Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: There's a giant turtle grinning at me from.
Speaker 2: The side of the road.
Speaker 1: He's about fifteen feet long, painted a green that doesn't
Speaker 1: exist in nature, and he's been standing at the edge
Speaker 1: of town for longer than most of the people driving
Speaker 1: past him have been alive. He's not scary. That's the
Speaker 1: first thing you notice every other stop on this road trip.
Speaker 1: The local monster wants to eat you. The thing in
Speaker 1: the trees up north wants your livestock. The thing in
Speaker 1: the swamp down south wants your dog. This one wants
Speaker 1: you to slow down, take a picture, and maybe buy
Speaker 1: a t shirt. The town built him on purpose. They
Speaker 1: put him right where you can't miss him, the way
Speaker 1: other towns put up a war memorial or a sign
Speaker 1: about a famous son who went off and did something. Churubusco, Indiana,
Speaker 1: did all of that for a snapping turtle that nobody
Speaker 1: ever caught, nobody ever photographed clearly, and nobody can prove existed.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the strangest stop yet. I'll be straight with
Speaker 1: you before we drive in, because I've close to forty
Speaker 1: years chasing things that leave footprints and not much else,
Speaker 1: and I've learned to say out loud where I stand.
Speaker 1: I don't believe a four hundred pound turtle the size
Speaker 1: of a kitchen table was living in a seven acre
Speaker 1: pond in northern Indiana. I'll walk you through why by
Speaker 1: the end of this. But here's the thing that keeps
Speaker 1: me coming back to this case, the thing that makes
Speaker 1: it worth a whole episode instead of a footnote. The
Speaker 1: turtle isn't the interesting part. The turtle was never the
Speaker 1: interesting part. The interesting part is what one stubborn farmer
Speaker 1: did to a small town, and what that small town
Speaker 1: did right back, and how a year of one man's
Speaker 1: life got swallowed whole by something he was sure was
Speaker 1: sitting at the bottom of his own lake. So let's
Speaker 1: take a break from the upright things in the woods.
Speaker 1: Let's go to Whitley County and let's talk about Oscar.
Speaker 1: You find you're a busco northwest of Fort Wayne, sitting
Speaker 1: flat in the kind of farmland that goes on until
Speaker 1: it hits the sky. In nineteen forty nine, when this
Speaker 1: story detonates, population was somewhere around twelve hundred people.
Speaker 2: Everybody knew everybody.
Speaker 1: The town got its name from a battle in the
Speaker 1: Mexican War, which is a strange and bloody thing to
Speaker 1: name a quiet Indiana farmtown after. But that's how it
Speaker 1: went in that era. And here's a detail I love,
Speaker 1: one of those things that's too perfect to make up.
Speaker 1: The town sits near the birthplace of Chief Little Turtle,
Speaker 1: the war leader of the Miami People, one of the
Speaker 1: most formidable military minds this continent produced. So this patch
Speaker 1: of Indiana was tied to a Turtle, a little one
Speaker 1: more than one hundred and fifty years before anybody started
Speaker 1: screaming about a big one. I'm not saying that means anything.
Speaker 1: I'm a skeptic, but I'd be lying if I said
Speaker 1: I didn't smile when I found it. The land around
Speaker 1: there is glacier country. When the ice sheets pulled back,
Speaker 1: they left the whole Upper Midwest pock marked with kettle
Speaker 1: lakes and ponds and bogs, little bowls of water sitting
Speaker 1: in the middle of fields. Some of them are deep,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are muddy and dark and full
Speaker 1: of wheats. And when you stand at the edge of
Speaker 1: one on a gray day, the water doesn't tell you anything.
Speaker 1: You can't see two feet down. That matters. Hold on
Speaker 1: to that, because every single thing that happens in this
Speaker 1: story happens in water. You can't see into. The particular
Speaker 1: pond that makes this whole town famous is about two
Speaker 1: miles out off Madden Road. Seven acres.
Speaker 2: That's the number.
Speaker 1: Everybody uses, seven acres, And I want you to really
Speaker 1: sit with how small that is. Seven acres of water
Speaker 1: is not a great lake. It's not loch ness. You
Speaker 1: could walk all the way around it in the time
Speaker 1: it takes to listen to this episode it's a farm pond,
Speaker 1: and the legend asks you to believe that a creature
Speaker 1: the size of a small car lived in that farm pond,
Speaker 1: undetected for half a century, with people fishing it the
Speaker 1: whole time.
Speaker 2: It was called Folk Lake.
Speaker 1: And to understand why it was called that, we have
Speaker 1: to go back to eighteen ninety eight, to the first
Speaker 1: man who ever said the words out loud. His name
Speaker 1: was Oscar Fulk, and he owned the farm. The story,
Speaker 1: as it comes down to us, is thin because it's
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty some years old, and there's no paperwork,
Speaker 1: no photograph, no sign statement, just the tale. Oscar Folk
Speaker 1: is out at his pond one day and he sees
Speaker 1: something in the water that stops him cold. A turtle,
Speaker 1: but not a turtle the size of a dinner plate,
Speaker 1: the kind you'd see sunning on a log. A turtle
Speaker 1: the size of a thing that shouldn't be in an
Speaker 1: Indiana pond at all. Some versions say he described it
Speaker 1: as being like a small dinosaur, which is the kind
Speaker 1: of phrase that should make any honest investigator narrow his eyes,
Speaker 1: because in eighteen ninety eight, the word dinosaur was doing
Speaker 1: a lot of imaginative work in the public mind. Folk
Speaker 1: runs back and tells people. And here's the part that
Speaker 1: tells you everything about how this kind of story actually
Speaker 1: lives and dies. Nobody believed him. Think about that. The
Speaker 1: very first witness the man the lake is no for
Speaker 1: the man the monster is arguably named for, got laughed off.
Speaker 1: There was no second sighting to back him up. There
Speaker 1: was no evidence. So Oscar Folk did the reasonable thing.
Speaker 1: He let it go, He dropped it. He went back
Speaker 1: to farming, and the turtle, if there was a turtle,
Speaker 1: went back to the bottom of the pond, and for
Speaker 1: fifty years, the whole thing simply did not exist. That's
Speaker 1: important because when the story comes roaring back to life
Speaker 1: half a century later, it comes back through people who,
Speaker 1: for the most part, had never heard Oscar Falk's version.
Speaker 1: The lake kept his name, the turtle eventually borrowed it.
Speaker 1: But the fifty year silence is the strongest argument against
Speaker 1: the whole thing.
Speaker 2: And I wanted on.
Speaker 1: The table early before we get swept up in the carnival.
Speaker 1: One man, one sighting, no proof, fifty years of nothing.
Speaker 1: If a giant turtle is living in your pond, you'd
Speaker 1: expect more than that. You'd expect a body of evidence
Speaker 1: to build over decades. Instead you get a single anecdote
Speaker 1: and a long, long quiet. Before we get to nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight, let me tell you about the animal we're
Speaker 1: actually arguing over, because most people picture the wrong thing.
Speaker 1: A snapping turtle is not a pond turtle. It's not
Speaker 1: the little domed thing sunning itself on a log that
Speaker 1: pulls its head in when you walk by. A snapper
Speaker 1: is an ambush predator, and it's one of the oldest
Speaker 1: designs still swimming, a body plan that's been doing the
Speaker 1: same job since before there were people around to be
Speaker 1: scared of it. It spends most of its life on
Speaker 1: the bottom in the mud, in the dark, not moving.
Speaker 1: It doesn't bask much because it doesn't need to. It
Speaker 1: lies in the muck with its shell crusted in algae
Speaker 1: and silt until it looks like part of the lake bed,
Speaker 1: and it waits, and when a fish or a frog
Speaker 1: or a duck gets close enough, it strikes. The neck
Speaker 1: is longer than you'd ever guess from the shell, and
Speaker 1: it comes out fast, and the jaws are built to shear.
