Original subtitles

All right. '93.

Um...

How old were you again?

Twenty-three. I was 23 years old. Yeah.

And I was visiting a good buddy

working on a cannabis farm up in Northern California.

The drive up 101 to Mendocino,

I remember it was really foggy,

and it was raining hard.

And it would continue to rain almost non-stop

for my entire time in Mendocino.

Like, just constant hard driving cold rain.

As soon as you cross the line into Mendocino County

out of wine country,

the trees are just huge.

They're so tall that the canopy, it cuts out the daylight.

I got to the town of Branscomb.

And my friend came and met me in a jacked-up 4-by-4 truck.

It was the first time I had been on the back roads.

Every property there is gated.

Most of the properties had posted "no trespassing" for a reason.

You know, locked gate after locked gate, the roads get smaller and gnarlier

until we finally get to the cannabis farm.

And my friend had set up shop

and was laying his head in sort of an outbuilding.

It had no heat, no electricity, no water, nothing like that.

The next day, I put in a little work on the farm.

And interacting with other workers on the farm,

they were all

telling stories about how there was this Sasquatch running around,

that was threatening people in backwoods cannabis patches.

They're, like, growling at people from the tree line

and bluff charging.

Running at somebody, then skittering off into the distance,

or hurling rocks, like big rocks just come chunking down

from ridge lines.

And I was like, are these people fucking with me?

Like, is the, like, fuck with the outsider new guy,

trying to scare me?

Accounts varied. Sometimes it was the same Sasquatch.

Sometimes it was a tribe of Sasquatch that were like all riled up

because they were starting to put cannabis farms too far out

in Bigfoot territory.

And that's when things got even a little weirder.

The second night I'm there,

the guy that owns the place, he was rolling joints.

He got a phone call.

The conversation was a little tense.

I mean, I remember him saying like, "You guys on a run?

Have you got everything sorted?"

And then he was like, "Okay. Okay."

And like, "All right, but keep him mellow.

You gotta keep him mellow."

About 15, 20 minutes later,

I see headlights of a truck outside.

These two guys come in, they're soaked,

they're muddy,

and one of them was... talking a mile a minute.

His eyes were like the eyes of a panicked horse,

you know, they're rolling around.

I was sketched out enough by this guy's presence

that I was just kinda trying to become one with the couch.

The owner of the farm is trying to calm him down.

He's like, just be cool, be cool, be cool.

And his voice got up, and he said,

"No, it wasn't a fucking rip-off.

"All the weed's still there.

"It's ripped up, it's all over the place, but all the weed's still there.

This wasn't a rip."

The guy that owned the farm... said,

"You sure they're dead?"

He's like, "Are you fucking not listening to me?"

"Yes, I'm sure they're dead."

"They're mangled."

And then the other guy that was with him was like, "Yeah, man, they're mangled."

And the guy was like repeating over and over.

He was like, "We have to warn everybody. We have to warn everybody."

He believed he had just seen three bodies

dead, mangled, torn to pieces.

He started to say something loud

and was shushed.

And then he said, "I'm telling you, man,

a Bigfoot killed those guys."

It was just before dusk,

we heard this screaming cry.

And I've heard every animal that lives in the locality,

and it wasn't any of those.

Everything was just dead quiet afterwards.

It made the hair crawl on the back of your neck.

The odor of this animal

after I rolled the window down

was so offensive that I couldn't remain there any longer.

Now, this thing truly scared me.

This is the sign that the creature struck,

leaving these indentations, or scratch marks.

Many sightings have revealed this creature to be

between seven to nine feet tall

and 600 to 900 pounds.

He had the most knowing look on his face.

His eyes.

I remember the eyes I think more than anything else.

The way it went up the mountain, the way everybody describes Bigfoot,

that's the only thing I can think it was,

because a bear just don't do things like that.

I looked at that mountain,

I knew I didn't want to be around it.

I knew something was there or something was watching me.

I don't think

that I had ever told anybody that story.

I mean, I got plenty of stories,

that like, sitting around, like, shooting the shit with people.

Like, I'll, I'll lay out there things that I experienced.

I don't think... That's never been in my repertoire

of, like, stories that you share about,

well, here's a crazy fucking thing that happened to me.

It just seems unbelievable.

I wasn't even sure at first if I was completely misremembering this.

So, square one, I looked at missing persons reports.

Nothing matched.

There was no, like, three males

that went missing that were last seen

anywhere in either of those counties,

like, in the right time frame.

