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Bigfoot Stories

kworley39 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:38:04 CST

There is possibly no other creature in the annals of science (or non-science) that arouses more curiosity than Bigfoot. The case files contain thousands of reported sightings, yet no actual specimen has ever been found. Hundreds of photographs exist, but the creature has not been identified. Still, the clues accumulate year after year. In the words of one investigator, "It is an extremely complex phenomenon with no starting point and few geographical limits." If Bigfoot exists, and nothing short of the actual creature will suffice for most skeptics, then it most certainly must be a relative of man.
Although no one has ever managed to capture a live creature, or claimed the carcass of a dead one, it still does not follow that Bigfoot is a creation of the imagination. The legend of wild half-men is universal, reaching from the satyrs and centaurs of Greek mythology to Tarzan and others of modern fiction. Nearly every mountain range in the world has stories of shambling, manlike creatures with footprints too large to be human. Eyewitness reports and physical evidence is just a little too staggering---a little too overwhelming---to be tossed aside as mere tricks of the mind.
Descriptions of the apelike creature do not vary. Bigfoot is anywhere from six to ten feet tall, 300 to 1,000 pounds, and walks upright on two legs. Hair covers almost all of its body and ranges in color from black to silvery-white, with the predominant color being reddish-brown. The creature has a flat face and nose, a receding, sloped forehead with a prominent brow ridge, and a cone-shaped head which sits on broad shoulders with no apparent neck. Its proportions are roughly those of a human, except for its long dangling arms. Species? Unknown.
Bigfoot draws its name from the gigantic footprints it leaves behind...some as long as two feet by eight inches wide. The length of its stride varies, but the distance is usually close to four feet between prints. Seldom in the company of others of its kind, although there have been occasional sightings of families---two adults and one or more juveniles---it appears to be largely nocturnal, feasting on whatever it finds. Some researchers claim it is usually inactive in extremely cold weather, but since evidence of its existence is normally found at the higher elevations of densely forested, largely uninhabited mountain ranges, how would humans really know what its preferences are in the midst of winter?
When the first gorilla was seen by a white man early in the last century, the reaction to the news was one of astonishment. Native stories of such creatures were well-known, but generally viewed as mythology by the scientific community...until the actual discovery of the enormous, intelligent animals reminded man that there might really be living fossils tucked away in the remotest reaches of the world. It was a sobering thought and spawned a world-wide search of dense jungles and icy mountain habitats for other creatures hitherto unknown or thought extinct.
Also with the discovery of the gorilla, the hairy man legends once again aroused interest. This time, modern fossil hunters were amazed to discover that the legends spanned the globe. They found that the majority of the sightings were concentrated on two continents, Asia and North America. The stories were fascinating...and baffling. If the most intriguing and elusive creature walking upright on the earth inhabited both the mysterious mountains of the west coast of North America and the snowy vastness of the mighty Himalayas, were they one and the same species? Scientists wondered. Further, how could the Australian two-legged hairy beast, a wild man called the Yowie, be explained in a land with no native gorillas?
It turns out from analyzing the reported sightings and folklore, that the hairy man may be a varied and widespread clan encompassing every continent of the world. There seems to be three distinct types: small, large, and extra-large, all or none of which may be related. They go by many different names: Alma, Shookpa, Yowie, Meti, Kang-mi, Kaptar, to mention a few, with Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti and Abominable Snowman the most commonly used by the western world. They all have one thing in common: an exceptionally big, human-like foot.
How, then, do these Bigfoots compare to one another? Are they different geographic races of the same species or several different types with nothing in common but big footprints, an upright stance, and lots of hair? John Green, the famous Sasquatch hunter, once theorized that the North American variety was a good deal larger than the others. He also believed that the Russian creature was taller than the Himalayan, although it might not be much heavier. But the real shock was his belief that the Himalayan creature, on the evidence of both its description and its footprints, was entirely unlike a human, whereas the Russian variety appeared to be very human indeed. The creatures called Bigfoot simply were not logical.
The earliest American report of Bigfoot seems to be the giant footprints discovered by well-known explorer and fur trader David Thompson in 1811. Trying to reach the mouth of the Columbia River by crossing the Rocky Mountains near Jasper, Alberta, Canada, he came across a trail of prints measuring nearly fourteen inches long by eight inches wide. (The toes themselves were almost four inches in length.) They were incredibly human-like with a distinct heel and five toes. He recorded all the information in his diary and later published a book, Narrative, which included his account of the first meeting with Bigfoot. The Indians in the area told him the tracks belonged to Sasquatch, the giant men living on Vancouver Island. Thompson never did find any giants, but since his time, many others have claimed to have seen creatures that could easily pass for one.
A few years later, the Yeti arrived on the Western scene when B. H. Hobson, a British naturalist, went to live among the Nepalese high in the mountains of the Himalayas. In 1832, he wrote about a tall, erect, apelike creature covered in red fur living in the remotest reaches of the high forest. He said the Sherpas called the creature yeh teh in their language, which meant "hairy man of the snow" or "mountain demon." He said they came in three sizes, meh teh, yeh teh, and deh teh, meaning large, extra-large, and giant. Although the news was not taken lightly, eminent scientists of the time thought Hobson was writing of the large Langur monkey or the Himalayan red bear, both of which are extremely reticent and seldom seen. His accounts were duly noted and ultimately dismissed.
It wasn't until 1887 that an outsider first saw direct evidence of the Himalayan Yeti. Another Briton, Major Lawrence Waddel of the Indian Army Medical Corps, wrote of seeing strange, gigantic footprints in Sikkim, footprints that the Sherpas said were "the trail of the great hairy wild men who live in the eternal snow." Mystified, Western man finally went searching.
The North American Bigfoot hit the news again in the 4 July 1884 issue of The British Daily Colonist newspaper, which served readers in British Columbia, Canada. According to the story, an engineer driving a train along the Fraser River between the towns of Lytton and Yale saw a body lying across the tracks ahead of the train. He managed to stop the train before hitting the body, but the squeal of the train's brakes frightened the creature and it fled to the nearby rocks. Crewmembers then chased the hairy beast across dangerous rock ledges before one of the crewmen managed to drop a heavy rock down on the creature's head, rendering it unconscious. Several of the men carried the beast back to the train.
"Jacko," as the creature was subsequently called, was four feet, seven inches tall and weighed 127 pounds. He was covered in dark hair all over his body, except for a small area around his eyes, palms of his hands, and soles of his feet. The creature also had long forearms. The examiner noted that Jacko was "something of the gorilla type." The only sound the creature made was "half bark and half growl."
Jacko was kept in a train car for the remainder of the trip to Yale and fed berries and milk. After being placed on exhibit in Yale, Jacko was sold to Barnum and Bailey's Circus, but he managed to escape before reaching his new circus home.
Theodore Roosevelt, a Deputy Sheriff of Billings, Montana, and no pushover for tall tales, heard the story of a great hairy creature roaming the wilderness of the Salmon River in Idaho. He wrote in his book, The Wilderness Hunter, of the incident in 1893. The story went that in the early 1850s, a solitary hunter had mysteriously been killed and half-eaten in a particularly wild and lonely pass in a remote mountain ridge dividing the Salmon River from the headwaters of the Wisdom River. A year after the grisly remains were found, two trappers decided to venture into the forbidding area to try their luck.
The men went upstream, set their traps, and returned at dusk to find their camp nearly destroyed. The only visible clue left by the intruder was a clear set of huge footprints indicating that whatever it was, it had walked upright, but was not human. Later that night, one of the men was awakened from deep slumber by a strong, wild-beast odor and turned over in his bedding to see a great body looming in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. He grabbed his rifle, shot at the shadow, and apparently missed, as he heard the thing smashing through the underbrush into the black night.
The next day the men again returned from their traps to find the camp destroyed. Most of the food was gone and everything else was generally messed up and scattered all over the area. Totally unnerved, they sat guard by the campfire all night, listening to moans, shrieks, whistles, and hisses from something staggering about in the darkness. At daybreak, they decided to collect their traps and leave.
When they had collected all but three of the traps, the men decided to split up in order to be out of the area by nightfall. It was agreed that one would work the traps, and the other would return to camp and pack up their belongings. The one working the traps found beaver in the last three, and by the time he had prepared them, the sun was low on the horizon. Keeping an uneasy eye on his surrounding, he warily returned to camp and yelled for his companion. Receiving no answer, he dropped his packs and cautiously searched the campsite.
He found the body of his friend stretched out beside the trunk of a great fallen spruce that they had been using as a repository for some of their non-perishable supplies. The body was still warm, but the neck was broken, and he could see four great fang marks in the throat. The human-like footprints of a great beast lay everywhere. Reading the signs, the trapper was able to determine that his friend had finished packing, built a fire, and then sat down on the log facing the fire with his back to the dense woods. The creature had not only killed his friend, "but apparently had also romped and gamboled around [the body] in uncouth, ferocious glee, occasionally rolling over and over it; and had then fled back into the soundless depths of the woods." According to Roosevelt, the man swore never again to return to Idaho's Salmon River.
The story caused a wild sensation and then gradually died, becoming no more than a tall tale to be told around campfires on dark nights---especially to tenderfoots and newcomers just arriving in the area. But after the turn of the century, newspapers began printing articles from other "credible witnesses" who claimed to see similar creatures in the Pacific Northwest. In fact, in 1902, a hairy, eight foot, upright creature wielding a club, terrified a group of ice skaters at a pond in Chesterfield, Idaho. Two years later, an entire Indian village abandoned their home on Vancouver Island because a "monkey-like wild man" took to spending the nights howling on the beach in an unearthly fashion.
As Bigfoot sightings increased, the number of skeptics did also, with most of the skeptics thinking the great hairy creatures were just legends from Indian mythology. They pointed out that the giant hominoids had been a part of American Indian traditions for centuries and the subject of at least 245 legends variously rooted in Canada and the United States---legends of giant men with cannibalistic natures and superhuman powers, including the ability to possess people and turn them into creatures like themselves. The legends bore names like O-mah and Seeahtik, Wendigo and Sasquatch.
In the late 1890s near the Chetco River in southern Oregon, a dozen loggers and their families encountered a great beast with disastrous results. Camping in tents by the river, the lumbermen would awaken each morning to find their freshly cut timber, logs which required three men to move, carelessly scattered about like matchsticks. Huge human footprints left in the damp earth were the only clues. Since they had been having trouble with bears, the men followed the footprints through the torn shrubbery and uprooted saplings until they disappeared.
That night, the loggers were awakened by shrill screams of something not quite human in the near underbrush. Seizing a rifle, one man lit a torch and headed into the darkness. He was quickly followed by several other men. In a very short time, the first man rushed back to collapse in terror at the feet of his tracking companions. He babbled incoherently about a hairy monster eight feet tall with yellow eyes, fangs, and hands like a man. His description put the camp in an uproar.
The next night, two men decided to track and kill the hairy intruder. They carried a small lantern and loaded rifles and disappeared into the darkness behind the tents. Back in camp, their friends heard screams and shrieks and the sounds of gunfire. Then...silence.
When the two men did not reappear, the other loggers grabbed lanterns and torches and, while firing their guns into the air, set out in search of their comrades. A half mile from camp, they found the scene of a desperate struggle. Broken and bleeding, arms and legs ripped from the torsos, their two friends lay scattered all over the place. They had been slammed against trees and torn into pieces by something with incredible strength. Blood dripped into small pools from branches high in the trees, as well as from the crushed greenery of the surrounding shrubs. But of the hairy creature responsible, there were only bloody footprints leading deep into the woods.
The loggers struck camp and left the area the next day. Professional hunters entered the forest in the days that followed, but found no sign of the creature.
The incident didn't stop lumberman Mike King from wanting to log a certain area of Vancouver Island in 1901. When his Indian workers refused to follow him because of the giant Sasquatch, he set out by himself with a rifle and a backpack to explore the area. Several days into the trip, King crossed a small hill and saw a hairy creature squatting by a stream. He lined up his rifle and through the sights he saw that the "bear" he was about to shoot was washing roots in the water and then stacking them in a neat pile on the riverbank. He was perplexed. Bears just didn't do things like that.
King hollered. The creature growled and shambled off on two legs, swinging long arms in pendulum fashion as it disappeared into the woods. When King investigated the riverbank, he found large human footprints in the damp earth.
In 1924, two amazing eyewitness reports lent more credibility to the North American Bigfoot myth, although one wasn't reported until 1957 when the Bigfoot phenomena was in its prime. Taken together, they provide astonishing insight into the creature's intelligence.
In the first report, miners in a canyon on the east side of Mount St. Helens in the Lewis River area of southwestern Washington State were alarmed to find huge footprints surrounding their cabin. The footprints looked human, having a distinguished heel and five toes, yet they were a foot-and-a-half long by eight inches wide. Where the ground wasn't covered with pine needles and other forest vegetation, some of the prints sank an inch or more into the soft dirt of the forest floor. Realizing that no human could possibly make such prints, the miners were baffled---and more than a little frightened.
A week later, unnerved by days of strange whistling and thumping sounds emanating from the nearby ridges, one of the miners shot at a huge, hairy apelike creature peeking from behind a tree. He wounded it in the head, and it lumbered off, shrieking and moaning in a frightful manner. Later, another miner named Fred Beck accidentally ran into a huge hairy creature on his way back from the coal mine. He panicked and shot the beast three times before it fell over the edge of a giant cliff. He raced to camp, mustered several men and returned to the cliff. Climbing to the bottom of the canyon in search of the creature's body, the men found nothing. That night, the real nightmare began.
As the miners nervously stood guard, something attacked the cabin, battering at the roof and walls in an attempt to break in. All through the night, the onslaught continued. The miners heard wood being ripped from the cabin walls, and heavy objects sounding like large rocks crashing on the roof. There was even a concentrated effort to bash in the door. But the cabin had been built to withstand heavy snowfalls. It had no windows, and with the door braced from the inside, whatever was outside was unable to get in.
Beck and his friends knocked out some chinks between logs and fired their rifles into the blackness. The attack continued, and the cabin shook from the pounding. The men kept shooting, becoming sick as the room filled with gunsmoke. When dawn finally crept over the treetops, the creatures left---and so did the miners. They abandoned both cabin and mine. None of the men could say what had really attacked the cabin, but they agreed that there were at least two creatures involved.
Newspaper reporters visited the scene later and wrote of giant footprints found in the dirt. The place, appropriately named Ape Canyon after the incident, became a place of mystery and fear. Unfortunately for today's seekers, if the creatures did live in the area, the eruption of nearby Mount St. Helens in 1986 buried any evidence in a deep layer of ash.
The second astonishing event from 1924 concerned Albert Ostman, a British Columbian logger and construction worker. While on a prospecting vacation looking for a lost gold mine rumored to be at the head of Toba Inlet opposite Vancouver Island, he listened to the natives tell of an old Indian legend about huge hairy beings---called Sasquatch---living in the mountains near where the mine was supposed to be. Being a skeptic, he refused to take the Indian fables of "big people" seriously. It was a decision he would later regret.
Starting out on foot with all the supplies he could carry, the thirty-year-old Ostman hiked for a week before settling on a likely area to prospect. He made camp near a spring between two tall cypress trees...and immediately things began to disappear in the night. After several nights of being robbed, he determined to stay awake and find out what kind of creature was making off with his supplies. He took off his boots and crawled into his sleeping bag fully dressed. He then pulled his boots and rifle in beside him.
Around midnight, just as he was beginning to doze, he was rudely snatched up, bag and all, "like a sack of potatoes, the only thing in sight being a huge hand clutching the partly closed neck of the bag." Before he could move, he was in the air and tossed over a broad shoulder. After hours of uncomfortable travel "hunched down on the bottom of the sleeping bag...sitting on my feet and my legs ached terribly," and while trying vainly to reach his knife and cut himself free, he was unceremoniously dumped on the ground. With dawn approaching, he clambered out, and found himself in the company of what appeared to be a family of Sasquatch giants from the Indian legend---father, mother, son, and daughter. The creatures made no effort to hurt him, but it was clear they did not want him to escape.
The "old man" (Ostman's term) was eight feet tall and had a large hump on his back. The mother was seven feet tall with "very wide hips and a goose-like walk. She was not built for beauty or speed." She weighed nearly 600 pounds. The son was almost full-grown at seven feet tall and 300 pounds. The daughter was young and kept a good distance from Ostman. All were covered in hair except for the palms of their hands, soles of their feet, and an area at the upper part of the nose and around the eyelids.
He was trapped in a tiny valley and the only way out was a ten-foot wide gap at the far end. While the mother and son did the chores and food-gathering, the father and daughter kept watch over Ostman. The creatures ate grass and roots while Ostman cooked from his dwindling food supply. The creatures slept under homemade blankets of cedar bark strips woven together while their "guest" slept in his sleeping bag.
After six days, Ostman decided he had had enough. He waited until the older male grabbed the chewing tobacco, and then fired his gun. The loud noise startled the creatures, and as the older male choked on the tobacco, Ostman made good his escape. Ostman told no one of his adventure until 1957 when Bigfoot phenomena was seriously being studied, rightly reasoning that he would not be believed. Swearing before a Justice of the Peace in Ft. Langley, British Columbia, on 20 August 1957, Ostman became the only man ever to live with a Bigfoot---and live to tell about it.
In late autumn of 1928, another man claimed to have been kidnapped by a Sasquatch in British Columbia. Muchalat Harry, a trapper and a giant of a man, was scooped up from his camp in the dead of night, wearing only his underwear, and carried several miles by a Bigfoot. At daybreak, he found himself surrounded by a crowd of the apelike creatures, male and female, at a campsite that was also littered with large bones. Completely terrified and thinking himself about to join the huge bone pile, Harry bolted when the creatures went on a food-foraging expedition that afternoon.
Harry said he was in such a panic that he raced right past his own camp without stopping to dress, traveled another ten miles to the river, retrieved his hidden canoe, and paddled non-stop the forty-five miles back to his native Indian village of Nootka. He never again went trapping in the woods. In fact, he never again stepped out of the village. His priest said Harry was in such a state of nerves that the slightest noise would send him shrieking in terror to the comparative safety of the church.
It was also in the 1920s that an international mania for mountaineering occurred among the unknown peaks of the Himalayas. These expeditions sent more details of the remarkable Yeti back to the eagerly awaiting Western journalists, and one of them coined the now famous phrase, "Abominable Snowman."
It so happened that the Nepalese villagers, Tibetian lamas, and hardy Sherpas had centuries of recorded history which claimed that something half-human and half-beast lived on the upper slopes of the icy mountain ridges. They claimed the Yeti was not a man, nor did it live in the snow. Instead, the animal's home was deep in almost impenetrable thickets in the highest Himalayan forests between 12,000 and 20,000 feet. Tibetian lama monasteries even claimed to have scalps, skins, and mummified remains of the creatures, only Westerners were forbidden to remove any of the relics for analysis.
One British explorer, however, did manage to swap a finger from a human skeleton with a finger from one of the relics, tying the human finger to the relic with a thin piece of wire. He smuggled the finger to England, where it could not be identified by a friend in the medical profession. Ironically, when the lamas finally did consent to a Western evaluation of some of the remains, it was this substituted human finger that gave cause for the scientific community to declare the entire collection a hoax. The scientists also discovered the so-called "Yeti scalps" were, in fact, ox hide and hair. But it is also true that the scientists weren't given everything to examine---only a few select pieces. Maybe the lamas intended to keep their true relics sacred from prying Western eyes?
All Himalayan villagers described the Yeti as big, sometimes as tall as twelve feet, and manlike, yet extremely agile. It walked erect with a loping gait, and was covered in thick, reddish-brown hair. They were said to be shy and to approach human habitation only when driven by hunger. Their diet was mainly lichen and rodents, and the Sherpas said they disemboweled their prey before eating it...a distinctly human trait. The Sherpas also reported that the females had breasts so huge and droopy that they had to throw them back over their shoulders in order to run properly. This exaggeration seemed to suggest that the creatures' protuberant rather than flat breasts ruled out the higher order of primates---the gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans---and made the creatures seem more like humans.
The scientific community was in an uproar, yet no one was able to provide evidence of its existence. No one, that is, until Colonel C. K. Howard-Bury became the first European to see one.
Colonel Howard-Bury was leading a British expedition attempting to scale Mount Everest when he spotted a strange group of creatures at about 17,000 feet on the Lhapka-la Pass. Reaching the spot, his party found enormous footprints in the snow, "each of them about three times the size of a normal human print." Although the Sherpas said the tracks were those of the Yeti, the Colonel remained skeptical. Despite his own description of the prints, he finally attributed them to a wolf.
In 1925, Russian troops in the midst of post-Revolution upheaval pursued defeated White Army soldiers into the Vanch mountains of the Pamirs. The Pamirs are the icy chunks of mountain ridges lying between Afghanistan and China---one of the reported "hiding places" of the elusive man-beasts. After several days, the soldiers encountered giant footprints of something not quite human which they suspected belonged to the wild-men. But the soldiers were not looking for Yeti, and they never really expected to see one. That is...until the day they accidentally shot one.
Firing into a cave suspected of hiding the enemy, the soldiers were astonished to see a strange hairy creature stagger out, howling loudly and hideously. They instantly killed it. After carefully examining the corpse, the Russian leader thought the specimen was some kind of a man. The medical officer stated otherwise. No one could identify the species, and it was finally accepted to be that of the Alma, regarded by the peoples of that remote region as a lowly sort of human being.
