Phantoms and Monsters

New Footprint Discovered in Burke County, NC
Central Savannah River Area Bigfoot?
Psychic Discovers Hotel's Spiritual Side
Messages From the Dead of 9/11

New Footprint Discovered in Burke County, NC

Posted: 19 Jun 2010 09:03 AM PDT

Video: Bigfoot In Burke County? Residents Discover Mysterious Footprint

wsoctv - BURKE COUNTY, N.C. -- A large, muddy and mysterious footprint has captured imaginations in the area.

The print is much larger than a human's foot, and some say it couldn't be an animal. Its size and unexplained origin are fueling wild theories about a creature of lore making a real-life emergence in rural parts of Cleveland and Burke counties.

A farmer said he recently stumbled across a larger-than-life footprint near the intersection of Highway 18 and George Hildebran School Road in the southern part of Burke County.

Pork Lowman said he was walking in the woods when he came across the print, which measures 15 by 8 inches.

"It's out here in no-man's land, and that's what really got me," Lowman said.

Lowman said its size and shape doesn't resemble that of a bear or large cat, which raised a question: Could Bigfoot have trekked through Burke County?

Area resident Rex Lail and others videotaped the print and also made a casting of it. They said they then contacted the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

Lail said the wildlife officer doesn't think the print was made by an animal, either.

Lowman and Lail said they hope the print turns out to be a hoax, but aren't sure that it will.

"We're trying to prove that it is a hoax, but the details of it are amazing," Lail said. "If it is a hoax, they are doing a terrific job."

A sighting of a large, unidentifiable creature was recently reported about 15 miles south of the location of the footprint.

"I had a fellow call me yesterday, told me I was crazy; that they had a sighting in Cleveland County and they must be a-running everywhere," Lowman said.

In the Cleveland County report, though, there was no print or any other evidence of someone -- or something -- passing through.

Eyewitness News reporter Dave Faherty tried to contact the wildlife biologist that Lail contacted, but he was unavailable.

Lowman said, while he hopes the print is a hoax, he still plans to be more cautious in wooded areas.

New Footprint Discovered in Burke County, NC

Central Savannah River Area Bigfoot?

Posted: 19 Jun 2010 08:47 AM PDT

metrospirit - Dave Collier has never come face to face with a Bigfoot, but he's talked to plenty of people who have.

"I believe that sightings and encounters are more common than most people believe," he says. "And what surprised me the most when I started this was how many there were in this area."

By this area, the Martinez resident doesn't mean the Southeast, and he's not just talking Georgia.

Collier means right here in the CSRA.

Working for a public utility, Collier is perfectly positioned to be a Bigfoot researcher. He's out among the public all day, often in rural locations, he deals with people in a relatively relaxed setting, and he deals with a lot of them.

Though he's consumed by the Bigfoot question — does it exist and if it does, how has it managed to remain so elusive for all these years — he doesn't come right out and ask people if they've ever seen Bigfoot. That kind of directness would just shut them down.

But if he sees evidence that the person might be an outdoorsman, he'll eventually steer the small talk around to the outdoors, maybe starting with some fishing or hunting stories before moving toward an icebreaker like, "So… have you ever run across anything unusual in the woods?"

While he admits the belief spectrum is pretty wide as far as Sasquatch is concerned, he says quite a few have actually confessed to having had some kind of encounter.

"And that's just sampling the smallest, random percentage of the population," he says.

The more people he talks to, the less surprised he is by what on the surface seems like such a disproportional response.

"The vast majority of people who have an encounter don't call the media or the sheriff, they just want to keep it to themselves," he says. "They don't want to expose themselves to ridicule."

Collier knows about ridicule. Like all Bigfoot researchers, he's taken his share of ribbing and dodged some, too, like the close call he had a while back when WGAC talk-show host Austin Rhodes got a hold of one of the flyers he's distributed throughout town.

"That could have been bad," he says with a chuckle. "He could have really let me have it."

"Bigfoot information wanted," the poster reads. "Any sightings or encounters with large, manlike animals sometimes called Sasquatch, Bigfoot or swamp ape. All reports wanted."

Collier devotes most of his free time to his hobby. He has read thousands of reports and is constantly amazed by what he considers the sincerity of the stories. If people wanted to make something up, he says, they could do a far better job.

"If it hits below the Holy Crap mark," he says, "it's probably true."

Collier's Holy Crap threshold might be a bit higher than most, however. Plenty of what he's come across in his day-to-day interactions is downright mystifying.

Like the guy outside Thomson who found his fishing trotline pulled up on shore with the bodies of his catch twisted off and the heads still on the hooks. Or the guy in Graniteville who saw a hairy figure clear a large incline in only two strides.

