Lyle Blackburn - The Beast of Boggy Creek: The True Story of the Fouke Monster

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 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 Foukes 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 Blackburns 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 Foukes 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 hes 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. Marylands 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 notThe 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.

Loren Coleman , director of the International Cryptozoology Museum and author of Mysterious America , Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America , The Field Guide to Bigfoot , and other cryptozoology books.

Introduction

For more than a century, tales of a mysterious ape-like creature lurking in the woods of southern Arkansas have circulated among believers and skeptics alike. The Fouke Monster, as it is called, has become one of those enduring artifacts of backwoods legend, fueled by news reports, movies, internet, and cryptozoological studies until it has earned a solid foothold within American lore. To those who believe to have seen it, it is real; to the skeptical, it is simply a campfire story; to Hollywood, a bankroll; and to those with a love for monsters or local lore, it is a subject worthy of continued research. But regardless of your affiliation, there is something interesting for all in the tale of the Fouke Monster. Thats because it is more than just the simple story of a monster. It is an exploration into primal fears, cultural phenomenon, cryptozoology, and the magic of movies all rolled into one.

Like many, my first exposure to the Fouke Monster (pronounced Fowk ) came in the form of celluloid cinema with the movie The Legend of Boggy Creek , originally released in 1972. This pseudo-documentary directed by Charles B. Pierce gave national attention to the small town of Fouke, Arkansas, whose namesake monster would be propelled into the pantheon of undocumented creatures alongside Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Mothman, and others. I was fortunate to catch The Legend of Boggy Creek in re-run at an old drive-in as a child. Having grown up near the movies real-life setting in Fouke (about three hours drive from my home in Fort Worth, Texas), it hit very close to home when I first heard the creatures scream during the opening sequence. I was familiar with the backwoods of the Texas/Arkansas areamy father was a bowhunter who didnt mind dragging his young son along on twilight stakeouts to hunt the local gameso it was not a stretch for me to imagine a seven-foot ape-beast lurking just out of sight on those crisp autumn nights. The movie not only scared me, but furthered my love for unexplained creatures and crowned the Fouke Monster as my very own homegrown beastie. [1]