bigfoot

A Cryptid Playlist by Your Favorite Scum Princess

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Art brought to you by Rick Spears

In quarantine, you realize who you are. Steeped in the onion burrito scent of your own B.O., staring into a party sized bag of Cheetos, you’re forced to deal with your dark night of the soul. Who are you without the structure forced on you by your boss, your dad, your boyfriend, your gynecologist? You question everything you ever stood for and everything you believe!!! WHO ARE YOU?!

On the bright side of things, depending on your situation, self-quarantine might be good for you. The way an apple cider vinegar cleanse might be good. Or a colonoscopy.

It’s times like these that force me to come to terms with how many of my usual daily activities are unnecessary and frivolous. To decide what activities to keep and purge. Without the outside world interrupting your thoughts every five minutes to ask what size latte you want or what your major was in college, you can think.

This is the chance to discover how much of your daily schedule is dictated by the needs or wants of others. To find out whether you’re human waste waiting to be picked up and disposed of in what Mom, Boyfriend, or Janie from accounting has deemed your proper place. Or if you’re human waste that can sort itself!

Being a writer has made me a pro at being confined to one place for long stretches of time, but no more than a few weeks. The possibilities of extended isolation are endless and I’m looking forward to examining the results of this grand experiment. What a dream!

I could become anorexic or fat. Go so long without brushing my teeth that my throat hurts from the tongue residue. Realize which people I really miss and who doesn’t miss me at all. I may not be able to leave my apartment, but these are the psychological trips that money just can’t buy!

That said, over the last month my usual existential dread has transformed into a focused pandemic-dread, with not much room for self-reflection. Every once in a while between reading COVID-19 tweets, my throat will start to burn like there’s ash in it, and I’ll swear it’s coronavirus creeping, when really it’s just allergies that come with the miracle of spring.

Big Fur: A Taxidermy Documentary That’s Stuffed with Surprises

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Ken Walker, the star of Big Fur, creates a life-sized Bigfoot. Image courtesy of Big Fur director Dan Wayne.

When Ken Walker was little, he found a dead bird, broke it apart and put it back together. He carried a jar of bugs around because he wanted to open them up to see how their anatomy worked. Later, he became one of the best taxidermists on the planet, dead set on designing the perfect bigfoot. And then some Kansas City director came along and made a movie about that shit.

Big Fur is a documentary that takes you inside the world of taxidermy, giving you a sneak peak into the belly of the beast… often literally. You get to see Walker carve Bigfoot’s tummy out of Styrofoam, select the right fur from other animals to mimic Bigfoot’s pelt, choose the perfect glass eyes for a mythical hominid, and debate whether or not to add nipples. He’s doing all of this to enter his creation into the World Taxidermy Championship and win. He also thinks his fake sasquatch will someday lead him to a real bigfoot.

“There might be somebody someday that walks up and sees that model [of Bigfoot] and decides to give me what’s in his freezer,” Walker says. “That is my ultimate goal.”

“I’m positive that proof of Sasquatch already exists. I know there’s somebody out there that has something. I know for a fact. And I’m just waiting until I can get it,” Walker says in the film. “There might be somebody someday that walks up and sees that model [of Bigfoot] and decides to give me what’s in his freezer. That is my ultimate goal.”

The most important detail of this undertaking is that Walker hasn’t decided to create just any bigfoot, but the most famous bigfoot to ever walk the Earth: Patty.

Patty is the sasquatch from what’s called the “Patterson-Gimlin film,” a short movie recorded in 1969 by two dudes trekking in the wilds of Humboldt County. Some people think that it was staged as all get-out, and that the bigfoot in the film is just a guy in a monkey suit. Others, like Walker, believe it’s some of the best recorded evidence to date. But he didn’t always think this way.

At the film’s San Francisco Indie Fest premiere, Walker admits to a tumultuous relationship with Sasquatch. “I wasn’t a believer until I saw one myself,” Walker says, his thick helmet of graying hair hanging over his brow. “Actually, I wasn’t a believer even after I had an encounter. It wasn’t until people started coming into my shop and telling me stories, people I trusted, that I understood it was real.” 

Me posing with taxidermist Ken Walker's Bigfoot creation at the SF IndieFest premiere of Big Fur.
Me posing with Ken Walker’s version of Patty at the SF IndieFest premiere of Big Fur.

Extra! Extra! Hot Alien Crash Lands in 2020, Probably Comes in Peace

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What a fucking decade.

It has been equal parts horrible and equal parts glorious for me. A lot of things came to a violent end: my older brother, my innocence (if you can believe it ever existed), my sex column, my modeling career and my will to live (at least for a time). But there was a lot of creation too: I finally acquired self-confidence, became a PAID writer (praise be), fell in love with both a small hairy comedian and a large hairy myth (a la the legendary Bigfoot) and gave birth to this Hot Alien you see before you, my pride and joy. 

