This Minerva monster sighting is not far from my location,actually it is only about 10 minutes from here.I have relatives that live in the same area as the sighting and has told me a few things that him and his father saw at that time.
PARIS TWP. — It was a hot summer night in August 1978.
Evelyn Cayton was sitting at the kitchen table with family and friends. They heard a noise in her back yard on Lincoln Street SE, about two miles west of Minerva.
It wasn’t the first time. The kids had heard strange noises before. They thought it was a hermit. Maybe a crazed mountain man. It made the dog go berserk.
Then they saw something in the woods — a 6-foot-tall, thickly haired beast.
The night of Aug. 20 was different. The beast got closer than ever, peering into the kitchen window, illuminated by an outside light, reeking of ammonia and rotten eggs.
Weighing 300 pounds, black-and-brown matted hair covered its head and body, making the face indistinguishable.
Venturing outside, the Caytons and their guests searched for it. They saw it in the headlights of a car. The manlike animal moved toward them. Everybody got scared and ran inside. A woman was so frightened she cried.
Twenty-six years ago this month, the stunned group reported what they saw to Stark County sheriff’s deputy James Shannon.
Some details elude him, but Shannon remembers that night, the start of what he calls the most bizarre investigation of his 30-year law enforcement career.
“They heard something in the window, kind of clawing and pawing,” said Shannon, who retired in 1997 as a captain in the department. “From what I remember, I don’t think this creature, critter, whatever the hell it was, was trying to get in as much as it was saying, ‘Hey, look at me.’ ”
Shannon did not suspect a hoax. Not a hint of it.
The family saw something. He doesn’t know what, though he’s not convinced it was a Bigfoot.
Then again, “For all I knew, I could have been the first person to substantiate the existence of one.”
Bigfoot buzz
The sighting was a sensation. It made the front page of The Repository four times.
“Deputies seek 6-foot beast,” trumpeted the headline on the first story, at the bottom corner of the front page. A few days later, the story was bannered across the top: “Beast still, but noises, odor persists.”
“Deputies will resume a stake-out tonight in efforts to spot a 6-foot hairy beast that frightened a Lincoln St. SE family earlier this week,” the Aug. 24 story began.
Jim Hillibish gumshoed the story for The Repository.
“It was those doldrums between the Hall of Fame (festival) and Labor Day,” he said, laughing. “It was a good story and we kept it going.”
Overnight, the property became a Bigfoot outpost, attracting media from Akron, Cleveland and even outside the country. Wire services spread the story nationally. Bigfoot investigators from Florida and California and hunters armed with high-power rifles descended on 14186 Lincoln St. SE.
A van drove onto the Cayton’s front yard one time. A group of hunters hopped out, flanked by Doberman pinschers, trekking into the deep woods and old strip mine behind the property. Bigfoot believers camped out in the woods.
It got so bad that the Caytons posted a fence to keep gawkers out. Evelyn Cayton was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
“I think the hype lasted into the fall,” Shannon recalled.
In 1983, Herbert Cayton, Evelyn’s husband, recounted the Bigfoot buzz.
“One day there were 100 to 150 cars ... in my driveway, on my lawn and lining both sides of the road,” he said.
Evelyn and Herbert Cayton are deceased. The remaining Caytons are publicity shy. Howe Cayton, a son, and Rebecca Manley, a daughter, declined to be interviewed about the Bigfoot.
The family took a lot of razzing. At a high school football game, local folks mocked them, chanting, “Bigfoot, Bigfoot.” A local eatery spoofed the sighting, advertising on a roadside sign: “Bigfoot ate here.”
Herbert Cayton took the skepticism in stride.
“There were doubters,” he said. “Those who yelled things from car windows when they passed. It was weird. ... The way I feel about it is if they don’t want to believe, they don’t have to.”
“I think most people thought of it as a joke, as a lark,” said Shannon.
But the Cayton report spurred claims of other sightings.
“Somebody claimed that they saw a Bigfoot running across Route 30 near the Cayton’s house,” Shannon said. “It was a fog-shrouded night and all of a sudden they saw this thing dart out in front of them.”
Another sighting was reported on Liberty Church Road SE.
The woman “reported hearing strange noises in the woods surrounding her house since sometime in June,” Shannon’s August report said. It sounded like a cat fight or a woman’s shriek, the woman said. Other neighbors heard the noises.
Searching for Sasquatch
Shannon took the Bigfoot report seriously, like any other investigation: a stolen car, a drug deal, a barroom scuffle.
On the night of Aug. 20, he spent an hour or two at the Cayton home, then returned when daylight broke.
Shannon and four other deputies scoured the area, searching for six or seven hours in Army surplus Jeeps and on horseback.
