Every time this question comes up, people divide into camps like we’re choosing the next ruler of a small, cheese-covered nation. One side declares pineapple delicious. The other acts as though a fruit escaped the salad bowl and committed a crime.
I understand why pineapple and ham work together. I’ve had them together. The sweet and salty combination makes sense. I simply don’t prefer sweet meat. No honey ham here. If I’m having ham, I want it smoked.
So on my dinner pizza, pineapple does not belong. That’s a preference, not a law. You can order yours with pineapple and ham, and I will leave you in peace with your slice. I’ll be over here eating the one with smoky toppings and no fruit.
But change the question to dessert pizza, and pineapple is welcome. Put it on a sweet crust with cinnamon and something creamy, and I’m interested. Suddenly the fruit isn’t interfering with dinner. It has found its people.
The pineapple argument seems to depend less on whether fruit belongs on a crust and more on whether we can tolerate somebody enjoying a different crust than ours. I can. I would rather spend dinner eating than appointing myself sheriff of your toppings.
There’s only one rule at my table: tell me which pizza is dessert before I take a bite. I’d like to meet my pineapple at the proper time.
Good morning from the Grove, where the coffee is hot, the pups are snoring, and I think the sun is rising somewhere behind the clouds and drizzle.
This morning’s prompt has clearly been peeking at my search history. As I get ready for Barcelona, it’s asking: What’s the best way to explore a new city?
Honestly, it depends on the city and the people you’re traveling with. There is no one right way, and I wouldn’t approach a tour of Rome, Italy, the same way I would Cabo San Lucas. They offer different experiences, so why expect one strategy to fit both?
I like to do some research before I go. I make a list of the must-sees and the would-be-nices, so I know what I’d be sorry to miss and what I can let go if the day takes us somewhere else. Then I pack patience, flexibility, and curiosity. Those matter just as much as anything in my suitcase.
Once you’re there, you have choices. Hop on a hop-on, hop-off bus. Book a private tour or join a group. Wander and see where the day takes you. The right choice can change from one place to the next, or even from one day to another. Go with what feels right for you and your people, and stay curious about what you find along the way.
Maybe the best way to explore a new city is to learn enough to start, leave room for the unexpected, and let the place show you what it has to offer.
So here’s to knowing enough to feel ready, then leaving room to follow a side street, linger a little longer, or change the plan. Wherever you’re exploring, may you find something wonderful that wasn’t on your list, and good company to share it with. Until next time, friends, keep your curiosity close and the coffee warm.
For the past two days, we’ve examined enormous hairy bipeds and seven-foot upright canines.
Today our investigation takes us to Fresno, California, where in 2007 a security camera captured something so anatomically baffling that nearly twenty years later, the most accurate description remains:
Pants.
They look like pants.
Walking.
By themselves.
We take our responsibilities here seriously, so let’s investigate the haunted pants.
The Creature
The Fresno Nightcrawler is generally depicted as a small, pale humanoid consisting almost entirely of two extraordinarily long legs attached to a very small upper body.
No visible arms.
Barely any torso.
Possibly a tiny head.
Imagine someone pulled on an enormous pair of white pajama pants, continued pulling until the waistband reached approximately eyebrow level, and then simply walked away.
That’s roughly what we’re dealing with.
Modern artwork often gives Nightcrawlers little black eyes or other features.
The original footage does not.
The creature we recognize today has largely been created by people trying to interpret a very poor video.
Which brings us to the actual evidence.
Fresno, 2007
The story begins with a Fresno resident usually identified only as José.
According to accounts of the incident, José’s dogs had been behaving strangely at night. He checked footage from a security camera outside his home and found something unexpected moving across his yard.
A pale figure walked through the frame.
Then another followed.
Their movement was slow and deliberate, and whatever they were appeared to consist primarily of legs.
José eventually brought the footage to local Spanish-language media, and from there it began making its way into paranormal circles and eventually across the internet.
There’s an immediate problem for anyone hoping to conduct a forensic analysis.
We don’t have the original footage.
What most of us have seen is essentially footage of footage. José recorded the image from his CCTV monitor, meaning the already low-resolution nighttime security video was degraded again before reaching the public.
That matters.
Every generation of copying removes information.
Details disappear.
Edges blur.
Light blooms.
Something perfectly ordinary can become considerably less ordinary when enough visual information is lost.
Unfortunately for science, that’s also precisely when things start looking like haunted pants.
Then There Were More Pants
Later footage attributed to the Yosemite area appeared to show similar figures moving through a wooded landscape.
