by Tyler Houck
The Legend of the Ohio Grassman
Ohio is in the number four spot for most Bigfoot sightings. The only states ahead of it are California, Oregon, and Washington. The Ohio Bigfoot even has it’s own nickname, the Grassman. The hotspot for Grassman sightings is Salt Fork State Park, home of the annual Ohio Bigfoot Conference.
The Ohio Grassman on MonsterQuest The first account of a Grassman sighting appeared in a newspaper on January 23, 1869. The headline was titled “A Gorilla in Ohio.” It told of a hairy creature that had attacked a man walking with his daughter. The man’s daughter threw a stone at the creature as it wrestled with her father, and it ran away after the stone hit its ear.
Another, more recent sighting occurred in 1978. Evelyn and Howe Cayton said their grandchildren and some friends came into the house crying, saying they had seen a monster in a nearby gravel pit. Vicket Keck and the Caytons went outside to see what had scared the kids. They saw a creature covered in dark, matted hair. They estimated its weight at about 300 pounds and said it was 7 feet tall. In Evelyn Cayton’s words:
“It just stood there. It never moved, but I almost broke my neck running back down the hill.” The rest of the Minerva sightings started on August 21, 1978. Ron Schaffner, a Bigfoot researcher, chronicled the sightings. This is how it happened.
On August 21, at about 10:30 P.M., Evelyn Cayton’s family and friends heard noises in the direction of an old chicken coop while sitting on the porch. They saw two pairs of yellow eyes reflecting in the porch light. Scott Patterson got up and turned on his car’s headlights. There were two “cougar-like” felines standing by the chicken coop. Then, a large, bipedal creature stepped out in front of them, as if to protect them. The creature then lurched towards Patterson’s car. Everyone ran into the house and someone
called the
Stark County
Sheriff’s
Department.
While they
were waiting
for the police
to arrive, they
saw the
creature
looking in the
window. It
stayed there
for 10
minutes.
Patterson and Evelyn Cayton loaded guns, but did not shoot at the creature because it did not try to attack them. After a while, it suddenly left. Mary Ackerman said “It doesn’t seem to want to bother anyone. It was just curious. We felt like it wanted to be friends.”
About 5 minutes after the creature had left, the police
arrived. A strong stench was still lingering in the area. They also discovered some unclear footprints. The creature was seen several times over the next couple of days.
One of the prominent Bigfoot researchers in Ohio is Joedy Cook. He has been studying Bigfoot since 1991 and has written books on the subject that include Bigfoot
Encounters in Ohio, Beginner’s Guide to Bigfoot Research, and Legend of the Grassman. He has found several
Grassman “nests.” He helped out the MonsterQuest team when they filmed an episode in Ohio. He sent in a baboon skull he had found (MonsterQuest said no one knew what the skull was from
because, you know,
TV has to be
interesting), and a
possible
Grassman handprint.
Forensic Examiner
Jimmy Chilcott
examined the print
and said it was either
from a gorilla or a
Bigfoot.
RIGHT: The handprint compared to a
gorilla hand and a chimpanzee
hand(courtesy of Joedy Cook)
PREVIOUS PAGE: A Grassman
‘Nest’(Courtesy of Joedy Cook)
2005 was a good year for grassman sightings. Joedy Cook lists 8 reports from that year in his book Legend of the Grassman: The Bigfoot of Salt Fork State Park.
Another Grassman encounter occurred on July 2, 1984, when Lorena Cunningham saw a female Sasquatch watching her kids while they were playing on the
playground. She said it was 7 ½ feet tall and she saw
several expressions on its face. It never looked like it was angry, it seemed to like to watch the kids playing. “It was almost smiling.” Lorena said. The hair covering the
creature was dark with red tips. Lorena called her kids over after a minute and they left.
Lorena didn’t know this, but that was only her first of three encounters with Bigfoot creatures. In 2004, she was at her father’s house and went out to shut the gate one cold winter night after her daughter and her fiance left. When she went out, she saw a tall, grey haired bigfoot walking along the fence line. She thought it might have been going to a barn on the property to get out of the cold. She said it was about 7 or 7 ½ feet tall like the other one she had seen 20 years earlier. When she yelled “Hey!”, the Bigfoot
turned, looked at her, and walked back across the field and went into the woods.
Her third encounter occurred in a barn. Lorena went into the barn to feed the horses. Usually when she walked into the barn, about 30 cats came running for food. That day, no cats came. The horses would not come inside. She heard the boards of the hay loft above her creaking, and saw bits of straw falling through the cracks.
She grabbed two pitchforks, because she
knew it was a Bigfoot up there, even
though she couldn’t see it. If it came down
and attacked, she wasn’t going down
without a fight, but, that didn’t happen. She
walked out of the barn unharmed.
Lorena’s stories have been investigated by Doug Waller, founder of the Southeastern Ohio Society for Bigfoot Investigations, or SOSBI for short, and author of Standing in the Shadows: Bigfoot Stories from
Southeastern Ohio. He also helped the cast of Finding Bigfoot when they were filming the Ohio episode. Doug is currently working on a second book.
