Honey Island Swamp Monster

Two named investigators have gone at this case, and neither of them says what our own earlier text said. Joe Nickell published his fieldwork in Skeptical Inquirer in July 2001. He hired the tour, interviewed the guides, and asked Dana Holyfield for a copy of one of the casts, which she sent him. His objections are concrete. Ford and Mills are what investigators call repeaters: the same two men produced the sighting, the tracks, further tracks of different sizes and a second sighting. The cast is small — about nine and three-quarter inches, against the fourteen to sixteen inches usual in Bigfoot reports. And the tracks do not match the creature described: a hairy upright hominid should leave a roughly human print, while Ford's casts are webbed. Nickell also notes the timing. The 1974 claim arrives two years after The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) was a box-office hit and after the Swamp Thing comic appeared. His conclusion is that the evidence "suggests a common hoax". On the number of toes our earlier text was simply wrong, and the error is traceable. The museum that holds the cast describes four-toed footprints; Nickell counted four on the copy Holyfield sent him. Frances Leary explains how three came to circulate: at first glance the print reads as three toes, but a "stubby knob slightly lower than the toes" suggests a fourth. Nickell adds the rest — popularisers file the creature among "freshwater merbeings", a cryptozoological category defined by three-toed tracks, "although Ford's casts actually exhibit four". A classification borrowed a foot the animal never had, and we copied the classification. The carved wooden stamp we used to blame has no author. Nickell never claims one for Ford; the carved feet in his article belong to other, documented hoaxes — the retired logger who came forward about the 1930 Mount St. Helens tracks, and Ray Pickens of Chehalis, Washington, who in the early 1970s carved seven-by-eighteen-inch feet, strapped them to hiking boots and said he did it "not to fool the scientists, but to fool the monster-hunters". The only specific claim about these casts that we could find with names on it is in Leary's thesis: before July 2003, M. K. Davis and Jay Michael reported that a shoe had been made to produce fake prints, a finding she describes as still under investigation. It appears not to have been published since. As for animals: the Louisiana black bear, Ursus americanus luteolus, is a real subspecies — one of sixteen of the American black bear. It was listed as threatened on 7 January 1992 and removed from the federal list on 11 March 2016, effective 11 April. The delisting rule states that black bears were known in the Lower East Pearl River Basin of southern Mississippi, which is this swamp. A black bear on all fours that rises onto its hind legs to look at people is ordinary bear behaviour, and it is exactly the movement Ford described in 1963. That does not settle what he saw, and it cannot explain the casts: a bear leaves five toes and no webbing. The sighting and the tracks pull in different directions. The circus does not survive contact with the archive. Louisiana lore says a train wreck freed circus chimpanzees into the swamp in the early twentieth century — in Leary's fieldwork it is a monkey off a circus train in the 1940s, and the alligator crossbreeding is a separate idea borrowed from the shape of the prints, which one scientist described as "a cross between a primate and a large alligator". We searched the parish's own newspaper, the St. Tammany Farmer of Covington, digitised in Chronicling America from 1874. Pages containing "circus train" together with "Honey Island": zero. Pages containing "chimpanzee" together with "Honey Island": zero. The controls in the same corpus and the same newspaper: "Honey Island" 355 pages, "circus" 292 pages, and a nonsense control word 0. The paper covered both the place and travelling circuses at length; it never joined them. The people who know the swamp best are unimpressed. Robbie Charbonnet, a Cajun guide with forty-five years in Honey Island, told Nickell in December 2000 that he had never seen or heard anything he could not identify, and suggested such stories may have been told to keep outsiders away from good hunting ground or moonshine stills, or to stop children wandering in. The naturalist John V. Dennis wrote in 1988 that "Honey Island, in my experience, does not live up to its reputation as a scary place." Paul Wagner, the wetlands ecologist who runs the best-known tour, is more open: his own website quotes him saying, "I have an open mind about it. I don't say it does or doesn't exist." One last thing, said with respect for a living author who has never hidden her stake in the story: the 1963 account has drifted. In the 1999 book Holyfield has the two men on foot deep in the swamp, hunting for an abandoned camp they had spotted from a twin-engine plane. On her own website today they are carrying provisions to their campsite. Sixty years on, the earliest telling of the founding scene is a book written thirty-six years after the fact by someone who was not there.