“A lot of people thought it was a bear; somebody thought it was a deer,” Shannon said. “And I thought, ‘These people ought to be able to tell the difference.’ ”
Cayton, who worked the midnight shift at Diebold, wasn’t home that night, but said he had seen the creature twice before.
“It was shaped like a man and it walked like a man,” he told The Repository in 1983. “When a bear moves away, it goes away on all four feet. This swung up over the (edge of the) strip mine on two.”
Part of a skull was found in a pit behind the Cayton home, Shannon said; it appeared to be from a cow or other large animal. Tufts of fur were found on the remains of a chicken coop, where the Caytons had spotted the Bigfoot sitting.
The fur and skull went to Malone College for analysis. The skull also was taken to the pathology laboratory at Aultman Hospital, but the hospital refused to examine it.
Nobody knows what happened to them.
Suzie Thomas, spokeswoman for Malone College, said she’s fielded questions about the samples before and has asked those who were on campus then.
“Either their memory is failing them or they’re just not admitting they were involved in a hunt for (Bigfoot),” she said, laughing.
Police report
Shannon interviewed residents of the Cayton home, friends, even a professional photographer in quest of a snapshot of Bigfoot.
The Caytons never used the word “Bigfoot.”
Mrs. Cayton simply described a creature, more than 6 feet tall with stubby legs and hairy, indistinct features, that at one point turned to protect two “smaller things that were standing beside it,” the report said. It eventually walked away into the strip mine.
Manley, 27, and her sister Vicki Keck, 25, were shaken.
Scott Patterson, 18, a family friend, also was shaken up. Skeptical of past sightings, Patterson told Shannon he was now a “believer.”
The sightings didn’t end on Aug. 20.
Two days later, Mary Ackerman, another Cayton daughter, said she saw the beast standing on the edge of a strip mine when she pulled into her parents’ driveway, and five days after the initial report, John Nutter, a photographer from Cuyahoga Falls, said he saw a bear about 30 feet away in a wooded area near Liberty Church Road SE. Nutter took a photo and retreated quickly. A deputy combed the area for 90 minutes and found what appeared to be bear tracks.
But Nutter’s color film produced a “fuzzy” image, and he waffled on the bear story.
“I thought it over and now (I) don’t think it was a bear,” he told The Repository a few days later. “It made a sound unlike any bear I’ve ever heard.”
More sightings
The Minerva Bigfoot continues to fascinate. Last month, a researcher visited the Cayton home to search the woods.
And reports of Bigfoot persist in Paris Township, a hotbed of sightings, though not with the same fervor of the 1978 sightings.
David White, 58, said he’s heard mysterious sounds behind his Paris Township home, a few hundred yards from the Cayton home, at the rear of Skyland Hills Mobile Home Park.
“It’s a blood-chilling sound,” White said. “A curdling sound.”
White paused. His eyes grew wide. “It will scare the hell out of you.”
He said he heard the noises last summer, echoing from the woods next to a small lake.
David’s wife, Connie White, backed him up: “You don’t want to look and see what it was,” she said. They said it sounded like the noises on a Bigfoot TV show.
“I’ve heard wild cats, panthers, you name it,” said David White, who grew up hunting with his father, “and I’ve never heard the sound like I heard here.”
Hunters have seen “something” in the woods, he added, vowing never to return. They said it sounded like a bear.
“It scared the animals off,” David White said. “The turkey, the deer, the rabbits — all the wild game was gone.”
In the 1980s, White said, his teenage son was haunted by “something” in a remote area on Crowl Street SE; it was months, maybe more than a year, before his son would camp in those woods again.
He said he also saw one in the Greentown area when he was a school boy. About an hour before sunset, White and two friends rode bicycles back to a strip mine pond off Highland Park Street NW.
Bigfoot was about 100 yards away, he said, the beast’s upper body on the other side of the lake, ominously poking over the brush line.
“This dog we had, a big collie, it wasn’t scared of nothing,” White said. “When it ran, we knew it was time to go.”
White stretched his hands about four feet apart: “Its shoulders were that wide.”
The story lives on
A few years ago, the legendary Minerva sighting was featured on the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” television show.
In 1996, The Wall Street Journal interviewed Shannon.
“We’re a pretty urban county, so there’s not too many places for Bigfoot to hide,” Shannon told the reporter. “When Bigfoot walks into one of our liquor stores and pulls a holdup, then I’ll believe it.”
The Akron Beacon Journal’s coverage included an artist’s rendering, and the story forever linked reporter Barbara Galloway, now an Alliance High School teacher, to the “Minerva Monster.”
