THE BEAST OF BOGGY CREEK: The True Story of the Fouke Monster (16 page)

7-Inch 45 RPM vinyl record by Billy Cole and The Fouke Monsters released in 1971.
(From the personal collection of Lyle Blackburn)

The little town of Fouke (population 509 at the time) was not ready for the new wave of madness that came their way as a result of the movie’s success. Fouke Mayor J.D. Larey summed up the surprising outcome in an interview with the
Texarkana Gazette
: “The man who made the movie had never made movie in his life. The guy who backed the movie had never backed a movie in his life. The people who acted in the movie had never acted before. I don’t think you could have foreseen anything happening on it.”

At this point, just about any animal with hair or legs seen skulking around Fouke was likely to be fingered as a monster. However, a few fairly credible reports still managed to stand out against this background noise. On November 25, 1973, Orville Scoggins watched a black-haired, four-foot tall creature creep across his bean field one morning. “I looked up to see what the noise was about, and there it was, about 100 yards from where I was, walking eastward very slowly,” Scoggins told reporters from the
Texarkana Gazette
. He confirmed that the animal “stood upright on two feet” and estimated its weight at “80 or 90 pounds.”

After the sighting, Scoggins jumped in his pickup and raced down to the Fouke Café where he found Constable Red Walraven. Upon hearing the story, Walraven and two other men went back to Scoggin’s farm, which was located on County Road 9 just four miles from Fouke’s main strip. Upon inspecting the area where the “monster” had been sighted, they found a line of visible tracks left in the soil. The tracks measured 5.5 inches in diameter and were spaced 40 inches apart. The men traced the tracks for nearly an eighth of a mile before the trail finally disappeared into the woods. An immediate search of the area, unfortunately, did not locate the culprit.

These tracks were shorter than the 13 inch tracks found in Willie Smith’s field, but Walraven noted, “These were the same tracks that were found the first time the monster was sighted.” (Presumably this meant they were of the three-toed sort.) In the end Scoggins was not confident that he had seen the Fouke Monster, but he was positive that he had seen
something
. Scoggins had always been known as a die-hard monster skeptic, but after this incident he changed his mind saying, “something stalks the woods near Fouke.” I spoke to Lloyd Sutton, another long time local resident, who confirmed the details of this story and reiterated that Scoggins had always been a non-believer and was not a man to make up stories.

1974: Two brothers report an encounter with an angry creature south of Mercer Bayou

Another incident, which occurred around 1974, came to me by way of Doyle Holmes, who grew up in the remote area along County Road 35 south of Mercer Bayou. Holmes was about nine years old at the time, but he will never forget the night his neighbors, the Giles brothers, came roaring into his house looking for his father. They had been out deer hunting that evening and had bagged a big buck. But they were not coming to brag about the kill. Instead, they were in a state of sheer panic. They claimed that as they were driving their truck back up the small road that led to their house, a hairy, ape-like creature suddenly emerged from the woods and jumped into the back of the trailer they were towing at the time. It proceeded to thrash about, damaging two motorcycles strapped to the trailer’s bed. When he realized what was happening, the driver hit the brakes, but the two brothers didn’t dare get out of the cab. The creature looked enraged as it took its fury out on the hapless bikes. After several seconds and considerable damage, it jumped out of the trailer and ran back into the woods.

The old Giles home, now collapsed, near the site of the “ape attack.”
(Photo by the author)

Holmes does not remember much about their description of the creature or other details, only that the men seemed genuinely upset by what had happened. His father and the men headed off to investigate, but they never found any sign of the angry beast.

The Fouke Monster has reportedly displayed aggressive tendencies, but jumping onto a moving vehicle and fighting motorcycles seems a bit far-fetched. At the time, everyone in the area was certainly familiar with the legend, so it’s possible that it was some kind of joke, but at that young age Holmes could not be sure. Regardless, we visited the Giles property one afternoon out of curiosity. The road where the incident allegedly occurred had long since grown over with grass, and the original house is now collapsed. Interestingly, the isolated property is only a short distance from where Pierce filmed the dog tracking scene in
The Legend of Boggy Creek
.

While much of the monster ruckus was a headache for law enforcement, or just plain nonsense to others, it did impact some residents in more serious ways. Families who had property located on the outskirts of town had to contend with growing waves of sightseers and monster hunters trespassing on their lands, and at times, causing considerable property damage to fences or other structures. The folks with farms had to deal with people trampling through their crops, which could impact their already fragile incomes. The monetary gains brought in by the throng of wild tourists were not enough to balance out the fact that things were being destroyed in Fouke as a direct result of the monster’s new fame.

Chris Rowton, a young girl in Fouke at the time whose story was reenacted for the movie, told me that people had little regard for the private properties near Boggy Creek. “There were people who would come searching, and they would camp out on my mom and dad’s front yard. They would sit out there and watch for stuff or just listen,” she said, thinking back to the craziness. “There for a while, you never knew who was going to come from where!”

