THE BEAST OF BOGGY CREEK: The True Story of the Fouke Monster Read Online Free PDF Page A

meandering paths of Boggy Creek on hot sweltering nights, the monster reeks of Southern swagger, occasionally letting out a bellow from the dark corner of the forested backwoods. There’s no well-groomed, well-fed California Bigfoot here. No, the beast of Fouke is lithe, lean, and covered in long matted fur. And he’s got a knack for frightening the locals. Yes, the world would eventually find out what the quiet residents of the area had suspected all along: that they were sharing the land with a strange and unknown animal.

2. Fouke Lore
    Birth of a Monster
    A creature resembling what came to be known as the Fouke Monster first came to the attention of local officials in 1946, although it wasn’t widely reported at the time. Not until the mid-1960s did encounters with some sort of peculiar animal began to occur with any frequency around the Boggy Creek area, but even these did not receive widespread attention. During that era, the term “Fouke Monster” was not yet used to identify the animal among the locals. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that the small town called Fouke became the nationwide focal point and namesake for the hair-covered beast now referred to as the Fouke Monster, or sometimes as the “Boggy Creek Monster.” It was then that the monster gained real popularity and sank its claws, so to speak, into the media. Newspapers such as the Arkansas Gazette , Texarkana Gazette , Texarkana Daily News , and Little Rock’s Dispatch began to run stories on the various reports. These were eventually picked up by the Associated Press and United Press International and transmitted to newspapers across the nation, drawing an unprecedented level of attention to the small town.
    The first of these reports, considered to be the starting point for the monster’s media age, appeared in the May 3, 1971 edition of the Texarkana Gazette . The article, written by journalist Jim Powell, told of a hair-raising experience reported by the Ford and Taylor families, both of whom had recently moved to the north side of Fouke about five miles from the infamous Boggy Creek. The climactic incident, which followed several consecutive nights of strange happenings, took place after nightfall on Saturday, May 1.
     
FOUKE FAMILY TERRORIZED BY HAIRY MONSTER
“I was moving so fast I didn’t stop to open the door, I just ran through it.”
This was the statement of Bobby Ford, 25, of Rt. 1, Box 220, Texarkana, Ark., Sunday morning after an unidentified “creature” attacked a house about 10 miles south of Texarkana on U.S. Highway 71.
Ford was taken to St. Michael Hospital where he was treated for scratches and mild shock and released.
“We have lived here only five days and I think we are going to move now,” Patricia Ford, 22, Bobby’s sister-in-law said. “The thing has been to the house three times now.”
The “creature” was described by Ford as being about seven feet tall and about three feet wide across the chest. “At first I thought it was a bear but it runs upright and moves real fast. It is covered with hair,” he said.
Ford, his brother Don Ford and Charles Taylor saw the creature several times shortly after midnight Saturday and shot at it seven times with a shotgun.
     
    The incident was utterly bizarre and frightening to the families, but apparently this wasn’t the first time the creature had been lurking around the house. Earlier that week the wives had heard something walking on the porch. On Friday night it tried to break into the house.
The article continued:
     
Elizabeth Ford said she was sleeping in the front room of the frame house when, “I saw the curtain moving on the front window and a hand sticking through the window. At first I thought it was a bear’s paw but it didn’t look like that. It had heavy hair all over it and it had claws. I could see its eyes. They looked like coals of fire ... real red,” she said. “It didn’t make any noise. Except you could hear it breathing.”
Ford said