The male corpse was covered in grayish-brown fur, except for the face, palms, and feet. The soldiers reported that its skin on the hands, knees, and feet was coarse and thickly calloused. The face was dark, with dark eyes, and it had a heavy, sloping brow, prominent cheekbones, "a flattened nose, and a massive lower jaw." The teeth appeared to be those of a human, and its torso was much like that of a man. Unable to carry the heavy body down the slopes, the soldiers buried it under a pile of stones. Scientists, reading the description months later, decided it matched that of Neanderthal Man, but an expedition to find the burial cavity went fruitless.
Many years later in 1937, the first photograph allegedly showing the Yeti's footprint was taken by Frank Smythe and published around the world. It was inconclusive and still no documentary evidence of the strange creature's existence, but it did fire the imagination, and full-scale Yeti hunts began to earnestly comb the mountainsides for proof.
Then on 8 November 1951, British mountaineers Eric Shipton and Michael Ward were climbing in the Gauri Sankar range of Mount Everest with their Sherpa guide, Sen Tensing, when the trio stumbled over a fresh trail of unusual, human-like footprints in the snow on the Men-lung Glacier at 18,000 feet. The prints extended for a mile along the edge of the ice mass, and as the trail descended into shallow, crystalline snow, the prints became increasingly firm and distinct. Shipton decided to photograph the clearest and sharpest of the prints. He used Ward's boot as a scale in one photograph and an ice axe as a scale in another.
The pictures were of a footprint not quite human, more than thirteen inches long by eight inches wide, and having an exceptionally broad heel with five toes, one of which was greatly enlarged. Later analysis indicated a creature about eight feet tall. Shipton, no stranger to tracks in the snow or the effects of melting ice, said he was convinced of the existence of a large apelike creature, either "quite unknown to science or at least not included in the known fauna of central Asia." His impeccable credentials convinced many.
Two years later when Mount Everest was finally conquered by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Sen Tensing, Hillary also found giant footprints scattered about in the snow. But Hillary always denied the existence of the Yeti. He even led the World Book Encyclopedia expedition in 1960 to prove it. The result was that no Yeti was found, and Hillary maintained it was because the Yeti did not exist. Even as recently as 1989, on the BBC/PBS program, Search for the Yeti, he was still repeating some of the same old tired, unsupportable arguments for why Yeti does not exist. Often his remarks reflected the notion that the Sherpas are somewhat foolish for believing there's something real behind it all.
It was 1958 when Bigfoot hunting took a giant step forward in the United States. Road construction workers near Bluff Creek in Humboldt County in northwestern California found huge footprints in the freshly turned dirt near their bulldozers. They were building Bluff Creek Road through the heart of Bigfoot country, clearing land in places where no man had gone before, and the footprints appeared each morning for a week, baffling the workmen. Other strange things also began happening up and down the construction site.
Concrete culverts measuring forty-eight inches across and weighing hundreds of pounds were being torn out of their fresh beds and thrown into nearby streams. The main supply truck carrying dozens of the culverts was flipped completely over onto its roof, scattering culverts all over the place and ruining most of the pipes. Two crews of workmen had difficulty just turning the truck back onto its wheels. Workers at another site were puzzled by the disappearance of a 55-gallon drum of diesel fuel weighing more than 300 pounds. The drum was finally located in a ravine where it had been tossed, not rolled, in. Gigantic human footprints were scattered all over the place. At a line shack, one worker came face to face with Bigfoot. The man reached behind him, felt across the counter top for a chocolate bar, and offered the candy to the beast. Bigfoot took the candy and walked away. The man ran in the opposite direction.
Finally one of bulldozer operators, Jerry Crew, decided to make a plaster cast of one of the larger prints. He then had his picture taken holding the cast. The resulting picture showed a footprint that stretched from Crew's shoulder to his waist. The cast measured sixteen inches long by seven inches wide, and the great weight of the creature that made it had sank the print two inches into the dirt.
On 5 October 1958, the Humboldt Times ran a full-page picture of Crew and his plaster cast. The picture and the story were picked up by local newspapers and then spread like tentacles all over the country. It was Jerry Crew holding that enormous cast of a footprint that really brought the creature to the attention of the people of the United States---and made Bigfoot a household word.
It was also in the early 1950s that Tom Slick, a millionaire Texas oilman, visionary, inventor, and world traveler, led and sponsored several major expeditions to the Himalayas in search of the Yeti. He assembled a world-wide group of consultants to examine and analyze the evidence gathered by his Nepalese expeditions. An insatiable cryptozoologist, Slick also financed and led extensive investigations into the Pacific Northwest in the quest for Bigfoot. He died in 1962 in a mysterious plane crash in Montana. With his death, Bigfoot research came to a screeching halt for nearly ten years.
Up until the 1950s, most of the Bigfoot sightings in North America occurred mainly in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada. But as logging and other types of construction advanced deeper into the untamed forests all across America, reported sightings began to surface in practically all the mountain states. The description of the giant beasts were always the same: a great, unidentifiable, hairy apelike person stalking the upper slopes and dense underbrush. Reports of a similar "Boggy Creek" Bigfoot also surfaced in the swamplands of the Deep South, Boggy Creek being used in reference to the cult movie, The Legend of Boggy Creek, which is about the Foulk, Arkansas, Bigfoot.
It should be pointed out that one of the main reasons the general population (not the skeptics, who still considered Bigfoot a fake) began to take these reported sightings seriously was that news services all across America no longer reported the great hoax stories that circulated around the turn of the century. Also, witnesses no longer had a deep fear of being ridiculed by their peers. Indeed, sighting Bigfoot was a sort of status symbol eagerly sought by most individuals.
As the eyewitness reports became more frequent, lay investigators began venturing into the brush hoping to glimpse one of the elusive beasts. Distinguished men like John Green, Ivan Sanderson, and John Napier sought out witnesses, tried to find patterns in the data of the sightings, and wrote articles and books about their findings. One book, Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life, by cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson, published in 1961, was the first of its kind to discuss Bigfoot in any comprehensive manner, linking the North American reports with the worldwide traditions of "wild men, Almas, and Yeti."
Then the seemingly impossible happened. In late 1967, Bigfoot was captured on film...twenty-eight feet of glorious 16mm color film taken from three different vantage points.
The amateur cameraman was Roger Patterson. A 1959 article in True magazine had sparked his interest in the creature and whenever time permitted, he roamed the Pacific Northwest woods with motion-picture camera in hand. Early in the afternoon of 20 October 1967, he and a companion, Bob Gimlin, rode their horses northward up the partly dry bed of Bluff Creek in the Six Rivers National Forest of northern California. They were patrolling sandbars on which Bigfoot tracks had previously been seen. The area was a virtual hotbed of Bigfoot sightings, becoming something of a weekend tourist attraction, and the men hoped to film fresh tracks or the creature itself for a documentary Patterson was preparing.
At one point, a large pile of logs in the center of the stream obstructed their view and interfered with their progress to such an extent that they had to detour around the logs to the east. As they passed the logs and veered back to the left to resume their northward course, they saw something that engulfed them in a controversy which, decades later, has yet to end.
A Bigfoot, squatting in the creek water, stood up at the sound of the approaching horses, and briskly ambled up into the trees, swinging its arms to and fro in pendulum fashion. The horses panicked, and Patterson's reared and fell sideways to the ground. As he rolled free, Patterson frantically groped for his movie camera in the saddlebag and raced up the slope after the creature, leaving Gimlin to recover the spooked horses.
Patterson stopped from a distance of about eighty feet and began filming. He managed to shoot a few clear frames that showed a heavily built creature, about seven feet tall, three feet across the shoulders, and covered in black hair. It walked smoothly with its knees bent the way a human does. When the creature turned to look back at Patterson, it revealed large, drooping breasts. The face was flat and hairy, with heavy brow ridges. The head was peaked at the back in a cone-shape, and sat right on the shoulders with no evidence of any neck.
The creature continued up into the brush. It left footprints fourteen-and-a-half inches long. Patterson and Gimlin made two crisp casts and several still photographs of the tracks.
The first investigator on the site, Bob Titmus, found tracks corresponding exactly to the creature's route as depicted in the film and made casts of ten of them. He also discovered the creature had gone up the hillside and sat down for a period, apparently to watch Patterson and Gimlin as they worked.
Then the controversy started. Investigator John Green, who wrote a very good book in 1973 on Sasquatch called On the Track of the Sasquatch, reported that analysis of the Patterson material revealed no evidence of fraud. Naturalist and primate biologist Dr. John Napier, equally cognizant of Sasquatch and who also wrote a very fine book on the creature in 1973 called Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality, disagreed. The disagreement seemed to stem from the crucial matter of the speed at which the film was shot and the apparent height of the creature.
Patterson said he could not remember if the film speed was twenty-four feet or sixteen feet per second. It does make a difference. If the film was shot at sixteen feet per second, according to a British biomechanics specialist, D.W. Grieve, then the cycle time and the time of swing were in a typical human combination. They were also much longer in duration than expected for the stride and the pattern of limb movement. It meant that if sixteen feet per second was the proper film speed, the creature's stride was very different to that of humans and the figure could not be a man in an ape suit. The possibility of fakery would be ruled out. But at twenty-four feet per second, the creature walked with a gait pattern very similar to a man walking at high speed.
The height of the creature was also important. Patterson estimated the height at seven feet, four inches. Painstaking on-site reconstruction estimated it at slightly under six feet, six inches. John Napier claimed either height was inconsistent with the size of the footprints---that only an animal in the size range of eight feet could have made fourteen-inch tracks. He also pointed out that the spacing between one footprint and the next was forty-one inches, and he believed that a creature six feet, five inches in height should have a step of forty-five inches, particularly, as it was seen in the film, when it was striding out. He also called attention to the exaggerated nature of the walk, summing that the step should be somewhat longer than the normal, or about fifty inches. His conclusion was that the footprints were fakes...or the film was.
It was most confusing. John Napier believed in the integrity of Patterson. In fact, he stated that he didn't believe Patterson was deliberately lying. But he just couldn't believe in the film. On the other hand, John Green claimed that the creature's walk was actually much smoother than a normal man's because the knee was bent as the weight came on it. He said a walking man would bob up and down as the body went over the top of the straightened leg, but the Sasquatch in the film moved in a flowing fashion. "It [the leg] is much straighter when she is reaching out in full stride than when it is bearing her full weight."
The controversy raged with strong evidence for both sides. If foot size and stride length did not match for the creature's height and gait to be that of a biped taking normal strides to which it was accustomed, then what exactly was it? No one could say. But although the small community of Bigfoot investigators were in disagreement on that issue, among others, they were in full agreement on one matter: Patterson and Gimlin simply were not bright enough to pull off a hoax of that magnitude.
The film, shown worldwide, renewed interest in the elusive creatures, and Bigfoot-hunting became a national pastime. Also later that same year in Oregon, a family of "ape-men" was reported to have been seen picking through a rock pile for hibernating rodents and then eating them "like bananas." Investigation by authorities did seem to support the claim, since huge boulders were tossed aside and deep tunnels were dug out of the hillside, but no evidence of Bigfoot was found.
What really impressed everyone, though, occurred not long afterward in Bossburg, Washington. Footprints found in October 1969 by butcher Joe Rhodes and reported to Sasquatch hunters Ivan Marx and Rene Dahinden showed something totally unexpected. In evaluating the material provided by the two investigators, John Napier studied 1,089 footprints measuring seventeen-and-a-half inches by seven inches. What was so astonishing was that the creature had a deformed right foot---a clubfoot---which Napier thought was from a crushing injury to the foot in early infancy. Napier claimed it would be very difficult to conceive of a hoaxer "so subtle, so knowledgeable---and so sick---who would deliberately fake a footprint of this nature." He discounted the footprints as fakes.
Suddenly, from coast to coast, border to border, sightings made headlines. In the autumn of 1967 in Marietta, Washington, a man night fishing the the Nooksack River felt a tug on his net. He pulled in the net and at the end of it was a dripping wet Bigfoot. Four other fishermen helped separate the Bigfoot from the net. Apparently, the creature was after the fish in the net.
In Munroe, Michigan, seventeen-year-old Christine Van Acker and her mother, Mrs. George Owens, almost ran down a Bigfoot standing in the middle of the road. Christine was driving. She slammed on the brakes, the car died, and before she could restart it, the creature reached through the open driver's window and grabbed her by the hair. Somehow in the struggle that ensued, Christine suffered a black eye. The creature was identified as being well over seven feet tall and smelling like rotten eggs.
Tina Barone, thirteen, from Yale, Michigan, literally ran into a Bigfoot in her barn. Her family had been terrorized for weeks by something tearing down fences, ripping doors off the barn, and howling and shrieking at all hours of the night. When Tina went to check on the livestock, the barn was dark. She reached for the light switch and plowed her fingers through "fur that was about one inch thick and all matted and dirty."
The Lake Worth monster, sighted in 1969 outside Fort Worth, Texas, in Possum Kingdom State Park touched off the biggest monster hunt in Texas history, surpassing the great headless horseman hunt of South Texas in the late 1840s. (See the story of The Headless Horseman under Ghost Legends on this site.) The Lake Worth creature was described as a biped, about seven feet tall, and covered with short white fur. One tall teenager, who happened to be wearing white coveralls during the search, was actually shot in the shoulder by one enthusiastic monster hunter.
The Missouri Mo-Mo surfaced in 1971 when two girls, traveling along Route 70 from Hannibal to St. Louis, encountered the creature at a roadside park where they stopped to have lunch. They first noticed a smell "like a family of skunks," and turned to see a huge, hairy beast staring at them from a thicket behind the picnic table. The girls raced to the car, hopped in, only to discover they had left the ignition keys behind on the table. The creature followed them. The girls described it as "ape-like, except that it was also human. It walked upright on two feet and its arms dangled way down." Honking the horn discouraged the beast and when it left, the girls retrieved their keys and drove away as quickly as they could.
When the Florida Skunk Ape was sighted in 1973, it made the national news on all major television networks. One man said he actually hit the creature with his car while driving home from work late one night. He claimed to have hurt it, and it limped off into the swamp. Police examined his car and found it damaged with traces of blood and fur on the car. Right after the story aired, an engineer and archaeologist, H.C. Osborn, told of his encounter with the creature while excavating an Indian mound in the Big Cypress Swamp. The creature left gigantic footprints in the soft earth, prints that measured seventeen-and-a-half inches long by eleven-and-a-quarter inches across at the toes. It was covered in reddish-brown fur.
In the early 1980s, a set of footprints were found with dermal ridges or fingerprints, which animals don't have and which monkeys, apes, and human beings do. A U.S. Forest Service ranger named Bill Freeman, driving his route through the Blue Mountains in the Walla Walla Ranger District of the Umatilla National Forest of southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon, decided to leave his vehicle to check a herd of elk for calves among the herd. Rounding a curve, he was overcome by a powerful stench and looked around to spot a Bigfoot less than 200 yards distant. When the area was examined two hours later, twenty-one prints, measuring fourteen inches long by seven inches wide, were found where the eight-and-a-half-foot tall creature had been.
Seven days later, Joel Hardin, a U.S. Border Patrol tracking expert and a Bigfoot skeptic, examined the prints and pronounced them hoaxes, mainly because they showed evidences of dermal, or skin ridges, on the soles of the feet. The prints also showed sweat pores and wear patterns, anatomical details almost impossible to duplicate, even by the cleverest of hoaxers. But Hardin refused to be swayed.
However, the day after Freeman had his encounter, a five-man search party was in the area looking for a boy who had disappeared the previous fall. They were following up on the "powerful stench" Freeman had reported. Although they weren't looking for Bigfoot, they discovered and tracked a trail beyond the twenty-one footprints found by the U.S. Forest Service. The tracks were discernible for three-quarters of a mile. "It would not be possible to fake the tracks without a helicopter," reported Art Snow, a local businessman who headed the search.
Anthropologist Grover Krantz of Washington State University studied four casts from the area, including one that Art Snow had made. The casts showed feet about fifteen inches long with toes nearly equal in size. The arches were nearly flat, and a double ball was visible at the base of the big toe. The estimated weight of the creature was more than 600 pounds. After careful analysis, Krantz declared that the prints were from two individuals. One had a big toe larger than that in the average Bigfoot track and the second specimen had a "splayed-out second toe." He was particularly taken by the dermal ridges, which he thought were visible because of the exceptional clarity of the prints.
Pointing to the bone impressions in the plaster casts, Krantz noted that the ankle seemed to be moved further forward on the foot than that of any other known primate, including man and gorillas. Such an evolutionary shift forward, Krantz maintained, would be necessary to support the great weight of the creature, another key detail fake prints would most assuredly overlook.
Another sighting making national news was the Colorado Bigfoot in the Pike National Forest. Dan Masias of Green Mountain Falls saw two of the creatures running down the road in front of his house the evening of 28 March 1987. He had been noticing strange footprints in the snow around his house for several days and determined to find out what kind of creature was making them.
Staying up late watching television with his son, he looked out his window around midnight and saw two large creatures running down the road. He said one was small, about five-and-a-half feet tall, and the other creature was about six fee tall. The creatures were covered in hair and as they ran, the long dangling arms swung back and forth in a pendulum motion. The road was covered in new-fallen snow, and tracks revealed human-like footprints.
After Masias's encounter made the headlines, others in the same general area came forward with similar stories. Then in early August 1988, a cabin was broken into by a large animal. When the owner rushed to the back porch, the intruder had vanished, but the cabin door had sustained considerable damage. Whatever had broken in had left tufts of dark hair snagged in the screen door. The hair was sent to a diagnostic laboratory at the University of California at San Francisco.
Doctor Jerold Lowenstein, who conducted the tests, reported that the hairs did not match any of the larger animals like deer and bear. It only reacted with the primates, and of the primates, it only reacted with the hominoids. There are only five hominoids: human, chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and gibbon. He eliminated everything except human and chimpanzee. His conclusion was that it was a large animal closely related to human or chimpanzee. "And, it's hard to see how that could have escaped detection over thousands of years."
Be that as it may, the coelacanth, a prehistoric fish dating back at least 350 million years, was long thought to be extinct until fishermen accidentally caught one off the coast of South Africa in the Indian Ocean in 1938, and the Stone Age Tasaday tribe lived virtually undetected in the jungles of the Philippines until they were accidentally discovered in 1971. The pygmy hippopotamus found in the jungles of Liberia in 1912, the kouprey or wild ox found along the Mekong River in Cambodia in 1937, the mountain nyala found in the high mountains of Ethiopia in 1910, and the Komodo dragon or giant monitor lizard found on the island of Komodo, Indonesia, in 1912 are other recent discoveries of hitherto unknown wildlife. Even as recently as 1975, the discovery of the long-nosed peccary, a relative of the pig, was made in Paraguay. Why not Bigfoot?
In July 1988, seventeen-year-old Christopher Davis was terrorized by a creature known as "Lizard Man" at the Scape Ore Swamp in Lee County, South Carolina. Located near the sleepy community of Bishopsville, about 100 miles south of Charlotte, the creature was reported to be seven feet tall and weigh nearly 1,000 pounds, having long arms, skin like a lizard, and covered in fur. It left footprints of fourteen inches long by seven inches wide and more than two inches deep in the mud.
According to Davis, who was driving his father's car from Bishopsville to his home in nearby Brownstown at dusk, he had just passed the swamp when the car had a flat. Pulling over to the side of the road and fixing the tire, he was putting the tools away when he saw something running across the field toward him. It had red glowing eyes.
Ignoring everything, Davis jumped in the car, tried to slam the door shut, and engaged in a tug-of-war with the creature, which had grabbed the partially rolled-down car window. "I could see him from the neck down---three big fingers, long black nails. He was strong." Davis finally got the door shut and took off with the creature chasing him in his car at speeds of 40 mph. The creature then jumped on the roof of the car and "I could see his fingers through the front windshield where they curled around the roof." Davis accelerated and swerved, and the creature tumbled off into the darkness. By the time he got home, Davis was so hysterical he wouldn't even get out of the car to go to the house until his parents came to the door in response to his frantic honking. Chris' father, Tommy, investigated the car the next day. He found a wing mirror "twisted round funny" and scratches on the roof.
The latest report indicates there is a Bigfoot burial ground in the Oregon wilderness. In July 1993, an archaeologist and four assistants searching for Indian relics east of Seneca in the Malheur National Forest stumbled on a large skull fragment that had apparently been exposed by wind and rain. They began digging, and were baffled by the size of the skeletons they dug up. They finally decided that the skeletons, which stood between eight and nine feet tall, must have come from creatures weighing as much as 600 pounds. Putting two and two together, they decided the skeletons belonged to Bigfoots. There were hundreds of the creatures buried in the Bigfoot cemetery. True? Who knows. However, the archaeologist, Dr. Jan Margate, claimed their suspicions were confirmed when they analyzed DNA samples from bone fragments they recovered from the ground. The skulls and bones were found to belong to creatures that were neither ape nor human, but something in between. Some bones were several centuries old, and others were as recent as two years. Doctor Margate's observations, which appeared in Weekly World News for 10 August 1993, indicated that she thought the creatures possessed an intelligence and spiritual awareness far beyond that of apes and other animals.
There are, in fact, some scientists who believe that Bigfoot might be the "missing link" in the evolution of man. They claim the creature might be related to either Neanderthal Man or Java Man, both of whom are presumed to be extinct. These scientists theorize that it is possible that one group survived and might have evolved into what is now called a Bigfoot. It would also account for the opinions of many Asians that the strange creature is a lowly form of man.
Bigfoot sightings now number about one per month from everywhere in the world, and even with the discovery of the cemetery, comprehensive proof of Bigfoot's existence is still elusive. A fragment of skin, a patch of hair, a few drops of blood...these are about all that scientists ever get to study. All that can be said for certain is that the creatures are too large to be men, and too much evidence exists for them to be myths. Until hard physical evidence does appear---like a live specimen or decomposing remains of a dead one---skeptics will continue to doubt. But skeptics have occasionally been wrong.