Speaker 1: A big one can take your fingers off. They're not
Speaker 1: aggressive in the water, where they'd rather sink and hide
Speaker 1: than fight. But on land cornered they'll come at you,
Speaker 1: and a person who's only ever met one on a road,
Speaker 1: hissing with its mouth gaped wide, walks away, half believing
Speaker 1: in monsters. Here's the part that matters for this case.
Speaker 1: A snapping turtle can stay underwater for a long stretch
Speaker 1: without ever surfacing, and it can bury itself in the
Speaker 1: bottom and go dormant for months through an Indiana winter.
Speaker 1: It is, in other words, an animal almost perfectly built
Speaker 1: to live in a seven acre pond for fifty years
Speaker 1: and almost never be seen. Clearly, you'd get glimpses and
Speaker 1: nothing more. A head breaking the surface for a breath,
Speaker 1: a dark shape, a swirl of water, and then nothing,
Speaker 1: which is exactly every single time what people at Folk
Speaker 1: Lake reported. The behavior of a perfectly ordinary snapping turtle
Speaker 1: and the behavior of a legendary lake monster turn out
Speaker 1: to the same behavior. The only thing in dispute is
Speaker 1: the size. Keep that in your back pocket, because it's
Speaker 1: going to matter twice before we're done, Once when two
Speaker 1: men see a head come up like a submarine, and
Speaker 1: once when a whole town wonders where the thing went
Speaker 1: after the lake was drained. Then comes July of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight, and two men go fishing. Their names were
Speaker 1: our Blue and Charlie Wilson, and they were locals, the
Speaker 1: kind of men everybody in a town that size could
Speaker 1: place by family and reputation. They had Gale Harris's permission
Speaker 1: to fish the lake because Harris owned the land now,
Speaker 1: the farm having changed hands across the decades. It was
Speaker 1: July twenty seventh, a regular afternoon, and by every account
Speaker 1: it was supposed to be nothing. Two guys in a
Speaker 1: boat on a small pond. What they said happened was this.
Speaker 1: The water started moving, not little ripples, not a fish
Speaker 1: breaking the surface, big waves rolling, the way water moves
Speaker 1: when something large, just pushing through it. And then it surfaced,
Speaker 1: or a Blue described it later in a way that
Speaker 1: stuck to this story like tar. He said, the waves
Speaker 1: came rolling, and up came that turtle, and he saw
Speaker 1: the big head sticking up, and the water moved away
Speaker 1: from it like a submarine. That's the image he reached for.
Speaker 1: Not a log, not a fish, not a beaver, a
Speaker 1: submarine surfacing in a seven acre farm pond. They said
Speaker 1: the head was the size of a child's head. They
Speaker 1: said the body was as big as the boat. And
Speaker 1: when they got back to shore, they took that story
Speaker 1: straight to Gail Harris, and then they took it into
Speaker 1: town and they told it and people listened, and people laughed.
Speaker 1: Here's why they laughed. And this is the part the
Speaker 1: legend likes to skip over because as a guy who
Speaker 1: spent sixteen years carrying a badge, witness reliability is the
Speaker 1: whole ball game.
Speaker 2: You don't get to just take the statement.
Speaker 1: You have to know who's given it or A Blue
Speaker 1: and Charlie Wilson were known around Churubusco as pranksters. Charlie
Speaker 1: Wilson in particular, had a reputation as a teller of
Speaker 1: tall tales. He was the guy who'd spin you a
Speaker 1: story for the fun of watching you decide whether to
Speaker 1: believe it. So when these two specific men come back
Speaker 1: from a fishing trip claiming they saw a submarine sized turtle,
Speaker 1: the town's reaction was not awe, it was, oh, here
Speaker 1: we go. There was a local man named Rusty Red
Speaker 1: who actually knew turtles, who bred and studied them, an
Speaker 1: honest to god turtle expert. In a town of twelve
Speaker 1: hundred people, and Reid talked to our Blue about what
Speaker 1: he'd seen, and Reid came away thinking the whole thing
Speaker 1: was a hoax, a put on, a couple of jokers
Speaker 1: having a laugh. That's where this story should have ended
Speaker 1: for the second time, same as eighteen ninety eight. Unbelievable claim,
Speaker 1: no evidence, unreliable narrators, and a town that knows better.
Speaker 1: The natural life span of a tall tale is about
Speaker 1: a week at the barber shop, and that's exactly where
Speaker 1: this one went to get told and retold, the local
Speaker 1: barbershop being the social media of its day, the place
Speaker 1: where a story either grew legs or got buried. By
Speaker 1: all rights, the Beast of Busco should have died in
Speaker 1: a barber's chair in the summer of nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: It didn't, and the reason it didn't has a name,
Speaker 1: Gail Harris. I've thought about Gail Harris more than I've
Speaker 1: thought about the turtle, because Harris is the actual engine
Speaker 1: of this entire thing, and Harris is where the story
Speaker 1: stops being funny and starts being something closer to tragic.
Speaker 1: He was a farmer. He owned the land and the lake,
Speaker 1: and by the accounts that survive. He was a man
Speaker 1: inclined to believe. One source I came across put it
Speaker 1: bluntly that Harris was known around town for being willing
Speaker 1: to believe just about anything. And I want to handle
Speaker 1: that fairly, because it's easy to turn a real person
Speaker 1: into a punchline a half century after he's gone. So
Speaker 1: let me put it this way instead, Gail Harris was
Speaker 1: not a cynic. He was not the kind of man
Speaker 1: who needed three forms of proof before he'd accept that
Speaker 1: the world was stranger than it looked. And in this
Speaker 1: particular story, that turned out to be the most dangerous
Speaker 1: quality a man could have. For a while, Harris didn't
Speaker 1: do much with what Blew and Wilson told him. It sat.
Speaker 1: Then came March of nineteen forty nine, and Harris saw
Speaker 1: it for himself, or at least he said he did.
Speaker 1: He was up on the roof of his barn doing repairs,
Speaker 1: and he had company up there, a friend named Orville Reyes,
Speaker 1: who happened to be a reverend. Two men on a
Speaker 1: barn roof, looking out over the pond, and according to them,
Speaker 1: the turtle surfaced. Now the first time they did the
Speaker 1: sensible thing. They shrugged it off. You're up on a
Speaker 1: roof the lights, playing tricks on the water. You saw something,
Speaker 1: who knows. But then it came back the next day,
Speaker 1: and the second time the shrug didn't hold. Curiosity got
Speaker 1: its hooks in. They got a rowboat and they went
Speaker 1: out onto the pond to look, and the story says
Speaker 1: the thing surfed again, this time on both sides of
Speaker 1: the boat, like it was circling them. That's the moment
Speaker 1: the whole thing turns, because now it isn't two jokers.
Speaker 1: Now it's the landowner himself and a man of the cloth.
Speaker 1: And the landowner has had it with being doubted. Harris
Speaker 1: had been hearing it for months. The turtle on his
Speaker 1: land was a joke, and by extension, so was he.
Speaker 1: And Gail Harris decided he was done being laughed at.
Speaker 1: He said it plainly, and the line has outlived him.
Speaker 1: He said he was going to get that turtle out
Speaker 1: of there, if he had to drain the whole lake
Speaker 1: to do it. He'd been called a liar long enough.
Speaker 1: I want you to hear that for what it is.
