#0247 Sector 7 — Northern California
Something tripped the cameras last night.
- Logged
- 04 / 25 / 26 · 02:47 PT
- Source
- Trail Cam Network 03 / NV-IR
- Status
- Unresolved
Three cameras. Same window. Same glitch. Frame 0:47 is the one we keep coming back to.
Something in the signal didn't agree with our software. The IT guy says it's a hardware issue. The IT guy has not been outside in six years.
We're sharing the footage as it came in. Unedited. Distortion and all. Make of it what you will.
Whatever crossed Sector 7 that night didn’t seem bothered by the cold. We can’t say the same. We dress for the nights the cams light up — and the walk back to the truck after.
Field gear for cold-timber country →
View #0247 on the survey map
#0312 Ape Canyon — Skamania County, Washington
A crew of miners took one shot at something in the timber. That was the mistake.
- Logged
- Winter · Skamania County · Archive ref.
- Source
- Recovered miner accounts / Cabin 03
- Status
- Unresolved
There's a cabin tucked into the ridges below Mount St. Helens. Quiet work, quiet country. One evening the crew spots something tall moving through the trees — and they fire at it.
After dark, the cabin comes under siege. Rocks hammer the roof and walls through the night. Something heavy leans against the logs. The men sit inside with rifles up, waiting for a morning that takes its time arriving.
When light finally comes, there are sixteen-inch tracks pressed into the dirt. They don't stay to measure them. They leave the canyon and they never go back.
They never call it a hoax. They call it the worst night of their lives — and they hold that line for the rest of them. The canyon still carries the name they gave it.
The Ape Canyon crew learned the timber doesn’t care how brave you are. Cold ridges, long sightlines, eyes on the treeline — dress for the country, not the campfire story.
Field gear for ridge country →
View #0312 on the survey map
#0118 Fouke — Miller County, Arkansas
It was looking in the window. And then, the way these things go, it wasn't.
- Logged
- Summer · Miller County · Archive ref.
- Source
- Household account / river bottomland
- Status
- Unresolved
The bottomland around Fouke is thick — river-fed, low, dense enough to lose a house in. A family living out there starts noticing something is wrong before they ever see it. Sounds at the treeline. The dogs refusing to settle.
Then a hand-like shape appears at the window.
What follows is a long night of a tall, dark, hair-covered figure circling the property, reaching onto the porch, unsettling everything that breathes. By morning the family has had enough of the house.
The story travels fast, picks up a name, and ends up on drive-in screens across the South. The locals already had a name for whatever lived in that swamp. The film just told everyone else.
The bottomland around Fouke is the kind of place the trail just gives up. If you’re headed past where the map ends, go in geared for it.
Field gear for where the map ends →
View #0118 on the survey map
#0274 The Everglades — Collier County, Florida
Most cryptids haunt cold pine forests. Florida's doesn't.
- Logged
- Collier County · Source: visitor reports
- Source
- Sightings log / sawgrass corridor
- Status
- Unresolved
Deep in the Everglades — sawgrass to the horizon, heat that sits on you like a hand — people keep reporting a tall, reddish-brown, upright figure. It crosses back roads. It steps out of the cypress and is gone again.
And it announces itself with a smell hikers describe as genuinely unforgettable. That's how it earned the name everyone uses now: the Skunk Ape.
Sightings have stacked up here for generations. Photos surface. The reports don't stop. Whatever it is, it has adapted to swamp, gators, and humidity that defeats most things — and it has no plans to relocate.
The weirderness isn't always dark and piney. Sometimes it's ninety-five degrees and watching you from the sawgrass.
Whatever’s out in that sawgrass has the heat handled. If you’re headed into swamp country, go in dressed for ninety-five and humid — weird is no excuse for unprepared.
Field gear for swamp heat →
View #0274 on the survey map
#0179 Salt Fork State Park — Guernsey County, Ohio
Ohio has its own Bigfoot, and Salt Fork is where it lives.
