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: We've been on this road a long time now, and
Speaker 1: if you've been riding along with me through the backwoods
Speaker 1: of this country, you know how this works. By now,
Speaker 1: we pick a state, we pick a stretch of woods,
Speaker 1: and we go looking for the thing that lives in
Speaker 1: the stories people tell there. Some of those stops have
Speaker 1: been swamp country, some of them have been mountain country.
Speaker 1: This one is river country, and river country has its
Speaker 1: own rules. Missouri is state number twenty five for us,
Speaker 1: the halfway mark of this road trip. Twenty five states
Speaker 1: behind us and twenty five still ahead of us. Half
Speaker 1: the country's worth of back roads and bad smells and
Speaker 1: people who saw something they can't explain, and we're only
Speaker 1: now standing at the turn. The highway drops down out
Speaker 1: of the farmland and starts to bend the way the
Speaker 1: water bends, and the bluffs come up on the side
Speaker 1: of the road like a wall somebody built and then
Speaker 1: walked away from. This isn't the Missouri that people picture
Speaker 1: when they think of Missouri. There's no flat corn horizon here,
Speaker 1: no long clean view. Northeast Missouri along the Mississippi is
Speaker 1: folded and wooded and cut through with creeks that run
Speaker 1: down out of the hills and go quiet in the summer,
Speaker 1: and the timber is thick enough that a man standing
Speaker 1: forty yards off the road can watch you go by
Speaker 1: and you'll never know he was there. The town we're
Speaker 1: stopping in is called Louisiana, not the state, the town.
Speaker 1: It sits on the west bank of the Mississippi in
Speaker 1: Pike County, about twenty five miles down the river from Hannibal,
Speaker 1: which is the town Mark Twain made famous. Louisiana never
Speaker 1: got that kind of famous. What Louisiana got was one
Speaker 1: summer and one hill and a name that stuck to
Speaker 1: it for more than fifty years. The hill is called
Speaker 1: Marsof Hill, though most of the younger people in town
Speaker 1: now call it Star Hill, and the name change tells
Speaker 1: you something about how a place tries to move on.
Speaker 1: Marsof Hill runs along the western edge of the town
Speaker 1: like a spine. There's a water reservoir up on top
Speaker 1: of it, a big one holding something like a million
Speaker 1: and a half gallons, And in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two, the neighborhood kids played up there the way
Speaker 1: neighborhood kids play everywhere, throwing rocks at things that made
Speaker 1: a noise when you hit them. At the foot of
Speaker 1: that hill, on Allen Street, there was a house with
Speaker 1: a family in it, and on the afternoon of July eleventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, two little boys were playing in the
Speaker 1: backyard of that house with the family dog. That's where
Speaker 1: this one starts. The kids saw it first, and that
Speaker 1: matters more than most people give it credit for. I
Speaker 1: spent sixteen years in law enforcement, taking statements from every
Speaker 1: kind of person there is, and children are a strange
Speaker 1: kind of witness. They're terrible with time, they're terrible with distance.
Speaker 1: They will tell you something was as big as a
Speaker 1: house when it was as big as a refrigerator. But
Speaker 1: children are also the worst liars in the world when
Speaker 1: they're actually frightened, because a frightened child doesn't construct. A
Speaker 1: frightened child reports, and the report comes out sideways and
Speaker 1: messy and full of the wrong details. And that mess
Speaker 1: is exactly what makes it worth listening to. The town
Speaker 1: of Louisiana laughed at the kids for about a day
Speaker 1: and a half. Then the adults started seeing it too.
Speaker 1: This didn't come out of nowhere, And the people who
Speaker 1: tell you this story as a bolt from the blue
Speaker 1: are skipping the part I find most interesting. Northeast Missouri
Speaker 1: had quiet talk about something in the timber going back decades.
Speaker 1: There are references in the older accounts to reports around
Speaker 1: Louisiana in the middle nineteen forties, and what survives of
Speaker 1: them is thin. What we have is mostly recollection collected
Speaker 1: later people saying that their parents or their neighbors had
Speaker 1: talked about a big, hairy thing along the river. Before
Speaker 1: the war and just after it. That's not documentation. That's
Speaker 1: oral history. And oral history is a real thing that
Speaker 1: historians use, but it isn't the same animal as a
Speaker 1: police report, and it doesn't get to wear the same clothes. Still,
Speaker 1: when a thing shows up in a town's mouth thirty
Speaker 1: years for it shows up in the newspaper, that's a
Speaker 1: pattern worth noticing, because towns tend to invent their monsters
Speaker 1: after the newspapers arrive, not before. The first account with
Speaker 1: real names attached to it comes from the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one, and it happened north of town. Two women,
Speaker 1: Joon Mills and Mary Ryan, were driving back towards Saint
Speaker 1: Louis on Highway seventy nine, which is the road that
Speaker 1: runs along the river and through some of the prettiest
Speaker 1: and loneliest country in that part.
Speaker 2: Of the state.
Speaker 1: They stopped to eat. That's the whole beginning of it.
Speaker 1: Two women pulled off the highway at a wooded spot
Speaker 1: to have a picnic lunch on a summer day, the
Speaker 1: most ordinary thing two people can do. According to the
Speaker 1: account kept by the local Historical Society in Louisiana, and
Speaker 1: according to the newspaper coverage that followed. They started hearing
Speaker 1: something out of the trees. They didn't call it a
Speaker 1: roar or a growl or a scream. They called it gurgling.
Speaker 1: And it was coming from the timber a few yards
Speaker 1: off from where they were sitting with their lung lunch.
Speaker 1: Then it came out of the woods, and the description
Speaker 1: they gave was half ape and half man, dark upright
Speaker 1: somewhere around six feet, though estimates in these accounts drift
Speaker 1: around the way estimates always do. And with it came
Speaker 1: the smell, the one that's going to follow this entire story,
Speaker 1: like a dog following a truck. The women got into
Speaker 1: their car and locked the doors, and the thing came
Speaker 1: in close, close enough that the distance in the retelling
Speaker 1: gets measured in a few paces rather than a few yards.
Speaker 1: And then it did the single most animal thing in
Speaker 1: the entire account, the detail that always stops me.
Speaker 2: It went for the food.
Speaker 1: Their lunch was still sitting out where they had left it,
Speaker 1: and by the accounts that survived, the creature helped itself
Speaker 1: and then went back into the trees.
Speaker 2: There's a version of this story where.
Speaker 1: The monster menaces two women on a Lonely Highway, and
Speaker 1: that's the whole point. And that version is a campfire story.
Speaker 1: The version where it eats the sandwiches is a different
Speaker 1: kind of story. A thing that raids a picnic isn't
Speaker 1: a nightmare. A thing that raids a picnic is hungry,
Speaker 1: and hunger is a very ordinary motive, and ordinary motives
Speaker 1: are what real animals have. I don't know what Joan
Speaker 1: Mills and Mary Ryan saw. I wasn't there, and neither
Speaker 1: was anybody else with a camera. What I know is
Speaker 1: that the account entered the record a full year before
Speaker 1: the town of Louisiana had any reason to be primed
Speaker 1: for it, which means when the thing on Marsov Hill
Speaker 1: showed up the following July, it didn't arrive as a
Speaker 1: brand new idea. It arrived as a second data point.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen seventy two, the second data point came
Speaker 1: from a fifteen year old girl standing at a bathroom window.
