Next, on August 16, 1970, at around 9:30 P.M., Dan Lindsey and Mike Anderson encountered a similar Bigfoot creature while driving on Route 136 approaching the Kickapoo Creek Bridge north of Waynesville. “My first thought was a tall man or maybe a bear or a gorilla,” Anderson said. The thing stood six feet five inches tall, was all brown, and had stooped shoulders. Walking on two legs and illuminated by the car lights, it more or less trotted across to the west side and along the creek’s edge. And then it was gone.
Flap of 1972
During the summer of 1972, even though far more dramatic events were going on just across the border in Louisiana, Missouri, where a smelly, red-eyed creature dubbed Momo was being reported (see chapter 9), a “monster” was seen in Illinois.
The Peoria Journal-Star for July 26 told of Randy Emert, eighteen, who reported seeing a “monster” two different times over the previous two months. Emert said the thing resembled Momo in most particulars, although its height was between eight and twelve feet and it was “kind of white and moved quick.” It also had a rancid odor and seemed to scare the animals living in the woods near Cole Hollow Road. Said Emert, “It lets out a long screech—like an old steam-engine whistle, only more human.”
Emert’s friends had also seen either the creature or its footprints. “I’m kind of a spokesman for the group,” he said. “The only one who has guts, I guess.” Ann Kammerer of Peoria corroborated Emert’s story, stating that all of her children, friends of Emert’s, had seen the thing. “It sounds kind of weird,” she admitted. “At first I didn’t believe it, but then my daughter-in-law saw it.”
According to Emert, an old, abandoned house in the woods had large footprints all around it and a hole dug under the basement. Emert thought this might be where the creature was staying. Interestingly enough, Edgar Harrison, the chief witness in the Momo affair, believed the creature might temporarily be residing in an abandoned building.
On July 25 a Pekin resident reported seeing “something big” swimming in the Illinois River, which also flows through Peoria. On the night of the twenty-seventh “two reliable citizens” told police they had seen a ten-foot something that “looked like a cross between an ape and a caveman.” According to a UPI dispatch, it had “a face with long, gray, U-shaped ears, a red mouth with sharp teeth, [and] thumbs with long second joints.” It smelled, said a witness, like a “musky wet-down dog.” The East Peoria Police Department said it had received more than two hundred calls about the creature.
Then Leroy Summers of Cairo saw a ten-foot, white, hairy creature standing erect near the Ohio River levee during the evening hours of July 25, 1972. The Cairo police found nothing when they came to investigate, and Police Commissioner James Dale warned that henceforth anyone making a monster report would have his breath tested for alcohol.
Enfield Horror
The following year, when creatures descended upon White County in southeastern Illinois and I received some national publicity for my search there, Sheriff Roy Poshard Jr. took an even sterner stance: he threatened to arrest the key witness.
Whatever it was that Henry McDaniel of Enfield saw, it was not a classic Bigfoot. Nonetheless, an undoubted apelike creature was observed during the resulting “monster scare.”
McDaniel claimed that late in the evening of April 25, 1973, he heard something scratching on his door. Upon opening the door, he did a double take, for the “something” looked as if it had stepped out of a nightmare.
“It had three legs on it,” he said, “a short body, two little short arms coming out of its breast area, and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half to five feet tall and was grayish colored. It was trying to get into the house.”
McDaniel, in no mood to entertain the visitor, grabbed a pistol and opened fire.
“When I fired that first shot,” he said, “I know I hit it.”
The creature hissed like a wildcat and bounded away, covering seventy-five feet in three jumps, and disappeared into the brush along a railroad embankment that runs near the McDaniel home.
I also interviewed ten-year-old Greg Garrett, who lived just behind McDaniel. Garrett had been playing in his backyard half an hour before McDaniel’s encounter, when the creature approached him and stepped on his feet, tearing his tennis shoes to shreds. The boy had run inside, crying hysterically.
On May 6 at 3 A.M., the howling of neighborhood dogs awakened McDaniel. Looking out his front door, he saw the creature again.
