Sasquatch on Hulu: 6 Reasons It’s a Haunting True Crime Docuseries

Sasquatch on Hulu ventures into territory where paranormal and true crime rarely cross paths. In fact, has anyone ever investigated Bigfoot’s part in an unsolved mystery before? In this case, he was blamed for not just one murder, but three.

It used to be rare when true crime and the paranormal merged in any meaningful way. However, it’s happening more often now that paranormal shows are capitalizing on the true-crime pop culture trend. Here are some recent examples where shows have blended the genres:

• Ghost Adventures:Ghost Adventures: Serial Killer Spirits, Ghost Adventures: Cecil Hotel
• Portals to Hell: The “McCormick Farm” episode
• The Holzer Files: The “Phantom Hand” episode about the Torso Murderer
• Ed Gein: The Real Psycho: Perhaps the scariest Shock Docs special yet.

Still, while the shows introduced the true crime element, their focus remained on the paranormal investigation aspect.

But now there’s a new beast on the block, and Sasquatch on Hulu just raised the benchmark for ghost hunting/true crime crossover shows.

All three episodes started streaming on April 20 and it’s a binger’s delight. David Holthouse and his style of investigative reporting are both refreshing and engrossing, the people interviewed are engaging, and the mystery is riveting, intriguing, haunting, and perplexing.

And where it all ends up? Well, without giving anything away, Holthouse sums it best with this statement: “I don’t know if I believe in Bigfoot, but I sure as hell believe there are monsters among us.”

I always have too, but now more than ever after watching this show.

Let’s look at six reasons why Sasquatch on Hulu is such a haunting true crime docuseries.

1. The Bigfoot Story

In the early 1990s, David Holthouse went to work with a friend on a cannabis farm in Northern California. Immediately he heard stories from other farmworkers about a Sasquatch, or a “tribe” of them, threatening people who worked on the farms in the area. They claimed it was growling at them from the treeline, bluff charging, and hurling huge chunks of rock. Naturally, people were a bit freaked out.

However, knowing he was in “Bigfoot country” and not a gullible type, he wondered if they were messing with him. Was it all some sort of new guy initiation?

Until his second night when he was in a cabin with his friend and the farm’s owner. A couple of guys burst in, and one was all upset talking rapidly about something they’d just seen, which was three bodies mangled and mutilated.

The farm owner asked if they’d been ripped off.

No. The pot was all still there, but it was torn up and covered in blood just like the bodies. Ones Bigfoot had killed because what else could’ve explained that level of carnage? He was desperately shouting about having to warn everybody.

2. The Mystery

The way Holthouse summarizes it in the third episode explains it best: “This started as a ghost story about three guys getting killed on a dope farm in 1993.”

Had that night in the cabin really happened? Holthouse wasn’t sure.

Was his memory playing tricks on him? Had he imagined that story, or maybe dreamed it?

And then there was the owner’s reaction. He didn’t rush to do anything about it. He just sort of absorbed the information. Then he laughed it off when the men left.

Not that he could’ve done much, though. It wasn’t like he could call the police and report the bodies. This was the 90s. Pot was illegal and growing it was a ticket straight to jail.

No one said anything more about the incident the rest of the time Holthouse worked there. But it haunted him ever after.

Decades later he finally launched an investigation to find out if it was a true story or not and the result is his quest to discover if three men had been murdered and if so, who were they and who —or what—had killed them? Was there a chance Bigfoot was really responsible?

No spoilers here, but I will say monsters of sorts were involved.

3. The Absence of Bodies

The thing that’s very unique about this true crime doc is that there are no bodies. No police report was ever filed and no formal police investigation was undertaken.

In the beginning, and even in the end, Holthouse isn’t even sure there was a murder. Although it starts to look more likely because he stumbles upon a case of another unsolved murder that happened in the same area.

4. Spy Rock Road

What is up with this road in Mendocino County? Holthouse is pretty sure it’s where the guys were when they reported the bodies killed by Bigfoot in 1993, but he’s not certain.

However, as he digs to separate memory from fantasy and fact from fiction, he uncovers the unsolved murder of Hugo Olea-Lopez in 2013. He worked as a guard for a cannabis farm and was killed by a single gunshot wound. He was found off of Spy Rock Road.

But why? Was it racially related? Or was there some other connection?

The trouble is, Spy Rock Road isn’t the kind of place that welcomes looky-loos and outsiders. It’s where heavy-duty criminal elements like the Hells Angels have set up operations.

Holthouse has to tread carefully. Is he going to be okay or stir up trouble and land himself in hot water with his investigation? It heightens the suspense of this doc.

5. Missing People

In one of the episodes, Holthouse states that “the rate of missing persons cases in Mendocino County and all throughout the Emerald Triangle is, per capita, the highest in the United States by far.”

There’s a scene where he shows a lot of missing person fliers and says that’s something he couldn’t help but notice. They’re posted everywhere up there.

I haven’t fact-checked that statement yet, but I did Google “most missing people per capita” which led me to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs. They call missing people “the nation’s silent mass disaster” and share a stat that 600,000 individuals go missing every year.

To put that in perspective, according to Statista.com, there have been 545,761 deaths caused by COVID-19 in just over a year, from January 2020 to April 14, 2021. Health System Tracker listed COVID-19 as the number one cause of death in the U.S. in 2021.

But to have that many people —more in fact— up and go missing each year…that’s a little disturbing.

Of course, people disappear for many reasons and not all are nefarious ones. Some people just check out. Not in a suicidal way. They just want a fresh start in a different life. Some vanish because of accidents. And of course, there are people who have been kidnapped or snatched and are either being held against their will or have been murdered.

I had no idea the number of missing people was in the hundreds of thousands, though. Sasquatch on Hulu shined the light on that chilling statistic.

6. The Alleged Killer

We don’t know who this man is because his name is concealed during the documentary, but my stomach was in knots just hearing the recorded conversation Holthouse had with him on the phone. I was super concerned for his safety. Talk about a no-nonsense person you wouldn’t want to fuck with.

Pardon my French, by the way. I try to leave colorful language out of my writing whenever possible, but some situations call for it and this is one of them.

Whoever the alleged killer is, he’s heavy-duty serious scary. Not the kind of person whose radar you’d want to be on, much less meet alone in a dark alley —or a deep, dark forest.

Holthouse’s inquiry into murders in the Emerald Triangle area is exactly the kind of thing that could put him in such a situation.

Semi-spoiler alert: he survives, though. That’s why we can enjoy Sasquatch on Hulu, which is a very novel true crime docuseries that is totally binge-worthy and worth every minute.

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Did you know over half a million people go missing in the United States every year?