BIGFOOT! by Loren Coleman

Author:Loren Coleman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 2003-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

The Big Muddy Monster

The rest of the summer months of 1973 were taken up with the events near the Big Muddy River.

The creature—which would quickly be called the Big Muddy Monster after the nearby river—first appeared shortly after midnight on June 25, 1973, and was seen by Randy Needham and Judy Johnson, who were parked on a boat ramp to the Big Muddy River near Murphysboro, a town in southwestern Illinois. The couple was startled by a cry “about three times as loud as a bobcat, only deeper,” emanating from the nearby woods. When they looked up, they saw a huge biped lumbering toward them, still shrieking but now in altering tones. It was not a human sound.

Randy and Judy agreed the thing was about seven feet tall, white, its short body hair matted with river mud. They were not interested in examining it at close range, and by the time it had approached within twenty feet of them, they were bound for the Murphysboro police station. Officers Meryl Lindsey and Jimmie Nash checked the area and found “impressions in the mud approximately ten to twelve inches long and approximately three inches wide,” according to the report they filed later.

Needham later described the impressions as “something like a man with a shoe on would make—only the thing wasn’twearing shoes.” He suggested that toe prints might not have registered in the mud.

At 2 A.M., Nash, Lindsey, Needham, and Deputy Sheriff Bob Scott returned to the scene. This time they discovered fresh tracks, similar in general appearance to those they had seen an hour earlier, but deeper and smaller. The police report noted an especially strange detail: “The prints in the mud were very irratic [sic] in that no two were the same distance apart and some were five to six feet apart. Also prints were found very close together.”

Officer Lindsey left to get a camera to take pictures of the prints, and while he was gone, the other three followed the tracks. While they were bending over to examine some of them, there came “the most incredible shriek I’ve ever heard,” Nash recalled. Apparently the creature was hidden in the trees less than a hundred yards away, but the trio didn’t stick around to find out. They beat a hasty retreat to the squad car. In the hours that followed, the officers scoured the area in pursuit of an elusive splashing sound, but found nothing. When daylight came, things quieted down, but with darkness the creature returned.

The first to see it this time was four-year-old Christian Baril, who told his parents he had seen “a big white ghost in the yard.” They didn’t believe him, of course, but ten minutes later, when Randy Creath and Cheryl Ray saw something very much like that in a neighboring yard, parents and police reconsidered the youngster’s words.

About 10:30 P.M. Creath and Ray were sitting on the back porch of the Ray home when they heard something moving in the trees just beyond the lawn.

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