Things could have been better and things could have been worse these past 10 years, but one thing is for certain: I’m completely different than the person I was in 2010—a totally-depressed college girl who barely knew what life was like outside of a small town in Maryland. Now I’m a sometimes-depressed 30-year-old in the San Francisco Bay Area who researches ghosts, aliens and mythical animals in her spare time. Remember: Things could be worse.

Cryptid Creatures: “The Feel Good Field Guide of 2019”

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Kelly Milner Halls and Rick Spears go way back. Not as far as the legends featured in their work, but far enough to have worked on eight projects together, including their latest book Cryptid Creatures, which just hit the real (and cyber) shelves today. 

Cryptid Creatures is a field guide featuring 50 mythical animals (AKA cryptids). Each entry presents a description of the creature, its history, and evidence suggesting that it exists—which often includes colorful accounts told in newspaper articles. Every cryptid also gets a “reality rating” represented by a scale of 1-6 stars. One star means the cryptid has been confirmed as a hoax, while six stars means the once-mythical creature has been proven real. 

Cryptids covered in the book range from well-known beasts like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, to the more obscure—such as the Iliamna Lake Monster of Alaska (which has the head of a wolf and body of an orca whale) and the Con Rit (a centipede purported to be larger than any known shark).

The creature illustrations depict the beasts in two stages of their lives, both as full-grown monster legends, and also as baby beasts—when the creatures were nothing but whispered tales around the campfire.

Halls is a prolific children’s book author and freelance writer, and Spears is an illustrator and sculptor with a focus on animals, science, and natural history.

I talked to both about the artistic inspiration behind Cryptid Creatures, why cryptids should be examined like real animals, and how they bonded over the bizarre in the first place.

So how did you two meet? 

K: Well, I was working on this book called Dino-Trekking in 1996, and I was looking for a paleontology expert from Georgia State to interview. And some guy in Georgia—I can’t remember who it was—said, “You really shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Rick Spears. He’s everything dinosaur.” And I said how do I get a hold of him?

R: He made it seem like I was a crackpot or something.

K: Well, so was I, so it worked out. Rick was just the best; he and I talked and he asked. “Who is illustrating the book?” And I said we don’t have a budget for illustrating, and he said, “Well, I’ll do it for free.” And I said, ‘“This guy is the best guy ever!” 

Letters from Willow Creek: The Bigfoot Capital of the World

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Me, standing in front of the Willow Creek welcome sign on Labor Day weekend, 2018 // Photo by Jordan Cerminara // Full size image here

Last year, I made my first trek to Willow Creek, California, a town known as the “Bigfoot capital of the world.”  Today marks the 59th annual Bigfoot Daze Festival, and while I won’t be there this year, I encourage you to check out this collection of letters from yours truly chronicling my visit. I write all about the town’s history, the mystery, and what’s it like to get lost in the Bigfoot craze—one giant step at a time.

These letters were originally published in California magazine, but I’m running them here on my blog for your viewing pleasure (with a bonus of extra photos not included in the California mag story). Enjoy.

Friday, August 31, 2018
11:00pm

It’s a cool summer night in Willow Creek, California, and I just chose to spend three hours of it in a hot, humid hotel room, holding the hand of a Bigfoot. Well, a Bigfoot’s hand cast, anyway. 

Daryl Owen, a white-haired man with a big grin and a small gap in his teeth, invited me over to show off his Bigfoot evidence. I met him outside the Bigfoot Motel just as I arrived. He was explaining to the front desk clerk that a news team had followed him and his crew, known as the NorCal Squatchers, to Willow Creek in a van, and that it was “so hard being famous.” He had been on Ancient Mysteries after all, and Good Day Sacramento, he said. I was standing next to Sasquatch royalty.

“I wanna say we’re pretty famous. I mean, we’re pretty good,” Owen told me in his motel room. “We’ve been on TV a couple of times. I’ve been on a TV show. People know our names. They know we’re NorCal Squatchers. They drive up beside our truck and give us the thumbs up, or the bird, or whatever, but… we’re well known.” 

He pulled the cast of a Bigfoot hand from a military spec storage container, cradled the lumpy mass of plaster in his arms and called it his baby. Owen said that when he died, he’d pass it on to his son-in-law Russell Stater, who was seated on one of the beds, while Owen’s daughter Taryn looked on silently from a seat in the corner of the room. These three were the NorCal Squatchers from Sacramento, and just like me, they were here for the Bigfoot Daze Festival, Willow Creek’s annual summer event where people from all over come together to celebrate Sasquatch.