The Northern California town obsessed with Bigfoot

Here’s a fact you probably don’t know: People who look for Bigfoot — or, as the cryptid is also known, Sasquatch — call themselves ‘Squatchers. 

So when I learned about Willow Creek, the tiny town in Humboldt County that’s famous for its most elusive resident, I had to go. 

Even if you’ve never heard of Willow Creek, California, you’ve probably seen it — or close to it, at least. The world’s most famous footage of “Bigfoot,” called the Patterson-Gimlin film, was captured in 1967 by Bluff Creek in the nearby Six Rivers National Forest. In the decades since, the three-minute movie has been analyzed, scrutinized, verified, debunked, torn apart and put back together by believers and skeptics alike. (Maybe it’s real, maybe it was faked — when you’re talking about mythic cryptids, who knows?)

As soon as I got to the town of fewer than 2,000, which primarily consists of one short main thoroughfare, it was easy to see why the promise of Bigfoot made such a big difference. It’s hard to imagine that the tiny spot — one grocery store, one bar, one motel — would attract many visitors were it not for the specter of Sasquatch hanging over the place. “It’s definitely helped the area,” Terri Castner, then-president of the local Chamber of Commerce, told the LA Times in 1989. “The legend has been fantastic for our town.”

You’re unlikely to see the cryptid in the flesh, but you’ll inevitably see it in other ways — especially at the Willow Creek China Flat Museum, which was my first stop. Pulling into the parking lot, my friends and I were greeted with a 25-foot-tall redwood sculpture of Bigfoot, sitting in front of the small yellow building that houses a world-renowned collection of Bigfoot research and artifacts. (If you don’t want to travel quite as far as Willow Creek, there’s a Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, near Santa Cruz.)

Inside, the museum has three rooms. The first is a gift shop with Bigfoot kitsch and several mostly full notebooks for people to record personal messages — or even Bigfoot encounters. “Yes, it’s here, alive and well,” one entry from 2013 read. “I saw him.” 

“Thank you so much for sharing such wonders,” another said.  

The second room has items from the history of Willow Creek, which was established as China Flat in 1878 and changed its name in 1915. 

The third was what I had come for: the Bigfoot collection. Inside, dioramas and other exhibits detailed the history and legend of Bigfoot. Though there were accounts of “wild men of the woods” in newspapers starting in the mid-1800s, the term “Bigfoot” didn’t appear until 1958, when Humboldt Times reporter Andrew Genzoli coined it in an article about “huge footprints found on wilderness road.” The stories weren’t new to locals, who had been reporting seeing impossibly large, impossibly hairy men in the woods for decades. But it kicked off a wider interest in the cryptid and inspired “Bigfoot hunters” to try to capture more evidence than just footprints. 

Nine years later, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin succeeded — or say they did, maybe it was a hoax? — in capturing three minutes of grainy, unsteady footage of what appears to be a long-limbed, loping creature, standing about 6 feet, 6 inches, walking by Bluff Creek. While the exhibit does include Patterson and Gimlin, it incorporates a much broader field of study … and also tons of ways that Sasquatch has manifested in pop culture, from movies to board games to musical scores to countless books. 

I won’t sugarcoat it for you: The collection entails a lot of reading and features a lot of casts of feet so big they make Andre the Giant look dainty. But going through all of it, it finally hit me — if there were stronger evidence, if there were bones or pelts or more modern photos, Bigfoot wouldn’t be such a hotly contested topic. 

Outside of the museum, the half-mile of Trinity Highway that’s the rest of downtown Willow Creek is also full of Bigfoots — or, at least, Bigfoot-inspired art. A Sasquatch statue (Squatchue?) stands outside Gonzalez Mexican Restaurant, and another is in front of the Chevron. On the side of the Ace Hardware, an enormous mural showcases the history and industries of the area. Every time there’s a group of miners or farmers, there’s a Bigfoot right there, pitching in on the effort. 

“Willow Creek is the gateway to Bigfoot Country,” Bryce Johnson, star of Discovery’s “Expedition Bigfoot” and co-host of the paranormal “Bigfoot Collectors Club” podcast, told SFGATE. “To get to Bluff Creek, you have to come through Willow Creek, and that’s a lot of how those guys like Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin came through. It’s where they stayed and ate, and then they’d pack horses and go into the woods and camp.”

The town became so famous because, once they captured that footage, Patterson and Gimlin took it straight to the museum. “It’s ground zero for where this film begins,” Johnson added. “That stands as still to this day, even today when everyone has a cellphone, the best footage around.” The podcast, which Johnson hosts with Michael McMillian and Riley Bray, just did a three-part deep dive into the history of Bigfoot research that analyzed the footage in depth.

The best part of the hunt, Johnson said, is “coming across this presence in the woods that can feel very alive and real, and it can also feel very supernatural. … It’s fun being out in the woods and looking for this creature and talking to people who have seen it. Whether it’s real or not, it’s still a phenomenon that happens on a global scale.”

When Jeff Goldblum came knocking, asking paranormal researchers Greg and Dana Newkirk to take him Bigfoot hunting for his show “The World According to Jeff Goldblum,” they brought the actor-turned-adventurer to Humboldt County. To introduce Goldblum to the world of cryptid research, the Newkirks took him out into the woods and used research tools like Bigfoot pheromones (which are real and smelly beyond description) and baseball bats to re-create the sounds of knocking on trees often described in Bigfoot encounters. 

“I think what we found was why Bigfoot is important,” Greg told SFGATE in 2021. “Things like Bigfoot teach us to maintain a curiosity about a world that is becoming increasingly more mundane. When we can get creative about it, when we can imagine monsters and we can chase monsters, it gets us out into the world that we feel like we know back and forth already.”

After exploring the town — and stopping to buy a T-shirt at Bigfoot Cannabis Company — we headed to lunch at Bigfoot Steakhouse. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but as soon as I opened the door, a 5-foot-tall Squatchue stood in the entry to greet us. Maybe I didn’t find Bigfoot, but I definitely feel like Bigfoot found me.