Other claimed sightings have subsequently been associated with California and elsewhere.
But the farther we move away from the original Fresno footage, the weaker the documentation becomes.
That’s important because you’ll sometimes encounter lists online describing Nightcrawler sightings across multiple states and even other countries as though we’re tracking the migration of a known species.
We aren’t.
We have one famous, poorly preserved piece of footage from Fresno.
Then we have later videos and stories influenced by a creature that had already become recognizable.
Once the world knows what a Nightcrawler is supposed to look like, every pair of mysterious legs enters the investigation with a suspect already attached.
What About the Native American Story?
Spend enough time researching Fresno Nightcrawlers and you’ll encounter claims that similar creatures appear in Native American traditions.
Sometimes you’ll even find elaborate explanations involving ancient beings who arrived on Earth to help humans reconnect with nature.
That sounds fascinating.
I could not find reliable evidence supporting it.
No specific tribal tradition is consistently identified. No credible historical source establishing the connection appears alongside the claims.
That doesn’t prove no Indigenous tradition anywhere contains a remotely similar being.
It means we don’t get to attach Native American spirituality to a cryptid because it makes the story cooler.
If we find reliable evidence later, we’ll revisit it.
Until then, that particular piece of lore stays off the evidence table.
What Could They Be?
This is where things get fun.
A person in a costume has been suggested.
So has a puppet or marionette.
Fabric manipulated across the yard.
Digital effects.
An ordinary object rendered bizarre by poor nighttime video.
And, naturally, extraterrestrials.
The Syfy series Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files investigated the footage and attempted practical recreations. Their experiments did not produce a sufficiently convincing match for the original movement, and the case remained unresolved on the program.
That is interesting.
It is not proof of an unknown creature.
Failing to reproduce something doesn’t establish what the original thing was.
It only means that particular attempt didn’t reproduce it.
And there is another explanation that becomes especially interesting once you remember what kind of camera we’re dealing with.
Bugs.
Yes.
Bugs.
Small insects moving very close to a security camera lens can look enormous, pale, translucent, strangely proportioned, and wildly unlike insects.
At night, infrared illumination can overexpose nearby insects while the camera’s focus remains set for the yard beyond them.
Legs can become bright elongated shapes.
Bodies can disappear into glare or blur.
Depth becomes extremely difficult to judge.
Something tiny crawling near the lens can appear to be something much larger walking across the property.
Do we know that’s what José’s camera recorded?
No.
The original footage is gone, so we’re missing exactly the information we’d need to test the theory properly.
But as explanations go, bug legs are considerably easier to accommodate within known biology than a species composed almost entirely of trousers.
What Evidence Do We Actually Have?
A degraded recording of an already low-quality nighttime security image.
That’s essentially it.
No body.
No bones.
No tracks that can be scientifically tied to an unknown animal.
No tissue.
No DNA.
No verified anatomical evidence demonstrating that a long-legged humanoid species lives around Fresno.
And no confirmed explanation for José’s original recording either.
That last part matters too.
Unexplained does not mean unexplainable.
It also doesn’t mean we should pretend we’ve solved something we haven’t.
We have weird footage.
We have several plausible explanations.
We do not have enough surviving information to determine which explanation is correct.
That’s where the evidence currently leaves us.
The Grove Take
I love them.
I’m sorry.
We’ve spent three days doing this, and apparently this is where my scientific objectivity collapses.
Bigfoot is mysterious.
Dogman is unsettling.
The Fresno Nightcrawlers are just out there walking somewhere.
They aren’t chasing anybody.
They aren’t eating livestock.
They aren’t screaming from the woods or predicting bridge collapses or demanding sacrifices.
They’re going somewhere.
Slowly.
In their little pants.
I don’t even particularly need to know where.
And somewhere along the way, the internet looked at one of the strangest silhouettes ever captured on a security camera and collectively decided:
That’s our little guy.
There are Nightcrawler plushies now.
Stickers.
Artwork.
T-shirts.
People have taken something objectively bizarre and turned it into one of cryptozoology’s least threatening celebrities.
Honestly, that may be my favorite thing about them.
Maybe they’re aliens.
Maybe they’re puppets.
Maybe they’re an artifact of terrible video quality.
Maybe they’re bugs.
But for a creature with virtually no body, they have developed an unreasonable amount of personality.
Porch Ruling
If they are indeed Haunted Pants, they have a seat.
What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?