As an investigative journalist,

I believe that the truth is never told in the nine-to-five hours.

I realized pretty early on in my career that I had a knack

for immersing myself

in different worlds.

Embedding with Chicano street gangs on both sides of a turf war,

running dope with drug mules,

staying up for 72 hours with crystal meth heads,

going undercover as a neo-Nazi skinhead, that kind of shit.

Those are kind of stories I went after and how I went after them.

Stalking monsters was a recurring theme for me.

If I decided you were a monster, I was coming for you,

and nothing was gonna turn me aside.

You were done.

I've borne witness to a lot of crazy fucking stories.

But the one about a Sasquatch wasting three dudes in dope country

is bar none the craziest, all right.

And for a quarter-century and then some, I had just been carrying it with me,

keeping it close.

It's not in my nature to just set it down and walk away and forget about it.

Because, sure, maybe it's just a ghost story,

maybe there's nothing to it.

Or maybe somebody got away with murder.

And maybe I can find out who and how and why.

Yeah. Nobody... Nobody ever talked about it.

We never talked about it.

It's like what, 26 years ago?

I reached out to my buddy

who, had the same experience that I did in the cabin that night.

I was trying to figure out whether my memories were

accurate, at all.

- Did you hear them say Bigfoot? - Yeah.

'Cause it was loud.

And that's when I heard about the bodies.

Right? You know, like the way they were all torn up.

I'm like, okay, he remembers too, you know.

At the time, I was scared shitless.

Man, I was scared shitless the whole time I was up there.

I wanted to see

if he knew how to get a hold of the guy that owned the farm.

But he's not telling me shit about how to get a hold of the guy,

except he gave me a couple names that I already had

of people that might have his number.

I'll bet you went into town when you left the next day or whatever

and started asking questions.

Fuck, no, I didn't want any part of that.

So why do you want to do it now?

He's like, why are you doing this?

You know. It set me back on my heels for a minute.

Just like, "Whoa, why am I doing this?"

Because it sounds ridiculous on the face of it.

A Bigfoot... murdered three guys... on a dope farm.

But... once you peel back the first layer of that

and you get the first glimpse of the truth

behind that crazy fucking story,

it's hard not to just keep peeling back layers

to try and really get at it.

The region's called the Emerald Triangle

because there's three counties

Trinity, Humboldt, and Mendocino County.

All three counties are famous worldwide

for producing very high-grade bright green cannabis plants.

It's only once you're in

the deep redwoods in Mendocino County or Humboldt County

that this story of Sasquatch, this legend

that has been passed down,

starting with the indigenous people of the region for hundreds of years,

starts to feel like less of a frivolous legend.

Those woods are a spooky place,

and it does feel, in those woods, like you're being watched.

Okay? You find yourself twitching a little bit.

There's a dark history to this place.

A lot of blood's been spilled beneath those redwood trees

and going back at least as far as the 1860s

with the California Gold Rush,

you know, you got hordes of white frontiersmen and plunderers

coming in the area just brutalizing the indigenous people

and committing horrible massacres,

including a number that targeted the Wiyot tribe.

They snuck into the camps in the middle of the night

and they used firearms to kill the adult men,

and then they switched to knives, hatchets, and axes,

and they butchered the women, children, and old people.

Once the Gold Rush starts to die down, the timber industry springs up.

That was the beginning of the rapacious loggers

that were taking down the first old growth redwoods

in Northern California.

Stripping the land of natural resources.

A hundred years later, 1970,

95 percent of all the original redwoods had been cut down.

A lot of those trees were over a thousand years old,

and they're just gone.

That was about the time the hippies

and the Back to the Landers started to move in.

And they were drawn there in part by the lawlessness of the place.

Because, while there's a lot of danger in lawlessness,

there's also a lot of freedom.

A lot of people left the Bay area

or migrated across the country to go to Humboldt

to, like, live the simple life, right?

To, to build a homestead, to have a community,

to have their own schools, to grow their own food.

We found community really quickly

'cause there were so many people

with similar values, raising young children.

We had an outhouse. We had one kerosene lamp.

We had no electricity whatsoever.

There's a great power to being on the mountain,

and it's a beautiful way to live.

And it starts to fix you.

People thought,

wow, we just stopped the Vietnam War, you know,

it's the Age of Aquarius, a lot of magical thinking

about how the system was gonna transform

and everything was gonna be,

unicorns and rainbows.

Most people had not originally

gone up to the Emerald Triangle to grow marijuana.

