My Bigfoot Story

I am going to warn you ahead of time that this story is going to be a bit of a wild ride. I’ve tried to provide details, reference links, and images wherever possible. However since I have never told it on this blog, and Oklahoma is in the news right now for our crazy “Bigfoot Hunting Season” legislation… it seemed like the right time to talk about it. Something you have to understand about the region I grew up in, is that it has very low population density and miles of largely undisturbed river bottoms attached to the Verdigris River complex that eventually winds its way to the Arkansas river and eventually to the Mississippi. The Bigfoot or Sasquatch is just something that has been talked about my entire life. I grew up around a large density of Native Americans and they would talk about the creature like it was fact not speculation, so admittedly it is a little hard not to get caught up in the romance of the tale.

The Noxie Monster

We are going to start this tale with something that comes right before I was born. In 1975 there was a Bigfoot sighting in Noxie, Oklahoma some 15-20 miles away from the County seat of Nowata where I grew up. It turns out my Dad who wanted to be a professional Photographer and and his Cousin who eventually became a photo journalist got the Bigfoot hunting bug. It was decided they were going to try their best to snag photographic evidence. Over the course of a few weeks in September they crawled throughout the Northwestern region of the county surrounding the farmstead where the sighting took place. They never really saw anything other than the fact that the landowner that made the sighting was very visibly shaken by the incident. It turns out that he accidentally shot his hunting dog one night thinking the “monster” had come back.

Boyscouting

Growing up I was heavily involved in Boy Scouting. While taking care of my parents over the last few months I happened upon my old scouting shirt where you can see the various badges and such I earned. Scouting got its start in Oklahoma and was largely brought to the Americas by Frank and Waite Phillips of Phillips petroleum fame. The very first troop organized was in Pawhuska Oklahoma and as such my Troop 29 identification legitimately means we were the 29th chapter given our proximity. I ultimately made the rank of Eagle before dropping out of the pattern of attending scouting events in 93/94-ish.

One of the challenges that comes with remembering back to this era is that the years sort of blend together. However I am pretty sure that our tale takes place in 1989, and I have some reasoning that goes into that. It surrounded a Birthday weekend, of one of the individuals involved and I know for certain it was not 1990. At that party it took place days before we were going to scout camp, and I had just gotten my grubby mitts on Final Fantasy 1 for the Nintendo, which released in 1990 and I was super sour about having to wait a full weeks time to play it… and ended up bringing it with me to the birthday party and stayed up all night long grinding the area surrounding the Marsh Cave trying to get through it. The birthday in question must have taken place the previous year which would have been 1989.

The Campground

Our scouting troop had been together since we were all cub scouts, and part of that leadership was the Biggerstaff clan. Adam was one of the members of the Troop and one of my close friends, his mom one of the den mothers, and his dad one of the adult leaders as we transitioned into boy scouts over cub scouts. At some point during the scouting journey they purchased a huge acreage that bordered the riverbottoms and because of the huge area of land this became our stomping grounds for so many shenanigans. We even managed to build a freaking bridge out of telephone poles and railroad ties to make it easier to traverse an area of the pasture. The highlight however as this little nook in the northwestern corner of the property bordering up against the fenceline that we turned into a permanent campground of sorts.

The funny thing about it is with the advent of google maps and satellite view I have at my fingertips things I never could have dreamed of as a teenager. This area seemed so massive to me but in reality it isn’t nearly as big as I thought. We never did get the pond to a state of it being swimmable, but did stock it with some fish so it was at least fishable. When they first bought the property it was overgrown with moss but a few moss carp took care of that. Sadly I see no visual evidence of bridge work, but it was in the lower left corner of the above image over that creek. We had originally tried to turn that corner into a campground but it was entirely too infested with tarantulas to make it a long term goal.

The First Incident

I feel like I have been talking around the story up until this point, so I guess it is just time to dive into it. I remember specifically that the gathering in question and campout associated with it was for Adams birthday. Since our little group was a bit like the kids from Stranger Things, there was a heavy crossover between those invited to the party and those who were part of the scouting troop. I’ve attempted to draw what I remember of the scene on top of the satellite photos for visual reference. I remember the area being significantly more wooded than the satellite photo shows. So I attempted to shade in green an area that I remember being the treeline at the time some thirty two years ago. The other problem with the overhead photos is they were taken in winter, so nothing looks anywhere near as full as it actually is during the summer months.

Essentially the campground was a little clearing right up against the northwestern fenceline of the property bordering the riverbottoms. It had a semi-permanent fire ring and then we would set up our tents in the open area just south of this, generally a single depth arc around the fire. There was a trail through the treeline on which we dug a latrine with a crudely lashed together lean-to allowing you to do your business in peace. When it came time to shut down for the night, the adults would hang a lantern on a dead tree that had a good branch for such things at the entrance to this trail, in theory allowing someone to find their way to the latrine at night if they were really desperate. To the best of my knowledge no one was ever that desperate.

