West Virginia Timberman Befriends Sasquatch Who Fathered His Daughter

# A West Virginia Timberman, Five Missing Years, and the Father Who Came Down From the Trees There's a story floating around YouTube right now that stopped me in my tracks, and I think anyone who has spent any time in Bigfoot country needs to hear it. It's a first-person account from a man named Earl Hall, a 68-year-old retired timberman who has lived his entire life within 12 miles of the Marlinton courthouse in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Three generations of Hall men have cut timber in those mountains, and Earl has a story to tell that he says his daughter finally gave him permission to share. The short version goes like this: Earl's wife Loretta walked out their back door on the evening of July 11, 1996, told him she was going up the ridge to clear her head before dinner, and did not come back for five years, four months, and nineteen days. She returned on November 30, 2001, with a three-year-old girl on her hip. The child's father, Earl says plainly, was not any man alive in the state of West Virginia. That child, Ruby, is now 28 years old. She splits her time roughly into thirds, according to Earl. A third of her life is spent with her father's people in country Earl himself has never walked. A third is spent in a cabin she built with her own hands on the back forty of Earl's property. And a third is spent helping her mother, who came back to that house in 2001 and has never fully left the property since, though where exactly she sleeps some nights is, in Earl's words, "not a question I have ever felt the need to ask her." The encounter Earl describes at the top of his pasture on an April morning in 2002 is the kind of scene that, if you have ever spent time in Sasquatch country, you can almost feel in your bones. He heard a single low pulse from the trees behind his hay barn, the kind that shakes the coffee in your cup. His old Labrador went rigid, hackles up, nose pressed against the back door. Earl grabbed the loaded shotgun he had kept above his kitchen door for two years and stepped out onto his back porch. Standing 140 yards away in the wet grass was the largest living thing he had ever laid eyes on in 29 years of running timber crews in the Monongahela National Forest. Seven and a half feet tall. Broad through the shoulders like the trunk of a full-grown red oak. Dark chestnut hair silvered along the shoulders. Long heavy arms hanging at his sides. Deep-set eyes fixed on Earl and on the black barrel of the shotgun. And he was not going to move first. Earl had a clean shot. His wife and the child she had brought home five months earlier were asleep upstairs. Every part of his Timberman's brain was telling him the figure in the pasture was a threat. Every part of him that had lived through Loretta's five-year absence and her strange return was telling him the opposite. He broke the shotgun open, ejected the two shells into his palm, and set them and the empty gun on the porch rail where the figure could see them plainly. Then he raised his empty right hand into the wet April air and held it there for a count of ten. The figure raised his own right hand. Held it for the same count. Lowered it. And waited, patient and still, while Earl put on his boots and walked those 140 yards to meet, for the first time on foot and in full daylight, the father of his daughter. Earl says he has met that being exactly seven times in the 25 years since Loretta walked back through his kitchen door. The most recent visit happened just last month, when the being came down out of the trees one evening and stood at the edge of the yard until Earl saw him and understood what the visit was for: a blessing, given in the only way he had of giving it, on the telling of this story. What makes the account land so hard is the backstory Earl lays out about Loretta. The two met at the community college in Beckley in 1979, married in 1980, and bought Earl's grandfather's old place in 1983, 48 acres of hillside backing directly onto the Monongahela National Forest at the top of the ridge behind the barn. They tried for a family for ten years. Loretta finally got pregnant in the autumn of 1989, and in the summer of 1990 she gave birth at Davis Memorial Hospital in Elkins to a baby girl they named Grace. The cord had wrapped around her neck. Grace was stillborn at 38 weeks. They buried her in the family plot behind the Methodist Church in Hillsboro, next to Earl's father, under a small white stone with the words *beloved daughter* carved above the one date. Loretta never came back from that grief in the way the books said she was supposed to. She went quiet in a way that, after about a year, stopped feeling like grief and started feeling like a change in the shape of her. She would sit at the kitchen table for two hours without speaking. She would come home from teaching at Green Bank Elementary, put on her boots, walk into the woods, and come back at dusk with wet hair and quiet eyes. By 1994 the walks were stretching to 12 or 13 hours on a Saturday, and she was keeping a small canvas pack in the mudroom with a jar of water, some jerky, and a wool blanket rolled into the bottom. Loretta had grown up wandering the Cranberry back country with her Uncle Vernell, a Forest Service trail hand who knew that wilderness the way most men know their own backyards. By the time she was 15 she could name every tree in the Monongahela by leaf and bark, find water in a dry summer by reading the tilt of the ferns, and sit still in a rhododendron thicket for six hours watching a black bear sow raise her cubs. Her uncle used to say she had the same quality as a good hound dog, that she paid attention with her whole self and did not waste any of it on things that did not matter. That kind of woods-sense, the kind that gets passed down through families in Appalachian hollows, is part of why stories like this one carry weight in Sasquatch research circles. West Virginia has a long, quiet history of Bigfoot encounters, particularly in the high country of Pocahontas, Greenbrier, and Randolph counties, and the Cranberry Wilderness in particular has been a hot zone for decades. The combination of thick rhododendron, old-growth spruce, and remote hollows makes it exactly the kind of place where a person could disappear into the deep woods and come back changed, if they came back at all. Earl's story is not a sighting report in the usual sense. It is not a blurry trail-cam clip or a set of casts. It is something rarer and, depending on how you receive it, either more or less credible: a first-person account of a peaceful, repeated, multi-decade relationship between a human family and a Sasquatch family, including a child who is said to be half of each. Earl says he is telling it now because Ruby asked him to, because the world is starting to guess about these beings anyway, and because if the story is not told straight, someone else will tell it crooked. It is worth your time. Find the video, settle in, and listen to a man who has spent his whole life in the woods describe the morning he walked 140 yards of his own pasture to shake, in his own way, the hand of his daughter's father.