from A Ghosthunter's Journal by Mason Winfield

III

The late drive home on those spare country roads gave me the chance to step back from the Black Creek situation. My first gesture was to take a breath.

The Allegany Bigfoot was something new for me all the way. Most of the cases I work with involve psychic (“supernatural”) phenomena, which are never so concrete or dramatic that there’s a chance of official acceptance; thus, there had never been much for me to gain or lose by them. The prospect of getting the goods on this one made me nervous. I tried to slow down and evaluate the case for its legitimacy.

This was the most persuasive twentieth-century encounter I’d ever heard of in Western New York and one of the only Bigfoot appearances anywhere reported in an area this accessible. Northern Allegany County is hilly, wooded, and rural, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a spot in it more than a mile from a paved road. The region is crossed by hunters, hikers, and ATV’s virtually all year. It was maddening to think of a big unknown animal living hidden here for very long.

The plaster footprints had looked imposing enough: blocky, brute affairs much like the ones from California and the northwest. It was impressive to see and heft them, as if their mineral quality indicated their maker. Of course a woodcarver like Bill Pascarella could have done the models for them; but he was one of the skeptics. And what would have been the motive? The family were trying to keep things quiet; and they were far from united in their belief.

Sandy and some of the older kids were serious about the natural mystery, though to the younger ones, passing around chalky footprints like family treasures, the Sasquatch-watch was clearly a game at this point. Husband Bill and college student Suzie had never caught the obsession, both seeming to feel that the family were the victims of a joker in the matter of the footprints and overactive imaginations thereafter. I drew no conclusion from this disparity. Even in some famous and apparently legitimate paranormal cases, members of a family don’t always agree about the situation under their own roof. Had Sandy’s entire clan been trying to persuade me of something I would have been more suspicious.

One thing even had me questioning Sandy’s belief. I know she’s a tree-hugger; but why, after taking its footprints, would anyone who believes in its existence invite this creature back near her children? This is a massive animal - or whatever - and, because of its presumed intelligence, potentially the most dangerous in the world. Then I thought of the UFO freaks in Independence Day imploring their own incineration from atop a high building. I know people who would do that, Brutally dismissive of other folks whose politics merely differ on points from their own, they can suspend all critical faculties with a UFO or an unknown animal, regarding any manifestation of either as a sacred event like the surfacing of an endangered whale. I reflected that anything is possible where people are concerned; and that my own attitudes were not above reexamination as well. I pondered my next concrete move. I wasn’t sure there would be one.

Whatever I am (or think I am) accomplishing, I never saw my role as that of a paranormal P. T. Barnum, calling ever more mystifying events to the world’s notice. My point has always been to remind us of the great language embodied in the world’s myth, religion, and spirituality; to protest this legacy’s neglect in the late twentieth-century’s materialism; and to point out for us all again that our scientistic mind-set has not proven its case well enough to rule out all but its own gods. The discovery and documentation of a Bigfoot in a Western New York backyard had no direct impact on any of these goals. Most decisive, however, was the concerned family’s desire for privacy. Any further publicizing on my part would be betraying them.

I decided simply to wait, either for Sandy’s clan to change its position or for another pertinent development I could write up without compromising any source. Because of my book and my new contacts in the region, I thought I’d have a fair chance of hearing about it. I resolved to prepare for it by solidifying a personal big picture about the whole topic. This was not a major scholarly undertaking, I might add. The literature is truly dense in almost no paranormal subject.

I found that most devotees see a Bigfoot question as a zoological one, regarding the beastie as a presumed-extinct hominid like Gigantopithecus. To them the only problem is that the hunt so far has been unsuccessful. The rest of us, though, run into some dead ends looking at it that way. It’s hard to see how the North American environment could support a still-secret breeding population of large animals (unless they eat trees and sleep underground). A Bigfoot still hasn’t been shot, captured, or even found dead.

There are counter-arguments, and good evidence of Bigfoot’s physical existence: footprints, recorded sound effects, even a few unidentified reddish hairs. The sheer mass of testimony has to be worth something, pointing at least to a perceptual mystery. Almost every forested state of the Union has had Bigfoot reports throughout White history and, at least in the west, Native American tradition. There is also that famous short, amazing film. It could be a power forward in an ape suit except for its walk, which physiologists have pronounced as humanly impossible to fake.

There are reasons to believe that the absence of a Bigfoot - living or dead - is not such crushing evidence. Its alleged environment is huge and trackless. A dead grizzly has never been found in the woods, either, and many natural animals are marvelously elusive. Most people in my region, for instance, are unaware that coyotes live among us in abundance, even in the suburbs. Bears hide pretty well, too, and they’re lumbering, and not as smart as hominids. The defiance of skeptics isn’t so worrisome, either. There have been these in every generation about every issue; they admit no doubt of the standard picture, which changes, if ever, around them. The most credible position may be in the middle, especially for those who haven’t done any digging. If you take only what’s known about Bigfoot - that it has been reported - and work backward, a number of insights make sense.

Worldwide, mystery critters - lake snakes (like the Loch Ness monster) and freaky furries (like Bigfoot, the Yeti, and others) - have for some reason become associated both with the UFO cycle and the “Earth Mysteries” school of modern supernaturalism. There seem to be UFO-beastie zones, and even seasons, about the world. For instance, the third week of May 1977 found the British Isles a supernatural circus of “big cat” and Nessie sightings with a veritable “Star Wars” bigtop of UFOs above. Researcher John Michell noted that most of the sightings were near “places of ancient sanctity” - old religious sites - and related geological features, like geomagnetic electricity and underground water (also associated with hauntings).

Philosophers of the paranormal have found a Jungian (as in psychoanalyst Carl Jung) significance to most of the apparitions, too. Big snakes, big monkeys, and big discs in the sky are elements of such primal significance in the language of the unconscious that they would be likely things to imagine. It doesn’t matter at all that the people who see them are unexposed to Jungian psychology; it’s actually more persuasive that way.

The upshot of all this philosophizing, though, is that I formed no theory at all about Bigfoot. Evenly weighted in my mind were the possibilities that Bigfoot was connected to forces within the earth that somehow caused its apparitions; that it was some semi-physical mystery being totally new to science, possibly a supernatural “wild card,” the classic “psychoid archetype” stepping from the collective unconscious in and out of the world; and that it and the whole business were make-believe. The prospect that Bigfoot could be a truly physical being was remote to me until my last 1998 visit to Allegany County.

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