Speaker 1: On the afternoon of Tuesday, July eleventh, nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 1: Both parents were at work. Edgar Harrison was at the
Speaker 1: Department of Public Works, where he'd put in twenty one years,
Speaker 1: and Betty was down at the cafe the family ran
Speaker 1: on Main Street. Doris was home minding her brother. She
Speaker 1: was fifteen, Terry was eight, and Wally was five, and
Speaker 1: the house was at ten o four Allen Street, right
Speaker 1: at the bottom of mars Off Hill. Doris was cleaning
Speaker 1: the bathroom sink. The boys were out back with the
Speaker 1: family dog, a dog they called Chubby. The back of
Speaker 1: that yard runs right up into the timber at the
Speaker 1: base of the hill, so there's no real line between
Speaker 1: the mode grass and the woods, just the place where
Speaker 1: one stops being one and starts being the other. Sometime
Speaker 1: around half past three, Terry started screaming. Doris told the
Speaker 1: Saint Louis Post Dispatch that Terry and Wally Paul were
Speaker 1: out in the back with Chubby when she heard Terry
Speaker 1: start screaming, and that she looked out the bathroom window
Speaker 1: and saw it and started crying and ran into the
Speaker 1: other room to call her mother on the telephone, and
Speaker 1: then her parents came home. What she saw was standing
Speaker 1: right by a tree, six or seven feet tall, black
Speaker 1: and hairy, and she said it stood like a man,
Speaker 1: but that it didn't look like one to her. Both
Speaker 1: Doris and Terry got a look at it and both
Speaker 1: of them said the same thing about the head, which
Speaker 1: was that they couldn't see a face because hair covered
Speaker 1: the whole animal from the crown down. It didn't appear
Speaker 1: to have a neck. The head sat directly on the shoulders,
Speaker 1: and I believe that's where the pumpkin description in the
Speaker 1: later coverage comes from. Some accounts add glowing orange eyes,
Speaker 1: and the eyes are the piece that moves around, depending
Speaker 1: on which witness is talking and what year they were talking,
Speaker 1: in running orange in some teilings and red or green
Speaker 1: in others. It was carrying something under one arm, a
Speaker 1: dead dog, by every account, and the hair of the
Speaker 1: creature was flecked with blood from whatever it was holding.
Speaker 1: The dead dog and the family dog are two different animals,
Speaker 1: and nearly every short version of this case runs them together.
Speaker 1: Chubby was the Harrison's dog, and he was out in
Speaker 1: that yard with those two boys, and he came back.
Speaker 1: Whatever the creature was carrying was some other dog, and
Speaker 1: that dog was never identified and never recovered. Nobody in
Speaker 1: Louisiana produced a carcass, and no owner ever came forward
Speaker 1: to claim one. What happened to Chubby after the incident
Speaker 1: is that he got sick. His eyes went bloodshot, and
Speaker 1: he started vomiting violently, and by the accounts, he stayed
Speaker 1: that way for hours before he came around, and what
Speaker 1: finally settled him was a meal of bread and milk.
Speaker 1: There's a long standing assumption in the reporting that the
Speaker 1: smell was what did it to him, And my own
Speaker 1: view is that a badly frightened dog can present the
Speaker 1: same way, and that both of those roads lead back
Speaker 1: to the same place, which is that something was in
Speaker 1: that yard. Edgar Harrison got home around four. He didn't
Speaker 1: find a monster. What he found was brush beaten down
Speaker 1: where his children said the thing had been standing, faint
Speaker 1: footprints in the dust, and black hair stuck to some twigs.
Speaker 1: Then he told his kids it was probably a hobo
Speaker 1: who had already moved on. That's the part I keep
Speaker 1: coming back to, because it's the last ordinary thing anybody
Speaker 1: in that family got to say about it. It didn't
Speaker 1: stay contained to that one yard. That same afternoon, a
Speaker 1: woman who lived a few blocks from the Harrisons, listed
Speaker 1: in the papers of that era as Missus Clarence Lee,
Speaker 1: reported animal sounds outside her house. She never claimed to
Speaker 1: see anything. What she reported was a creature carrying on
Speaker 1: something terrible somewhere off toward the hill. And not long
Speaker 1: after that she reportedly spoke with a local farmer whose
Speaker 1: dog had gone missing. Missing dogs run all the way
Speaker 1: through this case, and they come back in a serious way.
Speaker 2: About a week later.
Speaker 1: The next Friday was July fourteenth. Edgar was hosting the
Speaker 1: regular Pentecostal prayer meeting at the house, and this was
Speaker 1: not four people in a living room. By the accounts
Speaker 1: of the time. There were something like fifty people there
Speaker 1: that evening. Around half past eight. The meeting broke up
Speaker 1: and most of the congregation started for home. Edgar and
Speaker 1: about a dozen of them stayed outside talking. Betty and
Speaker 1: the children were in the house. That's when the fireballs
Speaker 1: came over the hill. Lauren Coleman, who has done as
Speaker 1: much careful war on American monster cases as anybody alive,
Speaker 1: preserved the account. Two objects came over Marsov Hill and
Speaker 1: dropped down into the trees behind an abandoned school across
Speaker 1: the street. They came about five minutes apart, and the
Speaker 1: first one was white and the second one was green.
Speaker 1: This is the seam in the Momo case where a
Speaker 1: hairy animal story turns into something else, and depending on
Speaker 1: which investigator you follow, it's either the most important part
Speaker 1: of the file or the thing that ruined it. About
Speaker 1: a quarter past nine, Edgar heard a ringing off the
Speaker 1: top of the hill, the sound rocks make hitting a
Speaker 1: metal water reservoir. That tank holds a million and a
Speaker 1: half gallons, and neighborhood kids were up around it constantly.
Speaker 1: After one especially loud ring, he heard a growl. In
Speaker 1: his own words, it got louder and louder and kept
Speaker 1: coming closer. He wanted to find out what was making
Speaker 1: the noise, so he and his family hopped in the
Speaker 1: car and drove down Allen Street and across Town Branch,
Speaker 1: which is the creek that cuts through that part of town,
Speaker 1: and he stopped the car. By then the noise had
Speaker 1: pulled people out of their houses all down that street.
Speaker 1: Edgar put the number at forty. Some of them were
Speaker 1: carrying guns. Some of them were headed up toward the
Speaker 1: reservoir to see for themselves. Then somebody yelled that here
Speaker 1: it comes. In Edgar's version, his wife and children shouted
Speaker 1: it from the car to the people in the street.
Speaker 1: In the version that ran in the local paper, it
Speaker 1: was one of the neighbors who yelled it either way.
Speaker 1: Forty people turned around and ran back down Allen Street
Speaker 1: in the dark. Police officers Jerry Floyd and John Whittaker
Speaker 1: came out to the house, searched the residence and the
Speaker 1: area around it, and found nothing. Edgar and Betty gave
Speaker 1: the Post Dispatch a planer account. They were having their
Speaker 1: regular church meeting when they all heard it, a loud
Speaker 1: growling noise three separate times, and then a sound like
Speaker 1: the thing was hurt, a large yelp. Betty said it
Speaker 1: sounded like a gorilla. Then she went further than her
Speaker 1: husband ever did and named it, saying that's what it was,
Speaker 1: a bigfoot, and that she'd heard they had one in
Speaker 1: California and up in Canada.
Speaker 2: That's the moment the.
Speaker 1: Vocabulary arrives in Louisiana, Missouri. Nineteen seventy two is five
Speaker 1: years after the Patterson Gimlin film got into the culture.
Speaker 1: Bigfoot was on television and in paperbacks and in men's
Speaker 1: adventure magazines by then, and Betty Harrison, reaching for the word,
Speaker 1: tells us the frame was sitting there and the town
Speaker 1: knew it. Later that same night, Edgar went up the
Speaker 1: hill with several other men and found the old building,
Speaker 1: a vacant shack with a pile of leaves and debris
Speaker 1: in one corner, and a stench coming out of it
Speaker 1: that the men compared to rotten flesh and to foul,
Speaker 1: stagnant water. Edgar described it as a moldy horse smell
Speaker 1: or a strong garbage smell. The smell runs through this
Speaker 1: whole case. It's in the nineteen seventy one picnic account,
Speaker 1: it's in that shack, it's on the hill during the searches,
Speaker 1: and it's in half the sightings that came after. Of
Speaker 1: everything in the Momo fire, well, the odor is the
Speaker 1: part that stays the same, more than the height, more
Speaker 1: than the eyes, more than anything about the head. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. Betty had had enough. She took the children
Speaker 1: and moved in with Edgar's brother, Vivian Howchins and his wife,
Speaker 1: and told her reporter she'd never go back up there.
