No, really! This is a true story. Bigfoot really DID come to our town when I was growing up. Or anyway, so some say....


When Bigfoot Came to Town

Bigfoot was all the rage in the 1970s. The previous decade had witnessed increasing interest in the Bigfoot/Sasquatch phenomenon in the Pacific Northwest of North America. The phenomenon spread far beyond that region in the 1970s. Many places had already long since come to have their tales of lovers’ lane monsters and strange creatures in the woods. Folklorists have suggested that the Bigfoot concept came to be merged with this local folklore. Whatever the cause, in the 1970s hairy bipeds of all shapes and sizes (mostly very large) were reported in nearly every state of the Union.

Arkansas was no exception. In fact, the state was the scene of what may be the most famous and influential Bigfoot sighting of all—the “Fouke Monster.” Fouke is a little town in the southwest corner of the state, near Texarkana. Some exceptionally sensational and well-publicized Bigfoot sightings came out of the Fouke area in the early 1970s. It was very much a classic Bigfoot—huge, bipedal, shaggy, and smelly. It attacked at least one house and was shot at. It left gigantic footprints.

In 1972 these sightings served as the basis for a semi-documentary feature film entitled “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” This cheap little drive-in movie became an unexpected international hit. It put Fouke and Bigfoot—or at least a certain idea of Bigfoot—on the cultural map. Most subsequent Bigfoot movies—and there would be quite a few in the 1970s—drew inspiration from “The Legend of Boggy Creek.” It would go on to have multiple sequels and spin-offs, most of which had nothing whatsoever to do with the original story.

I didn’t see “The Legend of Boggy Creek” as a child. I did see a televised showing of Sunn Classic Pictures’ 1975 quasi-documentary “The Mysterious Monsters.” My first exposure to this movie was watching its television trailer. The trailer included the moment when a huge, hairy arm crashes through a window and gropes around, terrifying the woman in the room. It was a reconstruction of an incident in the Fouke Monster sightings—although in the original incident, the arm came through a screen window, not a spectacularly-shattered pane of glass.

The arm-through-the-window incident was not the sort of thing that viewers could easily forget. It made an especially big impression on a seven-year-old. It was all the more impressive to a seven-year-old who lived not a hundred miles from where the incident allegedly happened.

Although we didn’t actually live very near Fouke, our home town was only an hour or so drive away. By most Americans’ standards, that’s practically in one’s back yard. Like Fouke, our hometown was surrounded mainly by miles of second-growth woodlands, more hilly than boggy in our case.

In 1976, when I was eight, our family moved out of town to a house that Dad had built. We weren’t really all that isolated there. Town was only about three minutes’ drive away. We could bicycle there on a nice day. Our neighbors on the same road were nearer still.

But we could not see any of the neighbors’ houses from anywhere on our twenty largely-wooded acres. One could, from our backyard, access a maze of utility-line cuts, logging roads, and streams that one could follow for miles, without ever seeing another human being or human dwelling. At night the air around our house filled with the sounds of nature, including whippoorwills and other night birds, occasional howling coyotes, and very rarely the cry of a wildcat. It was easy enough to imagine that something less familiar might be lurking out there in the dark woods.

It was in this house that I at some point saw the Sunn picture, groping arm through the window and all, on TV. I was imaginative enough to wonder whether Bigfoot might not be out there near our own south Arkansas home. I heard at school around that time about a man in some unspecified location who heard something at his door, opened it, and saw Bigfoot standing there, looking down at him. Might Bigfoot choose to show up on our doorstep? While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I lived in fear of a nocturnal visit from Bigfoot, I did worry about it some.

Bigfoot came to our town when I was nine or ten. It would be more accurate to say that he passed within a couple of miles of it. Ours was the closest town, so it was the place mentioned in the news reports. There were news reports, all right, in the papers and on the TV news stations in Little Rock.

Though nothing like as sensational as the stories from Fouke, the reports did involve the discovery of giant, bare, human-like footprints. The leaver of the prints would have had a fantastic shoe size. Oddly enough, our local shoe store for years had an example of such a shoe, special-made for one of the rare people who really do have such outsize feet, on display as a curiosity. The man who wore that shoe, so far as I know, did not live in town during the 1970s. I’m pretty sure I would have noticed him if he had.