There have been several. A few happened in Alaska. A couple came somewhere in Mexico or Central America. But one that always rises to the surface happened when I was seventeen, at the World’s Fair in New Orleans. There was a gondola over the Mississippi River. I am terrified of heights, so getting me onto that gondola was a hard sell. I was scared, and I was mad that nobody would stay with me while the others rode. I didn’t want to wait by myself, so I got on the stupid thing. And of course, if you rode one way, you had to ride it back. The river did not smell romantic or fertile or evergreen. Near the banks, it smelled like fuel and dank, murky, muddy water. But once we got past them, we could look back toward the fair and the theater where Willie Nelson was playing. On the ride back, he began singing “Always on My Mind.” We were a group of teenagers, all wrapped up in teenage angst and emotion, and we started singing with him. Eighties anyone? Bueller? When we got off, we hugged. We said we would hold on to that memory. And we have – we revisit it whenever we gather, reunions, receptions – when we run into each other. I remember being afraid. I remember being angry. I remember the smell of the river and the view of the fair behind us. I remember Willie’s voice carrying over the water and all of us singing along. The moment wasn’t perfect or even comfortable. It was just so full of feeling that we knew, right then, it would stay with us. I think that’s part of what makes a moment feel truly alive. Big emotions give the brain somewhere to anchor. Wonder, awe, and fear wake us up to what’s happening around us. The sound of a voice. The smell of the water. I think of a whale surfacing beside a boat while I was in Alaska once. You feel the swell move you, then catch the smell of the whale’s exhale. It is astonishing. Your whole body seems to understand that something remarkable is happening before you can put it into words. Maybe adrenaline junkies are chasing that same feeling: the rush that pulls you completely into the present. For me, the moments that stay are often tied to wonder, awe, or fear. They don’t have to be comfortable. They don’t even have to be happy. They have to be big enough to bring me all the way into them. Maybe feeling truly alive is that: being so present in a moment that your senses gather it up, your emotions give it weight, and some part of you knows you’ll carry it with you.
The Dogman Was an April Fools’ Joke. Then the Phone Rang.
If you make up a creature for an April Fools’ radio prank, you expect people to laugh, groan, or call the station to tell you to try harder next year.
You do not expect someone to call and say they’ve seen it.
In 1987, Steve Cook worked at WTCM in Traverse City, Michigan. He wrote a poem, set it to music, and called it “The Legend.” His Dogman was a creature of northern Michigan, part dog and part man, imagined by someone who loved folklore and wanted a fresh idea for the station’s April Fools’ broadcast.
Then the song played. At first, nothing happened. About an hour after the morning show ended, a listener called to ask about the creature. He told Cook that, decades earlier, he had been fishing near the Muskegon River when a pack of dogs surrounded him and one stood up on its hind legs.
I can see why Cook would have felt the hair rise on his arms. He had put a fictional creature into a song, and a stranger answered with a memory he said he had kept to himself for fifty years. The timing is extraordinary.
It is also difficult to interpret.
The man’s experience, whatever happened, preceded the song. His telling of it came after he heard the song. Both facts matter. Cook did not invent that man’s memory on the spot. We also cannot hear the original experience without the years that passed, the song that prompted the call, and the name that was now available to give it.
I don’t think that means the caller was lying. I think it means a person can sincerely recognize something in a story without the story proving what he saw.
And I understand the urge to call.
Imagine carrying a strange, frightening memory for years, then hearing somebody describe a creature that sounds like it. You might finally tell someone. You might feel relieved that another person has a name for it. Neither feeling requires the Dogman to be real to matter.
Cook’s joke did something no one at the station planned. It gave people a way to talk about experiences they had not known how to explain. It also gave new stories a shape to grow around. Once people knew what “Dogman” was supposed to look like, a sound in the woods or an animal glimpsed briefly on two legs could be understood through that name.
That is how a legend can become part of a place. It travels by radio, by phone call, by retelling. Eventually it feels older than the moment somebody first said it aloud.
I also don’t need to solve every caller’s experience to appreciate what happened in that little radio studio. A man invented a creature. People listened. Some of them heard an answer to a question they had been carrying alone.
The Dogman may have been fictional from his first breath. The phone calls were real.
The Grove Take
I’m interested in both ends of that telephone line.
Cook knew where his Dogman came from. The callers knew what they remembered. Those truths can sit together without either one proving an undiscovered animal.
A story can make it easier to speak about something strange. It can also change how we describe that strange thing once we have a name for it. I want to listen to the witnesses without quietly turning their sincerity into zoological evidence. I want to credit Cook for what he created without pretending his April Fools’ song explains every encounter someone has ever reported.
