Fouke Monster

The Fouke Monster is a Bigfoot-type creature reported in the creek bottoms around Fouke, a town of some 800 people eleven miles south of Texarkana, in southwest Arkansas. It is described as a hair-covered biped about seven feet tall and three feet across the chest, with red eyes and a strong smell, and is associated with three-toed footprints found in a local soybean field in June 1971. Unusually for a cryptid, its origin can be dated: on 3 May 1971 the Texarkana Gazette published reporter Jim Powell's account of a night attack on the home of Bobby and Elizabeth Ford, and it was Powell who coined the name at his typewriter. The Associated Press and United Press International carried the story nationwide within days, fifteen months before Charles B. Pierce premiered his docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek in Texarkana in August 1972, filmed around Fouke with residents playing themselves. The film turned a news story into a permanent attraction, with a free museum inside the Monster Mart on U.S. Highway 71 and an annual festival. Sceptics point out that no printed mention of the creature has been found before Powell's 1971 article, and that no primate has three toes.

Most cryptids have no birthday. The Fouke Monster has one, and it can be read: Monday 3 May 1971, page one of the Texarkana Gazette, under the headline "Fouke Family Terrorized by Hairy 'Monster'", by a staff writer called Jim Powell. The paper reprinted that article in its own "Gazette 150" anniversary series on 24 May 2025, byline intact. Almost nothing about this creature is older than that page. What Powell reported had happened two nights earlier, at a frame house on U.S. Highway 71 just outside Fouke, in Miller County, eleven miles south of Texarkana. Two young couples had moved in less than a week before. Elizabeth Ford, twenty-two, was lying down in the front room. Powell printed her account almost unedited: "I saw the curtain moving on the front window and a hand sticking through the window. At first I thought it was a bear's paw but it didn't look like that. It had heavy hair all over it and it had claws. I could see its eyes. They looked like coals of fire … real red… It didn't make any noise. Except you could hear it breathing." The men went out with guns. "We shot several times at it then and then called Ernest Walraven, constable of Fouke," the article continues. "He brought us another shotgun and a stronger light. We waited on the porch and then saw the thing closer to the house. We shot again and thought we saw it fall." Three men walked out towards where they thought it had dropped; the women screamed; Bobby Ford turned back — "I was walking the rungs of a ladder to get up on the porch when the thing grabbed me." The thing, as printed, was "about seven feet tall and about three feet wide across the chest": "At first I thought it was a bear but it runs upright and moves real fast. It is covered with hair." Bobby Ford was treated at a hospital in Texarkana for scratches and shock. The Miller County sheriff's office searched the property at daylight and came away with two things: a set of tracks nobody could identify, and claw scratches on the porch. No blood, although the men said they had fired until the ammunition ran out. Powell did not find the story; a radio man did. "Dave Hall called me and said something strange was going on down in Fouke," Powell recalled thirty years later. "So we went down there." Hall was news director of Texarkana station KTFS. What the two of them found was not a monster but a household in flight: "When we got to the house, the people were moving out. They had a U-Haul and were packing their things and leaving the area." They saw no tracks that day. "We checked with the hospital and they said this guy was in shock," said Powell. "He was really afraid of something." Then came the sentence that made the legend, and Powell has always been candid that he wrote it as a writer, not as a witness: "I was sitting at my typewriter on the second story, and I realized that I had to call it something. The woman had said it reached a hairy arm through the window. It was breathing hard, and had eyes that were as big as half-dollars and red as coal." He called it the Fouke Monster. The Associated Press and United Press International picked the story off the wire and sent it to member papers across the United States — fifteen months before any film existed. What followed that summer is documented in unusual detail because the local paper kept covering it. Three weeks after the Ford night, three Texarkana residents driving home from Shreveport nearly hit something large and hairy crossing U.S. 71 south of town. In mid-June a set of three-toed footprints turned up in the soybean field of Willie E. Smith, a Fouke service-station owner: 13.5 inches long and only 4.5 inches wide. Smith cast the prints in plaster, then sold souvenir copies from the mould at his station until a fire destroyed it. Sheriff Leslie Greer — in office from 1967 to 1974 — took the county game warden, Carl Galyon, out to the bean field; neither man had ever seen tracks like them and neither would vouch for them. The Little Rock radio station KAAY posted a reward of $1,090 and a local man named Scoggins another $200, and armed strangers began arriving. Greer's deputies stopped cars to check for guns and liquor and asked people not to cut fence lines. Three men who claimed the monster had attacked them were arrested and fined $59 each for filing a fraudulent report; Greer's verdict was blunt: "I think they were drinking and got into a scuffle and skinned one another up." Only then did the cinema arrive. Charles B. Pierce, who ran an advertising agency in Texarkana, borrowed money — the figure is given as $100,000 from a client or $160,000 from a trucking company, depending on who is telling it — bought a camera and shot a docudrama with a working title of Tracking the Fouke Monster. The locals played themselves; Keith Crabtree played the creature, chosen for his size and his availability; Pierce could not get permission to film at the real Ford house, so he used one in Texarkana. Retitled The Legend of Boggy Creek, it premiered at the Paramount Theater in Texarkana on 17 August 1972, became a drive-in hit and is credited with grossing more than $20 million. Not everyone in Fouke was pleased. Smokey Crabtree, who had guided the crew and is credited as wildlife consultant, self-published Smokey and the Fouke Monster in 1974 to argue the opposite case: "The movie made it into a horror story… That movie is not even close to the truth." The older layer of the story exists too, but it is thinner than the retellings suggest. Greer said he had first heard of such an animal in 1946, while campaigning for tax assessor, from a woman on her porch halfway between Fouke and the Below Bridge: "She said it looked kind of like a man, and walked like a man, but she didn't think it was a man." Greer never thought about it again until 1971. And a son of Smokey Crabtree reported an encounter in the mid-1960s, when the thing was known locally as the Jonesville Monster — with, in the words of the Gazette's own retrospective, "little notoriety or publicity about the event outside of Fouke".