“Of probably all the 3,000 stories I’ve done in my career, that’s the one that everyone remembers.”
Galloway’s name pops up on the Internet, mingled with reports detailing the Minerva case.
“People remember it, for some insane reason,” she said, “and they ask me about it quite a lot. I probably get a couple inquiries a year.”
Galloway recalls details of the Cayton story, including a “lionlike, tan-colored animal on four legs that walked with it.” She also recalls the Caytons “didn’t feel they were in imminent danger. ... It was just maybe curious.”
Galloway and photographer Ted Wall camped out on the Caytons’ porch.
“Ted was a grizzled veteran of news and he was like, ‘By gosh, if it is here, I am going to get a picture of it.’”
The creature never showed. But Galloway does not discount the story.
Some things couldn’t be explained, she noted. A tunnel, 7 or 8 feet long, was dug through dense brush and thorn bushes, leading to a gully behind the Cayton home. It resembled a nest or sleeping area — maybe Bigfoot’s bed.
Galloway grew up a farm girl. She knows the work of a bear when she sees it. It marks its territory, clawing trees, Galloway said, leaving scattered bark and tree limbs.
And “a person basically would have had to go in there with a chain saw and carve out a perfect circle, and it wasn’t like that at all. It didn’t look human, and it didn’t match the behavior patterns of a bear.”
Sticking to their story
The Caytons stuck to their story, said Shannon, Galloway and Donald Keating, a Bigfoot investigator from Newcomerstown.
“They were very plain, simple, down-to-earth people, and you could tell something had happened that really frightened them,” Galloway said. “There were never any inconsistencies with their story, however many times we went over it.”
Shannon drew the same conclusion.
“Some of the persons were interviewed separately and all described the beast identically,” he reported. “All hoped they would never see it again.”
Keating, who founded the annual Bigfoot conference in Newcomerstown and the Tri-State Bigfoot Study Group, said the Minerva story stands out among the hundred or so he’s probed.
“Back in ’85, when I spoke with the family, and again in ’91, their reports were the same practically word for word as they were in ’78,” he said. “If you had a list of the top 10 sightings in Ohio based on credibility or believability, Minerva would easily be in the top three.”
Massive publicity overwhelmed the Caytons, Galloway said.
“They were quite appalled when all the reporters and the hunters did show up,” she said. “They were kind of reluctant to even do the story, but on the other hand they felt they had to make it known it was even happening and that this unusual thing was in their area.”
Shannon still wonders exactly what the Caytons saw.
“To this day, I don’t think that I doubt that they saw something, and underscore something. I don’t necessarily think it was a Bigfoot.”
Additional Repository articles
They heard a noise in her backyard on Lincoln Street SE.
It wasn’t the first time. The kids had heard noises before. They thought it was a hermit, maybe a crazed mountain man. The hermit also made the dogs go berserk, the Cayton family thought.
But the night of Aug. 20 was different.
This time they saw something: a 6-foot-tall, thickly-haired beast.
The creature stood at the kitchen window, reeking of ammonia and rotten eggs.
It must have weighed 300 pounds. Hair covered its body, making the face indistinguishable, at least in the darkness.
The beast peered into the window, startling those inside. Venturing outside, the Caytons and their guests searched for it. At one point, Mrs. Cayton drew a rifle on the beast. It didn’t budge. Next it showed up in the headlights of a car. The man-like animal moved toward them. Scared, the Caytons and the others dashed inside. One woman was so frightened she cried.
Twenty-six years ago this month, the group reported what they saw to Stark County sheriff’s deputy James Shannon.
Some details elude him, but Shannon remembers that night, the start of what he calls the most bizarre investigation of his 30-year law enforcement career.
“They heard something in the window, kind of clawing and pawing,” said Shannon, who retired in 1997 as a captain in the department. “They ... investigated and saw what several of them described as Bigfoot kind of drawing attention to itself.
“From what I remember, I don’t think this creature, critter, whatever the hell it was, was trying to get in as much as it was saying, ‘Hey, look at me.’ ”
Shannon did not suspect a hoax. Not a hint of it.
The family saw something. He doesn’t know what, though he doesn’t believe it was a Bigfoot.
Then again, “for all I knew, I could have been the first person to substantiate the existence of one.”
Bigfoot buzz
The sighting was a
sensation. It made the front page of The Repository four times.
“Deputies seek 6-foot beast,” trumpeted the headline on the first story at the bottom corner of the front page. A few days later, the story was bannered across the top: “Beast still, but noises, odor persists.”
“Deputies will resume a stake-out tonight in efforts to spot a 6-foot hairy beast that frightened a Lincoln St. SE family earlier this week,” the Aug. 24 story began.