In April of 2014 I went to Salt Fork State Park for the 26th annual Ohio Bigfoot Conference. On the third day, I walked back to the Hosaks Cave area where there have been quite a few Bigfoot sightings. While walking near the cave, I found something odd and possibly Bigfoot related. I was up near the cave area (not right above the cave, because you can only get so close to it on the path because 4 people have fallen from the top of the cave and two of those four have died!
As I was walking, I noticed a tree that was upside down. The tree had its root up in the air and was angled off of the “cliff”(for lack of a better word.) I took a picture and checked the surrounding area. I saw a big hole in the ground where the tree may have originally stood, but found
no Bigfoot footprints. I did not go down to the area where the top of the tree was to see if it was lodged into the ground, and now I wish I had. Did I find
evidence that the Ohio Grassman had been there? Maybe. But, then again, maybe not.
LEFT: The tree I found in Salt Fork State Park I went to a Southeastern Ohio Society for Bigfoot Investigation(see page 24) meeting on July 12, 2014. While I was there I met Terry and Treba Jahn, two Bigfoot researchers from Westerville, Ohio. A week later I saw them at a SOSBI camp out in Salt Fork State Park.
Terry and Treba investigate Bigfoot sightings because they saw one in 1984. They were riding in a Volkswagen Beetle at the time and were driving near Hoover Reservoir. The area where they saw Bigfoot is now a housing division, but was all woods at the time. There was a Bigfoot sitting down in the middle of the road in front of them, and they said the head was higher than their car!
Terry swerved to avoid hitting the creature and they drove on. Neither of them said “What was that?” and didn’t talk about it for 10 years. When they finally did talk about it, they began investigating other Bigfoot sightings. Terry and Treba have also had several other encounters with possible Bigfoots. They saw one in Salt Fork State park in 2006, and that sighting was featured on the Ohio Grassman episode of the TV show MonsterQuest.
Terry and Treba also tol
d me of another incident when a Bigfoot shoved a trailer home off of it’s foundation in 2005. They investigated a sighting that occurred on January 13 of that year. The sighting occurred near Cardington in Morrow County. Terry, Treba, and Sarah W. of Hilliard, Ohio, talked to two witnesses who had been sitting around one of the witnesses trailer. That witness, Josh, was 18. The other witness, Charles, was 22.
On the 13th of January, the two were sitting outside around a fire. Josh asked Charles to go and get more firewood, which he did. When Josh was going to get the firewood, he saw something stand up in six-foot weeds. Charles said that the thing looked like a human but was much larger.
The creature’s shoulders were higher than the weeds and it was black in color. It stood slightly hunched over. Charles froze at this time, realizing that the creature was definitely not a deer. Its eyes reflected red from the security light on Josh’s trailer. Charles got Josh’s attention, and when he looked over the creature turned and took off. It ran off into a creek, which only came up to its waist. The creature climbed up the bank on the other side of the creek and walked off, still in a hunched over posture.
Charles and Josh both ran into Josh’s trailer. The next day they went out to look for tracks. They found one track in a field on the other side of the creek that measured 18 inches long, 8 inches wide at the toes, and six inches wide at the heel. After that time they heard wood knocks and howls. This is the incident where the Bigfoot knocked the trailer off of its foundation.
When I was at the SOSBI camp out in Salt Fork in July 2014, I went hiking on several trails where there have been Bigfoot sightings. I returned to Hosaks Cave, where we had gone in April at the Ohio Bigfoot Conference, and also hiked on a few other trails. One of the trails led back to the Stone House Museum. It was an interesting old building. Sadly, Bigfoot had decided not to visit it on that day.
The last trail we hiked on Saturday before we left was Morgan’s Knob Trail. That trail is connected to Morgan’s Knob Loop Trail and is the place of several Bigfoot encounters. Just a year or two ago, several kids hiking on the trail sighted a Bigfoot watching a deer. They ran back to their parents and told them what they had seen. The kids’ story was featured on one episode of Destination America’s Monsters and Mysteries in America.
We did not see Bigfoot while on the trail, but we did spot a deer. That deer showed us how hard it is to spot things in the park. It was standing out in the open, but still saw us before we saw it. Now, Bigfoot is smarter than a deer, so imagine how easily it could avoid being seen by humans walking in the woods.
I have included a few pictures from the campout on the next few pages. The Stone House
Museum in Salt
Fork State Park.
Is this a sign of Bigfoot activity? Found by the author in Salt Fork State Park on July 19, 2014
BELOW: Another strange thing at Salt Fork. Notice that a small branch is being held in place by the tree and larger branch. Found by the author on July 19, 2014.
RIGHT: Lean-to found in Salt
Fork State Park by the author on
July 9, 2014.
Conclusion: Man made.
Footprint found in Salt Fork State Park, not found by the author.
Photo courtesy of Joedy Cook
Florida: They Stink!