Speaker 1: Because everything that follows, every trap and net and harpoon
Speaker 1: and crane and dollar, and finally, his own health. All
Speaker 1: of it pours out of that one sentence. This stopped
Speaker 1: being about a turtle the second Gail Harris's name got
Speaker 1: attached to the doubt. It became about the man. It
Speaker 1: became about proving the town wrong, and a man trying
Speaker 1: to prove he isn't a liar will do things a
Speaker 1: man hunting an animal would never do. He'll keep going
Speaker 1: long after a rational person would quit. He'll spend money
Speaker 1: he doesn't have. He'll dig a hole and climb in
Speaker 1: after it. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. The other thing that happened
Speaker 1: in early March of nineteen forty nine, the thing that
Speaker 1: took this from a local grudge to a national.
Speaker 2: Circus, was the press.
Speaker 1: A newspaper over in Columbia City, the County Seat ran
Speaker 1: the story first around the seventh of March, just a
Speaker 1: small item about a giant turtle on a farm near Churubusco.
Speaker 1: But this was the era of the wire services, and
Speaker 1: a reporter put it on the wire, and the wire
Speaker 1: didn't care that it was a turtle. The wire cared
Speaker 1: that it was a good story on.
Speaker 2: A slow week.
Speaker 1: One of the History Center fellows who lived through it
Speaker 1: said it best decades later that it must have just
Speaker 1: been a slow news week, and the story went, in
Speaker 1: his words, viral before anybody used that word for anything.
Speaker 1: By the next day, it was front page news and
Speaker 1: places that had never heard of Churubusco and never would
Speaker 1: again except for this. The local Churubusco weekly, a paper
Speaker 1: called The Truth, got absolutely scooped on the biggest story
Speaker 1: to ever happen in its own backyard because it only
Speaker 1: came out on Thursdays, and the daily papers all over
Speaker 1: the country had run. At first, the town's own paper
Speaker 1: missed the town's own monster. And you have to understand
Speaker 1: the timing of it, the why now of it. Nineteen
Speaker 1: forty nine. The country had just come out of the
Speaker 1: Second World War, the depression before that, two decades of
Speaker 1: bad news, of telegrams nobody wanted, of rationing and worry
Speaker 1: and grief.
Speaker 2: And here, out of.
Speaker 1: A cornfield in Indiana comes a story that's just plain fun.
Speaker 1: A monster, but a friendly one, a turtle, a small town,
Speaker 1: and a stubborn farmer, and a thing in a pond.
Speaker 1: People were starved for exactly this. The reporters knew it.
Speaker 1: The editors knew it, so the wire kept feeding it,
Speaker 1: and the country kept eating, and Cherubusco woke up famous,
Speaker 1: and as the story traveled, it grew, the way stories
Speaker 1: do when they get passed hand to hand across a wire.
Speaker 1: The descriptions never quite agreed with each other, and they
Speaker 1: got bigger and stranger the farther they got from the
Speaker 1: actual pond. In some tellings, the turtle's neck was as
Speaker 1: thick as a stovepipe. Its head was the size of
Speaker 1: a child's or a man's, depending on which paper you
Speaker 1: picked up. Its shell was as big as the top
Speaker 1: of a car, or as wide as a dining room.
Speaker 2: Table, six feet across.
Speaker 1: Spiked along the back, the weight floated somewhere between four
Speaker 1: hundred and five hundred pounds, and not one person who
Speaker 1: printed those numbers had ever put the animal on a scale,
Speaker 1: because not one person had ever had the animal. Each
Speaker 1: paper took the wire copy and gave it a little extra,
Speaker 1: the way a fish gets longer every time. The fisherman tells,
Speaker 1: and radio carried it out past the newspapers all the
Speaker 1: way overseas, so that people on other continents were hearing
Speaker 1: about a turtle in a pond in Whitley County, Indiana.
Speaker 1: By the time the tale had bounced around the world
Speaker 1: a few times, the modest, murky, second hand siding of
Speaker 1: two known pranksters had hardened into established fact, a confirmed
Speaker 1: monster with confirmed measurements, none of which anybody had ever
Speaker 1: actually confirmed. That's the machinery of a legend running at
Speaker 1: full speed. It doesn't need one new piece of evidence.
Speaker 1: It needs repetition, a slow newsweek, and a country that
Speaker 1: wants the story to be true. Now Gail Harris has
Speaker 1: an audience, and that changes a man's behavior. It's one
Speaker 1: thing to chase a turtle when the only witnesses are
Speaker 1: your barn and your reverend. It's another thing when there
Speaker 1: are cars stacked up on Madden Road and a photographer
Speaker 1: from a national magazine standing in your field. The hunt
Speaker 1: gets bigger because the stage gets bigger, and the stage
Speaker 1: got a normeds fast. His first real attempt was about
Speaker 1: the most homespun thing you can imagine. He built a
Speaker 1: trap wood and chicken wire, set out in the lake,
Speaker 1: baited to draw the turtle in, and word had spread
Speaker 1: so people came to watch, and they stood around that
Speaker 1: pond for hours waiting for a four hundred pound reptile
Speaker 1: to wander into a chicken wire box on queue, and
Speaker 1: the legend says it actually showed up. The story goes
Speaker 1: that Oscar came and Oscar got into it or near it,
Speaker 1: and then Oscar simply broke through chicken wire against a
Speaker 1: creature that's supposed to weigh as much as two grown men.
Speaker 1: It didn't stand a chance. The turtle burst out and
Speaker 1: was gone back into the dark water, and the crowd
Speaker 1: had its first taste of the thing that would define
Speaker 1: the entire hunt. They almost had him, and then they didn't.
Speaker 1: That phrase is the whole structure of this story. Almost
Speaker 1: over and over. The crowds tell you how big this got,
Speaker 1: and the numbers are documented in the timeline the town
Speaker 1: itself put together. Later on the twelfth of March, three
Speaker 1: thousand people came out to watch attempts to catch the
Speaker 1: turtle in a town of twelve hundred. The next day,
Speaker 1: the thirteenth, the turtle slipped another makeshift trap, and the
Speaker 1: crowd grew to five thousand. By the twentieth of March,
Speaker 1: four hundred cars an hour were rolling past the Harris home.
Speaker 1: There were planes flying overhead so people could look down
Speaker 1: at the pond. There were traffic jams on rural roads
Speaker 1: that had probably never seen a traffic jam in their existence.
Speaker 1: The town was completely overrun, and it was overrun by
Speaker 1: people who came to see a turtle that to that
Speaker 1: point had never been clearly seen by anybody. The town,
Speaker 1: to its credit, tried to get organized about it. The
Speaker 1: community club met in special session, because what else do
Speaker 1: you do when ten thousand strangers descend on you in
Speaker 1: a week. They put together what they actually called a
Speaker 1: Turtle Committee, whose job was to oversee the safe capture
Speaker 1: of Oscar, and they pledged to provide a upper home
Speaker 1: for him once he was caught. They brought in boats
Speaker 1: and lumber and pipe to help with the hunt. So
Speaker 1: now it's not just one obsessed farmer. Now there's an
Speaker 1: institution behind it. The town has officially decided that the
Speaker 1: turtle is real enough to plan around, real enough to
Speaker 1: build a home for. The legend got an administrative structure.
Speaker 1: That's how you know a thing has stopped being a
Speaker 1: rumor and started being a project, And a project that
Speaker 1: size does things to a small town, things that have
Speaker 1: nothing to do with whether the turtle was ever real.
Speaker 1: For a few weeks in the spring of nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: Churubusco ran hot. The roads couldn't hold the cars. People
Speaker 1: parked in fields and walked the rest of the way.
Speaker 1: The town's handful of restaurants and filling stations did business
Speaker 1: they'd never seen, feeding and fueling thousands of strangers who
Speaker 1: driven in from three states over to stand at the
Speaker 1: edge of a pond. Somebody was always selling something, sandwiches, soda,
Speaker 1: a look through a pair of field glasses for a nickel.