Speaker 1: Houchins never saw it. He was fifty six years old,
Speaker 1: and what he got was the odor and the sound.
Speaker 1: He said, the odor was worse than any old goat
Speaker 1: you ever smelled, and then he said the line that
Speaker 1: has stuck with me for years, that the growl was
Speaker 1: like a bear's growl, but that a bear doesn't run
Speaker 1: on two feet. Edgar was doing something I respect and
Speaker 1: would probably not do myself. He hung fish and hamskin
Speaker 1: on a tree behind the house for bait. He tied
Speaker 1: his own dog up on the hill. He sat outside
Speaker 1: in the dark and waited. He eventually took a leave
Speaker 1: of absence from the waterworks and camped at the foot
Speaker 1: of Marsof Hill for twenty one night's running. Nothing took
Speaker 1: the bait. His position, as he gave it to the press,
Speaker 1: was that there was something up there and they hadn't
Speaker 1: found it yet. Around five the next morning, Saturday the fifteenth,
Speaker 1: a Louisiana man named Pat Howard watched something man like
Speaker 1: cross the road near Marsof Hill. He wouldn't go past,
Speaker 1: calling it a dark object running like a man. I'll
Speaker 1: take an unglamorous report like.
Speaker 2: That any day of the week. The man who had.
Speaker 1: To deal with all of it was the Louisiana Chief
Speaker 1: of Police, Shelby Ward. I've been on the other end
Speaker 1: of that radio, so I know what his week looked like.
Speaker 1: By the middle of July, Ward's department was rolling night
Speaker 1: after night on things people had heard, rather than things
Speaker 1: people had seen. That's the worst kind of call a
Speaker 1: small department can catch. There's nothing to process and nothing
Speaker 1: to photograph, nothing to put in a report except a time,
Speaker 1: an address, and the.
Speaker 2: Words the caller used.
Speaker 1: Every one of them still has to be answered, because
Speaker 1: the night of department decides not to roll is the
Speaker 1: night something is actually out there. On Wednesday, the nineteenth
Speaker 1: Ward quit answering calls one at a time and put
Speaker 1: together a posse. Twenty men spread out with walkie talkies,
Speaker 1: and they combed that ridge end to end and made
Speaker 1: three passes up the hill. They found an old dump
Speaker 1: that had been dug up recently, with rubbish strewn around.
Speaker 1: And they found two dog graves that had been opened,
Speaker 1: with the bones scattered. Nobody has ever explained that dogs
Speaker 1: dig sure, and Missouri has never had a shortage of coyotes.
Speaker 1: A man with a shovel and a bad sense of
Speaker 1: humor is never off the table in the middle of
Speaker 1: a monster flap. But that town had just spent a
Speaker 1: week talking about missing dogs and about a creature carrying
Speaker 1: a dead one, and then a search party walked up
Speaker 1: the hill and found two dog graves opened, and I've
Speaker 1: never been able to file that anywhere comfortable.
Speaker 2: Ward told the press.
Speaker 1: They hadn't found a thing, and he hoped that ended it,
Speaker 1: but it didn't end it. Searchers went back over the
Speaker 1: same ground the next day and found trampled brush, signs
Speaker 1: of digging tracks better than ten inches long, and handprints
Speaker 1: pressed into hard, dry soil that the men out there
Speaker 1: figured would have taken enormous pressure to make. They got
Speaker 1: the smell again, close enough that they thought the thing
Speaker 1: was standing right there with them, and they saw nothing around.
Speaker 1: Then Edgar took a Chicago reporter named Richard Crow up
Speaker 1: the hill, and Crow rode up a set of tracks.
Speaker 1: The two of them found together human looking prints, one
Speaker 1: of them ten inches long and five wide, even with
Speaker 1: the heel impression incomplete. There had been no rain in
Speaker 1: ten days, and the two of them figured better than
Speaker 1: two hundred pounds of pressure would have been needed to
Speaker 1: make a print in ground that hard. By the twenty third,
Speaker 1: the Post Dispatch was reporting that police had sealed off
Speaker 1: two hundred acres of woods while about twenty five hunters
Speaker 1: went through it. A good many of them expecting to
Speaker 1: turn up a black bear. Some accounts put one hundred
Speaker 1: armed men on that hill.
Speaker 2: At the peak of it.
Speaker 1: The creature in the town's mouth was getting bigger the
Speaker 1: whole time. It went from six or seven feet to twelve.
Speaker 1: It picked up clawed hands. Its eyes were red in
Speaker 1: one telling, orange in another, green in a third, and
Speaker 1: somebody started a story that the thing had lifted the
Speaker 1: back end of an automobile and dragged it into a ditch.
Speaker 1: Eight days in and the town was producing a tall
Speaker 1: tail rumor was out running report. Ward was worried about
Speaker 1: something more immediate than the record. He said out loud
Speaker 1: that people were going to go up that hill with
Speaker 1: guns looking for this thing, and somebody was going to
Speaker 1: get shot.
Speaker 2: Gus Artists.
Speaker 1: The state conservation agent working with him, said much the same,
Speaker 1: that he hoped it would die down before a bunch
Speaker 1: of adventure seekers overran the place. They were both right
Speaker 1: to worry. That's not a monster problem. That's a Tuesday
Speaker 1: night problem, and it's why law enforcement hates a public
Speaker 1: panic more than almost anything. Ward had an unknown number
Speaker 1: of armed civilians moving through dark timber at night on
Speaker 1: a hill above a town all of them looking for
Speaker 1: a large dark shape, so Ward barricaded the hill. He
Speaker 1: said they'd been up there and were convinced there was
Speaker 1: nothing there. Now he allowed that kids would get up
Speaker 1: there at night anyway, and then he gave his own
Speaker 1: theory of the case that kids making noises was more
Speaker 1: than likely. How the whole thing started. Friday night, July
Speaker 1: twenty first, Elis Minor, sixty three years old, was sitting
Speaker 1: alone in front of his cabin on the River Road
Speaker 1: north of town when his bird dog started to growl.
Speaker 1: Miner got his big hunting flashlight and put the beam
Speaker 1: out toward the road, and it was standing there. He
Speaker 1: told a United Press International reporter he couldn't see its
Speaker 1: eyes or its face because the hair came down about
Speaker 1: to its hind parts. As soon as he threw the
Speaker 1: light on it, it whirled and took off. He didn't
Speaker 1: call the police, He called GUS artists the conservation officer.
Speaker 1: Another sighting from that stretch belongs to Richard Allan Murray,
Speaker 1: chief of the local fire department and a member of
Speaker 1: the city council. Murray reported driving along a creek bed
Speaker 1: and putting his headlights on a large, upright creature he
Speaker 1: had to go to work the next morning. He had
Speaker 1: to sit in meetings with people who'd needle him about
Speaker 1: it for the rest of his life, and he told
Speaker 1: it anyway. Then the investigators arrived. Hayden Hughes ran an
Speaker 1: outfit out of Oklahoma City called the International Unidentified Flying
Speaker 1: Object Bureau, and he came up with an assistant named
Speaker 1: Daniel Garcia. They camped in the Harrison backyard. They took statements.
Speaker 1: They cast the two tracks on Marsov Hill and came
Speaker 1: away impressed. Both impressions are described in the reporting. One
Speaker 1: was about ten inches long and five inches wide. The
Speaker 1: other ran around five inches curved through the middle, with
Speaker 1: three impressions on.
Speaker 2: It that looked like toes.
