THE BEAST OF BOGGY CREEK: The True Story of the Fouke Monster (19 page)

Return To Boggy Creek

By the last half of the 1970s, the country had weathered the storm of Vietnam and was now gearing up for the bicentennial and the coming of John Travolta. Prosperity and progress were spreading like bellbottoms. The interest in Bigfoot creatures – initially kicked off by the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967 in which Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin captured an alleged Sasquatch strolling along a dry sandbar in Bluff Creek, California—had been fueled by several Hollywood renditions, including the horrendous
Bigfoot
in 1970 and, of course,
The Legend of Boggy Creek
in 1972. The country’s 200th birthday would also be marked by a flood of Bigfoot Americana, starting with
Creature From Black Lake
, followed by the feature film/documentary hybrid
The Legend of Bigfoot
, and finally by
Blood Beast of Monster Mountain,
all released in 1976. Bigfoot also made tracks on the small screen with guest appearances on the popular prime time television show, “The Six Million Dollar Man” (as a robot monster, no less), and a Saturday morning kid’s series called “Bigfoot and Wildboy” in 1977. These portrayals tended to paint Bigfoot as something of a spectacle, but nonetheless kept the interest in the unexplained phenomenon at an all-time high.

More Bigfoot feature films were released in 1977, including
Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot,
as well as
Return To Boggy Creek
. Yes, even back in those days a successful film would spawn an inevitable slew of sequels in an attempt to suckle more money from the public. But in the case of
Return To Boggy Creek
, it didn’t do much except suck. The studio had been urging Charles Pierce to do a sequel, but as he tactfully put it in the
Fangoria
interview: “I was still trying to prove myself as a filmmaker; I didn’t want to have to turn around and shoot the same thing all over again.”

Figuring that the subject matter alone was enough to sell the film, the studio decided to move ahead without Pierce. They enlisted Tom Moore as director, a relative newcomer who had directed one prior horror movie at the time called
Mark of the Witch
. Considering its budget, Moore had done a fairly respectable job with that film but the deck was stacked high against him when it came to the Fouke Monster sequel. Duplicating the success of
The Legend of Boggy Creek
would have been challenging to anyone, and, as expected, even Moore could not pull it off. The resulting film was an embarrassing flop.

To begin with, the sequel completely abandoned the frightening pseudo documentary style that had worked so well for Pierce. Instead, the producers went with a more traditional horror movie approach, incorporating the television star talents of Dawn Wells (
Gilligan’s Island
) and Dana Plato (
Different Strokes
) to carry it. The cheese factor of its stars certainly does not help the film, though they do a superior job of acting compared to the other cast members. In fact, the novice acting by the Fouke locals in Pierce’s film outshines most of the acting in
Return To Boggy Creek
. Further contributing to the film’s downfall, the real voices featured in the first film, with their authentic Arkansas drawl, are noticeably missing from the sequel. Instead we are forced to endure fake Cajun accents delivered by unconvincing actors.

All of those factors aside, the main problem is that it tries to be a heartwarming Walt Disney film in the vein of
Escape To Witch Mountain
. The plot centers around three children who are eventually stranded on Boggy Creek in a storm, only to be rescued by the monster himself. Like most of the big-screen Disney films of the era, the children are the main characters, and through their eyes the monster is transformed from a savage man-killer to a loveable brute, all outside the comprehension of the worthless adults.

The most puzzling element is why the filmmakers changed the name of the Fouke Monster to “Big Bay Tye.” They still refer to the waterway where he lives as Boggy Creek, but there is no mention of Fouke anywhere in the movie. Instead, the setting is moved to a place called Happy Camp, which seems appropriate since the movie is devoid of any of the spookiness or realism that made
The Legend of Boggy Creek
so frightening six years earlier.

The Night Walker

As the popularity of California’s Bigfoot grew and
Return To Boggy Creek
did little in the way of actual return, the Southern Sasquatch legend was mostly left to its quiet existence back in the swamplands. Reports of the creature are difficult to find for the remaining years of the 1970s and early 1980s, though several interesting sightings started to emerge from discussions with the locals who were still living in Fouke at the time.

The first sighting is quite possibly one of the most credible and amazing eyewitness accounts of the Fouke Monster that I have come across. I heard the details of the story directly from the eyewitness, Terry Sutton, and from his father, Lloyd Sutton, who was there to see the fear and shock on his son’s face just after the encounter.

The date was February 20, 1981. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon. Fifteen-year-old Terry Sutton had collected a jarful of nightcrawlers from his mother’s garden and headed off with his fishing gear towards the pond on the far side of their property. Their home was located in Jonesville, just off the main road that connects their countryside community with the outside world. Having grown up in the Jonesville/Fouke area, Terry was no stranger to the lurid tales of their haunting hair-covered beast, but this was not something that crossed his mind very often when traversing the backwoods. Like most boys in the area, Terry was an experienced hunter, trapper, and fisherman who had spent countless hours in the rich bayous. He was very familiar with all varieties of local wildlife and would not likely mistake one for a seven-foot-tall hairy hominoid. Perhaps that’s why this event would be so shocking to him.

After traversing the quarter mile from his home to the pond, Terry loaded his gear into the small aluminum boat that his dad kept there and pushed off into the lazy water. He promptly baited a hook with one of the fat worms, dropped it into the water, and sat there quietly fishing for the rest of the afternoon.