Or, even closer to home, several encounters sprinkled along the Savannah River in Columbia County.

Kids who grew up in that area a few years ago talk of a hairy creature they would sometimes see in the woods when they would venture out to their secret spot to party.

They called it the Wolfman.

One guy Collier talked to remembers coming up on it and running away, another talked about seeing one wrestle with a beaver just around the corner from that first sighting, and yet another heard strange howling sounds, as if a group of animals were closing in on their prey.

"All of a sudden, I'm finding a grouping over there," Collier says.

So, as he often does, he decided to go out and see for himself. Granted, it was a couple of years later, but to him it made sense to try. Sure, the area had become more developed, but the Sumter National Forest was still right across the water.

Looking for prints and stick formations (researchers suspect Sasquatches may actually bend small trees and position branches as a form of communication) is a daytime activity, but a Bigfoot investigation like this occurs at night.

"It was so dark that I had to use an LED light to stay on the trail," he says.

When he got to the end of the trail, he whacked a tree with a piece of wood, a technique called wood knocking, which is thought to be another form of communication.

Something knocked in reply.

"The next thing I know, I hear something coming through the woods all the way across the water… coming toward me," Collier says.

Then, in the still, cool silence of early morning, he heard something walking back and forth on the other side of the water.

"So, I'm hearing this breaking brush and then finally the sun just barely cracks and I hear this huge limb snap off, and I think — whoa, whatever that was, it was big."

As exciting as it was, Collier knows that to some his encounter is incomplete.

"All I have is a story," he says. "I heard something, but I didn't see anything."

Someone who did see something is Jack Hovatter. In the fall of 1971, Hovatter was hunting the small arms impact area of Fort Gordon with his son when he noticed a large footprint. The footprint was so large, in fact, that his first inclination was that it was the front and back prints of a bear that had blurred together. But on closer inspection, the print was obviously not made by a bear.

"It looked like a huge human track except for it was kind of a flatfooted human," he remembers. "It didn't make that much of an impression on the ground because the ground was so hard back there."

Hovatter set his gun barrel beside the print and gauged it to be about 22 inches long and about nine inches across the ball of the foot.

In that same area, in the vicinity of a nearly impenetrable thicket at the bottom of the ravine, he noticed what he thought were about a dozen very large ant hills.

"We dug down to the bottom," he said, "but it was just sand piled on the ground."

No ants. No ant holes.

"It was like a three- or four-gallon bucket was dumped there," he says.

In spite of the track and the strange piles of sand, he returned another day to investigate the thicket. It was a decision he will never forget.

"I heard something up on the other side of that hill," he says. "I looked, and some animal came rolling down that hill that wasn't even on its feet most of the time. It was a little bit far away to tell what it was or exactly how big it was, but I could see it was dark and I could see this salt-and-pepper look about it."

He swung around the ravine to cut back on the creature and got a strong whiff of something that smelled like vomit.

"That's what it was," he says. "There was a big pile of it up there. About three gallon's worth, I'd say. I took a stick and investigated it, and it had a piece of deer skin in there that was about two feet square."

Hovatter figures the deer skin, which was partially missing its hair, had made the creature sick, because the rest of the pile consisted of poorly chewed acorns.

"That really made me wonder what it was, so I started in [the small opening he found in the thicket] and I only got about 10 or 12 feet in there when I heard something coming toward me… and there it was. It was this man-ape looking thing, all covered with this super-dark hair, expect I could still see that flaking of grey. This thing apparently lived in there, and I didn't like the look on its face."

Having the presence of mind to compare it to a basketball hoop, he estimates it was 10 feet tall and nearly five feet across the shoulders, which is considered big even in the Bigfoot community.

"Its arms were massive, but proportionally they were a little bit longer than a man's arms," he says. "I didn't see any ears and its hair was kind of short, almost like a hound dog. It didn't have any hair around its eyes or its mouth or its nose, and I suppose the palms of its hands and the soles of its feet didn't have any hair on them, either."

The pathway was extremely narrow, and knowing he didn't want to provoke the creature, which he says looked disturbed by his presence, he resisted the urge to run, and though he had his gun, a 16-gauge, semi-automatic shotgun loaded with slugs, he says he never considered using it.

"I felt like I had a BB gun in my hands," he says. "Comparing it to horses and cows, I'd say it weighed at least 1,000 pounds, maybe as much as a hundred more."

Slowly, he continued to back up until he was out of the thicket. The creature remained inside.

"I went right up to the head of the ravine, up to the rifle range and back to my truck," he says. "Lord, was I glad to get back into my truck."

