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by darkwing » Fri Jan 16, 2026 10:12 pm
Steven Mark Streufert passed away peacefully in his sleep at his home in Vallejo, California on December 6, 2025, the anniversary of his father’s birth. He was 60 years old.
Steven lived at the threshold between worlds: waking and dreaming, certainty and doubt, belief and disciplined skepticism. For those who knew him in his final years, sleep was not merely a biological necessity but a familiar state of being. He sometimes drifted off mid-sentence, only to return moments later and continue his thought as though no boundary had been crossed, with only a brief apology. On other occasions he would narrate the events of his dreams to those present while he was still having them. He once explained that in his lucid dreams, he experienced a sense of self that made him question the reality of his experience in a body where he had long known pain, illness, and limitation.
In this, Steven reminded us of a paradox much like the one found in the finest teachers of any art: that only someone deeply at home with uncertainty can truly care for knowledge. Steven did not offer answers so much as he offered attention. He asked questions — of others, of evidence, of tradition, and relentlessly of himself. It could take hours of conversation before he would admit even his own quiet convictions, and even then, he held them lightly. If questions now arise around his passing, it is fitting. Steven was never here to close the inquiry. He was here to teach us how to keep it going.
News of Steven’s passing traveled quickly through the many communities he touched — researchers, skeptics, artists, and seekers who knew him as a singular voice in the study of paranormal phenomena and the folklore surrounding Bigfoot. Yet to speak of Steven only as an authority, or even as a legend, would miss the deeper truth of who he was. Before he was known for what he studied, he was known — by those closest to him — for how he listened.
He was an advocate for the outcast, the downtrodden, the weird, and the wonderful — those whose stories resist easy categorization. A key figure among The Armchair Anarchists, and a founding member of the Greebo Society of America, his life’s work was grounded in a fierce commitment to intellectual freedom and social justice. Though he became renowned as an authority within the Bigfoot research community, Steven consciously chose not to capitalize on the influence or notoriety that position afforded him. He was deeply wary of charlatanism and of any enterprise that traded curiosity for certainty or divided people from what is most honest and real within themselves for money. His role, as he understood it, was never to provide final answers, but to protect the conditions under which meaningful questions could be asked.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Steven was the son of Judith Ann Streufert (née Seidel) and Richard “Dick” Streufert. Inheriting a lineage steeped in scholarship, ministry, and moral seriousness, his family history traced back through generations of Lutheran ministers, most notably his great-grandfather, Rev. Frank Carl Streufert, ordained in 1895, whose global ministry — from New Guinea to South America — eventually brought the Streufert name to Humboldt County nearly a century before Steven himself would settle there. Where his forebears carried scripture, Steven carried questions.
In 1973, Steven’s family moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he would come of age intellectually and spiritually. There, in the 1980s, he enrolled as an Associate of the United Lodge of Theosophists in Santa Barbara and became a lifelong admirer of its founders, Raghavan and Nandini Iyer. Until the end of his life, he marvelled at the profundity of their erudition, ethical and moral seriousness, and universal teachings. Though Steven would later be widely known as a skeptic, his skepticism was never dismissive; it was grounded in reverence for inquiry itself and a resistance to dogma of any kind.
In the late 1980s Steven lived as a citizen of the Monarchy of Christania, a land of 40 acres on the San Marcos Pass in Santa Barbara County, which the procurator had declared a separate country, with a deed in the name of Jesus Christ. When the County of Santa Barbara challenged the sovereignty of this small country and bulldozed the homes on the property for lack of building permits, Steven was forced into exile pending return of the Lord and King, and lived for a while with his beloved mother and brothers again before relocating to Santa Cruz to study for his bachelor’s degree.
He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990, where he developed his lifelong fascination with myth, phenomenology, and the structures through which human beings make meaning. That foundation shaped everything that followed. At Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt), he completed two graduate degrees: an M.A. in English (Literature) in 1997, with a thesis titled The Anti-Teleological Dialogism of the Imagination in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and an M.A. in Teaching Writing in 1998, with a thesis exploring Bakhtin, Moffett and the Dialogical Model of Liberational Pedagogy. Across his life’s work, Steven synthesized religious studies, literary theory, folklore, and pedagogy into a distinctive approach rooted in dialogue, plurality, and intellectual humility.
Before his academic and research work, and informing his mindful playfulness, Steven was an earnest singer and songwriter in his earlier years, where he was able to give voice to the same generosity and reciprocity that animated his thinking. One of his most beloved songs, It’s Only a Matter of Time, offered a simple but profound refrain: that love, attention, and presence are the true currencies we exchange before “these bodies of ours die” and “our love fills the sky.” In the Santa Barbara music scene from the early 1980s onward, he performed with numerous bands, including the punk rock group Penis Brigade, the street-corner folk duo — and later electric ensemble — Kalamazoo Broccoli Coalition, and the proto-industrial outfit Fleur du Mal. He played bass, guitar, piano, synthesizer, and, on occasion, a washing machine. Music, like inquiry, was for him an act of generosity and play.