And I admit I love the uncomfortable middle: a prank that drew out stories nobody expected.
Porch Policy
Witnesses are welcome to tell us what happened. They don’t have to arrive with a perfect explanation or defend a memory from decades ago. We’ll offer a seat and listen carefully.
Cook gets a seat, too. Anyone who made an April Fools’ joke and then had to answer that phone call has earned a conversation.
As for Dogman himself, the invitation remains at the porch. If a living creature wants to come forward, we can make room without demanding that he perform, and without deciding what he is from a glimpse between the trees.
Until then, the song can visit. The stories can visit. We will not mistake either one for a guest who has arrived in person.
I was scrolling Facebook when a woman dressed up for “old person day” appeared on my screen. She had the cardigan, the scarf, the glasses perched low on her nose, and an expression that suggested she was thoroughly enjoying herself. Someone commented, “I don’t know whether to laugh, love, or cry at that. Getting older sucks.”
I understand the laugh. I even understand the cry. But that last sentence made me stop scrolling.
No, actually, getting older doesn’t suck, Barbara.
Parts of it do. I’m not going to stand here with creaky knees and an achy back and tell you that aging is a nonstop festival of wisdom and comfortable shoes. There are indignities. There are doctors’ appointments. There are mornings when your body files a complaint about something you did in your sleep.
There are losses, too. The longer you live, the more people you may have to miss. No amount of perspective makes that painless. I would gladly give up a few wrinkles if the trade came with getting certain people back.
But the whole thing? The vast majority of growing older is really quite lovely.
For one thing, I’m still here to do it.
That matters more to me with every year. So many people are denied the opportunity to grow older. They don’t get another birthday, another ordinary Wednesday, another chance to change their mind or order dessert. When I think about them, I can’t bring myself to call the years I’ve been given a disaster because my knees make noises.
I’m not saying gratitude cures pain. If your back hurts, your back hurts. You don’t owe anyone a cheerful attitude about it. But I can wish my back felt better and still be glad I woke up in a life that has room for me to do something today.
And there is dessert.
When you’re young, people spend a remarkable amount of time telling you the correct order in which to live. Finish dinner before dessert. Find a respectable job before you make art. Settle down before you travel. Know what you’re doing before you try something new. Be practical, be sensible, and for goddess’s sake, consider what everyone will think.
I spent years considering what everyone would think. Everyone turned out to be a very demanding committee with no clear qualifications.
Getting older hasn’t made every decision easy, but it has made me less interested in asking that committee for permission. I can have dessert first. Sometimes I can have dessert only. I know the difference between a rule that protects somebody and a rule that merely keeps me in my assigned seat.
That freedom is wonderful.
I don’t mean the freedom to do whatever I please without consequences. I mean the freedom to stop wondering, every waking minute, what I’m supposed to do. It takes so much energy to live under that question. What am I supposed to wear? Say? Want? How am I supposed to feel about this? Am I doing fifty-nine correctly?
I have no idea whether I’m doing fifty-nine correctly. I’m having a pretty good time doing it my way.
I’ve reached an age where I can make room for the ridiculous and the serious in the same day. I can talk about grief, write an essay, fuss over a piece of vintage glass, and celebrate a dog’s highly questionable defense in the cracker caper. Nobody has to approve the combination. It’s my life. All of those things belong in it.
The best gift maturity has given me is knowing where to give a fuck.
I still give plenty. That’s the part people misunderstand when they hear me say I care less what others think. I care about people. I care about the work I put into the world. I care when someone is hurting. I care about truth, kindness, good questions, the creatures who deserve a chance, and whether I’ve done right by the people who trust me.
I care about my friends. Some friendships have lasted long enough for us to work together, travel together, laugh until we can’t breathe, and bury people we loved. You don’t get thirty-five years of that by refusing to care.
I simply have a better idea of which opinions deserve space in my head.
That knowledge didn’t arrive with a birthday card. It came from years of getting things wrong, trying again, being afraid, loving people, losing people, and noticing that the world did not end when somebody disapproved of me. It came from discovering that I could give every ounce of energy to pleasing the wrong person and still never make them happy.
I would love to say I learned that lesson the first time. I did not. Maturity is generous enough to let you take the exam again.
There’s a lovely kind of relief in realizing that disagreement isn’t always a threat. I can share what I think and welcome discourse. Someone can read my words and tell me where they see things differently. We might both come away with more to think about. If they don’t like what I write at all, they are free to keep scrolling.