But while sitting there enjoying the solitude, he heard something moving through the thick blanket of leaves that covered the late winter ground. Earlier, he had heard what he thought was the bellowing of his uncle’s old Black Angus bull who roamed the adjacent property, so naturally he assumed the bull had wandered toward the pond. That, or perhaps his father was coming down to check on him. Either way, the sound was nothing out of the ordinary, since anything walking through the leaves would have made a significant amount of noise.

About an hour before dusk, Terry decided to paddle the boat around a small bend in the pond where the fishing might be better. The bend was like a small neck of water that jutted off into a wooded area. He heard some more loud rustling in the leaves coming from that direction, but still he wasn’t alarmed… until he rounded the bend. Now he could see the source of the leafy noise. It was a large, hair-covered animal walking on two legs away from the pond. Its back was facing Terry as it headed toward a ravine that dipped down to a nearby creek.

“It was walking away in a casual stroll,” Terry told me. “At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Terry was a mere 60 feet from the creature, so there was no mistake that he was seeing something other than human, bear, or any other common animal. Terry was over six feet tall at the time, so he estimated the creature’s height to be as tall or taller than he was. He described its fur as being scraggly, three-to-five inches long, and colored a dull black or very dark brown. It had notably long arms, which swung as it walked, giving it an ape-like quality, although it did not hunch over as an ape might do. “I know there’s varying stories, but what I saw was not bent over. It was walking upright just as straight as I do,” Terry recalled. In addition to the physical attributes, Terry also remembered smelling a musky odor.

Terry sat in the boat for several seconds—though it seemed more like an eternity—as he watched the creature walk by. During this time it never looked back, presumably because it never heard the boy floating quietly on the pond. After the few eternal seconds, the creature finally walked over a bank and disappeared into a ravine leading to the creek bottom below. The creature was now completely out of sight, but Terry could still hear its footsteps in the leaves as it continued to walk. Shaken, Terry quickly paddled to the bank and got out of the boat. At that point, the creature’s footsteps stopped. Terry stood frozen, listening intently in the direction of the ravine. Then he heard the creature start running!

“I didn’t panic until I heard it start running,” Terry confessed. From the tone of his voice, it’s apparent the memory still chilled him. “It was pretty much nervousness until then, but once I heard it run, fear overwhelmed me and I took off running for the house.”

Terry arrived at the house out of breath and still holding the boat paddle in his hand. He told his mother what he had seen, and she immediately called his father. Lloyd Sutton pulled into the driveway a short time later.

“Just as I parked, before I got out, Terry came out of the house and was standing near the edge of the patio with his hands over his face,” Mr. Sutton told me. “I could tell immediately that there was something wrong. I had no idea what it was, but I could see that something was not right. I stepped out of my pickup and said, ‘Terry what’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Dad, I just saw the Fouke Monster!’”

After Terry calmed down and explained what he had seen, Mr. Sutton felt he should head down to the pond to investigate. He quickly gathered his .357 Magnum pistol, a 35mm camera, and two flashlights. “I asked Terry if he wanted to go with me, but I could tell he was a little hesitant. I told him it might be better to go on back down there and get it over with, or he would always want to shy away from there,” Mr. Sutton explained. Terry was reluctant, but with his father’s encouragement, he agreed. It didn’t hurt that his father handed him the pistol either.

The Suttons walked the quarter mile down to the pond as dusk hovered heavy over Jonesville. They immediately looked for any signs of tracks, but found nothing in the dry blanket of leaves, nor on the water’s edge. They followed the creature’s path down into the ravine and checked along the creek bank. They found no tracks but did detect the faint remnants of a foul animal odor. As Mr. Sutton put it: “I can’t describe it, nor have I ever smelled anything like it, as I can remember. It may have been a little agitated after hearing Terry bump the bank with his boat earlier and the running may have contributed to the odor, I don’t know. But it was for real. You could walk either direction from that spot and it would go away. It was just lingering there in the moist air of the creek bottom.”

By now, darkness had enveloped the woods, making it difficult to continue the investigation, but they walked back to the pond and looked around once more. While walking west along the bank, a large animal suddenly tore out the brush and ran in front of them just out of sight. Though they pointed their flashlights in the direction of the animal, they did not get a glimpse of it. So they decided to give chase. “I jumped across the water and took off after it with Terry right behind me,” Mr. Sutton remembers. “We were making so much noise running, I would say: ‘Stop!’ We could hear it straight ahead of us and would go again. Each time we would stop, we could still hear it, but then the last time we stopped… nothing. We walked around in circles from the last time we heard it, but we didn’t hear or see anything again.”

1981: The creature is seen near the Sutton family pond in Jonesville.

With that, the Suttons trekked through the darkness back to the house and spent the rest of the evening talking about the incident. Terry kept the incident a secret for a long time, but eventually mentioned it to some friends. He was ribbed, laughed at, and called a liar on many occasions, but he never changed his story. During my research for this book, several people told me about Terry’s sighting, saying that his family was well respected and that I should try to follow up on it. Mr. Sutton was a longtime deacon in the local church, and although some people laughed off the incident, most felt that Terry and his father were not the type to make up stories, especially knowing how easily it could become a source of ridicule.