Fouke is a real town of 808 people (2020 census), eleven miles south of Texarkana on U.S. Highway 71 and Interstate 549, in Miller County. Boggy Creek runs two miles south of it and takes its name from the sawmill of George W. Fouke, the Presbyterian lumberman the town is named after. It is an easy detour off the highway and it does not pretend the monster never happened. Fouke Monster Mart — 104 U.S. Highway 71, Fouke, AR 71837, tel. +1 870-653-2497 — is the one fixed attraction. It has been trading since 1983 and is now run by a new family; it is a roadside store, gift shop and pizza counter with a small free museum of Fouke Monster material — the Gazette photographed an outsized painted creature greeting visitors there back in 2001. Opening hours are long and unglamorous, which is the point of a store on a trunk road: Monday to Friday 05:00-21:30, Saturday 06:00-21:30, Sunday 10:00-21:30. There is no admission charge for the museum area. Parking is on the forecourt. The festival. Fouke has celebrated the creature since 2013, when the Boggy Creek Festival began in the town. The 2026 edition, run as the Fouke Monster Festival by Craig Woolheater, was held on Saturday 25 April 2026, 09:00-22:00, at the Fouke Community Center, with ticketed entry through Eventbrite and paid guided bus tours through the bottomland during the day. Dates, name and organiser have all moved over the years, so check before travelling rather than assuming an anniversary weekend. What you cannot see. The house on U.S. 71 where the 1971 attack was reported no longer stands, and Charles B. Pierce could not get permission to film there even in 1972 — the house in The Legend of Boggy Creek is one he used in Texarkana instead. The soybean field with the three-toed tracks, the Sulphur River bottoms and the creek banks are private working land. This is not a formality: in the summer of 1971 the sheriff's deputies had to stop cars to check for guns and liquor and ask visitors to stop cutting fence lines, and the resentment that caused is still remembered locally. Do not enter fields, woods or river bottoms without the owner's permission, and do not go looking after dark. Nearby. Texarkana, eleven miles north, is where the story was written and where the film opened: The Legend of Boggy Creek premiered at the Paramount Theater on 17 August 1972, and the restored version premiered at the city's Perot Theatre in June 2019. Fouke also has the Miller County Historical and Family Museum, opened in 2003, and the Community Center, opened in 2001, which is where the festival is held. The nearest commercial airport, hotels and hospitals are all in Texarkana.