Aunt's 22-Year Sasquatch Friendship Revealed by Nephew

There's a story floating around YouTube right now that I can't stop thinking about, and if you've spent any time in the Sasquatch research community, it's going to hit you somewhere deep too. The video comes from the channel Weekly Terror, and it tells the tale of a woman named Lorine Maddox, who lived in Skamania County, Washington, right at the mouth of a drainage that climbs north into the Gifford Pinchot country. Lorine was born in 1951 and passed away in the winter of 2020, but not before sharing something extraordinary with her nephew across a dozen visits that last winter of her life. For 22 years, Lorine fed a Sasquatch at the bottom of that drainage. It started in the fall of 1972, just months after her father had died. She had taken over his deer feeding station behind the woodshed, mostly just to have a reason to walk out there. But the food started disappearing in patterns that didn't match any bear. The latch on the feed bin worked open and set back down. The lid lifted and replaced. Something was taking grain and closing up after itself. One gray morning, she stood at the bin turning that over in her head, the careful human wrongness of it, and she looked up. He was standing against the woodshed watching her. His shoulder cleared the eve of that shed, and the eve is nine feet up. She didn't run. She always said she should have, but she never could explain why she didn't, except that his face was not an animal's face. It was a wide, flat face with a heavy brow ridge and flat reflective eyes, looking at her the way you look at a problem you're deciding about. She stood very still and let him decide. After a while, he walked back up the draw toward the second ridge and was gone. Now here's where the story takes a turn that genuinely gave me chills. Lorine spent two decades with this Sasquatch. She learned the shape of what he would allow. He would come down to the station, take food, and sit at the edge of the trees. But he would not come past the shed toward the house. And more than that, he would not let her go up the draw. She tried following him in December of 1972, and again in February. Every single time, he was uphill of her before she understood he had moved, and he always faced the wrong way, out at the high country, not down at her. It took her 20 years to see it the other way around. He wasn't keeping her out of his territory. He was standing between her and something else entirely. And then there's the photograph. One photograph, taken in 1976 outside Stevenson in Skamania County. In it, Lorine is 25 years old, laughing, with her arms around a Sasquatch over seven feet tall. He's standing next to her the way a person stands next to a person. Far more Neanderthal than ape, with a heavy bony brow ridge, a broad prominent nose, a wide flat humanlike face with no muzzle at all. Dark rust brown hair shading to charcoal down the back. Weathered gray-brown skin. A torn notch in his left ear. And one enormous hand resting on her shoulder. Both of them looking at the camera. Both of them, by every account, looking happy. If that photograph is real, and the story around it holds up, it's the kind of evidence that researchers have been chasing for decades. The story also touches on something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Skamania County passed an actual ordinance in 1969 making it a crime to kill a Sasquatch. Three years before Lorine ever met hers. People outside the county laughed about it for decades, but the people who lived in that drainage voted for it. They looked at the question of whether something big was living up there and decided the safest thing was to make it illegal to shoot. That ordinance is still on the books today, by the way, with penalties of up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. It's the only law of its kind in North America, and it tells you everything you need to know about how the folks closest to those mountains felt about what was walking around in them. But the part that really got me, the part Lorine circled for the rest of her life, is what she came to believe about what he was actually doing on that ridge. She didn't think the Sasquatch was the strange thing in those mountains. She thought he was the thing standing between her and the strange thing. She thought he was a wall. And she went to her grave certain that everything people report out of country like that, the screams, the disappearances, the hunters who come back wrong, gets blamed on Bigfoot for one simple reason. Bigfoot is the only thing up there that anyone ever manages to see. The thing he spent his whole long life keeping off her porch never let itself be seen at all. There's also the matter of him speaking. His first word came in the spring of 1974, two years into their acquaintance. Lorine had been saying good morning to him every single day, one-sided the whole time, the way you talk to a horse or a dog. Just noise to fill the space and let it know your voice. That morning in April, walking down to the bin with the light still gray in the trees, something behind her made the sound back. Low, wrong, effortful, like the shape of the word was a weight he was lifting. But it was her word. Good morning, mangled and dragged down into a register no human throat makes, coming out of the tree line in his voice. She didn't go back for a week. Not because she was afraid he would hurt her, but because she was afraid of what it meant that he could do that. Afraid of the door it opened. Over the years, he learned around 40 words. The word for grain. The word for cold. A flat two-syllable sound that was her name and stayed her name for 20 years. He was not a person in a suit, and this was not a conversation. It was more like being understood by a mountain that had learned to say a few things back. He never told her a single thing about himself. Every question she asked about where he slept, what he was, whether there were others, he let fall into silence. And every question about the high country, about what was past the second ridge, did something worse than silence. He would go completely still, turn his head, look up the draw at the ridge line, and hold it there. Then he would get up and leave. Every time. There was one word she could never place. He only used it in the late fall when the larch on the high slopes went gold and started to drop. The same word he used for winter, the same flat sound, but he said it in October with something under it that the winter word never had the rest of the year. She thought for a long time it just meant the season turning. She was wrong about that too. And being wrong about it cost a man his life. The video cuts off there, mid-story, with Lorine's brother Jean having just spotted them together from the porch one June evening in 1976. Jean didn't say a word. He just went inside. I don't want to spoil where it goes from here. The full account is worth your time, and the way the nephew tells it, plain and slow, the way people say enormous things when they have finally decided to, stays with you long after the video ends. Go watch it. Seriously. This is the kind of story that reminds you why you started paying attention in the first place.