Ohio was a natural choice for an
episode of Finding Bigfoot. There are hundreds of reports
from there, and I would guess that Ohio has more bigfoot researchers
there than anywhere outside of the Pacific Northwest. Matt
Moneymaker lived in Ohio while he attended law school in Akron during
the 1990's, and knows that area well. I had done an expedition there
a few years back near Beaver Creek State Park soon after an excellent
vocalization was recorded there, and indeed I heard what I believe
was a sasquatch at very close range one night on that trip. I knew
it was just a matter of time until we did an expedition there.
The video we came to investigate was
taken by a man named Jeff Patterson at Salt Fork State Park. Jeff
started calling himself the “Squatchmaster” at some point, and
has since posted many short films on his Youtube channel
(http://www.youtube.com/user/TheSquatchmaster
). The film shows a dark, upright figure walking through shallow
snow to a tree. It then grabs the tree and starts shaking it back
and forth until the video clip ends. The footage clearly shows
either a bigfoot or a human.
Jeff Patterson's bigfoot video from Salt Fork State Park.
Jeff's story starts before his video
does. According to Jeff, he was sledding in Salt Fork State Park
with several of his children. They parked at a parking lot and Jeff
and his son, Chris went towards the woods to look around for bigfoot
footprints. They had run across possible prints just a few weeks
before in this same area, and they wanted to see if any more had
shown up.
They soon reportedly heard snapping
noises in the woods, and they both followed the noises. A sasquatch
was seen walking along the nearby trail, which is in a small ravine
and runs through the area. They paralled it a short ways and lost
sight of it, but could still hear it. Soon they saw it again a
distance away as it walked out of the ditch and towards the tree.
This is where the film starts, so you know the rest. After the film
ends, Jeff doesn't know what the figure did because he was leaving
the area.
An interesting component of the video
is that one can faintly hear speaking in the background. Jeff and
Chris both said they were the only ones there, but the noises can
readily be heard. Jeff and Chris said that they could hear two
creatures making noises to each other. When Chris was asked what
they sounded like, he said the noises sounded like a sasquatch.
Hmmm... a red flag had been raised.
We found the same tree that the figure
was shaking in the video, but it had been knocked down and broken by
the time we got there. Jeff remembered where he was standing while
he filmed, and it was not difficult to find the exact camera position
by aligning the numerous trees and branches visible in the footage.
This would later give insight into the height of the figure as well.
We were also able to do our recreation using the same camera Jeff
used for the original footage.
A photo from our recreation. Bobo is the blue blob in
the center of the photo.
Another red flag was raised while we
were interviewing Jeff and his son. Being a professional educator,
and having taught fourth through sixth grades for more than a decade,
I was very eager to speak to Chris about the encounter. Most
teachers are very good at determining when a student is telling the
truth or not, or even if they are leaving out important details. I
figured that my experience would give me a pretty good handle on the
authenticity of Chris' version of the story.
When I asked Chris what the thing
looked like, he said that he saw a large, dark figure shaking a tree.
When he was asked if he could see its face, Chris answered that he
saw a large, dark figure shaking a tree. When asked about if it was
covered in hair, he said that he saw a large, dark figure shaking a
tree. It was soon becoming pretty clear that Chris had probably been
coached on what to say.
Comparing our recreation video to the
original, it was obvious that whatever is in that clip is not very
big. It seems to be about six to ten inches shorter than Bobo.
Looking very closely at the original video, there seem to be some
frames that hint at the figure wearing clothing as well, though this
is less than sure.
Before we did our investigation, I
received some information that the Squatchmaster video had been
proven a hoax, so I did some online investigating into the work done
by others on this film. I ran across a very reliable reference to a
video where Jeff Patterson himself confessed that the video was a
hoax, and that he did not believe that there were any bigfoots in
Salt Fork State Park. At one point he said that he believes the
footprints found in Salt Fork were the result of other bigfoot
investigators trying to hoax him. The videos in which Jeff confessed
these things had since been removed from his Youtube channel.
Looking again, I found that all of the Squatchmaster videos were only
a month or so old. It occurred to me that it had only been a month
or so since the producers had contacted him about using his video for
the show. I suspect that Jeff did a major house-cleaning on his
Youtube page at about this time for obvious reasons.
