The Fouke Monster

Swamp folklore that became a movie legend

The Fouke Monster lives in the creek bottoms around Fouke, a small town in Miller County in southwestern Arkansas. Witnesses in the early 1970s described a bipedal creature about 7 feet tall and 250 to 300 pounds, covered in long dark hair, with red eyes the size of silver dollars, a smell somewhere between a skunk and a wet dog, and a fast, galloping run with arms swinging like a monkey's. Later tellers made it 10 feet and 800 pounds.

It became famous in May 1971. Bobby and Elizabeth Ford had lived in their house less than a week. Elizabeth said she was asleep on the couch in the front room when a hairy arm with claws came through the window; she saw red eyes, and at first took it for a bear. That night Bobby, his brother Don and a hunting companion spotted the thing behind the house by flashlight, shot at it and thought they saw it fall. When the women screamed Bobby ran back, and he said the creature put an arm around his shoulder and grabbed him; he broke loose and ran through the front door without opening it, and was treated in hospital for minor scratches and shock. The sheriff's search found no blood, only strange three-toed tracks and claw marks on the porch.

Jim Powell of the Texarkana Gazette and Texarkana Daily News found the family moving out. His follow-up story gave the creature its name, and the wire services sent it across the country. Sightings followed along U.S. Highway 71, and more three-toed prints turned up in a soybean field. A Little Rock radio station, KAAY, put a $1,090 bounty on the creature, hunters poured in, and Sheriff Leslie Greer had to impose a temporary no-guns rule. Three people were fined $59 each for filing a fraudulent monster report.

Then came the film. Charles B. Pierce of Texarkana borrowed $160,000 from a trucking company and shot The Legend of Boggy Creek in Fouke with an old camera, using locals who played themselves. Released in 1972 as a faux documentary, it became a drive-in hit, grossed more than $20 million and stands as a cult classic.

The doubters were close at hand. A month after the Ford attack the archaeologist Frank Schambach put the odds that the tracks were a hoax at 99 percent, since every primate has five toes, and by 1986 Greer and the town's mayor both thought the tracks were man-made. Older stories run back to sightings in 1946, when the creature was the Jonesville Monster, and reports still come in from time to time.