For a long time, I was so afraid people wouldn’t like what I had to say that I barely gave them a chance to hear it. I nearly started a blog years ago. The ideas were there. The bones were there. I just never took the steps that would make it real.
Now I have a blog. I write. I share myself. People read, and some of them come back. New people find their way to the porch. Some agree with me, some may not, and I’m no longer treating either outcome as a verdict on whether I should have spoken.
You couldn’t pay me to trade that for younger knees.
Well, you might be able to negotiate about the knees. I’m willing to hear your offer. But the voice stays.
That voice has lived with me all along. It needed time to become one I could use in public without apologizing for taking up space. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I’d started the blog earlier. Then I look at what I’m writing now and know that this particular place could only have come from the woman I am today.
The years did something good with me.
They’ve done more than give me confidence, too. They’ve taught me how often I was wrong about what a life should look like. I used to think certain choices had deadlines. If you hadn’t begun by a particular age, you were too late. If a plan changed, you’d failed it. If you were still figuring yourself out, everyone else must be further along.
Now I know people are figuring themselves out at every age. Some of us just get better at admitting it.
I watched Michael J. Fox speak about accepting Parkinson’s without surrendering to it. That distinction stayed with me. Life can change in a way you never wanted, and you can grieve what changed. You can also keep looking for what matters to you now. Sometimes the new vision reveals possibilities you couldn’t have seen before.
I don’t want to dress someone else’s hardship up as an inspirational story for my convenience. Getting older can bring illness, disability, and grief. Those things deserve honesty and care. When I say aging is lovely, I’m speaking from the life I’ve been given and the perspective I’ve earned within it. Someone living through a hard season may not feel the same way today. I would sit with them before I asked them to look on the bright side.
I can speak only for myself. And for myself, I refuse to flatten all these years into a complaint.
I know my body better. I know what calms me and what costs me. I’m more willing to protect my peace, and more willing to disturb it for a cause that matters. I’ve learned that joy can show up in small, peculiar forms: a dog asleep nearby, a good line in an essay, a piece of glass that catches the light just right, or the realization that nobody is stopping me from eating the cake.
I’ve learned that plans can change without ending the story. That love can remain after loss, and new love can find a place beside it. That friendship deepens because we keep showing up through the years, not because every year is easy.
I’ve learned that the woman I was twenty years ago deserves a little tenderness. She was trying to find her way here. She had ideas she couldn’t yet carry into the world. I can see what she left me, take her hand, and make something with it now.
I wouldn’t know any of this if I hadn’t gotten older.
So when I see “old person day,” I can laugh at the costume. I can appreciate the woman who put it together and clearly understood the assignment. What I don’t want is for the joke to become our entire understanding of age. An older person is more than a cardigan and reading glasses. She has stories. She has people she loves and people she misses. She has opinions she has spent a lifetime forming, and perhaps a brand-new idea she’s about to try.
She may even have dessert before lunch.
Barbara, I’ll grant you the creaky knees. I’ll grant you the aching back and the days when you look in the mirror and have to get acquainted with another change. You’re allowed to be annoyed. You’re allowed to mourn what has become harder.
But I hope you’ll look at what has become easier, too. I hope you get years enough to know yourself so well that the question “What am I supposed to do?” loses its grip on you. I hope you find people worth caring about, work worth beginning, and the nerve to say what you mean.
I hope you learn where to give a fuck.
Then give those things everything you’ve got. Save a little room for cake.
Good morning from the Grove, where the sun is shining, the birds are already singing, and we’re getting ready to enjoy this beautiful October day before two days of rain settle in. There’s something lovely about knowing the weather is about to turn. It gives us a reason to linger in the sunshine and savor what the day has to offer.
Today’s prompt just isn’t inspiring me. Maybe it’s because I’ve already planned what I would do. I’ve dreamed about it and shaped it in my mind because I equate a wish from a genie with winning the lottery.
I’d love to tell you I’d be unselfish and wish for a cure for cancer, childhood diabetes, hunger, or poverty, but alas, I am human. It’s a much more mundane wish. I want my land, my sanctuary, my rescue, my haven.
Not to say I wouldn’t donate or do good works, but I want my dream space first. My friends and I have discussed it. We have a plan. We know what we would do. There are dogs to rescue and tiny homes to build.
I could wish for the land, or the Sanctuary, or the money. I think I’d rather win the lottery because that setup lets me control the rest of it. I live in a state where I don’t have to disclose my identity, and I have a plan: claim my win, hire an attorney, a financial planner, and a realtor, then get started.
We should probably buy a lottery ticket if we really want to win. Otherwise, could someone point the way toward the genie?
