Sasquatch Central E-Book

Michael Quast

• Herausgeber: Hangar 1 Publishing
• Serie: Bigfoot Chronicles
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 282

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

I have been a Bigfoot researcher in the state of Minnesota for over 30 years, dedicated to the pursuit of a giant hairy upright walking manlike or apelike creature that keeps being encountered by scores of people year after year but has even more people scoffing and insisting that it can not and does not exist.

What a surprise it was near the end of 2019 to find that there was a place in Minnesota a three hours' drive from my home in the city of Moorhead (sister city to Fargo, North Dakota) where there was reported to be a consistent and perhaps even permanent Bigfoot presence within a few square miles of private property.

Hands down, it quickly became the single most intense Bigfoot case I have ever investigated. This is the story of my first-hand experiences, interviews with witnesses, and subsequent research that would follow from these encounters.

Leseprobe

Sasquatch Central

High Strangeness at a Northern Minnesota Homestead

Michael Quast

Hangar 1 Publishing

Contents

INTRODUCTION

1. OPENING

2. BLOOD MASSACRE

3. STICK STRUCTURES & DEER KILLS

4. FIRST SIGHTING?

5. REACHING OUT

6. A COMRADE

7. ESCALATION

8. FINALLY!

9. MORE STRANGENESS

10. CORROBORATION

11. 2019 WINDS DOWN

12. 2020 BEGINS

13. RANDY’S SECOND SIGHTING

14. TWO SIGHTINGS, TWO ILLUSTRATIONS

15. DEATH AND DRAMA

16. SECOND SRA VISIT

17. PEANUT BUTTER LOLLAPALOOZA

18. PSYCHIC VISIT

19. MINNESOTA BIGFOOT CONFERENCE

20. ACTIVITY CONTINUES

21. EVEN MORE DISTURBING

22. THIRD SRA VISIT

23. DELRIO VISIT

24. FOURTH SRA VISIT

25. 2020 WINDS DOWN

26. CONCLUSIONS

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AFTERWORD

To report Bigfoot encounters in Minnesota or for further information the author may be contacted at [email protected].

Cover design by Doug Hajicek.

Copyright 2021

This book is dedicated to the year 2020. Many of us couldn’t wait for it to be over and would like to forget it ever happened. But for me, it was the biggest Bigfoot year ever.

INTRODUCTION

I have been a Bigfoot researcher in the state of Minnesota for over 30 years, dedicated to the pursuit of a giant hairy upright walking manlike or apelike creature. A creature that keeps being encountered by scores of people year after year but has even more people scoffing and insisting that it can not and does not exist. I’ve been naturally drawn to “fringe” subjects my whole life- UFOs, ghosts, monsters, and cryptozoology- but it was strongly bolstered when I had my own Bigfoot sighting at the age of eight in 1976. It was a seconds-long glimpse of a tall black figure over a hundred yards distant from a moving car. A fairly mundane sighting as such things go, put to shame by some of the dramatic stories I’ve collected from other witnesses since I started to seek them out in adulthood. I’m a lifelong resident of Minnesota, and I love my state, but as a kid, I thought of my Bigfoot sighting as a freak occurrence and that the creatures were most firmly established in the Pacific Northwest. Now I know that eyewitness reports are widespread across all of North America. I feel that Minnesota, with its numerous lakes and forest areas, is one of the top states east of the Rockies to serve as a habitat for them.

I have produced a few self-published books on the subject over the years, and in 2019 I authored “Bigfoot Chronicle: A Researcher’s Continuing Journey Through Minnesota and Beyond.” In that book, I included an appendix that listed every single Minnesota Bigfoot report that I had been able to assemble from every available source over three decades. The grand total was nearly 700, and it has continued to grow since then. I’m very proud of that accomplishment and all the work that went into it, but it left me wondering- what comes next? I knew of a handful of “Bigfoot hotspots” when the book came out that I would travel to and search for evidence on a semi-regular basis. It was always a fun adventure to go on for a day or two, but as is the nature of the search for Bigfoot in general, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. One hopes to find evidence or have an encounter in these areas, but they are few and far between and make it feel as if the search is going to go on forever as it has for so many years. This is what most Bigfooters do.

