1978 Bigfoot Sighting now a Local Legend

[From “The Canton Repository”. August, 15/ 2004.]

It was a hot summer night in August 1978.

Evelyn Cayton was sitting at the kitchen table with family and friends. They heard a noise in her back yard on Lincoln Street SE, about two miles west of Minerva.

It wasn’t the first time. The kids had heard strange noises before. They thought it was a hermit. Maybe a crazed mountain man. It made the dog go berserk.

Then they saw something in the woods — a 6-foot-tall, thickly haired beast.

The night of Aug. 20 was different. The beast got closer than ever, peering into the kitchen window, illuminated by an outside light, reeking of ammonia and rotten eggs.

Weighing 300 pounds, black-and-brown matted hair covered its head and body, making the face indistinguishable.

Venturing outside, the Caytons and their guests searched for it. They saw it in the headlights of a car. The manlike animal moved toward them. Everybody got scared and ran inside. A woman was so frightened she cried.

Twenty-six years ago this month, the stunned group reported what they saw to Stark County sheriff’s deputy James Shannon.

Some details elude him, but Shannon remembers that night, the start of what he calls the most bizarre investigation of his 30-year law enforcement career.

“They heard something in the window, kind of clawing and pawing,” said Shannon, who retired in 1997 as a captain in the department. “From what I remember, I don’t think this creature, critter, whatever the hell it was, was trying to get in as much as it was saying, ‘Hey, look at me.’ ”

Shannon did not suspect a hoax. Not a hint of it.

The family saw something. He doesn’t know what, though he’s not convinced it was a Bigfoot.

Then again, “For all I knew, I could have been the first person to substantiate the existence of one.”

Bigfoot buzz

The sighting was a sensation.

It made the front page of The Repository four times.

“Deputies seek 6-foot beast,” trumpeted the headline on the first story, at the bottom corner of the front page. A few days later, the story was bannered across the top: “Beast still, but noises, odor persists.”

“Deputies will resume a stake-out tonight in efforts to spot a 6-foot hairy beast that frightened a Lincoln St. SE family earlier this week,” the Aug. 24 story began.

Jim Hillibish gumshoed the story for The Repository.

“It was those doldrums between the Hall of Fame (festival) and Labor Day,” he said, laughing. “It was a good story and we kept it going.”

Overnight, the property became a Bigfoot outpost, attracting media from Akron, Cleveland and even outside the country. Wire services spread the story nationally. Bigfoot investigators from Florida and California and hunters armed with high-power rifles descended on 14186 Lincoln St. SE.

A van drove onto the Cayton’s front yard one time. A group of hunters hopped out, flanked by Doberman pinschers, trekking into the deep woods and old strip mine behind the property. Bigfoot believers camped out in the woods.

It got so bad that the Caytons posted a fence to keep gawkers out. Evelyn Cayton was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

“I think the hype lasted into the fall,” Shannon recalled.

In 1983, Herbert Cayton, Evelyn’s husband, recounted the Bigfoot buzz.

“One day there were 100 to 150 cars ... in my driveway, on my lawn and lining both sides of the road,” he said.

Evelyn and Herbert Cayton are deceased. The remaining Caytons are publicity shy. Howe Cayton, a son, and Rebecca Manley, a daughter, declined to be interviewed about the Bigfoot.

The family took a lot of razzing. At a high school football game, local folks mocked them, chanting, “Bigfoot, Bigfoot.” A local eatery spoofed the sighting, advertising on a roadside sign: “Bigfoot ate here.”

Herbert Cayton took the skepticism in stride.

“There were doubters,” he said. “Those who yelled things from car windows when they passed. It was weird. ... The way I feel about it is if they don’t want to believe, they don’t have to.”

“I think most people thought of it as a joke, as a lark,” said Shannon.

But the Cayton report spurred claims of other sightings.

“Somebody claimed that they saw a Bigfoot running across Route 30 near the Cayton’s house,” Shannon said. “It was a fog-shrouded night and all of a sudden they saw this thing dart out in front of them.”

