THE BEAST OF BOGGY CREEK: The True Story of the Fouke Monster (20 page)

Photo of the actual pond where Terry Sutton saw the creature.
(Photo by Lloyd Sutton)

As I spoke with Terry about his sighting, I noted the tone in his voice as he told me of the events. This was not a man telling me an exciting story he had made up to entertain people; this was a man describing something that had happened to him, whether he liked it or not. The underlying fear that he must have felt that night as a young teenager alone in the woods still lingered as he spoke about the creature. I suppose nothing rules out that someone could have played hoax on him, but this would have to have been an extremely convincing suit to fool an experienced hunter sitting only 60 feet away. And who knew he was even there fishing that evening other than his parents? No, this does not seem like a hoax. This is a man telling me of what he actually saw that night so many years ago when he managed to get a rare glimpse of a shadowy creature.

Sutton’s sighting certainly fits with the theory that the creature prefers to travel the local waterways of the Sulphur River Bottoms. Strange occurrences always seem to happen in proximity to the vast network of rivers and ponds in the area. In June of 1981, just five months after Terry’s sighting, Jerry Wayne Scoggins claimed to have also seen the creature, this time along the Sulphur River south of Jonesville. As the story goes, he was going to check on his boat, which was tied up near the water. After re-securing it, he began to head back through the trees on his way home but stopped when he heard something splashing in the water. Figuring it must be a large alligator, he turned around to get a look, only to see a large, hairy man-like animal moving across the river. After splashing through the water, it walked up on the bank and disappeared into the trees.

Another near-water encounter took place in 1987. I heard the story from James “Peanut” Jones as we sat around his kitchen table one sweltering summer afternoon. Jones, who has lived on his family’s property along the Sulphur River all of his life, was well aware of the monster legend, although he had never seen anything himself. And, as well, he had never been scared by anything in those swamps… until one moonless night in May. As he and his wife quietly rowed their boat along the edges of a pond searching for frogs to gig, they heard something large moving in the brush beyond. Jones shined a spotlight in the direction of the noise and was surprised to see a pair of brightly illuminated eyes staring back at him. Curious to know what kind of animal might be watching them, they rowed out into the pond to get a better view. After a few paddles, Jones could make out the shadowy shape of a large creature. As they got closer, the animal began to move in the trees just beyond the edge of the water. Suddenly, Jones and his wife became very frightened. The creature was upright, walking biped, as large or larger than a man. Inevitably, thoughts of the Fouke Monster popped into his mind, and that was enough to make him drop the light and begin rowing back toward their vehicles parked some distance away. Once they reached the bank, both Jones and his wife jumped out and pulled the boat ashore. They grabbed a few things and ran to his wife’s four-wheeler, fired up the ignition, and headed up the trail out of the bottoms.

Did they overreact to something that could not be seen clearly? Jones has seen every kind of fowl, fish, and beast that inhabits the rugged swampland, and best he could tell, this was no ordinary denizen of the swamps. He doesn’t claim it was the Fouke Monster, but it was scary enough to make him leave his own truck there until the following day. After seeing the strange animal, it was quicker to jump on his wife’s four-wheeler and get out of the area than to drive his own truck back. Daylight would provide plenty of time to retrieve his truck. Plenty of time and safety.

Boggy Creek II

Ever since
The Legend of Boggy Creek
proved its worth as a moneymaker, film studios had been bugging Pierce to consider a sequel. “AIP had been after me for years to make one more
Boggy Creek
,” Pierce revealed in the 1997
Fangoria
interview. “But I really didn’t want to do
Boggy Creek II
. I think it’s probably my worst picture.”

By 1984 Pierce had produced eight other films and his interest in the monster subject was not what it was in the early 1970s. He had capitalized on an instant in time at the outset of the monster’s media heyday and that was that. As a director, he had moved on. But as we are all sometimes painfully aware, studio executives are more than willing to sully the name of a classic film in order to milk a few extra bucks out of the franchise. So Pierce finally relented and agreed to write and direct
Boggy Creek II
, which was released in 1985. Looking at the film today, there’s not much evidence to refute Pierce’s own criticism of the final product.

In this outing, Pierce casts himself in the lead role as Professor Brian C. “Doc” Lockart, an anthropologist who has an interest in tracking down the swamp-dwelling Sasquatch rumored to live in southern Arkansas. Lockart wrangles a group of three students—including his son, Chuck Pierce, who plays the part of the male student—and heads off toward the bayou to hunt for monsters. In route they stop off in Fouke to visit with some of the locals. One scene takes place in Fouke’s convenience store where the locals warn Lockart against the dangers. The clerk is played by James Tennison, who played the landlord in the climactic Ford scene in the original Boggy Creek movie.

One of the most interesting scenes in
Boggy Creek II
—well, perhaps the
only
interesting scene—takes place as the group visits a local farm on the way out of town. In it, Pierce uses a flashback to describe a sighting of the Fouke Monster. This scene is the only one reminiscent of the docudrama style that made the original film work so well, and it was based on a real incident told to him prior to shooting the first film in 1971. As the story goes, the farmer took Pierce down to his barn where he carefully pointed out the location of his chilling encounter. As Pierce recalls:

He told me, “When I came in here to milk, [the monster] was standin’ there, looking at me. He stepped out, and the back barn door was open, and the light was at his back. He twisted his head and looked at me very curiously, backed up a couple of steps, and then started walkin’ off across my back pasture toward the woods. The hair drooped off his shoulders, off his arms, and he didn’t have any clothes on. The hair completely covered his body.”