Sasquatch,Fact Or Myth

kworley39 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:12:35 CST

A creature that has dwelt for centuries in the misty lands of fantasy may soon merge from its status as a myth and in stark realism become a monster or even newly discovered type of man. It is the Sasquatch of British Columbia, Canadian near relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas and first cousin of Mr. Bigfoot of California.
Before white man's coming, the Sasquatch was the subject of Indian mythology and verbal history from Alaska to California. White man's calloused disregard of Indian lore drove many of their mythical creatures into he unknown, to become completely forgotten. The Sasquatch, or to use its Indian name, Boqs, only retreated. Today it is staging a strong comeback, not as a myth, but as a real flesh-and-blood creature.
Observers describe it as a very muscular, man-shaped creature, large-chested, with arms that hang to its knees, about seven feet in height and of tremendous strength. Hunters who search for it refer to it as an ape. It is extraordinary, however, that stories told by natives, illiterate and living thousands of miles apart, give his creature not only the same name but also the same physical characteristics.

A generation ago the Sasquatch was derided, unwanted, refused recognition.

A generation ago the Sasquatch was derided, unwanted, refused recognition. To say that you had seen one was to brand yourself as a liar; to believe in them was to put yourself into the idiot class. Today, while skeptics are as voluble as ever, many people are willing to acknowledge the creature might exist. Ivan Sanderson, well known traveler and one of the world's foremost scientists, fiercely champions the thought of its existence. The Sasquatch's Himalayan cousin, the Abominable Snowman has at least risen to the level where fierce discussions on lecture platforms and even in the non-commercial National Geographic Magazine have centered on it. Organized hunts have taken place to establish his whereabouts as well as his very being.
An American oil king has offered virtually a million dollars in rewards and expenses to the man or group that brings in a genuine, indisputable Sasquatch. The search for Sasquatch has gone from California to Quebec, from Harrison Hot Springs to Kitimat and has centered recently into a triangle of British Columbia's rain forest marked out by Bella Coola, Bella Bella and Klemtu. This last area has a big and active Indian population and is as rich in Sasquatch stories as Fort Knox is in gold bricks. Bella Coola advertises as being the home of the Thunderbird, but it could as well be the Sasquatch center of North America. A lucky hunter could get his million-dollar quarry there.
Two years ago (in 1961), then California resident Bob Titmus, who dedicated much of his life to bringing in the Sasquatch out of the land of myths, took Bella Coola's ace Nuxalk grizzly bear guide, Clayton Mack into the forests of the outer islands of the Pacific Coast near Klemtu. Expert trackers both, and keen observers, they made interesting finds.
"The tips of young trees had been broken off about seven feet from the ground and the tender stems eaten," Clayton reported. "Bob Titmus says the same thing was found in Sasquatch country in California. They wrap the broken tip down around the stem as if attempting to hide their tracks. We found hair and tracks too. But no sasquatches. Otherwise we would have been millionaires by now."
He illustrated the one requirement needed to collect the reward for a Sasquatch, dead or alive, but undeniably a Sasquatch. Photos would not be accepted because photos can be faked. Incidentally, the British Columbia government has no regulations against taking sasquatches. Why legislate about something that has not yet been proven to exist?
Clayton Mack, whose workshop is heavily forested, mountainous fiord country of the mid-coast where humans are so scarce that these apes could go long undetected, has a fund of personal and related experiences concerning them.

I think I once saw one in Jacobsen Bay about 20 miles from Bella Coola" he stated. "I was gill netting in there when I saw this thing on the beach standing erect. I thought it was a bear and started my boat directly for it. It watched for a minute or two and then turned and ran into the woods, about ten yards away. It wasn't a bears, because bears will stand up like a man and take a few steps but always they drop and run on all four legs. Just like a rabbit will stand on its hind feet but always uses its four legs for running. It was pretty busy fishing season and I more or less forgot about it until George Olson, manager of Tallheo Fish Cannery said he saw what he first thought was a bear splash through the stream that runs into the same bay. He said the beast looked somewhat like a man with long arms and heavy chest and ran stooped over. He concluded it must be something else than a bear because it ran on its hind feet, not on all fours.

Olsen and Mack are alike in several respects. Both know the appearance and habits of bears and when they say something isn't a bear, it isn't! And neither have any desire to promote the Sasquatch idea. Neither have anything to gain by it.

How could a creature that didn't exist leave tracks for hundred of people to see?

A few miles from Jacobsen Bay, George Tallheo shot a hairy monster that looked like a Sasquatch, but fear spiced with superstition cause him to leave without investigation. Two years ago, a boatload of basketball players anchored during a storm a few miles from Jacobsen Bay and heard the high pitched whinnying call attributed to Sasquatches. One of the original and best known haunts of Sasquatches is the Harrison Lake area, near Hope British Columbia and it was there in 1941 that a Sasquatch appeared at the home of an Indian family, the Chapmans, in the middle of the afternoon. The father, working on the railroad was absent. Mother and children fled. Enough people saw the tracks and other evidence left by the beast that there could be no doubt about its visit. How could a creature that didn't exist leave tracks for hundred of people to see?
Many sightings have occurred throughout the province, but one that carries with it the greatest clarity and continued observation was made at Tete Jaune Cache, five or six hundred miles distant from Harrison Lake by William Roe on an afternoon off from a road building job. He had this large powerful creature actually in his rifle sights but desisted from shooting because it was so human like. The creature approached to within twenty feet of him and in his statement, made under oath, he gives very detailed descriptions of the beast. He describes the way it plucked the vegetation it was eating, noted its even teeth and the look of surprise and dismay on its face when it discovered, him.
At Bella Bella, on the island fringe of the west of the continent, the tracks of a family of Sasquatches were seen on the muddy beach of the village's water supply lake, and every night tools used by pipe-line workers were tossed about by prowlers who left large tracks. In Gun-Boat Passage, one of the approaches to Bella Bella, a Sasquatch was intercepted on a beach and at Klemtu some more of the creatures have been met face to face while clam digging on the beaches. The Bella Coola Indians had a dance called the "Boqs dance" which portrayed the Sasquatch shielding his face from the squirting of the seawater from the clams.
At Bella Coola, in the early spring of 1962, a young Indian Mother went to retrieve her two children, 5 & 7 years old from the river bank on which is built the twin Indian and white Villages of Bella Coola. She saw her children watching something on a gravel bar very intently and following their gaze she saw a creature covered with yellowish brown hair, standing upright and holding a junior specimen by one hand (a young Sasquatch). For a moment the two groups looked at each other intently, then each mother gathered her young and fled, each running upright from each other.
Asked months later why she did not report this so that people might investigate, the human mother said, "People would say I was lying or had gone crazy."
Early in the fall of 1962 Harry Squiness was camped in a hay meadow, with his family at Anahim Lake, 90 miles east of Bella Coola. During a bright moonlit night, he heard a disturbance and taking up his shotgun, stepped out of his tent to investigate. He saw two big ape-like creatures and three small ones. Since he had but three shotgun shells, not very effective except at point blank range, he kept very quiet and watched the strange beats skulk away. Next morning, looking at the tracks, and seeing where the hand of one of the creatures had skinned a small poplar tree about 8 feet from the ground, Harry decided to move camp and never returned.
Forty or fifty miles down at Dean River, which flows out of Anahim Lake, Frank Sill, another hay-maker, picketed his horse a thousand pound animal in the closest meadow. In the morning he found it, not where he had left it staked, but hanging in a tree, so high that only the tip of one hind hoof touched the ground. Its neck was broken but there were no signs of torn flesh. It would seem possible that the horse, frightened, ran to the end of its picket rope, then fell on its head and broke its neck as the rope brought it up short. How it got trussed up in the tree at the edge of the meadow is anyone's guess, but it was a task taking great physical strength. Huge footprints were found near there. Like Squiness, Frank Still suddenly didn't like the scenery in that part of the country.
But there are no stories of Sasquatch savagery, except one from Kitimat, B. C., and that incident, in which a Kitimat Indian of two generations ago had shot one of the beasts. Others seemed to threaten to attack him while he was trying to drag the body out. When he fled to the beach and his canoe, they did not follow. Stories consistently pain them as shy, very strong, very keen of sight and of hearing and in some cases endowed with a sense of inquiry that leads them to move tools and other human products about. But never any shadow of savagery is related and all stories show the animal as vegetarian and an eater of shellfish.
Whatever else he might be revealed as, he is now the most challenging of quarries. For the scientists who find him in flesh and blood it would be the answer to a tremendous riddle and a door opening to another field of study. To the Indians (The First Nation Canadians), he is a supernatural creature returning in the flesh. But to someone who is smart enough, brave enough and lucky enough, he could be the way to gaining million of dollars. British Columbia Digest, October 1963.