Jim Hillibish gumshoed the story for The Repository.
“The Hall of Fame (festival) was about over,” he said, laughing. “It was those doldrums between the Hall of Fame and Labor Day. It was a good story and we kept it going.”
Overnight, the property became a Bigfoot outpost, attracting media from Akron, Cleveland and even outside the country. Wire services spread the story nationally. Bigfoot investigators and hunters armed with high-power rifles descended on 14186 Lincoln St. SE.
A van drove onto the Cayton’s front yard one time. A group of hunters hopped out, flanked by Doberman pinschers, trekking into the deep woods and old strip mine behind the property. Bigfoot investigators camped out in the woods.
It got so bad that the Caytons posted a fence around their property to keep gawkers out. Evelyn Cayton was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.
“I think the hype lasted into the fall,” Shannon recalled.
In 1983, Herbert Cayton, Evelyn’s husband, recounted the Bigfoot hysteria.
“One day there were 100 to 150 cars ... in my driveway, on my lawn and lining both sides of the road,” he recalled.
Evelyn and Herbert Cayton are deceased. Today, the remaining Caytons are publicity shy. Becky Manley, their daughter, and Howe Cayton, their son, declined to be interviewed about the Bigfoot.
The family took a lot of razzing. At a high school football game, local folks mocked them, chanting, “Bigfoot, Bigfoot.” A local eatery spoofed the sighting, advertising on a roadside sign: “Bigfoot ate here.”
Herbert Cayton understood the skepticism.
“There were doubters,” he said. “Those who yelled things from car windows when they passed. It was weird. Things like that are hard to believe. The way I feel about it is if they don’t want to believe, they don’t have to.”
“I think most people thought of it as a joke, as a lark,” said Shannon.
But the Cayton report spurred other sightings.
“Somebody claimed that they saw a Bigfoot running across Route 30 near the Cayton’s house,” Shannon said. “It was a fog-shrouded night and all of a sudden they saw this thing dart out in front of them.”
Another sighting was reported on Liberty Church Road SE.
The woman “reported hearing strange noises in the woods surrounding her house since sometime in June,” Shannon’s August report said. It sounded like a cat fight or a woman’s shriek, the woman said. Other neighbors heard the noises.
Searching for Sasquatch
Shannon took the Bigfoot report seriously. He handled it like any other investigation: a stolen car, a drug deal, a barroom scuffle.
He spent a few hours at the Cayton home the night of Aug. 20, then returned when daylight broke. Shannon and four other deputies scoured the area, searching for six or seven hours in Army surplus Jeeps and on horseback.
“A lot of people thought it was a bear, somebody thought it was a deer,” Shannon said. “And I thought, ‘These people ought to be able to tell the difference.’ ”
Cayton, who worked the midnight shift at Diebold, wasn’t home the night of Aug. 20, but said he had seen the creature twice before.
“It was shaped like a man and it walked like a man,” he told The Repository in 1983. “When a bear moves away, it goes away on all four feet. This swung up over the (edge of the) strip mine on two.”
Part of a skull was found in a pit behind the Cayton home, Shannon said; it appeared to be from a cow or other large animal. Tufts of fur were found on the remains of a chicken coop, where the Cayton’s had spotted the Bigfoot sitting.
The fur and skull went to Malone College for analysis, according to the sheriff’s report. The skull also was taken to the pathology laboratory at Aultman Hospital, but the hospital refused to examine it.
Nobody knows what happened to the skull and fur.
Suzie Thomas, spokeswoman for Malone College, said she’s fielded questions about the samples before and has asked those who were on campus then.
“Either their memory is failing them or they’re just not admitting they were involved in a hunt for (Bigfoot),” she said, laughing.
Police report
Shannon interviewed 10 people — residents of the Cayton home, friends, even a professional photographer in quest of a snapshot of Bigfoot.
Originally, the word Bigfoot was not even uttered by the Caytons, Shannon recalled.
Mrs. Cayton simply described a humanoid, more than 6 feet tall with stubby legs and hairy, indistinct features, that at one point turned to protect two “smaller things that were standing beside it,” the report. It didn’t flee after Mrs. Cayton loaded a .22 rifle, but it eventually walked away into the strip mine.
The Cayton’s two daughters — Rebecca Manley, 27, and Vicki Keck, 25, — were shaken.
Scott Patterson, 18, a family friend, also was shook up. Skeptical of past sightings, Patterson told Shannon he was now a “believer.”
The sightings didn’t end Aug. 20.