That’s the Friday update from the Grove. We’re enjoying our coffee and the morning, looking forward to the first October weekend, even if it’s filled with rain. We know rain is part of the way things go, and sometimes there will be rainy weekends.
We hope to see you back here this evening to meet the Dogman, Friday’s featured Cryptid.
Historical image: Frame 352 from the Patterson Gimlin film, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, 1967. Public Domain.
October has arrived, which means we could spend the next 31 days talking about pumpkin spice, sweater weather, and changing leaves.
We’re not doing that.
For the next 31 days, we’re going looking for things that may or may not be looking back. Cryptids. Creatures. Sea monsters. Legends. Eyewitness reports. Questionable photographs. Occasionally compelling evidence. And at least one pair of what appear to be haunted pants.
We’re going to take the stories seriously enough to research them, but not so seriously that we stop having fun.
Come on up, grab a cup. Let’s get weird.
And there is only one place to begin.
Bigfoot.
The Creature
Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is generally described as a large, powerfully built, hair-covered biped with an apelike or humanlike form. Reported heights commonly reach seven or eight feet, although, as with most creatures nobody has successfully measured while it was standing still, estimates vary considerably.
Its traditional modern range is the forested Pacific Northwest, particularly Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, although reported sightings now come from across North America.
The name Sasquatch is derived from Sasq’ets, a Halq’emeylem word associated with the Sts’ailes people of British Columbia. Indigenous traditions involving wild, hairy, or humanlike beings long predate the creature that twentieth-century popular culture would come to call Bigfoot.
Those traditions are not all interchangeable, and they shouldn’t be treated as if every Indigenous story about a wild being was simply an early Bigfoot sighting.
The modern American Bigfoot story is considerably younger.
The Modern Record
Bigfoot stomped firmly into American popular culture in 1958.
Workers around Bluff Creek in Northern California reported finding enormous footprints near a logging operation. The Humboldt Times covered the tracks, including the name workers had given whatever made them: “Big Foot.”
The story took off.
There had been earlier settler accounts of wild men and large hairy creatures in the Pacific Northwest, including a widely reported 1924 incident near Mount St. Helens. But after Bluff Creek, Bigfoot became something recognizable: enormous footprints, an upright hairy creature, remote forests, and witnesses who were absolutely certain there had been something out there.
Then came 1967.
Patty Walks Across the Screen
On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were near Bluff Creek when Patterson filmed a large, hair-covered figure walking away from them across a creek bed.
The footage lasts only seconds.
Nearly sixty years later, those few seconds remain the most famous Bigfoot footage ever recorded.
The figure, commonly nicknamed Patty, walks across the clearing, turns her upper body toward the camera, and continues into the trees.
Believers have spent decades examining her gait, proportions, apparent musculature, and the movement visible beneath the hair. Skeptics have spent just as long arguing that Patty is exactly what she looks like if Bigfoot doesn’t exist: a person wearing a costume.
For almost six decades, nobody managed to end the argument.
Then 2026 happened.
Well. This Is Awkward.
The documentary Capturing Bigfoot, released in 2026, presented newly surfaced footage said to have been filmed in 1966, a year before the Patterson-Gimlin encounter.
The short film reportedly shows what appears to be a rehearsal involving a thinner Bigfoot-like figure walking through wooded terrain.
The documentary also includes statements from members of Roger Patterson’s family who say the famous film was staged.
If the newly surfaced footage is what the filmmakers say it is, that’s a serious problem for Patty.
You don’t generally rehearse an unexpected encounter with an undiscovered primate a year before unexpectedly encountering the undiscovered primate.
Skeptics have understandably treated the documentary as devastating evidence that the Patterson-Gimlin film was a hoax.
Bigfoot researchers have pushed back. Questions have been raised about the dating and interpretation of the rehearsal footage, whether the figure shown is actually the same costume or creature seen in 1967, and whether the new material proves as much as its proponents claim.
Bob Gimlin, now the surviving participant in the original encounter, has continued to maintain that what he and Patterson saw was real.
So Patty has not quietly left the building.
But her chair is wobblier than it was.
What Evidence Do We Actually Have?
After generations of searching, the Bigfoot evidence file is enormous.
It contains eyewitness reports. Footprint casts. Photographs. Videos. Audio recordings. Hair samples. Tree structures. Alleged handprints. Strange smells. Nighttime howls. Thermal images. And enough blurry photographs to make one wonder whether Bigfoot emits some previously unknown field that disables autofocus.
