Gone squatchin'

Investigating the myth, mystery and mischief at Oklahoma’s annual Bigfoot festival

Over a roaring campfire in the foothills of the Kiamichi Mountains, Bigfoot believers still tell the bloody tale of the Siege at Honobia (pronounced “Hoe-nubby” by the locals).

The winter was unusually harsh sixteen years ago, they say, when a deer hunter and his family noticed fresh-shot carcasses stolen from their outdoor freezer.

He and his family lived in a two-story cabin on 30 acres of dense woods in rural Honobia, an unincorporated dry little town in southeastern Oklahoma, where hungry predators were frustrating but not extraordinary. They chalked up the missing meat and mischief to bears, nothing more, and emptied out the freezer. Problem solved.

But soon the hungry predators began to target the fresh meat living inside their cabin. The creepy beings came back almost nightly, jiggling doorknobs, scratching at their doors, bending gates. According to reports* and campground lore, the persistent beasts stood more than eight feet tall and smelled of musk, urine and burnt hair.

They say the wintry woods surrounding their cabin echoed with screams and strange chattering and the thrashing of trees. With each terrifying night, the predators grew more ferocious in their attempts to break into the cabin.

The family became convinced these were not bears. The mother and children fled. The deer hunter and his friends loaded assault rifles and waited on the porch. They’d had enough.

Story goes, they didn’t have to wait long. The man shot a massive, red-eyed monster prowling a hundred yards from the cabin. He hit the beast in the head, and it ran howling into the timberline and out of sight.

They heard pained screams all for the rest of the night. The woods seethed. The southeastern edge of the expansive Ouachita Forest churned with noise until daybreak. No one slept.

Townspeople searched the woods the next day, following a trail of blood to the leafy bedding of a massive being. They found rudimentary attempts at first aid, bits of brain matter, more blood. The injured predator was gone.

Out-of-state volunteer investigators with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization arrived on the scene within 16 hours of the shooting. The official report, filed in the BFRO’s online database of Sasquatch investigations, concluded the blood trail led to a rifle-shot deer, not an injured Bigfoot.

The Okies were nervous and riled up as the woods. They fired assault weapons into the winter dark at the slightest flash of glowing red or movement beyond the timberline. The BFRO investigators, keen on preserving and observing Bigfoot life, politely disagreed with their shoot-first-and-find-the-body-later method.

But it worked. The mischief and the screams around the cabin slowed. Weeks later, the menacing hilltop hollering ended for good.

Sixteen years later and a mile away from the besieged cabin, enthusiasts and experts now gather the first weekend in October for the annual Honobia Bigfoot Festival & Conference.

The Tulsa Voice sent a crack investigative camp crew to the Honobia festival, held at the Kiamichi Mountains Christian Mission on Christ’s 40 Acres (RV & Campgrounds), a worthwhile three-hour drive south of Tulsa.

The day after we arrived, we were approached by a large man in black overalls. He rode into the middle of our crew’s site at the outermost edge of Christ’s 40 Acres and cut the engine.

“Are ya’ll tryna to get abducted by Bigfoot?” he asked, exasperated. “You tryna become his love slave?”

He took off his camo baseball hat and shook the sweat from his head. Noontime sun in southern Oklahoma is still warm in early October.

We were bright-sun confident around a dying breakfast fire, cavalier after a skillet of scrambled eggs and bacon. And we hadn’t heard the Siege at Honobia tale told around the campfire yet.

The man in the overalls revved his ATV, tossed us a “Suit yourself” smirk and rode off down the grassy-green ravine and back to the safety of the center of camp.

It was true. We had pitched our tent just a Bigfoot-stomp from the wild woods, once roiling with angry predators and nervous rifle-fire, to get up close and personal with an Okie monster legend.

We’d also come for the genuine fun of this quirky Oklahoma festival. For one weekend each year, Christ’s 40 Acres plays host to NDN taco trucks and local high school bands, to dreamcatcher stands selling rattlesnake bracelets, truck-stop wolf t-shirts and Trump hats. In the brick-red chapel, Bigfoot experts run through PowerPoint presentations and theories and sell self-published books.

At dusk, hundreds gather in camp chairs around a communal fire and tell stories. They talked of hanging six-pound bags of butter-drenched popcorn in trees to lure Bigfoot (fresh apple fritters are also effective), of coming across immense, humanoid footprints, of the Siege at a Honobia.

