Monsters and Myths

HONOBIA — Some 25 to 30 researchers will be braving the southeastern Oklahoma woods this weekend in search of the reclusive Bigfoot.

The Kiamichi Mountains provide the apelike creature a habitat that’s rich with deer, berries, honeysuckle and plenty of woodsy cover, believers say.

“You could hide an army in there and never know it,” said D.W. Lee of Stilwell, global director of the Mid-America Bigfoot Research Center.

In October in Honobia, the researchers saw “eye shine” from a creature standing about 8 feet tall, he said.

“They would get close enough that the campfire would shine in their eyes and it would show green,” Lee said.

Like ghost hunters, the Bigfoot researchers will be equipped with night-vision goggles and scopes, along with an array of audio and video equipment. They will record hours of footage from the trail for viewing after their trip.

Lee said the creatures typically throw rocks at them when they’re sitting around a campfire.

“If they wanted to hit you, they would,” he said. “It’s like they just want to see how you’ll react. Other times you may get in areas where you’re not welcome. If you’re close to the little ones — the young Bigfoot — they’re going to make sure you leave.”

The only time Lee said he became fearful in the woods was during a trip to the Chelsea area in northeastern Oklahoma.

“I saw three groups of Bigfoot going across a field in front of me,” he said.

About a year ago

in the Chelsea area, the researchers poured a cast of a footprint, 15 inches long and 5 inches wide, that they believe was made by a Bigfoot.

They’ve photographed other footprints along logging roads in the Kiamichi Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma.

Mountain-area natives and Sasquatch-track followers are familiar with what they say are the creature’s distinctive screams and whoops.

Lee said Bigfoot is intelligent and can mimic the sounds of other animals.

“We do hear a lot of owl calls, but you can tell it’s not an owl because it’s like an 800-pound owl hooting at you,” he said.

About five years ago, Lee’s group received a report from a man hunting deer in a tree stand in the Kiamichi Mountains. It seems that his pager went off, and after he turned it off, he heard something in the woods mimicking its beep-beep sounds.

“When he turned around, he saw Bigfoot standing there,” Lee said. “His words were that it was a ‘big something’ that he just didn’t want no part of.”

Perhaps Jane Goodall gives skeptics some pause.

In a 2002 interview with National Public Radio, the primatologist said she believes that the creature could exist. She said she based that assessment on descriptions given to her by American Indians, who reported two sightings and described sounds they’d heard.

Some people have dismissed Bigfoot sightings in Oklahoma as actually black bear sightings. But unlike bears, Lee said, a Bigfoot walks upright exclusively and — at 7 to 8 feet tall — is much taller than a black bear.

“We’re not just a bunch of country hicks,” said Lee, a network administrator.

Hundreds of people attend the Honobia Bigfoot Festival and Conference each year. This year it will be held Oct. 2-3 and sponsored by the Talihina Chamber of Commerce.

Source: tulsaworld

As a boy growing up in Arkansas, Rob Stone thought the old woman he saw at his grandparents’ farmhouse was just an “imaginary friend” - until a photograph of his dead great-grandmother revealed a strikingly similar appearance between the two.

As a teenager in Fort Wayne, Paul Walter had a similarly weird experience: the vision of a woman wearing rimless glasses and a dress, who he at first thought was his grandmother - who was in another room at the time. Both got goose bumps when the dress Walters described turned out to resemble his great-grandmother’s burial gown.

Youthful fantasies? Memories twisted by time? Bad dreams? Stone and Walter can’t say for sure, which is why they and several other local “ghost hunters” have formed an organization designed to disprove or verify the existence of things that go bump in the night.

In the process, they hope to help save one of Fort Wayne’s unique but endangered architectural treasures that may - or may not - have ghost stories of its own to tell.

“All of us are active in our community; one guy is an engineer, some of us are in manufacturing or own (a) business. We want people who want to get to the bottom of these experiences,” said Stone, 41. As spokesman for In Nomine Paranormal Research, he doesn’t want his 7-month-old organization’s serious, methodical search for answers to be hijacked by thrill-seekers whose knowledge of paranormal research is limited to movies like “Ghostbusters.”

“It’s neat to try to document the unexplainable. It’s a debunking process,” said Walter, 28, explaining that group members use technology to search for answers that often defy human senses and reason.

The group, which was created when like-minded people discovered each other on the Internet, uses devices to detect abnormal electro-magnetic levels and also uses audio and visual equipment in an attempt to record … well, something.

Stone, who administers the information technologies network at Lincoln Foodservice in Fort Wayne, said the quest has taken the 10-member group to an old house in Sturgis, Mich., an old hotel in Sandusky, Ohio, and, more recently, to Fort Wayne’s Masonic Temple, which has been the scene of several unexplained events and will host the group’s first paranormal conference in May.

The conference will feature sessions on demonology, exorcism and ghost-hunting; presentations of personal paranormal experiences; a four-hour ghost hunt in the Temple; and other lectures. Proceeds will go to the Temple’s preservation fund.

As Masons, Stone and Walter are very familiar with the eight-story temple that has stood at 216 E. Washington Blvd. since 1923 but has fallen on hard times in recent years because of soaring maintenance and utility costs and declining membership.

They have also become familiar with several oddities they cannot yet explain, including shadowy forms moving through doorways and elevated electro-magnetic levels, especially near a fifth-floor conference room and trophy case.

As with the group’s other investigations, the existence of paranormal activity has not been conclusively documented at the Temple. But Stone said many “rational” explanations for the odd energy readings have been refuted, such as the presence of electrical wires and circuit boxes - a potentially disappointing but necessary step toward proving the existence of paranormal activity.

Stone said his group’s ghost-hunting, counseling and related services are free to anyone who has experienced the inexplicable and is seeking answers.

The group also plans to explore local ghostly legends such as the story of the so-called “Waynedale Witch,” a 27-year-old woman murdered in 1965, doing whatever is possible to separate fact from fancy.

What drives the 10 members of In Nomine (Latin for “In the name of”)?

“For me, it’s mostly scientific,” Stone said. “But it’s also religious. Most of our members are Christian, but we also have one pagan. They taught us in Sunday school that you die and go to heaven. Why are (spirits) still here?

“We feel like we’re meeting a need. Not everybody takes this as seriously as we do.”

As Stone, Walter and I spoke in the Temple’s partially darkened, cavernous social room, a series of loud clanks came out of nowhere.

Ghosts?

“The furnace,” Stone said.

news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/

20090205/NEWS/902050316/0/FRONTPAGE