What it does not contain is a verified body, skeleton, tooth, bone, tissue sample, or DNA sequence establishing the existence of an unknown North American great ape.
Some footprint evidence has intrigued researchers. Some alleged tracks have shown anatomical details that proponents argue would be difficult for casual hoaxers to reproduce.
Other famous tracks were absolutely hoaxed.
Some witnesses are undoubtedly sincere.
Sincerity, unfortunately, is not the same thing as identification.
Bears can stand and walk briefly on two legs. Distance distorts size. Darkness is terrible for identification. Human memory is imperfect. Expectations matter. And once people know Bigfoot is supposed to live in a particular forest, every strange sound, enormous shadow, and unidentified footprint arrives with a ready-made suspect.
And then there are people who simply lie.
Bigfoot has attracted rather a lot of those too.
So Is Bigfoot Real?
There is currently no scientifically verified evidence establishing that an unknown giant bipedal primate lives in North America. Most scientists regard Bigfoot as folklore produced through some combination of misidentification, hoaxes, cultural tradition, and human beings’ longstanding fascination with wild creatures that look almost, but not quite, like us.
And yet.
People keep seeing him.
Hunters who know what bears look like say they’ve seen something else.
People who have nothing obvious to gain from telling the story describe encounters that frightened or unsettled them for decades.
Families pass stories down.
Communities incorporate Bigfoot into their identity.
People keep walking into forests carrying cameras, plaster for footprints, thermal equipment, audio recorders, and a stubborn conviction that somewhere beyond the next tree line is an animal science hasn’t catalogued yet.
Maybe they’re wrong.
Statistically and scientifically, that’s where the evidence currently points.
But I understand why they keep looking.
The Grove Take
I think Bigfoot occupies a strange little patch of territory between zoology and hope.
We have mapped the planet. Satellites photograph it. Trail cameras watch our forests. Millions of us carry excellent cameras in our pockets every waking hour.
The world is supposed to be known now.
And maybe Bigfoot represents the stubborn little part of us that doesn’t want it to be.
Maybe we want one forest to still contain something we haven’t named.
One enormous footprint that doesn’t belong to anything in the field guide.
One place on the map where the correct scientific answer remains:
We don’t know.
Do I think an undiscovered breeding population of eight-foot-tall primates is wandering through the Pacific Northwest without leaving behind a body, bone, tooth, or verified DNA?
That’s a hard sell.
Do I want some quiet bastard to have spent the last century watching us stomp around the woods looking for him while staying just out of sight?
Very much.
Porch Ruling
Bigfoot can come up.
He seems shy, generally avoids people, and after everything we’ve done to his reputation, I figure we owe him a cup of something.
He’ll have to sit on the steps, though.
I don’t think the porch furniture is rated for eight feet and 700 pounds.
And if Patty turns out to have been a guy in a suit?
Good morning from the Grove, where the coffee is hot and the birds are starting to wake in the woods. October is here, and for that we are grateful. It brings with it the beauty and flavor of autumn. I don’t know. The question makes me a little sad. Not because I don’t love the things I’m doing. I love writing. I love making books and coloring pages. I love collecting glass, learning its stories, and sharing what I find. These projects let me follow my curiosity and spend time with the parts of myself that don’t fit neatly into a job description. I’m grateful for that. But we’ve normalized the side hustle as if it’s just another charming feature of modern life. Work your regular job, then find something else to sell, teach, make, drive, or post. Keep looking for another little stream of income. Somehow, a full workweek still isn’t always enough to cover one person’s life. A generation ago, one income could often support a whole household. Now, plenty of people are stitching together multiple jobs just to support themselves. We talk about that as ambition, ingenuity, or being a “go-getter.” Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s also necessity dressed up in a more inspiring outfit. I can be thrilled to build something that fulfills me and still wish our lives weren’t arranged so that everybody has to monetize every spare hour. I don’t want to turn every interest into a product or every quiet moment into a chance to make a little more money. Some things deserve to be loved without needing to pay rent. So, favorite side-hustle ideas? I have some. I’m living a few of them. But I wish fewer people needed one just to make ends meet. I want the work I love to be a choice I can enjoy, not another job the world quietly expects me to take on. Join us in the evenings throughout October as we explore the myth and mystery of cryptids, the stories people have carried from the woods, the water, and the edges of the map. One more thing we are grateful for is that some things get to stay mysterious, unmonetized, and happily out of sight