At the end of every video recreation,
each team member has to tell the witness to his/her face what we
think of the video. Sometimes this gets a little uncomfortable,
especially for Ranae when she tells them they're wrong or lying. Now
it was my turn to feel a bit awkward. Jeff and Chris had been
nothing but kind to us, and were enjoying their time recreating the
film.
Each team member took his or her turn
telling Jeff that the film probably doesn't show a sasquatch. My
turn came up and I looked Jeff in the eye and told him that I did
some digging on the history of this film. “Since you are on record
yourself saying that the film doesn't show a sasquatch, why should I
think it does?” were the words I used. Jeff agreed with me. Bobo
later told me that Jeff looked like he was going to cry. I'm glad he
didn't. I felt a bit bad. Jeff and his son showed up to the town
hall meeting the next night and waved at us when we walked by, so I
guess it didn't hurt his feelings too badly.
That first night's investigation was
done not far from Jeff's film site. Bobo and I teamed up together
and hiked various horse trails through the woods for several hours.
We heard strange calls on two occasions that night. The first time
was when Bobo and I crested a hill and he did a call. A short reply
call came from our north west. Bobo immediately thought it was a
human, and it might have been. In fact, at the time, I thought it
was too. Later, after looking at a map, I realized that it seemed
rather unlikely that anyone was in that area. I do not know what
made those sounds, honestly...
The second set of sounds came a while
later after Bobo and I left the hill top and were hiking in a densely
forested canyon. This call came from our south, from the direction
of the road. Again, we assumed it was a person doing the noises, but
the crew back at base camp later told us that almost no cars were
seen driving the roads that night, and they saw no people in the area
either. It's possible that both of the evening's sounds were human,
but I would give either one, but the first one in particular, a fair
chance of being from something else...
The town hall meeting was excellent.
There were over 170 people in attendance, and many of them were
bigfooters. When we asked who had seen or heard a bigfoot, a
staggering number of hands shot up. We took the time to listen to
each and every person's story, which took several hours. After
marking them all on a map, I finally got a chance to mingle and talk
to some folks. I met many people that night, but a highlight for me
was to meet Don Keating. Don has been researching bigfoots in that
area since the 1980's, and his name has been on my radar for a long
time. I was thrilled to meet him.
Cliff Barackman and Don Keating
The next day I went to speak to Chief
Little Soldier of the Munsee/Delaware Indian Reservation. Chief
Little Soldier told us about the two eyewitness sightings that he had
had on the property over the last three years, as well as the
numerous strange sounds he had heard, and the footprints he finds
while walking the land. I investigated his most recent sighting from
May of 2011, but a year or two before, he saw a smaller individual
running through the trees just under the ridge line above him while
walking the trails.
The sighting I investigated happened
while Chief Little Soldier was pounding in a trail maker. He looked
up the trail to see a creature walking across the trail and into the
ravine below. The creature brushed its head against a branch as it
ran downwards, and took the slope and cleared the river in six or
seven steps. Using the branch as a marker, we figured out that the
creature stood at about 7 feet, 5 inches tall, give or take a bit.
The red arrow marks the branch that brushed
against the sasquatch's head. The gully it ran into
is behind and down from the tree.
against the sasquatch's head. The gully it ran into
is behind and down from the tree.
Chief Little Soldier had been finding
footprints of three individuals in the area over the years. One
individual has feet of 17 inches in length, another of 15 inches, and
a smaller one a little less than 10 inches. He believes that he most recently saw
the 15 inch individual.
Just a few days before, Chief Little Soldier found prints of the smallest individual on one of the trails nearby. While Chief Little Soldier was filming his recreation, I sneaked off to try to find the footprint. Using the directions Chief Little Soldier gave me, I soon located a very faint yet obvious footprint right on the same stretch of trail I was directed to. It had been several days, and rain had occurred, but the print was worthy of a photograph, no matter how poorly the picture turned out.
Just a few days before, Chief Little Soldier found prints of the smallest individual on one of the trails nearby. While Chief Little Soldier was filming his recreation, I sneaked off to try to find the footprint. Using the directions Chief Little Soldier gave me, I soon located a very faint yet obvious footprint right on the same stretch of trail I was directed to. It had been several days, and rain had occurred, but the print was worthy of a photograph, no matter how poorly the picture turned out.
