Fouke Monster

Right

... you know, the, the other Bigfoot story we did down in Arkansas, the Fouke Monster, where he kinda grabbed a guy on the porch, and, or at least that's what they said.

Mm-hmm.

In most cases, they're- they're just not violent-type creatures.

And then there's other creatures out here.

And we talked about the folk monster, which also known as the Boggy Creek monster, you know, the type of Bigfoot famous cryptid film in the 70s, a low budget horror, the legend of Boggy Creek.

Loveland Frogman.

As Cisco says, there's all kinds of crap out there.

And it's believed to...

That's what they say the Falk Monster is.

It's an escaped creature that was from a derailed circus train.

And it escaped into the swamps.

Now, when you have what is essentially kind of a Bigfoot-like creature seen in Arkansas in the early 70s, nobody was really thinking Bigfoot.

So the journalist, the newspaper writer gave it the name the Falk Monster, and a lot of these journalists will do that, sort of a localized name.

though essentially it was described as being, you know, seven foot tall, walked upright on two legs, it's covered in hair, you know, it's ape-like, essentially a Bigfoot.

But what stood out here is that many of the encounters were terrifying because there was a family that was living in a rental home there near Boggy Creek and This thing was creeping around on the porch.

And, you know, those kind of encounters obviously translated well to the sort of docudrama horror film movie, The Legend of Boggy Creek, because they were very scary and scary.

So that was kind of the reputation, Boggy Creek Monster, as it kind of became called, was this aggressive sort of ape-like creature living down there in the Sulphur River bottoms.

So much like the Lake Worth Monster that kind of had this outbreak, if we want to call it that, was it the same with the Falk Monster?

Very similar.

Uh, and there's the list goes on and my buddy Lyle Blackburn, he put together a great publication called Texas Bigfoot, which really, uh, chronicles a lot of the different historical instances and these regional names that have been given to, uh, what otherwise people just know to be Bigfoot.

Well, I think it's just amazing to see that, uh, wherever, you know, in these places that there've been sightings, um, a lot of times, and as, as this, uh, great line goes with the, uh, the legend of Boggy Creek, the 1972 cult classic that I really learned about through Lyle and his, um, ability as the sort of the biographer of the Boggy Creek monster, that this isn't just something that people know to be a phenomenon in, in Washington and Oregon and Northern California, but all over this area of Eastern Texas, Southeast Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, there's a concentration of reports.

Now what people are actually seeing that can be questioned and looked into, but there's no doubt a thorough number of people who have described seeing something to the effect of a wild feral humanoid person, whether that falls along the more of the lines of a large Sasquatch type creature or more of a feral person or homeless person, maybe that just seems like they're out in the wild.

And so whatever variance you have, colors of hair and all of these things, um, various groups like the Texas Bigfoot Research Center have tried to make sense of, uh, cataloging these and, and putting them together for archival and research purposes.

The three toes is one of the strangest threads in the whole tapestry, because no known primate on this earth has three toes.

Whatever the Fouke monster is, if those tracks are to be believed, it isn't quite anything that's in the books.

What happened next was, in some ways, more dangerous than the monster ever was.

The story went national, and Fouke was overrun.

In 1972, a young local filmmaker named Charles B.

Pierce made a movie about it.

Working on a shoestring budget of around $160,000, and calling it at first Tracking the Fouke Monster, Pierce shot a pseudo-documentary right there in and around Fouke, casting actual residents of the town, many of them reenacting their own real encounters in front of the camera.

The Crabtree family, longtime locals wound all through the legend, were deeply involved.

For those who venture into the deep forests along the rim, the legend serves as a stark reminder that the wilderness keeps its own secrets, some of which may be large, hairy, and very hostile.

Now, in the murky swamplands and moss-draped cypress groves of southern Arkansas lurks one of America's most famous regional cryptids, the Fouke Monster.

This creature is inextricably linked to the small town of Fouke and the labyrinthine waterways of Boggy Creek.

While stories of a wild man in the area circulated for decades, the beast clawed its way into the national spotlight during a series of intense encounters in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Fouke Monster is typically described as a large bipedal hominid standing around seven feet tall and covered in thick dark brown or black hair.

Its chest is said to be massive and broad, and it moves with a peculiar loping gait, swinging its arms as it runs.

But its most defining characteristics, its glowing red eyes, and most notably, its tracks.

Unlike the five-toed footprints associated with Bigfoot, the Fouke Monster is said to leave behind enormous three-toed tracks, a biological anomaly that deepens its mystery.