Stories of Alabama Bigfoot

kworley39 — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:43:01 CDT

The hour was late; the weather was warm. Back then, air conditioning for most folks meant an open window. Whenever her daddy worked the swing shift at the steel mill, eight-year-old Connie slept in the bed with her mother.
Restless in the heat, Connie was half-awake when she heard a sudden shrill scream like nothing she had heard before. She bolted to the window and peeked out. A gas light at the end of the front walkway gave her a clear view of something in the driveway a huge white creature, curled up in a ball and lying very still.
In my childs eye, it was huge, much bigger than me, even bigger than my dog Brownie, a collie mix, says Connie Horsley, now a grandmother of three. I screamed and looked away.
Connie’s mother scurried to the window to see what all the commotion was about, but the thing whatever it was was gone. In the distance, they could hear crying, a haunting sound of distress.
Ichabod Crane and the folks of Sleepy Hollow have nothing on the good people of Happy Hollow in Trussville. Ichabod is famed for fleeing that relentless headless horseman who made his famous ride on Halloween night.
On Happy Hollow Road, residents see the fabled White Thing year round. The fearsome creature is reportedly snow white and has a piercing scream, much like that of a woman in distress or a baby crying. He is reportedly as tall as a man with claws strong enough to scrape bark off trees, and as swift as the wind. White Thing sightings have been reported for at least 150 years.
Connie, a lifelong Trussville resident, grew up on Happy Hollow Road, back before urban encroachment had leveled trees and cut gaping holes through woods and mountain.
I’d heard about The White Thing all my life, she remembers. My granddaddy was a Baptist preacher. We would sit outside on his covered porch and listen to him tell stories. He’d talk about the Bible, and tell us Bible stories, and then hed go into these other stories.
Connie recalls hearing her grandfather tell how back in about 1949, a group of men formed a posse to track the White Thing down. The men later reported that from a distance, they could tell that when he stood on his hind legs, he was tall or taller than a man.
They followed it as far as Roper Hill then lost sight of it, says Connie. But they could tell which way he went because where he had scraped the sides of trees, the bark was peeled away.
The sightings, she says, would be the talk of the town. I remember Daddy and our neighbor, Mr. Walker, talking about what this thing left behind. There was a kind of rural area just past our house and after every sighting people out there would find dead cows, or chickens, or goats all with their throats slit.
Connie’s mother, Hazel Taylor, has her own memories of the creature that has plagued more than four generations of Happy Hollow residents. Taylor was born in Trussville and has lived there all her 70-plus years.
I saw it more than once Hazel says, and heard it many more times, even as recently as last November. Everybody who has ever heard it always described that same sound, that high-pitched cry of distress. It would make that one sound then it was gone. You might hear it one more time, far in the distance, that hair-raising wail.
Hazel says her first encounter with the White Thing was when she was 13 years old. She was lying across her bed, suffering from a headache, when she suddenly became conscious of a loud, heavy panting outside a nearby window.
I opened my eyes and looked out the window, and he was standing right there, Hazel recalls. I screamed, and my uncle jumped off the porch and chased it with a shotgun, but he wasnt able to catch up with it. As far as I know, nobody else ever got that close.
According to Hazel, loud, heavy panting and barking dogs all over the valley always signaled the creatures presence. Her dad and some of his friends, she says, experienced that spine-chilling panting sound a little too close for comfort the year he turned 18. The boys were walking home from a hunting excursion when they heard a panting sound behind them. They turned to find the White Thing headed their way.
Thats all it took to get those boys running toward home, Hazel laughs. They ran as fast as they could with the thing hot on their heels. As my dad told it, his cousin was so frightened and going so fast, he didn’t even wait to open the door. He just went right through it, knocking the whole thing off its hinges and right to the floor.
Hazel admits that some far-fetched tales of the creature have sprung up over the years. One story claims the White Thing crept onto a front porch, frightening a dog and cat so badly that both literally climbed the walls and clung there for several days.
But Hazel believes that in all likelihood, the creature is actually a panther-like animal that hibernates because its usually seen in the spring and fall. She also reasons there has most likely been more than one White Thing.
We are not stupid enough to paint it as the same one for over a 100 years. Still, she adds, it was wonderful fun to get scared out of your wits as children. My granddaddy loved to entertain the children, and he told wonderful stories.

The Downey Booger

Written by: Vera Whitehead (Daughter of Margaret Catherine Downey & Jim Plunkett)

Thanks to Joyce Farris for submitting this story.

In the later part of the 1800s, Winston County, Alabama was known for its rugged men, still-brewed whiskey, hard shell preachers, and Saturday night dances. It was also known for the Downey Booger. John and Joe Downey were cousins. They were together constantly, like two peas in a pod. They were returning home from one of these dances when they first saw the booger. There were only two houses on this long stretch of road they traveled. One was the Hub Baughn place with the lightening rods. The other was a rambling log house belonging to Oscar Tittle where the dances had been held. The remainder of the road was enveloped by a dense pine forest. John and Joe were jostling along on their thoroughbreds gaily recounting the events of the evening, when suddenly a strange looking creature, bearing both the resemblance of a human and an animal, leaped out in front of them. Their horses must have spotted it at the same instant the boys did for they stood on their hind feet, snorting madly almost throwing them from their saddles, then whirled around and took off on a wild stampede in the opposite direction using every ounce of strength they could muster. They managed to bring them to a halt. They turned around and again started toward home. As they approached the sand bed where this weird creature had appeared, the horses came to an abrupt stop. They gouged them in the side, beat them with the bridles but they would not budge an inch. Finally they turned around and rode back to the Tittle house remembering a longer route they could take. They would pass through Lynn, a small town seven miles from their homes. This was known as the Byler Road. The sun had risen when the boys arrived. Their parents doubted their odd story as much as they had been able to trust them before. No one else had run into the booger. One night about three months later, a family was returning from a three day church service. When they came to the sand bed it darted out from behind a clump of bushes. It stood for a few seconds and as quickly as a wink ran from sight. The children were panic stricken so much so that for months their mother had to make a pallet for them all to sleep together. On a moonlit night in early fall, Jim Jackson loaded his two horse wagon with his barrels of home made moonshine and headed for the Commissary in Galloway, a mining town a few miles from his home. The manager of the Commissary would sell it secretly to the miners for a huge profit. He was jogging along hearing nothing but the melancholy whine of the wind in the pine branches, probably thinking of the loot he would receive from the liquor, when he sensed he was being followed. Glancing over his right shoulder his eyes fell upon a peculiar looking creature waltzing on two feet behind his wagon. He froze; his first impulse was to try to outrun it. He decides against that because his mules, Pet and Hathe (or Hattie) were not accustomed to running except downhill. This was level ground. He remembered his gun on the wagon seat beside him. He took the revolver, aimed, and fired twice. It screamed like a woman in distress and went limping away on three feet. The news spread quickly. Jim Jackson had shot the Downey Booger. A posse was formed. They combed the forest, only finding traces of blood leading from the sand bed to a distant cliff. Until this day, this incident is repeated among the residents of Winston County. What the Downey Booger was will forever be a mystery.

Bigfoot {Fact or Fiction}

kworley39 — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:22:05 CDT

Throughout the periods of history, the mythical creature thought to be real is the Bigfoot. It is a name familiar to most people. Others call it a legend, others a fantasy creation, and the truth is not really established on the trueness of its existence. The firm believers are inclined to stating out that the half-man-half-ape creature that is fully bipedal is a forest and woodlands dweller, with the locations in mind being The Northwestern Region of the Pacific in the US and Canada. A synonym to the name is Sasquatch which is to say ‘wild man’. This term bases its origin in the British Columbia from an Indian tribe in The Coast Salish. Bigfoot is nothing more than a lingual creation from the journalists who thought that it would befit the enormous footprints that the beast left in its path. It is not more than a century old. Sasquatch is the right term, but Bigfoot is the preferred one.
As far as the physical appearance of the creature is concerned, there are no precise words that have been used to make the description. But from unspecific sources, it is mentioned that Bigfoot is an ape with human characteristics. That is, it stands at anywhere between 6 and 15 feet tall with about 400-600 pounds in weight. The body covering is not skin but hair with a brown or reddish tinting characteristic. The facial exhibitions are what are human like, with a low forehead and brow bridge. The body odor from Bigfoot is far from pleasing. The real sense of the word Bigfoot comes in the footprint size which is roughly 24 inches in length and 8 inches in width. In this case the term fits perfectly.
Sources that claim to have set their eyes on the Sasquatch are many with the initial ones being the Indian Tribes of Salish Sammish, Klallan and Lummi. Modern day believes of the creature residing in the Northwest areas of the pacific are based on the knowledge of the mentioned tribes. The sighting of Bigfoot has been on the account of the descriptions that have been made brought forward which ideally point to the existence of the creature that is more or less a Sasquatch. The fascination with the legend that cannot be said in all faith that it is real has seen the making of photo films and footprints engraved in plaster casts and even fur samples from the creature so that a DNA analysis can be conducted. But there has been one filming where Bigfoot is shown with the description offered is nothing short of a Sasquatch, the film is known as the Patterson-Gimlin film. It got the attention of scientist who are still less certain about the film and whether it is real or fictional. The plaster casts of the Sasquatch’s feet are what can be regarded as the most convincing evidence. These casts are made by Crypto Zoologists that specialize in establishing the existence of such mythical creatures. The casts are more relevant since they are hard to fake with rubber feet and this they are better evidence. What the footprints reveal is the stepping distance which is almost human-like, but bigger, owing to the longer height of the creature. It makes even more sense when you take into consideration the fact that such kind of prints are hard to create, when you consider the stepping distances. Unreliable reports from eye witnesses indicate the sighting of Bigfoot to be near water sources and creeks where rainfall is abundant. This is more factual than unreal since such a niche would be essential to support the creature’s livelihood.
From scientific records, a Gigantopithecus is history’s man with ape characteristics. The fossils of this have been found in some parts of the Asian country if China. This migration across the ‘Bering Land Bridge’ is factual and thus the Gigantopithecus can be attributed to be sightings of the Bigfoot. This theory is however not strong enough to drive forth a solid argument since little is known about the Gigantopithecus to create a relation to the Sasquatch. Some simply put it that Bigfoot is a primate species that is located in the remotest of wildernesses where man’s access is denied and thus no facts of its existence can be tabled. Other skeptics simply associate the Sasquatch as being a creation of UFO’s
Even in the present days, Bigfoot still remains a subject of interest to scientists and many a group. Those people that give an account of having seen the creature are not taken seriously and the conclusion reached is that their sightings are unreal and what they saw was not really the reality. But even this not withstanding, there are a few select that have dedicated their lives’ purposes to finding and proving the existence of the creature. They travel to the documented areas and try to find any evidence that could point them in the right direction. Bigfoot, in the Crypto Zoological study is the most interesting fascination.
Many questions still remain unanswered as to the habitat of the ‘primate man’. It has not been established if the creature is a myth created by human fantasy, or it is real, hiding away from the visual sighting of man. What is awaited is for some candid proof to give the story a backbone and essentially an ending.

The Vikings and Sasquatch

kworley39 — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:33:33 CDT

One of the earliest written records of a sasquatch sighting ever recorded was in 986 a.d. by Leif Ericson.The supposed discoverer of America. This is only one of many early sightings and I will be doing more research on this subject. If I am not mistaken there are more records dating back even earlier,as far back as the mid 800,s.Please check back and I will be adding more at a later date.

Knock, Knock... Clack, Clack

donnathrasher — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:26:23 CDT

Well, I will start off saying I am a night owl and for a week or so I have been hearing strange and weird noises at night starting about 2 in the morning, but Keith was already in bed when these things happen. I would hear rocks being thrown at the house, whooping and hollering coming from out back, and something hitting the side of the house close to where I would be sitting. It would be so loud at times, I thought I was going to jump out of my skin. Not let me say, I was a skeptic on this topic for a long time and still to a certain degree, but let me tell ya, some things are just unexplainable around here. Anyways, to my story. This morning, Keith couldn't sleep, so we were up and we decided to go on the back porch before trying to lie down. Its about 4:30 in the morning, we are standing there, and what do ya know, a first for me, we heard rocks clacking by the creek. They had told me about it before, but I had not heard it until now. I was kind of amazed. I was really amazed when Keith started clacking rocks back at it and it would answer back. WOW, I thought, actual communication. They were going at it back and forth, and every now and then there would come a tree knock from the woods to the other side of us. So, we had rocks clacking by the creek, tree knocking on the other side, and us in the middle. Anyways, a few minutes after being out there, we heard a loud growl, I was ready to run back in, but Keith told me it was o.k., stay. I stayed a few more minutes. This knocking and clacking went on between them for I know 30 minutes before we decided to come back in. It was an experience, maybe not to some, but for us, it was truly amazing. If it is a bigfoot or whatever, it is a very intelligent creature.

St. Clair County Bigfoot Home

kworley39 — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:56:06 CDT

Night scare

kworley39 — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:15:36 CDT

Hi, I am Keith's step daughter Alex and I would like to share a story with you.
One night me ,my mom ,my step brother Zac, and Keith were outside by the fire . We were having a good time ,Keith was making sounds next to the woods and Zac and I was tipping each other out of our chairs. We got tired so we sat back down eating roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. After we got done eating we started telling ghost stories and bigfoot stuff then all of a sudden we heard a huge crash behind us. We all turned around and we were shocked of what we heard. It sounded like something threw a huge branch and fell on another branch. Then we started hearing stuff in the woods. We got the flashlight and shined it the woods were we heard the crash, we saw nothing. So, we started talking again and stuff started throwing things in the woods. We ignored it, then it sounded like a rock hit a tree. The fire started going down a little bit so we went inside. We started talking about what happened. Keith, Zac, and I went outside and started throwing things in the woods. We all heard walking in the woods and we made sounds and it made sounds back.Keith shined the flashlight in the woods again. We went back inside and went to the computer and got a website of what these creatures do. We saw, throw things to get attention, make noise, hide, and a bunch of other things. If you have other information or expiriences please e-mail us or join our members list. THANKS! for reading my story. Good-Bye!

The Kapre,Phillipines

kworley39 — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:40:03 CST

The Kapre is another cousin to the bigfoot from the Philippines. It is characterized as a menacing creature that seeks refuge in big trees and displays human physical attributes but with taller height at about 7 to 10 feet and more hairy with thick beard, brown skin and deep eyes that makes them appear more menacing than ordinary human beings. A Kapre is usually depicted as sitting on a large tree trunk smoking a huge tobacco that emits smoke that produces a strong aroma that will attract it’s human prey’s attention. They are indeed one of the scariest mythological creatures told through generation from generation in the Philippines. Most considered them as just a pigment of the wide imagination of man, but a growing number of people especially in the countryside have been reporting sightings of these mythological beasts The term “kapre” was derived from the Arabic term “kaffir”, meaning a non believer in Africans. It is also related to the Spanish term “kapfre”. According to historical accounts, the early Moors and Arabs used that term to signify persons who are non-Muslims and who possesses dark complexion. By having contact with the Moors, the term later on find its way in the language of the Philippines by the Spanish in their more than three century of colonizing the Philippines. The legend of the kapre lingers on and still very much alive and infused in the consciousness of Filipinos. Scores of people from the countryside have reported sightings of a mysterious creature atop a big tree, usually an acacia, bamboo, narra, banyan (known locally as balete) and mango trees. Sometimes a kapre can be seen sitting unmindfully under those trees as well. Wearing only a bahag, a locally made loincloth underwear that covers only the private part of a person, typical cases has the kapre sporting a belt which the elders believe gives the kapre a magical power that makes them invisible to the naked eyes anytime they don’t want to be seen. Kapres are not entirely described as pure evil unlike other Philippine mythological creatures such as the aswang and the manananggal. Kapres sometimes develops fascination with human beings and had them reaching out to human beings with the intention of offering a sincere kind of friendship, in some cases kapres are found to develop being attracted and smitten to a woman. In this case, it will become a frightening situation for any woman to attract the attention of a kapre because it is learned that when a kapre fell in love with a female human being, they will pursue this love throughout the life of that particular woman and tales of a kapre doing everything in his power just to get the heart of a girl ran abounds through generations past. Most of the stories about close encounters with kapres involve pranks played by kapres on humans. Not too long ago a dozen of mountain climbers climbing a mountain in a scenic Philippine province of Batanggas, become disoriented thus losing sense of their direction. They decided to leave marks on the trails that they already passed by only to find themselves passing back that same place over and over again. Until a local man about 70 years old that lives near the mountain heard their call and helped them by reciting a prayer and a ritual that pays homage and respect to the kapres asking them to stop the pranks being played on the mountain climbers. After a few minutes the climbers went on with their downward trek and were able to find the right place to lowland again. Some witnesses reports seeing a tree shaking its tree branches and leaves violently even if there’s an absence of a strong wind. Strong and loud laughter that sends a chilling after effect on the ears of people around the vicinity of a tree that a kapre resides in are also reported as one of the exhibition of existence of this mythological creature. Although they don’t harm people all the time, just the way they display their existence as told by people who believed that they have seen and proven that the kapres really exists swears that the sight of them smoking from atop of a tree and staring down on you with those huge, fiery and haunting eyes is enough to make anybody run like hell. Whatever the truth about this interesting mythological creature that originated in the Philippines, myth or fact? It continues to dazzle the mind and the interest of everyone. Scary at times, romanticize in some accounts of their pursuit of beautiful women, playful, cigar lover. All these add up to the mystery and what fascinates ordinary people into believing the real existence of kapres and makes even the skeptics to have an open mind regarding the possibility that kapres do really exist.

Ebu Gogo Flores Island,Indonesia

kworley39 — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:29:52 CST

The Ebu Gogo are the main characters in a traditional folk story told by the Flores Islanders. They are a small, nasty people with an voracious appetite that sometimes included the occasional human baby. When they could tolerate them no more the Flores islanders drove the Ebu Gogo in the direction of the caves near Some scientists believe that the folk lore maybe a shared cultural memory of Homo floresiensis but there is no solid evidence to support that theory.
The following is an excerpt from the novel where Sarah discusses with Richard the legend of the Ebu Gogo during their dinner:
“Look you know how the legends go about the Ebu,” said Richard.
Sarah “Yes, I do, how could I not. I've been over it a hundred times. Let's see Ebu Gogo, meaning Grandmothers that eat anything. According to legend they are small hairy people with long arms, about a meter tall and the women have pendulous breasts that they throw over their shoulders or so the local legend goes.”