Two days later, Mary Ackerman, another Cayton daughter, said she saw the beast standing on the edge of a strip mine when she pulled into her parents’ driveway, and five days after the initial report, John Nutter, a photographer from Cuyahoga Falls, said he saw a bear about 30 feet away in a wooded area near Liberty Church Road SE. Nutter took a photo and retreated quickly. A deputy combed the area for 90 minutes and found what appeared to be bear tracks.
But Nutter’s color film produced a “fuzzy” image, and he waffled on the bear story.
“I thought it over and now (I) don’t think it was a bear,” he told The Repository a few days later. “It made a sound unlike any bear I’ve ever heard.”
More sightings
The Minerva Bigfoot continues to fascinate. Last month, a researcher visited the Cayton home to search the woods.
And reports of Bigfoot persist in Paris Township, a hotbed of sightings, though not with the same fervor of the 1978 sightings.
David White, 58, said he hears sounds behind his Paris Township home, a few hundred yards from the Cayton home, at the rear of Skyland Hills Mobile Home Park.
“It’s a blood-chilling sound,” White said. “A curdling sound.”
White paused. His eyes grew wide. “It will scare the hell out of you.”
He said he heard the noise last August, echoing from the pine trees that surround a small lake.
David’s wife, Connie White, backed him up: “You don’t want to look and see what it was,” she said.
“I’ve heard wild cats, panthers, you name it,” said David White, who grew up hunting with his father, “and I’ve never heard the sound like I heard here.”
Hunters have seen “something” in the woods, he added, vowing never to return.
In the 1980s, White said his teenage son was haunted by a Bigfoot experience in woods near Crowl Street SE; it was months, maybe more than a year, before his son would camp in the woods again.
He said he also saw one in the Greentown area when he was a school boy. About an hour before sunset, White and two friends rode bicycles back to a strip mine pond off Highland Park Street NW.
Bigfoot was about 100 yards away, he said, the beast’s upper body on the other side of the lake, ominously poking over the brush line.
“He stood up and this thing was hairy with long arms and ugly.”
“This dog we had, a big collie, it wasn’t scared of nothing,” White said. “When it ran, we knew it was time to go.”
White stretched his hands about four feet apart: “Its shoulders were that wide.”
The story lives on
A few years ago, “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” featured the legendary Minerva sighting on its television show.
In 1996, The Wall Street Journal interviewed Shannon.
“We’re a pretty urban county, so there’s not too many places for Bigfoot to hide,” Shannon told the reporter. “When Bigfoot walks into one of our liquor stores and pulls a hold up, then I’ll believe it.”
The Akron Beacon Journal’s coverage included an artist’s rendering, and the story forever linked reporter Barbara Galloway, now an Allinace High School tea cher, to the “Minerva Monster.”
“Of probably all the 3,000 stories I’ve done in my career, that’s the one that everyone remembers.”
Galloway’s name pops up on the Internet, mingled with reports detailing the Minerva case. Alliance students and faculty burst with curiosity and ask her about the “Minerva Monster.”
“People remember it for some insane reason,” Galloway said, “and they ask me about it quite a lot. I probably get a couple inquiries a year.”
She recalls details of the Cayton story, including a “lion-like, tan-colored animal on four legs that walked with it.” She also recalls the Caytons “didn’t feel they were in imminent danger. ... It was just maybe curious.”
Galloway and photographer Ted Wall camped out on the Cayton’s porch.
“Ted was a grizzled veteran of news and he was like, ‘By gosh, if it is here, I am going to get a picture of it.’”
The creature never showed. But Galloway does not discount the story.
Some things couldn’t be explained, she noted. A tunnel, 7 or 8 feet long, was dug through dense brush and thorn bushes, leading to a gully behind the Cayton home. It resembled a nest or sleeping area — maybe Bigfoot’s bed.
Galloway grew up a farm girl. She knows the work of a bear when she sees one. It marks its territory, clawing trees, Galloway said, leaving scattered bark and tree limbs.
And “a person basically would have had to go in there with a chain saw and carve out a perfect circle, and it wasn’t like that at all. It didn’t look human, and it didn’t match the behavior patterns of a bear.”
Sticking to their story
The Caytons stuck to their story, said Shannon, Galloway and Donald Keating, a Bigfoot investigator from Newcomerstown.
“They were very plain, simple, down-to-earth people, and you could tell something had happened that really frightened them,” Galloway said. “There were never any inconsistencies with their story, however many times we went over it.”
Shannon drew the same conclusion.
“Some of the persons were interviewed separately and all described the beast identically,” he reported. “All hoped they would never see it again.”
Keating, who founded the annual Bigfoot conference in Newcomerstown and the Tri-County Bigfoot Study Group, said the Minerva story stands out among the hundred or so he’s probed.