Speaker 1: The three toad print is a problem. North American Harry
Speaker 1: Hominid reports overwhelmingly describe a five toed foot, and the
Speaker 1: casting record in this field, for all its faults, is
Speaker 1: dominated by five toad prints. Historically, when a three toad
Speaker 1: track turns up in the middle of a flap, it
Speaker 1: has very often turned out to be a man with
Speaker 1: a board and a jigsaw. The cast went to Lawrence Curtis,
Speaker 1: then the director of the Oklahoma City Zoo, and botanical garden,
Speaker 1: a man who had spent his professional life looking at
Speaker 1: the feet of actual large primates. The record splits badly
Speaker 1: on what came back. A number of sources say Curtis
Speaker 1: examined the material and called it a hoax. Others say
Speaker 1: he described the prince as belonging to an unknown primate species.
Speaker 1: Both have been in print for fifty years and I
Speaker 1: can't reconcile them, And anybody who tells this story as
Speaker 1: though the Curtis verdict is settled has gone past what
Speaker 1: the record supports. On the night of Saturday the twenty second,
Speaker 1: Hughes and Garcia camped on the hill hoping to get
Speaker 1: a tape of the growling. Around half past nine that night,
Speaker 1: somebody called the police to report hearing the thing on
Speaker 1: the far side of the hill from where the two
Speaker 1: of them were sitting. They walked over, but they got
Speaker 1: nothing at all. Hugh said afterward that they didn't see
Speaker 1: or smell or hear anything, and then added that from
Speaker 1: the number of reports, he believed something had clearly been sighted.
Speaker 1: Hughes came in convinced Momo fit what he called a
Speaker 1: giant hairy biped, a category he said his organization had
Speaker 1: collected close to three hundred reports of since it opened
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty seven. His first theory was that a
Speaker 1: flying object had left the creature there. Then he softened
Speaker 1: into four possibilities, running from an experimental animal dropped off
Speaker 1: by a craft, to a prehistoric survivor, to an escaped
Speaker 1: zoo primate, to a good old fashioned hoax. On the
Speaker 1: first of August, he held a press conference to say
Speaker 1: that despite finding some hoaxes while interviewing at least twenty people,
Speaker 1: he believed the creature was most likely an unknown form
Speaker 1: of hominid, something along the lines of a Neanderthal that
Speaker 1: never went extinct, and that it needed to be taken
Speaker 1: alive because it would be the greatest anthropological find in history.
Speaker 1: Nothing was ever taken alive or otherwise. On Monday the
Speaker 1: twenty fourth, two farm families out between Louisiana and Bowling
Speaker 1: Green reported a circle of flashing lights that hovered or
Speaker 1: seemed to set down in the distance and stayed about
Speaker 1: five minutes. I've got some complicated feelings about the investigators here.
Speaker 1: Hughes collected statements that would otherwise have evaporated, and men
Speaker 1: like Coleman who came at it from the cryptozoology side
Speaker 1: instead of the flying saucer side, preserved a chronology of
Speaker 1: that July we would not otherwise have. They did the
Speaker 1: field work in the heat on their own money. The
Speaker 1: flying object angle is also where this case lost anybody serious.
Speaker 1: Once an investigation frames a hairy animal as cargo dropped
Speaker 1: off by a spacecraft, it has stopped doing zoology. The
Speaker 1: sober people who might have gone up that hill with
Speaker 1: cameras and casting kits and a little discipline stayed home instead.
Speaker 1: The case got enormous attention and almost no rigor. The
Speaker 1: last piece of the flap came early on the morning
Speaker 1: of August third, northwest of town, at the farm of
Speaker 1: Bill Sutdarth and his wife. They heard a high pitched
Speaker 1: howling in the yard in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: and went out with flashlights, and in the middle of
Speaker 1: their garden they found four large prints. Sutdarth called his
Speaker 1: hunting partner, Clyde Penrod, who came over and cast one.
Speaker 1: What Penrod couldn't work out was that the prince started
Speaker 1: abruptly in the middle of the garden and ended just
Speaker 1: as abruptly twenty feet from anything else, with no trail
Speaker 1: leading in or out. Years later, a woman named Gail
Speaker 1: Sa Darth, who was seven years old that summer, said
Speaker 1: she'd been out picking tomatoes in that garden, bored thinking
Speaker 1: about the monster everybody was talking about, and that she
Speaker 1: drew a big footprint in the soft dirt with her
Speaker 1: own big toe. The accounts differ on the date and
Speaker 1: on the number of prints, so I can't tell you
Speaker 1: those are the same event.
Speaker 2: What I can tell.
Speaker 1: You is that the last piece of physical evidence in
Speaker 1: this case has a grown woman attached to it, saying
Speaker 1: she made one as a child with her toe. The
Speaker 1: name showed up somewhere in the middle of this flap,
Speaker 1: and the name is a big part of why we're
Speaker 1: still talking about it today. In twenty twenty six, the
Speaker 1: press dubbed the thing Momo, short for Missouri monster, and
Speaker 1: they did it as a joke. Nobody in Louisiana used
Speaker 1: the word before the papers did. The family called it
Speaker 1: a monster, Betty called it a bigfoot. Houchens called it
Speaker 1: a thing that smelled worse than a goat. The name
Speaker 1: went national inside of a week. A wire story could
Speaker 1: travel farther in nineteen seventy two than most people remember
Speaker 1: once the Associated Press and United Press International had it.
Speaker 1: That story ran in papers all over the country, and
Speaker 1: the photographs that went with it are the ones still
Speaker 1: in circulation. Men in short sleeves standing on a wooded
Speaker 1: hillside holding rifles and plaster casts. Ports spread with the
Speaker 1: name up and down the Mississippi from Saint Charles County
Speaker 1: in the south, all the way north past Hannibal. Then
Speaker 1: it got into the culture. A disc jockey at a
Speaker 1: country station over in Bowling Green recorded a song called
Speaker 1: Momo the Missouri Monster, and by at least one account,
Speaker 1: that record did more for the legend than any newspaper did,
Speaker 1: because a song gets played and replayed and hummed and requested.
Speaker 1: For several years after the scare, the town of Louisiana
Speaker 1: held Momo Days, with people walking around in wigs combed
Speaker 1: down over their faces. That's a town making its peace
Speaker 1: with its monster. Whatever scared everybody in July is on
Speaker 1: a T shirt by the next summer, and there's nothing
Speaker 1: cynical in it. It's how people survive a strange year.
Speaker 1: What it does is shut people up. Once a case
Speaker 1: becomes a festival, the ones who actually saw something close
Speaker 1: their mouths because the whole business is a joke now,
Speaker 1: and nobody wants to be the punchline. The louder the
Speaker 1: legend gets, the quieter the real witness are. By the
Speaker 1: first week of August, it was done. The sightings tailed off,
Speaker 1: the reporters left, and Louisiana went back to being a
Speaker 1: rivertown with a hill behind it. The explanations people offered
Speaker 1: are part of the record too. The first was a bear,
Speaker 1: and that's what a lot of the searchers on that
Speaker 1: hill thought they were after. Missouri's black bear population in
Speaker 1: the early seventies was small and concentrated down in the Ozarks,
Speaker 1: and a bear in Pike County in nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: would have been a notable event by itself. The second
Speaker 1: was kids, which is where the chief of Police landed.
Speaker 1: It covers the noises and the reservoir and a fair
Speaker 1: amount of the movement on that hill. The third is
Speaker 1: a costume, and there's a name attached. Priscilla Guildner, a
Speaker 1: retired Louisiana educator, has said for years that she knows
Speaker 1: it was a put on because three of her former
Speaker 1: students confessed it to her. She has never named them.
Speaker 1: They have never come forward. The fourth is that a
Speaker 1: fifteen year old girl, an eight year old boy, a
Speaker 1: fire chief, an old man with a bird dog, two
Speaker 1: women having a roadside picnic the summer before, and a
Speaker 1: Pentecostal congregation of about fifty people all reported something inside
Speaker 1: of a year in the same stretch of river country.
Speaker 1: I think something happened behind that house on the eleventh.
