Regular Episode
227 – Bigfoot and the Paranormal
🧹 Weirdwashing and the Desire to Sit at Science’s Table
Cutchin and Renner argue that a significant and vocal segment of the Bigfoot community — the “apers,” as the guests call them — strips out anything that sounds supernatural before presenting cases to the public. Their motivation, as Joshua puts it, is “wanting to sit at the big boy’s table of science.” The irony is that this approach isn’t actually more scientific: it selectively credits witness testimony only for the parts that fit a predetermined hypothesis, while dismissing the same witnesses when they describe glowing eyes, footprints that begin and end in open snow with no approach or exit trail, or a UFO hovering overhead. Timothy frames it bluntly: if you’re going to accept a witness’s claim that they saw an eight-foot-tall ape man, you don’t get to discard their account of the bright-green fur or the self-illuminating eyes in the same breath.
One anatomical flashpoint is the question of tapetum lucidum — the reflective membrane behind the retina that produces eye-shine in many nocturnal animals. Conventional Bigfoot researchers invoke it to explain glowing-eye reports. The problem, as Timothy notes, is that no higher-order primate possesses a tapetum lucidum. And even setting that aside, many witnesses explicitly insist the eyes were self-illuminating rather than reflective — some describing color changes as they watched. No known animal biology accounts for this; folklore, on the other hand, is full of creatures with glowing, color-shifting eyes.
⛏️ The Ape Canyon Case and Fred Beck’s Book
The Ape Canyon incident of 1924 — in which a group of miners in Washington State claimed their cabin was besieged all night by a band of large hairy creatures — is a canonical Bigfoot case, cited repeatedly in the literature. What almost no one mentions is what the primary witness, miner Fred Beck, actually wrote in his own account. Blake had gone back to read Beck’s original book while researching the case and was “absolutely shocked” to find it saturated with spiritualist detail that had been excised from every documentary and secondary source he’d ever encountered.
As Timothy describes it, the account opens not with ape men but with the apparition of a giant Native American spirit who directs the miners to follow a white arrow through the sky into the wilderness. Along the way they encounter another spirit — a female figure they name Vander White, who leads them to the gold claim they subsequently named after her. Before the Bigfoot creatures appear, there are sounds of enormous machinery coming from underground, a set of two or three footprints appearing in the middle of a wide sandbar with no approach or exit tracks (as if something was carried in and out), and at least one apparent apport — a pencil Beck needed that materialized in his hand. Beck himself concluded explicitly that the creatures were supernatural entities, not animals. He was writing this, with his son, in the 1960s — making him, in Timothy’s words, “way ahead of his time.”
👻 Bigfoot as Poltergeist — Lithobolia and the Class B Report Problem
One of the book’s most striking structural arguments is that the suite of phenomena the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization classifies as “Class B reports” — thrown stones, anomalous voices, anomalous smells, feelings of being watched, wood knocks — is functionally identical to what parapsychologists would describe as a poltergeist haunting. Move the same phenomena indoors and no one would hesitate to call it a ghost case.
The stone-throwing parallel is especially deep. The ancient Greek term lithobolia — the paranormal throwing of stones — appears in poltergeist cases, Bigfoot encounters, generalized hauntings, witch accounts, and fairy stories alike. In poltergeist reports, thrown objects are sometimes described as warm to the touch, consistent with apport phenomena. The same warm-rock detail appears in the Minerva Monster flap (Minerva, Ohio, circa 1970s), where children who had ongoing interactions with a Bigfoot-like creature would mark rocks with an X, throw them, and find the returned stones warm when caught.
Joshua also notes that Franek Kluski, the celebrated early-twentieth-century Polish medium, reportedly manifested a large hairy humanoid during séances — and that author Stan Gooch recounted witnessing a caveman-like figure covered in hair appear during a spiritualist sitting. These séance Bigfoots, Joshua suggests, deserve to sit alongside the forest variety in any honest accounting of the phenomenon.
🛸 Momo, UFOs, and the Missouri Monster
The Momo (Missouri Monster) case of 1972 is another standard Bigfoot entry that arrives in most accounts heavily weirdwashed. The baseline story: the Harrison family in Louisiana, Missouri (yes, that’s in Missouri) saw a large hairy creature carrying a dead dog, which touched off a wave of local monster hunts. What typically goes unmentioned: four days after the initial sighting, a Pentecostal congregation leaving a church service watched two fireballs — one white, one green — shoot out from an area called Marz Off Hill and descend into the woods. A subsequent sighting described a luminous gold cross forming on the moon, bright enough to light the road like daylight. Searchers in the woods reported hearing disembodied voices warning them off — including the famously inexplicable phrase, “I’ll take your cup of coffee.” Momo also left three-toed tracks, which conventional researchers attribute to inbreeding or deformity. Joshua points out this explanation fails on the bilateral symmetry alone; both feet show identical structure, which doesn’t fit either injury or genetic abnormality. Globally, three-toed or bird-footed hairy wild men appear across folklore from Ireland to Siberia, often associated with fairy or witch figures — including a County Tipperary legend of a fairy queen transforming into an ape with turkey feet.
