The Sasquatch Attack Story That Inspired David Holthouse's Documentary

For people who don't know, the docuseries is called Sasquatch and you look at it on Hulu you go, oh man, it's a Bigfoot documentary. Nope. Not really. No, it's a lot scarier. How did this come about? How did this project fall into your lap? Well, the genesis of the project really goes back to the fall of 1993. I was visiting a buddy of mine who was working on a dope farm and he kind of, it was harvest season which is like a particularly dangerous time of the year up there, but he kind of got me a hall pass with the guy that owned the farm and vouched for me, for me to parachute in for about a week. And something that didn't make it in the show is that I went up there to do like a heroic mushroom trip with this guy. So the day before, the day that the ship went down, okay, we took about an eighth mushrooms each and went tripping around the redwoods. Now that didn't make it in the show. But that night as we were coming down, we were in the cabin, the A-frame cabin that belonged to the guy that owned the farm. And these two dudes showed up late at night covered in mud, like splattered with mud soaked claiming that they'd just been to a nearby dope farm where they'd seen three bodies that were torn up, like mutilated. And these guys were freaking out. They seemed legitimately traumatized to me. They were exuding this energy of terror and having just seen mutilated bodies to the point where I was just trying to shrink into the couch where I was. I was like really not happy to be in that room at that point. How old were you at the time? I was 23 years old. I was just getting going in journalism. The owner of the farm kind of pulled them off to the side and they were having a conversation in the kitchen. They were trying to keep their voices hushed, but these guys, they were so rattled. Also like I didn't know the signs at the time, but now looking back, I'm like they were on crystal. They were tweaking, right? And so they were like their voices were going up and down in volume, but they were clearly saying that they'd just like seen these three bodies and they'd seen like Sasquatch footprints at the murder scene. And they knew it wasn't a rip off, they were saying, because all the weed had been harvested, but it was still there. Like some plants had been torn up and thrown around, right? But the bud was still there, like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weed for this typical patch. And at one point the guy was like, are you sure they're dead? They were like, yeah, yeah, with the fucking not listening to us. They were torn to pieces, man. They're fucking dead. And a bigfoot killed these guys. And he kind of like got them out of the farm and like sat down and was like, well, that was really fucking weird. And we like had a laugh, you know? But obviously that story stuck with me for the next quarter century. And it was one that I kind of, I told it around like a ghost story around the campfire kind of thing a few times. But then a friend of mine and a guy I collaborated with, Joshua Fay, who's the director of the series Sasquatch, he, we were just finishing up another project together and he texted me out of the blue and he'd become, he'd become a fan of this podcast Sasquatch Chronicles, right? And he texted me, he's like, dude, if we could find some sort of true crime story wrapped up with a Sasquatch angle, like we'd really have something. What is Sasquatch Chronicles? I don't even listen to it. I've never listened to it, but it's a podcast. It's like, it's basically like people's reporting their Sasquatch encounters. Okay. And so he sent me this text out of the blue and I hit him right back. I was like, I might have one. So he's like, dude, like, can you, can you look into that? So the next step was to get a hold of, get a hold of Buddy that was working on, you know, that was working on the farm up there, get a hold of anybody I could find that worked in the dope game up in Northern Mendocino County was near a town called Branscomb that worked in that area at that time in the dope game. Be like, do you ever hear a story like this? Because our thinking was, you know, we can't like do a series of it. It was just me hearing that story in that cabinet one night. But it's the kind of story where you think like that probably spread beyond that one cabin, right? Those guys didn't seem like the type that they were going to keep that to themselves. Okay. So, you know, after drawing a lot of blanks, we finally like hit this one sort of information ecosystem sub circle up there, if you will, where people had heard that story. And they were like, yes, three guys did get killed. But there's, you know, there's there's more to it, right? They were like, there's there's a story behind that. And it doesn't really involve a Sasquatch actually killing these guys. But I mean, I don't want to spoil the show. Yeah, yeah. You know, anybody who hasn't seen it, it's well worth the three, like 50 minutes or so Yeah, yeah. Something like like our TV show link. Yeah. It's it's very intense.