“Stop it, you're getting me hot,” Richard said.
Sarah continues to talk despite Richard's failed effort at humor. “ Flores natives say they will eat anything, including raw meat, fruit, vegetables and the occasional human baby. They've been known to make a pest of themselves by raiding the native's crops and they were tolerated by the islanders. That is until the human islander's drew the line at the taking of their babies. The Ebu were driven away from human habitation and they forced to seek refuge in the caves at Liang Bua. Incidentally, at the very same caves, scientists have found seven dwarf skeletons belonging to Homo floresiensis that date back about 13,000 years ago. The last of the Ebu were seen on the island at the same time the original Dutch colonists arrived. They haven't been seen since.”
Sarah continues. “The question remains: is this a legend or a shared folk memory? All we know is there are at least four university teams scouring Flores looking for them as we speak. But guess what? We are looking on a totally different island that nobody knows about. What do they look like? I haven't a clue but I know that these little critters do vocalize.”
Richard decides to interject. “My guess is that they are not particularly hairy and they don't have pendulous breasts, thank goodness for that. I mean after all, I like a natural breast as much as the next man but down to the floor…,” Richard stops short after the eyeing the exasperated look Sarah gives him.
“But I digress. Okay, not much hair, no pendulous breasts nor do they eat everything. There is some truth to the legend in that they are probably omnivores and they enjoy eating a mixed diet very much like our own. Based on the remains at Liang Bua they are about a meter tall, long arms, with sloping foreheads, no chin and a naked skin similar in color to African or dark Indonesian people. Their hands and feet are probably very similar to our own as well.

Algonkian Legends

kworley39 — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:15:14 CST

Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains--Four or five versions of this curious and strange legend come into my collection over a period of about six years (1948 to 1954) from an isolated region of the Kentucky mountains. At first I did not know what to make of it but, having also collected a few versions of the "Bear's Son" story (Type 301), minus the half-bear, half-man introduction, I guessed that this was that introduction now broken away and told separately. It now appears to be a distinct legend since Dr. Archer Taylor refers me to the long search for American versions by Mr. Rudolph Altrocchi. and now that I reflect on this item I realize that it is not unique to Kentucky mountain folklore. During my youth in these mountains it was not unusual to hear a rumor of some half-wild man, naked and hairy, being found in the woods, living close to animal state. This kind of Romulus-Remus legend seems to stick in the minds of the folk. But how this particular legend made its way into eastern Kentucky is a mystery to me.
The following version was taken down in pencil in 1950 from the lips of Lee Maggard, who lived in a small cabin on the south slope of the Pine Mountain range near the small lumber town of Putney, Harlan County, Kentucky. He had heard it on Maggard's Branch, Leslie County.

The Yeahoh

Once they was man out huntin' and he got lost and after a while he begin to get hungry. He come to a big hole in the ground and he thought he would venture down into it. He wen down in there and he found that the old Yeahoh lived in there and had deer meat hangin' up and other foods piled around the walls. km The man was afraid at first, but Yeahoh didn't bother him and he went toward that meat to get him some. The Yeahoh walked over and looked at the knife and said, "Yeahoh, Yeahoh," a time or two. He cut it off a piece of the meat and it started eatin' it.
Well, the man stepped over to the middle of the pit and took out his flint and built him up a fire. And the Yeahoh watched him and looked at the fire and at the flint and said, "Yeahoh, Yeahoh" again. The man put his meat on a stick and br'iled him a nice piece and started eatin' it. The Yeahoh watched him and acted like it wanted a piece. The man cut it off a piece of the br'iled meat and reached it over, and the Yeahoh commenced to eatin' it up and smackin' its lips and saying, "Yeahoh, Yeahoh."
Well, the man lived there with it a long time and they got along all right. After so long they was a young'un born to 'em, and it was half-man and half-Yeahoh. And the Yeahoh took such a liking to the man it wouldn't let him leave. He got to wanting to get away and go back home. One day he slipped off and the Yeahoh follered him and made him go back. Went on that way for a good while, but he picked him a good time and slipped away. This time he got to the shore where they was a ship ready to set sail. He got on this ship and he looked and saw the Yeahoh comin' with the young'un. It screamed and hollered for him to come back and when it saw he wasn't goin' to come, why, it just tore the baby in two and helt it out one-half to him and said, "Yeahoh, Yeahoh". He sailed on off and left it standing there.
The version that Dr. Taylor refers to in my book _South from Hell-fer-Sartin_ is called "The Origin of Man." Another version was given to me by this teller's grandson. It has the same title and contents, except that the Yeahoh has six children and tears them all in twos and throws them after the embarked man. Another text, similar to the one given above, was accidentally erased from my tapes.
The following text was recorded from Joe Couch, Appalachia, Virginia, in 1954. He had heard it from his people while he lived in Perry County, Kentucky.

The Hairy Woman

One time I's prowling in the wilderness, wandering about, kindly got lost and so weak and hungry I couldn't go. When it begin to get cool, I found a big cave and crawled backin there to get warm. Crawled back in and come upon a leaf bed and I dozed off to sleep. I heard a nawful racket coming into that cave, and something come in and crawled right over me and laid down like a big old bear. It was a hairy thing and when it laid down it went chomp, chomp, chawing on something. I thought to myself, "I'll see what it is and find out what it is eating."
I reached over and a hairylike woman was there eating chestnuts, had about a half a bushel there. I got me a big handful of them and went to chawing on them too. Well, in a few minutes she handed me over another big handful, and I eat chestnuts until I was kindly full and wasn't hungry any more. D'rectly she got up and took off and out of sight.
Well, I stayed on there till next morning and she come in with a young deer. Brought it in and with her big long fingernails she ripped its hide and skinned it, and then she sliced the good lean meat and handed me a bite to eat. I kindly slipped it behind me, afraid to eat it raw and afraid not to eat it being she give it to me. She'd cut off big pieces of deer meat and eat it raw. Well, I laid back and the other pieces she give over as she eat her'n. She was goin' to see I didn't starve.
When she got gone again I built me up a little far and br'iled my meat. After being hungry for two or three days, it was good cooked--yes, buddy. She come in while I had my far built br'illing my meat, and she run right into that far. She couldn't understand because it kindly burnt her a little. She jumped back and looked at me like she was going to run through me. I said, "Uh-oh, I'm going to get in trouble now."
Well, it was cold and bad out, so I just stayed another night with her. She was a woman but was right hairy all over. After several days I learnt her how to br'ile meat and that far would burn her. She got shy of the far and got so she liked br'iled meat and wouldn't eat it raw any more. We went on through the winter that way. She would go out and carry in deer and bear. So I lived there about two year, and when we had a little kid, one side of it was hairy and the other side was slick.
I took a notion I would leave there and go back home. I begin to build me a boat to go away across the lake in. One time after I had left, I took a notion I would slip back and see what she was doing. I went out to the edge of the clift and looked down into the mountain, and it looked like two or three dozen of hairy people coming up the hill. They was all pressing her and she would push them back. They wanted to come on up and come in. I was scared to death, afraid they's going to kill me. She made them go back and wouldn't let them come up and interfere.
Well, I took a notion to leave one day when my boat was ready. I told her one day I was going to leave. She follered me down to my boat and watched me get ready to go away. She was crying, wanting me to stay. I said, "No, I'm tired of the jungles. I'm going back to civilization again, going back."
When she knowed she wasn't going to keep me there, she just grabbed the little young'un and tore it right open with her nails. Throwed me the hairy part and she kept the slick side. That's the end of that story.

Scientific Data and Research

kworley39 — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:36:45 CST

Evidence regarding Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, (the supposed ape-like animal said to live in North America) is contentious. Every piece brought forward as evidence has aroused both criticism and support.

Content

Eyewitness reports

People generally report seeing Bigfoot in remote, wooded areas, some do originate from parks near major cities, such as Portland, Oregon. Eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable as the witness can both have seen events incorrectly as well as distorted the memory or them with time. With only anecdotal evidence, there is no way to tell if a witness is describing events correctly or even trying to perpetrate a hoax. John Napier wrote that however accurate and sincere witnesses might seem, "eyewitness reports must be treated with considerable caution ... Although we don't always know what we see, we tend to see what we know." He also adds, "without checking possible ulterior motivations, eyewitnesses cannot be acceptable as primary data."
Critics of eyewitness reports suggest that people may have mistaken bears for Bigfoot, as the forests where sightings most often occur are inhabited by bears. Standing on their hind legs, bears roughly match the description of Bigfoot. Bigfoot advocates counter that witnesses include experienced hunters and outdoorsmen, who claim to be familiar with bears, and insist that the creatures they saw were entirely different. John Bindernagel, an advocate of Bigfoot, argues that the bear's snout and other body parts make it distinct from anything that would be identified as a Bigfoot. However, these arguments assume that the witnesses had a good look at the creature. There are documented cases in which hunters have mistaken bears for Bigfoot.
Proponents of Bigfoot claim that consistencies in the locations of reports support the hypothesis that they are caused by a real animal. The majority of Bigfoot reports are generated from areas having low human population densities. The often will occur near rivers, creeks, or lakes and from areas where annual rainfall exceeds 20 inches (510 mm).[citation needed] Bigfoot advocates claim that these common factors indicate patterns of a living species occupying an ecological niche rather than hoaxed sightings.

Native American artifacts

Legends and certain historical artifacts of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast have been presented as circumstantial evidence for Bigfoot. The modern legend of Bigfoot has been suggested to descend from traditional Native stories.
Robert Pyle argues that "Certain artifacts suggest that some Amerindians were acquainted with something having the visage of an ape," specifically "several carved stone heads from the Columbia River basin," which Pyle believes depict "prognathous, chinless faces with heavy brow ridges and in at least one case a sagittal crest." These stone carvings date to pre-Columbian times, According to B. Robert Butler these stone carvings date to the Wakemap Middle Period, circa 1500 BCE to 200 CE. Pyle adds, "relics do not prove that Bigfoot exists or that [natives] had contact with apes, but they do raise some uncomfortable questions."
These artifacts are discussed at length by anthropologist Roderick Sprague in Carved Stone Heads of the Columbia and Sasquatch. Dozens of similar stone heads were recovered and most depict common animals. Sprague examines seven carved heads, which he argues have distinctively primate-like features. Like Pyle, Sprague notes that this does not necessarily support Bigfoot's existence, but Sprague sees the question of what inspired the carved stone heads as intriguing and unresolved.
In The Tsimshian Monkey Masks and Sasquatch, the anthropologist and ethnologist Marjorie Halpin describes two wood facemasks that were collected from the Tsimshian and Nisga'a tribes near Prince Rupert, British Columbia. One was obtained by Lieutenant G. T. Emmons in about 1914, and the other was obtained by Marius Barbeau in 1927. Emmons described the artifact as "a mythical being found in the woods, and called today as a monkey." Halpin also reports that the physical anthropologist R.D.E. MacPhee examined the Emmons mask and noted that it had both primate-like features.Halpin details the elaborate mask-related folklore and rites pertaining to a creature called pi'kis, which has both human and animal traits (especially connected to otters). He also describes the creature as occupying a "dangerously close intersection between human and animal" in native lore. As with the carved stone heads, Halpin notes that these monkey-like masks alone do not prove that Sasquatch are real; rather, they are curious artifacts which warrant further investigation.
In the article On the Cultural Track of Sasquatch, Wayne Suttles offers a detailed examination of such legends, cited from various Pacific northwest tribes, including tales from the Salish, Lummi, Samish and Klallam peoples. Suttles confirms the often-repeated observation that none of the groups makes a "real/mythical or natural/supernatural dichotomy."However, Suttles concludes that rather than being inspired by a real creature, "It seems more likely that these beliefs have grown out of several sources and have been maintained in several ways. One of the sources may have been a real man-like animal. But I must reluctantly admit that as I have presented data and organized arguments, I have found its track getting fainter and fainter."
Some scientists] have speculated that such evidence is, in fact, circular. Sasquatch statues and legends existed long before the modern Bigfoot sightings. Thus, it is speculated these legends reinforced the first modern-day "mysterious sighting" as "some kind of giant apelike creature", creating the Bigfoot legend. In other words, the legend of Sasquatch created the Bigfoot legend, and therefore cannot be used as evidence. Footprints
Photographs or plaster casts of presumed Sasquatch footprints are often cited by cryptozoologists as important evidence. It is from that that Bigfoot received its most widely used name. Advocates of Bigfoot claim that tracks provide enough evidence to determine whether a footprint is genuine or hoaxed without having a gold standard from which to work from (i.e. a cast made from a footprint that is universally agreed to have come from Bigfoot). Coleman and Clark write that hoaxes are often clumsy in comparison to presumably genuine prints, which "show distinctive forencic features that to investigators indicate they are not fakes." Notably, Krantz claimed to have two ways of determining if a footprint was genuine or a hoax. He did not reveal his two techniques due to concern that they would be used in future hoaxes. However, Krantz authenticated a known hoax sent to him using his two criteria.
One of the features that Krantz argues suggests that footprints are due to a real creature rather than hoaxers is pressure ridges. These are small mounds of soil created "by a horizontal push of the forefoot just before it leaves the ground." For normal human locamotion the main pressure ridge occurs near the front, but in some Bigfoot tracks the primary ridge occurs in the middle of the foot.Krantz writes that "the push-off mound in midfootprint is one of the most impressive pieces of evidence to me," and argues that neither artificial wood nor rubber Bigfoot feet can create this feature, after trying to duplicate it. However, anthropologists David Daegling and Dan Schmitt were able to creat many different patterns of pressure ridges by walking with a complaint gait.
Another feature of Bigfoot tracks that is used in support by advocates is the spacing between prints. Krantz writes: "The comfortable walking step for humans is about half the individual's standing height, or a trace more. Sasquatch step measurements correspond, in general, to stature estimates that are reported from sightings." Krantz also reports that reputed Sasquatch steps are "in excess of three feet",arguing that this enormous step would be difficult or impossible for hoaxers to create artificially by wearing fake feet. Critics argue that proponents discount the ingenuity of hoaxers. Krantz, himself, reported an instance of a high-school hoaxer creating 8 feet (2.4 m) long Bigfoot strides up a steep slope by strapping fake feet on backwards and running down the slope.
Bigfoot prints have a wide variety of features. In addition to the normal prints of a human-like foot with five toes, casts with anything between two and six toes have been attributed to Bigfoot. Even among the standard type of footprint, variations occur in pressure ridges and toe position, which Krantz argues points to a real creature rather than a hoax.[

Gaussian curve

Henry Franzoni argues that the distribution of Bigfoot prints supports the hypothesis that they are caused by a real animal rather than hoaxers:

[W. Henner Farenbach] has studied a database of 550 track cast length measurements and has made some preliminary observations... The Gaussian distribution of the 550 footprint lengths gives a curve that is very similar to the curve given by living populations of known animals without much sexual dimorphism in footprint length. The standard error is very low, so additions to the database will not affect the result very much. It is not very likely that coordinated groups of hoaxers conspiring together for 38 years (the time span covered by the database of track measurements) could provide such a 'life-like' distribution in footprint lengths. Groups of hoaxers who did not conspire together would almost certainly result in a non-Gaussian distribution for the database of footprint lengths."

The Gaussian distribution is found in many phenomena. A Gaussian distribution of hoaxed footprints is possible if hoaxers had a conception of roughly how big a Bigfoot print should be. This would result in a greater number of prints around the mean with the prevalance of larger and smaller prints falling off similarly to a Gaussian distribution.

Deformity

A series of alleged Bigfoot tracks found near Bossburg, Washington, in 1969 appeared to show that the creature's right foot was affected by clubfoot. The deformed footprints are consistent with genuine disfigurement, and some[who?] argue that a hoax is unlikely. John Napier wrote of this case, "It is very difficult to conceive of a hoaxer so subtle, so knowledgeable; and so sick; who would deliberately fake a footprint of this nature. I suppose it is possible, but it is so unlikely that I am prepared to discount it." Krantz declared that "analysis of the apparent anatomy of these tracks proved to be the first convincing evidence... that the animals were real."
Rene Dahinden, Ivan Marx, and another investigator found the tracks shortly after encountering another vehicle parked by the side of the road. Marx pulled over, got out, and walked off, returning shortly and explaining that they had to leave immediately to retrieve his camera equipment since he'd just found tracks. Many have suggested that the track makers (whose car was parked by the road) simply weren't done leaving the fake trackway for the Bigfooters to "find." John Green regards the entire Bossburg episode to be a hoax.

Handprints

As another argument offered for the existence of Bigfoot, Krantz cited two alleged Sasquatch handprints taken from northeastern Washington in the summer of 1970. He claims the prints were of a left hand, showing a very broad, flat palm (more than twice as broad as Krantz' own larger-than-average hands) with stubby fingers, lacking an opposable thumb. Krantz writes that the prints have "many irregularities ... which cannot be identified in terms of human anatomy."
Another pair of alleged handprints was recovered in the late 1980s by Paul Freeman and given to Krantz for analysis; for similar reasons, Krantz judged them genuine.

Fingerprints

Several alleged Bigfoot hand and foot impressions said to contain dermal ridges (fingerprints) have been discovered; fingerprints are present only on humans and other primates.
Krantz reports that he offered casts of these prints to "more than forty" law enforcement fingerprint specialists across Canada and the United States for study. The reactions that he received ranged from "'very interesting' and 'they sure look real' to 'there is no doubt these are real.' The only exception was the Federal Bureau of Investigation expert who had said something to this effect, 'The implications of this are just too much; I can't believe it's real.'"
Krantz offered these same casts to physical anthropologists and primatologists. Conclusions were similarly varied, with several ruling them hoaxes. Tim White, unlike most respondents, said there was "no good reason to reject them." Opinion remains divided, however, with suggestions that the man who allegedly discovered the prints had confessed to other hoaxes.
One of the casts with visible fingerprints showed what Krantz took to be sweat pores. Krantz reports that "police expert Benny Kling ... commented that anyone who could engrave ridge detail of such quantity and quality should be making counterfeit money." This same print showed dysplasia, a common minor irregularity. Krantz writes, "The late Robert Olson was particularly impressed with this irregularity, as was Ed Palma of the San Diego Police Department."