“I seen something moving out on the railroad track and there it stood,” he said. “I didn’t shoot at it or anything. It started on down the railroad track. It wasn’t in a hurry or anything.”
The publicity McDaniel’s report received brought hordes of curiosity seekers, newsmen, and serious researchers to Enfield. Among them were two young men whom Deputy Sheriff Jim Clark arrested for hunting violations after they said they had seen and shot at a gray, hairy creature in some underbrush. Two of the men thought they had hit it, but the thing had sped off, running faster than a man. Two of their friends, Roger Tappy and Mike Mogle of Elwood, Indiana, who were not arrested, confirmed the incident of May 8, when I spoke to them.
Another witness I talked with was Rick Rainbow, news director of radio station WWKI, Kokomo, Indiana. On May 6 he and three other people saw a strange creature near an old, abandoned house close to McDaniel’s place. They didn’t get a good look at it because it had its back to them and was running in the shadows, but they described it as apelike, about five and a half feet tall, grayish, and stooped. Rainbow taped the cry it made, a distinctively apelike, short, screeching sound. Rainbow’s companions shot at and missed the creature. Rainbow was shaken by the experience and called me back to discuss the reality of such creatures, as he could hardly believe what he had seen.
Then on May 12 I heard the creature myself. I was on-site with Richard Crowe, a Chicago investigator and writer on the unknown, searching the area around McDaniel’s home, when we heard a high-pitched screech. We had spent our time interviewing witnesses, measuring and photographing the sighting locations, and just looking around the area. Suddenly, while examining a plowed field for fresh tracks in the late afternoon, we heard the most ungodly, piercing shriek you can imagine. Though startled, we attempted to locate the source of the sound in a wooded section that abutted the field. We looked around, searched through some sheds, but did not see the creature or any signs of it. We felt we were close, but then we also thought we were the ones being seen.
On June 6, a month after the Enfield events, the police in Edwardsville, Illinois, received and checked three reports of a musty-smelling, red-eyed, human-sized creature said to be lurking in the woods on the eastern edge of town. It was said to be more than five and a half feet tall and broad-shouldered, with eyes that apparently were sensitive to light. It made no sound when it walked. The witnesses said the thing chased them, and one man told police the creature had ripped his shirt and clawed his chest. All told, three sightings occurred, two on June 4 and one on June 8, all in the wooded area near Mooney, Little Mooney, and Sugar Creeks.
The Big Muddy Monster
The rest of the summer months of 1973 were taken up with the events near the Big Muddy River.
The creature—which would quickly be called the Big Muddy Monster after the nearby river—first appeared shortly after midnight on June 25, 1973, and was seen by Randy Needham and Judy Johnson, who were parked on a boat ramp to the Big Muddy River near Murphysboro, a town in southwestern Illinois. The couple was startled by a cry “about three times as loud as a bobcat, only deeper,” emanating from the nearby woods. When they looked up, they saw a huge biped lumbering toward them, still shrieking but now in altering tones. It was not a human sound.
Randy and Judy agreed the thing was about seven feet tall, white, its short body hair matted with river mud. They were not interested in examining it at close range, and by the time it had approached within twenty feet of them, they were bound for the Murphysboro poli
ce station. Officers Meryl Lindsey and Jimmie Nash checked the area and found “impressions in the mud approximately ten to twelve inches long and approximately three inches wide,” according to the report they filed later.
Needham later described the impressions as “something like a man with a shoe on would make—only the thing wasn’twearing shoes.” He suggested that toe prints might not have registered in the mud.
At 2 A.M., Nash, Lindsey, Needham, and Deputy Sheriff Bob Scott returned to the scene. This time they discovered fresh tracks, similar in general appearance to those they had seen an hour earlier, but deeper and smaller. The police report noted an especially strange detail: “The prints in the mud were very irratic [sic] in that no two were the same distance apart and some were five to six feet apart. Also prints were found very close together.”