Another sighting was reported on Liberty Church Road SE.

The woman “reported hearing strange noises in the woods surrounding her house since sometime in June,” Shannon’s August report said. It sounded like a cat fight or a woman’s shriek, the woman said. Other neighbors heard the noises.

Searching for Sasquatch

Shannon took the Bigfoot report seriously, like any other investigation: a stolen car, a drug deal, a barroom scuffle.

On the night of Aug. 20, he spent an hour or two at the Cayton home, then returned when daylight broke.

Shannon and four other deputies scoured the area, searching for six or seven hours in Army surplus Jeeps and on horseback.

“A lot of people thought it was a bear; somebody thought it was a deer,” Shannon said. “And I thought, ‘These people ought to be able to tell the difference.’ ”

Cayton, who worked the midnight shift at Diebold, wasn’t home that night, but said he had seen the creature twice before.

“It was shaped like a man and it walked like a man,” he told The Repository in 1983. “When a bear moves away, it goes away on all four feet. This swung up over the (edge of the) strip mine on two.”

Part of a skull was found in a pit behind the Cayton home, Shannon said; it appeared to be from a cow or other large animal. Tufts of fur were found on the remains of a chicken coop, where the Caytons had spotted the Bigfoot sitting.

The fur and skull went to Malone College for analysis. The skull also was taken to the pathology laboratory at Aultman Hospital, but the hospital refused to examine it.

Nobody knows what happened to them.

Suzie Thomas, spokeswoman for Malone College, said she’s fielded questions about the samples before and has asked those who were on campus then.

“Either their memory is failing them or they’re just not admitting they were involved in a hunt for (Bigfoot),” she said, laughing.

Police report

Shannon interviewed residents of the Cayton home, friends, even a professional photographer in quest of a snapshot of Bigfoot.

The Caytons never used the word “Bigfoot.”

Mrs. Cayton simply described a creature, more than 6 feet tall with stubby legs and hairy, indistinct features, that at one point turned to protect two “smaller things that were standing beside it,” the report said. It eventually walked away into the strip mine.

Manley, 27, and her sister Vicki Keck, 25, were shaken.

Scott Patterson, 18, a family friend, also was shaken up. Skeptical of past sightings, Patterson told Shannon he was now a “believer.”

The sightings didn’t end on Aug. 20.

Two days later, Mary Ackerman, another Cayton daughter, said she saw the beast standing on the edge of a strip mine when she pulled into her parents’ driveway, and five days after the initial report, John Nutter, a photographer from Cuyahoga Falls, said he saw a bear about 30 feet away in a wooded area near Liberty Church Road SE. Nutter took a photo and retreated quickly. A deputy combed the area for 90 minutes and found what appeared to be bear tracks.

But Nutter’s color film produced a “fuzzy” image, and he waffled on the bear story.

“I thought it over and now (I) don’t think it was a bear,” he told The Repository a few days later. “It made a sound unlike any bear I’ve ever heard.”

More sightings

The Minerva Bigfoot continues to fascinate. Last month, a researcher visited the Cayton home to search the woods.

And reports of Bigfoot persist in Paris Township, a hotbed of sightings, though not with the same fervor of the 1978 sightings.

David White, 58, said he’s heard mysterious sounds behind his Paris Township home, a few hundred yards from the Cayton home, at the rear of Skyland Hills Mobile Home Park.

“It’s a blood-chilling sound,” White said. “A curdling sound.”

White paused. His eyes grew wide. “It will scare the hell out of you.”

He said he heard the noises last summer, echoing from the woods next to a small lake.

David’s wife, Connie White, backed him up: “You don’t want to look and see what it was,” she said. They said it sounded like the noises on a Bigfoot TV show.

“I’ve heard wild cats, panthers, you name it,” said David White, who grew up hunting with his father, “and I’ve never heard the sound like I heard here.”

