Michigan siblings encounter small Bigfoot in Porcupine Mountains

A speech therapist from Michigan's Upper Peninsula may have just given one of the most fascinating witness accounts of the year, and what makes it stand out isn't just what she saw—it's how her professional training helped her understand it in real time. The story comes from a video posted by The Forest Sentinel and The Deep Forest Tales, where a woman named Megan Aaninan recounts an encounter that happened back in September 2024 during her annual backpacking trip with her brother Kyle through the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. Now, if you know anything about the Porkies, you know this is serious old-growth country—roughly 35,000 acres of virgin northern hardwood forest, some of those hemlocks and maples pushing 400 years old. It's the kind of place where sound does strange things and where you can walk for miles without seeing another soul. Megan and Kyle had been doing this trip together every September since 2015. No phones, no agenda, just three days of walking and silence. Their route took them up the Little Carp River corridor toward Mirror Lake, a stretch they've done before. But on the second morning, something was off. Kyle stopped at a wet seep crossing the trail and found a barefoot print in the mud—human-shaped, about seven inches long, five toes with the big toe in line rather than splayed out, and no shoe tread anywhere nearby. Then came the encounter that changes everything. Knee-deep in the Little Carp River, roughly 40 feet ahead of them, stood a small Sasquatch. Megan describes it as no taller than a first-grader, dark and soaked, holding wet stones in both hands. It tilted its head at them the way a toddler might when meeting a stranger, then made three rising vocalizations—and waited. As if expecting a response. Here's where Megan's background becomes crucial. For 14 years, she's worked as a speech-language pathologist, spending her days with children who struggle to communicate. She explains a concept called "joint attention"—that moment when a child realizes another person has a separate mind and can be communicated with intentionally. Before joint attention, a person is just a tool. After it, they're someone you can talk to. Megan says the small Sasquatch in that creek demonstrated exactly that behavior: making a sound, then waiting for an answer. Not threatening. Not fleeing. Communicating. And then there's the detail that will give anyone reading this chills. Somewhere in the hemlocks behind the juvenile, something much larger shifted its weight, and a branch came down. An adult was nearby, watching. The account also notes something subtle but significant: on their entire first day, they saw zero deer sign. No tracks, no browse marks, nothing. In a corridor that normally has deer everywhere in September. At the time, Megan chalked it up to wolf pressure—the UP has a recovered wolf population of around 700 animals. But in hindsight, she's not so sure. The Porkies have long been a hotspot for reports. The dense old-growth, the remote drainages, the Lake Superior influence—it all adds up to ideal Sasquatch habitat according to many researchers. Michigan's Upper Peninsula has a steady stream of sightings that never quite make national headlines, but the people who live there know. This is one of those stories that sticks with you. The full video goes into much more detail about the rest of the day, the brother's reaction, and how they made it out safely. Definitely worth setting aside some time to watch the whole thing over on The Forest Sentinel's channel. Stories like this remind us that the people having these encounters aren't always hunters or adrenaline seekers—sometimes they're trained observers whose professional expertise gives them a completely different lens on what's happening in front of them.