THE BEAST OF BOGGY CREEK: The True Story of the Fouke Monster (26 page)

Before evaluating specific theories, it is worth addressing the general notion that only rednecks and crazy people tend to see such “monsters.” While cabin fever or mental issues could certainly cause a person to see something that is not there, this “explanation” is basically nonsense. While people living in rural areas may not possess the refined communication skills of college graduates, the fact is that city folks are unlikely to spot such a creature while strolling the alleyways of their concrete jungles! Rural folk are simply far more likely to witness a strange wild animal than someone who does not live near a significant patch of woods or other remote area. So it is not surprisingly that most sightings of the Fouke Monster have been made by country folk and hunters. This fact doesn’t validate the Fouke Monster, but at least it should not raise a red flag, as popular culture might suggest.

As for the question of “crazy,” I have not found this to be a predominant characteristic of people who claim to have sightings. While I have come across some folks whose stories or demeanor have led me to believe that they are either seeing things or making things up, those are the rare exception and their stories were not considered for this book. On the contrary, the majority of people I have talked to who claim to have had sightings of Sasquatch-type creatures seem to be of sound mind. Beyond the average down-to-earth hunter and country folk types, the witness demographic ranges widely. Some have been college graduates, college professors, medical researchers, military personnel, police officers, truck drivers, and other upstanding professions, which shatters the feeble “crazy redneck” theory the media tends to favor. That might make for good television and shield the reporters from making any serious conclusions on the air, but in reality some very sane and credible people have reported seeing hairy, ape-like creatures lurking in the woods of Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and surrounding states. Again, this in and of itself doesn’t prove anything, but it does force one to consider the phenomenon more closely.

Blame the Train

The first theory that usually comes up in conversation is that of the so-called “circus train wreck.” In this scenario, which is by no means exclusive to the Fouke Monster, the sightings are attributed to a circus animal, namely a primate, that has survived the wreck and promptly taken up residence in the nearby woods. While circus accidents have been known to happen, there is little evidence that these events occur with any regularity, much less in the areas in question. Nor could they possibly account for all the strange sightings that people have been reporting. However, since most of the Fouke Monster sightings tend to describe the creature in terms of a primate, it seemed worthwhile to research the possibility that some sort of circus calamity is at the root of the phenomenon.

With a little research, I learned that the worst circus train accident in U.S. history occurred on June 22, 1918, in Ivanhoe, Indiana. The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train was parked on a side rail after making an emergency repair stop, when it was struck by an empty troop train whose conductor had fallen asleep at the throttle. Of the 300 passengers onboard the circus train, 86 were killed and 127 were injured. The number of animal fatalities were not reported.

Another famous wreck involving a circus train occurred on August 6, 1903, in Durand, Michigan. In this instance, two trains transporting the Great Wallace Brothers Circus crashed into each other when one train’s brakes failed. Some animals were killed, but human travelers took the brunt of the collision with a total of 23 people dead.

So, while these type of incidents do happen, it does not come close to explaining anything in Fouke, unless one of the displaced primates happened to catch an outbound train for Arkansas. Fouke resident Willie Smith stated once that he believed the Fouke Monster was an animal that had been left behind by a circus or traveling show. “It could have escaped,” he told the
Texarkana Gazette
back in 1971, “or maybe someone let it loose.” Smith’s daughter-in-law, Lynn, even cited a date for an alleged circus crash. She claimed that a “traveler coming through Fouke mentioned to her that about 1953 a wreck of a circus truck reportedly occurred and some wild animals escaped.”

Armed with an approximate date and the tidbit about it being a
truck
not a train, I dug deep into news archives until I found something that made my jaw drop. A circus transport had indeed crashed in Arkansas around this time. It was not in 1953, but in 1951. And on the list of escapees were three monkeys!

My heart beat rapidly as I flipped to the article. Could this reveal a zoological smoking gun? Reading the short blurb, I found that the crash did not occur in the Fouke area, but in Mena, Arkansas, more than 100 miles away. Nonetheless, it was still an interesting fact. The blurb appeared as part of a larger article titled “Animals: Battle of Species” which ran in the November 12, 1951 issue of
Time
magazine:

In Mena, Ark., while the Campa Bros. circus trumpeted through its one-night stand, nine-year-old Maria Campa, granddaughter of one of the circus owners, was clawed and chewed to death by a young lion considered so tame he was tied to a stake outside his cage. Next day, as the Campa circus trundled along the rain-slicked road toward Mount Ida, two trucks overturned. Nine beasts scampered into Ouachita National Forest. A pursuing posse brought down one of two escaped leopards and recaptured a tame black bear and a rhesus monkey. The other leopard prowled all night before being tracked down by a small but heroic cur named Tony, whose owner, Roiston Fair, shot the leopard, but not before it had killed Tony. Still in the forest: a polar bear, a black bear, three monkeys.

Mena, Arkansas sits about 120 miles north of Fouke on Highway 71. It is unlikely that the escaped monkeys made their way all the way to Fouke from the Ouachita Mountains, [15]  but nonetheless, this seems to confirm the rumor heard by the Smith family, which claimed that a circus truck had crashed in the region. Perhaps the traveler mentioned by Mrs. Smith had confused the two areas. If he was not from Arkansas, he might not have realized how far Mena was from Fouke.

