creek and enters the hayfield below the house. He describes it crossing upright under a partial moon, with long arms moving beside a body "too broad to mistake for a late night walker." It doesn't angle toward the road, the barn, or his lighted kitchen window. It goes north, enters the old stock lane, and disappears behind the shelter belt. A few minutes later, the red gate at the far end shifts against its post. The chain draws straight. Metal gives one low complaint across the field. Here's where it gets interesting. Mercer had wrapped that chain and locked the gate himself that afternoon. The figure presses the gate once more, then stops. Its head turns along the cross fence that runs southwest from the opening, and it begins following that wire, each post bringing it farther from the gate and closer to the occupied house. The opening Mercer had secured was now carrying it toward him. The backstory is what elevates this from a simple sighting to something worth digging into. Owen had a habit of leaving the north gate open every winter, a practice documented in his barn office calendar with the note "north gate open till spring." Lena Ortiz, the 57-year-old caretaker who knew the family before Mercer could reach a gate latch, confirms this was deliberate. "He did not leave things open by accident," she tells him. The gate was part of the farm's infrastructure, a route to move cattle between the lower ground and the upper pasture without driving them through the yard. But Owen never explained why it had to stay open through winter when the cattle were moved south. Mercer finds tire marks near the gate, two chevron-shaped impressions in mud beyond the opening that had softened under frost and thaw. The discussion cuts off there, but the implication is clear: something with a wide stance had been using that entrance. What I appreciate about this account is how it resists easy answers. Mercer doesn't claim to know what he saw. He doesn't assign motive. He just lays out what crossed the field, what it did to the gate, and what he found afterward. The mystery of why his father kept that gate open for decades, and what Owen might have known, remains unresolved. It's the kind of story that reminds me why first-person Sasquatch encounters from rural Washington and the Pacific Northwest continue to carry weight. The terrain, the isolation, the generational knowledge of the land, it all fits a pattern researchers have been tracking for decades. If you're into slow-burn encounter stories with a strong sense of place and a few genuinely creepy details, this one's worth your time. The pacing is deliberate, the descriptions are grounded, and the moment where the figure shifts from the locked gate to following the fence line toward the house is the kind of thing that sticks with you. Check it out on the Watchtower Files channel and let me know what you think.