“The ‘Minerva Monster’ episode ... appears to be one of the longest lived series of events that hasn’t changed at all during the past 26 years,” he said. “Back in ’85, when I spoke with the family, and again in ’91, their reports were the same practically word for word as they were in ’78.”
“If you had a list of the top 10 sightings in Ohio based on credibility or believability,” Keating said, “Minerva would easily be in the top three.”
Massive publicity overwhelmed the Caytons, Galloway said.
“They were quite appalled when all the reporters and the hunters did show up,” she said. “They were kind of reluctant to even do the story, but on the other hand they felt they had to make it known it was even happening and that this unusual thing was in their area.”
Shannon still wonders exactly what the Caytons saw.
The Missing Monster
John Nutter of Cuyahoga Falls was convinced he had proof of the existence of a large, hairy creature that Paris Township residents and Stark County were claiming as the their answer to a Bigfoot. The "Minerva monster," as it became known in media circles, has eluded law-enforcement officials and anyone with the camera during the hot, dry months of August and into September. Nutter walked into the Beacon journal with a roll of film. He said he and a brother were walking a wooded area near an abandoned strip mine that when the creature stepped out from behind a tree in front of them. Nutter said he snapped one picture of the creature before running to safety. The film was ceremoniously developed in the Beacon journal dark room yielded a murky picture of trees, brush and nothing else.
Here is the old pit pond where some of the Minerva reports came from, taken while we were there in 1978. The area was very off-limits, but we managed to search the area many times only to be chased out by dog packs and gun toting residents.
Minerva’s monster is almost like a pet
By Barbara Mudrak, Akron Beacon Journal Staff Writer Sunday June 29, 1980He’s become, residents of the area say, a fixture in the neighborhood: Everyone knows he’s there, but no one pays much attention anymore. He has a few eccentricities, such as regularly pelting nearby houses with small stones, but mostly he keeps to himself and is generally considered a good neighbor, they say. The so-called "Minerva monster," who two years ago created an uproar the likes of which Paris Township had never seen, still is hanging around the densely wooded area behind the home of Herbert and Evelyn Cayton in southeastern Stark County, nearby residents report. "He’s almost like a pet," said Mary Ackerman, one of the Caytons’ daughters, who lives nearby.’It was moving pretty good on two legs, pumping its arms like a track star. I got back in the car, rolled up the windows and locked the door.’- Herbert Burke Jr.THE CREATURE’S first reported public appearance came in August 1978 when Mrs. Cay- ton, her son, Howe, and another daughter, Vicki Keck, were walking up the banks of the abandoned strip pit behind the house. There, they said, they saw a creature - described as over six feet tall and covered with dark, matted hair - standing less than 50 feet away. Mrs. Cayton and Mrs. Keck, along with their friends, Becky Manley and Linda Jones, both of Canton, and Scott Patterson, of Minerva, said they got a better look at the creature a few nights later when he appeared outside a window, less than 10 feet from the kitchen table where the group was sitting. A powerful outdoor light over- head showed the creature clearly, but the witnesses said they could not distinguish arms or facial features because of the thick hair. They said the creature weighed at least 300 pounds.THE FlVE said they noticed that when the creature appeared, the usual "night noises" from crickets and tree toads stopped and a strange, peculiar odor like that a stagnant water was evident.
They called the Stark County sheriff’s and deputy James Shannon was dispatched to the scene. Shannon paid he smelled a terrible odor when he arrived. He said later the sheriff’s department did not consider the sightings a hoax. Reports of the creature brought a horde of reporters, photographers, curiosity seekers and "bigfoot" hunters to the area. Some of the hunters came armed with shotguns, high-powered rifles, Dobermans and cases of beer.
TWO YEARS later, it appears no one is any closer to finding out what the Minerva monster is. Sheriff’s deputies who investigated in 1978 say they were never able to identify some pieces of hair and something that looked like a jawbone, found near the strip pits.
Herbert Burke Jr., 24, lived in the trailer park next to the Caytons and said he got a good look at the creature as it crossed Route 30 last summer. Burke, who now lives in North Canton, said he’d heard stories about the creature but decided he would "believe it when I see it." He said that one night as he was pulling into the driveway of the trailer park, he spotted something tall standing across the road. He ’said he shined his head lights on the creature - which was less than 40 yards away - then got out of the car for a better look. He said the creature was seven or eight feet tall, weighed more than 400 pounds, and was covered with dark, matted hair.