He told his brother in Tennessee about the encounter, and his brother rounded up someone from a natural resources organization, who called Fort Gordon to get permission to investigate. When they arrived, however, the ravine had been bulldozed and the thicket was gone.

Hovatter had another sighting during the fall of 1991, at the Yuchi Wildlife Management Area in Burke County, when he saw a hairy, bipedal creature sitting down at the base of a tree.

Though it might seem strange for one person to have two separate encounters while so many of the rest of us have never even had one, Hovatter says it's all a function of his relationship with the outdoors.

"Most people when they go hunting don't go very far from their vehicle because they figure if they get a deer, how are they going to get it back," he says. "Me — I don't really go deer hunting to kill a deer. I just enjoy being out, so I don't worry about that kind of thing. I get way back in there."

To Collier, Hovatter's encounter is additionally significant because it coincides with two other sightings in the same general area at the same general time, including one he recently discovered where an area woman saw one near the Dearing Ponds.

According to the witness, a creature about the same size as the one observed by Hovatter rose up out of one of the ponds covered in green algae.

"If this is all just a bunch of BS, it's strange that you start getting these clusters," Collier says.

Besides that, he says, if somebody's trying to pull a fast one, what's the point of coming up with such detailed information and then setting it 30-some years in the past? And what are the odds of hearing it as a result of a purely random inquiry?

Spearheading the coordinated research into the Bigfoot mystery is the Bigfoot Field Research Organization (BFRO). Established in 1995, the group has a few hundred active members spread across the continental U.S. and Canada, including a few in Georgia, mostly in the southeast corner of the state.

According to Mike Aragona, a curator and investigator, BFRO investigators come from all walks of life, though most have one predominant similarity.

"The majority of the people grew up in the '70s with the whole Roger Patterson footage," he says.

Taken in 1967, the Patterson Footage, which shows a hairy, ape-like creature walking through the woods, made Bigfoot a household name across the nation, spawning such '70s classics as "The Legend of Boggy Creek." Soon, Bigfoot became a tabloid staple and a cameo player in shows like "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "In Search Of."

A few men of science, like anatomy and anthropology professor Dr. Jeff Meldrum and fingerprint expert Jimmy Chilcutt, brought scientific and forensic credentials to the search, but mostly the academic world has taken a pass on Sasquatch.

"Overall, I don't think the academic community is accepting that these creatures exist," Aragona says. "It's a level of arrogance, really. It's people who don't go out in the woods, who already have it set in their minds that there's no way they're out there."

Using the reach and power of the Internet, BFRO founder Matthew Moneymaker set out to create an informational clearinghouse for Bigfoot information.

On the BFRO Web site, bfro.net, witnesses can submit detailed reports of their sightings, whether recent or historical, and have them classified in two ways: as an outright sighting like Hovatter's, or as an encounter with evidence like vocalizations, woodknocks or footprints.

The Web site lists thousands of sightings, including 79 in Georgia.

As for what exactly the creature is, Aragona says they're getting closer to an answer.

"The overall consensus in the BFRO and the greater Bigfoot community is that it's a primate, either like us or like the great apes," he says. "It might be a giant ape like gigantopithecus that's managed to survive. Whatever it is, it's an intelligent primate."

Detractors, of course, would say that the existence of some kind of prehistoric cousin is next to impossible, but Aragona says such common logic doesn't always make sense.

First of all, as a species we've been through a lot ourselves without going extinct, and, in order to survive side by side with us, a Bigfoot-like creature would have to have mastered skills of evasion, like being nocturnal, being shy and living ever deeper in the woods, he says.

"We believe their only natural enemy is man," Collier says. "We actually believe they avoid making tracks."

While that might seem like a convenient excuse for a general lack of evidence, in recent months Collier himself has come across some interesting tracks, and while he admits they are far from conclusive, they're nevertheless enough to make him go, "Hmm." And to him, that's what the quest for Bigfoot is all about.

"I guess it fascinates me because, at my age, there aren't many more mysteries in life," he says. "If one eventually does get nailed by a car or something, I guess it will be kind of fun to say 'I told you so,' but the other side of me is like, well, there goes that hobby."

Aragona agrees it's going to take a body to convince modern science of Bigfoot's existence.

Any other evidence, including the heralded "Kentucky" footage he says should be released this fall, will always be suspect.

Hovatter, however, doesn't need convincing.

"I know one thing — I don't feel safe in any area where they are if I'm not armed… and I don't feel real safe then," he says. "I would not go out at night and get out of a vehicle, that's for sure. I'm 71 years old and I'd like to live to at least what the average is."