Speaker 1: I think the children and their teenage sister saw it.
Speaker 1: The smell is, in my opinion, the strongest.
Speaker 2: Thread in the file.
Speaker 1: The tracks are worthless, and the flying object material muddied
Speaker 1: a case that might have gotten a serious look from
Speaker 1: serious people. Edgar Harrison believed what he experienced for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life and became the man people drove
Speaker 1: into town to talk to. Doris grew up, married, became
Speaker 1: Doris Harrison Bliss until her death. She said what she
Speaker 1: and her brother saw at the foot of that hill
Speaker 1: was not an animal known to science. Marsov Hill is
Speaker 1: called Star Hill. Now, most people in that town under
Speaker 1: fifty couldn't say what marsof Ever was. The older folks know,
Speaker 1: and they know exactly which house on Allen Street it was,
Speaker 1: and they'll talk about it with somebody who buys them
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee and doesn't act like a tourist.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. The documented record runs out around the
Speaker 1: first week of August, and that's where most tellings stop,
Speaker 1: with the reporters packing up and the hill going quiet,
Speaker 1: and the whole business folding itself into a festival and
Speaker 1: a song strip the name off it, though. Take away
Speaker 1: Momo and the wigs and the novelty record and the
Speaker 1: flying object material hughes hung on the side of it,
Speaker 1: and look at what's in that file. A tall bipedal
Speaker 1: figure covered in hair, no visible face, and no visible neck,
Speaker 1: an overpowering odor prey carried under one arm. A dog
Speaker 1: that came apart, noise off a wooded ridge at night,
Speaker 1: tracks in dry ground. Every item on that list is
Speaker 1: an ordinary sasquatch report. Almost everything about the Harrison encounter
Speaker 1: that sounds outlandish came from what the press did to
Speaker 1: it afterward. The raw thing that happened behind a house
Speaker 1: on Allen Street on a July afternoon would fit without
Speaker 1: a wrinkle into any file cabinet of North American hairy
Speaker 1: hominid reports. Anybody wants to open Those reports didn't stop
Speaker 1: in Missouri in nineteen seventy two, and they didn't slow down.
Speaker 1: They stopped being famous. I'd argue the state has been
Speaker 1: quietly producing some of the more interesting encounters in the
Speaker 1: Midwest ever since, in near total silence, because everybody who
Speaker 1: lives there learned in the summer of seventy two what
Speaker 1: happens to your name when you talk. So the second
Speaker 1: half of our stop in Missouri belongs to the Sasquatch.
Speaker 1: The big Foot Field Researchers organization has cataloged something north
Speaker 1: of one hundred and sixty reports out of Missouri, which
Speaker 1: puts the state around ninth in the country. That's higher
Speaker 1: than anybody expects from a place most people picture as farmland.
Speaker 1: The database is self submitted accounts, some investigated in person
Speaker 1: a volunteer, and some not. The organization sorts them into classes.
Speaker 1: The strongest is a clear visual observation under decent conditions.
Speaker 1: The middle is sounds or odor or activity without a
Speaker 1: good look at the animal. The weakest is secondhand material
Speaker 1: that reached the investigator through somebody else. What a database
Speaker 1: like that gives us is geography. The Missouri geography is
Speaker 1: consistent to the point of being boring. Reports cluster along
Speaker 1: the Big River corridors and up in the Ozark Uplands,
Speaker 1: with Pike County, Crawford County, and Jackson County turning up
Speaker 1: over and over the eastern half of the state. The
Speaker 1: Mississippi side has been generating them since before Momo and
Speaker 1: has never stopped. West of Louisiana out toward Bowling Green,
Speaker 1: a farmer named William Maigi has a place where he
Speaker 1: and members of his family have been reporting a sasquatch
Speaker 1: since nineteen ninety one. His own encounter came that year.
Speaker 1: He was driving along a creek on his own ground,
Speaker 1: came around a bend, and there it was down in
Speaker 1: the creek bottom, squatting on two legs the way a
Speaker 1: man squats about seven feet of it, hunched over, covered
Speaker 1: in black brown hair. It turned its head and looked
Speaker 1: at him.
Speaker 2: He says.
Speaker 1: The face struck him as more human than ape. Then
Speaker 1: it went straight up and over a creek bank that
Speaker 1: stands about eight feet high, and it was gone down
Speaker 1: in Lincoln County, in and around Queverra River State Park.
Speaker 1: There have been enough reports in the last few years
Speaker 1: to make the news repeatedly queverra River is better than
Speaker 1: six four hundred acres of hard wood and prairie and
Speaker 1: river bottom, and it sits within an easy night's travel
Speaker 1: of everything we've been talking about. At Bowling Green Lake,
Speaker 1: at least three separate people came forward with sightings over
Speaker 1: about three years. A farmer, a state park, a lake.
Speaker 1: Three unconnected people, and not one of them making a
Speaker 1: nickel off any of it. Move west across the state,
Speaker 1: and they keep coming. Late May of twenty twelve, Clay County,
Speaker 1: at a game access area near Smithville Lake, a young
Speaker 1: man named Cody, a college student, then was out there
Speaker 1: at night with three friends, sitting in a jeep with
Speaker 1: the windows cracked. Everything went quiet at once, and in
Speaker 1: every direction. Cody had seen bears, He'd seen mountain lions
Speaker 1: and bobcats. He'd been out in the dead of night
Speaker 1: in southern Arkansas checking game cameras when a panther screamed.
Speaker 1: And that's a sound that will take the legs out
Speaker 1: from under a grown man the first time he hears it.
Speaker 1: With all of that behind him, he said he had
Speaker 1: never in his life heard woods go as quiet as
Speaker 1: those woods went. The man who has done most of
Speaker 1: the legwork in that part of the state for the
Speaker 1: Bigfoot Field Researchers organization is Carter Bouchard out of Liberty.
Speaker 1: He's consulted on finding Bigfoot and he's led well over
Speaker 1: one hundred private nighttime expeditions. He's also a friend of
Speaker 1: mine and has appeared on my show Sasquatch Odyssey as
Speaker 1: a guest several times over the years. That's an enormous
Speaker 1: number of unpaid hours in the dark, and the people
Speaker 1: who put in those hours are the ones who end
Speaker 1: up with the real witness relationships. A witness will tell
Speaker 1: a man at their own kitchen table things they will
Speaker 1: never type into a form. Carter says he can hear
Speaker 1: it over the phone with no picture at all, when
Speaker 1: somebody has been moved and possibly changed by what they saw.
Speaker 1: Southeast Missouri has its own scene built around a research
Speaker 1: group working out of the Cape Girardeau area, and two
Speaker 1: of their people went on the record in a documentary
Speaker 1: a few years back about the Mark Twain National Forest Country.
Speaker 1: The first was a man named Matt, who wasn't a
Speaker 1: believer in any of this beforehand. In twenty eighteen, he
Speaker 1: was driving and caught movement in the woods, and his
Speaker 1: brain told him it was a deer. Then it came
Speaker 1: out and walked across the road in front of him,
Speaker 1: and it was far bigger than a deer. He said
Speaker 1: it was brown as a paper sack, with long black hair,
Speaker 1: and he watched it jump down into a ditch, and
Speaker 1: he said its feet were jet black. The second was
Speaker 1: a man named Bill who camped in an area with
Speaker 1: a history of reports and expected nothing but a night's sleep.