Officer Lindsey left to get a camera to take pictures of the prints, and while he was gone, the other three followed the tracks. While they were bending over to examine some of them, there came “the most incredible shriek I’ve ever heard,” Nash recalled. Apparently the creature was hidden in the trees less than a hundred yards away, but the trio didn’t stick around to find out. They beat a hasty retreat to the squad car. In the hours that followed, the officers scoured the area in pursuit of an elusive splashing sound, but found nothing. When daylight came, things quieted down, but with darkness the creature returned.
The first to see it this time was four-year-old Christian Baril, who told his parents he had seen “a big white ghost in the yard.” They didn’t believe him, of course, but ten minutes later, when Randy Creath and Cheryl Ray saw something very much like that in a neighboring yard, parents and police reconsidered the youngster’s words.
About 10:30 P.M. Creath and Ray were sitting on the back porch of the Ray home when they heard something moving in the trees just beyond the lawn. They saw the creature standing in an opening in the trees, quietly watching them through glowing pink eyes. Cheryl Ray insisted, during an interview with my associate and friend Jerome Clark, that the eyes were glowing, not reflecting, since there was no nearby light source that could have caused the effect.
The creature was either the same one the other young couple had seen the night before or similar to it. It was white and dirty, weighed close to 350 pounds, and stood seven feet tall. It had a large, round head. Ray thought its arms might be “ape-length,” although she wasn’t certain because it was standing in waist-high grass.
Creath went down to get a closer look while Ray went inside to turn on the yard light. The light did not reveal much more of the creature than they had already seen.
Finally the thing ambled off through the trees, making considerable noise. Later, investigators found a trail of crushed weeds and broken brush, as well as imprints in the ground too vague and imper fect to be cast in plaster.
Cheryl Ray’s mother called the police. While waiting for them to arrive, they suddenly began to smell a “real strong odor, like a sewer,” the Ray teen said, but it lasted only a short time.
Soon Officers Nash and Ronald Manwaring pulled up in their car. What happened then is recounted in the official report they shared with me:
Officers inspected the area where the creature was seen and found weeds broken down and somewhat [sic] of a path where something had walked through. Jerry Nellis was notified to bring his dog to the area to see if the dog would track the creature. Upon arrival of Nellis and dog [a German shepherd trained to attack, search buildings, and track] the dog was led to the area where the creature was last seen. The dog began tracking down the hill where the creature was reported to have gone.
As the dog started down the hill, it kept stopping and sniffing at a slime substance on the weeds; the slime appeared periodically as the dog tracked the creature. Nellis put some of the slime between his fingers [and] rubbed it and it left a black coloring on his fingers. Each time the dog found amounts of it, the dog would hesitate.
The creature was tracked down the hill to a pond, around the pond to a wooded area south of the pond where the dog attempted to pull Nellis down a steep embankment. The area where the dog tracked the creature to was too thick and bushy to walk through, so the dog was pulled off the trail and returned to the car. Officers then searched the area with flashlights.
Officer Nash, Nellis, and the dog then proceeded to the area directly south of where the dog was pulled off the tracks. The area was at the end of the first road to the west past Westwood Hills turnoff. The area is approximately one-half mile south of the area of the pond behind 37 Westwood Lane.
Nellis and the dog again began to search the area to see if the dog could again pick up the scent. Nellis and the dog approached the abandoned barn and Nellis called to Officer Nash to come to the area as the dog would not enter the barn. Nellis pushed the dog inside and the dog immediately ran out. Nash and Nellis searched the barn and found nothing inside. Nellis stated that the dog was trained to search buildings and had never backed down from anything. Nellis could find no explanation as to why the dog became scared and would not go inside the barn. Officers continued to search the area and were unable to locate the creature.
The Murphysboro creature was reported twice more in 1973. During an evening July Fourth celebration in a city park near the river, carnival workers said they had seen it watching some Shetland ponies. And on July 7, Mrs. Nedra Green heard a shrill, piercing scream from near the shed on her isolated farm. She did not go out to investigate.
