West Virginia Farmer's Wife Returns 8 Years Later With Bigfoot-Raised Daughter

A story surfaced recently on The Forest Sentinel YouTube channel that might just be one of the most extraordinary Bigfoot-adjacent tales ever put on record. A 70-year-old West Virginia man named Dewey Tacket shares what he claims is the true story of his wife Dorene, who vanished during Hurricane Fran in September 1996 — and returned eight years later carrying a daughter who had been raised by a Sasquatch in a remote mountain hollow. According to Dewey, he and Dorene married in 1979 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, on the same 80 acres his grandfather bought during the Depression. For 17 years, the couple wanted children, and none came. Then in August 1996, when Dorene was 38, she learned she was finally pregnant. The baby was due in March. Dorene was a seasoned ginseng hunter, carrying on a family tradition passed down by her father. Every September, she'd drive up the Highland Scenic Highway, park near Tea Creek, and disappear into the thick red spruce and rhododendron between the Williams River and the Cranberry — country so dense a dog couldn't push through it. Her ginseng patch was a family secret, rotated through three generations, and she never told Dewey exactly where it was. A sang patch, as he puts it, is like a will — you don't discuss it outside blood. On September 5, 1996, with Hurricane Fran barreling up from North Carolina, Dorene headed out early to beat the weather. That evening, the rain hit the mountains the way old-timers feared — not gradually, but all at once, like a hand laid over the whole sky. By 8 p.m., Dewey couldn't see the barn light from the kitchen window. By 10, he had his coat on. Then the phone rang. Sheriff Lumis told him a plow operator had found Dorene's tan Ford pickup sitting alone at a pull-off on the scenic highway, with water rising everywhere and nobody in it. What followed was a 23-day search involving the county, the Forest Service, volunteers from three counties, dogs, and a helicopter out of Elkins. On day nine, searchers found her cloth ginseng sack a mile and a half downstream of where her trail would have crossed a feeder branch — torn, with freshly dug roots still knotted into a corner. Two days later, her hoe turned up wedged in the rocks another half mile down. That was all they ever found. Sheriff Lumis sat at Dewey's kitchen table on the last day of September and said the word "drowned" very quietly. The Williams River in flood, he explained, doesn't give things back. Dewey mowed around her garden for eight years because he couldn't bring himself to plow it under. Her coat stayed on the hook by the door. He buried an empty box with her name on the stone because the county told him it would help him move along. It never helped. Then, on a warm night in June 2004, a soft knock came at his door after 10 p.m. — the kind of knock from someone trying not to wake the house. He opened it, and Dorene was standing on his porch. Gray at the temples, brown as saddle leather, wearing clothes stitched out of deerhide. Asleep against her shoulder was a little girl of seven with Dewey's mother's chin and eyes he would have known in any crowd on this earth because they were his. That child had been born in a mountain hollow with no road into it. She had never once seen another human being. What raised her alongside Dorene is the reason Dewey is telling this story. The full account, told in Dewey's own slow, careful words, is worth sitting with. The Forest Sentinel channel has the whole thing, and it's one of those videos that sticks with you long after it ends. Hit play when you've got the time — this one deserves your full attention.