By: Charles Romans
Carter County Times
On September 13, Olive Hill will have its very first of what will hopefully become an annual Bigfoot Festival. Even if you choose not to believe in what is arguably the most famous of the mysterious – and some would say mythical – creatures who are commonly gathered under the umbrella term of Cryptids, nearly everyone alive today has a basic understanding of Bigfoot.
Some say it is an undiscovered animal, and others say it is much more, but there are a few basic attributes that most agree upon. It is reported to be a two-legged creature that is large (7 to 9 feet in height), much broader than a human, and entirely covered in fur that varies from reddish-brown to black. Many report that the palms of its hands and its face aren’t completely covered in hair.
Tabatha Steagall, who will be hosting the upcoming festival, has been fascinated with Bigfoot for years. Steagall said that many people might think sightings of the creature are limited to the Pacific Northwest, but there have actually been sightings all across the country. And some of them, she said, have happened in our own back yards, quite literally in her case.
The community of Grahn, might not be the first place that comes to mind when discussing Bigfoot sightings or evidence, but Steagall shared some very interesting events on her Facebook page and elsewhere about her experiences there.
In the post, Steagall shared how her entire family went to work in her father’s garden for a Father’s Day gift. While working, a large print was discovered between freshly tilled potatoes. In an effort to keep out deer, they had set fenceposts that bags could be attached to, hoping the movement of the bags would startle the notoriously skittish animals.
“When we were done planting my dad left to go cut hay, my mom and me went to get more bags from her house because Jason (Steagall’s husband) had run out,” Steagall wrote. “My sister and Jason went to my house to get the kids water. About 30 minutes later, we returned to put bags on, and my little boy ran to the end of the garden to beat us all there. He started screaming he had found a Bigfoot print and to call Bobo and Cliff because of course being six he loves the show Finding Bigfoot!”
“I didn’t know exactly what I thought we were going to see but of course I didn’t think it would be this!” she continued.
What Steagall and her family found were five footprints in the freshly tilled soil, prints so large that they could not have been made by any human foot. One of those prints, she said, measured in excess of fifteen inches length.
“No one went back to the potatoes where this print was found after my dad tilled, and no one had entered the property without us knowing about it,” Steagall said.
“It may not be a Bigfoot print or a footprint at all,” she said. “But I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what else it could be.”
“Growing up I always heard Bigfoot stories from my area,” Steagall continued. “Sightings from before people even knew what Bigfoot was, when people thought it was a monster that came out at night to eat their livestock. A creature they would hear scream from the woods and catch glimpses of in the fields. My favorite sighting was the time a local guy passed out in his car at the pallet mill here in Grahn and woke up to a Bigfoot going through the workers trash barrel that they would throw their left over food in from lunch time. It’s said that he was so scared he jumped out of his car and ran all the way home. The story goes that the Bigfoot chased him and when he busted through the front door his mom looked out and seen the creature standing in the road. That happened in the 1970’s, and in the late 1980’s there was another sighting in the same location.”
These old stories helped inspire Steagall to dig deeper into the lore – and eventually to found her own research group.
“It was in 2014 that I realized I had a good number of sightings from our area, and I started to get intrigued by gathering more. At the beginning of 2015 my mom, our friend Ronnie, our friend Jim, and myself started our group known as the Carter County Bigfoot Group. I have gathered 62 sightings of the creature we know as Bigfoot. Some are through the grapevine, one is from a grandma who was spying on the telephone party line, and some are from the individuals themselves or close family members. They date back to the 1960’s and as recent as the Summer of 2016. The sightings are not just from Grahn, but all over Carter County,” Steagall said.
“2013 seemed to be an active year for sightings here in Grahn,” she remembered. “In March I heard about a black Bigfoot crossing the road and jumping a gate like a man would. My son Dylan found his first footprint in our garden in June of 2013. In July I heard about a neighbor seeing one in his back yard. It looked at him, then crossed the fence and walked on. In November, my little boy saw something black in the woods behind our garage. We heard a loud siren noise moments later, and screams from the other side of the road that are recorded and on the Kentucky bigfoot site.”
Steagall said other years of heavy Bigfoot activity were 2015 and 2016.
“Although I gathered mostly reports from the 80’s, I had a few recent ones,” Steagall said. “A woman got home after work late one night (November 2015) and spotted a dark gray bigfoot about 9-foot-tall walking around her garage and out of sight. It had silver hair around its head. It actually happened two nights in a row.”
Steagall said the woman discovered the following spring that her neighbors also had a sighting of something 9-feet-tall with glowing eyes, also in November of 2015.
“A mother and son were driving down the road in the summer of 2016 when the young boy spotted something hunkered down under a tree. He showed his mom who stopped in the road to look. The creature then stood up and walked away.”
Steagall said that on the same road in virtually the same spot another individual reported being chased by a white Bigfoot in the 1990’s.
“You may not believe in Bigfoot but there is something living here in the woods of Carter County that has people talking,” Steagall said.
Steagall said belief in Bigfoot might be a plus, but it isn’t necessary to come to the festival on September 13.
“We just want everyone to come out and enjoy themselves,” she said. “There will be good food and vendors, and lots of good stories. We hope to see everyone there.”
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
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