Uncle Dewey and The Bigfoot

The movie Legend of Boggy Creek came out around 1972. The film used many of the original townsfolk who had been witness to the now-famous Bigfoot sightings and events that took place in Fouke, Arkansas in the late sixties.

In 1975, my Uncle Dewey passed away. The following summer my grandma and I headed down to Arkansas to visit relatives in Little Rock--and then on to Camden to see Aunt Clara. Grandma had not seen her since Dewey had died. We stayed with her a couple of days. I happened to bring up the subject about the "Fouke Monster" since the town was not too far away (about 90 miles). Aunt Clara looked over to grandma and said, "Dewey saw one of those things." My grandmother scoffed, "Oh, Clara...". "No. He absolutely did." Clara insisted. "Dewey and one of his buddies were out deer hunting. Way back in the woods somewhere. Miles. Dewey thought it was a bear at first. When he got back he told me about it. Said it was walking on two legs the whole time. Said it was just walking around out there." "What did he think?" I asked. "Oh, he thought it was kind of odd," she said. "He was mad about it, more than anything else. Said they'd been tracking a deer all that morning, and worried the thing had scared it off. He come back without one (a deer), so I guess it probably had (scared it off)."

"Gary is Haunting the House"

I grew up listening to tales my grandfather told me about how when he was young, he and his sister had used a Ouija board to try and locate their long lost father. He had run out and abandoned the family many years earlier. His current whereabouts at the time were unknown. The board spelled out the name of an Illinois town. They never knew if the board was right or wrong. They had never heard of this town before. It sounded like something made up. But the town was real--Kankakee. It was small--but made national news in the early sixties after a soviet space capsule landed there by mistake. Records show that a man having my great grandfather's name did in fact live in the town in 1915--ironically. Whether or not it was him, who knows?

One day I wanted to try a Ouija board myself. I was around 10 years old at the time. A neighbor down the street owned one. I was friends with her daughter. One lazy summer afternoon, we pulled it down from out of the living room closet and headed down to the cellar to give it a try. There was a small storage room built next to the staircase that was quiet. The room was damp, cold and covered in cobwebs. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling by a cord over an old black turn-of-the-century era trunk. We climbed onto the truck, facing each other with the board in between us. Neither of us knew what we were doing. We just started asking questions. Stupid ones. At first nothing. Then the pointer began to respond. Each of us accused the other of pushing it. Then we began to giggle. Started asking the board really ridiculous questions. We laughed. Suddenly the light bulb above our heads began to flicker, until finally it went out completely. The room was now completely dark. We began screaming for my friend's mother to turn the light back on. We thought she was playing a joke. But then we heard her walking into the kitchen from another room. She called down to us, "The light is on." Suddenly the light bulb popped back on--as if in response. My friend bolted, leaving me alone in the room with the Ouija board dangling from my fingertips. I hestitated. The bulb then went dark again, but immediately came back on--as if prompting me to exit as well. I did. We put the board away and never messed with it again.

Some years ago, I was back in the house on a visit and recounting the story to a friend's brother who still lived there--Gary. He told me the Ouija board was actually his old Ouija board. He said his mom had bought it for him in the fifties. He told me it was still in the living room closet. I asked if I could have it. "No. But I'll sell it to you for twenty bucks." He did. He died quite suddenly a short time later. He was only in his forties. Some months later I was told by his brother--Kenny, that Gary was now "haunting the house." Lights in bedrooms would flicker and go out. Television sets would come on by themselves. Gary's mother had just purchased new carpeting for his old bedroom and the main den. It was thick and plush. Kenny remembered how he had walked into the den one morning and noticed fresh footprints embedded in the carpet--coming out of Gary's old room and ending near the sofa Gary always sat in when he watched television. A painting on the den wall that Gary had always disliked (I can't recall what it was now) was oddly "tilted". I told Kenny that the "footprints" were probably either his or his mom's. Kenny disagreed. So did his mom. Both said, "Whoever had left them, had only four toes on their right foot." Gary had suffered from diabetes and had recently had the small toe on his right foot removed-- a complication from his illness. The new carpet had been purchased and installed after his death.

Hank Checks Out, Ghost Checks In

Grandma had lost Hank about a year before Clara lost Dewey. Grandma married Henryk Jeglenski (we all called him, "Hank" for short) in 1968. He was her third husband and was an immigrant from Warsaw, Poland. He worked for McDonnell Douglas Aircraft in St. Louis as a technical illustrator and loved Laurel & Hardy movies. But at age 46, he started having problems with his eyes. Then his legs. He shot himself on Labor Day 1974 and died three days later. At the time, grandma and he were in the process of moving out of their old home and moving into a new one they had recently purchased a few miles away. She completed the move without him and took up residence in the new house on Little Flower Lane where they had planned to live. Six months passed. Then the disturbances began. Unusually loud "popping noises" from the ceiling. Every night and always around the same time. Grandma described them as sounding like "someone in the attic running back and forth with a board along the wooden rafters". Other times she described them as sounding "like gunshots". On occasion, my parents and I would stop over for dinner. Grandma would always have my dad get the ladder out and look up in the attic, but nothing was ever found. Grandma eventually started telling close friends that she believed her house was "haunted". My mom stayed there once. It was the first and last time. She refused to ever stay another night, explaining she had heard "strange things" --like a "man's moaning, coming out of the walls". The house had an extra room built onto it. It seperated the main house from the garage. Though it was not insulated from the weather, it was noticed that during the heat of summer, the room always remained "ice cold". It was where the majority of Hank's personal effects were stored and what was to have been his personal work den. Grandma moved out a couple years later. Her new home was much smaller, but as she often like to put it, "a lot more quiet".

Kyle J. Wood © 2008