Speaker 1: Kids skipped school to be near it. Out of town
Speaker 1: reporters needed rooms and meals and telephones to file their stories,
Speaker 1: and a town of twelve hundred didn't have the bones
Speaker 1: for any of that. The Community Club wasn't only being
Speaker 1: civic minded when it formed the Turtle Committee. It was
Speaker 1: trying to keep a flood from washing the place out.
Speaker 1: They had to figure out where the cars would go,
Speaker 1: how to keep people from trampling the Harris farm into
Speaker 1: the dirt. What would happen if some tourists kid wandered
Speaker 1: into that lake while every adult around was staring at
Speaker 1: the water hoping for a monster. Nobody had planned for
Speaker 1: fame and fame had shown up anyway in the shape
Speaker 1: of a turtle nobody could produce, and the town had
Speaker 1: about a week to learn how to hold itself together
Speaker 1: under the weight of all those people. Some folks loved
Speaker 1: every minute of it, some were exhausted by it inside
Speaker 1: of three days. And underneath all of it, the farmer
Speaker 1: at the center, the man whose barn roof started the
Speaker 1: whole thing, was finally getting the audience he'd wanted, which
Speaker 1: is a dangerous thing to hand a man who's decided
Speaker 1: he has something to prove. Harris, meanwhile, was getting inventive
Speaker 1: in the way that obsessed people get inventive. He rigged
Speaker 1: up a periscope, a piece of pipe and a piece
Speaker 1: of glass so he could put it down in the
Speaker 1: murky water and try to see the bottom, try to
Speaker 1: spot the thing moving down there in the dark. Picture
Speaker 1: it a farmer who's never seen the ocean, building himself
Speaker 1: a submarine viewer out of plumbing parts to peer into
Speaker 1: his own pond. There's something almost noble in it and
Speaker 1: something almost unhinged in it, and in Gale Harris, the
Speaker 1: two were the same thing. When the homemade methods failed,
Speaker 1: and they all failed, the hunt brought in professionals. There
Speaker 1: were turtle trappers who came up from Tennessee men who
Speaker 1: actually did this for a living down south where the
Speaker 1: big alligator snappers live, and they set their nets and
Speaker 1: worked the lake the way they knew how, and they
Speaker 1: raised nothing muck and weeds and an empty net. The
Speaker 1: professionals did no better than the chicken wire. And think
Speaker 1: hard about what that tells you, because those Tennessee men
Speaker 1: were the real article. Down in the Mississippi country, Trapping
Speaker 1: big alligator snappers was a living and a tradition, and
Speaker 1: those turtles got genuinely large, large enough to give a
Speaker 1: legend its bones. If anybody alive knew how to pull
Speaker 1: a monster turtle out of a muddy lake, it was them.
Speaker 1: They knew the bait, the sets, the patients.
Speaker 2: It took.
Speaker 1: They came north on the strength of the headlines, worked
Speaker 1: harris As Pond with everything they had, and went home
Speaker 1: with nothing. When the men who hunt giant turtles for
Speaker 1: a living can't find your giant turtle, that's a data point,
Speaker 1: and it's not the one the believers like. It points
Speaker 1: the same direction as the empty photographs and the leaking helmet.
Speaker 1: The more expertise you threw at Folk Lake, the more
Speaker 1: clearly the lake answered that there was nothing in it
Speaker 1: to catch, or at least nothing anywhere near the size
Speaker 1: the headlines had promised. They tried hooks, they tried dragging
Speaker 1: the bottom. Men spent sleepless nights out at that pond,
Speaker 1: shining lights down into the black water, watching for a ripple,
Speaker 1: for a shadow, for anything, and night after night the
Speaker 1: water gave them nothing back. There's one account from the
Speaker 1: hunt that's better than all the others, the one piece
Speaker 1: that even a hard skeptic like me has to slow
Speaker 1: down and respect, because it doesn't come from the believers.
Speaker 1: It comes secondhand from the equipment itself. The story goes
Speaker 1: that at one point they actually had it. They got
Speaker 1: a gaff hook into the turtle, a big, sharpened hook
Speaker 1: on a pole, the kind you'd use to land something heavy,
Speaker 1: and whatever was on the end of that hook started
Speaker 1: to pull, and it pulled hard enough that it nearly
Speaker 1: tipped the boat over. The men had to let go.
Speaker 1: One of the History Center men looking back, said that's
Speaker 1: how they knew it was a large turtle, because of
Speaker 1: how it fought the hook. Now, I'll be honest with
Speaker 1: you about what that does and doesn't prove. It tells
Speaker 1: you there was something heavy in the water. It does
Speaker 1: not tell you it was four hundred pounds ounce, and
Speaker 1: it does not tell you it was the size of
Speaker 1: a car, a big common snapping turtle, a sixty or
Speaker 1: seventy pounder fighting on a hook, and a small boat
Speaker 1: with scared men in It can absolutely feel like it's
Speaker 1: going to take you under Adrenaline does math very badly,
Speaker 1: But I'll grant the believers this one. Something with weight
Speaker 1: was in that lake, and something with weight got hooked,
Speaker 1: and something with weight got away. The water kept its secret.
Speaker 1: They brought in a diver. His name was Woodrow Rigsby
Speaker 1: out of Fort Wayne, and they put him in a
Speaker 1: diving suit and sent him down into a seven acre
Speaker 1: Indiana farm pond to look for a monster with his hands,
Speaker 1: basically because he sure couldn't see anything down there. And
Speaker 1: the dive went about how you'd expect a thing like
Speaker 1: that to go. By one account, the wrong equipment got
Speaker 1: delivered to the farm and the whole attempt fell apart
Speaker 1: before it started. By another, Rigsby got down into the
Speaker 1: water and his helmet sprang a leak and he came
Speaker 1: bobbing right back up to the surface, the most anti
Speaker 1: climactic monster dive in American history. Either way, the diver
Speaker 1: found nothing. Visibility in that water was measured in inches.
Speaker 1: A man in a leaking helmet feeling around in liquid
Speaker 1: mud was never going to lay hands on anything, monster
Speaker 1: or not. But the spotlight he used is sitting in
Speaker 1: the Churubusco History Center to this day. They'll plug it
Speaker 1: in for you for about a second because it's blinding.
Speaker 1: They aimed that thing down into the water and it
Speaker 1: told them nothing. And then there's my favorite attempt, the
Speaker 1: one that tells you the hunt had officially lost its
Speaker 1: mind in the best way. Somebody had the idea to
Speaker 1: lure Oscar out using romance. I'm not joking. They got
Speaker 1: hold of a sea turtle, a female, a two hundred
Speaker 1: pound sea turtle, and they put her into Folk Lake.
Speaker 1: The theory, as near as I can reconstruct it was
Speaker 1: that Oscar would be drawn to her, that the giant
Speaker 1: male snapper would come out of hiding for a lady.
Speaker 1: Now set aside that a sea turtle and a snapping
Speaker 1: turtle are about as romanceantically compatible as a man and
Speaker 1: a fire hydrant. Set aside that putting a salt water
Speaker 1: animal into a freshwater farm pond is its own small cruelty.
Speaker 1: Just picture the meeting where this got decided. Picture grown men,
Speaker 1: sleep deprived weeks into a fruitless hunt that's bankrupting one
Speaker 1: of them and embarrassing the rest, sitting around, and somebody says,
Speaker 1: what if we get him a girl? And everybody nods.
Speaker 1: There was predictably no love connection. The sea turtle did
Speaker 1: sea turtle things which did not include seducing a cryptid,
Speaker 1: and by the middle of May they pulled her back
Speaker 1: out and went back to dragging the lake with hooks
Speaker 1: like sensible people. I lay all of that out, the
Speaker 1: chicken wire and the trappers and the diver and the
Speaker 1: dating service, because I want you to feel the shape
Speaker 1: of it. This was months. This wasn't a weekend lark.
