Who is Saxsquatch? The sax-playing cryptid from NC offers a look inside the suit
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Dean Mitchell reveals identity as Saxsquatch after eight years of anonymity
- He parlayed street sax sets into festival slots and national media attention
- Mitchell keeps stage persona, asks fans to attend charity shows and donate
For the last eight years, the world has thrilled to musical stylings of a 7-foot saxophonist in a Bigfoot suit — a fur-covered crowd-pleaser in blue Pit Viper shades who invites the world out of its tedium into a mythical world of lasers, disco balls and near-ecstatic dancing.
The artist known as Saxsquatch combines sax-heavy melodies ranging from Wham’s “Careless Whisper” to the “Star Wars” cantina theme with an irresistible beat, launching a career that landed the onetime busker from Franklin Street into the lineup at Bonnaroo and Electric Forest festivals — a cryptid in the pages of Rolling Stone.
But until now, the sax-playing creature kept to his whimsical back story, staying strictly anonymous. Onstage, in interviews and everywhere else, Saxsquatch presented exclusively as a real-life Bigfoot who learned to jam in the Chapel Hill woods alongside a grandfather named Gigfoot and a sister named Bigflute, aided by a long extension cord.
But now Saxsquatch wants to pull back the curtain, stop all the guessing and let fans glimpse the man inside the mask. Meet Dean Mitchell, no longer a blurry figure in the distance.
“So many people Google ‘Who is Saxsquatch?’” Mitchell said in an interview with The N&O last week. “There are no articles of me being Dean, being myself.”
Inside the suit
The 31-year-old man who emerges from the suit he keeps in a blue barrel in the back of his Chevy van stands nearly as tall as Bigfoot himself — well over 6 feet with a reddish beard, boyish grin and tattoos from shoulders to ankles.
Much of the Saxsquatch legend springs from his own experience: Mitchell really did fall in love with the saxophone after hearing “Urgent” by Foreigner, and he really did play for change on Franklin Street as a 12-year-old boy.
“I would skip school and ride the bus,” he confessed.
He left high school without graduating and lived for a time as a wandering sax player, sometimes without a bed to call his own, getting jailed briefly in Greenville, SC, for unauthorized street music. Thinking of that era, Mitchell smiles to recall playing a line from John Coltrane for a passing stranger.
“He reached into his pocket and took a $100 bill and put it in my pocket,” he said. “I ran down the street screaming, ‘I’m gonna make it!’“
Success came first when he joined up with Southern rockers the Marcus King Band, having met them in Asheville, then again in 2018 when he figured out how to make music on his own, fiddling with bass distortion and beat variations late into the night. He drives a 1995 Camaro, has a fiancee named Grace Teel who sometimes joins the act as Thiccfoot and a 4-year-old son, Otto, who steps in as Littlefoot.
“It’s been the craziest ride ever,” he said last week, putting his suit back in the barrel. I’ve found myself half-naked in really weird parts of really weird buildings.”
Somehow, revealing these biographical details hardly detract from the Saxquatch mystique.
“My face is not what the brand is about,” he said. “It’s about taking people out of the mundane into a world of the unknown. If you really want to know who I am, you’ll find it anyway. This way, I get to shout out all the people who helped make this happen.”
Cryptids with a cause
He asks that The N&O recognize his parents, Greg and Alicia Mitchell, both retired, who supported him through the lean and troubled years and would love seeing their names in the paper.
And he asks that fans flock to see him play Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro on Halloween in what is becoming a long string of sold-out shows, this one aiding a favorite charity. As he did last year with his Chapel Hill flash mob, Mitchell asks that patrons bring canned goods and nonperishable food to support Porch, a nonprofit food pantry.
“I always wanted to have enough power to bring good into the world,” he said. “We really have purpose now. It really is cryptids with a cause, and our cause is good.”
Mask or on mask off, Saxsquatch offers the same chance at mass revelry whether you come dressed as an elf or a unicorn, whether you follow a sun god or moon spirit, whether you insist that Bigfoot sightings have a rational explanation or choose to embrace the mystery.
“I never wanted my face to be a part of it,” he said, “but I wanted Saxsquatch to be a thing in the world. It all happens anonymously, but I wish the same amount of adventure for everyone who comes to the shows. Be what you believe in, you know?”
This story was originally published October 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM.