This trail cam photo from a man named Frank in Vermont is making an appearance again so I thought I’d dive into some info and history behind it.
The location of Western Vermont definitely offers an elusive creature a very dense forest and mountainous area to hide in, some of us would call it “squatch country”. In Vermont’s early history with bigfoot, it was referred to as “wild man”. It was first reported in 1879 by a group of hunters claiming to have seen an enormous, hairy creature lurking in the woods.
Two studies of the creature were conducted here, one was an analysis of hair samples and the other by biologists that set up several motion cameras around an area it was sighted. Both studies came back pointing to local wildlife. The hair sample was that of a deer and the cams picked up deers, bears, etc.
Western Vermont trail cam photo
Now back to the trail cam photo. while everyone can agree that’s a coyote on the left, what the hell is happening over there on the right? A question a man named Frank was wondering. Frank’s apple trees were continually missing apples and trying to get to the bottom as to who or what was taking them he set up cameras and this picture was the result.
The mystery of this picture was featured on season three, episode two of the series Finding Bigfoot. They also interviewed others that had a sighting in the area. One man had seen one right outside his kitchen window and another was a woman who had seen one driving home down a mountain road.
Photo from Finding Bigfoot series
The boys were convinced her sighting was real and while they conducted their own investigation they picked up a possible tree knock, and when Bobo recreated the photo, it gave them a good sense of the sheer size this creature may have been. As for the photo they believed it was definitely a Sasquatch, and to our surprise likely holding a young one to them.
I watched an amazing presentation by Cliff Barackman and he was discussing bigfoot photographs through the years and this one made the cut. Here is his take on the photo:
Cliff Barackman at the Deschutes Public Library
His findings was that this most likely is an adult bigfoot holding its young one. I, like many were curious of the white patches which he believed may be from the skin disease vitiligo. And yes primates also can be born with it. Overall for me, I feel this picture is the real deal. Always have. What are your thoughts on the photograph? And if you don’t feel it’s a bigfoot, what do you think it could be?
“A wild man is loose in the woods at Hancock, N. Y. A group of hunters have just returned from Port Jervis, where they went for guns and ammunition with which to slay him.
But the question has arisen whether they have a right to kill a wild man? Some of the hunters argue tnat it would be murder. Others say that it wouldn’t, but that wild men are protected by the game laws. His life will probably be spared until legal advice has been taken, unless some impetuous woodsman slays him and then waits for a ruling. The first intimation the farmers had of the presence of the wild man was the disappearance of cows, young cattle and sheep.
They at first thought that a bear had taken them. John Cook, a farmer, heard a terrible rumpus in his piggery the other night and, believing that the pigs had upset a beehive placed temporarily in their stye, he ran ont. As he stepped into the shed be was grabbed by the wild man. The fellow looked seven feet high and was quite naked. He was a hairy man.
From his mouth protruded big teeth like fangs. Farmer Cook is six feet three and very powerful, but he was helpless in the grasp of the wild man, who carried him to the door and hurled him thirty feet The farmer fell unconscious; when he woke up he found himself lame and bruised. His best pig was gone. crowbar lay on the ground tied into knots. Farmer Cook says the wild man did this to show his annoyance at being interrupted. The next night Peter Thomas was driving near Dead Man’s Lane when he met the wild man.
Thomas says he looked like an ape. He seized the near horse and, with a single sweep of his long, hairy arm, tore off the harness. Then he wrung the horse’s neck and dragged him to the woods. This story is vouched for by Mr. Thomas, who is a church deacon.
A party of hunters fallowed the tracks to a lonely swamp. The footprints showed that ths man’s nails had developed into claws. He had uprooted trees.The lair ot the wild man was found on Friday, but he was not at home. Berry pickers discovered it in the woods near Rattlesnake Hill.
Near by was a portion of Mr.; Thomas’ horse, which evidently had been torn with the teeth of the wild man. Scattered about were tbe bones of sheep and other animals. The wild man takes his meat raw. Some say the wild man is an escaped chimpanzee or gorilla, but a member of the New York Veterinarian Association who is boarding at Port Jervis says monkeys don’t eat meat.”