👰 Women in White and the Wild Man’s Retinue
Perhaps the most unexpected chapter in the project is Timothy’s investigation of the folkloric link between Bigfoot-type creatures and the woman in white archetype. It began with a thread on Sasquatch Chronicles in which witnesses described a strangely dressed woman in white — with oversized shoes — repeatedly appearing in the vicinity of their Bigfoot encounters. Timothy started cataloguing similar juxtapositions and found the pattern remarkably consistent across modern reports and ancient folklore alike.
The key folkloric connection runs through Perchta (also rendered Bertha in some Austrian royal traditions), a Central European fairy/goddess figure who always wore white, appeared alternately as young and beautiful or as a crone, and possessed one or both feet in the form of an oversized swan’s foot — the three-toed bird foot once again. More striking is Perchta’s retinue: the Heimchen, souls of children she lured into the woods who manifest as will-o’-the-wisps (i.e., orbs of light), and the Perchten, a band of hairy wild men. Tim’s chapter documents analogous pairings — a female figure in white accompanied by or presaging the appearance of a hairy wild man — across Russia, England, northern Africa, and Native American traditions. Baba Yaga, who lives in a hut that walks on chicken legs, has Siberian analogs described as tall, hairy, and bulletproof — another recurring Bigfoot claim. Joshua traces a related lineage through Dionysus, the Green Man, Odin, and the Wild Man tradition all the way to Santa Claus.
🛐 Is Bigfoot a Religion? The Gifting Exchange and the Trickster
The conversation ranges into territory that is less monster hunt than religious studies. Joshua describes attending a 2019 monster conference hosted by the religious studies department at the University of Texas at San Marcos and coming away with the question: “How is Bigfoot not a religion?” Research cited in the episode finds that Bigfoot conference attendees are statistically less likely than average Americans to identify as Protestant and attend church less frequently — consistent with the idea that Bigfootery fills a metaphysical role for some participants.
The gifting exchange is one concrete example. Many long-term Bigfoot investigators leave food or objects in the field for Bigfoot and believe they receive something in return. Timothy maps this directly onto the broader cross-cultural practice of spirit gifting — leaving offerings for non-human entities — noting that the behavior is “almost a one-to-one thing” with documented folklore traditions, from Santa Claus’s milk and cookies on down.
The trickster dimension is handled through George Hansen‘s framework in 📚 The Trickster and the Paranormal 💵: paranormal phenomena structurally embody the trickster archetype, which is self-negating and resists capture or confirmation by design. The recurring pattern in poltergeist, UFO contactee, and Bigfoot cases in which someone eventually gets caught faking evidence fits Hansen’s model: the trickster “almost respects” sincere belief and faith while perpetually eluding final proof.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Where the Footprints End, Volume I: Folklore 💵 by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner
– 📚 Where the Footprints End, Volume II: Evidence 💵 by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner
– 📚 A Trojan Feast 💵 by Joshua Cutchin
– 📚 The Brimstone Deceit 💵 by Joshua Cutchin
– 📚 Thieves in the Night 💵 by Joshua Cutchin
– 📚 Beyond the Seventh Gate 💵 by Timothy Renner
– 📚 Bigfoot in Pennsylvania 💵 by Timothy Renner
– 📚 Bigfoot: West Coast Wild Man 💵 by Timothy Renner
– 📚 Don’t Look Behind You 💵 by Timothy Renner
– 📚 The Trickster and the Paranormal 💵 by George P. Hansen
🔗 Related Links
– Ape Canyon (1924 incident)
– Momo the Monster
– Perchta (European folklore figure)
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy per se, but there has long been an effort to (as today’s guests call it) “Weirdwash” many unusual features out of Bigfoot cryptozoology. To mend that gap, they’ve co-written a book in two volumes:
Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon
Joshua Cutchin is the author of several books covering weird topics including cryptozoological, Fortean phenomena, UFOs and fairies. These include A Trojan Feast, The Brimstone Deceit, and Thieves in the Night.
Timothy Renner is an author, illustrator and musician living in Pennsylvania. His work can be found in books, magazines, comics and album covers. He’s also a podcaster – creator of Strange Familiars, and has frequently appeared on the show Where did the Road Go. His books include Beyond the Seventh Gate, Bigfoot in PA, Bigfoot: West Coast Wild Man, and Don’t Look Behind You.
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