Bigfoot Makes Its Home in the Big Thicket of Texas

The "Big Thicket" in Texas is the perfect habitat for bigfoot. Numerous researchers have investigated the are that spans across the eastern edge of Texas, and there has been a long history of sightings and activity in the area. Bigfooter Rob Riggs leads a reporter into the Big Thicket to look for the big beast in the following article:

"“Do you notice anything?” asks our guide, Rob Riggs.

We notice that there aren’t any birds chirping and wonder if that’s normal.

“No,” Riggs says. He listens carefully. “It is pretty quiet. Well, we may have one around.”

This reminds us of something the 68-year-old said earlier in the day, over coffee in his sister’s kitchen. “One of the things that will often happen in a Bigfoot encounter is that things will go dead silent in the woods—all the insects and the birds will go quiet for unknown reasons. And that ain’t natural.”

We’re in the middle of the woods in snake country, on a log beside a rotund man wearing a camouflage baseball cap and a magnetic bracelet, and we are afraid.

Riggs tells us that he first heard legends of a giant ape marauding through the woods of East Texas while growing up in Sour Lake, a small town just outside the Big Thicket. This was in the ’50s, when the beast was known variously as Booger, Hairy Wild Man, Swamp Beast, Old Mossy Back. No name really stuck until later in the decade, when a creature of similar description was discovered in northern California, a creature soon dubbed Bigfoot.

At first, Riggs discounted the stories. “I just assumed there was some kind of reasonable explanation for these sightings, that it wasn’t possible that there was any kind of hairy monster in the woods.” He left home for college and didn’t move back to East Texas until 1979, when he became a reporter for the Kountze News, the largest publication in Kountze (Wikipedia: “home to the world’s only known pair of married armadillos”).

When Riggs ran a notice in the paper calling for stories of unusual sightings in the woods, he was deluged with letters. A teenage girl claimed that a giant ape had chased her away from a cemetery. A couple in a car on Ghost Road—the local lovers’ lane—reported that Bigfoot jumped on their hood, forcing the man, who fortunately had his shotgun handy, to scare the creature away by firing at it through the front windshield."

Find out what happens during their investigation into the Big Thicket by clicking here.