1958: The Bigfoot Hoax That Wasn't

Artwork by Rick Spears, I think?

Raymond Wallace was born in Clarksdale, Missouri on April 21, 1918 - and has since posthumously risen to fame as one of the most prolific Bigfoot hoaxers the world has ever known. He was known to use large, badly-crafted foot-shaped wooden shoes to create the tracks supposedly left by the unknown primate. He is also even said to have been behind the famous clip of a hairy humanoid filmed by Roger Patterson on October 20, 1967. These claims to fame were made after his death by his nephew, Dale Lee Wallace, after his uncle's death in 2002. He had allegedly started hoaxing the world in 1958, when he went stomping around one of the construction sites he owned in Northern California. It was the tracks he left on this occasion which became the first to mean that the creature behind them was referred to as Bigfoot. However, some evidence suggests that Wallace's hoax in 1958 might've outgrown its creator - and that the creature might've somehow sprung to life...

Calling His Bluff (Creek)

A photo of Jerry Crew holding his famous footprint cast

Jerry Crew arrived to work on a Wallace-owned construction site in Bluff Creek, California on August 27, 1958. He was busy bulldozing some nearby brush to make space for a new road when he caught sight of some odd footprints pressed deeply into the ground beneath him. He got down off his bulldozer and took a closer look at the prints - and it would be this action that would ultimately launch Bigfoot into the public consciousness. Crew and his... well... crew decided that the tracks were perhaps the work of a prankster - and apparently already knew to point the finger at their boss Ray Wallace. They knew that he was 'demented' and would probably have been the one behind the unconvincing tracks. A county sheriff even went as far as to publicly accuse Wallace of creating the tracks. However, a longer line of tracks would appear that year in September, and would convince Crew and the other workers that there was perhaps more to the story than they had initially thought. Casts were taken of these prints after a taxidermist named Bob Titmus declared that they were too faint to be used as evidence just by themselves and the story made the front page of the local newspaper, and this is technically the first time the term 'Bigfoot' was used to describe the culprit critter.

Ray and Elna Wallace as of 1947

Although the crew had originally settled on the assumption that the tracks were naught more than hoaxes, there were some interesting anomalies which seemed to show the holes in this conclusion. After the original tracks had been found - the workers on the site decided that the monster making the footprints must've also been behind some other disturbances on the construction site. For example, a 450-pound drum of diesel had vanished one summer previously - leaving only its imprint and some odd footprints in the dust behind. It had obviously been picked up and moved as opposed to dragged. It later reappeared at the bottom of a nearby gulley. The foliage on the other side of the gulley had been broken by something large, suggesting that perhaps something had thrown the drum into the gulley. Another example of this odd phenomenon was brought to the crew's attention by one of the Wallace brothers - Wilbur 'Shorty' Wallace. A 700-pound spare tire meant for a road-grading machine had found its way into a ditch thanks to some mysterious force. Some of the footprints found around the moved equipment varied in depth, indicating that whatever had left the prints was actually carrying the objects - something which Ray Wallace might not have been able to do.

The condition of the second trail of tracks (the ones which resulted in Titmus coming to the scene) is also worth mentioning here when discussing the possibility that perhaps the Bigfoot activity in the area wasn't just the work of an opportunistic hoaxer. The tracks made a trail of several miles in length, which went deep into a steep and mountainous forested area. Bob Titmus and Edward Patrick, another man on the site, decided to follow the trail into the woods. As they made their way along this impressive trail (even more impressive if we're to assume that the then-skinny Raymond Wallace made it), they came across yards worth of coiled 3x16 inch steel-braided wire. This wire would've weighed over 100 pounds, and had apparently been dropped in an area covered with brush of sufficient density that the two men couldn't continue past it. Patrick was left with the distinct impression that it wouldn't have been possible for Ray Wallace to have carried this wire up such a sharp incline and to have dropped it in such a well-forested area. The only tracks leading to or away from the wire were the ones supposedly made by Wallace's cast, and these prints allegedly continued off into terrain that even Titmus couldn't brave. Patrick had been initially skeptical, but now he felt that something mysterious was almost certainly afoot.

While there is no doubt that Wallace was behind quite a lot of hoaxery during the genesis years of the Bigfoot phenomenon, there also seems to be at least some doubt that he was behind all of it. He was aided by a man named Rant Mullins who constructed the crude stamps he used to create Bigfoot tracks, and he even possessed a Bigfoot suit which was worn by his wife to make fake photographs. After Ray's death in 2002, his family decided to release the information regarding the tools he had used to 'invent Bigfoot' - and it turns out that not one of the foot-shaped stamps matches up with the cast taken of Crew's trail of mystery footprints. The holotype Bigfoot cast taken of one of the prints found by Crew is just over 16 inches in length, while none of Wallace's stamps come close to this measurement.

