THE BEAST OF BOGGY CREEK: The True Story of the Fouke Monster
Read THE BEAST OF BOGGY CREEK: The True Story of the Fouke Monster Online
Authors: Lyle Blackburn
Lyle Blackburn
Anomalist Books
San Antonio * Charlottesville
An Original Publication of ANOMALIST BOOKS
The Beast of Boggy Creek: The True Story of the Fouke Monster
Copyright © 2012 by Lyle Blackburn
ISBN: 1933665947
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Cover artwork and layout by Justin Osbourn of Slasher Design
(
www.osbourndraw.com
)
Sighting illustrations by Dan Brereton (
www.nocturnals.com
)
Map illustrations by Lyle Blackburn
Miller County Historical Society photos courtesy of Frank McFerrin
Other photos courtesy of individual photographers as credited
Book design by Seale Studios
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint material from…
- Various newsprint articles. By permission of the
Texarkana Gazette
. - Various sighting reports and articles from the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy website. By permission of Daryl Colyer and Alton Higgins.
- Various sighting reports from the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization website. By permission of Bobby Hamilton.
For more information about the author, visit:
www.monstrobizarro.com
For the latest on the Fouke Monster, visit:
www.foukemonster.net
For information about Anomalist Books, visit
anomalistbooks.com
,
or write to: 5150 Broadway #108, San Antonio, TX 78209
For my grandmother, Bette Capps, who always
believes in every crazy thing I do.
Contents
The Quiet Before the Storm
The Natural State
The Arkansas Wild Man
Manimal Conjecture
Birth of a Monster
It Walks Among Us
Media Mayhem
Bounty on the Beast
Don’t Blink
Sabbath Outpost
Boggytown
The Haunting Begins
A Change of Fate
Others Come Forth
The Strange Runner
Enter: Charles B. Pierce
The Legend of Boggy Creek
Four-Wall Phenomenon
The Aftermath
Creature From Black Lake
Lasting Influence
Legacy Makers and Caretakers
Return To Boggy Creek
The Night Walker
Boggy Creek II
Shine On, You Crazy Monster
A Glimpse Behind the Curtain
Strange Remains
Skeleton in the Closet
The Hunt For Bigfoot
Monsters By Moonlight
Swamp Stalker
Man-Made Man-Apes
Blame the Train
Moonshine Master Plan
There’s a Panther Under the House
Sundown Town
Hidden Hominoid
Land of the Southern Sasquatch
Diminishing Domain
Trouble with Three Toes
Modern Trail of Mythic Creatures
Legacy At Large
Appendix: Stranger Than Fiction
Reel to Real
Chronicle of Sightings Near Fouke
Books
Magazines
Newspapers
Online Articles
Websites
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
—Albert Einstein
Foreword:
Why Are Fouke’s Boggy Creek Creatures So Important?
Something shocking and historically important took place in 1972. A drive-in Bigfoot movie became a surprise moneymaker. The movie was
The Legend of Boggy Creek
, released in 1972, and out for the first time on DVD in 2002.
Despite the fact that people around the Boggy Creek area had been seeing Swamp Ape type creatures since at least the 1940s, their encounters in the 1960s and then especially in 1971, received a good deal of media attention. As Lyle Blackburn’s account makes clear in great detail, the large and hairy “Fouke Monsters” gained notoriety when one or more unknown hominoids harassed two families (the Fords and the Crabtrees) living outside Fouke, Arkansas (population 600), in the southwest part of the state. Director Charles B. Pierce decided to use real eyewitnesses and the actual locations near Boggy Creek to recreate Fouke’s experience with their local monster. The docudrama or semi-documentary thriller became a smash success, a cult classic.
Although a scripted movie, the spooky footage of the river bottoms, fog, and vegetation along Boggy Creek made for a captivating, and for most filmgoers, scary setting. I am constantly struck by fellow researchers and members of the general public who tell me that it was
this
movie that got them involved in the pursuit of more information on Bigfoot and other cryptids.
The impact of
The Legend of Boggy Creek
has been far-reaching. A couple of modern reviews from the internet give more than a hint of its significance: “Bigfoot was, and still is, a celebrity because of this movie!” and “This may be the movie that made ‘Bigfoot’ a national star.”
A self-published book by Smokey Crabtree entitled
Smokey and the Fouke Monster
(1974) followed the film, giving “another point of view” of the events portrayed in the Boggy Creek movie. Smokey and I lectured from the same stage in Ohio years ago, and he’s still talking as if it all happened yesterday. Crabtree never saw the Fouke Monster, but the movie still changed his life.
The movie also created a whole new generation of dedicated Bigfoot hunters. Young people between the ages of 10 and 13 who were first attracted to Bigfoot research in the 1970s, speak of
The Legend of Boggy Creek
as the source of their passion in the subject. In his 1988 book,
Big Footnotes
, Daniel Perez wrote: “My personal interest in monsters was first ignited at about the tender age of 10, by the movie
The Legend of Boggy Creek
. This was the trigger which lead to casual to casually serious to serious full-fledged involvement in this subject matter.” Maryland’s
Bigfoot Digest
author Mark Opsasnick notes this movie inspired his interest in Bigfoot at the age of 11. Ditto for cryptozoology artist Bill Rebsamen, who told me, “I was about 10 years old when I saw it. I went immediately to the library the next day and checked out all the books I could find on Bigfoot.” And Chester Moore, Jr., Texan outdoors journalist and author of
Bigfoot South
(2002), writes: “Seeing
The Legend of Boggy Creek
lit my interest in the Bigfoot phenomenon into a full-blown passion. While the Pacific Northwest seemed a world away to me, Arkansas did not…The impact it had on me as a youngster was immense.”
Please note, however, these Hollywood Swamp Ape and Bigfoot movies did not lead to a rash of Boggy Creek-type creature sightings in most places in North America. No, instead, what it did do was stimulate and influence future researchers to be open-minded about the possibilities of such unknown beasts being out there.