AS THE lights illuminated the creature, it began running toward the woods, he said. "It was moving pretty good on two legs, pumping its arms like a track star," he said." I got back in the car, rolled up the windows and locked the door." He said he and other residents of the trailer park often heard rocks hitting their mobile homes at night and a variety of strange noises coming from the woods. He said the noises ranged from a kind of laughter, to a loud scream, to something that sounded like a baby’s cry. The Caytons say they often find large footprints in the soft ground near their garden, and Mrs. Cayton has several snapshots of them. She said the footprints resemble those of a human and range from 14 to 21 inches long.
IN THE MONTS following the commotion two years ago, she said, she put out fruits and vegetables behind the house every night on Deputy Shannon’s advice. She said every morning the food would be gone and footprints occasionally would be nearby.
"This year I’ve got a garden out and if any of my vegetables are touched...," Mrs. Cayton said in a mock-threatening voice. The Caytons and their neighbors say that, on occasion, they still experience the eerie silence and smell the odor, which Mrs. Ackerman says smells like the "seaweed" her son Andy brought up from the lake in the abandoned strip mine last year.
WITH THE silence and the smell, they say, they know the creature probably is near. But they say they have grown accustomed to it and no longer make a fuss. "Whatever it is, it’s not dangerous," Mrs. Cayton said. "If it was going to hurt someone, it would have done it by now."
Hairy ’7-footer seen hanging around central Ohio farmland
Those who live in the small towns and villages of these two mostly rural counties joke about bigfoot’s appearances. But those who live on the farms in the area of the sightings are a bit more cautious. They are cautious mainly because of the reputation of those who claim to have seen bigfoot. "Hey, I laughed at this whole thing at first," Powers admitted. "But now I’m not so sure. I think it should be looked into. You talk to Pat Poling and you won’t be so sure, either." Poling farms on the border between Logan and Union counties. He has the first to sight the creature in the area. There are 434 square miles in Union County. There are only 28,100 people, and 12,000 of them live in incorporated areas. There are a lot of lonely places in Union County. Logan County has 469 square miles, with a population of 37,000. About 13,000 of them live in incorporated areas. The rest of the population in each county lives on farms. There are 2,598 farms, about evenly split between the counties. When television commentators talk about "the heartland," they are talking about such counties as Union and Logan. Come summer, a farmer there spends long, solitary hours driving a tractor across one field or another. He is alone. He is miles away from other humans.
ON JUNE 17, Poling had been to a baseball game. Poling is in his 30s and has two adolescent sons. He returned from the game, where he had watched one of his sons play, and decided to do some cultivating in one of his cornfields before the light failed. It was about 8:30 p.m. Poling had worked for a short time when he glanced along his fence line at the edge of the woods. "Something caught my eye," he said. "At first I thought it was a bear. But it wasn’t no bear. It came out of the woods and had to duck under a branch hanging out over the fence. Then it stood up. It was about seven feet tall. But maybe more. I mean, it walked with its knees bent a little. It walked along the fence line. It wasn’t like anything I seen before. It wasn’t a monkey or a gorilla or anything. I watched it. I was really scared at first."
"But then I figured it couldn’t hurt me as long as I was on the tractor," he said. "So I moved toward it. It was walking along t.he fence, perpendicular to me. I wanted to see if I could turn it around so I could see its face. So I gassed the tractor to head it off." "That’s when it stopped and turned and looked at me. It turned around like this." Poling crouched, held his hands at his side and turned his whole body. When facing front, his palms were out in a curious gesture, almost as though in appeal for understanding. When asked about the gesture, Poling glanced in surprise at his hands. "Yeah," he said. "Like this. This is how he stood." Poling said he is most upset because he could see no facial features, even though he estimated the creature was only about 30 yards away. "I just couldn’t see any face. There was just nothing there," he said.
Poling is reluctant to talk about his experiences. He has been plagued with phone calls, he said, and goaded by radio and television people to make some controversial statement or other. One television crew came to his home while he was in the fields and took his two sons and talked the boys into taking them to where the creature was sighted. "I’m tired of it," Poling said, and shook his head. "I refused to go on television. The radio called and when I said I wouldn’t go on the radio and they said OK and then they taped the telephone call." "One television station told me everybody wants to be on television. I told them I didn’t."Tired of the whole business, too, is Donna Riegler. A legal secretary, she is the wife of a Union County game protector. She was on her way home Tuesday. It was about 5:30 p.m. It had been a hot, muggy day. The sky darkened, electricity crackled and when the rain came it fell in large drops. "I was in a good mood. I just wanted to get home," Mrs. Riegler said. "I went over the rail- road tracks slow. I always do because I don’t want to knock my wheels out of line. Then I saw this thing laying on the road, hunched over. I thought it was a big dog at first. Then it stood up and I thought it was a man. I thought he was crazy, laying on the road. I couldn’t figure why he was out there. He had no golf clubs. No luggage. Then he turned around and looked at me." She said the creature was about 60 yards away.