Ray Wallace's stamp (right) against Crew's trail (left)

Realistically, all we can say is that Ray Wallace may have been responsible for the find that resulted in the coinage of the name 'Bigfoot' - and that's not even for certain. He was a prolific hoaxer, but the father of Bigfoot he was not. So if Mr. Wallace wasn't behind all of the destructive phenomena taking place around his construction sites, then what was? Perhaps a real monstrous creature was summoned into existence by the certainty of its existence held by some of the workers - like a Tibetan Tulpa? Then again, it seems as if something was throwing tires around the site at least a year before Wallace stepped into some exceptionally large shoes. There are certainly plenty of reports of hairy humanoid monsters that predate 1958, and so perhaps a Sasquatch really was wandering around Bluff Creek all those years ago, and the opportunistic practical joker decided to expand on its activity? It's a mystery that will likely go unsolved, despite what the public at large may believe. Ray Wallace did not invent Bigfoot.

Sources

Raymond L. Wallace - Wikipedia

'Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend' by Joshua Blu Bluhs

'The Ray Wallace/Rant Mullins Mess' - bigfootencounters.com

'Bigfoot - The Curiosities of 1958' by Bob Gymlan on YouTube

Beast of Cole Hollow Road

Eighteen-year-old Randy Emmert and a group of his friends were apparently the first ones to be confronted by the stinking simian spectre that would plague the area around Pekin, Illinois in the summer of 1972. Emmert had his encounter in early May, but eventually over 200 reports of the pale ape-like creature known as 'Cohomo' or the 'Cole Hollow Road Monster' would stack up...

Cohomo!

This illustration appeared in the Chicago Tribune

Emmert and his friends noted that the terrifying creature made a loud shrieking noise, and described it as being very large and covered in white hair. They apparently believed that it made its lair underneath a local abandoned house, but there is no indication as to why they came to this conclusion. Emmert originally didn't want to report his sighting out of fear of being thought to be insane, but he eventually pulled through. Little did he know that his report in May would kick off an outbreak of monster hysteria two months later.
The next widely-publicised sighting was on July 25th, and was reported by the Creve Coeur authorities who had apparently received a story about something big swimming in the Illinois River. Just one day later, over 200 phonecalls had been logged by the East Peoria police as coming from terrified townsfolk who had allegedly seen the hirsute horror. Also on the evening of the 26th, the Tazewell County Sheriff's Department took a presumably-frantic call from a man living in Eureka who had apparently been partaking in a family birthday party at Fondulac Park in East Peoria when he caught sight of at least one UFO. He and the rest of the party all saw some bizarre lights moving in a vertical position before going down behind some trees and disappearing. These lights left a vaporous trail behind them. Other reports included such incidents as the monster being seen walking in the forest, roaming back-yards, patrolling riverbanks and even destroying one unlucky caller's garden fence. The police - led by then-sheriff James Donahue - were skeptical of the reports but logged them nonetheless.
On July 28th, a woman in rural Pekin had a run-in with Cohomo while picking berries by an old mine. The witness was so terrified, according to her testimony to the Tazewell County Sheriff's Department, that she fled the scene immediately and left her purse behind. That same night, East Peoria Police claimed that a further two reliable citizens claimed to have seen said furry fiend. The creature was described as having long, u-shaped ears and a red mouth with sharp teeth. It had thumbs with 'long second joints'. Overall, it was compared to a mix of an ape and a caveman. Newspaper articles from the time stated that monster had a distinct stench about it comparable to that of a wet dog, rotten eggs or akin to sulphur. Early articles from the local Daily Times newspaper originally suggested that perhaps the Missouri Monster 'Momo' had migrated to Tazewell County, seeing as it had been seen just one year before the monster mayhem kicked off.
A search party even eventually took to the East Peoria woods in search of the simian monstrosity. This party consisted of roughly 100 armed men, and they patrolled the thick forest for quite a long while before one hapless volunteer accidentally shot himself in the foot and the search was promptly called off for health and safety reasons.
Another twist arrived in this already-bizarre story in 1991 when Emmert (held to be the first witness) called the Peoria Journal Star to claim that he had made the entire thing up. He and his friends had apparently invented the entire story to frighten another friend of theirs who worked late shifts at a local gas station. However, this obviously doesn't explain the rest of the 200+ reported sightings during this brief monster flap. So we are left to ask, what on earth happened in Tazewell County in the summer of 1972?

Sources
'Did a Hairy Monster Stalk Tazewell County?' published by FLOutdoorsman
Cryptid Profile: Cole Hollow Road Monster by the Pine Barrens Institute