Speaker 1: From March into the summer and beyond, a real town
Speaker 1: poured real labor and real money and real hope into
Speaker 1: a seven acre pond, and the pond gave back nothing
Speaker 1: you could hold in your hand, Which brings us to
Speaker 1: the part of the case that ought to bother a
Speaker 1: believer more than it usually does. The evidence or the
Speaker 1: total absence of it. Because here's what you'd expect from
Speaker 1: an event this big, this watched, this photographed. You'd expect
Speaker 1: a picture, one good clear picture of the thing. There
Speaker 1: were thousands of people, there were professional photographers. There was
Speaker 1: supposedly film. A man named del Winegardner is said to
Speaker 1: have climbed a tree during one of the March sidings
Speaker 1: and filmed the beast of Busco from up in the branches,
Speaker 1: film of the actual turtle. And that film is gone lost.
Speaker 1: To be fair, here, film got lost or destroyed all
Speaker 1: the time in nineteen forty nine and beyond. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a digital file you could copy one hundred times. It
Speaker 1: was a physical strip of celluloid, and physical things vanish.
Speaker 1: But you'll forgive an old investigator for noticing that the
Speaker 1: one piece of moving picture evidence of America's most famous
Speaker 1: turtle conveniently does not survive, and that this is the
Speaker 1: same shape as a thousand other cryptid cases where the
Speaker 1: proof always existed and was always just barely lost. The
Speaker 1: camera always malfunctioned, the film always got ruined, the photo
Speaker 1: always came out blurry. The pattern is sometimes the pattern
Speaker 1: for a reason. And then there's the magazine. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Life Magazine, the biggest picture magazine in the country, sent
Speaker 1: a photographer named Mike Shay out to Churubusco, and Shaye
Speaker 1: did his job. He shot two hundred and ninety nine
Speaker 1: photographs at the lake, and not one of them was usable.
Speaker 1: Not one of them showed the turtle. A professional photographer
Speaker 1: for the most important photo magazine in America fired off
Speaker 1: nearly three hundred frames and came back with nothing publishable. Now,
Speaker 1: the kind reading is that there was nothing to photograph
Speaker 1: that he could catch surfacing, that the turtle was shy
Speaker 1: and fast, and the water was bad. The skeptical reading
Speaker 1: is simpler. Two hundred and ninety nine photographs and no
Speaker 1: turtle is exactly what you'd get if there was no
Speaker 1: turtle to photograph. A real animal surfacing repeatedly in front
Speaker 1: of thousands of people over months, in front of a
Speaker 1: pro with a fast camera leaves you at least one frame.
Speaker 1: The Beast of Busco left zero. That silence in the
Speaker 1: evidence is to me louder than anything or a blue
Speaker 1: ever said. But Gail Harris wasn't listening to silence. Harris
Speaker 1: had made up his mind back in March with that
Speaker 1: vow about being called a liar, and a man like
Speaker 1: that doesn't read the absence of evidence as a hint
Speaker 1: to stop. He reads it as a reason to dig deeper. Literally,
Speaker 1: because by the time the leaves started turning in the
Speaker 1: fall of nineteen forty nine, Harris had decided that if
Speaker 1: he couldn't catch the turtle in the water, he'd take
Speaker 1: the water away from the turtle. He was going to
Speaker 1: drain the lake. This is the part of the story
Speaker 1: where I stopped being able to make jokes, because this
Speaker 1: is where it gets sad, and the timeline the town
Speaker 1: preserved lets us watch it happen almost day by day.
Speaker 1: They set up pumps, they ran them off a tractor engine,
Speaker 1: pulling the water out of a seven acre lake and
Speaker 1: pushing it away across the fields, and they ran them
Speaker 1: for weeks. By the second of October, they'd gotten fulk
Speaker 1: Lake down to about one acre of open water, and
Speaker 1: that remaining acre was twenty feet deep, a deep, dark
Speaker 1: column of mud and water concentrated in the middle of
Speaker 1: the drained bowl. And then the tractor engine running the
Speaker 1: pump broke down, of course it did. The lake was
Speaker 1: fighting him with mechanical failure, the way the chicken wire
Speaker 1: and the nets and the diver's helmet had all fought
Speaker 1: him before. On the ninth of October, Harris went back
Speaker 1: to the harpoon on his own farm pond in Indiana,
Speaker 1: and the story says he hooked it. He got the
Speaker 1: harpoon into something big, and the something big nearly flipped
Speaker 1: his boat over the same way the gaff hook had
Speaker 1: months earlier, and he lost it again, almost always almost.
Speaker 1: By this point the lake was barely five feet deep
Speaker 1: where it had been twenty. There's one more sighting in
Speaker 1: the official record, and it's the last one, and it's
Speaker 1: the most theatrical of them all. On the thirteenth of October,
Speaker 1: according to newspaper accounts from the time, the turtle made
Speaker 1: its most spectacular appearance in plain view of two hundred people.
Speaker 1: The paper said Oscar leapt out of the water to
Speaker 1: feast on live ducks that had been set on top
Speaker 1: of a trap as bait. A four hundred pound turtle
Speaker 1: breaching like a whale, lunging up out of the water
Speaker 1: in front of a crowd to snatch a duck. That's
Speaker 1: the last time anybody officially saw the beast of busco
Speaker 1: a leap two hundred witnesses and then back down into
Speaker 1: the shrinking lake, never to be confirmed again. And I'll
Speaker 1: let you decide for yourself how much weight to put
Speaker 1: on a siding that conveniently delivered the most dramatic possible
Speaker 1: image right when the crowds and the camera's most needed feeding.
Speaker 2: I have my opinion.
Speaker 1: You can hear it in my voice now. The operation
Speaker 1: gets industrial. On the twentieth of October, with the water
Speaker 1: mostly gone and the bottom turning to exposed muck, they
Speaker 1: brought in a crane, a seventeen ton crane parked on
Speaker 1: the shore of a farm pond, rigged with steel nets
Speaker 1: to drag the bottom and haul oscar up out of
Speaker 1: the mud.
Speaker 2: They set a date. They called it T Day, the way.
Speaker 1: You'd plan an invasion. T Day, on the twenty third
Speaker 1: of October, the day they would finally raise the beast.
Speaker 1: The crowds came back for it, hundreds during the week
Speaker 1: more than two thousand on the weekends, all of them
Speaker 1: standing around a drained, stinking, half frozen mud hole in
Speaker 1: northern Indiana, waiting to watch a crane pull a monster
Speaker 1: out of the earth. Tea day came. They tried to
Speaker 1: maneuver the crane out over the muck, and the crane
Speaker 1: couldn't do it. The seventeen tons of machinery couldn't get
Speaker 1: into position over a bottom that was equal parts water
Speaker 1: and quicksand they kept trying. On the third of Novae, remember,
Speaker 1: the bearings on the crane burned out and the whole
Speaker 1: operation ground to a halt. The lake had now defeated
Speaker 1: chicken wire, professional trappers, a diver, a sea turtle, a harpoon,
Speaker 1: and a seventeen ton crane. Every tool Gail Harris and
Speaker 1: the entire town of Churubusco could throw at that seven
Speaker 1: acres of water, the water had thrown right back, and
Speaker 1: it was about to take its real prize, which was
Speaker 1: never going to be the turtle. It was going to
Speaker 1: be Gail Harris himself. On the twentieth of November, Harris
Speaker 1: was hospitalized with appendicitis. He'd been out in the cold
Speaker 1: and the mud for months, running on obsession and not
Speaker 1: much else, and his body finally quit on him. He
Speaker 1: nearly died. He said so himself years later in an
Speaker 1: interview given in nineteen seventy one, more than two decades
Speaker 1: after the fact. He said that when he came out
Speaker 1: of the hospital, that was it. He was done. He
Speaker 1: said it was lying up there on the verge of
Speaker 1: death that made up his mind that the whole thing
Speaker 1: had to stop. There's no romance in that quote. There's
Speaker 1: no monster in it. It's a man telling you plainly
Speaker 1: that it took nearly dying for him to let go
Speaker 1: of a turtle. Except he didn't quite let go, not yet,
Speaker 1: because that's not how obsession works. And Gail Harris is
Speaker 1: the textbook case. By the nineteenth of December, recovered enough
Speaker 1: to be on his feet, he was back.