Most people who have seen a Bigfoot said that the creature had an awful smell, but in Florida lives the stinkiest Sasquatch around. Its smell has even given it the name of Skunk Ape. There may even be two types of skunk apes! Before World War II, the creatures were described as short, hairy, and smelly, almost like a chimpanzee. The chimp-‐Skunk Apes almost sound like Napes (North American Apes, a term coined by Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman). Witnesses said the Skunk Apes moved around on all fours.
There seems to be a second kind of Skunk Ape that looks more like your average Bigfoot. It is described as bipedal, seven feet tall, weighing about 300 pounds, with dark red, brown, or black fur, and it has a terrible odor that smells like a combination of skunk, rotten eggs, and cow manure.
Skunk ape photo, taken in 2000 Some Skunk Ape sightings involved multiple creatures. In November 1975, seven young men saw 3 of them in Citrus County, Florida. Three also appeared in February 1977, and one was 10 feet tall! In 1997, a bus tour of foreign tourists saw a large, ape-‐like creature. Soon afterward, Ochopee fire chief Vince Doerr saw a similar creature cross the road near his home. He managed to take a quick
picture before it disappeared into
the swamp.
Vince Doerr’s photo
The photo the fire chief took stirred a great deal of publicity, but he believed it was just a prankster in a gorilla suit. This is what he said:
“I just think someone’s playing games. I just looked at it and laughed. If I thought it was real, I would have run in there, beat it to death, and sold it to the National Enquirer.”
Others did not think it was a fake.
MoMo: Missouri Monster A creature that looked similar to the Minerva Monster in Ohio was seen in Missouri in 1972. People started calling it the Missouri Monster, or MoMo. But, MoMo isn’t the only strange thing seen in Missouri. River Road, which stretches north from Highway 54 along the Mississippi River, has a longstanding tradition about a “phantom man” who walks across the road and then vanishes into thin air. Travelers heard what sounded like a woman’s scream emanating from an old abandoned lime kiln in the 1940s. The screams were always heard around midnight, and they were never explained.
A couple was found dead in their car around the same area in the winter of 1954. A woman sat in the passenger seat almost looking like she had just went to sleep, and a man was found crouched under the steering wheel completely nude. His clothes were found in a pile 20 feet behind the car. The deaths were listed to be caused by asphyxiation even though one of the windows was rolled all the way down (in -‐10 degree weather!) The MoMo story started in July 1971, when Joan Mills and Mary Ryan were having a picnic near Highway 79. While they were eating, they smelled an awful odor. As Mary Ryan said, “I never smelled anything as bad in my life.” Joan though they might be smelling a whole family of skunks, but was then shocked at what she saw standing in the bushes. “I turned and saw this thing standing there in the thicket,” she said. “The weeds were high and I only saw the top part. It was staring down at us.”
The two described the creature as an ape-‐man. Mary Ryan said this:
“ It was a half-‐ape half-‐man. I’ve been reading up on the Abominable Snowman since then, from stories to articles, and you get the feeling it is something more like a gorilla. This thing we saw was not like that. It had hair all over its body, like an ape, but its face was more like a
human.”
When the creature made a gurgling sound and stepped out of the brush the women rushed to the car. They locked the doors, and the beast followed them, caressed the hood, and then tried to unlock the doors, a definite sign of intelligence. It walked on two feet the whole time, and it’s arms “dangled way down.” The two said it’s arms were covered by hair but it’s hand were hairless. The two could do nothing but wait for the beast to leave, because Mills had left her keys in her purse, which was still sitting at the picnic area. Mills’ arm hit the horn, and the noise caused the beast to “jump straight in the air and move back.”
Mills didn’t know what else to do, so she just kept beeping the horn. After a while, the creature realized it was in no danger. It proceeded to walk over to the area where the two had been eating, picked up a peanut butter sandwich, sniffed it, and at it. It then picked up Joan’s pure, but dropped it and walked back into the woods. Joan got out of the car and grabbed her purse, and the two left.
That was only the beginning of MoMo sightings. About a year later, on July 11, 1972, Terry Harrison and his brother Wally (ages 8 and 5), were playing in their yard when their older sister Doris, who was inside, heard them scream. She looked out the window and saw a creature that was “six to seven feet tall, black, and hairy.” She said it stood like a man but didn’t look like one.
The creature was flecked with blood, probably from the dead dog it had under its arm. Doris could not see the face because it was covered with hair.
That same afternoon, Clarence Lee, who lived half a block away, heard some animal growling. Not long after that, she talked to a farmer whose dog had recently disappeared. He wondered if “the monster had taken it.”
On July 14, Doris’ father, Edgar Harrison, conducted the regular Friday prayer meeting at his house. About 45 minutes after the meeting had ended, at about 9:15, he heard noises like rocks being thrown on metal. The sound was coming from a reservoir on the top of Marzolf Hill. After one loud ring, Harrison said he heard “something that sounded like a loud growl. It kept getting louder and closer. At that time my family came running from the house. They were insisting that I drive away, so I drove down Allen Street to the Town Branch. My wife told the congregation ‘here it comes!’, and those 40 people turned and ran.”