sasquatch

STEVE AND THE
SOONER SASQUATCH
When I was just a young man I read an article in Argosy magizine about the Sasquatch (sometimes called Bigfoot) monster that is said to rome the woods of the western U.S.A.
Although I can't say I am a true believer, there is just enough of a question to make it fun to think about. As I grew up, I often fantasized about what it would be like to go on a real Sasquatch hunt.
In collage it was always a joke that no matter where we were going, if someone asked, we told them we were going on a Sasquatch hunt.
It wasn't till after I had graduated and I should have grown out of such foolishness that I had the chance to go on a "real" Sasquatch hunt,
I lived in Oklahoma City and it was the late 70's. The head lines of The Daily Oklahoman were full of alliteration as it proclaimed something like "Sooner Sacquatch Sends Searchers Scurrying."
The story told of the biggest Sasquatch hunt in Oklahoma history, near the small town of Stillwell Oklahoma.
According to the news story , a boy had reported to police that he had been picked up and scratched by a large manlike creature outside of the boys friends home. He reported it to be a large 10 foot tall hairy, foul smelling creature with red eyes,
It had first been seen by the boy's friend. It had been looking in the window. When the boys went outside to get a better look, it graped one of them and scratched him. The creature then was said to have run away. The boys tried to follow, but the creature started throwing rocks at them. It then escaped by running into a deeply wooded valley know as "Englander Holler."
That night police units from several nearby towns joined in to search for the thing these boys had reported..
It sounded like they had a wild time. Several people went into the woods and saw, heard and smelled some strange things. Someone brought in some dogs who got the trail of something, but when the dogs got scared, the people did too and they called off the hunt for the night.
They all went home and locked their doors. The next morning, nobody wanted to talk about it except for the two boys.
That morning I decided I wanted to investigate this story for myself.
I drove to Stillwell and started asking questions. I soon found out who the boys were and where they lived. Iwent to find them, and what I found was an adventure bigger than I expected.
By the time I arrived, things had stated to settle down a little. The media presence was gone.
When I got to the home of the boy who had been mainly involved, his parents decided not to let him talk to me. They said it had been like a circus around there and they needed their privacy.
They did answer a couble of questions to help me locate the place it was said to have happened, just down the road at the neigbors house.
It was a shock when I saw the shack where the neigbors lived. It was like a picture from a set of a movie about the Hatfields and McCoys!
The house had no paint, the roof was caving in. The door was open and the dogs and goats were coming and going freely along with the flies.
On the porch sat an old man in tattered overalls sitting in an old rocking chair with a shot gun in his hands.
This man was the only one home, but it didn't take me long into our conversation to realize that he was drunk, and maybe a little crazy too.
This man was the grandfather of the other boy.
I asked him a few questions and he showed me where the creature had been seen, the rocks that had been thown and where the creature had gone back into thr woods.
Then he told me that he thought it was a ghost.
The old man said he had seen the creature before. He said that he had even shot at it from close range, but that the shot seemed to pass right through it, then he saw it dissapear into thin air.
By this time the man was acting wild, shouting and waving his gun about. I became afraid, not of a Sasquatch, but of this man. I almost left then, but instead, I asked him if it would be OK if I went back into the woods to have a look myself.
He discouraged me calling me crazy for wanting to go out into the woods when there was such a dangerous monster out there, but he said if I was foolish enough to go, I could.
At first I went back behind the barn. I looked for footprints, clumbs of hair or any clue.
I found an old road that wandered back into the woods so I decided to follow it.