What a surprise it was near the end of 2019 to find that there was a place in Minnesota a three hours’ drive from my home in the city of Moorhead (sister city to Fargo, North Dakota) where there was reported to be a consistent and perhaps even permanent Bigfoot presence within a few square miles of private property. Most of my searching was done in state or national forests where one did not need permission to be. Only once before had I encountered a case with multiple encounters on a piece of private land where I was able to become involved for an extended period, and that had been way back toward the beginning of my Bigfooting career in the early 1990s. An old retired tracker and trapper named Ed Trimble living in Clearwater County near the town of Bagley found strange bipedal tracks on his land. He reported it to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The DNR knew of me as a Bigfoot researcher then and referred him to me, and after he wrote to me, I drove up and met with him. He was 76 years old at the time and quite a character, an old man of the woods who knew all there was to know about the wilderness. Ed and I struck up a friendship that lasted for a few years, and he became a bit of a mentor to me. I told his story in my books, but in spite of his best efforts, he never managed to catch sight of the creatures that were prowling his land. His experiences consisted of finding footprints, hearing eerie sounds, and damage done to some of his property. He did introduce me to a few of his neighbors, though, who had seen the creatures, and for many years it stood as the most exciting episode I had ever experienced as a Bigfooter. Ed is long gone now, God rest his soul, and I miss him.

But now there was this new case, another private property that I was granted access to, and this one turned out to be like something I had never even dreamed of. Hands down, it quickly became the single most intense Bigfoot case I have ever investigated, and I knew very early on that it was going to deserve its own book. Not only that, I knew it was going to be extremely controversial.

I remember that when I first got involved in the Bigfoot field, I was so turned off by the creatures being referred to as “monsters.” Then as now, I saw monsters as being things like vampires, werewolves, demons, supernatural things that came from a completely different realm if they existed at all. Sasquatch was something I have always approached through the field of cryptozoology, seeing it as an animal species that I am loathed to describe as “undiscovered” since thousands of witnesses have discovered it, but having yet to have its existence verified by science. It has always seemed to be a giant primate, perhaps more humanlike, perhaps more apelike, or perhaps something in between. It has left in its wake a long line of physical evidence in addition to eyewitness observations- footprints, hair samples, vocalizations caught on tape, even a plethora of photos and films alleged to show it. This was how it was when the subject first gained widespread public attention back in the late 1950s when reports from northern California spawned the name “Bigfoot.” The first researchers into it then brought forth the information that these things were known throughout the Pacific Northwest, that across the border in Canada, they were known as “Sasquatch,” and that there was a history of people encountering them that stretched all the way back into the 1800s. So many classic stories came out, all of them portraying Bigfoot/Sasquatch as either a big ape or a kind of wildman. The famous Patterson-Gimlin film captured in northern California in October of 1967 may be suspected by some of being a hoax and showing nothing but a man in a costume by many skeptics, but the images it shows did nothing to alter the perception of Bigfoot as being a flesh and blood denizen of our forests. (By the way, I firmly believe that film to be genuine.) Even as an ever-expanding number of researchers began to reveal that reports of such creatures were not limited to the Pacific Northwest region but had just as rich a history all across North America as far afield as the East Coast, the idea that they were a natural part of our fauna did not change in the early days.

Of course, though, there were always the Native American legends. These were just as prolific across the continent and described beings that seemed to match what people see in modern times but referred to them as spirits with all sorts of paranormal abilities. Researchers pointed to these tales as further evidence of the creatures’ existence going hundreds of years back into history and tended to regard the supernatural aspects as just a product of how Native folklore viewed practically all the animals of the forest, a culture whose religions were intimately connected to the earth.

Things began to change, however, in what as far as I can pinpoint was around the early 1970s. That was when reports began to circulate from areas across America of Bigfoot creatures being associated with various paranormal phenomena. They came from witnesses who were just as much real and honest people as any in the past who had simply described seeing huge upright hairy creatures or finding giant footprints, but now there were new bizarre elements being added. Bigfoots were being seen in association with UFOs and all sorts of floating lights, with theories emerging that they might even be extraterrestrial in nature or that they might come from some parallel dimension that they could teleport in and out of at will. It seemed to be a viable explanation as to why in spite of how many years went by, no firm proof that they actually existed that would be accepted by the scientific community had so far been captured. Most Bigfoot researchers cringed at these theories, still convinced that they were looking for nothing but a very elusive flesh and blood animal.