- Logged
- Cam check · Bigfoot Ridge loop · 23:14 ET
- Source
- Trail Cam Network 04 / IR
- Status
- Unresolved
Seventeen thousand acres of woodlands, lake shore, and patchwork hill country in Guernsey County. The locals call the thing the Grassman. The sightings here go back to the mid-1700s, which is older than the state of Ohio.
The modern record is its own kind of stack. More than three dozen reports logged by a single researcher since the 1980s. Vocalizations recorded in the timber. Wood-knocks answered out of the dark. There is a ridge inside the park, on the map, called Bigfoot Ridge. The park hosts a Bigfoot conference every year because there is enough material to fill one.
Our Cam 04 sits the Bigfoot Ridge loop. Most nights it logs deer. This frame is not a deer.
We can’t tell you what crossed the lens at 23:14. We can tell you it was tall, it walked on two, and it didn’t stick around to clarify.
Some sectors have one famous story. Salt Fork has thirty-six of them and an annual conference. If you’re heading into Ohio timber, dress like you might end up on a list yourself.
Field gear for Ohio timber →
View #0179 on the survey map
#0291 San Juan Range — Durango–Silverton Line, Colorado
Most Bigfoot footage is grainy and at night. This one had witnesses, sunlight, and a tour train.
- Logged
- Daylight · narrow-gauge rail · 10:42 MT
- Source
- Passenger phone · 4× zoom
- Status
- Unresolved
The Durango · Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad runs a coal-fired tourist line through the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. Steep grades, open valleys, and a slow enough roll that everyone on board has a phone out.
On a clear October morning in 2023, a couple riding the line spotted something moving on the mountainside. Tall. Dark. Upright. They were looking for elk. This wasn’t elk.
They filmed it. The figure crosses a stretch of open slope and sits down. The video gets out and goes everywhere within a week. The Forest Service comments politely. The internet is less polite. Silverton, the town the train terminates in, has been quietly nodding about Sasquatch for years.
Whatever the couple saw, it picked a real audience: a moving train, dozens of cameras, broad daylight. Most cryptids do not choose to be on the record. This one made an exception.
High-altitude Bigfoot country is its own thing. Cold air, thin light, a long way between trailheads. If you’re headed into the San Juans, gear up like a creature might be doing the same.
Field gear for alpine country →
View #0291 on the survey map
#0144 Honey Island Swamp — Pearl River, Louisiana
The first photograph of a Louisiana Bigfoot was a casting of its footprints. The film came later.
- Logged
- Reel · transferred from Super 8 · ca. 1974
- Source
- H. Ford archive / 16 mm transfer
- Status
- Unresolved
In 1963, two retired air traffic controllers — Harlan Ford and Billy Mills — are hunting near the Pearl River in St. Tammany Parish. They see something. Seven feet tall. Grayish-brown hair. Yellow eyes. Smell that puts both men off their lunch.
Eleven years later, Ford returns from the swamp with plaster casts. Three-toed tracks. Webbed. Fourteen inches long. The locals had a name for it going back generations — Letiche, in the older Cajun tellings. The papers settle on Honey Island Swamp Monster, which is catchier.
After Ford’s death his family finds a reel of Super 8 in his belongings. Footage of a figure moving through the cypress along the Pearl. The image quality is exactly what 1970s 8 mm in a Louisiana swamp gets you: enough to show something, never enough to settle it.
Honey Island is real swamp — dense, dark, and the kind of country where a thing seven feet tall can step behind a tree and disappear. Whatever Ford filmed, the swamp has kept it.
Bayou country runs warm and wet, and most cryptid gear assumes a forest in fall. If you’re going where the cypress grow, gear up for humidity, mosquitoes, and the small chance of company.
Field gear for bayou country →
View #0144 on the survey map
#0203 Chestnut Ridge — Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania
An entire Pennsylvania borough has declared Bigfoot its official cryptid. The sightings are why.