Body cast

The Skookum Body Cast was collected in the summer of 2000 after the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) set out fruit bait in a rain run-off puddle near Skookum Meadows in the Gifford Pinchot National forest (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization web site). A handful of top U.S. primate anatomy experts argue that the impression left in the mud near the fruit is the impression of a Sasquatch. 325 pounds of casting material was used to capture a "half-body print" consisting of an imprint of what has been called "a Sasquatch's butt, ankles, hip, thigh, left arm, and apparent hair on the body." Skookum is the Native American Chinook word for Bigfoot or Sasquatch and according to Chinook Indian historian Joel Freeman, "Skookum" simply meant "powerful".
All of the scientists who have examined the Skookum Cast in person, including, but not limited to, Dr. Jeff Meldrum (Anthropologist - Idaho State University - Pocatello), Dr. Daris Swindler (Anthropologist - University of Washington) and Dr. Esteban Sarmiento (Anthropologist - The American Museum of Natural History - New York City) have unanimously confirmed that the Skookum impression is not an elk impression.
In March 3, 2001, journalist Marc Hume wrote an article for the National Post in which he claimed he recognized, based on some photos of the cast, the tracks of an elk and described, "imprints left that would match perfectly with an elk's legs." In his opinion, the cast was "if anything, a cast of the impression made by the hindquarters of an elk." Hume never saw the cast in person, however, and was not aware that there were a few elk tracks in the large slab cast. There were tracks of a least five different mammal species in the cast, including coyote, elk and human (the finders of the impression almost stepped on it).
In July 2006, a geologist named Dr. Anton Wroblewski saw a gallery duplicate of the cast at science exhibit in Texas. It was the first time that Wroblewski, a long-time skeptic of the Skookum cast, saw a duplicate in person. After seeing the duplicate at the exhibit, Wrobleswki wrote up an analysis which agreed with his prior skeptical opinion about the cast. His analysis disagreed with the scientists who examined the actual cast and who positively ruled out elk as a cause. Unlike the prominent anthropologists who carefully studied the cast in Seattle in late 2000, Wroblewski has no training in any field relevant to the study of mammals and their impressions.

Samples of hair and blood

Hairs retrieved from a bush in 1968 near Riggins, Idaho were given to Roy Pinker, a police science instructor at California State University, Los Angeles. Pinker concluded that the hair samples did not match any samples from known animal species. Pinker also stated that he could not attribute them as being Bigfoot hairs without a bonafide Bigfoot hair sample for comparison. Pinker's analysis did not use genetic fingerprinting, which was not developed until the 1980s. In "Analysis of Feces and Hair Suspected to be of Sasquatch Origin", anthropologist Vaughn M. Bryant Jr. and ecologist Burleigh Trevor-Deutch report the analysis of six alleged Bigfoot hairs recovered near Riggins, Idaho. They examined several sets of hair samples and their results were inconclusive, but the samples appeared to be most similar to those from a black bear.
Hair samples were also taken from a house located on the Lummi Indian reservation in Washington. Three more samples were retrieved from Maryland, Oregon and California. Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Ellis R. Kerley and Physical Anthropologist Dr. Stephen Rosen of the University of Maryland, as well as Tom Moore, the Supervisor of the Wyoming Game and Fish Laboratory, examined the hair samples and stated that all the hair samples matched in terms of belonging to a "non species specific mammal". They concurred in finding that the four sets matched each other, were similar to gorilla and human but were neither, and they did not match 84 other species of North American mammals. They found that the samples had primate, carnivore and ungulate characteristics. Rosen said if he had to choose he would guess it was an unknown primate. Blood associated with the sample from Idaho was tested by Dr. Vincent Sarich of the University of California and found to be that of a higher primate though Dr Sarich has suggested that the blood could possibly have been human. Like the Riggins samples above, these were not subjected to DNA tests.
Dr. Jeff Meldrum at Idaho State University has other hair and DNA samples that are clearly primate in origin, but from no known primate species. Dr. Henner Fahrenbach in Arizona has several hair/DNA samples which he concludes are Sasquatch in origin—samples screened from hundreds of possible samples sent to him over the years. Many hair samples sent in for examination did not contain hair follicles, so DNA analysis was impossible.
The DNA tests used on somatic samples give very limited information as there is no known Bigfoot sample to compare it to. The process can only compare the unknown sample to a set of known samples, which necessarily lacks samples of all known animals. Therefore, a hoaxer could obtain hair from a species that is not native to North America, which would have a high chance of not being included in the set of samples tested against. It would receive the same result as a genuine Bigfoot sample: inconclusive.

Audio and visual evidence

Analysis of purported Sasquatch vocalizations have been recorded and analyzed, leading bioacoustics expert Dr. Robert Benson of Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi to report that some recordings "left him puzzled", and helped alter his perspective somewhat, "from being a raving skeptic to being curiously receptive."See also: Patterson-Gimlin film There have been several alleged photos or motion pictures of Bigfoot. The best-known was filmed by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin on October 20, 1967. This film has generated much discussion and debate.
Critics note that audio and/or visual evidence is typically of poor quality

Story of Ruby Creek

kworley39 — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:27:52 CST

Stories about the Sasquatch have been appearing in print from time to time since the 1860s, and I have clipping in my files from almost every year since the early 1920s. But the modern history of the Sasquatch really dates from September 1941, when one of these creatures paid a visit — in broad daylight — to an Indian family named Chapman. While the Amerindian stories have usually been dismissed as legend, or laughed off because Indians are not supposed to be reliable, this experience was accompanied by too much physical evidence to be ignored. The Chapman family consisted off George and Jeannie Chapman and children numbering, at my visit, four. Mr. Chapman worked on the railroad, and was living at that time in a small place called Ruby Creek, 30 miles up the Fraser River from Agassiv, British Columbia, in Canada's great western province. It was about 3 in the afternoon of a sunny, cloudless day when Jeannie Chapman's eldest son, then aged 9, came running to the house saying that there was a cow coming down out of the woods at the foot of the nearby mountain. The other kids, a boy aged 7 and a little girl of 5, were still playing in a field behind the house bordering on the rail track. Mrs. Chapman went out to look, since the boy seemed oddly disturbed, and they saw what at first she thought was a very big bear moving about among the bushes bordering the field beyond the railway tracks. She called the two children who came running immediately. Then the creature moved onto the tracks and she saw to her horror that it was a gigantic man covered with hair, not fur. The hair seemed to be about four inches long all over, and of a pale yellow-brown color. To pin down this color Mrs. Chapman pointed out to me a sheet of lightly varnished plywood in the room where we were sitting. This was of a brown-ochre color. This creature advanced directly toward the house and Mrs. Chapman had, as she put it, "much too much time to look at it" because she stood her ground outside while the eldest boy — on her instructions — got a blanket from the house and rounded up the other children. The kids were in a near panic, she told us, and it took two or three minutes to get the blanket, during which time the creature had reached the near corner of the field only about 100 feet away from her. Mrs. Chapman then spread the blanket and, holding it aloft so that the kids could not see the creature or it them, she backed off at the double to the old field and down on to the river beach out of sight, and then ran with the kids downstream to the village. I asked her a leading question about the blanket. Had her purpose in using it been to prevent her kids seeing the creature, in accord with an alleged Amerindian belief that to do so brings bad luck and often death? Her reply was both prompt and surprising. She said that, although she had heard white men tell of that belief, she had not heard it from her parents or any other of her people whose advice regarding the so-called Sasquatch had been simply not to go further than certain points up certain valleys, to run if she saw one, and not to struggle if one caught her as it might squeeze her to death by mistake. "No," she said, "I used the blanket because I thought it was after one of the kids and so might go into the house to look for them instead of following me." This seems to have been sound logic as the creature did go into the house and also rummaged through an old outhouse pretty thoroughly, hauling from it a 55-gallon barrel of salt fish, breaking this open, and scattering its contents about outside. (The irony of it is that all those three children DID die within three years; the two boys by drowning, and the little girl on a sickbed. And just after I interviewed the Chapmans they also were drowned in the Fraser River when a row-boat capsized.) Mrs. Chapman told me that the creature was about 7½ feet tall. She could estimate its height by the various fence and line posts standing about the field. It had a rather small head and a very short, thick neck; in fact really no neck at all, a point that was emphasized by William Roe and by all others who claim to have seen one of these creatures. Its body was entirely human in shape except that it was immensely thick through its chest and its arms were exceptionally long. She did not see the feet which were in the grass. Its shoulders were very wide and it had no breasts, from which Mrs. Chapman assumed it was a male, though she also did not see any male genitalia due to the long hair covering its groin. She was most definite on one point: the naked parts of its face and its hands were much darker than its hair, and appeared to be almost black. George Chapman returned home from his work on the railroad that day shortly before 6 in the evening and by a route that by-passed the village so that he saw no one to tell him what had happened. When he reached his house he immediately saw the woodshed door battered in, and spotted enormous humanoid footprints all over the place. Greatly alarmed — for he, like all of his people, had heard since childhood about the "big wild men of the mountains," though he did not hear the word Sasquatch till after this incident — he called for his family and then dashed through the house. Then he spotted the foot-tracks of his wife and kids going off toward the river. He followed these until he picked them up on the sand beside the river and saw them going off downstream without any giant ones following. Somewhat relieved, he was retracing his steps when he stumbled across the giant's foot-tracks on the river bank farther upstream. These had come down out of the potato patch, which lay between the house and the river, had milled about by the river, and then gone back through the old field toward the foot of the mountains where they disappeared in the heavy growth. Returning to the house, relieved to know that the tracks of all four of his family had gone off downstream to the village, George Chapman went to examine the woodshed. In our interview, after 18 years, he still expressed voluble astonishment that any living thing, even a 7-foot-6- inch man with a barrel-chest could lift a 55-gallon tub of fish and break it open without using a tool. He confirmed the creature's height after finding a number of long brown hairs stuck in the slabwood lintel of the doorway, above the level of his head. George Chapman then went off to the village to look for his family, and found them in a state of calm collapse. He gathered them up and invited his father-in-law and two others to return with him, for protection of his family when he was away at work. The foot-tracks returned every night for a week and on two occasions the dogs that the Chapmans had taken with them set up the most awful racket at exactly 2 o'clock in the morning. The Sasquatch did not, however, molest them or, apparently, touch either the house or the woodshed. But the whole business was too unnerving and the family finally moved out. They never went back.

The Chapman's house at Ruby Creek

After a long chat about this and other matters, Mrs. Chapman suddenly told us something very significant just as we were leaving. She said: "It made an awful funny noise." I asked her if she could imitate this noise for me but it was her husband who did so, saying that he had heard it at night twice during the week after the first incident. He then proceeded to utter exactly the same strange, gurgling whistle that the men in California, who said they had heard a Bigfoot call, had given us. This is a sound I cannot reproduce in print, but I can assure you that it is unlike anything I have ever heard given by man or beast anywhere in the world. To me, this information is of the greatest significance. That an Amerindian couple in British Columbia should give out with exactly the same strange sound in connection with a Sasquatch that two highly educated white men did, over 600 miles south in connection with California’s Bigfoot, is incredible. If this is all hoax or a publicity stunt, or mass-hallucination, as some people have claimed, how does it happen that this noise — which defies description — always sounds the same no matter who has tried to reproduce it for me? These were probably the last words on the Sasquatch that the Chapmans uttered and I absolutely refuse to listen to anybody who might say they were lying. Admittedly, honest men are such a rarity as possibly to be non-existent, but I have met a few who could qualify and I put the Chapmans near the head of the list.

Eye shine

kworley39 — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 13:42:00 CST

This story is on my profile page as well.Just thought that I would add it here to give those that don't take time to look at the profiles a chance to read this story.By the way these are more than just stories,they are actual expierences of my family.Okay,lets get to the story.
This started one night when I had let my dog outside to do his business.We have a shed out in the backyard and as my dog went around the corner he startled something and it made a rather loud grunt 3 times in a row.Before I could yell for my dog he was already back on the deck.So I had my youngest son go in and get my spotlight so that we could check things out.Then we went to the general area of where we thought the noise had came from and shined the light into the woods.Well,this is where things started to get unreal.As I shined the light into the woods we all saw these rather large yellow eyes staring back at us.So just to make sure that we were not seeing things I turned the light off and then back on and it was still there ,only a little further back.So I decided to turn the light off once more and when I did it was further back and very tall.Some people have tried to say that this was a dog or a bear.But the thing that convinces me that it was neither.Is the fact that the figure was larger than a bear or dog.What makes me say this is the fact that the eyes were to far apart and also the fact that if you yell at a dog or bear they will usually turn and run.They definitely do not stand 7 to 9 ft tall.One more interesting fact is that we were standing at the edge of the woods and we heard no movement as the thing moved and the last time it moved it seemed to be 20 feet further into the woods.Now if there should happen to be anyone out there that can give me the reason that we heard nothing during this time,then I would be more than happy to listen.Now the next morning when I got out of bed I went into the woods to see if I could find any sign of what was there the night before.The only thing that was out there that was not there before was a rather large formation.

The Walk About
This is one of my sons experiences that he shares with one of his close friends from school.They were here spending the weekend and my son began telling his friend about some of the things that had been going on around the house.So,curiosity got the best of his friend and they decided that they would got out into the woods and walk around.This was around 10:30 at night so off they went.As they got into the woods something started following them around making grunts and growls as it followed them.Now some people have tried to say that it could have been a dog or something to that effect.But,if you are having the same thought then I will finish the story and then you decide.
Okay,let's finish the story.Well as they were continuing there walk things began to get weird.Such as something began throwing thing at them.So that kinda spooked them.So they decided to come out of the woods,as they got closer to the house what ever was following them began to throw things closer and more frequent.Finally as they got to the edge of the woods and stepped out they heard the siren sound that we have talked about on our home page.
So they came to the house and got me,then we went out onto the deck just to listen.When we did we began hearing sounds like rocks being clicked together.When that started we heard calls coming from the other side of the house and they seemed to be communicating back and forth.This went on for several minutes.
Now,some of you will try to explain this away so that you can make better since of what happened that night.But,if you think about it.The sounds that the boys heard were not humanly possible or could not have possibly been made by any animal that I have ever heard.I know for sure that dogs or any other animals that I know can not pick up things and throw them with the accuracy and force that they were thrown that night.They also can't pick up rocks and click them together in an intelligent manner as if morse code and then get a response from some where else in the woods.This to me shows some form of intelligence. Stay tuned....Plenty more experiences to come................Click Here For Night Visitor

The Hominid of Many Names

kworley39 — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 13:21:05 CST

This page will go into depth about the history and folklore dating back as far as the early 1500's and delving into the many names that these creatures have been given by so many cultures.I have decided and have been convinced by my own expierences that they most definetly exist.I will include the many names and countries that these creatures have either been seen or have been listed in the lore and legends.

Lets start out with the Chinese Yeren or Wildman.The first recorded sighting of this creature was in the mid 1500's.Many people have reported seeing the creatures through out China.Although they are reported to be smaller in stature than it's american cousin they do have the large feet and are very agile also.If these creatures do not exist and they are suppose to be figments of our imagination,explain why there are recorded sightins dating back as far as my research has indicated.The Yeren is only one of the many creatures documented and sighted all over the world.
In Vietnam the creature is called Ngu-oi-rang {forest man} also called forest people.They are also smaller in stature than the American Bigfoot,the average height of these creatures is 6ft tall.They range in color from black to brown.The only Date that I can find in reference to the first encounter with one of these creatures only goes back to 1969.

The Yeti or Abominable Snowman is an apelike cryptid said to inhabit the Himalayan region of Nepal and Tibet. The names Yeti and Meh-Teh are commonly used by the people indigenous to the region, and are part of their history and mythology. Stories of the Yeti first emerged as a facet of Western popular culture in the late 1800s.
The scientific community largely regards the Yeti as a legend, given the lack of evidence, yet it remains one of the most famous creatures of cryptozoology. The Yeti can be considered a parallel to the Bigfoot legend of North America.

Ebu Gogo is a human-like creature (or race of creatures) that appears in the mythology of the people of the island of Flores, Indonesia, of similar form to the leprechaun or elf. These "little people" are said to be about one meter tall, their passion fruit sized head covered in hair, pot-bellied, and with ears that stick out. They are held to walk somewhat awkwardly and are often said to be "murmuring" in what is assumed to be their own language. It is also said by the islanders that the Ebu Gogo can repeat what is said to them in parrot-like fashion.
In one language of central Flores the name means "grandmother who eats meat" (or possibly "grandmother glutton") from the words ebu "grandmother" and gogo "(s)he who eats meat".

The HIBAGON is described as a black creature with white hands and large white feet, standing about five feet tall. Sightings have been reported in forested, mountainous areas of the country. It has been reported in the forests around Mount Hiba in Hiroshima Prefecture and has been said to resemble a gorilla.

The Almos is another creature related to our Bigfoot.It is smaller in stature also ranging from 5ft to 6ft tall.The first recorded report of these creatures dates back to 1430.Hans Schiltberger reported his own personal oberservation of these creatures in the 15th century.That is nearly 600yrs ago.

The barmanou (or barmanu) is said to be a bipedal primate living in the mountainous region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sightings have been reported by shepherds living in the mountains. The zoologist Dr. Jordi Magraner, a Spaniard living in France, researched the barmanu extensively. He was murdered in Pakistan in 2002.

