Don Keating, founder of the Eastern Ohio Bigfoot Investigation Center, peers into the woods at Salt Fork State Park Thursday afternoon the area where a Cambridge couple claimed they saw a large creature Wednesday evening.
Dan Davis
The Daily Jeffersonian August 20, 2004
Some say it’s myth.
Others claim it’s real.
The arguments both for and against the existence of Bigfoot meant little to a Cambridge man and his wife on a visit to Salt Fork State Park Wednesday evening. To them, the creature they claim they saw in the woods was, without a doubt, real.
The couple stopped with their pet dog in the park between 7 and 7:30 p.m. to eat food they purchased a short time earlier at a local eatery. As they finished, they decided to hike along a groomed trail through the woods, expecting it to lead to the lake shore. Their trip was cut short a few scant yards into the woods.
“We heard the first noise over here in the woods,” the man recalled at the site Thursday afternoon. “We could hear it ... I’ve never heard that noise before.”
The man - who requested anonymity in The Daily Jeffersonian - said the sound was like a low guttural moan lasting a couple of seconds.
The couple hesitated, peering into the woods briefly before moving further along the trail.
Again they heard the sound, in all about a dozen or more times.
“Our dog’s pulling at the leash, and we’re watching over into the woods and saying, ‘What is that?’ We keep walking, and we’re real cautious, because I’m not sure what this thing is. We get down to a certain point ... and we stop. And I hear it again. And as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘Look! Look! Look! There it is! There it is! There it is! What is that?’ And she said, ‘Where, where?’ And I said, ‘Look between these two limbs.’ She said, ‘I see it! I see it!’”
The man described what he and his wife observed several dozen yards away.
“What we saw ... it was standing there. It was dark - I won’t say it was covered with hair - but it was a dark figure standing nearly 8 feet tall. I could see its head [move from side to side], like it’s looking at me. And then it turns and keeps on walking [down the hill].”
Now both frightened, the couple retreated up the trail.
“We kept looking over our shoulder,” he said. “We could hear a few more noises out there, not like he’s closing in, but we could hear him doing that noise.”
Returning to the spot where they ate their meal, the twosome again heard the creature, the man said, this time very close, just a few feet away at the edge of the woods.
“We start gathering up our stuff,” he said. “It did two of those noises - the last one extremely loud. That’s when we grabbed the stuff and took off running, because we knew it had followed us back.”
The two returned to their automobile, and drove away.
The man, who has spent time in the woods hunting, said he was certain they had seen neither a deer, a bear nor a horse.
The man contacted Don Keating Thursday morning. Keating founded the Eastern Ohio Bigfoot Investigation Center in 1984, and has investigated a number of reported sightings and other encounters.
Keating and fellow investigator Richard Myers met the man at the scene of the reported sighting, interviewed him and examined the scene.
Keating said details of the man’s account matched those in other documented cases, giving it credibility.
The nature of the soil in the area combined with rainfall after the incident meant little chance of footprints being found. And none were found.
A possible “stick stack” was found, however, a phenomenon associated with some alleged sightings.
Keating’s assessment?
“With the history of the area, with the circumstances surrounding the incident and with every bit of information he’s told me ... I have no reason to doubt he and his wife saw what they claimed to have seen. And I furthermore tend to believe that it was probably one of these creatures. I say that not to make a case for an unknown biped in the Salt Fork State Park area. I say that because everything he has told me, even stuff he wouldn’t know no matter how many Web sites he may have gone to and stuff I haven’t even talked about ... things that he has mentioned indicate to me that they probably saw the real McCoy.”
The behavior of the creature the couple reported, Keating said, could have been consistent with it issuing a warning against intruders in its territory or in defense of an adolescent creature.
According to Keating, Salt Fork State Park has a history of sightings, dating back to the early 1970s. Accounts of the sightings may be accessed on the EOBIC Web site at www.angelfire.com/oh/ohiobigfoot/home.html.
Keating asked that anyone believing they have had an encounter with a creature similar to the one the couple described to contact him at (740) 498-4542 or via e-mail at eobic@yahoo.com.