Speaker 2: Out at the lake.
Speaker 1: By then, the remaining water had frozen over, and Harris
Speaker 1: was out there looking for a hole in the ice,
Speaker 1: still thinking about where the turtle might be, hibernating in
Speaker 1: the mud underneath, still turning it over. The man who
Speaker 1: nearly died chasing this thing was back on the ice
Speaker 1: within a month, looking, and then the lake delivered its
Speaker 1: final answer, and it was almost merciful in a cruel way.
Speaker 1: On the fifth of January nineteen fifty, the dam they'd
Speaker 1: built to hold the drained water back from refilling the
Speaker 1: lake gave way. It broke, and everything they'd put into
Speaker 1: that bowl over the long months of the hunt, the pipes,
Speaker 1: the boats, the traps, the trap all of it got
Speaker 1: swept back in as the water came roaring home. Months
Speaker 1: of draining undone, in a moment, the pond simply refilled
Speaker 1: itself and reclaimed every tool that had been used against it.
Speaker 1: Then the rains came that winter and spring and topped
Speaker 1: it back off to where it had always been, seven
Speaker 1: acres of dark water, exactly as if none of it
Speaker 1: had ever happened, exactly as if no crane had ever
Speaker 1: stood on its shore and no diver had ever sunk
Speaker 1: into its mud. And while all of that played out
Speaker 1: at the lake, the thing nobody put in the newspapers
Speaker 1: was happening back at the house. Gail Harris had a wife, Helen,
Speaker 1: and a son, Vaughan, the boy who, by his father's
Speaker 1: own account, had given the turtle its name. A farm
Speaker 1: is not a hobby. It's the thing that feeds the family,
Speaker 1: and it needs you every single day. The animals and
Speaker 1: the fields and the fences and the hundred small jobs
Speaker 1: that don't wait on a man's mood. For the better
Speaker 1: part of a year. Gail Harris wasn't doing those jobs
Speaker 1: at the lake. He was building periscopes out of pipe
Speaker 1: and arguing with crane operators and standing in cold mud
Speaker 1: at midnight with a spotlight while the work that actually
Speaker 1: paid the bills went undone. You can chase a monster
Speaker 1: or you can run a farm. You can't do both,
Speaker 1: and Harris chose the monster week after week until there
Speaker 1: wasn't enough farm left to save. The money that should
Speaker 1: have bought seed and feed went into pumps and trappers
Speaker 1: and a sea turtle. By the time he finally quit,
Speaker 1: there was nothing waiting to go back to. The farm
Speaker 1: didn't fail because of bad weather or a bad market.
Speaker 1: It failed because the man who was supposed to run
Speaker 1: it spent the year looking into the water instead.
Speaker 2: That was the end. Harris's health was wrecked.
Speaker 1: His money was gone, All of it poured into pumps
Speaker 1: and cranes and trappers and a sea turtle's plane ticket,
Speaker 1: while his actual farm, the thing that was supposed to
Speaker 1: feed his family, sat neglected because every waking hour for
Speaker 1: the better part of a year had gone into the lake.
Speaker 1: In all tu Gust of nineteen fifty the Harris family
Speaker 1: sold the farm. They sold the land, the buildings, the turtle, traps,
Speaker 1: and the lake itself, and they left Gail Harris walked
Speaker 1: away from the property that had made him famous, broke
Speaker 1: and beaten, having proved exactly nothing, with his name attached
Speaker 1: forever to a creature he could never produce. I think
Speaker 1: that's the real heart of this whole episode, and it's
Speaker 1: got nothing to do with cryptozoology. A man got called
Speaker 1: a liar, and rather than let it go, rather than
Speaker 1: shrug and move on the way most of us would,
Speaker 1: he set out to prove the doubters wrong, and the
Speaker 1: proving consumed his health, his savings, and his land. He
Speaker 1: didn't lose to the turtle. There may not have been
Speaker 1: a turtle. He lost to the need to be believed.
Speaker 1: That's a human story, and it's older than any monster,
Speaker 1: and you can find a version of it in every
Speaker 1: town in this country if you look. The thing in
Speaker 1: the lake was just the shape this particular man's pride
Speaker 1: decided to take. So what was actually in that pond?
Speaker 1: Start with the biology, because biology doesn't care about a
Speaker 1: slow news week. There are two turtles you could reasonably
Speaker 1: blame for this. The first is the common snapping turtle,
Speaker 1: the one actually native to Indiana, the one you genuinely
Speaker 1: find in a place like Folk Lake. A common snapper
Speaker 1: is a mean, prehistoric looking animal, and a big one
Speaker 1: is impressive. But let's talk real numbers. A common snapping
Speaker 1: turtle tops out with a shell around eighteen to twenty
Speaker 1: inches and an average weight in the range of thirty
Speaker 1: five to fifty five pounds, and the largest ones ever
Speaker 1: recorded in the wild come in around seventy five pounds,
Speaker 1: not four hundred, not five hundred.
Speaker 2: A seventy five.
Speaker 1: Pounds snapper is a genuinely large, genuinely dangerous animal, and
Speaker 1: if one bit you, it could take a finger. But
Speaker 1: it is not the size of a kitchen table, and
Speaker 1: it does not surface like a submarine. The second suspect
Speaker 1: is the alligator snapping turtle, and this is the interesting
Speaker 1: one because this is where the descriptions actually start to fit.
Speaker 1: The alligator snapper is the largest freshwater turtle in North America.
Speaker 1: It's a monster compared to its common cousin, a heavy, ridged, spiked,
Speaker 1: shelled thing that looks like it crawled out of the Cretaceous.
Speaker 1: The witnesses remember described a shell that was spiked ridged,
Speaker 1: and that detail matters because a common snapper shell is
Speaker 1: fairly smooth with age, but an alligator snapper shell has
Speaker 1: those three pronounced keels running down it, those spikes, so
Speaker 1: the description points at an alligator snapper. The problem is range.
Speaker 1: Alligator snappers live in the South, in the Mississippi drainage,
Speaker 1: down where those Tennessee trappers came from. They are not
Speaker 1: native to northern Indiana. The far southern tip of Indiana
Speaker 1: might brush their range, maybe, but Whitley County up by
Speaker 1: Fort Wayne is well outside it. So if there was
Speaker 1: a genuinely big spike shelled turtle in Folk Lake, the
Speaker 1: most likely explanation isn't a native monster that grew to
Speaker 1: impossible size. It's a relief least exotic. Somebody at some
Speaker 1: point could have dumped an alligator snapper into that pond,
Speaker 1: a pet that got too big, an oddity somebody brought
Speaker 1: back from down south and turned loose. It happens constantly
Speaker 1: even today. People release things they shouldn't into water that
Speaker 1: isn't theirs. An alligator snapper that got dropped into Folk
Speaker 1: Lake could have lived there quietly for years, big enough
Speaker 1: to startle two fishermen, big enough to fight a gaff hook,
Speaker 1: big enough to be real, just not four hundred pounds.