If you follow along with me on this and other platforms, you know I enjoy researching and posting older news and encounters. Today’s post is from the Bigfoot Casebook, which did a good job collecting a lot of sighting reports from all over, from other researchers as well. Here is one of those encounters…
“A 30-year-old police officer, Verlin Herrington, encountered a Bigfoot at 2:35 a.m. on Sunday 26 July 1969. He was himself a deputy sheriff for Gray’s Harbor County, Washington State, and at the time was driving home on the Deekay Road in the direction of Copalis Beach. As he rounded a bend he found a large creature standing in the middle of the road which he first took for a bear. He braked hard and then coasted towards it. As he came nearer he noticed that it did not have a bear’s snout and he could see fingers and toes on its hands and feet. From a distance of 70-80 feet he put his spotlight on it as it walked towards the edge of the road, not going down on all fours as would a bear but remaining upright. He pulled out his revolver with the intention of shooting it in the leg and returning in daylight to follow the trail. But as he cocked his pistol the creature faded into the trees at the roadside and was lost to view. Herrington estimated that he had about two minutes in which to study the creature, and he said it was 7-8 feet tall, weighed more than 300 pounds, and was covered in dark-brown hair about 3-4 inches long on the head, but shorter elsewhere. He also observed hair-covered breasts, with nipples which were black, as was its face. Herrington did not intend to publicize his sighting, but he made the mistake of telling two incredulous colleagues when he met them in a cafe, where he was overheard, and the next day his story was the property of the news agencies…”
“Valentine visitor frightens woman and her dog in Carmel New York! On February 14th a young woman was taking her German Shepherd for his nightly walk around 10 pm and had quite a surprise. They stepped outside and her watchdog suddenly froze and tucked his tail between his legs and started whining to get back inside. She had heard something breaking branches in the wood line and quickly went back into the house. The following morning she decided to investigate what was happening on her property. They had gotten 12″ of snow and she was shocked to see large human like tracks going through her backyard! She also heard several wood knocks from the tree line which leads down to the creek.” From the Hudson Valley Bigfoot
Hearing a sound outside the farmhouse Larry Abbott, his father and a relative, Arnold Hubbard, went outdoors to look. Then, from the opposite side of the house, they heard a rustling of weeds. Grabbing a flashlight they saw a “monster” rising from the tall brush about 50 ft away. It was walking toward them, and appeared to be about 10 ft tall and about 4 ft across the shoulders. Its arms were long, like an ape’s. In the flashlight beam the monster’s hairy body was a beige color; its eyes glowed over a nose that was beyond Larry’s ability to describe. The teeth were prominent and protruding, the ears pointed. But the feature that Larry remembered most was the thickness of the shoulders. “The thing put me into a sort of trance,” said Larry. “I couldn’t talk. Maybe it was just fright, but I couldn’t open my mouth. And nobody else talked either. Maybe we were all in a trance.” Larry said when he played the light beam on the monster it dropped down to the ground and was lost from sight. Then, a few minutes later, they could hear it again, near the garage. Alarmed, Larry’s father returned to the house and brought back a .22 rifle and gave it to Hubbard, who wanted to stalk the beast. As the men moved across the open field, the creature suddenly stood up in clear view about 50 ft away. When Larry got it in the beam of the light, Hubbard fired. His first shot was a direct hit. The creature screamed hideously, a scream that Larry will never forget. Two more shots were fired. Unbelievably, before the eyes of all three men, the creature was suddenly enveloped in a white mist. In less than a minute the mist vanished, then darkness. The three men searched the spot where the creature was shot and found no trace of it.”