- Logged
- Dawn · ridge trail · 07:13 ET
- Source
- Witness phone · handheld
- Status
- Unresolved
Chestnut Ridge is the westernmost ridge of the Allegheny Mountains, running through Westmoreland and Fayette counties in western Pennsylvania. Dense second-growth forest, deep hollows, very little light pollution. People around here have been turning in reports for decades.
One researcher in Greensburg has been logging encounters from the area since the 1950s. The Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society holds an annual conference. The BFRO ranks Pennsylvania in the top ten states for sightings. In 2024 the borough of Derry made it official: Bigfoot is the town’s cryptid, and Derry is the “gateway to the mysterious Chestnut Ridge.”
February 2023. A witness sees something just after seven a.m. — four feet tall, gray hair, running from behind a building toward whoop-whoop sounds coming out of the woods. Two days later, neighbors report a half-hour stench of rotten meat. August: a woman walking her dogs sees a seven-foot figure with arms hanging down among the trees. It stares back. She leaves.
The ridge is busy. Whatever lives there does not seem to be in a hurry to move on.
Appalachian timber country has its own rules — cold, wet, steep, and full of things that don’t want to be photographed. If you’re heading to the ridge, dress for an early morning that might be longer than planned.
Field gear for ridge country →
View #0203 on the survey map
#0058 Bluff Creek — Six Rivers National Forest, California
This is the Bigfoot everyone else’s Bigfoot is compared to.
- Logged
- 16 mm reel · archival transfer · Oct 20 1967
- Source
- Patterson / Gimlin · hand-held Kodak
- Status
- Unresolved
October 1967. Two Yakima rodeo cowboys — Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin — pack horses into the Bluff Creek drainage in Del Norte County, California, chasing a set of fresh track reports coming out of the Six Rivers National Forest. Patterson is carrying a hand-held 16 mm Kodak.
October 20th, early afternoon. They round an overturned tree at a bend in the creek and see a large figure standing on the far sandbar. Patterson gets off his horse, gets the camera running, and shoots 954 frames as the figure walks left to right across the gravel, glances at the camera once, and disappears into the timber.
The film runs about a minute. It has been copied, slowed down, stabilized, motion-captured, and dissected for six decades. Some analysts call it the second-most-studied strip of footage ever shot, after the Zapruder film. Others call it a costume. Both sides have spent careers on that one minute.
The site itself was lost after the 1964 flood scrubbed the streambed. A group of researchers relocated it in 2011 by matching the background trees frame-by-frame. It’s still down there, still just a bend in a creek. You can hike it in a day if the road is open.
Bluff Creek is the ur-sector. If the last sixty years of Bigfoot come from anywhere, they come from that sandbar. Dress for the timber that made it possible.
Field gear for cold-timber country →
View #0058 on the survey map
#0187 Big Thicket — Hardin County, Texas
The Big Thicket has been logging “wild man” reports since before Bigfoot had a name.
- Logged
- Dashcam · Bragg Road corridor · 22:47 CT
- Source
- Passenger vehicle CH 01 · FM-1488
- Status
- Unresolved
The Big Thicket is a 1.3-million-acre biological crossroads in southeast Texas — southern swamp, eastern hardwood forest, central prairie, and East Texas piney woods all meeting in one place. It has some of the highest biodiversity in the country and it is very easy to disappear in.
Southeast Texas newspapers were logging “wild man” reports along the oil pipeline routes as far back as the 1920s — forty years before the name “Bigfoot” entered the American press. The locals called it Booger, Hairy Wild Man, Old Mossy Back. In 1962, two boys hog-hunting near the Thicket ran home saying an eight-foot hairy figure had watched them from the brush.
There is a road that runs through the Thicket called Old Bragg Road. It has its own ghost light. People go out there to see the light and end up seeing other things instead — a figure crossing the road, something on the hood of the car, tall shapes standing at the edge of the beam.
The Thicket is the kind of country where a large animal can move through the brush and you would never see it — unless you happened to be pointing your headlights at exactly the right spot at exactly the right second.