Am Fear Liath Mòr (also known as The Big Grey Man of Ben MacDhui or simply The Greyman) is the name of a presence or creature which is said to haunt the summit and passes of Ben MacDhui, the highest peak of the Cairngorms and the second highest peak in Scotland. It has been described as an extremely tall figure covered with short hair, or as an unseen presence that causes uneasy feelings in people who climb the mountain. There is little evidence of the existence of this creature besides various sightings and a few photographs of unusual footprints

Kapre (related to the Agta in the Visayan dialect) is a Philippine mythical creature that could be characterized as a tree demon, but with more human characteristics. It is described as being a tall (7 to 9 ft), brown, hairy male with a beard

A malevolent creature from Northeast Anatolian Turkish and Bulgarian folklore. The Karakoncolos is a variety of the bogeyman - merely troublesome and rather harmless, but sometimes truly evil. It has thick hairy fur like the Sasquatch. The name probably comes from the Greek Kalikantzaros.

Orang Mawas or Mawas (also known as the Orang Dalam) is a hominid cryptid reported to inhabit the jungle of Johor in Malaysia. It is described as being about 10 ft (2.4-3 m) tall, bipedal and covered in black fur, and has been reported feeding on fish and raiding orchards.Reported sightings date back to the 1870.

Orang Pendek (Indonesian for "short person") is the most common name given to a cryptid, or unconfirmed animal, that reportedly inhabits remote, mountainous forests on the island of Sumatra.
The animal has allegedly been seen and documented for at least one hundred years by forest tribes, local villagers, Dutch colonists, and Western scientists and travelers.

Yowie is the modern generic, and somewhat affectionate, term for an unidentified hominid reputed to lurk in the Australian wilderness. It is an Australian cryptid similar to the Himalayan Yeti and the North American Bigfoot.Reports of Yowie-type creatures are common in the legends and stories of Australian Aboriginal tribes, particularly those of the eastern states of Australia. The mid to late 19th Century saw a wealth of sightings, most describing a large, gorilla-like creature (albeit usually bipedal), which lived in remote mountainous or forested regions.

Old Yellow Top was reported to be a 7 ft (~2.1 m) Sasquatch-like creature that was sighted several times around the town of Cobalt, Ontario, Canada. Descriptions of the creature by eye witnesses closely resemble that of a Sasquatch; however, it has a blonde patch of hair on its head and a light-coloured mane, which is what has given it its name.
Alleged sightings have taken place over a 64 year period, with the first reported sighting in September of 1906.

The Wendigo of the Eastern US (also Windigo, Weendigo, Windago, Windiga, Witiko, Wihtikow, and numerous other variants) is a mythical creature appearing in the mythology of the Algonquin people. It is a malevolent cannibalistic spirit into which humans could transform, or which could possess humans. Those who indulged in cannibalism were at particular risk, and the legend appears to have reinforced this practice as taboo.The first reported case was in the early 1800's.

Recent Reports

kworley39 — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:33:54 CST

This page will contain all recent reports for 2008.I will post all any and all reports that I find as long as they are not laughable.If they contain crediable accounts and are not meant to be pranks.

April 08-Crystal,New Mexico.Group of people observed large hairy creature chasing turkeys up into the mountains Narbona Pass On the otherside of Chuska Mountain.

Spring 08-Toadelena,New Mexico.Man went up on mesa where he had his crop of corn planted to check things out.As he was walking through the corn field.As he came to the fence line near the tree line of the surrounding woods,he looked down and noticed a very large foot print.As he was standing there he began to get this weird feeling as if something was watching him.So he hurried back to his vehicle and left the area.

July 08-Sansostee,New Mexico.
Lady was awoken by the dogs in the neighborhood at 4:00 a.m.As she stepped outside she heard this loud siren type sound,but it was louder and longer than any siren she had ever heard.She said the weird thing about it was that after the sound there was an almost eerie quiet that came over the neighborhood.She also said that the call blasted two more times before she went back into the house.

July 08-Argo, Alabama
Man reported strange sounds around his house.Could not explain the sounds,just said that they were like nothing he had ever heard.

April 08-Argo,Alabama
This happened in the area around my house.My dogs were just barking as if someone were outside so I went to the door to see what they were barking at.As I opened the door stand at the end of the turn around I saw a large black and hairy figure with no neck and some where around 7 to 9 feet tall and about
4 and a half feet wide at the shoulders.Guessing the weight would have to have been between 550 to 675 lbs.Have had weid things happen around the house like sounds,trees breaking,bangs on th side of the house, weird eye shines in the woods around the house,formations,tree knocking,etc.In the fall I look for the activity to pick up in the surrounding area.

Oct 08-Enterprise,Ala.
A friend of mine lives in this area and he told me that his wife was laying out on the swing on his back deck and she heard this rather loud scream almost like a siren.So she got kinda spooked and went inside.He said that he had gotten home around 1 am and went to make sure that his kids had turned out the lights in his shed and locked the door when he heard the same thing that his wife had heard earlier.So he knida tturned around and went back in the house.Until the sun came up and then went outside and found some footprints in his backyard.

Oct.15-Pike County,Ala
A man and his daughter were on their way home about 9p.m. when the man thought that he was looking at a deer standing near an old farm house.As he kept watching what he thought was a deer stood up and took off running toward the woods.He said that there were sulfur lights between the house and the barn that lit the area brightly.He saw enough that he could tell that the creature was about 7ft tall and was very skinny and had grayish hair all over its body and that it moved very quickly and seemed to be very agile.

Nov 08 Margaret,Ala.
Another friend of mine told me about this sighting.He has some guys that he goes hunting with and they told him about this sighting.They were on the road to the hunt club,keep in mind this road is wide enough to drive an F-350 on.They said that they had stopped on the road and had gotten out of the truck just to hang out and chat.When they heard this loud commotion in the woods,like something just tearing through the woods.It got louder as it came closer as they were looking up the road to see if it might be a deer,it came out of the woods and crossed the road in almost one leap.The guys told my friend that it was not a deer.or wild boar.They said that it was not anything that they had ever saw,it was standing upright and at least 7 to 9ft tall.Dark in color and just huge.I will try to find out more about this sighting.

The Chinese Yeren {Wildman}

kworley39 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:39:57 CST

The debate on the link between humans and apes has not yet been completely resolved, according to many experts. Neanderthals who were evidenced to have existed in Central and Northern Asia 350,000 years ago, provided the scientific community with information on human evolution.

Compared to the famous Bigfoot and sasquatch of North America, China has its own version of the creature, called yeren in the native tongue, which translates as wild man. Paleontologists claim that possibly 1,000 to 2,000 of the
yeren live in Central China, particularly in Shennongjia Nature Reserve, in Hubei province. Variants of the name are xueren, yiren and yeh ren, which more accurately means wild man of Shennongjia.

The yeren is described as a large animal, appearing much like the orangutans of Southeast Asia, but are bipedal and can walk upright. The height of the creature is estimated between five to seven feet, with the entire body covered with red to dark brown fur. The yeren has a large belly, but is reported to be able to move quickly and run fast. The facial region resembles a cross between an ape's and a human's. The yeren can leave a large footprint, about 16 inches long, displaying five toes like humans, but with a structure closer to that of apes.

Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have gathered evidences for the existence of the yeren, which is claimed to have been seen by many tourists in the Shennongjia Nature Reserve. These experts have been able to uncover footprints, and have even made plaster moldings for further examination. Most scientists theorize that the yeren may have been a species of giant ape, called Gigantopithecus blacki, which lived in Asia but was declared to have been extinct for over 500,000 years.

Many of the locals believe that the yeren is a carnivore and preys on humans. Their tales narrate stories of giant beasts that grab captive humans by the arms and eat their flesh after. Though the Chinese scientific community continues to send expeditions to the nature reserve in search of the yeren, many of their assumptions remain as theories. However, the stories of the yeren continue to be part of Chinese folklore and myths.

According to the journal of Cryptozoology, some more detailed descriptions of the Chinese wild man are: the hairs covering its body are about three to four centimeters long, the male genitalia resembles that of humans, the female yeren has prominent breasts, and the creature gives a distinctive yell as part of its language.

Combined theories from accounts and observations of yeren stories claim that these creatures don’t live in communities, but males and females move about in pairs. Though they walk on two hind legs, the yeren can use all four limbs when running fast or when climbing. As old tales regard the yeren as man-eaters, most accounts claim that they eat fruits such as berries and nuts, sometimes insects, and empty corn cobs have been located in areas where the footprints were sighted.

There is a website that describes the Yeren and numerous other creatures of Cryptozoology in detail, this website is called: Unknown Creatures and it may be found at this url: http://www.unknown-creatures.com

The Hibagon {Japan}
The Hibagon is a creature similiar to the bigfoot or yeti,although it is smaller in stature standing around five feet tall.It main attribute to the bigfoot is the large feet that is one of the trade marks these creatures seem to share.The are spooted round the mountains of Hiroshima.I will be doing some more research on the creatures,but as of now this is all that I can tell you about them.

Old Yellow Top {Canada}

kworley39 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:35:55 CST

Reports of a large, hairy ape-like creature haunting the mining region near Cobalt in the northern reaches of Ontario are numerous and stretch back to the earliest years of human habitation. In fact, the first recorded sighting of the mysterious beast occurred just over 100 years ago, in September 1906, the same year in which the silver boom-town of Cobalt was founded.
The area was then unsettled and the mining frenzy was only in its infancy. Spurred on by dreams of overnight riches, prospectors pushed deeper into wilderness that had rarely if ever been trod by human feet before.
One group of silver-seekers had pushed deep in the woods east of Cobalt, where they began building the headframe of the soon-to-be famous Violet Mine. To their horror, an ape-like being suddenly emerged from the forest. The anxious miners watched the creature for several long minutes until once more its shape blended in with the trees at the edge of the clearing. When the men returned to civilization and told their sensational story, the creature was dubbed the “Traverspine Gorilla” by the media.
This ape-man seems to be a subspecies of the famous Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, of the Pacific Northwest. Large and elusive, they are covered in coarse brown hair, have peculiarly long arms, stand over seven feet in height, and weigh over 300 pounds. The only apparent difference between the hairy creatures of northern Ontario and those of the Pacific coast is the light-colored hair covering their head, neck, and shoulders. This distinctive coloration is the source of the creatures’ most famous and enduring name: Old Yellow Top.
That Was No Bear
In July 1923, two prospectors, experienced woodsmen by the names of J. A. MacAuley and Lorne Wilson, were taking test samples of their mining claims northeast of Wettlaufer Mine near Cobalt when they saw what initially looked to be a bear feasting in a blueberry patch. With courage that bordered on recklessness, Mr. Wilson threw a stone at the animal.
Its response was immediate and terrifying. The creature, no bear, stood up to its full seven feet and, baring its teeth, let out an ear-piercing roar of defiance. It was like nothing either man had ever heard before, a dreadful sound that melted courage and left these grown men quaking in terror. They ran, and didn’t stop until they reached the safety of town.
“It sure looked like no bear I have ever seen,” said Mr. Wilson to a reporter from the North Bay Nugget. “Its head was kind of yellow and the rest of it was like a bear, covered in hair.”
MacAuley and Wilson returned to the wilderness afterwards—the lure of silver riches was too strong to ignore—but were never again so cavalier about its dangers. They knew, even if others doubted, that they had encountered the embodiment of nature’s primal fury. Both men went to their graves convinced they had seen Old Yellow Top.
Another well-documented sighting took place in April 1946, near the hamlet of Gillies Depot. A woman and her young son began the long walk along the railway tracks into Cobalt to do the family’s weekly shopping. As it was early spring, the woman was wary of stumbling into young bear cubs and their protective mothers, and so she jumped when a large shadow in the periphery of her vision moved toward the tracks.
What she saw shocked her nearly beyond belief. This was no bear, nor a wolf or any other creature she was familiar with. It walked effortlessly on two legs “almost like a man,” but was entirely covered in brown hair. The woman held her son close, but they held no interest for the beast. It ambled across the tracks and disappeared into the woods, leaving the shaken onlookers to continue on their journey.
Dramatic Encounter
The most famous—and controversial—encounter with Old Yellow Top occurred on an August night in 1970. That evening, 26 miners bound for a graveyard shift at the Cobalt Lode Mine clambered aboard a bus driven by Aimee Latreille. The journey started off routinely enough, but nearly ended in disaster when Latreille swerved to avoid something on road before him, then lost control as the bus hit the soft shoulder and nearly plunged down a rocky embankment.
“At first I thought it was a big bear,” Latreille later explained, “but then it turned to face the headlights and I could see some light hair, almost down to the shoulders. It couldn’t have been a bear. I have heard of this thing before but I never believed it. Now I am sure.”.....

The Fouke Monster {Fouke,Arkansas}

kworley39 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:30:57 CST

Appearance

Various reports of the creature made between 1971 and 1974 described the creature as being a large hominid-like creature covered in long dark hair, which was estimated to be about 7 feet (2.1 m) tall with a weight of 250-300 pounds. Witnesses said that its chest was about 3 feet (0.91 m) wide. Later reports, published during the early 1980s, claimed that it was far larger, with one report describing it as 10 feet (3.0 m) tall, with an estimated weight of 800 pounds.
Some accounts describe the Fouke Monster as running in a 'hunched/slouched' posture and swinging its arms in a similar fashion to a monkey. Reports also describe it as having a terrible odor and as having bright red eyes, about the size of silver dollars.
A variety of tracks and claw marks have been discovered which are claimed to belong to the creature. One set of foot prints reportedly measured 17 inches (430 mm) in length and 7 inches (180 mm) wide, another appeared to show that the creature only had three toes.

Chronology

Pre 1971

Although most cases date from the early 1970s onwards, Fouke residents claim that an apelike creature had roamed the area since 1964, but that sightings had not been reported to news services. Local legend also holds that the creature can be further traced back to sightings in 1946.Most early sightings were in the region of Jonesville. Owing to this, the creature was known as the "Jonesville Monster" during this period.

Post 1971

Despite claims of earlier sightings, the Fouke Monster first made headlines in 1971, when it was reported to have attacked the home of Bobby and Elizabeth Ford late on the night of May 1.
According to Elizabeth Ford, the creature, which she initially took to be a bear, reached through a screen window while she was sleeping on a couch. It was chased away by her husband and his brother Don, who were returning from a hunting trip. The creature returned shortly after midnight (Sunday, May 2), when it was reported to have grabbed Bobby Ford across the shoulders as he stood on the porch, throwing him to the ground. Bobby managed to crawl free and was later treated in St. Michael Hospital, Texarkana, for scratches across his back. He was suffering from mild shock when he arrived.
During the encounters, the Fords fired several shots at the creature and believed that they had hit it, though no traces of blood were found. An extensive search of the area failed to locate the creature but found three-toed footprints close to the house, scratch marks on the porch, and some damage to a window and the house's siding.
According to the Fords, they had heard something moving around outside late at night several nights before their encounter but, having lived in the house for less than a week, had never encountered the creature before.
The creature was spotted again on May 23, when three people, D. Woods, Wilma Woods, and Mrs. R Sedgass, reported seeing an ape-like creature crossing Highway 71.More sightings were made over the following months by local residents and tourists, who found additional footprints.The best known footprints were found in a soybean field belonging to local gas station owner Willie E. Smith. They were scrutinized by game warden Carl Galyon, who was unable to confirm their authenticity.Like the Ford prints, they appeared to indicate that the creature had only three toes.
The creature began to attract substantial interest during the early 1970s. Soon after news spread about the Ford sighting, the Little Rock radio station KAAY posted a $1,090 bounty on the creature. Several attempts were made to track the creature with dogs, but they were unable to follow its scent. When hunters began to take interest in the Fouke Monster, Miller County Sheriff Leslie Greer was forced to put a temporary "no guns" policy in place in order to preserve public safety. In 1971, three people were fined $59 each "for filing a fraudulent monster report."
After an initial surge of attention, public interest in the creature decreased until 1973. It was boosted significantly when Charles B. Pierce released a documentary-style horror feature on the creature. By late 1974 interest had waned again and sightings all but stopped, only to begin again in March 1978, when tracks were reportedly found by two brothers prospecting in Russellville , and there were sightings in Center Ridge ; both approximately 4-1/4 hours drive northeast of Fouke. There was also a reported sighting in Crossett 4 hours drive east of Fouke, on June 26 that year.
During this period the creature was blamed for missing livestock and attacks on several dogs.
Since the initial clusters of sightings during the 1970s, there have been sporadic reports of the creature. In 1991 the creature was reportedly seen jumping from a bridge. There were forty reported sightings in 1997 and, in 1998, the creature was reportedly sighted in a dry creek bed five miles (8 km) south of Fouke.

Presumed Hoax

One month after the Ford sighting, Southern State College archaeologist Dr. Frank Schambach determined that "There is a 99 percent chance the tracks are a hoax."
According to Schambach, the tracks could not be from a species of ape, or ape man, as claimed by witnesses, because they were from a three-toed creature, whereas all primates and hominids (both modern and historical) have five toes. In addition to the number of toes, Dr. Schambach cited several other anomalies as part of his conclusion. He noted that the region had no history of primate activity, ruling out the possibility of the creature being the remnants of an indigenous species. He also argued that while all primates are diurnal, the Fouke Monster appeared to be nocturnal. A number of Dr. Schambach's critics say that he did not take into account inbreeding as a possibility for physical abnomalities, or the creatures nasty disposition. Three-toed footprints of possible sasquatch sightings have been found from Florida to Texas and Oklahoma. A number of face-to-face encounters have been reported, with most saying that the creature was not scared or shy, but instead somewhat aggressive. Schambach's critics also state that for he, or any other scientist, to simply disregard people's citings as "mass hysteria" or "mistaken identity", is both fool-hardy and disrespectful.