They went up there because they wanted to go back to nature

and have a nice place for their kids to grow up.

Only to discover once they were there

that there weren't a whole lot of other ways

to earn a living.

So, basically, most people got into marijuana by default.

Having a cash crop, that allowed the locals to thrive.

The owner of the farm where I wound up in the fall of 1993

originally moved up there to kinda like, you know, get off the grid

and get back to the land.

Then he saw how much money you can make growing dope,

and he became a major grower.

You could take a bite of Greenshine, my creation.

Big nice chunky old-time bud.

Northern Mendocino County probably has the best climate

for growing cannabis... by far.

Nice little joint.

Everything out there,

the flowers are more intense,

the wild-crafted herbs are more intense.

It has the tastiest tomatoes.

And by extension, the cannabis that people have grown out there

is just the best in the world.

And here's... Look at this.

Here... Wait a minute. Sasquatch has appeared.

Here he is. Woo-woo, it's Sasquatch.

Woo! Yaa! I'm not so scary or tough.

Talk about Bigfoot. Let's talk about Sasquatch.

What's your take on Sasquatch, Bigfoot?

- Like, what... what is Sasquatch. - Well, you know,

I personally have never seen one

or seen anything that said to me,

my god, this is pretty good evidence,

but I'm kind of from Missouri on that stuff.

I'll be open to a lot of things,

but for me to say I know it or got it,

I pretty much got to experience it firsthand,

and I have not.

The one thing I have heard,

about Sasquatch

is that, um,

usually before you see them, if the wind is blowing right, you get

they have a very sweet, musky smell.

That could be when she's in that time of her moon cycle

and when she's really, looking for love.

- Hello? - Hey, this is, David Holthouse.

So I start contacting everybody that I can find

that was a part of the cannabis industry

in the Emerald Triangle in the early 1990s.

I've heard a pretty crazy story

that, a Sasquatch had killed

three guys on a weed farm.

Does that sound like a story you heard before?

Not at all.

No. I wish I had.

Anything like that ringing any kind of bell?

No.

Sasquatch. Murder. Dope farm. Anything like that?

Yeah, no.

Boy.

That's the funniest thing I ever heard.

So, no. But, you know, I, I, I'm very much interested

in the UFO subject.

You may know that the Navy has come out with statements

that the Navy has... What?

Been hitting dead ends.

So decided to hire a private investigator.

- Hey, Dave, how are you? - Good, man.

So I'll just sorta start from the beginning. I'd just graduated...

The thinking was get an ex-cop who's now a PI in Mendocino County.

They're gonna be familiar with the dope world.

They're probably gonna have sources in that world now.

So somebody that had a foot in both worlds.

Right.

So he's like, yeah, let me dig around for you.

Try and find another angle here.

Anybody ever tell you firsthand about a Sasquatch

that was aggressive or violent toward them?

Like, firsthand story.

I started thinking if anybody has, heard this story

it's gonna be "squatchers."

Mendocino County, Humboldt County, this whole region,

it's most famous for two things

One is Sasquatch habitat,

the other is cannabis farms.

When I got to Northern California back in 1993,

I mean, I knew that

the lore of the place was that the Patterson-Gimlin film

had been captured, you know, not far from where I was.

Right here, in this big comfortable chair?

- Yes, please. - Okay. Thank you.

Hey, that is perfect. Thank you so much.

People have said there's no such thing,

no such creature can exist.

So we decided to see if we could find more evidence.

We rode every day

miles and miles and miles,

about 35, 40 miles a day,

making big circles around and through the mountains.

The 20th day,

it was about two o'clock in the afternoon.

The sun was still up, nice.

We was riding up the creek bed,

and, um

all at once

one was standing across the creek

looking straight at us.

Roger got his camera out.

You see her make that famous

turn like that

to look at me when I got off the horse.

When I saw her, I thought,

"My god, these things really do exist."

You ever heard of a Sasquatch attacking or killing people?

No. Not at all.

I've heard of stories of where they've protected people,

but never any stories

of, of, of people being killed by them.

In my opinion, if we,

if we do go into the woods,

go with an open mind.

Appreciate the forest, appreciate everything there,

and maybe you might see one.

Georges, you're over there.

No, this way.

I'm sorry.

That's what he said, the chair.

What? I thought it was the other way.

Where do we differ on what Sasquatch is?

Well, you believe that Sasquatch can teleport and.

- No. - Yes, you do.

