Bowie County,
Texas
Texarkana, Texas Beechwood Road in the Liberty-Eylau area.
Fall, 1978
It was sometime
around October or November in 1978. I was about 14 years old when these
incidents occurred. They happened in about a span of a month, never
before or never after has anything like this ever happened to me. The
first incident occurred at my friend Tom's house who lived 3 houses
down from me.
Tom and I were playing
football in the front yard of his house at dusk one evening when I kicked
the football over the roof of his house. Tom ran around the house to
retrieve the football and his dog followed after him. In a couple of
minutes the dog came running from behind the house squealing and ran
under a car. Then Tom appeared also running and looking scared. I asked
him what was wrong and he told me he had seen something on the wooded
hill behind his house. I asked him what he meant by "something"
and he told me he didn't know except that it was big and moving. We
got the dog out from under the car and went in the house. At first I
thought he was just messing around but thinking of how the dog had acted
kind of scared me.
I spent the night
with Tom that night and around 9:00 or 10:00 PM he motioned me to the
back door which he had opened. He told me to listen and what I heard
was a lot of crashing around out in the woods behind his house. Now
I was really becoming pretty scared with all the things that had happened
on that evening especially knowing something had scared the dog the
way it did. We went on to bed and the rest of the night was uneventful.
A few days later
Tom called me and told me to come over that he wanted to show me something.
When I got there he took me around to the back of his house and there
in a muddy area by his sister's bedroom window were large footprints.
The footprints were about an inch to an inch and a half deep and about
fifteen or so inches in length. It looked like a human print except
for its size and I remember it being wide from toes to heel. We knew
something strange had been there and we started talking about maybe
it had been the Fouke Monster, a creature that had been seen around
a small community about 30 miles south of Texarkana for years.
The next incident
occurred about 2 weeks later early on a Saturday morning. A friend of
mine, Royce and I took my .22 rifle to go squirrel hunting in some woods
off of Flower Acres Rd. about a mile and a half from my house.
We walked through
the woods several hundred yards to a large oak flat and sat down next
to a big tree. That's when we noticed the woods were quieter than normal;
there weren't any squirrels and hardly any birds. We decided to shoot
into some squirrel nests so I shot several rounds into a nest and about
30 seconds after that we heard a large roar. I have never heard anything
sound like that in my whole life, it seemed to shake the whole woods
and I couldn't tell what direction it had come from.
Royce and I looked
at each other and both asked "what the heck was that?" we
looked around but didn't see anything and then we started running. We
heard the roar again but we never looked back we just kept running.
We came to a small farm and the cows were acting strange, they were
bumping into each other and seemed confused. We didn't stop running
until we were back at my house. We told my parents what we had heard,
but they didn't take us seriously and just thought we had overactive
imaginations. To this day I can still remember how that roar sounded
and I probably won't ever forget it.
The last incident
didn't happen to me but to two of my friends, one of who lives at the
small farm I mentioned earlier. One day I was telling my friend Tracy
about my experience in the woods hunting and he said that he and another
friend Tony had seen something in the woods also. Tracy and Tony were
riding their bikes along some trails that went through the woods. These
trails are always very dimly lit because of the canopy created by the
tall pine trees. They had parked their bikes along the trail and were
just shooting the bull when they heard a noise about a hundred yards
up the trail. When they looked they saw a figure that Tracy said looked
like a big man in an Eskimo coat. He said it seemed to look their way
and then took of running through the woods opposite of where it had
emerged. They jumped on their bikes and rode like hell until they were
out of the woods.
I have told this
story many times and most people don't believe me, but I know what I
heard and saw and I believe that there was some kind of creature that
passed through this area. I have been in and around these woods all
of my life and this was the only time these strange events occurred.
To this day when I am in the woods and think about it I still get chills.
The area is heavily
wooded with many creeks and bottoms. These woods interconnect to the
Sulphur River bottoms that are very deep and vast. Other reports from
that area include Fouke, Arkansas, which is a small community about
30 miles South of Texarkana. For many years a creature terrorized this
community and was dubbed the "Fouke Monster". A movie was
made about these incidents called The Legend of Boggy Creek. There was
also a sequel to this movie.
I was very excited
to find this site especially since I have had my own encounter. and
I am looking forward to reading more accounts. Maybe someday there will
be some type of proof to show the world that these creatures do indeed
exist.
Posted to the IVBC
digest Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 19:42:35 -0700
Subject: Bigfoot: Report: 1978, Texarkana, Texas
From the IVBC files of Bobbie Short,
1996