Speaker 1: Even the biggest verified alligator snappers run in the neighborhood
Speaker 1: of a couple hundred pounds at the absolute extreme, and
Speaker 1: most are far smaller. The four hundred and five hundred
Speaker 1: pound numbers are fear talking, not measurement. And that's the
Speaker 1: last piece, the human piece, the one that explains how
Speaker 1: a seventy five pound animal becomes a five hundred pound legend.
Speaker 1: People are terrible at judging the size of things that
Speaker 1: scare them, and they are especially terrible atjudging the size
Speaker 1: of animals and water. There's a herpetologist I came across
Speaker 1: in the research, a man who studies exactly these animals
Speaker 1: in exactly this region, and he made the point cleanly.
Speaker 1: He said it's common for people to badly overestimate a
Speaker 1: reptile size, particularly if they're afraid of it. He said
Speaker 1: he's gotten calls from people swearing they'd caught one hundred
Speaker 1: pound turtle, and when he actually put it on a scale,
Speaker 1: it was a perfectly ordinary thirty pound adult. Thirty pounds
Speaker 1: felt like one hundred to a frightened person holding it.
Speaker 1: Now take that and put it in dark water you
Speaker 1: can't see into. And add a head breaking the surface
Speaker 1: and waves rolling off it. And add two men already
Speaker 1: inclined to embellish, and add a town prime to repeat it,
Speaker 1: and add a national press cord desperate to make it bigger,
Speaker 1: and at a farmer who needs it to be real
Speaker 1: so he isn't a liar. By the time all of
Speaker 1: those multipliers stack up, a thirty or seventy pound turtle
Speaker 1: is a four hundred pound.
Speaker 2: Beast the size of a car.
Speaker 1: And everybody telling you so is telling you the truth
Speaker 1: as they experienced it. That's the thing about this kind
Speaker 1: of legend. Nobody has to be lying for it to
Speaker 1: be completely wrong. So that's my verdict, and I'll say
Speaker 1: it the way i'd say it under oath. There was
Speaker 1: probably a turtle, a real one big for Indiana, possibly
Speaker 1: an alligator snapper that didn't belong there, dropped into a
Speaker 1: pond by some long forgotten hand. It startled some fishermen,
Speaker 1: It fought a hook, It was real enough to leave
Speaker 1: a heavy weight on the end of a line, and
Speaker 1: then fear reputation, the press and one man's wounded pride
Speaker 1: inflated it into something that could never have fit in
Speaker 1: seven acres of water. The Beast of Busco was real
Speaker 1: and the Beast of Busco was impossible, both at once,
Speaker 1: and the gap between those two is where the whole
Speaker 1: legend lives now. Even the name is a fight, which
Speaker 1: I love because it shows you how a legend doesn't
Speaker 1: even have a stable core. It's contested all the way down.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. Most people will tell you the turtle
Speaker 1: was named Oscar after Oscar Fulk, the eighteen ninety eight farmer,
Speaker 1: the original witness, And that's the clean version everybody likes.
Speaker 1: But it's not the only version. There was a local
Speaker 1: man who claimed the name actually honored a Churubusco realtor
Speaker 1: named Oscar is Say, a claim that I Say's own
Speaker 1: brother flatly denied. Other folks insisted that Oscar was just
Speaker 1: a generic name people in that area gave to any
Speaker 1: turtle the way you might call any old farm dog rover.
Speaker 1: And Gail Harris himself said none of those were right,
Speaker 1: that his son Vaughan was the one who picked the name.
Speaker 1: Four different origin stories for a single nickname, and no
Speaker 1: way to settle it. If the town can't even agree
Speaker 1: on what they called the thing, you can imagine how
Speaker 1: solid the rest of the details are what happened to
Speaker 1: Oscar In the end. The believers have answers, and the
Speaker 1: answers are wonderful, and none of them can be checked.
Speaker 1: Harris himself, after he'd given up, came to believe that
Speaker 1: Oscar had escaped, that the turtle had slipped out a
Speaker 1: folk lake, through some underground river into a different lake entirely,
Speaker 1: a theory, he said, was suggested to him by some
Speaker 1: men from Zoos an underground river a secret turtle subway
Speaker 1: leading out of a seven acre Indiana pond. Other people
Speaker 1: figured Oscar had buried himself in the deep mud at
Speaker 1: the bottom when the draining started going into a kind
Speaker 1: of stasis, hiding out the whole catastrophe under the muck.
Speaker 1: Rusty Red, the local turtle expert, the one who'd called
Speaker 1: the original sighting a hoax, allowed that the burying in
Speaker 1: the mud idea was at least possible, but he leaned
Speaker 1: towards something grimmer. He thought that if the turtle was
Speaker 1: down there, the draining probably killed it that it suffocated,
Speaker 1: buried in the bottom, and simply died there, undiscovered, and
Speaker 1: rotted into the sediment of the lake it had made famous.
Speaker 1: And the worst part for anybody who wants to settle
Speaker 1: this once and for all is that nobody's allowed to look,
Speaker 1: since every owner of that land after Harris has refused
Speaker 1: to let anyone search the lake. So the answer, whatever
Speaker 1: it is, the bones or the empty mud, is still
Speaker 1: sitting under that water, two miles out on Madden Road,
Speaker 1: and the people who own it have decided they'd rather
Speaker 1: keep the mystery than kill it. There's a footnote too
Speaker 1: that I can't leave out because it tickles me. In
Speaker 1: July of nineteen fifty, the very next summer, after the
Speaker 1: whole Churubusco circus had finally died down, somebody reported another
Speaker 1: giant turtle in Indiana, this one in a swamp at
Speaker 1: a place called Black Oak, about one hundred miles away
Speaker 1: from Fulk Lake. A second giant turtle one state, one
Speaker 1: year apart, which tells you something about how these things spread.
Speaker 1: Once the country had learned that a giant turtle could
Speaker 1: make a town famous, the country started finding giant turtles.
Speaker 1: That's not how animals work, that's how stories work. The
Speaker 1: lake itself never changed, and that might be the eerious
Speaker 1: part of the whole thing. A few years back, the
Speaker 1: property that holds Folk Lake went up for sale, listed
Speaker 1: for around a million dollars a piece of Indiana folklore
Speaker 1: you could actually buy. People still pull their cars onto
Speaker 1: the shoulder of that road to look at it. You
Speaker 1: can't get onto the water, the owners have kept it
Speaker 1: closed off to the public. But you can stand at
Speaker 1: the edge of the road and look at the dark
Speaker 1: algae skin surface of the pond that started all of this.
Speaker 1: And the people who do it come away saying the
Speaker 1: same thing every time, that the water gives you nothing,
Speaker 1: that it's stained and still, and you can't see down
Speaker 1: into it at all, and that standing there with the
Speaker 1: legend already in your head, your imagination starts filling in
Speaker 1: the dark on its own, which is when you stop
Speaker 1: and think about it exactly how this whole thing began.
Speaker 1: Two men looked at water they couldn't see into, and
Speaker 1: their minds supplied a monster. Seventy some years later, people
Speaker 1: are still standing at the same pond doing the same thing.
Speaker 1: The lake hasn't changed, Neither have we But here's the turn,
Speaker 1: and it's the part that makes Churubusco different from almost
Speaker 1: every other stop on this whole road trip, because at
Speaker 1: most of these places, the legend is something the town
Speaker 1: tolerates or exploits a little or is faintly embarrassed by.
Speaker 1: Cherubusco did the opposite. Cherubusco took the monster that wrecked
Speaker 1: Gale Harris and turned it into the best thing that
Speaker 1: ever happened to the town. In nineteen fifty, the same
Speaker 1: year Harris sold his farm and slunk off broke, the
Speaker 1: town held its very first Turtle Days festival, and they've
Speaker 1: held it every single year since. Every June, going on
Speaker 1: three quarters of a century now, Cherubusco throws a party
Speaker 1: for the turtle they never caught.
