By: Charles Romans
Carter County Times
Not everyone believes in Bigfoot; but you couldn’t have proven that by the turnout for the first annual Carter County Bigfoot Festival last Saturday. The free event was held at the Depot in downtown Olive Hill and welcomed people from not only counties but states away. The festival’s organizer Tabatha Steagall said there was no way to truly gauge the turnout because no tickets were sold, but guests Turtle Man and Swamp Man said that over 2,500 people went through their line.
Vendors lined the path, selling Sasquatch engravings and stickers, while food trucks doled out funnel cakes, burgers, and drinks. Children – and some adults – got their faces painted in bright colors to match the sunny day, and everyone was talking about their favorite cryptid. Don’t know what a cryptid is? Don’t worry because there were thousands of people who could explain it to you around sips of iced lemonade or bites of hot dogs and hamburgers.
There were of course guest speakers like Charlie Raymond who has been hunting and writing about the elusive hominid for decades. Raymond could tell you the creature’s habits and diet, and even show you a cast – or several – of the instep which gave everyone’s favorite hairy giant his nickname. Turtle Man and Swamp Man were doing their own thing at their table. And then there was me; talking as usual about my podcast.
I have a podcast called Shadows of Legend where I let people call in and tell me about their brushes with the strange and the paranormal, and many of those stories involve Sasquatch. Bigfoot, you might be surprised to learn, is thought to be both by a lot of people. I have heard stories from England and Canada, from Australia and Russia. Some are terrifying, like the one from an Inuit hunter in Canada who watched a Bigfoot run down a herd of caribou in full flight, and some are strangely comforting like the one where a man told me he left out fruit and other food and got flat stones with images scratched on them in return.
I told a few of these stories to people at the festival as they moved between booths, and I got a mixture of knowing nods from people who had similar experiences and sideways glances from those who thought I might be out of my mind. Is Bigfoot real? Well, no one has definitively proven he is … yet. But a lot of people, more now than ever, are trying to find the right evidence.
And I will say this much; everyone I have spoken to about Bigfoot on Shadows of Legend believes he is. And that’s enough to go on for now. I’ll keep listening as long as people keep talking. And you should too, because a lot of the stories happened in your own back yard.
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