While he was known to enjoy fast food, he was a notoriously slow cook. As a teenager, he was unceremoniously released from his employment at McDonalds, spatula in hand, after engaging with other workers and customers on the subject of worker’s rights to the chagrin of his managers. From early on, he was essentially unmanageable and resisted criticism of his way of preparing meals with meticulous intentionality. He prepared delicious vegetarian meals as a cook at the legendary Borsodi’s Coffeehouse in Isla Vista, where he worked for very little pay in support of the hippie ethos of the place, and was able to watch performers like Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth, and Camper van Beethoven live from the kitchen. He also worked as a cook on a fishing boat, launching from the harbor in Santa Barbara in the wee hours of the morning and enduring sometimes fierce storms and rolling waves with a knowing smile to provide sustenance for the crew until the boat returned to dock in the full light of day.
Moving to Willow Creek in the early 2000s, having worked as a bookseller in coastal Humboldt County and online prior to that, Steven opened Bigfoot Books, where he specialized in rare and antiquarian books while housing a vast collection of every possible genre of book imaginable. There he settled into the research and storytelling work that he would become most known for. As one of the central characters of the Bluff Creek Project, he contributed to the rediscovery and documentation of the film site where the Patterson-Gimlin footage of Bigfoot was captured in the late 1960s, serving as an authority for numerous book projects, radio programs, and documentary programs on the Discovery Channel and elsewhere.
More than anything, Steven was a poet. His published writing is scattered across the internet, including extensive periods in the 2010s when he shared poetry daily on his Facebook page. Deeply influenced by the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, and James Joyce, his love of language was both fierce and tender. While others sought him out as an expert or debunker, Steven understood that his poetry was the truest revelation of his inner life. If there is meaning to be found in his legacy, it may be discovered more fully in those poems than any speculation on the mystery or cause of his death.
Steven’s early years were marked by extensive travel and a spirit of immediacy. In his early twenties, he and a friend rode their bicycles from Santa Barbara to Calgary, Canada. He visited the pyramids of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and stood at the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, among many other places. He rode his motorcycle solo cross-country from Santa Barbara to Milwaukee to join in a Rainbow Gathering and visit family. On another occasion, he dropped everything and drove to the East Coast at a friend’s request, simply to be present during a moment of crisis and help prevent a suicide. For Steven, showing up was not a metaphor; it was a moral act.
Steven was the father of two daughters, Gitanjali Castallian and Robin (Denali) Brown. Though he never married either of their mothers, Stephanie Brill or Samantha Brown, he took fatherhood with great seriousness. He believed deeply in chosen family, in ethical responsibility, and in the capacity of human beings to form bonds that transcend biology.
Early in Gitanjali’s life, he chose not to be a regular presence in her daily upbringing in recognition and sensitivity for the value and fundamental importance of the relationship she had with her mother’s new partner, who sought to adopt her. He did so with clarity and his legal blessing, affirming his belief in the essential goodness and sanctity of the family they created together. Nonetheless, he later traveled to Germany with Gitanjali when she was ten years old to explore the land of her German and Jewish ancestors – which reflected his enduring belief that identity is something to be explored with care, honesty, and reverence for all sides of the story.
When Robin was born, Steven chose a different path, partnering fully with her mother in the daily work of parenting — changing diapers, sharing care, playing, and remaining actively involved in her life until she reached adulthood, even after he and Samantha eventually chose to live separately. In both cases, Steven’s decisions reflected his commitment to ethical responsibility, respect for others’ bonds, and an expansive understanding of what family can be.
Steven lived for many years with significant health challenges, including diabetes and heart disease, and he spoke of them without drama or denial. That he died peacefully in his sleep feels, to those who knew him, less like an ending than a final crossing between states he had long inhabited with grace.
He is survived by his daughters Gitanjali Castallian and Robin Brown; his brothers Peter Streufert and Eric Streufert, and Eric’s wife Lindsay and their children Holden, Ava, and Isla — as well as a wide constellation of friends, lovers, and fellow seekers.
His life reminds us that attention is sacred, that truth resists ownership, and that meaning is not something to be conquered but something to be listened for. In honoring Steven, we are invited not to resolve the mystery he leaves behind, but to keep it alive with care.
If his passing leaves questions, that is no accident. Steven taught that inquiry itself is a form of love, and that absolute attention — whether to a text, a story, a person, or a mystery — is among the highest human callings. His life reminds us that meaning is not something we arrive at once and for all, but something we keep alive by listening well.
D.W. "Darkwing" Lee
MABRC Executive Director
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