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.

The “Great American Eclipse” Passes Over Nicolas Cage’s Tomb

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“Holy crap. Nicolas Cage is dead.” 

My wide eyes trailed over the smooth stone of the actor’s tomb, so hot you could burn a pizza on it. It was 2017 in the dead of August, and I was about to watch what the media was calling the “Great American Eclipse” from the center of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. The band of the solar eclipse would span the entire contiguous United States, which was a big deal, apparently.

Anyway, I knew the New Orleans cemetery was famous for housing the dead bodies of Voodoo Queen Maria Laveau, human rights activist Homer Plessy and New Orleans first mayor, Étienne de Boré. But Nicky baby—I thought he had so much life left to live. 

“As you can see, Nicolas Cage’s grave is popular with the ladies,” said Linda, our short, stocky tour guide, who wore a towel around her neck to catch sweat. “And the drag queens.”

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.

Mark Twain’s Bloody Kitten Man of Kearny Street

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Mark Twain with some bloody kittens // Mark Twain painting sourced from Terry Ballard, Flickr

In 1866, Mark Twain wrote a newspaper story called “The Kearny Street Ghost” that has haunted the minds of San Franciscans ever since. He was a San Francisco correspondent for a Virginia City, Nevada paper called Territorial Enterprise, and allegedly reported this story after conversations with a real live SF resident.

Here’s how Twain’s tale twists:  

It’s the 1800s, and a dude named Albert Krum can’t keep a maid to save his life. 

Every time a maid goes to her bedchamber to sleep after a day of work, within moments of turning out the light, she’s attacked by “dead and damned scalliwags” AKA evil spirits. One spirit in particular seems to show up more often than the rest: a tall, shadowy male figure intent on attacking women.

He takes maids “by the hair” and “grabs [them] by the waterfall” (which I can only assume was the original “grab ’em by the pussy”) before “bouncing” them on the floor two or three times to get his thrills. The man hurls things at maids too, like washbowls and boots and hoop skirts. He’s really loud, stomping around like the Nutty Professor (yet Krum nor the rest of his family ever hears the evil spirit’s footfalls or come to the maids’ aid during these alleged attacks). As soon as the maids manage to get their lanterns lit again, the stomping stops and the haunting ceases. 

No one knows what or who is messing with the maids, just that it keeps happening—and that Krum’s chamber pot keeps filling up with no one there to empty it. This is not the lavish life he pictured when he moved into his fancy Kearny Street home. What’s a farty rich guy to do?

Jeepers! Creepers, Havana Syndrome, and Mass Hysteria

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A sinister bug swarm

In late 2016, a group of American diplomats in Cuba fell mysteriously ill, experiencing symptoms that ranged from headaches, hearing and memory loss, nausea, fatigue, and even brain damage. This mysterious collection of symptoms is referred to as “Havana Syndrome,”  and there are a lot of theories as to possible causes—including neurotoxins from insecticides, and even a sonic attack.

The sonic attack theory emerged because multiple diplomats recorded an eerie, high-pitched sound the night their symptoms appeared, and they assumed they were hearing a sonic weapon. But last year, UC Berkeley graduate student Alexander Stubbs, along with Fernando Montealegre-Z of University of Lincoln, listened to the diplomats’ sound recordings—and after thorough investigation, discovered that the sounds actually matched the chirp of Anurogryllus celerinictus, the Indies short-tailed cricket.

“The call of this cricket does not cause people to have adverse physical reactions,” Stubbs said in a phone interview last year. “I don’t want anyone to potentially hear that species of insect and think they or their family could be at risk due to that sound.”

Knowing that the sounds the diplomats heard were crickets, Stubbs says another explanation worth considering is that Havana Syndrome may be a case of mass hysteria, where the diplomats’ ailments are psychosomatic and they imagined themselves sick after hearing the crickets’ call.

“In my opinion, the sonic attack story seems to be a media and government narrative, not informed by rational science,” Stubbs says. “Once you break the link between the sound and the symptoms, it starts to seem less likely that the diplomats were victims of a nefarious attack.”