The monster season of 1973 ended on the night of October 16, when four St. Joseph, Illinois, youths—Bill Duncan, Bob Summers, Daryl Mowry, and Craig Flenniken, all high school seniors—encountered a hairy “gorilla-like” creature on a road south of the town. They had stopped their car to investigate what they had thought was a campfire near the bridge on the Salt Fork. One of them lit a match and they all saw the creature, approximately five feet tall, about fifteen feet away. They did not linger to investigate further.
Nevertheless, the Big Muddy Monster again made brief return appearances in July 1974 and July 1975. Officials didn’t know what to make of the Big Muddy Monster. “A lot of things in life are unexplained,” concluded Police Chief Toby Berger, “and this is another one. We don’t know what the creature is. But we do believe what these people saw was real…. These are good, honest people. They are seeing something. And who would walk through sewage tanks for a joke?”
I cut my teeth on those hominological investigations, and they form a body of cases that give me insights into the diversity of the Eastern Bigfoot. The variety of Southern “Bigfoot” would prove to be another matter entirely, one that would hark back to one of my earliest discoveries, that apelike track I had found near Stevens Creek. Deep down in Dixie, an entirely different kind of ape appears to live in the palmettos.
Part 3
Reflections
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16 Three Big Questions
Several major questions arise when considering the reality of Bigfoot, but one stands out above all the rest. People ask me this question all the time. It’s the same question that all Bigfoot researchers face at one time or another.
First Question
If Bigfoot is real, why hasn’t anyone found a dead Bigfoot?
Anthropologist Grover Krantz had a great rejoinder to that troubling question: “Well, if bears are real, then why don’t we find their bones? I’ve talked to hunters, many game guides, conservation people, ecology students, and asked them how many remains of dead bears have you found that died a natural death? Over twenty years of inquiry my grand total of naturally dead bear bones found is zero! Now the best population estimate guess we can make is there are at least one hundred bears out there for every one Bigfoot, and we haven’t found the first bear yet. We would very much like to find the remains of a naturally dead Sasquatch, but
the chance is just simply so remote it’s not even serious to even think about it.”
Though we have no dead Bigfoot to study, we do have a good deal of physical evidence that points directly to the reality of this animal, beginning with its footprints. The number and reasonable variety of Bigfoot tracks are quite compelling. Just think of it: over hundreds of years we have found hundreds of miles of Bigfoot tracks in mud, snow, and sand—all looking very human with five toes straight ahead and showing individual differences. They have been discovered in long series, in small sets, and individually, exactly as we would expect from a large, intelligent primate. To top it off, these tracks have been found in the most out-of-place locations, not where they would immediately be noticed or be available for the six-o’clock news.
Since they were first described for the Canadian Sasquatch, the Bigfoot footprints have been remarkably consistent over the years. Obviously there can be no truth to the news stories that appear every dozen years or so about one individual being responsible for all Bigfoot tracks ever found. To think, for example, that retired Washington State logger Rant Mullens’s “confession” in 1982, in which he claimed to be responsible for the legend of Ape Canyon by carving wooden feet to leave large footprints and was somehow involved with the Bluff Creek 1958 incidents, has any merit, is, well, more unbelievable than Bigfoot.
Bigfoot footprints actually support the case for population and individual animal diversity. People taking casts often go for the best-looking print, but researchers today now collect series that illustrate the animal’s movement and individuality. Furthermore, the footprint, along with the Bigfoot behavior, indicates regional differences. The argument for a distinct geographic subspecies in the East is strong and growing stronger, based upon its routinely more curved footprints and more aggressive behavior. This Eastern Bigfoot, which I have called Marked Hominids and Mark A. Hall has dubbed Taller Hominids, are probably the Windigo of old. (The Napes from the American South and lower Midwest have quite different tracks, with footprints that look like human hands. These are so dissimilar that these cannot be grouped with the classic Bigfoot. Since these Napes are so rare and pose such a distraction to most Bigfoot hunters, I will not concentrate on them here.)
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