Central Savannah River Area Bigfoot?

Psychic Discovers Hotel's Spiritual Side

Posted: 19 Jun 2010 08:25 AM PDT

calgaryherald - According to Chip Coffey, the Banff Springs Hotel is a lively place for the dead.

While Fairmont may not be putting this in its brochures, it seems those long held theories that the 123-year-old historical building is a hotbed for ghostly activities are true.

Coffey, the bespectacled medium and psychic from A&E shows Paranormal State and Psychic Kids, was in the hotel for only 15 minutes Sunday afternoon when he claims to have sensed no less than three ghosts milling about amid the chattering mob of movers, shakers and wannabes attending the Banff World Television Festival.

One was a woman, perhaps the famous bride who died on her wedding day and is said to haunt one of the hotel's many stairwells. Her name, Coffey has determined, was Christina and she was pregnant when she died.

"Not one life but two were lost at that time," said Coffey, in an interview with the Herald in the lobby of the Fairmont Banff Hotel. "With me being here, she felt very comfortable is saying, 'It's not a stigma anymore, so I will let you know I was pregnant. And the only two people who knew at the time was my mother and my husband-to-be.'

He also saw a man who he believes may have been Sam McAuley, the devoted bellman whose ghostly figure is said to haunt the hotel on a regular basis since his death in the 1970s.

The third was a little boy named Jack. He just wanted to hang.

"He's been around and pretty active and hanging in my room," says Coffey on Monday afternoon. "I do a show called Psychic Kids and I work with a lot of children. Children in particular feel comfortable, in spirit, to be chatting with me. The boy identified himself as Jack -- he's blond, he's about six to nine years old. He showed up in my room first and came through last night on the ghost walk."

Coffey, who was at the Banff World Television Festival for a panel discussion about paranormal TV shows, was enlisted to lead a private ghost walk around the premises alongside some VIPs. That's when he met Christina again, and Sam. The hotel's famous "hidden room" on the eighth floor is apparently haunted by ghosts of sheepish workers, who hang around as a sort of penance for mistakes in construction that required the room to be hidden in the first place. During his short stay in Banff, lights have mysteriously turned on in his hotel room, his computer rebooted by itself and his tour manager claimed some sort of presence was tapping him on the shoulder Sunday night.

"There's history," says Coffey about the hotel. "There's a lot of people here celebrating good times, maybe some bad times. There's people who are here with a lot of emotional events occurring. There were a lot of things that were heightened emotional events. Plus all the people here are very excited to be here. It's very open and your people are networking and having a good time and they're open and expressive emotionally. That really does attract energy, also. Our heightened excitement might heighten their excitement for trying to communicate."

The great-grandson of Native American medicine woman Minnie Sue Morrow Foster, the 55-year-old New York native says he has always been psychic, but admits his peculiar talent for having dead people talk to him was something he discovered by accident 10 years ago when a co-worker's dead brother started chatting him up in Atlanta, Georgia. By 2007, he was called to take part in A&E's Paranormal State, then called Paranormal U. He would later appear in Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal, making him one of the more recognizable faces in North America's fascination with all-things creepy.

Whether it be Ghost Hunters, Ghost Trackers or the History Television's Nostradamus Effect, television is cashing in on a renewed interest in the unexplained.

"There's a worldwide interest in spiritual and paranormal topics," Coffey says. "From the aspect of people looking for valid answers about the afterlife: Is it real? Does it exist? Within history, there have been these resurgences like the whole spiritualist movement in the late 1800s. Sometimes there is some correlation to world events. After 9/11 people, in my country, we were talking about spirituality and searching for answers. I think tough times can lead people to seek answers. We seek out faith and spirituality in tough times, and forget about our faith and spirituality when things are going well."

Of course, Coffey acknowledges there is always going to be some skepticism about his activities, not only as to whether the powers he claims to have are actually real but also about how he has managed to turn them into a rather lucrative business for himself.

But Coffey himself is arguably a skeptic, at least when it comes to showing reverence to some of the end-of-the-world scenarios that are linked to the paranormal or spiritual worlds.

The Mayan calendar, for instance, supposedly suggests that the world will end in Dec. 21, 2012, a prediction that has sounded alarms in some circles. Coffey, for one, doesn't buy it.

"People ask me what I'm going to be doing on that day," he says. "I'm going to be doing light Christmas shopping. I think the Mayans got tired and said, 'We've been doing this calendar for six weeks now. Let's stop. Let's go sacrifice somebody. Let's have a feast and sacrifice a virgin. Anything other than this calendar. I'm tired of this.'