Speaker 1: He woke around half past one in the morning to
Speaker 1: noise owl's going off, and then to something huffing and
Speaker 1: blowing near his tent. He came up out of the
Speaker 1: bag and turned around, and what he saw is what
Speaker 1: put him in that documentary. His line that's stuck with
Speaker 1: me is that they'll let you have the daytime, but
Speaker 1: they don't want you out there at night. There's an
Speaker 1: older account out of Douglas County down in the Ozarks
Speaker 1: from an October morning in nineteen eighty a nineteen year
Speaker 1: old hunting on a relative's private ground around eight in
Speaker 1: the morning. And there's a secondhand story out of Saint
Speaker 1: Charles County going back to the seventies from a man
Speaker 1: whose father was a serious hunter and came in from
Speaker 1: the field early one night and wouldn't finish the evening,
Speaker 1: saying somebody big and tall and dark had been out
Speaker 1: there with him. He'd assumed it was another hunter until
Speaker 1: it wasn't, and by his account, he came out of
Speaker 1: those woods with something behind him. There's organized work going
Speaker 1: on in the Ozarks now too. My good friend Mary
Speaker 1: Ann has run investigations in Missouri with an emphasis on
Speaker 1: physical evidence and sample collection, and that's the only approach
Speaker 1: that will ever settle anything. She organizes an annual conference
Speaker 1: and camp out down there that puts witnesses and researchers
Speaker 1: in the same room. I've spoken at that conference for
Speaker 1: the past two years, and it does more good than
Speaker 1: people realize, because the hardest problem in this field is
Speaker 1: that witnesses often think they're the only one. They're never
Speaker 1: the only one. That's the whole reason I do this, Anne.
Speaker 1: Missouri has more going for it physically than most people assume.
Speaker 1: Two of the largest river systems on the continent meet
Speaker 1: in the middle of that state, and river corridors are
Speaker 1: highways for everything that walks. The Mark Twain National Forest
Speaker 1: is scattered across a million and a half acres in pieces.
Speaker 1: The ozark uplands are steeper and rougher and emptier than
Speaker 1: the postcards suggest, full of hollows and caves and creek
Speaker 1: bottoms and stands of timber nobody has walked through in
Speaker 1: fifty years. There's a deer herd down there that would
Speaker 1: feed anything, plus hardwood, mast and water everywhere, and a
Speaker 1: creature moving north and south along the Mississippi bottoms can
Speaker 1: cover enormous distance in continuous cover while never being more
Speaker 1: than a few miles from a road and never being
Speaker 1: seen by anybody who isn't standing in exactly the wrong
Speaker 1: place at exactly the right hour. That's what I think
Speaker 1: happened at the bottom of mars Off Hill, not a
Speaker 1: resident population on a ridge above a town. Something passing
Speaker 1: through a corridor in a hot, dry summer, coming down
Speaker 1: to water and getting caught in the open by two
Speaker 1: little boys who weren't supposed to be that close to
Speaker 1: the timber. The rest of what I have came in
Speaker 1: the mail. Every time we put an episode of this
Speaker 1: road trip out, people write, and Missouri has produced some
Speaker 1: of the heaviest male we've ever gotten. Most of it
Speaker 1: says the same thing in different words. They never talked
Speaker 1: about it, or they told one person, got laughed at
Speaker 1: and never told anybody again, or they waited until they're
Speaker 1: was gone because their father wouldn't have wanted it.
Speaker 2: Repeated.
Speaker 1: People sit on these things for decades, some of them
Speaker 1: sat on them for fifty years, and a part of
Speaker 1: the state that had already learned what happens when you
Speaker 1: say it out loud. The first is from Jenny. Jenny
Speaker 1: was seven years old in the summer of nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: a year passed the newspaper frenzy, and right in the
Speaker 1: stretch when everybody had officially decided the whole thing was
Speaker 1: kids on a hill. She spent most of that summer
Speaker 1: at her grandmother's place, an old farmhouse well outside of town,
Speaker 1: with a creek along the back of the property and
Speaker 1: timber on the other side of the creek that went
Speaker 1: on forever as far as a seven year old was concerned.
Speaker 1: The thing Jenny remembers first isn't the creature. It's the laundry.
Speaker 1: Her grandmother hung wash on a line that ran from
Speaker 1: the corner of the house out to a post by
Speaker 1: the garden, and Jenny's job that summer was to bring
Speaker 1: it in before dark. She hated it because the line
Speaker 1: was closest to the creek, and her grandmother wouldn't turn
Speaker 1: the porch light on until the wash was in the basket,
Speaker 1: so there were always a few minutes where Jenny was
Speaker 1: out at the end of that line, in the blue
Speaker 1: part of the evening, with the house behind her. She
Speaker 1: smelled it before anything else happened. The way she describes it,
Speaker 1: it came in on the air all at once, instead
Speaker 1: of building, like walking past an open door. She was
Speaker 1: seven and had no language for it, so what she
Speaker 1: reached for at the time was that somebody had dumped
Speaker 1: a deer. Then the sheet moved. There was a sheet
Speaker 1: on the line about ten feet from her, and it
Speaker 1: moved the wrong way wind moves a sheet in a
Speaker 1: lift and a settle down the whole length of the line.
Speaker 1: This one moved the way a sheet moves when something
Speaker 1: on the other side touches it and stops. She didn't run,
Speaker 1: she says. She stood there with a clothes pin in
Speaker 1: her hand and looked at the bottom of that sheet
Speaker 1: where it wasn't quite touching the grass, and there were
Speaker 1: legs behind it, two of them covered in dark hair.
Speaker 1: The legs turned and went toward the creek. Jenny could
Speaker 1: hear it going down the bank, and she says, the
Speaker 1: sound in the water. It wasn't a splash, but a
Speaker 1: series of long steps, and then it was up the
Speaker 1: other side and into the timber. She walked back to
Speaker 1: the house. She didn't bring the laundry in. Her grandmother
Speaker 1: took one look at her, then went out on the
Speaker 1: porch and stood there a while with her arms folded,
Speaker 1: and didn't say anything, and then came back in and
Speaker 1: locked the back door. They didn't lock doors out there.
Speaker 1: Jenny had never in her life seen that door locked.
Speaker 1: Nobody in that house ever discussed it. Her grandmother brought
Speaker 1: the wash in herself for the rest of the summer,
Speaker 1: and when Jenny raised it once as a teenager, her
Speaker 1: grandmother said that some things you leave alone, and then
Speaker 1: asked her if she wanted pie. The next one is
Speaker 1: from Ray, who was a young man in the late
Speaker 1: seventies working nights. He was driving a river road, the
Speaker 1: kind that runs between the bluffs and the bottoms, with
Speaker 1: almost nothing on it after midnight. He'd driven that stretch
Speaker 1: several hundred times and could have told you where every
Speaker 1: pothole was. It was fall cold enough that he had
Speaker 1: the window up. There was fog sitting in the low spots,
Speaker 1: the way it does along the Mississippi. In October, he
Speaker 1: came around a bend and there was something in the road.
Speaker 1: It was already crossing when he came around, moving left
Speaker 1: to right. It was tall enough that his head lights
Speaker 1: caught it across the chest instead of across the head.
Speaker 1: It was dark, and he couldn't tell whether the darkness
Speaker 1: was hair or just the way a backlit thing looks.
Speaker 1: And he says, anybody claiming they got a good look
Speaker 1: at texture at highway speed in fog is telling stories.
Speaker 1: What he did see, and what he has never stopped
Speaker 1: seeing is the way it moved. It didn't hurry, and
Speaker 1: it didn't look at him, and it took the whole
Speaker 1: width of that road, and what he swears was three steps,
Speaker 1: and then it went down the bank on the right
Speaker 1: side and was gone. Ray didn't stop, he says. He
Speaker 1: thought about stopping for about a mile and a half,
Speaker 1: then thought better of it and kept going. And at
Speaker 1: the end of his shift, he sat in his car
Speaker 1: in the driveway a while before he went in the house.
Speaker 1: He told only one person he worked with, and that
Speaker 1: man told him he'd seen a bear. Ray grew up
Speaker 1: around that river. He'd seen a black bear exactly once
Speaker 1: in his life, in a different part of the state.