East Texas is warm, wet, and thick. If you’re heading into the Thicket — for the ghost light, or the woods, or whatever’s watching from them — gear up for the humidity and the long walk back to the car.
Field gear for the piney woods →
View #0187 on the survey map
#0221 Willow Flowage — Oneida County, Wisconsin
The Northwoods have been quietly stacking Bigfoot reports for decades. Most of them come in during hunting season.
- Logged
- Cam check · winter deployment · 10:22 CT
- Source
- Trail Cam Network 07 / cold-weather kit
- Status
- Unresolved
The Chequamegon–Nicolet National Forest and the Willow Flowage cover thousands of square miles of northern Wisconsin — dense pine, cedar swamp, dark lakes, and enough terrain that you can walk for a week and not see another person. BFRO has logged more than a hundred sightings in the Northwoods since the 1970s.
Vilas, Oneida, Marinette, and Price counties are the cluster. There is an annual convention in Marinette. Local researchers describe the highest report density along a corridor between Lake Tomahawk and Antigo.
A retired police officer sees a seven-foot figure with a pointed head cross a Marinette County highway in July 2018. A duck hunter at Powell Marsh finds himself alone in the parking lot at dusk in October 2021, watching a two-legged shape move fast across the marsh. Neither witness has anything to gain by making it up.
Cam 07 sits a game trail off the Willow Flowage. In summer it logs bears and the occasional wolf. This frame is neither.
Winter Northwoods country runs cold and long. Anything crossing your camera at 18°F has business being out there. If you’re following it, dress like you do too.
Field gear for winter timber →
View #0221 on the survey map
#0219 Mogollon Rim — Rim Country, Arizona
Arizona’s Bigfoot predates the word “Bigfoot” by half a century.
- Logged
- Motorist phone · State Route 260 · 21:47 MT
- Source
- Passenger cellphone, night mode
- Status
- Unresolved
The Mogollon Rim is a 200-mile escarpment cutting across central Arizona, dividing the high ponderosa-pine country from the desert to the south. From Prescott to Alpine, it is one long stretch of remote, forested rimrock, dropping thousands of feet in places, threaded by two-lane highways and gravel forest roads.
In 1903, an Arizona Republican account describes a hunter named I. W. Stevens meeting a creature near the Grand Canyon: long white hair, matted beard, an eerie scream. That story runs fifty-five years before anyone in California uses the word Bigfoot in a newspaper. The Yavapai and Apache had a word for the same thing long before Stevens.
The classic modern encounter is the 1944 Don Davis story. Boy Scout camp on Tonto Creek, at the base of the Rim. Davis wakes to something rummaging through the supplies. Heavy footsteps come to a stop directly over his sleeping bag. He remembers a hairless face, massive shoulders, and, specifically, a “square” head. The figure looked at him and left. Davis grew up to become a cryptozoologist.
In July 2015, a motorist on State Route 260 near Payson filmed something tall and dark crossing the highway at twilight in two long strides. The dashcam era arrived, and so did the Mogollon Monster.
Rim Country runs cold nights and hot days, thin air at seven thousand feet. Whatever comes down out of the ponderosas is dressed for it. Anyone hiking the Rim after dark should be too.
Field gear for Rim Country →
View #0219 on the survey map
#0136 Uwharrie National Forest — Montgomery County, North Carolina
Montgomery County has the most reported Bigfoot sightings in North Carolina, and the Uwharrie is where they mostly happen.
- Logged
- FLIR field session · campsite stump · 02:14 ET
- Source
- Handheld thermal camera
- Status
- Unresolved
The Uwharrie National Forest covers 50,000 acres in the central Piedmont of North Carolina — old worn-down mountains, thick second-growth hardwood, and a network of forest roads that mostly go where the loggers used to go. The BFRO logs more reports out of Montgomery County than any other county in the state.
