Massachusetts Hiker Recalls Terrifying 10-Foot Bigfoot Encounter from 2011
Posted Wednesday, September 23, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
A recent video surfaced on YouTube that dives deep into a chilling encounter from over a decade ago in the woods of western Massachusetts. Jeremiah Byron, host of Bigfoot Society, sits down with a man named Antonio who, at just 11 years old, experienced something in the summer of 2011 that he's carried with him ever since.
The setting is the heavily wooded border area between Southwick and Westfield, near Granville, Massachusetts. For anyone familiar with that part of New England, you know it's dense wilderness — the kind of terrain where the trees and undergrowth go on for miles and miles. It's exactly the kind of place where reports tend to come from.
Antonio and his best friend were walking home around midnight after a sleepover. These weren't kids afraid of the woods — they lived out there. Airsoft battles, manhunt games, fishing trips, campfires. They knew every trail and thicket. But on this particular night, something came out of an area they would never enter because the brush was too thick, too thorny, too brutal even for adventurous 11-year-olds.
What they heard first were footsteps. Not just any footsteps — Antonio describes them as massive, bipedal, and impossibly heavy. He compares the sound to the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park, where the ground itself seems to vibrate. Whatever was moving through that brush was clearing it like it was nothing, pushing through thorns and pricker bushes that would have torn those boys to shreds.
This is a behavior that comes up again and again in Sasquatch encounters across the country. Witnesses describe these subjects moving through terrain that would stop a human dead in their tracks — dense undergrowth, steep ridges, swampy ground — like it's not even there. Researchers have long noted that whatever these creatures are, they're built for the deep woods in ways humans simply aren't.
Antonio and his friend froze as the footsteps got closer. They could tell from the spacing between steps that whatever was approaching was tall — really tall. One step, then a pause of two or three seconds before the next footfall. The creature stopped about 10 to 15 feet away from them, right at the edge of a single light post that lit up part of the path. And here's the part that gets under your skin — it stopped. It knew where the light was. If it had taken one more step, the boys would have seen it clearly.
Then came a sound Antonio says he still can't properly describe. A low, guttural growl, so deep he compares it to Shaquille O'Neal letting out a massive grunt. Whatever was in those woods wasn't curious