From Bigfoot to Braxie: how monster sightings become local culture
There are few feelings lonelier than believing something that no one else does.
There’s a song by The Weakerthans that puts this better than I ever could. Nothing new, considering it’s a song written by John K Samson, but ‘Bigfoot!’ from their 2007 album Reunion Tour is a particularly heartbreaking effort. Samson sings from the perspective of someone who (if you ask them) has encountered Bigfoot. Who believes with all their heart in what they saw with their own two eyes, but has to bear the ridicule of the world if they ever talk about it. After all… y’know, it’s Bigfoot.
Let’s be real here, Sasquatch and his cryptid cronies like the Mothman, the Loch Ness monster, and the Yeti are tourist traps. They’re t-shirts, bumper stickers and maybe a baseball cap if the merch budget can stretch that far. They’re conspiracy theories and thus, they’re a weird little sideshow at best and a sign of profound mental sickness at worst. More likely, they’re the sign of a country the size of a continent, desperate to manufacture its own culture and scrambling to get people to visit national parks that are just like any other acre of forest in a country with hundreds of millions of them.
Yet… people really do believe in these stories. Which can’t help but be a hilarious prospect to other people. Like still holding on to the Tooth Fairy because you saw her when you were four and can’t accept that it was a waking dream because it felt so real at the time. This is the kind of isolation that all of us can relate to, and one can only imagine how bad it gets when your story isn’t of Bigfoot or Nessie or any of the more famous cryptids, but one of the B or C listers.
What is the Flatwoods Monster?
On September 12th, 1952, three kids in Flatwoods, Braxton County, West Virginia saw a light in the sky. At 7:15pm, the brothers Edward and Fred May, along with their friend Tommy Hyer, saw a bright object cross the sky and seemingly land on the property of a local farmer, G Bailey Fisher. The boys ran home to tell the May’s mother, Kathleen, just what had happened, before heading back to the crash site to see what had happened. For the rest of their days, the group swore they saw a pulsating red light and, in the words of Eugene Lemon, the West Virginia Guardsman who joined the group en route, “A man-like figure with a round, red face surrounded by a pointed, hood-like shape.”
Over the next 70 years, the story of the Braxton County Monster (or Braxie, if ya nasty) has become local legend. Like the other cryptids, there’s a thriving tourist trade of folks trying to catch a glimpse of the elusive creature/alien/demon (it was probably an owl). Yet as easy as it is to sneer at this local legend, much like the Bigfoot example earlier, there’s a song that shows another, more genuine side to the story. One that doesn’t frame it as a cash grab but more as an earnest expression of a simpler, more community-focused time.
Shortly after the news story of the Flatwoods monster broke, a folk song was written about the cryptid to the tune of Sweet Betsy From Pike. The song became a standard on West Virginia radio, but was never officially recorded. However, Flatwoods schoolteacher Judith Davis knew the song off by heart and made it part of her educational mission to keep the legend of the Flatwoods phantom alive by performing the song wherever she could.
A reminder that no matter how silly these things may seem, they could mean everything to someone. If that’s the case, you could do much worse than listening to these people, if only to make them feel less alone.