In 2009 a researcher named Michael Greene set up a stump near an Uwharrie campsite, placed a candy bar on top, and pointed a thermal camera at it. What he captured is one of the state’s most argued-over pieces of footage: a large heat signature stepping in, reaching for the stump, and moving off through the trees. Believers point to the anatomy of the heat blob. Skeptics point out that people also have heat signatures.
August 2017. A research group setting up glow sticks in McDowell County meets a large bipedal figure in the trees at close range. Solid black face, no visible hair on it. Several powerful strides and it’s gone. Reports like this keep the Eldorado Outpost, half an hour north, in the Bigfoot T-shirt business.
The Uwharrie doesn’t look wild from the road. But it is old country, worn-down mountain country, and it is very good at not being observed.
The Uwharrie is Piedmont hardwood — warm humid summers, cold-wet winters, ticks all year. If you’re heading in with a headlamp and a thermal camera, dress like you’re staying out longer than you planned.
Field gear for Piedmont timber →
View #0136 on the survey map
#0091 Grafton Notch — Oxford County, Maine
Maine’s Bigfoot record is older than the term “Bigfoot,” and Oxford County has more reports than any other county in the state.
- Logged
- Polaroid · marked “Aug ’ 78” · archived print
- Source
- Family album, recovered on estate sale
- Status
- Unresolved
In 1886, the Waterville Sentinel reports a ten-foot hairy figure attacking a camp a hundred miles north of Moosehead Lake. That story runs seventy years before the Bluff Creek tracks. Maine is 90% forested, remote across most of it, and the Wabanaki oral tradition already had a name for what the settlers were seeing.
Modern reports cluster in Oxford County, in and around the White Mountains. Grafton Notch — a narrow state park pinched between mountains on the New Hampshire line — is a common one. Hikers on the Notch trails have been logging odd tracks, rock stacks, and dusk figures since the 1970s.
In August 2015, a couple driving out of Grafton Notch late in the afternoon watches a large figure cross the road behind another car. Eight to nine feet tall. Muscular. What the witness remembers most is how it ran: fast, smoothly, arms held behind its back. In winter 2023 a family in Aroostook County finds a nine-foot figure standing next to their chicken coop during a power outage.
The Polaroid on file is dated August 1978, from a family album that turned up at an estate sale outside Bethel. Whatever it caught, someone in that family cared enough to keep the print for forty-five years.
Northern Maine woods run cold, damp, and long. Whatever the Wabanaki knew about the thing that lives up there is still true. Anyone heading into Oxford County trails should dress for weather that doesn’t warm up until nine a.m.
Field gear for the North Woods →
View #0091 on the survey map
#0033 Skookum Meadows — Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington
The Skookum Cast is one of only two pieces of physical Bigfoot evidence taken seriously by working anthropologists.
- Logged
- Field cast · wallow imprint · 09-22-2000
- Source
- BFRO expedition · Freeman/Fish/Randles
- Status
- Unresolved
Skookum is the Chinook Wawa word for a mountain giant. When the BFRO ran a September 2000 expedition into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, at the base of Mount Adams, they were operating in country the local peoples had been naming after this thing for centuries.
On the morning of September 22, the team walked up on a mud wallow they had baited with fruit the night before. The fruit was gone. In the mud, pressed several inches deep, was the impression of a large reclining body — forearm, hip, thigh, heel, and what appeared to be the impression of a heel-bone and Achilles tendon insertion. Roughly five feet long, three and a half feet wide. Not a footprint. A body cast.
Dr. Jeff Meldrum at Idaho State reviewed the cast. So did Grover Krantz at Washington State, one of the few working anthropologists to seriously study the subject. Both agreed the imprint was not consistent with any known regional animal — elk, bear, or otherwise. What it was consistent with was a large primate lying down and reaching over.
The cast is now housed at Idaho State. The wallow is still up there, on the shoulder of Mount Adams, somewhere in ten thousand acres of huckleberry meadow and old-growth silver fir.
The Cascades in September run cold at dawn and hot by noon, and there is no cell service where the wallows are. Anyone going up there is going up there for a while.
