More cryptozoological goodness. Sadly, it's all stuff I made up.


Terror at Lake Grayson

During the 1970s awareness of the Bigfoot phenomenon reached an all-time high throughout the United States, thanks to movies and other media coverage. As noted in the introduction, sightings came to be reported all over the United States. Arkansas had its share. Indeed, the Boggy Creek incident near Fouke in southwestern Arkansas served as inspiration for a popular motion picture, “The Legend of Boggy Creek,” that did much to increase interest in Bigfoot.

In Dunbar County there were new reports. Footprints were found in the woods near the town of Mason. There were sightings and rumored sightings near Orinda and Fellowship.

The summer of 1977 brought something well beyond run-of-the-mill reports of footprints and vague glimpses. On the evening of June 12 two couples from Adelphia, Bill and Sherry Jones and Mike and Stacey Mitchell, drove to the isolated recreation area at Iron Mountain Point in Lake Grayson State Park north of Adelphia to view the sunset. The couples passed a pleasant time along the pine-clad bank of the lake, chatting and watching the sky darken.

As the stars began to emerge, they decided that the time had come to leave. They got into their cars and started their engines. Bill Jones pulled onto the narrow access road that led out of the park.

Suddenly a huge, dark shape leaped from the woods into the gravel road. Jones described what happened next in an interview with the Adelphia Advertisor-Tribune:

It was this big, black thing shaped like a man. But huge! I’ve never seen a man so big. It just ran into the road and froze in front of the car like a deer in the headlights. I hadn’t got up too much speed yet, so I was able to hit the brakes and stop before I ran into it. I must’ve stopped not more than a few feet away.

Then it leaned over the hood and started pounding on it. Bang, bang, bang, like somebody hitting a big sheet of metal with a hammer. My wife was screaming like everything! I threw the car in reverse and backed up a few feet. I like to hit Mike’s car right behind me. Then I ran forward again. When it saw me coming it tried to jump aside. I heard a bump as we hit it. Then I gave it more gas and got us out to the highway.

Sherry Jones had little to add to her husband’s account. “Oh, I really don’t like the thought of even talking about it. I was so scared!” As for Mike and Stacey Mitchell, they could not get a good look at what the Jones’ car had encountered, but distinctly saw a large, dark figure falling to the side as the car sped away.

The report caused a sensation in Adelphia. Over the next two weeks there were additional reports of sightings and other strange incidents. Among them:

Several teenagers claimed to have been chased from the Iron Mountain Point area by what one described as “A big ugly ape-looking thing.” The creature threw rocks at them and had a foul odor.

An older couple fishing on the lake from a boat saw a dark, shadowy figure walking along an isolated section of bank near the western end of the lake, a few miles from Iron Mountain Point. They did not get a close look at it, but did not think it looked human.

A family returning from Hot Springs to Grayson community north of the lake one night saw a tall, dark shape crossing the road in front of them. It was “Too tall to be a man."

The most hair-raising incident occurred shortly before dawn on June 27. Todd Carter of Benton, who had come down to Lake Grayson to fish, spent the night in a sleeping bag in the bed of his pickup truck at the Cedar Point access, several miles east of Iron Mountain Point. A noise of something approaching awakened him. Looking up, he saw a dark form towering over him:

It was seven feet tall if it was an inch. It had black hair all over it. The thing looked down at me. I looked up at it. I couldn’t see its face too well, but it didn’t look like any human being I ever saw. I guess you could say it looked kind of like a gorilla or something like that.

It grabbed the side of the truck bed and started rocking it back and forth. It rocked that half-ton pickup so hard I thought it might tip it right over. I started screaming and hollering. What else can you do in situation like that? Maybe my screaming did something, because then it ran off.

Carter lost no time in departing as well.

By this time the surrounding community was in a state of something like panic. Police found themselves besieged with reports of strange goings-on. Claims of sightings and unfamiliar howling noises came in almost nightly. Some were undoubtedly prank calls. Others were the sorts of cases of mistaken identity that inevitably occurred in such a climate of growing hysteria.

One evening, for example, police were summoned by a terrified woman just outside Adelphia who said that a Bigfoot monster was crawling back and forth in her back yard on its hands and knees. When officers arrived they found only a large stray chow dog. “It was a pretty rough-looking dog, but it didn’t seem too fierce,” one officer recalled later.

There were many unsubstantiated rumors as well. One story that made the rounds claimed that a woman had looked out her window one evening after hearing a commotion in the yard and saw a Bigfoot in the process of devouring her dog. This tale, not surprisingly a popular one in area schools, had no police or other reports to confirm it. There were also stories of missing or mutilated livestock, of strange, apelike howls heard during the night, and of a man who opened his door one evening to find a Bigfoot on his doorstep, staring down at him. Again, these were all “heard from a friend of a friend” accounts with nothing to back them up.

Nearly everybody began to shun Lake Grayson after dark. They did so with good reason. By now local men had begun to form armed groups to try hunting for the monster. These roamed the Lake Grayson area for several nights in late June and the beginning of July, despite the efforts of police and park rangers to dissuade them. County Sheriff Lonnie Bennett told interviewers later that he and his men “had to break up at least four ‘posses’ that we caught running around with rifles looking for the monster. I still think it’s a miracle nobody got hurt with all that foolishness going on.”

A member of one of these ‘posses’, Johnny Greer of Adelphia, described how he and several other men drove to the Iron Mountain Point area, and set off in pairs armed with deer rifles to see if they could find the monster. “One of the guys thought he saw something big and shadowy through the trees a couple of times,” Greer said later. “His partner thought he just barely caught a glimpse of it once. Neither of them had a very good look at it.” After about three hours of searching, during which one man was nearly fired upon by a member of another monster hunting party heading west from Cedar Point, the group returned to Iron Mountain Point to find that the sheriff’s deputy had ticketed all of the vehicles they had left parked there.

By Independence Day the uproar had begun to die down. Eventually people began braving the park again after sunset. One last sighting occurred on the evening of July 22, when two members of a group taking an evening “party barge” cruise out from the Dunbar County Marina spotted a large, dark, manlike figure walking along the bank of the lake. By the time they had succeeded in getting the attention of others in their party, the creature had disappeared into the trees.

Bump for Simon. Merry Christmas!

Thank you!

Merry Christmas to you, also! I'm enjoying this. It's wonderful.