Speaker 1: And what struck him about it was how much of
Speaker 1: a bear's business gets done with its head down. A
Speaker 1: bear crossing a road is a low animal with a
Speaker 1: rolling gate. What Ray watched go across in front of
Speaker 1: him was a tall, vertical thing with its head up,
Speaker 1: covering ground the way a man covers ground when he's
Speaker 1: late and refuses to run. He said, one more thing.
Speaker 1: I haven't been able to shake for about a year. Afterward,
Speaker 1: he drove a different route home, longer by eleven miles,
Speaker 1: and he never told his wife why. The next account
Speaker 1: is from Marla, and hers is the only one in
Speaker 1: this batch with anything physical in it. Marla and her
Speaker 1: husband kept hunting dogs, working hounds rather than pets, a
Speaker 1: kennel of them out behind the house. Anybody who has
Speaker 1: been around a hound kennel knows the noise is more
Speaker 1: or less constant.
Speaker 2: They talked to each other.
Speaker 1: Into raccoons, and to the mail carrier, and to the wind,
Speaker 1: and to nothing at all. Late spring, and she puts
Speaker 1: it in the middle eighties without being able to pin
Speaker 1: the year, and the kennel went silent. That's what brought
Speaker 1: her outside, because a silence like that is louder than
Speaker 1: the noise. She came out on the backstep and the
Speaker 1: dogs were pressed into the far corner of the run,
Speaker 1: all of them in a group, and not one making
Speaker 1: a sound. The only thing she could hear was one
Speaker 1: of them breathing. She called out and got no answer.
Speaker 1: Then she got the smell. Marla has a farm woman's
Speaker 1: vocabulary for bad smells, and she used all of it
Speaker 1: on me. It wasn't carrying, and she knew carrying. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a skunk, it wasn't the hog operation a few
Speaker 1: miles over. It wasn't a dead animal under the floor
Speaker 1: of an outbuilding, which.
Speaker 2: She had also dealt with.
Speaker 1: The closest she could get was a wet dog that
Speaker 1: had rolled in something and then been shut in a
Speaker 1: car in August, and even that wasn't right. She went
Speaker 1: in and got her husband. He took a light and
Speaker 1: a rifle and walked the fence line and came back
Speaker 1: twenty minutes later with nothing to report except that he'd
Speaker 1: smelled it too, and that the dogs wouldn't come out
Speaker 1: of the corner for him either. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The
Speaker 1: next morning they found the tracks. There was a low
Speaker 1: spot along a fence where the ground stayed soft into
Speaker 1: the summer, and there were impressions in it. Her husband
Speaker 1: put his own boot down next to one, and the
Speaker 1: impression was longer than his boot by a good margin,
Speaker 1: and considerably wider. There were four of them in a line,
Speaker 1: and the spacing was wrong for a man walking too
Speaker 1: much distance between them. He stepped it off twice trying
Speaker 1: to match it, and couldn't do it without lunging. They
Speaker 1: didn't cast it. They didn't photograph it. Her husband looked
Speaker 1: at it, got quiet, and then went and got a
Speaker 1: shovel and turned the ground over. Marla didn't understand that
Speaker 1: at the time and asked him about it. He told
Speaker 1: her that if there was something in the timber, he
Speaker 1: didn't want people coming out to look for it, because
Speaker 1: men looking for something in the dark with guns are
Speaker 1: more dangerous than whatever they're looking for. I heard that
Speaker 1: and thought about Shelby Ward standing in front of reporters
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two, saying he was afraid somebody was
Speaker 1: going to get shot up on that hill, same instinct,
Speaker 1: fifteen years apart, two people who never met. Marla's husband
Speaker 1: has since passed. She said she's telling it now because
Speaker 1: there's nobody left for it to embarrass. The next one
Speaker 1: is from Dean, and Dean is a deer hunter. That
Speaker 1: means he has spent hundreds of hours sitting perfectly still
Speaker 1: in the dark in the woods watching for movement. He
Speaker 1: has seen coyotes at forty yards. He has watched a
Speaker 1: bobcat cross a clearing, had a great horned owl come
Speaker 1: off a limb over his head, had a deer walk
Speaker 1: under his stand close enough to touch. Dean was in a
Speaker 1: stand along a fence line on the second morning of
Speaker 1: a season sometime in the nineties, cold and still dark
Speaker 1: in that gray fifteen or twenty minutes before a man
Speaker 1: can really see color. He'd been up there about half
Speaker 1: an hour. The first thing he noticed was that the
Speaker 1: woods were wrong, and he was specific about what he meant.
Speaker 1: The squirrels had started, and then they stopped. The songbirds
Speaker 1: that had begun stopped, and it happened in a sequence
Speaker 1: that moved, starting off to his left and traveling to
Speaker 1: his right, the way a wave of silence moves ahead
Speaker 1: of something walking. Then he heard it walking on two feet.
Speaker 1: He was emphatic with me about that, and his reasoning
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with counting steps. A four legged
Speaker 1: animal in leaves makes a sound with a rhythm to it,
Speaker 1: a kind of soft rolling gallop of noise, even at
Speaker 1: a walk. What he heard was two impacts, evenly spaced,
Speaker 1: with a pause between them, long enough that he started
Speaker 1: narrating it in his head, the way a man narrates
Speaker 1: another man coming up on his stand. He assumed it
Speaker 1: was another hunter. He got ready to say something so
Speaker 1: he wouldn't get shot. Then it came out along the
Speaker 1: fence line sixty or seventy yards off, walking in the
Speaker 1: open at the edge of the field. Dean could see
Speaker 1: the shape of it against the field, which was lighter
Speaker 1: than the timber. It was tall, and its shoulders were wrong,
Speaker 1: that's the word he used, and he couldn't improve on it.
Speaker 1: The shoulders were too wide for the height, and they
Speaker 1: sat too high, so there didn't appear to be much
Speaker 1: neck involved. It walked the fence line without stopping, went
Speaker 1: into the timber on the far end, and he never
Speaker 1: heard it again. Dean sat in that stand until full
Speaker 1: daylight because he didn't want to climb down. Then he
Speaker 1: walked the fence line himself and found nothing because the
Speaker 1: ground was frozen and covered in leaf litter. He hunted
Speaker 1: that property another six or seven years. He never saw
Speaker 1: it again and never heard anything like it again. The
Speaker 1: closest he can come to a conclusion is that he
Speaker 1: saw a person, except there was no reason for a
Speaker 1: person to be walking a fence line in the dark,
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, on the opening weekend of
Speaker 1: a season, with no vehicle anywhere, no.
Speaker 2: Light, and no dog.
Speaker 1: I asked him what I always ask, whether he has
Speaker 1: an explanation. He prefers, he said, but he doesn't have one,
Speaker 1: and he's at peace with that. And then he said
Speaker 1: the experience didn't turn him into a believer in anything.
Speaker 1: It took one thing off the list of things he
Speaker 1: was sure about. The next one is from Colleen, and
Speaker 1: I saved hers for this spot on purpose. Colleen was
Speaker 1: raising three children in the early two thousands, well out
Speaker 1: in the country. It was summer and the kids were
Speaker 1: outside in that stretch of the evening when supper is
Speaker 1: nearly ready and everybody's being told to stay in the yard.
Speaker 1: Colleen was in the kitchen and the window over her
Speaker 1: sink looked out on the back Her middle child started screaming.
Speaker 1: She says that as a mother, you develop a whole
Speaker 1: taxonomy of your children's screams, that most of them are nothing,
Speaker 1: and that maybe twice in a childhood you hear the
Speaker 1: one that puts you through a door before you've decided
Speaker 1: to move. This was that one. She was outside before
Speaker 1: she registered turning off the burner. All three kids were
Speaker 1: coming across the yard at a dead run, and the
Speaker 1: youngest wasn't screaming at all, which worried her more than
Speaker 1: the screaming did. They came in around her and got
Speaker 1: behind her and turned around, and all three of them
Speaker 1: pointed at the same place along the tree line. Colleen looked,
Speaker 1: she saw nothing. She stood in her own backyard and
Speaker 1: looked directly at the place three children were pointing, and
Speaker 1: she didn't see one thing out of place. Then she
Speaker 1: smelled it, and she said, she made a sound she
Speaker 1: has never made before or since. She got the kids
Speaker 1: inside and locked the door and stood at the window
Speaker 1: over the sink. After some period of time, she couldn't estimate.
