The eyes felt like they were looking right through my soul.
The teller grew up in San Jose and has spent his whole life in the Santa Cruz Mountains next door. On a weekday morning in late summer 2019 he and his girlfriend at the time were hiking the Loma Prieta Grade trail in the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. It's a popular trail and there were other people about, though there were long stretches with nobody else in sight.
About an hour in, his girlfriend needed a bathroom break. The trail ran between thick trees, but they found a gap on the right and walked twenty or thirty feet in so she'd be out of sight of passing hikers. He tossed her the backpack with the toilet paper. She ducked behind a tree, and he walked halfway back toward the trail, where he could still see her and keep watch.
With nothing to do but look around, he caught movement on his left. On a medium-sized tree about ten feet away there was a hand, very dark and very distinct, wrapped around the trunk. His first thought was someone in black gloves, maybe a creep peeking at his girlfriend. Then a face leaned out from behind the tree, and everything turned upside down.
He's six foot two, and he puts the figure at seven or eight feet tall. He only ever saw half of it, but it matched the classic description: big black eyes, a broad flat nose, dark skin and blackish-grey hair, and just a hint of a peaked skull. For no reason he can explain, he felt sure it was female.
It leaned out twice. What he remembers most are the eyes. He calls them mesmerizing, as if they were looking right through him. He wasn't scared in that moment so much as stunned, with everything slowed down the way it does during a car accident. Taking out his phone never crossed his mind. The strangest detail is that he was aware the whole time of two things at once: the face behind the tree, and the sound of his girlfriend peeing a few yards away.
The second time, it held his gaze for a few seconds, then pulled back behind the tree and seemed to sink, as if it was crouching or lying down. That was the last he saw of it. The whole thing took perhaps twenty or thirty seconds.
Only when his girlfriend walked back toward him did the fear arrive. He grabbed her hand, pulled her back to the trail and said they had to go, now. He explained on the way down, walking much faster than they had come up. She believed him at once; she's Canadian, and an uncle and a cousin of hers had claimed a sighting when she was growing up. She even wanted to go back and look for it. He did not.
He points out that Bigfoot was the last thing on his mind that morning. He'd spent the whole hike complaining about his manager. He had strange dreams for weeks afterward. His girlfriend loved telling the story over beers, but he was never comfortable with people knowing. He allows that a very large person in a suit could have been out there at that exact moment, in that exact spot. He just doesn't think so.