Field gear for high-Cascade country →
View #0033 on the survey map
#0107 Marzolf Hill — Louisiana, Missouri
For two weeks in July 1972, a Mississippi River bluff town had its own Bigfoot, and it was carrying a dog.
- Logged
- Newspaper clipping · wirephoto · July 20, 1972
- Source
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch archive
- Status
- Unresolved
Louisiana is a small river town in Pike County, Missouri, sitting on the west bank of the Mississippi across from Illinois. Behind it rises Marzolf Hill — wooded bluff country, deep ravines, the northern edge of the Ozark forest.
July 11, 1972. Three of Edgar Harrison’s children are playing in the yard when Terry, age 8, and Wiley, age 5, look up the hill and see a seven-foot figure covered in dark hair standing at the treeline. Terry says it had a “pumpkin-shaped head.” It is carrying, tucked under one arm, what appears to be a dead dog. They can smell it from where they are standing.
The sheriff’s office logs a formal report the same afternoon. Within days a 20-man posse is combing the ridges. St. Louis Post-Dispatch and UPI send reporters. Sightings keep coming — downtown Louisiana, up the highway, out at the Cuivre River bridge, in the fields between Hannibal and Bowling Green. Locals begin calling it Momo, short for Missouri Monster.
By August the sightings slow to nothing. Momo, whatever Momo was, moves on. The town still holds Momo Days every September. The Post-Dispatch archive still has the file.
The Missouri River bluffs run humid in July and cold-wet in November. The country between Louisiana and Hannibal is still mostly wood and hollow and old road. It doesn’t take much for a thing to disappear up there.
Field gear for river-bluff country →
View #0107 on the survey map
#0288 Siskiyou Crest — Josephine County, Oregon
Oregon logs more of these than almost any state in the country, and it has been doing it since 1904.
- Logged
- Camcorder tape · hand-held · 0:14:26
- Source
- VHS-C cassette · recovered from estate lot
- Status
- Unresolved
The Siskiyous are where the Cascades run into the Klamath Mountains — old-growth timber, marble caves, and some of the most botanically strange country in North America. Josephine County sits in the middle of it. Oregon as a whole has better than two hundred and fifty documented reports, putting it at or near the top of every state ranking that exists.
The earliest one on paper is from 1904, on the Sixes River in Curry County, where miners reported a long-haired wild man and the tracks he left behind. That is fifty-four years before anyone in California printed the word Bigfoot.
Clackamas County, up north, has the densest cluster in the state — twenty-nine reports, most of them strung along a stretch of Route 224 near Estacada that people up there just call Bigfoot Highway.
July 2000, near the Oregon Caves. A psychologist named Steve Johnson comes back down the trail and reports an eight-foot, black-furred figure. The park ranger who took the statement said it plainly for the record: there is no question at all he did not make this up. The researcher who followed up rated Johnson’s credibility a ten out of ten. Nobody has improved on the evidence since. Nobody has explained it away either.
Siskiyou country is steep, wet, and dense enough that you can lose the trail looking at a map. Dress for a long way back to the trailhead.
Field gear for old-growth country →
View #0288 on the survey map
#0162 Selway–Bitterroot Wilderness — Idaho / Montana
One point three million acres, no roads, and the one American university office where this gets studied as anatomy.
- Logged
- 35 mm transparency · processed Sep 1984
- Source
- Pack-trip slide box · unmarked donor
- Status
- Unresolved
The Selway–Bitterroot straddles the Idaho–Montana line across more than a million acres. It is one of the largest contiguous roadless areas left in the lower forty-eight. There is no driving into it. You walk, you ride, or you do not go.
Two hundred miles south, at Idaho State in Pocatello, Dr. Jeff Meldrum keeps a lab full of footprint casts. He is a professor of anatomy and anthropology, and he is one of the very few working academics willing to treat the track record as a morphology problem rather than a folklore problem — dermal ridges, mid-tarsal flexion, weight distribution. His field guide to the subject came out in 2013 and is still the only one of its kind.