As the decades passed, the dichotomy between the two camps became even more extreme as the paranormal believers began to talk of psychic communication between Bigfoot and humans, a phenomenon that came to be called “mind speak.” As the 2000s dawned, at its most extreme, this line of thinking even led to the formation of what could easily be called cult groups that were literally worshiping Bigfoot and viewing the creatures as advanced spiritual beings.

The flesh and blood researchers who still beat the bushes in search of footprints and DNA samples in an attempt to bring Bigfoot firmly into the realm of zoological acceptance came up with a quaint term for the other camp that was seeking to exist side by side with them. That term was “Woo.”

“Woo” is a completely dismissive term meant to indicate that anyone it refers to is either mentally unstable or a hoaxer that is peddling delusional or deceptive false claims. I will use the term here only because it seems to have become established in the Bigfoot field. So these are our two camps now - the flesh and blood, and the woo. The flesh and blood denounce the woo totally and completely, while the woo try to reach out and find common ground with their opposing camp and try to get them to open their minds to other possibilities. It does not seem likely that such a thing will happen any time soon.

The flesh and blood camp also tends to issue strong cautions against taking seriously any Bigfoot cases that involve witnesses who claim to have multiple encounters. The creatures are so rare and elusive, they insist, that anyone who says they’ve been able to see them multiple times is likely to be just making it up for notoriety. Of special attention are “habituation cases,” in which people claim to have developed any kind of rapport or communication with creatures over long periods of time through whatever method they’ve found works for accomplishing this. Habituation equals woo, they insist. It doesn’t happen, so don’t believe it. Of course, we’d love to be able to commune with the creatures the way Dian Fossey did with gorillas, but it’s just a fantasy. And hoaxes of this kind are known to have happened, to be sure.

I approached the Bigfoot field as a member of the flesh and blood camp, and for the most part, I still consider myself as such. After all, if one is trying to prove to the world that something exists, you do not want to hear that even if you get your hands on it, it is capable of just dissolving into smoke. I have to admit- I do not like the woo. It threatens one of my greatest goals in life, a dream I’ve held for decades. It was a dream hard enough to achieve under normal circumstances, but harder still if one accepts that what you’re seeking isn’t truly of this world. It’s not that I don’t believe in paranormal or supernatural things because I most certainly do, and I find them fascinating. It’s just that I had never wanted to think of Bigfoot as being one of them. But at the same time, my years of meeting and interviewing Bigfoot witnesses have taught me to have faith in peoples’ honesty. Many people with nothing to gain and things to lose have gone on record with me about the creature sightings they’ve had, asking nothing in return except to be believed and to share their stories. I am an advocate for those people, for they often suffer ridicule for their stories, and that bothers me a great deal. In all those years, only a very few times were there even hints in any of the stories I collected about anything paranormal. But I have to ask myself now that if I was to encounter such a case, wouldn’t I have to apply my faith in people in the same way? It would not seem fair to reject someone’s story out of hand after I’ve thoroughly assessed them and looked into it just because it doesn’t agree with my previous beliefs. Maybe I’m unique in that respect, but that’s how I feel about it.

I say these things because the case I ran across in late 2019 started out as a standard Bigfoot investigation but ended up as not only a habituation case but as full-blown woo. The witnesses in the case- and there are a lot of them- are as good and honest as any I have ever met. I would be doing them a disservice if I did not tell their story in full and if I was to censor any bit of it, leaving things out because I thought it wasn’t what people wanted to hear. I didn’t even want to hear it, but I did, and it cannot be ignored. Especially since I came to experience some of it for myself.

Is it a pipe dream to hope that this book might begin to forge a bridge between the flesh and blood and the woo camps in the Bigfoot field? Maybe. Probably. But hope springs eternal.

The owner of the property on which this story takes place is named Randy Bauer. Interpretations of the events that have happened on that property may vary widely, but what follows is the true account of those events.

