I wanted to move, but physically could not.
About thirty-five years before she posted, the teller was a teenager in Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island, babysitting at a house in the remote Beaver Creek area. It was the last house on a quiet road and backed onto forest that ran unbroken over a mountain range toward Horne Lake. There were no street lights and no motion lights.
She didn't scare easily, partly because of the family's dog, a big German shepherd cross who was a superb guard dog. Whenever he pricked up his ears at a noise outside, she would slide open the patio door and he would charge off into the dark barking to chase away whatever it was, a raccoon or a stray dog. A little later he'd whine at the door and she'd let him back in.
One night the dog's ears went up at something she couldn't hear, and she went to let him out as usual. The heavy sliding door stuck about eighteen inches open. While she struggled with it, the dog was pushing past her leg to get out. The moon was nearly full and the yard was unusually bright.
At the same moment, she and the dog both saw it, and both of them froze.
About thirty feet away, beside a stand of trees, a large hairy figure stood upright, lit from behind by the moon so its outline was sharp. One big arm was resting against the tree beside it. Her mind flipped back and forth: a person watching her? No, it had to be a bear standing up. Then it shifted slightly and she saw its profile, and she knew it was neither.
What convinced her was the dog. Instead of tearing off barking as he always did, he stood rigid beside her, as petrified as she was. She remembers trying to make herself move and being physically unable to. It was probably twenty or thirty seconds, but it felt like minutes.
At last she shoved the dog out, slammed the slider and retreated to a room with no windows. She never heard him bark, and she never heard him crashing through the brush. Eventually she worked up the courage to cross in front of an uncurtained window to reach the wall phone and called her father, who came and stayed until the parents got home. He found the dog curled up silently on the front step. She told the family only that she'd heard noises.
She grew up hiking all over the island and has seen more than forty bears in her life, one of them just a few weeks before she wrote this. She knows what bears look like, and her heart still races when she thinks about that night. She has no doubt Sasquatch roams Vancouver Island.