Maine Mill Worker Breaks 23-Year Silence on Bigfoot Family Encounter

There's something about a really good witness account that just hits different, and this one from The Deep Forest Tales channel stopped me in my tracks. It's the kind of story that reminds you why people keep going back into the woods looking for answers, because sometimes the answers come to them. The story comes from a woman named Sharon Mishad, a 56-year-old lifelong resident of Franklin County, Maine, who spent eleven years working at the Forester mill in Strong. If you've ever used a Strong toothpick, you've held a piece of her town's history in your hands. Strong was once the toothpick capital of the world, and that mill was the last of its kind in Maine. When it shut down in May of 2003, Sharon was one of 90 workers standing in a parking lot at 2 o'clock on a Monday afternoon with nothing but a sheetcake and the rest of the day stretching out in front of them. What happened next is the kind of detail that makes this story feel so real. Sharon didn't spiral into anything dramatic. She just got quiet. She put in applications, waited for callbacks that didn't come, and started feeling like a piece of furniture nobody had a use for. So she started walking. Out the door after her son Ryan got on the bus, up the road, into the woods, back by supper. By June she was logging five and six miles a day. By July she was heading into country she hadn't walked since she was a girl. And that's where her father's teachings come in, and honestly, this part of the story is worth paying attention to on its own. Sharon's father, Leon Pulan, was a woods boss for a small outfit out of Phillips, Maine, and he taught her three rules she never revised. The woods are a place you are let into, not a place you go into. Stillness is a tool, not a mood. And if a big thing ever comes at you in the woods, you do not run and you do not stand in its road. You step aside and let it have the road. He was talking about cow moose in September, which, if you've spent any time in Franklin County, you know is no joke. But rules like that live in the body, and they don't ask which situation you're in before they fire. On August 12th, 2003, Sharon was walking the old Senate Hall Road, a stretch of legal walking path that runs along the outside of a 4,000-acre watershed owned by a small water district. That piece of paper from the 1920s and a locked gate is the only reason that mountain has stayed as quiet as it has. She had her canteen, her sandwich, and a head full of arithmetic that wasn't working out. She wasn't paying attention. Then she heard water move behind her. She turned. Nothing. She kept walking. It followed her for a mile before she caught it. When she finally stopped and looked back, there it was, standing in the middle of that grown-over road about 40 feet behind her. No taller than a five-year-old child. Covered head to foot in pale tan hair. Watching her with a face she says she has never once been able to describe to anybody. She knew it was a baby the second she saw it. The same way you know an infant of any kind. Then the trees moved at the top of the clearing ahead of her, and she looked up, and three of them were standing along the treeline. Full grown. Not moving. Waiting. Sharon was 33 years old, out of work, alone, four miles from her truck, standing directly between a baby and its family. What happened in the next ten minutes, she says, rearranged the whole rest of her life. And she kept it to herself for 23 years. Now, the western Maine mountains have a long history when it comes to Sasquatch reports. Franklin County sits in that sweet spot of remote hardwood and softwood forest, plenty of water, plenty of cover, and very few people once you get off the main roads. The Sandy River valley and the High Peaks region have produced witness reports going back generations, and the kind of terrain Sharon describes, red spruce and balsam fir on the north slopes, sugar maple and yellow birch in the coves, hobble bush so thick along the seeps you go through it sideways, is exactly the kind of ground researchers pay attention to when they're mapping historical activity. What makes this account stand out is the detail. The baby followed her for a full mile before she noticed it, which suggests a level of tracking behavior that goes beyond simple curiosity. And the family waiting at the treeline, three adults, motionless, watching, that's protective behavior. That's a family unit responding to a young one wandering toward a human. The pale tan coloration on the infant is also consistent with regional reports from the Northeast, where witnesses often describe lighter coats on younger individuals compared to the darker adults. The discussion cuts off right as Sharon is about to describe what happened next, and honestly, that's the part that kept me up. She was standing in the middle of a standoff with no weapon, no backup, and a set of rules from her father that she was about to find out whether she really believed. This one is absolutely worth the listen. The Deep Forest Tales channel tells it in Sharon's voice, and the pacing is slow in that good way, the way a real person tells a real story when they've finally decided to let it out. Go watch it. Bring a soda. Her father would have approved of the stillness.