A small footprint from the Munsee/Delaware Indian Reservation.
Though I did not investigate her
sighting, I would like to make a comment on Lorena's sighting report
of a sasquatch watching her children play in a playground. It was a
very close range, daylight sighting with no chance of mistaking a
bear or deer for a bigfoot. She watched it for long enough to
observe some very interesting physical details. As it turns out,
there is an eyewitness drawing of this bigfoot, as well as a short
description of the account on the BFRO website here.
After getting Bobo from the woods, all
four of us went to meet with Tim Stover. He encountered a bigfoot on
October 6, 1992 while crossbow hunting in Salt Fork State Park. Tim
was perched in a tree stand watching and listening when he caught
sight of a 7.5 to 8 feet tall, coyote-colored sasquatch coming up the
hill towards his location. He saw it quite clearly and was only 38
yards away. Interestingly, Tim remembered that he could see no
whites in its eyes at all.
Tim Stover and the gang from Finding Bigfoot
Because of the sheer number of people
who are interested in bigfoot in this part of Ohio, we decided to
invite the public out for another grid search, much like the one we
held in North Carolina during season one. The weather was not nearly
as nice that day as it was in North Carolina, but still a great many
people came out to comb the forests with us. I spent much of the
time walking with families and interpreting things that were pointed
out to me as possible bigfoot evidence.
I did not see anything that day that I
would consider bigfoot data, which probably explains my absence from
that particular clip of the show. However, we did come across a
strange thing that defies explanation on my part. Over the course of
the day, I saw two or three small branches that were sticking out of
the ground, as if pushed in the mud. They were embedded about two or
three inches deep into the soft soil. No substrate nearby had been
disturbed. I am guessing that these 18 to 24 inch long branches had
fallen out of the trees and stuck into the ground that way, but it
was a puzzling thing to see. I still had a great time meeting the
local people and talking about bigfoot with fellow bigfooters.
The last night investigation was held
on the fringes of the park away from any place humans might go, such
as a campground or picnic area. We started in a cemetery and headed
out into open fields surrounded by ravines that lead down to the
reservior. These ravines are heavily treed in and very brushy. It
was kind of a long night, and my team only heard coyotes until Bobo
notified us that something just hit the ground nearby where he and
Ranae were standing. He said it was possibly a rock, but he couldn't
be sure. Matt and I went to their location to help solve the
mystery. Bobo and Ranae showed us where the sound came from, and
together we all four slowly searched the area. One of us ran across
a walnut fruit and suggested that this might have been the source of
the sound. Sure enough, there was a walnut tree not far from our
location, and it was very possible that the fruit had just fallen out
of the tree nearby and made the reported noise.
As a test, Matt tossed the walnut fruit
into the air. We wanted to hear the noise for ourselves, and we
wanted Bobo and Ranae to compare the two sounds. The walnut fruit
went twenty or so feet into the air and fell directly on Ranae
causing an explosion of laughter. We know Matt didn't do it on
purpose, because he would have missed. It was too perfect, and a
great way to end the night. We solved the mystery of the sound, and
we got to witness a perfectly slapstick moment after a long night in
the woods.
This was my second trip to Ohio, and I
can't wait to get back out there to do some more bigfooting. The
entire eastern side of the state has excellent habitat for bigfoot,
which is only part of the reason there are so many reports from
there. The other part is the number of bigfooters looking into the
mystery from that area. By their good efforts, more information will
continue to come from that region. Thank you, bigfooters in Ohio and
neighboring states, for your work. Keep it up.
Enjoy some other pictures from my adventures in Ohio:
Enjoy some other pictures from my adventures in Ohio:
Cliff Barackman and Chief Little Soldier
In a clip that didn't make the show, I got to ride around in
this Amish buggy. It was very cool.
this Amish buggy. It was very cool.
"Buggy Parking Please..."
A giant cookie from the hotel staff.
Thank you!
Thank you!
"Dangerous Cliff"
Hosak's Cave
Salt Fork State Park is indeed a very bigfooty spot.


