1

OPENING

Randy Bauer was a very healthy and active 60 years old when I first met him in December 2019 at his rural home a few miles from the town of Blackduck (population 820) in Beltrami County, Minnesota. This is about a half hour’s drive from the larger hub of Bemidji (population 16,350) and nestled firmly within the heavily forested upper third of the state, just north of the upper border of the Chippewa National Forest. Minnesota loves to display giant animal statues, and true to form, Blackduck has a couple of big black ducks to welcome visitors. There is a mixture of civilization and wilderness here, with small towns few and far between and wildlife everywhere. One might expect people living in this rugged region to be cattle farmers or lumber mill workers, and many are, but not Randy.

Randy is a musician. He plays saxophone, keyboards, and accordion, does sound engineering and manages what I think I can safely call a country-flavored swing and boogie-woogie band called Smokehouse. As such, he does quite a bit of traveling, playing different venues around the country. He even sometimes does solo work as a sound engineer for other acts, even famous celebrities at times, and two names he casually dropped during one conversation I was witness to were Alice Cooper and Dwight Yoakam. Two of many.

He is also a very dedicated and prolific family man. He and his first wife, Tina, were married from 1979 to 1999 and had six children. In 2010 he married his current wife Teri, who also had children from a previous marriage, and in all, Randy ended up with eleven grandchildren. It is a blended and complex family but one that seems to function very well and with a lot of love. Randy is a friendly and outgoing guy who comes across as being a very good and decent man, with just a bit of a saucy sense of humor. He is a patriarch, a man to be respected.

Apart from his musical career, Randy enjoys nothing more than spending time in the woods that surrounds him. When I met him, he had lived on his property for over 20 years and regularly hunted it. The yard of his bright red house contains a plethora of decorations, including an Indian totem pole and various animal statues and cutouts, and on the inside, the house is a sportsman’s abode with taxidermy mounts on the walls, including a deer head and bearskin. His property comprises 40 acres, a standard size for plots of land in the area. It is all forest, with two rivers winding through it and also an arrow-straight powerline corridor cutting through that offers some open space. Some people own more than one plot, such as a farmer Randy has as a neighbor who has pasture land for cattle, and one of Randy’s daughters lives just a quarter of a mile or so up the road from him with her husband and kids. He has good relations with his neighbors and has permission to hike and explore and hunt on those properties that border his own. He has been doing this for many years, a typically experienced woodsman who has been observing nature and the changing of seasons and the habits of animals and becoming someone who can speak with authority about them.

It was a world he understood well. At least until November of 2013.

2

BLOOD MASSACRE

While deer hunting just across the river on his farmer neighbor’s property, Randy suddenly made a deeply disturbing find. He knew how to recognize spots where deer bedded down to rest and the impressions they made in the ground when they did so. The ground was snow-covered, and in a spot where three deer beds were evident, there were signs in the snow showing that all three deer had been suddenly and violently killed before they could even manage to try to run away, the snow and surrounding leaves being littered with hair and splashed with blood. The spot was between Randy’s land and a cedar swamp that lay a little farther on, and he stood there pondering what this gruesome sight could possibly mean. There was nothing solid left of the deer but hair and blood. No meat, no bones. It was eerie, and he couldn’t come up with an explanation except to wonder if there might be a wolf pack in the area. When he tells the story, he uses the term “blood massacre.”

A few months went by, and the winter was a cold one. The snow was deep, and with his curiosity piqued, Randy wanted to get back out and see what else he might find, but he waited until February 2014 and then went out on his snowmobile to create hard-packed trails that he could confidently walk on. When he returned to the area of the deer kill, he found something even more surprising and disturbing than before.

A long line of footprints was impressed into the snow, about eighteen inches long and appearing to be made by something walking on only two feet. Melting snow is known to distort and enlarge animal tracks, but the weather was still cold, and there had been no melting. The snow conditions were not quite right to show a crisp outline of the exact shape of the animal’s feet, but the stride between prints was far too wide to be the bootprints of a human being, an astounding six to eight feet between impressions. In deep snow like this, it would have been especially impossible for a human. Randy took several photographs, feeling later that he hadn’t done a good enough job of documenting the find in that he’d let his own prints mingle with the mysterious ones a bit too much, but he also planted sticks in the snow next to each of a series of prints to show the massive stride. He followed the track maker’s trail for a long distance, finding that it came to the river and crossed it, whether by jumping or simply stepping across. From there, he continued to follow through the thick woods until he came to a spot where he lost the trail, not because of ground conditions but because the prints just seemed to end. In snow, this seemed impossible, and as far as he could tell, there didn’t seem to be any way that the thing could have taken to the trees or had any other way for its footprints to simply vanish the way they did.