Good morning from the Grove, where the coffee is hot and the birds are starting to wake in the woods. October is here, and for that we are grateful. It brings with it the beauty and flavor of autumn. This morning’s prompt asks: What are your favorite side-hustle ideas? I don’t know. The question makes me a little sad. Not because I don’t love the things I’m doing. I love writing. I love making books and coloring pages. I love collecting glass, learning its stories, and sharing what I find. These projects let me follow my curiosity and spend time with the parts of myself that don’t fit neatly into a job description. I’m grateful for that. But we’ve normalized the side hustle as if it’s just another charming feature of modern life. Work your regular job, then find something else to sell, teach, make, drive, or post. Keep looking for another little stream of income. Somehow, a full workweek still isn’t always enough to cover one person’s life. A generation ago, one income could often support a whole household. Now, plenty of people are stitching together multiple jobs just to support themselves. We talk about that as ambition, ingenuity, or being a “go-getter.” Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s also necessity dressed up in a more inspiring outfit. I can be thrilled to build something that fulfills me and still wish our lives weren’t arranged so that everybody has to monetize every spare hour. I don’t want to turn every interest into a product or every quiet moment into a chance to make a little more money. Some things deserve to be loved without needing to pay rent. So, favorite side-hustle ideas? I have some. I’m living a few of them. But I wish fewer people needed one just to make ends meet. I want the work I love to be a choice I can enjoy, not another job the world quietly expects me to take on. Join us in the evenings throughout October as we explore the myth and mystery of cryptids, the stories people have carried from the woods, the water, and the edges of the map. One more thing we are grateful for is that some things get to stay mysterious, unmonetized, and happily out of sight
Hey, it’s me, Vivie! I’m the inner five-year-old, and I’m here to tell you what’s happening around the Grove. A lot of our ideas started with me saying, “Hey, let’s…” so the Grown Up decided I could tell you what we did, what’s going on now, and what we might do next.
Before I tell you what we did, I should probably tell you who “we” are. Sunstone Grove has a lot of branches. Seasoned Saves was the first, our flipping shop for vintage glass and pottery. Then came Never Ending Coffee Press and Pet Care Made Simple Press, each with its own books and voice, along with the blog, the socials, and the witchy wares shop.
The Grown Up is a middle-aged pagan witch in the southern United States, a Hu-mom to three pups, and an adult-diagnosed ADHDer whose ADHD affects her significantly. She found a way to harness some of her creativity with a purple pen and a Remarkable notebook. She says it may be the best medicine she could have given herself.
Now the Grove has three published coloring books, one published Guinea Pig care book, a Beardie care book in the works, a blog, and a witchy wares shop. That is a lot of branches. I like branches.
What We Did
September was when Y’all Come Sit a Spell opened its front door. The Grown Up has been filling the blog with essays, and people have started stopping by to read. I like having company on the porch.
The witchy wares shop opened, and the Grove started showing up in more places online. Facebook and Tumblr joined the mix, and the Grown Up kept making things for TikTok. There are a lot of doors on the internet. We are still learning which ones lead to friendly people.
The glass menagerie had new adventures, and Annie the Anthurium bloomed. There is always something happening around here. Sometimes it is a very pretty piece of glass. Sometimes it is a plant. Sometimes it is me saying, “Hey, let’s…”
What’s Going On Now
October is We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know: Cryptid Edition. The October cryptids are all researched, written, and loaded to be released one a day, every day. Starting tomorrow, you’ll meet a new one each day. I’m excited to introduce you to my new friends. Some of them are very strange. I like that.
The Grown Up is still working on the Beardie care book and building the 2027 Cozy Witchy Grove Planner. She has a very large pile of herb research, and there are crystals and animals in the mix, too. The purple pen has been busy.
What We Might Do
November might be “We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know: American History.” December might be “We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know: Holiday Traditions.” The Grown Up has started mapping both, and I think there is a lot we still need to learn.
After that, there’s the Wheel of the Year. We have to decide if we want to do that whole thing, or go in another direction. I have ideas, obviously. The Grown Up says we’ll talk about it later.
Vivie’s Junction
Things that went well: The purple pen and the Remarkable notebook. A lot of ideas turned into real things because we had a place to catch them.
Things we’re looking forward to: Introducing you all to my new friends, the Cryptids. One every day in October!
Things we need to do better: Posting consistently on socials and updating the sales posts. I have brought this to management’s attention. The purple pen is right there.
Welcome to our new friends, and welcome back to the folks who have been sitting with us since the beginning. There’s room on the porch for everyone. Pull up a chair and stay awhile. October’s bringing cryptids, and I can’t wait for you to meet them.