Source: Leonard H Stringfield, Situation Red The UFO Siege
What has four toes and leaves a footprint almost 20 inches long? Roger Crews of Jenkins County really, really wants to know. Crews found not one, but two strange footprints in his niece’s driveway near Payne’s Chapel Road, just two miles from the Bulloch/Jenkins County line Tuesday. The prints appear humanlike, but only show four toes. The largest measures 19″ long and 11″ wide, and was way deeper than Crews was able to make one of his own prints, and he weighs about 250 pounds. In fact, the off prints dwarf his size 13 EEE shoe prints, he said. Crews’ niece was taking her children to the end of the driveway Tuesday morning when she spotted the prints and called Crews. “She said she heard the dogs, which were in the house, raising cain around 4 a.m.,” he said. “They wouldn’t shut up.” But that doesn’t help identify what made the tracks, only that something was near the house that upset the dogs, he said. Crews examined the track closer. “I got to looking at the thing, and I just said ‘whoa.’ It looks like a human print, but with only four toes, very huge,” he said. He called Georgia Southern University for help in preserving the tracks with plaster and possibly identifying them, but as of Friday, he had not received a response. He said there were two brothers who live in the area who claimed they had seen tracks like this before while coon hunting in the Bay Gall creek area nearby, nearly 10 years ago. Both men, who spoke with Crews separately, told him the same story about seeing the odd, four-toed footprints where they hunted, “except both of them said the ones they saw were not as big…”
“The First time Jim Spink lived by himself in Florida’s Everglades in search of Bigfoot, he stayed six months. He purchased equipment at a flea market. His camera didn’t have a Flash attachment..
-Now Jim Spink is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, duly certified by the Internal Revenue Service.
And the next time he lives in the Eyerglades, he figures the National Science Feundation can provide him with $21,780 in infra-red camera equipment so he can take Bigfoot’s picture.
Spink is an unusual man. So is Bigloot (or the Skunk Ape), if he is real.
Spink is for real. Spink is a perpetual junior colege student: “retired,” he says, living off $290 a month from the GI Bill for going to school.
He is the research director of the
Bigfoot Research Society, and he collects letter from scholars and professors that he would be happy to collaborate with like
David D. Martin. Ph.D., Primate Research Center. Cooperation and encouragement Spink receives. Money he doesn’t. He is undaunted.
Spink, a lean red-bearded ex-Navy quartermaster, is the author (albeit, an unpublished one of the manuscript, Bigfoot and Me.” Therein he tells about his lonely expedition to a remote oyster mound in a mangrove swamp in Charlotte County on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The mosquitoes were terrible. He spent his time there naked so Bigfoot would see they weren’t so different.
Unlike other true believers, some of whom have professed to see an 800 pound hairy man-ape. Spink acknowledges that he never actually saw a Bigfoot.
Instead, Bigfoot watched him, he said “I’m positive he was out there somewhere.” Always it was at night.
Once Bigfoot leaped right up to his pop tent and scared the living crap out of him, Spink said, “chattering and raving in a high-pitched scream.” Spink said he sang a Gllbert and Sullivan tune to calm Bigfoot. He said he played his harmonica and spoke reassuringly . He called Bigfoot “Gin.
“How you doing, Gin?” he said he asked. Bigfoot never answered
Spink, nonetheless, is convinced that Bigfoot, and perhaps his mate, made frequent nocturnal visits to his camp Site. Spink said he collected feces specimens, took pictures. He said he casted a footprint
Bigfoot, he said, once stole his apple-sauce from a pan, picking up the pan, carrying off the pan, and dropping the pan. Spink said he even dusted the pan for fingerprints.
In March tragedy struck, hoodlums came and trashed his camp. Ruined everything, equipment, journals and evidence. Spink refused to give up. It was lucky that his girlfriend won 660 on “Bowling for Dollars” a television show and bought him new equipment. Unfortunately, Bigfoot didn’t return. Instead, a butterfly collector from Minnesota came by. And he became a great birder…”
Charleston Daily Mail
Wednesday, Nov 10th, 1976
Art by Aaron Johnson, Joel Anderson, 2022
I only attempted to transcribe part of the article, but I included it for anyone who would like to transcribe it, in its entirety….
Sasysquatchgirl 