Randy was mystified, could not fathom what he was seeing, and for the first time, he allowed a certain thought to enter his mind. Though he was vaguely aware of the phenomenon, as are most people in America, he had never given it any serious thought before or formed any kind of opinion about it. But now, as he stood here looking at these giant footprints, he had to wonder- “My god, is this Bigfoot?”

Wondering if a legendary giant monster had paid a visit and if it might be responsible for the previous deer kills was daunting enough without the added mystery of its tracks simply vanishing into thin air. This kind of strangeness would occur again farther down the line, but for now, Randy turned to the source most people in the modern age turn to when they want answers- the Internet.

Randy uses sticks to mark the stride of tracks in deep snow.

I gather that Randy did a general search on the topic of Bigfoot in Minnesota. If he had searched a little more in-depth, he might have found me then and there, but my time as the main Bigfoot researcher in Minnesota was a few years in the past. Instead, he found the Minnesota-based Sasquatch Research Association (SRA) headed by Jim Hebb. He e-mailed Jim, told him the story, and showed him the photos of the mysterious tracks. Jim responded with a classic quote:

“You’ve got a squatch.”

3

STICK STRUCTURES & DEER KILLS

Randy estimates that it was in April of 2014 that he started to find something throughout the area that would become a hallmark of this story. Even before the Bigfoot episode began, one of his favorite activities was hiking the woods and just enjoying being out in nature. Now he was doing even more of it, and here and there, he began to notice odd arrangements of tree branches that did not seem to him to be likely to have just fallen into place naturally.

This is a bit of a controversy within the Bigfoot field and has been a matter of contention for several years. Some researchers believe these structures are artificially manufactured by Bigfoot creatures, while others are sure that wind and the falling of dead trees and other factors are capable of depositing branches in all kinds of crazy ways and that people are simply reading too much into them. It is certainly true that forest debris can be a complex jumble of shapes and patterns that do happen entirely on their own, but sometimes there are structures that just seem to defy logic as to how they could have possibly formed naturally, and for creatures as intelligent as Bigfoot is alleged to be it is not really difficult to imagine them making such things. As a researcher myself, I try to keep both views in perspective.

To say that Randy’s finds of this kind are many would be a massive understatement. Once he first started to notice them, they became a nearly constant occurrence. He has carefully kept track of where each of them has shown up, documented them with photographs, and speculated about their meaning. For the purposes of this book, however, to delve into each individual find would become tedious. I think it suffices to say that the finds have continued unabated for years. They consist partly of structures resembling teepees or pyramids, sometimes incorporating and leaning against live growing trees and sometimes just free-standing, the unlikelihood of their having just fallen that way seeming to be in the extreme. Along with those are a huge number of structures in the shape of letters of the alphabet, namely X and A, sometimes lying flat on the ground but more often standing up vertical. I feel it’s important to point out that there is no implication here that the creatures understand our alphabet and that the structures depict those letters literally, only that these are fairly simple shapes that just happen to look like those letters, and whenever these are found they appear perfectly balanced and symmetrical.

Also found frequently in association with these structures have been small broken off sticks in the shape of the letter Y. With the way twigs branch off of larger limbs, it is, of course, possible to find the y-shape literally everywhere in the forest, but these seem to have been trimmed to depict only that shape and are often found hanging from larger structures. Randy feels that the y-shape has some kind of special meaning to the creatures, and he has even found these sticks left in seemingly deliberate ways that he’s felt were meant to convey some kind of message.

I had begun to encounter stick structures in other Bigfoot cases before I met Randy, as well as the heated debate about them. Some within the field even angrily assert that reading meaning into every weird jumble of sticks one might run across makes us look gullible as researchers, and I can certainly understand that concern and have discussed it with Randy. But he stands firm in his discoveries and has gestured around at the woods surrounding us, talking about how he knows a windfall when he sees one, pointing out how some of the branches in the structures are driven into the ground without any root structure evident showing that they did not come from the spot where they are found, how certain branches are woven together in ways that are just impossible naturally, and just generally defending himself in a convincing way that makes one feel that he knows what he is talking about.