Hunters have seen “something” in the woods, he added, vowing never to return. They said it sounded like a bear.

“It scared the animals off,” David White said. “The turkey, the deer, the rabbits — all the wild game was gone.”

In the 1980s, White said, his teenage son was haunted by “something” in a remote area on Crowl Street SE; it was months, maybe more than a year, before his son would camp in those woods again.

He said he also saw one in the Greentown area when he was a school boy. About an hour before sunset, White and two friends rode bicycles back to a strip mine pond off Highland Park Street NW.

Bigfoot was about 100 yards away, he said, the beast’s upper body on the other side of the lake, ominously poking over the brush line.

“This dog we had, a big collie, it wasn’t scared of nothing,” White said. “When it ran, we knew it was time to go.”

White stretched his hands about four feet apart: “Its shoulders were that wide.”

The story lives on

A few years ago, the legendary Minerva sighting was featured on the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” television show.

In 1996, The Wall Street Journal interviewed Shannon.

“We’re a pretty urban county, so there’s not too many places for Bigfoot to hide,” Shannon told the reporter. “When Bigfoot walks into one of our liquor stores and pulls a holdup, then I’ll believe it.”

The Akron Beacon Journal’s coverage included an artist’s rendering, and the story forever linked reporter Barbara Galloway, now an Alliance High School teacher, to the “Minerva Monster.”

“Of probably all the 3,000 stories I’ve done in my career, that’s the one that everyone remembers.”

Galloway’s name pops up on the Internet, mingled with reports detailing the Minerva case.

“People remember it, for some insane reason,” she said, “and they ask me about it quite a lot. I probably get a couple inquiries a year.”

Galloway recalls details of the Cayton story, including a “lionlike, tan-colored animal on four legs that walked with it.” She also recalls the Caytons “didn’t feel they were in imminent danger. ... It was just maybe curious.”

Galloway and photographer Ted Wall camped out on the Caytons’ porch.

“Ted was a grizzled veteran of news and he was like, ‘By gosh, if it is here, I am going to get a picture of it.’”

The creature never showed.

But Galloway does not discount the story.

Some things couldn’t be explained, she noted. A tunnel, 7 or 8 feet long, was dug through dense brush and thorn bushes, leading to a gully behind the Cayton home. It resembled a nest or sleeping area — maybe Bigfoot’s bed.

Galloway grew up a farm girl. She knows the work of a bear when she sees it. It marks its territory, clawing trees, Galloway said, leaving scattered bark and tree limbs.

And “a person basically would have had to go in there with a chain saw and carve out a perfect circle, and it wasn’t like that at all. It didn’t look human, and it didn’t match the behavior patterns of a bear.”

Sticking to their story

The Caytons stuck to their story, said Shannon, Galloway and Donald Keating, a Bigfoot investigator from Newcomerstown.

“They were very plain, simple, down-to-earth people, and you could tell something had happened that really frightened them,” Galloway said. “There were never any inconsistencies with their story, however many times we went over it.”

Shannon drew the same conclusion.

“Some of the persons were interviewed separately and all described the beast identically,” he reported. “All hoped they would never see it again.”

Keating, who founded the annual Bigfoot conference in Newcomerstown and the Tri-State Bigfoot Study Group, said the Minerva story stands out among the hundred or so he’s probed.

“Back in ’85, when I spoke with the family, and again in ’91, their reports were the same practically word for word as they were in ’78,” he said. “If you had a list of the top 10 sightings in Ohio based on credibility or believability, Minerva would easily be in the top three.”

Massive publicity overwhelmed the Caytons, Galloway said.

“They were quite appalled when all the reporters and the hunters did show up,” she said. “They were kind of reluctant to even do the story, but on the other hand they felt they had to make it known it was even happening and that this unusual thing was in their area.”

Shannon still wonders exactly what the Caytons saw.

“To this day, I don’t think that I doubt that they saw something, and underscore something. I don’t necessarily think it was a Bigfoot.”

WCSRO, 2006.