- No, I do not. - Yes, you do. You do.

Do not go there.

And you believe that he... he can cloak

and all that other fucking bullshit.

- No, I do not, goddammit. - Yes, you do.

- We've talked about it before. - The only thing...

Yeah, and you get it wrong.

- The only thing I believe... - No. I think...

He's... he's just a being.

He's a blood and guts human being kind of creature.

So many people have experiences. I've had personal experiences.

I have walked into woods and had noises following me,

and I know that it wasn't a kitty cat.

My first encounters were

when I was ten,

what I saw out the window at two o'clock in the morning.

You know? Those eyes.

And I remember screaming.

I was camping and around,

I would say two o'clock in the morning or so,

I hear noises,

and then I see my tent being squished down.

And then I start screaming and screaming and screaming,

and then I just... hit the tent.

Then this thing just, like, jumped up and you could hear it moving backwards

and just running off.

And I'm just, like, terrified.

I mean, I am just terrified the rest of the night.

I used to go fishing a lot.

This one particular night,

I turned and I looked up the river

and all I could see

was this, um

just, like a, a form.

It was...

Sorry.

Um, it stank,

and it looked like it was, um,

covered with, like, dreadlocks.

And it was just going through the water,

and I couldn't figure out what that could have been.

Then all of a sudden, um,

this,

See? My hair's standing up on my arms now.

It's this scream

um... like a, a banshee.

I turned and I ran. I, I never went back.

And I know that if I'd stuck around,

I might not be here.

All I know is it

it scared the crap out of me.

It's the only time in my life that, um,

I've been that scared.

One of the first questions I'm often asked,

by people, including journalists,

is, "So you believe in Bigfoot?"

And I say, "No. I don't believe in Bigfoot"

and let that stew for just a moment until they're uncomfortable

and then explain when I'm asked that question,

usually from a skeptical point of view,

it usually connotes a position of faith.

Have I accepted something in the absence of evidence?

And no, I'm convinced that Sasquatch exists.

It's the evidence that convinces me.

The most compelling evidence for the existence of Sasquatch,

from my point of expertise, is the footprint evidence.

I've spent a lot of time assembling

a very large sample of footprints from all over North America.

When we consider the odds

that all these tracks are simply spurious hoaxes,

it becomes incredible.

How is it that these hoaxers have incorporated

things that have only come to light and been understood

in the realm of science and anthropology

in the past, you know, few decades?

If I were to estimate

the number of Sasquatch here in Idaho,

I would come up with a figure that, even if I was liberal,

about maybe 300.

We're talking about a 100-fold more black bear

than Sasquatch.

How many carcasses of black bear

do you stumble on when you're out on a hike?

Black bear are notoriously rare and elusive.

They're called the shadow of the forest.

As with any large and potentially dangerous animal,

you need to show the proper, sensibility and precautions.

I never go out in the field without pepper spray

or a sidearm for personal security.

I mean, after all, we're talking about a 800-to a 1,200-pound primate.

They could lift 50-gallon barrels of oil

and throw it like it's a toy.

So they're so strong, they

I mean, they could tear a body apart?

Easily.

Hey, man, how are you?

If your friend was willing to, to talk to us

or pass information through you, either one, like, we'd be,

we're all ears, man.

I didn't, like, get anywhere today,

but one thing that I did

notice today that I've noticed before

just in, like, knocking around up here

talking to people that are

anybody associated with, like, the cannabis, sort of, cultivation

scene up here then or now

is that there's a current of

belief in supernatural forces that runs deeper

up here than I think in most places.

I keep coming back to what I know, okay.

What I know is what I heard

in October 1993 in that cabin.

I heard a guy that was like

fucking terrified and traumatized.

I am convinced that he was convinced

that he had seen three bodies

on a pot farm.

They were mutilated,

mangled, torn to pieces,

and he believed that a Sasquatch had done it.

I would go on in my career to be in situations

where things got violent or things had just been violent,

and always the temperature in the room sort of shifts.

And these guys came into the place, and the temperature changed.

You could actually feel it.

So it was obvious that they were coming directly

from having seen this scene of the murder.

And I know that there were all these stories

about aggressive Sasquatches at the time, because I heard them.

You know? That's what I know.

But I haven't found anybody else

who's heard the story about three dudes getting killed

on a dope farm in 1993.

I mean, fuck.

This is all grabbing at smoke right now still, you know.

It's still all just grabbing at smoke.

It's just like... poof, you know.