My worries about a visit from Bigfoot probably peaked around that time. But there were no more prints locally. In the 1980s interest in Bigfoot faded. There were fewer sightings. The movies stopped coming for a time. I, now old enough to go out into the woods by myself, spent much of the decade exploring those trails and streams around our house. I found beaver ponds and puddles full of tadpoles, the remnants of old house sites and tracks of various creatures. I never found anything that looked like a trace of a passing huge, hairy biped.

I read everything about Bigfoot that I could find, as I did with reports of ghosts, UFOs, and other phenomena as well. In the late 1980s a college classmate wrote an undergraduate research paper on Arkansas Bigfoot incidents, including the discovery of footprints near my hometown. I wish now that I had a copy of her paper, which included such details as our local Bigfoot’s estimated shoe size. It would help to flesh out those scattered childhood memories.

My reading about Bigfoot and his big, shaggy kin around the world left me a definite skeptic regarding the whole business. Mountain gorillas live in regions more isolated and inaccessible than anywhere in the American Pacific Northwest. Yet we have abundant evidence and documentation of them, including live captive specimens. It’s more than a little hard to imagine how a viable population of creatures as big and conspicuous as Sasquatch could live in the Pacific Northwest without footprint finds and sightings occurring on almost a daily basis, and physical evidence more compelling than an occasional blurry photo. That’s still more the case for the idea of such creatures living in sparsely-populated, but hardly wilderness, rural Arkansas. And still more the case for the suburban settings where so many other Bigfoot sightings have taken place.

If these hairy bipeds exist, then they must be visitors from outer space, or from otherworldly realms, to leave so little trace of their presence. That sort of explanation only makes the whole phenomenon seem that much more farfetched. Wholeheartedly though I believe in God, and Jesus, angels and demons, Heaven and Hell, I have a hard time believing in spirits that look like big, hairy ape-men.

None of this means that I don’t still like to read about Bigfoot now and then. The stories are sometimes quite entertaining, for one thing. They’re also a useful reminder that the world we live in really does contain all sorts of fantastic things. The Creator has proven endlessly inventive over the past few billion years. A Sasquatch would be by no means the strangest thing in Creation. Indeed, the prehistoric ape Gigantopithecus could have given Bigfoot a run for his money in terms of sheer size. Unfortunately, Gigantopithecus, like so many other fantastic creatures, has been gone for a very long time.

The Fouke Monster, on the other hand, is still very much with us. Fouke has in recent years held a “Fouke Monster Festival” every spring. While I’ve never been to it, it must be an interesting, one-of-a-kind event. Between festivals, visitors to Fouke can find appropriate Bigfoot memorabilia for sale. Interest in variations on the Bigfoot theme is still going in many other parts of the world as well.



By way of a postscript, the 1990s were the time of my eldest niece’s childhood. In terms of appearance, she took very much after her parents. Personality-wise, she seemed at times alarmingly like me at that age. She was highly introverted, easily upset by things that seemed to her out of place, a precocious reader with a precocious vocabulary. Somehow she became aware of Bigfoot at an early age. How, I don’t know, though I suspect it may have been a home video viewing of the 1987 comedy movie “Harry and the Hendersons.” Bigfoot had become mostly a joke by that time.

Where I, at about her age, had made myself nervous at the prospect of a visit from Bigfoot, she turned him into an imaginary friend (Other imaginary friends included Wile E. Coyote and a pack of velociraptors that only she could see. She was always interesting to play with at that age). I recall more than one occasion where she, home for a visit with the grandparents, looked at patches of southwest Arkansas woods and pretended to see Bigfoot there, doing this and that.

Bigfoot helped to make my niece’s childhood a little more charming and fun. For that, I suppose we owe the big hairy guy something.

I enjoyed that, thank you.

It seems we shared a number of childhood interests. I was intrigued by Bigfoot as well and I still am. I've never seen the Boggy Creek film, but I had the book based on that Sunn Pictures film (which I didn't see until just a few years ago on YouTube).

I used to read The Unexplained Magazine, and read numerous books about cryptozoology as a boy. I still do read books like that from time to time.

As far as whether or not they're physically real...I have no idea, but I'm intrigued by the fact that people keep saying they've seen them. It happens frequently here in Australia, it seems. It's always been, and will always be, a particular interest of mine.

BTW, if you're ever heading to the U.S., you could always try to schedule your trip to be here in time for the annual Fouke Monster Festival:


http://www.foukemonster.net/festival/

I would definitely do so!

Thank you.