Mike Quast - Sasquatch Central: High Strangeness at a Northern Minnesota Homestead

High Strangeness at a Northern Minnesota Homestead

Michael Quast

Hangar 1 Publishing

1. OPENING

2. BLOOD MASSACRE

3. STICK STRUCTURES & DEER KILLS

4. FIRST SIGHTING?

5. REACHING OUT

6. A COMRADE

7. ESCALATION

8. FINALLY!

9. MORE STRANGENESS

10. CORROBORATION

11. 2019 WINDS DOWN

12. 2020 BEGINS

13. RANDYS SECOND SIGHTING

14. TWO SIGHTINGS, TWO ILLUSTRATIONS

15. DEATH AND DRAMA

16. SECOND SRA VISIT

17. PEANUT BUTTER LOLLAPALOOZA

18. PSYCHIC VISIT

19. MINNESOTA BIGFOOT CONFERENCE

20. ACTIVITY CONTINUES

21. EVEN MORE DISTURBING

22. THIRD SRA VISIT

23. DELRIO VISIT

24. FOURTH SRA VISIT

25. 2020 WINDS DOWN

26. CONCLUSIONS

To report Bigfoot encounters in Minnesota or for further information the author may be contacted at mqstk@aol.com.

Cover design by Doug Hajicek.

Copyright 2021

This book is dedicated to the year 2020. Many of us couldnt wait for it to be over and would like to forget it ever happened. But for me, it was the biggest Bigfoot year ever.

INTRODUCTION

I have been a Bigfoot researcher in the state of Minnesota for over 30 years, dedicated to the pursuit of a giant hairy upright walking manlike or apelike creature. A creature that keeps being encountered by scores of people year after year but has even more people scoffing and insisting that it can not and does not exist. Ive been naturally drawn to fringe subjects my whole life- UFOs, ghosts, monsters, and cryptozoology- but it was strongly bolstered when I had my own Bigfoot sighting at the age of eight in 1976. It was a seconds-long glimpse of a tall black figure over a hundred yards distant from a moving car. A fairly mundane sighting as such things go, put to shame by some of the dramatic stories Ive collected from other witnesses since I started to seek them out in adulthood. Im a lifelong resident of Minnesota, and I love my state, but as a kid, I thought of my Bigfoot sighting as a freak occurrence and that the creatures were most firmly established in the Pacific Northwest. Now I know that eyewitness reports are widespread across all of North America. I feel that Minnesota, with its numerous lakes and forest areas, is one of the top states east of the Rockies to serve as a habitat for them.

I have produced a few self-published books on the subject over the years, and in 2019 I authored Bigfoot Chronicle: A Researchers Continuing Journey Through Minnesota and Beyond. In that book, I included an appendix that listed every single Minnesota Bigfoot report that I had been able to assemble from every available source over three decades. The grand total was nearly 700, and it has continued to grow since then. Im very proud of that accomplishment and all the work that went into it, but it left me wondering- what comes next? I knew of a handful of Bigfoot hotspots when the book came out that I would travel to and search for evidence on a semi-regular basis. It was always a fun adventure to go on for a day or two, but as is the nature of the search for Bigfoot in general, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. One hopes to find evidence or have an encounter in these areas, but they are few and far between and make it feel as if the search is going to go on forever as it has for so many years. This is what most Bigfooters do.

What a surprise it was near the end of 2019 to find that there was a place in Minnesota a three hours drive from my home in the city of Moorhead (sister city to Fargo, North Dakota) where there was reported to be a consistent and perhaps even permanent Bigfoot presence within a few square miles of private property. Most of my searching was done in state or national forests where one did not need permission to be. Only once before had I encountered a case with multiple encounters on a piece of private land where I was able to become involved for an extended period, and that had been way back toward the beginning of my Bigfooting career in the early 1990s. An old retired tracker and trapper named Ed Trimble living in Clearwater County near the town of Bagley found strange bipedal tracks on his land. He reported it to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The DNR knew of me as a Bigfoot researcher then and referred him to me, and after he wrote to me, I drove up and met with him. He was 76 years old at the time and quite a character, an old man of the woods who knew all there was to know about the wilderness. Ed and I struck up a friendship that lasted for a few years, and he became a bit of a mentor to me. I told his story in my books, but in spite of his best efforts, he never managed to catch sight of the creatures that were prowling his land. His experiences consisted of finding footprints, hearing eerie sounds, and damage done to some of his property. He did introduce me to a few of his neighbors, though, who had seen the creatures, and for many years it stood as the most exciting episode I had ever experienced as a Bigfooter. Ed is long gone now, God rest his soul, and I miss him.

But now there was this new case, another private property that I was granted access to, and this one turned out to be like something I had never even dreamed of. Hands down, it quickly became the single most intense Bigfoot case I have ever investigated, and I knew very early on that it was going to deserve its own book. Not only that, I knew it was going to be extremely controversial.

I remember that when I first got involved in the Bigfoot field, I was so turned off by the creatures being referred to as monsters. Then as now, I saw monsters as being things like vampires, werewolves, demons, supernatural things that came from a completely different realm if they existed at all. Sasquatch was something I have always approached through the field of cryptozoology, seeing it as an animal species that I am loathed to describe as undiscovered since thousands of witnesses have discovered it, but having yet to have its existence verified by science. It has always seemed to be a giant primate, perhaps more humanlike, perhaps more apelike, or perhaps something in between. It has left in its wake a long line of physical evidence in addition to eyewitness observations- footprints, hair samples, vocalizations caught on tape, even a plethora of photos and films alleged to show it. This was how it was when the subject first gained widespread public attention back in the late 1950s when reports from northern California spawned the name Bigfoot. The first researchers into it then brought forth the information that these things were known throughout the Pacific Northwest, that across the border in Canada, they were known as Sasquatch, and that there was a history of people encountering them that stretched all the way back into the 1800s. So many classic stories came out, all of them portraying Bigfoot/Sasquatch as either a big ape or a kind of wildman. The famous Patterson-Gimlin film captured in northern California in October of 1967 may be suspected by some of being a hoax and showing nothing but a man in a costume by many skeptics, but the images it shows did nothing to alter the perception of Bigfoot as being a flesh and blood denizen of our forests. (By the way, I firmly believe that film to be genuine.) Even as an ever-expanding number of researchers began to reveal that reports of such creatures were not limited to the Pacific Northwest region but had just as rich a history all across North America as far afield as the East Coast, the idea that they were a natural part of our fauna did not change in the early days.

Of course, though, there were always the Native American legends. These were just as prolific across the continent and described beings that seemed to match what people see in modern times but referred to them as spirits with all sorts of paranormal abilities. Researchers pointed to these tales as further evidence of the creatures existence going hundreds of years back into history and tended to regard the supernatural aspects as just a product of how Native folklore viewed practically all the animals of the forest, a culture whose religions were intimately connected to the earth.