This friend of mine in LA put me on to a dope dealer in Oakland.

Dope dealer in Oakland said.

I wasn't up there at that time,

but I know a guy who was for sure.

Hey, is this Razor?

Hey, Razor, my name's David Holthouse.

I think a, mutual acquaintance of ours said I'd be giving you a call

about a project that I got going.

The time and place is Emerald Triangle,

early to mid-1990s like.

Our mutual acquaintance said that you had

some valuable perspective and experience in that time and place.

Can you just, tell me a little bit about your background in that regard.

In Mendo and Humboldt?

Well, listen, man, let me sorta lay this,

this story out for you, okay.

I heard three individuals were murdered

on a weed farm

somewhere in northern Mendocino County, I don't know where.

And that the murders

purportedly were carried out by a Sasquatch.

Okay?

Yeah?

Does that ring... does that ring any sort of bell for you?

Without missing a beat, he goes,

three Mexican dudes in Mendo, fall of '93.

Boom.

You know... okay, tell me more.

He says, yeah,

I remember hearing that story in bars a lot.

These three Mexican guys had gotten killed by a Bigfoot

at a, at a, at a farm on Spy Rock Road.

He said on Spy Rock Road.

So... that's a lead.

That's a lead.

What's the Spy Rock area?

You know, I was up in Spy Rock.

I lived up in Spy Rock for some time.

There's a stone on the way up to Spy Rock,

and it's one of the oldest engraved petroglyphs

in the whole United States.

So... it has a whole mysticism to Spy Rock.

It is inland enough and raises high enough

above the cloud line and the fog line

that if you get up the mountain a certain height,

you don't deal with rot in the plants.

In Sonoma County, everything rots.

The plants on Spy Rock are far bigger

than any plants

in Sonoma or Mendocino County.

When you start getting thousands of feet up those mountains,

you get into pretty rugged and hard terrain.

And I wouldn't suggest anybody go wandering up there,

um, looking around because it's not that kind of place.

They don't want outsiders up there.

How far away was the cabin you were in from Spy Rock Road?

Let's see. Branscomb to Spy Rock Road is somewhere in the neighborhood

of an hour, I would guess.

- Let me check it, okay. - Just... - I believe you.

No, I just want to know.

Wait a minute, it's only 15 minutes.

- Shit. - Yeah, it's only 15 minutes.

I wouldn't be able to find the cabin I was in that night,

but I know that it was... just outside

of Branscomb.

So even if you stretch it out,

you know, that they were north

of Laytonville and I was south of Branscomb,

maximum they would have been 30, 35 minutes away.

It's quite possible that they were closer.

So the geography and the time frame is pretty good match.

Going to meet a guy named Razor,

in the high desert outside Joshua Tree.

And I don't know Razor's real name

but I've asked around about him, and what I've heard is that

he's, a guy that was raised

by the Hells Angels in San Bernardino

in the '60s, when he was a kid.

He started growing cannabis sometime in the '70s

and grew in Humboldt and Mendocino counties

in the '80s all the way through the '90s.

He got busted three times,

did three bids in San Quentin, but he always kept his mouth shut.

He never rolled over on anybody, never said anything to the cops.

And that's earned him a lot of respect and credibility,

among other cannabis growers in Northern California, so...

And I've got plenty of people on the phone

but whenever I'd work my way around to,

well, hey, I'm looking into a triple homicide

from the early '90s,

I was always careful not to give anybody the, the date,

um, because I didn't want them to just feed information back to me

and take me for a ride.

But when I finally got Razor on the phone and I laid that line on him,

he immediately said, yeah, three Mexican guys

on a backwoods patch in Mendo County, fall of 1993.

So he nailed the date.

So I think that he knows something.

I think that he's at least heard the story or a version of the story.

You've arrived at your destination.

I have?

That about how you like it?

So the 1993 season,

you heard a crazy fucking Bigfoot story.

Tell me that story.

You know... I'll say this,

that time period was like... there was a lot going on.

Every time I stopped for a second to take a breath

and socialize for a minute with some people,

I would hear stories.

But this one story stood out

just because I had never heard anyone, like, say it,

you know, with such conviction.

That was like a serious call to arms.

This is the biggest threat we're going to be facing

towards the end of the season,

is we're gonna get attacked by Sasquatches.

As if the stuff we were up against already wasn't enough.

Um...

Just got a, kind of a sketched out

and unsettling text message

from the former Mendocino County cop turned private investigator

I've been working with the last couple weeks.