What the Selway offers is the thing every other sector lacks: room. Elk winter range, salmon runs up the Lochsa, whole drainages that go unvisited for years at a stretch. If something large is living quietly in the American West, this is the country where the arithmetic works.
The slide came out of an unmarked box of backcountry transparencies. Mount label reads Selway divide, 8:40am. No name on it, and no way left to ask.
Backcountry Idaho in September runs frost at dawn and shirtsleeves by ten. Pack for both, because nobody is coming to get you.
Field gear for high wilderness →
View #0162 on the survey map
#0073 Big Muddy River — Murphysboro, Illinois
For two weeks in 1973 a small Illinois river town had a monster, and the police department has the file to prove it.
- Logged
- Evidence photo · 06-26-1973 · 02:40
- Source
- Murphysboro PD · case 1187-A
- Status
- Open
June 25, 1973, somewhere around midnight. Randy Needham and Judy Johnson are parked by the boat ramp on the Big Muddy River just outside Murphysboro when something comes out of the trees at them.
What they describe is seven to eight feet tall and three hundred pounds, covered in light matted hair — dirty white, cream — and caked over that in thick black river mud. It screamed at them. The smell stayed after it left.
Police Chief Toby Berger does not file it and forget it. He puts all fourteen men on his force into the woods and searches the rest of the night. Officer Jimmie Nash finds the tracks: ten to twelve inches long, three wide, pressed three to four inches down into the bank. They find black slime like sewage sludge laid across the grass in a line running straight back to the water.
It keeps going. July 7, at the Miller Carnival in Riverside Park, three carnival workers — Otis Norris, Ray Adkerson, Wesley Lavender — stand and watch it stand at the edge of the lights, looking at the ponies with its head cocked to one side. Then the whole thing stops as abruptly as it started. The Murphysboro case file has never been closed.
Southern Illinois bottomland runs hot, wet, and full of mosquitoes in June. If you’re walking the Big Muddy after dark, wear something you don’t mind losing to the mud.
Field gear for river bottoms →
View #0073 on the survey map
#0140 Kiamichi Mountains — Honobia, Oklahoma
In the Kiamichis the brush is too thick to see through, so the research there is done with microphones.
- Logged
- Parabolic capture · station 4 · 02:41:07
- Source
- Overnight array · 48 kHz · channel L
- Status
- Unresolved
Honobia is a wide spot in the road in the Kiamichi Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, deep in Choctaw Nation country. Short steep pine ridges, hollows that hold fog until noon, and not much in the way of roads.
In 2000, a family living outside town reported a string of nighttime encounters at their own house — something circling, something at the walls, over a period of weeks. People down there still call it the Siege of Honobia. The BFRO came out and investigated, and the reputation of the area was set from then on.
The country is too dense for cameras to earn their keep, so the work is acoustic. Parabolic dishes on the ridgelines, recorders running all night, and a lot of tape to go through in the morning. Most of it is owls, coyotes, and wind.
Occasionally it is not. Cataloged here: three whoops in series, evenly spaced, then a scream with a fundamental near 1.85 kilohertz carrying nine harmonics and held longer than a human larynx will hold a note. No match in the reference library. Every October the town throws the Honobia Bigfoot Festival, and the money from it puts local kids through college.
Kiamichi pine country is steep, humid, and full of ticks and copperheads. If you’re sitting out all night on a ridge with a recorder, dress for the sitting-still part.
Field gear for pine ridge country →
View #0140 on the survey map
#0176 Abair Road — Whitehall, New York
Whitehall is the only town in America where harassing a Sasquatch is a municipal offense.
- Logged
- Dispatch log · 08-24-1976 · 2208–0014
- Source
- Whitehall PD · transcribed teletype
- Status
- Unresolved
August 1976, in the Adirondack foothills where New York runs up against Vermont. Three teenagers driving on Abair Road outside Whitehall come across something standing at the edge of the road and go straight to the police with it.