Church is held in the chapel on Sunday morning and everyone’s welcome. The happy whooping of kids and the chatter of grown-ups drift into nearby trees like campfire smoke till long past 11pm.

It’s a great weekend to be alive in Squatchin’ country. (Verb: Squatch. Meaning: To go out in search of Sasquatch. Common accoutrements: Walking stick. Cargo shorts. Headlamp. Flask, filled with whiskey. Balls.)

In the morning, women in the communal bathroom, in between toweling off kids and brushing their teeth, asked, “Did you experience anything last night?”

One woman said she heard grunts.

We heard nothing but the whirring of insects. So we packed a whiskey-filled flask and took a rocky, dry creek-bed trail marked with painted-yellow wooden feet (size large). We tripped down stones through a dense forest of elm, oak, pine and walnut trees, spun with cottony bagworm nests.

The trees quickly muffled the safety of camp. Rocks gave way to soft sand, and we heard a stubbed-toe whoop-howl bounce off the murky Little River from deeper in the woods. We shushed quiet.

Another group of Squatchers were throwing out Bigfoot calls to attract the real deal. We returned the call, belly-out, full-force.

Thirty seconds later, another yowl bellowed across the copperhead-ridden river water. A few birds took flight. We called again.

No response.

After turning up empty-footed on the trail, we checked into the conference on Saturday morning. In white plastic chairs, attendees drank church coffee and ate church soup (white bean & ham with a thick slice of cornbread, $5) and listened to Sasquatch experts in the chapel. The windows are taped over with aluminum foil, the walls are wood-paneled, the lighting, rec-room overhead fluorescence.

The lineup of speakers for the 2016 Honobia Bigfoot Festival & Conference was only available in one place: handwritten on a sheet of lined paper in a soft-bound journal on a card table set up outside the chapel doors. 

“You can take a picture of it if you like,” said a church lady sitting at the card table in front of the journal and a cash-box.

We did. Here’s the roster with TTV field notes:

9am, Dr. Webb Sentell. Self-described Jungian clinical psychologist and hard-knock rationalist. Listed physical symptoms of a nearby Bigfoot: sizzling brain, rumbling tummy, mindspeak (out-of-body thoughts like STAY OUT OF THE WOODS), sudden sleepiness, dysphoria, dream intrusion.

10.30am, Kewaunee Lasperitis. Awakened at night for the last 37 years by inter-dimensional living apparitions, whom he identifies as the Bigfoot race. Latest self-published book, $10 on his merch table: “The Sasquatch Message to Humanity: Conversations with Elder Kamooh” by SunBow with foreword by Kewaunee Lasperitis, MS, MH.

Noon, Lunch hour

12.30pm M.K. Davis. TL; DR.

1.30pm Lyle Blackburn. The Criss Angel of monster hunters. Black cowboy hat, tight black T, tattooed biceps. Drew a standing room only crowd of brunettes in Bigfoot shirts, mom jeans and slip-resistant black shoes. Wikipedia entry says he’s a musician, author, actor and cryptozoologist from Fort Worth, Texas. Promoted his co-producer and on-screen role in an upcoming documentary from Small Town Monster Films, “Boggy Creek Monster.” Release date, Nov. 11.

2.30pm Shel Dron. (Couldn’t even.)

That evening, imitation Bigfoot calls boomed back and forth across the ravine for hours. We sent up our fair share of throat-open, hand-cupped hollers, too.

No dice. In the morning, someone went for church coffee and church biscuits (free) for soppin’ up bacon grease. We rolled up the tents, burned trash, ate the biscuits, poured water on the campfire. Groups of campers were already out squatchin’; the sound of gunshots boomed throughout the woods near Christ’s 40 Acres.

On the winding road back to Tulsa, we stopped at a crew member’s family home not far from Honobia and told them about striking out in our search for Bigfoot. An uncle in camouflage coveralls who had just spent two days in a deer stand said, “Bigfoot? You don’t gotta find him. He’ll find you.”

Just ask the deer hunter and his family.

*For the full report of the Siege at Honobia, check the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization’s online database at bfro.net.

For more from Jennie, read her article on Oklahomans for Health and their fight to put Medical Marijuana on the ballot.