Many in Central Louisiana fear Bigfoot

[From “The Associated Press”. 2000.]

Bigfoot has been the talk of the diner in the little western Louisiana town of Zwolle since word got out that Hosea Remedies sighted a hairy monster a month ago.

"Customers kept on talking about it and talking about it, so I told them I'd start serving a Bigfoot burger," said Sharon Leone Pearce, manager of Bill and Sissy's Diner.

That lasted but one day. Some customers didn't find it funny to see their fears about a lurking beast posted as a joke.

Bigfoot is no laughing matter to some folks in the bayous of central Louisiana, where there have been four sightings this summer and some parents are keeping their children indoors. Some older people are so scared that they've given up the evening feeding of farm animals.

Sheriff's deputies and wildlife officials say it's the work of pranksters, but logger Earl Whitstine isn't backing off his account of a hairy, foul-smelling beast.

"People have made fun of me," he said, "but they didn't see what I saw."

Whitstine and another logger said they spotted the creature Aug. 25 in some cypress swamps called Boggy Bayou, near Cotton Island about 20 miles from Alexandria.

That report prompted Larry Satcher, a fisherman, to say he had come across a similar beast in those same woods a few weeks earlier.

Then 74-year-old Remedies came forward with his own month-old sighting, a clear 100 miles away from Cotton Island, on the other side of the state, in Sabine Parish. He said he was mowing his lawn when the hairy Bigfoot appeared.

Now, landowners around Zwolle are wondering if this doesn't explain some hogs that were killed these past months.

Allen Rivers, Zwolle's assistant mayor, said a couple of his hogs were killed by "something out there that's dangerous, that has some pretty big claws and pretty big teeth."

Bigfoot? Wild cat? Hungry black bear? Retired game warden Steve Malik said he'd surely like to bag a Bigfoot.

"God dang, everyone has seen it, why can't I?"

Capt. Bryan Poston of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said the hysteria has gotten way out of hand.

"As far as I'm concerned, any Bigfoot sighting is a hoax," he said. "I deal in facts, and until I am shown facts, I will not give them any credibility.

Still, hundreds of folks visiting Mary Ward's bait shop in Cotton Island in Rapides Parish hardly talk about anything else. Her son Joe was one of the loggers who say they saw the legendary creature.

Since then, the Wards have sold tickets and Bigfoot T-shirts to those who stop to gawk at 16 massive tracks on her Cotton Island land.

On Wednesday, LSU lab tests of hair taken from the Cotton Island sighting revealed it was from a horse, and Rapides Parish sheriff's deputies formally closed their investigation -- without classifying it a hoax.

The Cotton Island sightings echo a similar sighting 25 years ago, when Whitstine's father and a friend made a plywood Bigfoot footprint and laid down giant tracks in the woods.

The prank was exposed and was largely forgotten until this summer, but Whitstine insists this sighting is for real.

So does Satcher, the fisherman in Boggy Bayou: "I know what I saw, and it was no man in a suit."

WCSRO, 2006.