Speaker 1: Something moved back in the timber. It moved inside the
Speaker 1: trees rather than coming out of them. She says it
Speaker 1: was a change in the pattern of the dark rather
Speaker 1: than a shape she could describe. Here's what the children said.
Speaker 1: The oldest, who was ten, said it was standing at
Speaker 1: the edge of the trees, that it was as tall
Speaker 1: as the doorway, and that it had hair on it.
Speaker 1: The middle child, who was seven, said it didn't have
Speaker 1: a face. The youngest, who was four, said nothing at
Speaker 1: all the rest of that night, and then at breakfast
Speaker 1: the next morning, said one word about it, and the
Speaker 1: word was harry, and then went back to eating. A
Speaker 1: seven year old in the early two thousands gave the
Speaker 1: same description. A fifteen year old girl gave a newspaper
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two, twenty some miles away. What a
Speaker 1: child means by it is hair hanging over a head
Speaker 1: with no features visible through it and no face is
Speaker 1: the only way a kid knows to say that. Colleen's
Speaker 1: husband got home an hour later and did what husbands do,
Speaker 1: which has walked the tree line with a flashlight. He
Speaker 1: came back and said there was nothing there and the
Speaker 1: kids had spooked each other. She let him have that.
Speaker 1: She says she has never contradicted him about it in
Speaker 1: twenty years of marriage and doesn't intend to start. She
Speaker 1: also told me she hasn't planted anything along that side
Speaker 1: of the yard since when the kids were small. She
Speaker 1: moved the swing set to the other side of the house,
Speaker 1: and she told the children they could play anywhere they
Speaker 1: wanted except the back fence. The last one before we
Speaker 1: get back on the road is from Wes, and Wes
Speaker 1: was out on the river. He fishes at night, which
Speaker 1: is its own culture and its own kind of person.
Speaker 1: Night fishing on a big river means a small boat,
Speaker 1: a lantern or a headlamp, a lot of hours of
Speaker 1: very little happening. In a relationship with the dark, most
Speaker 1: people never develop. Wes has been doing it since he
Speaker 1: was a teenager. And he told me that the river
Speaker 1: at night is loud. He rattled off barges and carp jumping,
Speaker 1: and beaver and trees coming apart in the current. Somewhere upstream.
Speaker 1: He knows all of it by sound. He was anchored
Speaker 1: in close to a bank where the timber comes right
Speaker 1: down to the water, and there's no road behind it
Speaker 1: for a good long way. Middle of the night, something
Speaker 1: came down the bank into the water. His first thought
Speaker 1: was a deer, But a deer entering water makes a
Speaker 1: lot of noise all at once and then commits, and
Speaker 1: this was different. It came in slowly, It stayed in
Speaker 1: the shallows. It moved along the bank instead of out
Speaker 1: into the current, and he could hear the water break
Speaker 1: and close around it in a way that suggested legs plural,
Speaker 1: moving one at a time, waiting rather than swimming. He
Speaker 1: turned his light on it. Wes won't claim he saw
Speaker 1: a monster. What he says is that he saw the
Speaker 1: top half of something standing chest deep about forty feet
Speaker 1: from his boat, that it was dark and wet, that
Speaker 1: there was too much of it above the water for
Speaker 1: a deer, and that it didn't run when the light
Speaker 1: hit it. Everything on that river runs from a light.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: It turned its head and he couldn't see a face
Speaker 1: in it, and then it went back up the bank
Speaker 1: against the current, with the water breaking off it, and
Speaker 1: up into the timber. Some period of time later, from
Speaker 1: up in that timber, he heard a knock one hollow
Speaker 1: strike wood on wood, well back from the water. He waited,
Speaker 1: and about a minute later there was another one farther off.
Speaker 1: Wes pulled his anchor and left. He says he didn't
Speaker 1: do it in a panic, that he was deliberate about it,
Speaker 1: that he coiled his line and stowed his rod and
Speaker 1: started his motor and idled out and didn't look back
Speaker 1: at that bank. He has never fished that spot again,
Speaker 1: and he has kept night fishing everywhere else on that
Speaker 1: river for twenty years.
Speaker 2: That's where we leave Missouri.
Speaker 1: Momo has a particular place in the file for me
Speaker 1: because it's the one case where the whole life cycle
Speaker 1: of an American monster story is visible from end to
Speaker 1: end inside of about three weeks. On the eleventh, there
Speaker 1: are two boys and a dog and a yard and
Speaker 1: a teenager at a bathroom window. By the fourteenth, there
Speaker 1: are fifty people from a prayer meeting on Allen Street
Speaker 1: and a growl coming down off a hill. By the nineteenth,
Speaker 1: the chief of police and twenty men with walkie talkies
Speaker 1: are making three passes over that hill and turning up.
Speaker 2: Two open dog graves.
Speaker 1: By the twenty second, there are out of state investigators
Speaker 1: camped in a family's backyard with a tape recorder. Then
Speaker 1: come the wire services, the name, the song on the
Speaker 1: country station over in Bowling Green, the twelve foot creature
Speaker 1: that lifts the back end of a car, and Momo
Speaker 1: Days with the whole town in wigs. It took three
Speaker 1: weeks to get from a girl at a bathroom window
Speaker 1: to a novelty record. Underneath all of it, the original
Speaker 1: event just sits there, as small and as strange as
Speaker 1: it was. On the first afternoon, two boys were screaming
Speaker 1: in a yard. There was a tall, dark shape by
Speaker 1: a tree, with hair over its face and something dead
Speaker 1: under its arm. The family dog came home and threw
Speaker 1: up for hours, and there was a smell in an
Speaker 1: abandoned shack. I don't think Marsof Hill had a monster
Speaker 1: living on it, because an animal that size can't hold
Speaker 1: a wooded ridge on the edge of a populated town
Speaker 1: through a summer of armed searches and leave nothing behind.
Speaker 1: The geography doesn't allow it. What I think is that
Speaker 1: the river lets something pass through, and that for a
Speaker 1: few days in July of nineteen seventy two, a lot
Speaker 1: of ordinary people in one small town got to look
Speaker 1: at something that doesn't fit in any of the boxes
Speaker 1: we brought with us. Then the newspapers arrived and made
Speaker 1: it silly, and the silliness did what silliness always does.
Speaker 1: It protected the mystery by making sure no serious person
Speaker 1: would ever go Look. The kids saw it first. That's
Speaker 1: the part I keep coming back to, and it's why
Speaker 1: I wanted to make this stop. Nobody believes the kids.
Speaker 1: Nobody ever believes the kids in the Harrison case. The
Speaker 1: town got about a day and a half of that
Speaker 1: before fifty people from a prayer meeting came running down
Speaker 1: Allen Street in the dark, and after that nobody in Louisiana,
Speaker 1: Missouri thought it was funny for the rest of the month.
Speaker 1: Star Hill is still up there, with houses on it
Speaker 1: now and a water tank on top, and a generation
Speaker 1: of kids who never heard the name marsov The scene
Speaker 1: at the bottom of it is still there too. Down
Speaker 1: at the end of Allen Street, where the mode grass
Speaker 1: quits and the timber starts, it's the same few feet
Speaker 1: of ground an eight year old boy was standing on
Speaker 1: when he started screaming, We're back on the road soon.
Speaker 1: With twenty five states in the mirror and twenty five
Speaker 1: to go. The river runs east from here, and where
Speaker 1: the river goes, the stories go with it. And I've
Speaker 1: got to stop in mind on the.
Speaker 3: Other side of that water that I've been saving.
Speaker 1: Did did didn't