I was on the fence about stick structures, but this case has convinced me that at least some of them are Bigfoot related while others are probably natural and misread. I honestly can’t say whether I had seen these structures during my many years of exploring the woods because before they started to be associated with Bigfoot, I don’t think I would have even noticed, but Randy’s case has changed that.

There was a second thing besides the stick structures that became a regular occurrence. The deer kill Randy found in November 2013 was not a singular event, and this is actually a quite sinister recurring theme in the story. Randy started finding other deer kills, lots of them, all consisting of a massive area of deer hair littering the ground over several yards with no solid body parts present. His first find in 2013 that seemed to indicate three deer killed at once was splashed with blood, and he’s had no other finds like that, but he assumes that one was very fresh and that the blood dries and fades over time.

A teepee or pyramid type structure.

What I had a skeptic in an online debate tell me that these finds were just deer beds where the deer shed their winter hair. Randy laughed at that, as he should have. I have seen these sites, and there is far more hair on the ground than would result from shedding. I think they indicate the deer being killed, all of their hair being stripped off, and then their bodies carried away to be eaten elsewhere. Randy reports that he typically finds seven or eight of these sites a year, in all seasons.

An "A" structure.

Added to this is that while just in the act of hiking around the area, Randy has also found and collected deer skulls on a semi-regular basis, both bucks and does, decapitated heads just left in random places in the woods. It would be next to impossible for poachers to be operating on this piece of private land, and even if they were poachers, don’t leave the antlers behind. Randy has such a collection of these skulls that it kind of makes me worry about game wardens seeing them someday and asking him how he came to have them. He says that if they ever do, he will have quite a story for them but that he’ll never bring it to their attention unless he has to.

He finds is not normal for known predator kills. There are bears and mountain lions in the area that do prey on deer and Randy has seen their kills. They leave partially eaten bodies behind that are torn apart, not just masses of plucked hair on the ground.

I am writing this in 2020, at which time Randy has found about two dozen skulls and close to 50 kill sites. I would not want to be a deer on his property.

4

FIRST SIGHTING?

Summer came to 2014, and in spite of the strange goings-on around Randy’s property life and the process of earning a living had to go on. Smokehouse had gigs to play, and in June, a guitarist who was with the band at that time was staying with Randy briefly.

Chris Cornish

Chris Cornish is as prolific a musician as Randy, hailing from Rapid City, South Dakota, and having played with many well-known artists over the years, as well as now having his very own band. His sound is adaptable, ranging from country to rock. He was 38 years old when he stayed at Randy’s, sleeping in a trailer house just across the yard from the main house that is maintained for guests. Randy, new to the bizarre phenomena going on around his home and not sure what to think about it, was keeping it very close to the chest and had told Chris nothing about any of it. If a first sighting had to occur to confirm the presence of Bigfoot on the property, then it seems to be lent credence that it was by a witness who was untainted with suggestibility.

However, and unfortunately, there is some controversy with this incident. I contacted Chris via Facebook in preparing this book to get his recollections, and he first stated that the place had a spooky and unnerving feeling to it and that he heard some strange nocturnal animal noises that sounded like they came from something large, close to the trailer, and somewhat similar but not exactly identical to the noises made by the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character from the old Loony Tunes cartoons.

(I should point out that this does not mean sounds of the real-life animal known as the Tasmanian Devil, just its cartoon counterpart.) This was in agreement with what Randy had told me about the sounds. Chris admitted that his memories of that time were a little fuzzy but then further recalled that he had also seen something that night. He wrote:

“I had stepped out to have a cigarette and was sitting on a picnic table. While I was sitting there, some movement caught my eye across the yard, and I saw a pair of reddish-colored eyes reflecting off the yard light. It happened very quickly, and I could not make out any definitive shape, but they were well above the ground, but I couldn’t say how far up because his yard has a slope to it.” 

The controversy enters in because Randy has a very different recollection of what Chris told him about his observations while staying in the trailer, that it involved seeing a Bigfoot creature in the yard at very close range. I will not go into detail so as not to add to the disagreement or speculate on why it might exist, but this account- flawed as it may be- does show that something strange was seen and heard in Randy’s yard just outside of his house by someone who had not been told anything about the earlier activity.

Randy's house as seen from the guest trailer.