On this specific trip I was bunking with a guy named Ryan, that we called “Slimer” because he was sort of our mascot and we could get him to do pretty much anything. Look this is 80s friend group logic and also Ghostbusters was still a big deal at this point. We were staying in an A Frame tent that we generally referred to as a “Pup Tent”, this one specifically was beige but I copy pasted this example from Amazon because I remember it being pretty similar. The opening faced the fire ring and thus the entrance to the trail. Both of us were pretty chill and ended up bunking together because we actually wanted to sleep… not stay up all night doing nonsense. Some of the campers were known for doing pranks and such and we were attempting to avoid this.

I was not taken to wearing a watch at this time in my life, so I have no clue what time it was when I was awoken by some sound. I scanned outside the tent to see what it might have been when I noticed someone messing with the lantern at the entrance to the trail. At first I thought it was one of the adults adjusting it, but as my befuddled state faded I noticed the the thing was batting the lantern with its hand. Now this lantern was hung at least 10 ft off the ground and required either standing on something or using a stick to hang it up there. I woke Ryan up to see if he was also seeing what I was seeing, and we sat there for a few minutes whispering trying to sort out what was happening.

I am guessing our frantic whispering was not as quiet as we thought, because whatever it was bolted and started running towards our tent, or at least at the time I thought it was running towards our tent. At some point it veered to the west before it hit the fire ring and headed to the fenceline, hurdling it in a single fluid motion before heading out into the neighboring pasture and disappearing out of our sightline. I drew in orange what I am guessing the path probably was, but at the time it certainly felt like it was heading towards us.

The problem is I can only speculate what it actually was. It was a humanoid figure and it was dark, but the fact that it was a figure standing between us and a light source is pretty much going to mean all we really saw was a silhouette. While our eyes were adjusted to the dark, I can’t for certain pick out any specific details about the figure. I certainly thought “Sasquatch” at the time given its scale. I’ve seen a truly countless number of whitetail deer and it certainly wasn’t something like that. Far as I am aware there are no bears in this area, nor am I aware of bears being able to hurdle fences like a track star.

I remember thinking it was very tall and relatively lanky for the height. My 1980s brain thought that it looked sorta like the outline of Chewbacca. Past that I don’t really trust my memory of specific details. I do remember being extremely scared and not really talking much about what we had just witnessed for the rest of the night. I am sure at some point sleep claimed me, but I remember sitting there staring out at the night for a really long time afraid it would come back for us. Neither of us told the others the next morning, and it was years before I was really willing to talk about it myself.

Some Math

I have no clue why this is suddenly important to right down this story today, but as a result I have been doing copious amounts of searching for various bits of information. Firstly I was curious how tall a humanoid would have to be in order to carelessly bat around a lantern that was in theory hung roughly 10 ft up in the air. In my searching I found this interesting blog with a built in Standing Reach calculator, allowing you to type in your height and get an estimation of what your Standing Reach would be. So in order to comfortably reach that 10 foot high lantern, the humanoid in question would need to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 feet tall. Granted that is taking a bunch of assumptions that a “Bigfoot” would have a human like ratio of arm to height, when that might be the case depending on how much after how similar they might be to our shared primate ancestors.

Now for some more math. The average barbed wire fence stands around 4 foot tall, and from what I remember it was the standard ubiquitous red topped metal fence post construction similar to the above photo. I do not remember the vertical pieces designed to keep the fence tight however because we absolutely crawled through the fence on a few occasions. The calculation that I am not sure about, nor am I really certain how to find out is what it would take to seamlessly leap over a fence like that. The tallest hurdles used in track and field events are around 3.5 feet in height, so I am guessing this hypothetical 8 foot tall humanoid should have the clearance to cross a 4 foot tall fence. Again this takes a lot of things for granted, that a Sasquatch would have similar abilities to a Human of that size and build.

The Second Incident

After we got up and around, ate some breakfast the birthday boy wanted to go roam around in the river bottoms. After having experienced what I did the night before, I was apprehensive but eventually was talked into doing so. I guess I figured there were enough of us roaming around in a group that nothing was going to happen, safety in numbers sort of thing. Before long I had forgotten myself and we were playing hide and seek in the trees. Ryan and I once again paired up and ended up breaking away from the group. We kept slipping away as they tried to find us and eventually hung his knock off members only jacket up on a tree trying to convince them that we were hiding somewhere we were not.

We did this for several hours and when it was finally around lunch time we all met up as a group. We were about to head back, when I remembered that we didn’t have Ryan’s jacket and since it was my idea to hang it up I figured I should be the one to retrieve it. I had hung it on a tree near the bank of the creek running through the property. I pulled it down from the branch that was holding it and as I was turning to walk back to my friends I heard a noise behind me. On the other side of the creek in the treeline there was what looked to be a humanoid shape walking away from me back into the trees. Once again zero clue what exactly it was, but in my mind I was thinking it had to be whatever we saw the night before.

