BURLINGTON, Wash. — There's something "big" "afoot" in the Skagit Valley.
"Yeah, this is very bizarre," said Mike Vail. "Man, every piece in here has its own story."
Vail is the founder and owner of the Skagit-Squatch Museum, a place filled with cryptic cryptids, and built by a man who loves a mystery.
"There are many theories on Sasquatch," Vail said. "I lean real heavily toward feral or wild human beings myself."
More than a decade ago, Vail was looking for a suitable retirement plan.
"And I didn't want a conventional job, so I'm just gonna have a Bigfoot museum," he recalled.
The electric sign maker and chainsaw carver thought he'd take advantage of all the traffic zipping by his home on the North Cascade Highway.
"There's thousands of cars every day that drive by here," Vail said. "They like to come in and feed on the knowledge of Skagit-Squatch."
The price is right.
"It's free and it's family-friendly," Vail said.
Vail has filled his museum with hundreds of pieces of Bigfoot-inspired art and artifacts.
"You can look in any direction and your mind can just wander," Vail said.
He's created many of the Bigfoot-themed pieces himself.
"My museum is majority art, an art museum," Vail said. "because there is a huge lack of evidence when it comes to Sasquatch and Bigfoot."
But he has gotten his hands on a very impressive foot, which he pointed out next to the museum's front entrance.
"This is a Bigfoot print from out on the Olympic Peninsula," he said.
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Vail once had a brief meetup with the big guy, himself.
"This is real similar to my Sasquatch encounter," he said, referring to a carving of a creature with a classic Bigfoot look.
When visitors bring with their own 'squatch stories, the curator carefully documents them.
"This is my journal that I've been acquiring for about 6 years now," he said as he hoisted a well-tended book, "It's a collection of over 300 Bigfoot stories. Someday I hope to produce this into a movie or a book of some sort."
Vail's wife, Peggy, provides some impressive artwork of her own, and she supports her husband's hairy passion: A roadside stop where you're guaranteed to spot Bigfoot and even bigger smiles.
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