Films

The Legend of Boggy Creek

In 1973, the story of Bobby Ford's encounter with the Fouke Monster was turned into a semi-factual, documentary-style horror feature, The Legend of Boggy Creek, (initially titled "Tracking the Fouke Monster") which played in drive-in theaters around the country. It was written by Earl E. Smith and directed by Charles B. Pierce. The part of Bobby Ford was played by Glenn Carruth and the part of Elizabeth Ford was played by Bunny Dees. Fouke Garage owner Willie E. Smith, on whose land three toed footprints were found, starred as himself. Many characters were named after the people who played them.
Much of the film was shot on location in Fouke and nearby Texarkana, though some scenes also were filmed in Shreveport, Louisiana. Most of the cast were local people or Texarkana college students.It ran for 87 minutes (90 on DVD) and is believed to have cost $165,000 to make. It grossed $22 million, making it the 7th highest grossing movie of the year.

Return to Boggy Creek

A second Fouke Monster film, Return to Boggy Creek (also known as Boggy Creek II: The Legend Continues), was filmed and released in 1977. The movie had an entirely fictional plot and was not intended to be a sequel. It was written by Tom Moore, was directed by John David Woody, and starred Dawn Wells as the mother of three children who become lost in the swamp.Some of the film's scenes were shot on location in Fouke; others were filmed in Dallas, Texas, and Loreauville and Iberia Parish, Louisiana.[27]

The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II

In 1985, a third Fouke Monster film was released. It was titled The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II and written as a sequel to the original film. Charles B. Pierce wrote, directed, and starred in it as Brian Lockart, a University of Arkansas professor who leads a group of students into the swamps around Fouke. It was shot on location in Foukebut included some scenes shot at the University of Arkansas.
In 1999, The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek was used by Mystery Science Theater 3000 to produce Boggy Creek II: The Legend Continues. It aired on May 9, 1999 (Episode 6, Season 10

The Almas' of Mongolia

kworley39 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:01:36 CST

The Sasquatch and the Yeti, from the descriptions available, are large and very ape-like. But there is another wildman, the Almas, which seems smaller and more human. Reports of the Almas are concentrated in an area extending from Mongolia in the north, south through the Pamirs, and then westward into the Caucasus region. Similar reports come from Siberia and the far north-east parts of the Russian republic.
Early in the fifteenth century, Hans Schiltenberger was captured by the Turks and sent to the court of Tamerlane, who placed him in the retinue of a Mongol prince named Egidi. After returning to Europe in 1427, Schiltenberger wrote about his experiences. In his book, he described some mountains, apparently the Tien Shan range in Mongolia: "The inhabitants say that beyond the mountains is the beginning of a wasteland which lies at the edge of the earth. No one can survive there because the desert is populated by so many snakes and tigers. In the mountains themselves live wild people, who have nothing in common with other human beings. A pelt covers the entire body of these creatures. Only the hands and face are free of hair. They run around in the hills like animals and eat foliage and grass and whatever else they can find. The lord of the territory made Egidi a present of a couple of forest people, a man and a woman. They had been caught in the wilderness, together with three untamed horses the size of asses and all sorts of other animals which are not found in German lands and which I cannot therefore put a name to" (Shackley 1983, p. 93).
Myra Shackley (1983, pp. 93-94) found Schiltenberger's account especially credible for two reasons: "First, Schiltenberger reports that he saw the creatures with his own eyes. Secondly, he refers to Przewalski horses, which were only rediscovered by Nicholai Przewalski in 1881....Przewalski himself saw 'wildmen' in Mongolia in 1871."

Drawing of a Mongolian Almas from a 19th-century Tibetan book (Shackley 1983, p. 97)

A drawing of an Almas is found in a nineteenth-century Mongol compendium of medicines derived from various plants and animals. The text next to the picture reads: "The wildman lives in the mountains, his origins close to that of the bear, his body resembles that of man, and he has enormous strength. His meat may be eaten to treat mental diseases and his gall cures jaundice" (Shackley 1983, p. 98).
Shackley (1983, p. 98) noted: "The book contains thousands of illustrations of various classes of animals (reptiles, mammals and amphibia), but not one single mythological animal such as are known from similar medieval European books. All the creatures are living and observable today. There seems no reason at all to suggest that the Almas did not exist also and illustrations seem to suggest that it was found among rocky habitats, in the mountains."
In 1937, Dordji Meiren, a member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, saw the skin of an Almas in a monastery in the Gobi desert. The lamas were using it as a carpet in some of their rituals. Shackley (1983, pp. 103-104) stated: "The hairs on the skin were reddish and curly....The features [of the face] were hairless, the face had eyebrows, and the head still had long disordered hair. Fingers and toes were in a good state of preservation and the nails were similar to human nails."
A report of a more recent sighting of live wildmen was related to Myra Shackley by Dmitri Bayanov, of the Darwin Museum in Moscow. In 1963, Ivan Ivlov, a Russian pediatrician, was traveling through the Altai mountains in the southern part of Mongolia. Ivlov saw several humanlike creatures standing on a mountain slope. They appeared to be a family group, composed of a male, female, and child. Ivlov observed the creatures through his binoculars from a distance of half a mile until they moved out of his field of vision. His Mongolian driver also saw them and said they were common in that area. Shackley (1983, p. 91) stated: "So we are not dealing with folktales or local legends, but with an event that was recorded by a trained scientist and transmitted to the proper authorities. There is no reason to doubt Ivlov's word, partly because of his impeccable scientific reputation and partly because, although he had heard local stories about these creatures he had remained sceptical about their existence."
After his encounter with the Almas family, Ivlov interviewed many Mongolian children, believing they would be more candid than adults. The children provided many additional reports about the Almas. For example, one child told Ivlov that while he and some other children were swimming in a stream, he saw a male Almas carry a child Almas across it (Shackley 1983, pp. 91-92).
In 1980, a worker at an experimental agricultural station, operated by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences at Bulgan, encountered the dead body of a wildman: "I approached and saw a hairy corpse of a robust humanlike creature dried and half-buried by sand. I had never seen such a humanlike being before covered by camel-colour brownish-yellow short hairs and I recoiled, although in my native land in Sinkiang I had seen many dead men killed in battle. ... The dead thing was not a bear or ape and at the same time it was not a man like Mongol or Kazakh or Chinese and Russian. The hairs of its head were longer than on its body" (Shackley 1983, p. 107).
The Pamir mountains, lying in a remote region where the borders of Tadzhikistan, China, Kashmir, and Afghanistan meet, have been the scene of many Almas sightings. In 1925, Mikhail Stephanovitch Topilski, a major general in the Soviet army, led his unit in an assault on an anti-Soviet guerilla force hiding in a cave in the Pamirs. One of the surviving guerillas said that while in the cave he and his comrades were attacked by several apelike creatures. Topilski ordered the rubble of the cave searched, and the body of one such creature was found. Topilski reported (Shackley 1983, pp. 118-119): "At first glance I thought the body was that of an ape. It was covered with hair all over. But I knew there were no apes in the Pamirs. Also, the body itself looked very much like that of a man. We tried pulling the hair, to see if it was just a hide used for disguise, but found that it was the creature's own natural hair. We turned the body over several times on its back and its front, and measured it. Our doctor made a long and thorough inspection of the body, and it was clearthat it was not a human being."
"The body," continued Topilski, "belonged to a male creature 165-170cm [about 5 1/2 feet] tall, elderly or even old,judging by the greyish colour of the hair in several places. The chest was covered with brownish hair and the belly with greyish hair. The hair was longer but sparser on the chest and close-cropped and thick on the belly. In general the hair was very thick, without any underfur. There was least hair on the buttocks, from which fact our doctor deduced that the creature sat like a human being. There was most hair on the hips. The knees were completely bare of hair and had callous growths on them. The whole foot including the sole was quite hairless and was covered by hard brown skin. The hair got thinner near the hand, and the palms had none at all but only callous skin."
Topilski added: "The colour of the face was dark, and the creature had neither beard nor moustache. The temples were bald and the back of the head was covered by thick, matted hair. The dead creature lay with its eyes open and its teeth bared. The eyes were dark and the teeth were large and even and shaped like human teeth. The forehead was slanting and the eyebrows were very powerful. The protruding jawbones made the face resemble the Mongol type of face. The nose was flat, with a deeply sunk bridge. The ears were hairless and looked a little more pointed than a human being's with a longer lobe. The lower jaw was very massive. The creature had a very powerful chest and well developed muscles.... The arms were of normal length, the hands were slightly wider and the feet much wider and shorter than man's."
In 1957, Alexander Georgievitch Pronin, a hydrologist at the Geographical Research Institute of Leningrad University, participated in an expedition to the Pamirs, for the purpose of mapping glaciers. On August 2, 1957, while his team was investigating the Fedchenko glacier, Pronin hiked into the valley of the Balyandkiik River. Shackley (1983, p. 120) stated: "at noon he noticed a figure standing on a rocky cliff about 500 yards above him and the same distance away. His first reaction was surprise, since this area was known to be uninhabited, and his second was that the creature was not human. It resembled a man but was very stooped. He watched the stocky figure move across the snow, keeping its feet wide apart, and he noted that its forearms were longer than a human's and it was covered with reddish grey hair." Pronin saw the creature again three days later, walking upright. Since this incident, there have been numerous wildman sightings in the Pamirs, and members of various expeditions have photographed and taken casts of footprints (Shackley 1983, pp. 122-126).
We shall now consider reports about the Almas from the Caucasus region. According to testimony from villagers of Tkhina, on the Mokvi River, a female Almas was captured there during the nineteenth century, in the forests of Mt. Zaadan. For three years, she was kept imprisoned, but then became domesticated and was allowed to live in a house. She was called Zana. Shackley (1983, p. 112) stated: "Her skin was a greyish-black colour, covered with reddish hair, longer on her head than elsewhere. She was capable of inarticulate cries but never developed a language. She had a large face with big cheek bones, muzzle-like prognathous jaw and large eyebrows, big white teeth and a fierce expression." Eventually Zana, through sexual relations with a villager, had children. Some of Zana's grandchildren were seen by Boris Porshnev in 1964. In her account of Porshnev's investigations, Shackley (1983, p. 113) noted: '"The grandchildren, Chalikoua and Taia, had darkish skin of rather negroid appearance, with very prominent chewing muscles and extra strongjaws." Porshnev also interviewed villagers who as children had been present at Zana's funeral in the 1880s.
In the Caucasus region, the Almas is sometimes called Biaban-guli. In 1899, K. A. Satunin, a Russian zoologist, spotted a female Biaban-guli in the Talysh hills of the southern Caucasus. He stated that the creature had "fully human movements" (Shackley 1983, p. 109). The fact that Satunin was a well-known zoologist makes his report particularly significant.
In 1941, V. S. Karapetyan, a lieutenant colonel of the medical service of the Soviet army, performed a direct physical examination of a living wildman captured in the Dagestan autonomous republic, just north of the Caucasus mountains. Karapetyan said: "I entered a shed with two members of the local authorities. When I asked why I had to examine the man in a cold shed and not in a warm room, I was told that the prisoner could not be kept in a warm room. He had sweated in the house so profusely that they had had to keep him in the shed. I can still see the creature as it stood before me, a male, naked and barefooted. And it was doubtlessly a man, because its entire shape was human. The chest, back, and shoulders, however, were covered with shaggy hair of a dark brown colour. This fur of his was much like that of a bear, and 2 to 3 centimeters [1 inch] long. The fur was thinner and softer below the chest. His wrists were crude and sparsely covered with hair. The palms of his hands and soles of his feet were free of hair. But the hair on his head reached to his shoulders partly covering his forehead. The hair on his head, moreover, felt very rough to the hand. He had no beard or moustache, though his face was completely covered with a light growth of hair. The hair around his mouth was also short and sparse. The man stood absolutely straight with his arms hanging, and his height was above the average — about 180 cm [almost 5 feet 11 inches]. He stood before me like a giant, his mighty chest thrust forward. His fingers were thick, strong and exceptionally large. On the whole, he was considerably bigger than any of the local inhabitants. His eyes told me nothing. They were dull and empty — the eyes of an animal. And he seemed to me like an animal and nothing more" (Sanderson 1961, pp. 295-296). Significantly, the creature had lice of a kind different from those that infect humans. It is reports like this that have led scientists such as British anthropologist Myra Shackley and Soviet anatomist Dr. Zh. I. Kofman to conclude that the Almas may represent a relict population of Neanderthals or perhaps even Homo erectus (Shackley 1983, p. 114). What happened to the wildman of Dagestan? According to published accounts, he was shot by his Soviet military captors as they retreated before the advancing German army.
In the 1950s, Yu. I. Merezhinski, senior lecturer in the department of ethnography and anthropology at Kiev University, was doing research in Azerbaijan, in the northern part of the Caucasus region. From local people, Merezhinski heard reports of an Almas-like wildman called the Kaptar. Khadzi Magoma, an expert hunter, told Merezhinski that he would take him to a stream where the Kaptar sometimes bathed at night. In exchange, the hunter asked Merezhinski to take a flash photo of the creature for him. Merezhinski agreed, and they went to the stream, near which a few albino Kaptars were said to live. Shackley (1983, p. 110) stated: "sure enough Merezhinski saw one from a distance of only a few yards, clearly discernible on the river bank through the bushes. It was damp, lean and covered from head to foot with white hair. Unfortunately the reality of the creature was too much for Merezhinski, who instead of photographing it shot at it with his revolver but missed in his excitement. The old hunter, furious at the deception, refused to repeat the experiment."
Here once more we have a report by a professional scientist who directly observed a wildman. As an anthropologist, Merezhinski was particularly well qualified to evaluate what he saw. It is reports like this that tend to dispel the charge that the Almas is a creature that exists only in folklore.
And as far as folklore is concerned, accounts of the Almas and other wildmen are not necessarily a sign that the Almas is imaginary. Dmitri Bayanov, of the Darwin Museum in Moscow, asked (1982, p. 47): "Is the abundant folklore, say, about the wolf or the bear not a consequence of the existence of these animals and man's knowledge of them?" Bayanov (1982, p. 47) added: "Therefore we say that, if relic hominoids were not reflected in folklore and mythology, then their reality can be called into question.

Description

Almas is a singular word in Mongolian. The Russian plural is almasty; the correct Mongolian plural is almasuud. As is typical of the legendary hominids throughout Central Asia, Russia, and the Caucasus, the Almas is generally considered to be more akin to "wild people" in appearance and habits than to apes (in contrast to the Yeti of the Himalayas).
Almas are typically described as human-like bipedal animals, between five and six and a half feet tall, their bodies covered with reddish-brown hair, with anthropomorphic facial features including a pronounced browridge, flat nose, and a weak chin.[2] Many cryptozoologist researchers believe there is a similarity between these descriptions and modern reconstructions of how Neanderthals might have appeared.[3]

Evidence

Speculation that Almas may be something other than legendary creatures is based on purported eyewitness accounts, alleged footprint finds, and interpretations of long-standing native traditions, which have been anthropologically collected.[4]

Folk tales

Almas appear in the legends of local people, who tell stories of sightings and human-Almas interactions dating back several hundred years.
Drawings of Almas also appear in a Tibetan medicinal book. British anthropologist Myra Shackley noted that "The book contains thousands of illustrations of various classes of animals (reptiles, mammals and amphibia), but not one single mythological animal such as are known from similar medieval European books. All the creatures are living and observable today." (1983, p. 98)

Famous sightings

Sightings recorded in writing go back as far back as the 15th century.
In 1430, Hans Schiltberger recorded his personal observation of these creatures in the journal of his trip to Mongolia as a prisoner of the Mongol Khan.[5] Schiltberger also recorded one of the first European sightings of Przewalski horses. (Manuscript in the Munich Municipal Library, Sign. 1603, Bl. 210).
Nikolai Przhevalsky observed the animals in Mongolia in 1871 (Shackley, 94). He noted that Almas are part of the Mongolian and Tibetan apothecary's materia medica, along with thousands of other animals and plants that live today.[6]
British anthropologist Myra Shackley in Still Living? describes Ivan Ivlov's 1963 observation of a family group of Almas. Ivlov, a pediatrician, decided to interview some of the Mongolian children who were his patients, and discovered that many of them had also seen Almas. It seems that neither the Mongol children nor the young Almas were afraid of each other. Ivlov's driver also claimed to have seen them (Shackley, 91).

Captives

A wildwoman named Zana is said to have lived in the isolated mountain village of T'khina fifty miles from Sukhumi in Abkhazia in the Caucasus; some have speculated she may have been an Almas, but hard evidence is lacking.
Captured in the mountains in 1850, she was at first violent towards her captors but soon became domesticated and, indeed, was able to assist with simple household chores. Zana is said to have had sexual relations with a man of the village named Edgi Genaba, and gave birth to a number of children of apparently normal human appearance. Several of these children, however, died in infancy. Some commentators[who?] have attributed these early deaths to Zana's genetic incompatibility (as an Almas) with humans.
The father, meanwhile, gave away four of the surviving children to local families. The two boys, Dzhanda and Khwit Sabekia (born 1878 and 1884), and the two girls, Kodzhanar and Gamasa Sabekia (born 1880 and 1882), were assimilated into normal society, married, and had families of their own. Zana herself died in 1890. The skull of Khwit (also spelled Kvit) is still extant, and was examined by Dr. Grover Krantz in the early 1990s. He pronounced it to be entirely modern, with no Neanderthal features at all. Khwit's tooth was examined in 2008 as part of the Monster Quest tv show. Genetics tests were unable to definitely show Khwit's parentage, but tests will continue.
Another case is said to date from around 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the USSR. A "wild man" was captured somewhere in the Caucasus by a detachment of the Red Army under Lt. Col. Vargen Karapetyan. He appeared human, but was covered in fine, dark hair. Interrogation revealed his apparent inability (or unwillingness) to speak, and he is said to have been shot as a German spy. There are various versions of this legend in the cryptozoological literature, and, as with other Almas reports, hard proof is absent.