The Area

One of the things about this area is that there is a near unbroken series of low lying forested riverbottoms that span from the verdigris river all of the way up into Southern Kansas. When my dad was talking about Noxie growing up, things like Google Maps did not exist. So today as I was thinking about that tale of him hunting for Photographic evidence I finally thought to plot how close Noxie was to the area in which I had my own sighting. If you measure as the crow flies from the point of my sighting to the relative area of where I think the Noxie sighting was it is roughly 16 miles. However if you also look at the map there is pretty much a pathway through the green forested areas that could lead one between the two points.

I am not saying necessarily that they are connected, but that sighting in 1975 took place far closer than I ever realized as a kid. So you have to take some pretty severe leaps of reason here and assume that what I saw was a Bigfoot, but I am left not knowing any other explanations. The second day sighting could have been literally anything, but I tend to personally focus on the Lantern incident because it is significantly more clear in my memory. I have no clue what the range of something like a Bigfoot might be. If you take an animal like a bear, they have an active range of around 15 to 20 miles depending on a bunch of variables. What would the active range of something as large as a Sasquatch be in that case?

The Third Sighting

For this next incident we scan forward several years. I’ve graduated High School and am still living at home and commuting back and forth to Junior college in an attempt to get a college degree on the cheap. It was during this era that I discovered the internet and more importantly IRC, and through Vampire Roleplay Channels I met this girl who was attending Pitt State in Pittsburg Kansas. As a result I would occasionally make the roughly two hour drive to go see her in person throughout late 1995 and early 1996. I would go up US-169 to around Cherryvale KS, grab US-400 through Parsons KS and on into Pittsburg KS.

The above area is as far as I can tell the stretch of road this third incident took place on. I left my girlfriends apartment in Pittsburg around midnight and was driving back. I had just made it through Parsons and was crossing a creek which in theory would have been the creek you can see on the lower left hand corner of the image above. As I was driving along, something crossed the road in front of me that made me slam on my brakes for fear of hitting it. It was large, humanoid, dark and extremely fast moving. I remember sitting there for awhile not exactly sure what I had just seen before continuing driving again. I made a stop at some convenience store just down the road to get a drink and calm my nerves a bit.

I am guessing that I rattled the attendant as well because when I got home I noticed something odd. When I stopped to get a drink and something to munch on, I paid with a $20 bill and should have gotten back a $10 and some ones. What I instead had sitting in my wallet was $100 bill and some ones, and apparently neither of us noticed this. I wasn’t super keen on driving that road by night anymore, and limited any trips up to the daytime. Truthfully we had a falling out not long after, which is a bummer because I never got back my original hardbound copy of Werewolf the Apocalypse. Again I have no clue what crossed the road but it absolutely looked like a large humanoid leaping across.

Out of curiosity I did the same thing that I did with my original sighting and Noxie, and drew a measurement as the crow flies. That spot on US-400 is way closer than I would have assumed. Drawing a straight line between the two points is roughly 35 miles. Once again most of this region of Oklahoma and Southern Kansas are dotted with these low lying creekbeds and hollows. Not saying there is any connection, but were fencelines not an issue you could get from point A to point B again without ever leaving wooded low lying areas.

The Rationalization

So where I am left with all of this is that I can rationalize away everything except that first incident. Up in Kansas it was after midnight on a somewhat unfamiliar stretch of road and literally anything could have crossed and startled me. I thought it was humanoid in shape but who knows what I saw because it was over in a second and I was left only with scattered thoughts to piece it together. The second incident I saw movement in the trees on the other side of a creek and what I thought was a humanoid shape walking away. However it could have been anything in the woods or it could have been nothing. I could have startled something and my mind played tricks on me for the humanoid shape.

The one I cannot rationalize away is whatever was batting that lantern all those years ago and that bolted across a 4 foot tall fence like it was nothing. Enough time passed during that incident that I feel like I had my wits about me. Time perception is really hard. When you find yourself in an intense situation it often feels like time slows down. In my mind it felt like five or more minutes passed, but maybe it was significantly less and that my mind just sorta played those events back after the fact in slow motion. I can’t with any certainty say that I saw a “Bigfoot”, but the region does have a history of whispered Sasquatch sightings. I do wish I had a more scientific mind at the time and would have actually looked for some form of evidence.

Again I have no clue why it was suddenly important for me to talk about this. I think the whole Bigfoot Hunting season is pure nonsense and mostly bait for the press to talk about it. That said this region does have a history of sightings or at least supposed sightings. I saw something that I can’t reason away and I largely think of this as a my Bigfoot story, but the truth is I have no clue exactly what I saw. People get real weird around me when I have opened up about this. Chances are a few of you are going to treat me like I have a little less sanity than you thought afterwards. It just felt like something that I wanted to get out there.