British Columbia Widow Shares Two-Year Bigfoot Bond Story
Posted Friday, August 07, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
There's a video that recently crossed my path that I can't stop thinking about, and if you have any interest in long-term Sasquatch encounters, you're going to want to carve out some time for this one.
The footage features a 71-year-old woman recounting, in her own words, what she describes as a two-year relationship with a young Sasquatch that took up residence in her barn on a remote property south of Balfour, British Columbia, on the west arm of Kootenay Lake. The Selkirk Mountains rise right behind her back fence. Her husband, Gordon, a provincial surveyor, had passed away in the spring of 1976 from a cerebral aneurysm. She had no children. She had fifteen acres, a woodlot, a barn, and a great deal of silence.
What happened in the winter of 1980 is the heart of the story, and she is very deliberate about her language. She isn't talking about feeding a stray or accidentally habituating wildlife. She uses the word "relationship," and she means it. She describes a companionship that unfolded across years, conducted in a different kind of silence than the one she shared with her late husband, and across a different kind of distance.
What makes this testimony stand out from the usual encounter reports is the duration. Two years is not a fleeting glimpse through a windshield or a quick set of tracks found along a game trail. This is someone describing daily coexistence with a young Sasquatch over a span long enough to constitute a real bond. And after it left, she says it began leaving things on her porch. The video doesn't spoil what those items were, and honestly, that's the part that kept me leaning in.
She told exactly two people in her entire life. The first was her doctor in Nelson, a Dr. Franklin Coates, who listened to the full account and quietly said he believed her. The second was her niece Patty, who drove up from Castlegar and cried, not from fear, but from grief for a world she hadn't known existed. That detail alone tells you something about the weight of what this woman carried alone for decades.
The Kootenay region is no stranger to Sasquatch reports. The interior wet belt of British Columbia, particularly the Selkirks and the surrounding drainages, has produced a steady stream of sightings for as long as records have been kept. The dense old-growth forest, the steep terrain, the abundance of water, and the relative remoteness all create the kind of habitat that researchers consider ideal. What this account adds is something rarely captured in the literature: the perspective of someone who wasn't looking for a Sasquatch, wasn't out investigating, and wasn't trying to prove anything. She was a retired schoolteacher living alone on her late husband's land, and something came into her life at a moment when she was most open to receiving it.
The video is worth your time. The narrator's voice is steady, measured, and remarkably unguarded. She talks about Gordon, about learning to stack her own firewood and reset fence posts, about the women from the Blewett school who brought food through that first winter, and about the older sawmill operator named Alf Sorenson who showed up with a load of split wood and never sent a bill. The way she weaves the ordinary details of rural Kootenay life into the extraordinary thing that happened in her barn is what gives the story its power. It doesn't read like a performance. It reads like memory.
Watch the video. Sit with it. And if you've ever had an encounter that you told almost no one about, you'll understand exactly why this woman waited this long to speak.