Speaker 2: There's a parade. There are turtle races where.
Speaker 1: People bring actual turtles and let them crawl toward a
Speaker 1: finish line. There's a fish fry, there's a carnival, there's
Speaker 1: a crowning of Miss Turtle Days. There's a pie eating
Speaker 1: con test, and a five k race and a poker run.
Speaker 1: People bring their pet turtles and let them hang out
Speaker 1: together for the afternoon. The whole town leans all the
Speaker 1: way into the thing that almost broke one of its own.
Speaker 1: And somehow that's not grim. It's kind of beautiful because
Speaker 1: the town turned a story about obsession and loss into
Speaker 1: an annual reason to come together. They call themselves Turtletown USA.
Speaker 1: Now they put it on the welcome signs. That fifteen
Speaker 1: foot grinning green turtle I mentioned at the top, the
Speaker 1: one standing guard where US thirty three comes into town.
Speaker 1: That's no accident, and it's no joke to them, that
Speaker 1: civic identity cast in concrete and fiberglass. There's a smaller
Speaker 1: concrete turtle parked right at the main intersection Downtown, Turtles
Speaker 1: in the shop windows, Turtles on the water tower, mentality,
Speaker 1: The whole place built around the mascot. And there's a
Speaker 1: history center started by two men named Chuck, Chuck Jones
Speaker 1: and Chuck Mathew, both of whom around when it all happened.
Speaker 1: Chuck Jones was eleven years old in nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: a kid who biked out to that lake and fished
Speaker 1: it himself and never once saw the turtle, and who
Speaker 1: remembers most of all just how unbelievably mucky the water was.
Speaker 2: They keep the relics.
Speaker 1: They've got one of the spotlights from the hunt, the
Speaker 1: one they'll plug in for a second to blind you with.
Speaker 1: They've got a piece of the broken net that was
Speaker 1: supposed to catch Oscar and didn't. They've got one of
Speaker 1: the hoops they devised to trap him that also didn't.
Speaker 1: They've got the underwater light the diver used down in
Speaker 1: the mud, the actual physical leftovers of a year of
Speaker 1: failure displayed with real affection. Over in the Whitley County Museum,
Speaker 1: there's more of the dive gear, and in a restaurant
Speaker 1: in Decatur, Indiana, of all places, there's a turtle shell
Speaker 1: hanging on the wall labeled as the Beast of Busco,
Speaker 1: which it almost certainly is not, but which serves the
Speaker 1: legend just fine. There's even a stage comedy, a play
Speaker 1: called Turtle Soup that a Fort Wayne Wright, that are
Speaker 1: built out of the whole episode, with Gail Harris and
Speaker 1: Helen Harris and Vaughan and Ora Blue and Charlie Wilson
Speaker 1: and the Diver all up there as characters. The Hunt
Speaker 1: turned into theater for the people whose grandparents lived it.
Speaker 1: I asked myself, standing in front of that grinning fifteen
Speaker 1: foot turtle. Why this one lands so differently from the others,
Speaker 1: And I think it's because Oscar was never a threat.
Speaker 1: The thing in the woods up north.
Speaker 2: Is a predator.
Speaker 1: People are scared of it, and being scared of it
Speaker 1: is part of why they believe in it. But a turtle,
Speaker 1: even a giant one, even a four hundred pound one,
Speaker 1: isn't going to come up on your porch. There were
Speaker 1: never any missing swimmers at Folk Lake, no drowned livestock,
Speaker 1: no maulings, no bodies. The beast of Busco never hurt anybody.
Speaker 1: The only person that ever destroyed was the one man
Speaker 1: who couldn't stop hunting it, so the town was free
Speaker 1: to love it. You can't put a man eater on
Speaker 1: your welcome sign, but a giant, friendly turtle that made
Speaker 1: you famous and never harmed, a soul that you can
Speaker 1: build a festival around, that you can paint green and
Speaker 1: stand at the edge of town, that you can hand
Speaker 1: down to your kids. One of the chucks said, the
Speaker 1: thing that I keep coming back to the line that
Speaker 1: I think is the truest thing anybody's ever said about
Speaker 1: this case. He said, they never found Oscar, but it's
Speaker 1: kind of nice because it keeps the story alive.
Speaker 2: And that's it.
Speaker 1: That's the whole secret of Churubusco. The not finding is
Speaker 1: the point. If Gail Harris had ever hauled a four
Speaker 1: hundred pound turtle up out of that mud, it would
Speaker 1: have been a great day and a forgotten one. It
Speaker 1: would have been a stuffed exhibit in a museum and
Speaker 1: a paragraph in a book, settled finished dead. Because he
Speaker 1: never found it. Because the crane burned out and the
Speaker 1: dam broke, and the rains came, and the lake kept
Speaker 1: its secret, the turtle got to stay a beast forever.
Speaker 1: The failure is what made the legend. The mystery survived
Speaker 1: precisely because it was never solved.
Speaker 2: I started this.
Speaker 1: Episode telling you I don't believe a four hundred pound
Speaker 1: turtle lived in that pond, and I'll end it the
Speaker 1: same way, because nothing I found changed my mind on
Speaker 1: the animal. The biology won't allow it, the evidence won't
Speaker 1: support it. Two hundred and ninety nine photographs and not
Speaker 1: one turtle, a lost film, a leaking diver's helmet, a
Speaker 1: drained lake that gave up nothing but a broken crane
Speaker 1: and a busted dam. By every standard I'd apply to
Speaker 1: any other case, the Beast of Busco fails to clear
Speaker 1: the bar. But belief isn't really the question this place
Speaker 1: asks you, and that's what makes it worth the drive.
Speaker 1: Churubusco isn't asking you to believe in a turtle. It's
Speaker 1: showing you what a town does with a story. It
Speaker 1: loves how a place can take a year of one
Speaker 1: man's obsession and grief and turn it into something the
Speaker 1: whole community celebrates every June with pie and a parade.
Speaker 1: Gail Harris went to his grave, having lost his farm
Speaker 1: and his money and nearly his life over a creature
Speaker 1: he couldn't produce, And the town he embarrassed himself in
Speaker 1: front of decided after he was gone, to make him
Speaker 1: a kind of found figure, to name themselves after his monster,
Speaker 1: to keep the spotlight and the broken net in a
Speaker 1: place of honor. Whatever was or wasn't down in that mud.
Speaker 1: The obsession was real, and the town made the obsession
Speaker 1: into something gentle and permanent, And there's a strange grace
Speaker 1: in that. So that's Indiana. That's the Beast of Busco.
Speaker 1: A turtle that was probably real and definitely impossible. A
Speaker 1: farmer who'd rather drain a lake than be called a liar,
Speaker 1: a town that turned its monster into its mascot and
Speaker 1: never looked back. The lake is still out there off
Speaker 1: Madden Road, dark in private and full of mud, and
Speaker 1: the owners still won't let anybody look. And somewhere under
Speaker 1: that water is either an old turtle's bones or nothing
Speaker 1: at all. And the people of Churubusco would I think
Speaker 1: prefer you never found out which next stop on the
Speaker 1: backwoods cryptid road trip we get back to the deep woods,
Speaker 1: and I promise you the thing we're hunting there is
Speaker 1: a lot less interested in being your mascot, your eyes
Speaker 1: on the tree line. I'm glad you wrote along. If
Speaker 1: you've got a siding, a story, or a stop you
Speaker 1: want me to add to the map, reach me at
Speaker 1: Brian at Paranormalworldproductions dot com. Until next time, take care
Speaker 1: of yourself and always keep your eye on the water.
Speaker 2: Dit