Picture of the area while we were there in July, 1980. We spent a few nights traveling the back roads spotlighting (back when it was legal to do so in Ohio) and checking creeks by day. We never found anything.
Five have sighted big, hairy creatureWithin the last two weeks, five people claimed to have seen bigfoot. The sightings were within a five-mile radius. Each witness gave basically the same description, although Donna Riegler said that a driving rain prevented her from seeing some details.
The sightings:
June 17: Patrick Poling, a farmer, while cultivating a cornfield, saw the creature come out of the woods.June 19: Ray Quay said he came around his barn and saw tbe creature, yelled and it walked off into some heavy undergrowth. Quay’s son, Thomas. 17. said he saw the same creature a little later.June 24: Mrs. Riegler, a legal secretary, saw the creature lying on a road while she was on her way home from work.June 26: Larry Ramey saw the creature at the edge of a woods while Ramey was driving a farm tractor. Each witness told of a man-like creature more than seven-feet tall, with long hair, broad shoulders, and a well proportioned body. The creature, they said, was not exceptionally long-legged or long- armed, but built like a very large man. Each said the creature moved stiffly and turned
its whole body, rather than just the upper portion. Donald Mathys, a neighbor of Poling, made a plaster cast of a footprint found near where Poling sighted the creature. The footprint is about 17 incbes long, seven inches wide and has four toes. Union County sheriff’s deputy Mike Powers took a team into the area Friday night. The group spent the night there. Powers told the Beacon Journal Saturday that "We found definite signs that indicate something is there. We have to look into it."
Powers said hundreds of people already have driven around looking for the creature. The county detective said he is concerned that gawkers could pose a threat. Some of them, he said, are armed, and he is afraid an overeager sightseer might shoot someone. Powers said there is no indication the creature is dangerous. But, he added, he wants no one taking chances and he wants no one shot.
Volcano May Have Driven Bigfoot EastThree citizens in Union County claim they each watched an enormous, strange-looking creature emerge from wooded areas. The first witness, Patrick Poling, said the monster was; "about seven feet tall and could weigh 400 pounds." Poling was plowing a field one evening before dusk, when the beast burst out of the woods and lumbered, along the edge of the clearing. Transfixed, he watched the creature until it was ahout 100 feet from him. "At first I froze. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t," afraid at the time and figured I was pretty safe on my I tractor." he told GLOBE. "He turned and looked at me and then he ran into the I woods. It looked like a big, hairy ape that walked like a man. It had long black hair that wasn’t fur because it hung straight down." Puling then rushed to a neighbor’s house to report the amazing scene. "I had a hard time convincing people." he recalls. "The first four or five thought I was kidding. I watched that thing for too long a time to mistake it for anything I’d ever seen before."
His neighhor Donald Mathys told GLOBE: "Patrick was real excited and said he’d seen an ape-man. I believed he saw something because he’s usually a calm individual." The next day, Poling, Mathys and a few neighbors went in search of the beast. "Near the edge of the woods I found three huge footprints that were certainly not made by bears or cattle or anything ordinary," said Mathys. To prove his discovery he made a plaster cast of one of the prints. It measures 17 inches long, seven inches wide and two inches deep. "Whatever it is, the creature seems to have four toes," he said.
Experts from the Mammal Research Team in Lima, Ohio, who specialize in tracking wild creatures that kill farm animals, rushed to the Union County in hopes of spotting the beast. Team leader Bill Sheets told GLOBE he has between 150 and 200 documented sightings of a similar creature in other areas of Ohio and has himself spotted a hairy beast three times. "In the Union County case we have reliable witnesses and the footprint as evidence. The sighting fits the overall description of a giant, ape-like creature that has been seen before."
Less than a week later, residents of nearby Logan County claimed they saw a hulking shape rush into the woods late one night. Two days after this, Donna Riegler of Marysville, Ohio, said she was returning home from work when she saw a gigantic, hairy creature lying on the highway. She was so frightened she put her car into reverse and backed away from the beast. Riegler reported it covered with hair and stumbled away with a robot-like walk.
The Union County Sheriff’s department put several officiers on the case. "There was no doubt on our minds that sombody saw something out there," said deputy sheriff Mike Powers.
Officials at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio are now studying the footprint and the Mammal Research Team is continuing its probe. "It may be that Bigfoot is migrating from the West," Sheets told GLOBE. "Maybe it's because of the volcano out there." "Regardless, we'll keep following it until we find out just what this creature is."
gREAT JOB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteThanks Ed!!
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