"That's my crazy sense of humour that often comes out when I talk about topics," he explains. "I think we take some of this stuff so seriously."

NOTE: For those who are fans of Chip Coffey, I received a tweet from Chip last evening...he is in the Tampa area filming the 1st episode of 'Psychic Kids' third season...Lon

Psychic Discovers Hotel's Spiritual Side

Messages From the Dead of 9/11

Posted: 19 Jun 2010 08:08 AM PDT

Posted by Cynthia Dermody at CafeMom - Bonnie McEneaney was a skeptic, just like you may be now. In the days and weeks following the death of her husband, Eamon, in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, McEneaney continued to question that the "signs" her dead husband was sending her were real and not some imaginary attempt to hold on to something she'd lost forever.

An eerie wind out of nowhere on a perfectly still day, making a river pattern among the leaves and branches of the trees.

A blue heron, a bird not native to Connecticut in the middle of winter and having great significance to her personally, guiding her to a burial plot in a local cemetery.

And then the penny. For her, this is what made her believe beyond a doubt that her dead husband was communicating with her from another realm.

She was at a restaurant with friends, discussing some of the strange things she and other spouses and relatives of 9/11 victims had experienced since the terrorist attack. She was explaining that Eamon had foreseen his own death several times, most recently two days before he died while he and Bonnie were watching the World War II-based Band of Brothers miniseries about D-Day, which occurred on June 6, 1944.

She opened her menu, and there sat a wheat penny -- from 1944.

The restaurant did not operate in cash or tips. No one else knew the background or would be so cruel as to plan such a mean practical joke. McEneaney could not rationalize any other way that the penny, with that specific date, could have gotten there, except for Eamon.

"This was just an incredible experience," McEneaney said. "No one at the table could explain where the penny came from. For me, it was clear. And what makes this experience even more remarkable was that the entire day I was beginning to feel like I had made a big mistake -- my own skepticism setting in. When the penny appeared that evening, it was if Eamon was saying, 'Don't give in to your doubts -- stay the course.' And I did."

McEneaney has chronicled her own spiritual experiences and those of numerous others in the book Messages: Signs, Visits, and Premonitions From Loved Ones Lost on 9/11.

Her goal is not to convert skeptics, but to help others who've lost loved ones open up to the possibility that they might be receiving messages, too. She believes that when you love someone, even when they die, the relationship continues -- it's just different. That special connection is not broken.

McEneaney provided 4 key ways the rest of us can try to be more spiritually open to communication from the dead.

1. You don't have to be religious

"Raised Christian myself, I have thought a lot about this. I was brought up to believe in the resurrection of Christ -- that there is truly more than this Earthly existence we lead. And yet, when there is a sign that there may really be more than this, we become skeptics again ... 'it's impossible because we (with our human limitations) can't understand it' or 'it simply can't be because we haven't seen it ourselves.' The reality is, for most of us, unless you have had a spiritual experience yourself, it's extremely difficult to transition from skeptic to believer. Not until I experienced the events described in my book did I realize how transforming these experiences could be."

2. Realize that premonitions happen to people of all beliefs

"Although he was raised Catholic, Eamon was more spiritual than religious. He shaped his view of the spiritual world by combining tenets from several religions in addition to Christianity, Buddhism being one of them. I don't know why he had premonitions. This is a phenomenon that has been going on forever. Countless cases are documented. And why do some people see signs from their loved ones when others don't? There are just certain things that the human mind may never understand. There were so many things that made Eamon special. But all these traits do not preclude anyone else from having a strong presence after death. Perhaps, in part, I believe it's a function of how much love existed between the one who passed over and the one left behind."

3. You may be getting signs right now -- you just might not realize it

"This phenomenon is not unique to 9/11; it has and continues to happen all around us. Most people don't talk about their experiences for fear they will be judged in some negative way. But I have found that when I talk to small groups, it seems the one who hasn't had something unusual happen is the exception. And it's possible that they missed a sign that occurred right next to them. This is what has the most meaning for me."

4. Don't overlook the signs in your own life

"Pay attention to the small things that happen around you -- small but unusual. Signs from nature -- bird and butterfly behavior, coins, messages in dreams. There is a danger in looking for something too hard. Just be aware. The messages are never complex -- on the contrary, they are very basic -- even when someone has a sensory visitation, when they smell, feel, hear, or even see the loved one they lost. In most cases, the message is simply that the person who passed on is doing fine and still looking out for the loved one left behind. Just be open to all the spiritual possibilities that surround you every day."

NOTE: ABC's 20/20 presented an excellent segment on this phenomena. Podcast link: After 9/11, Messages From Beyond...Lon

Messages From the Dead of 9/11

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