While no doubt many locals experienced property damage and woe, their tales did not become public record like those of Smokey Crabtree, who seemed especially impacted by the movie-spawned madness. After all of Smokey’s experience with the monster—his son’s encounter, his relative’s sightings, his now regrettable involvement in the Pierce film—he decided to tell his side of the story by way of a memoir. The result was a modest-sized book entitled
Smokey and the Fouke Monster,
which he self-published in 1974. The book offered a personal perspective of the events that amounted to nearly a decade of woe—all because of an undocumented animal that had eluded capture.

For much of the book, Smokey relates stories of his upbringing in the swampy backwoods as a way to underscore his honest and straight-forward viewpoints. Tales of catfish noodling, hog hunts, and close encounters with snakes are told to great effect in simple, country boy language. Eventually, he brings in stories of his early adulthood—as a boxer, navy man, pipe welder—and then finally covers his family’s experiences with the Fouke Monster. While it is essentially a book about Smokey’s life and experiences, the monster does play a significant role in the book, and as such serves as one of the only written records of several interesting Fouke monster incidents.

The primary motivation for writing the book came as a direct result of Smokey’s involvement with
The Legend of Boggy Creek
film. After providing guide and consulting services to Charles Pierce, Smokey felt slighted by the film’s astounding success, which left Pierce a millionaire and Smokey with a rash of trespassers trampling his land. Smokey had also been instrumental in convincing many of the locals to share their stories with Pierce, to act in the film, and in some cases loan out their residences as movie sets. Pierce had very little budget at the time, so—according to Smokey—Pierce promised most of the folks some payback once the film was purchased and released down the road. But once the premiere had come and gone, no one received a dime. Many of the Fouke locals had been invited to the movie’s premiere, but this only led to more problems when they saw themselves on the big screen acting out a scene while the voice-over they heard belonged to someone else. Of course many of the townsfolk were just happy to see themselves in a movie, but still some were angry. Feeling taken advantage of, they turned to Smokey for answers. Smokey had been in contact with Pierce all along, and they expected him to iron out a contract for everybody before the movie went into circulation, but that had not been the case. Not surprisingly, the unfinished monetary business left an ugly scar on the relationship of the two men and ultimately pitted them against each other in a Los Angeles courtroom in the late 1970s.

But the more immediate concern was the horde of monster hunters beating a path toward the Crabtree property. After having their stories sensationalized for profit by others, and feeling Smokey had let them down, some of the townsfolk were more than happy to direct tourists straight over to Jonesville where they could get a glimpse of the Crabtree boys. This was not the first time Smokey had dealt with monster hunters, but it was certainly the worst. The first round had come in 1965 when his son encountered the monster at their private lake. Well-meaning locals dropped by to offer a hand with the hunt, which went well enough, but nosey outsiders also dropped in to hunt on their own. This resulted in a loss of privacy, which was important to Smokey and his family, and some property damage as people jumped fences and tromped across his land. But this was mere child’s play compared to the foolishness that came as a direct result of the movie’s success. Though nobody could have predicted the reaction, least of all Pierce, it did not make the bad situation any better for the Crabtrees. According to Smokey, in his first memoir: “They had seen the movie,
The Legend of Boggy Creek
, and they were taking my place apart looking for the Monster.”

Some of the visitors were even insulting, calling the Crabtrees liars and phoning them at all hours of the night to ask silly or downright rude questions about the monster. It became a full time job to police the property and to keep the damage to a minimum. “They were coming by the car load and by truck loads. Sometimes, there was as many as twenty different groups here at the same time. All of them wanted something from our place to take home with them. Some were willing to settle for a twig from a tree they remembered seeing in the picture. Some asked for bark off the trees.”

Smokey called Pierce and asked for help, but the mobs were out of Pierce’s control. It seemed the monster’s legend was blowing up like a puffer fish, and getting just as ugly. Smokey tried posting signs which read “PRIVATE: Monster Hunters or Sight Seekers Are Not Welcome” and “Lake Closed—Sickness.” This helped for a while but ultimately did not keep people out. According to Smokey, a group of brazen sightseers simply tore the signs down, apparently mad that they had driven so far and were not able to speak to Smokey in person. But their wish was soon granted, in a backhanded sort of way, as Smokey chased them down with a shotgun. They all ended up at the sheriff’s office.

It seems nearly inconceivable that a low budget movie featuring a rather cheesy long-haired “gorilla” would create such a stir, but behind it all there lurked a harmless monster mystery and that was part of its appeal. People tired of the horrors that had become so familiar in the bloody trenches of Vietnam were hungry for the escape provided by hometown movie monsters. The Fouke Monster—scary, mysterious, and perhaps real—was something that would thrill them but not kill them. It was aggressive at times but not a true threat. Sure, maybe he had caused Bobby Ford a few scratches and a trip to the hospital, but so far it had all been in fun. Fun for the whole country—with the exception of a small town called Fouke, of course. The front line is not usually the best place to be in a skirmish.