I continued to dig deeper, trying to determine if another such crash had occurred closer to Fouke. In searching various archives, including www.circushistory.org, I was able to verify that a number of circuses played Texarkana in the years prior to and after the Jonesville/Fouke Monster began to surface in the 1960s. Circus troops such as Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey, Cole Brothers, Downie Brothers, King Brothers, and Mills Brothers regularly played in Texarkana, including dates in the year of 1953. Many of their touring routes went from Texarkana to Shreveport or vice versa, which would have taken them right up Highway 71 where the monster was known to haunt.

Two Fouke kids display an alligator pulled from the Sulphur River.
(Courtesy of the Miller County Historical Society)

Though the details of these routes are intriguing, I failed to uncover another circus wreck that happened in the vicinity of Fouke. In the end, I could say with a fair amount of certainty that circus-related tragedies, although rare, are typically well documented. So it stands to reason that if something like this had occurred in the Texarkana/Fouke area, I should have been able to find some record of the event.

I also discussed the circus train mystery with Miller County historian Frank McFerrin, who has written extensively about the history of railroads in the area. He had also heard of the train wreck theory but had never come across any evidence that could explain why non-indigenous apes might be loose in the area. McFerrin and a few other locals seemed fairly certain that a cargo train had derailed at the location where Boggy Creek enters Days Creek, but there was nothing to suggest it was carrying any circus animals.

Given the sketchy details of this derailment and the facts about the circus truck crash in the Ouachita Mountains in 1953, it is likely that the circus train myth developed out of one of these incidents or a combination thereof. Something else may have happened that was never recorded, but there’s no way to be certain. It does seem that an event of this nature, if it occurred on Highway 71, would have been quite newsworthy and would have received at least some coverage in the
Texarkana Gazette
. Nearly every brief sighting of the monster garnered attention, so it stands to reason that an overturned circus truck spilling out a family of apes into the nearby woods would be major news.

This being said, I am not ruling out the potential presence of circus-worthy animals who managed to visit Fouke by other means. It is a fact that a full-grown African lion was loose in the area around 2008. Most likely it was an exotic pet that had escaped into the heavily wooded area near Jonesville. On one occasion, Rick Roberts and his son saw the lion standing in an open field about 50 yards from one of the old county roads near Jonesville. It turned up months later on the other side of Highway 71, severely famished and covered in blood, as reported by a female witness. Nothing else is known about this strange visitor, but either way, it is not likely that it was ever mistaken for the Fouke Monster.

The example of the wild lion does at least prove that it’s possible for exotic animals to find their way into rural settings. If an orangutan, chimpanzee, or gorilla managed to escape its owner and run off to the woods down by Fouke, then perhaps it could be mistaken for a monster when seen on a moonlit night or from a considerable distance. But this does not account for the descriptions that say the creature walked upright like a man or that it was running on two legs. Nor does it take into account that most people, even good ol’ country folk, are familiar with common apes and would be able to discern them from “hairy monsters.” If the Fouke Monster were an escaped pet, then most likely it would end up being properly identified or caught. But this never happened.

Moonshine Master Plan

Another theory that comes up in conversation is the “moonshine monster.” This theory suggests that perhaps the Fouke Monster was created to keep people away from illegal whiskey operations. While there were definitely moonshine stills operating in and around Fouke, there is little evidence to suggest that moonshiners invented a monster for such purposes.

Stills existed in Arkansas prior to prohibition in 1920, but it was this particular American fiasco that kicked up demand and got the alcohol really flowing, so to speak. Out-of-the-way rural locations such as Fouke were ideal for hiding illegal stills, and indeed these type of hidden production facilities boomed in the area. They became so rampant, that in 1931 the resident Federal officer in Fouke, Jess Quillen, claimed it was a “war” after a local liquor raid resulted in the death of Miller County Sheriff Walter Harris.

Following his death and a renewed vow to bring the bootleggers to justice, hard-nosed cop Rufus Turkette was appointed as the new Miller County Sheriff. Within six months of Turkette being in office, an astounding 89 stills were destroyed and numerous bootleggers arrested in the process, many of them in the immediate Fouke area.

With the end of prohibition in 1933, things calmed down but this did not completely eradicate the illegal liquor business. The demands of prohibition had created a new breed of moonshiner who was not going to stop simply because liquor was again legal. Keeping it underground kept them from paying taxes on their product. As a result, stills remained active in the area, which attracted an ever increasing flow of criminals, including Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd and the infamous duo of Bonnie and Clyde. One celebrity appearance is detailed in
Fouke Arkansas In Word and Pictures 1891-1941
(1991):

The prohibition era and the great Depression produced an environment in which crime flourished. Several heavyweight criminals and their associates came into the area.

Butler Pruitt, who worked with J.W. “Bill” Parker in the logging business went to Parker’s house one day near Sulphur River for a visit. When Pruitt arrived he noticed that Bill already had guests, a well dressed young man and woman, who seemed friendly. Later he was told by Parker that the visitors were Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and that they had come into the area to visit with friends and rest for a day or two. It was alleged that Bonnie was kin.