What makes this one different is who looked next. Over the following nights officers from the Whitehall department went out there and several of them saw it too. Patrolman Brian Gosselin got closest — seven to eight feet, upright, covered in hair, eyes throwing red back at his spotlight. He had a rifle on him and did not use it, which he has never once apologized for.
State police were advised. The area was searched and nothing was located. Tracks were photographed and casts were taken a couple of weeks later when a woman reported the same thing again.
In 2004 the Whitehall town board settled the matter in its own way. They passed an ordinance declaring the town a protected habitat, making it a municipal offense to hunt, harm, or harass a Sasquatch inside town limits. No one has been charged under it. That is either because there is nothing out there, or because people in Whitehall have better manners than that.
Adirondack foothills in August run warm by day and cold the second the sun goes. If you’re out on a back road at midnight waiting on something, dress for the waiting.
Field gear for the Adirondack line →
View #0176 on the survey map
#0164 Dewey Lake — Sister Lakes, Michigan
For one week in June 1964 a Michigan resort town was overrun — not by the monster, by the people who came to shoot it.
- Logged
- Instamatic print · marked June 1964
- Source
- Family album · Cass County
- Status
- Unresolved
Sister Lakes is a small resort cluster in Cass County, southwest Michigan. In June 1964 residents around Dewey Lake began reporting something in the brush between the water and the berry fields: ape-like, hair-covered, and — by the time the story reached the South Bend Tribune — ten feet tall, five hundred pounds, with eyes that threw back light.
The Tribune ran it June 12 and again June 14, and that was that. Carloads of thrill-seekers came in from Indiana and Illinois. Local stores started selling monster hunting kits: a net, a flashlight, a squirt gun, a mallet, and a stake. People were firing guns into the dark near other people’s cottages.
Cass County Sheriff Robert Dool and conservation officer William Rowe spent the week trying to talk everybody down, searching the brush and finding nothing, telling reporters there was no monster. Zoologists offered a bear. A Tribune retrospective in 1983 offered strawberry pickers who had been drinking.
Inside of a week it was over and the crowds went home. What nobody has ever explained is why, before the papers printed a word of it, the people who actually lived on that lake were already saying the same thing to each other.
Southwest Michigan in June is humid, buggy, and full of brush that comes up over your head. If you’re going in after something, go in better equipped than a squirt gun and a mallet.
Field gear for lake country →
View #0164 on the survey map
#0175 Elkins Creek — Pike County, Georgia
A Georgia deputy who thought he was debunking a prank came back with one of the best tracks ever pulled in this country.
- Logged
- Plaster cast 94-1 · 17.5 × 8.5 in
- Source
- Pike County S.O. · Dep. J. Akin
- Status
- Unresolved
Summer 1994, Pike County, west-central Georgia. An elderly couple living along Elkins Creek keep reporting an intruder — noises at night, livestock gone, a shed torn up. Deputy James Akin figures somebody is playing a prank on them and goes out after his night shift to prove it.
He and the homeowner walk the creek bank and find five enormous footprints in the silt. Four are underwater. The fifth is clean, and Akin casts it. Seventeen and a half inches long, eight and a half wide.
The cast went to Jimmy Chilcutt, a police fingerprint examiner out of Conroe, Texas, who had spent years building a reference collection of primate dermal ridges specifically so he could catch a hoax. He found ridge flow that matched no human and no known primate — and that did match two unidentified prints from the Pacific Northwest. Jeff Meldrum noted the absence of the flexion creases a human foot leaves and an ape foot does not have. Grover Krantz called it one of perhaps six or seven American prints worth anything at all.
Akin was a skeptic when he walked down to that creek. He left the sheriff’s office some years later, became a teacher, and wrote a book about the thing he found. The cast is still held.
Georgia creek bottoms in summer are hot, close, and full of things that bite. If you’re walking a bank at dawn looking for sign, dress like you mean to stay a while.
Field gear for creek bottoms →
View #0175 on the survey map