Even though the man was willing to share the story, he did not want anything to do with a movie. He did not want his name used; he did not want it reenacted under a fictitious name. He wanted nothing to do with it. Perhaps this is why the scene did not appear in the original movie, although the unwillingness of the Fouke residents’ to allow their names and stories to be used never stopped Pierce in other cases. Perhaps Pierce just never had time to recreate it. Either way, all these years later he finally found a place for it, giving
Boggy Creek II
its only flicker of authenticity.

The rest of the movie is comprised of a totally fictitious hunt for “Bigfoot,” wherein Lockart and his young companions use primitive computer surveillance equipment to hone in on a swampy Sasquatch and eventually its offspring. The monster in this film lacks the mystery of the original, as it treads in full view. Pierce’s marginal acting skills don’t help matters either, which he readily admits: “I played too big a role in the picture.” The two girls of the group bring way too much Flashdance to the forest, while his son Chuck chooses to spend most of his screen time shirtless, for some odd reason. Jimmy Clem, who plays in many Pierce films, appears as the dirty hermit named Crenshaw, but even his inspiring performance fails to provide any real spark even as the final scenes erupt in a fiery cabin blaze. These and other laughable elements provided perfect fodder for the award-winning comedy series,
Mystery Science Theater 3000
, which subjected the movie to its wise-cracking in episode 1006 of the series.

I had the good fortune of visiting Jimmy Clem at his home in Texarkana during my research for this book. I found him to be an extremely interesting and engaging person, who recalled both the good and bad aspects of the film. He did not dispute the fact that Pierce was not altogether happy about making the sequel, but he admitted they both enjoyed the movie-making process and the chance to work together again.

Regardless of the pay-off in fun or money, the film was pretty much a bust. And to confuse matters, the film’s title,
Boggy Creek Part II
—or
The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek Part II,
as it is sometimes billed
—
seemed to forget the previous sequel,
Return to Boggy Creek
, although no one can blame them for trying to erase the memory of it from the moviegoers’ consciousness. However, in the end, II might as well have been III. With its lackluster storyline, cheesy elements, and laughable creature, Pierce’s effort wasn’t much better than the previous sequel and failed to register much of a blip on the horror movie radar. Since the time when
The Legend of Boggy Creek
frightened audiences during the mid-seventies, horror fans had experienced
Halloween
,
The Shining
,
Alien
,
Evil Dead
,
An American Werewolf in London
, and many other great films of the genre. The bar had been raised considerably, and Pierce was not doing the Fouke Monster any favors by creating his own fake stories, even if he was portraying the beast as more dangerous and aggressive. The Fouke Monster was better off and certainly more intriguing for what he really was: a shadowy legend on the edge of civilization.

Shine On, You Crazy Monster

It was 1990. It had been nearly 50 years since reports first began to suggest that a seven-foot-tall hairy creature might be roaming the woods near Jonesville, and two decades since something attacked the Fords in Fouke. During that time, interest in the phenomenon had waxed and waned, but like the moon it always returned, sometimes shining as bright as ever. If it hadn’t been apparent before, it was certainly clear now… the Fouke Monster was not going away. Not ever.

While printed reports throughout the 1980s are hard to come by, the 1990s offered new, credible sightings that are somewhat easier to track down. This is not to say that there weren’t as many reports during the 1980s, only that the newspapers had lost interest and the internet had yet to offer a new outlet for publishing. As a result, I would venture to guess that many word-of-mouth reports only circulated among the locals for a time. But by the 1990s, it seemed that a surge of Fouke Monster activity was taking place, much of which managed to find its way to the public one way or another.

The first sighting was recorded by the ever stalwart
Texarkana Gazette
. According to the report, two men from Oklahoma, Jim Walls and Charles Humbert, were traveling north on Highway 71 on October 22, 1990. As they approached the Sulphur River Bridge around 8:30 a.m., they got wind of a pungent odor that was strong enough to make them pull over, thinking there might be a large dead animal in the vicinity. After stopping on the gravel shoulder, just before the bridge, something off to the right caught their eye. It was a tall, man-like creature covered in shaggy black hair and running across an open field toward the south riverbank, east of the highway. The men were shocked!

“He walked upright just like a human, not like a bear or gorilla,” Jim Walls later told reporters. “I don’t know what I saw, but I know it had to be made of flesh, blood, and bone.”

The men estimated its height to be eight feet and its weight at approximately 400 pounds. They described its face as looking “much more human-like than a chimpanzee or a monkey.”

After the alleged creature ran approximately 200 yards across the field, it paused for a moment and then leapt from the high riverbank towards the water. The men quickly drove across the bridge and circled back to see if they could get another look, but the creature was already gone. Walls assumed that it must have jumped into the river and disappeared below the surface, but this was pure speculation since they never actually saw it hit the water.