American Mythology: A Guest Post by John O’Connor
From the things that go bump in the night to legends and lore dating back centuries, a universal truth about people is that we love a good myth. Whether its fairies, leprechauns or good ‘ole Nessie, there has always been a fascination with the unknown. Enter Bigfoot — one of the most iconic (and head-scratch inducing) monsters of all. Here, John O’Connor joins us with an exclusive essay on writing The Secret History of Bigfoot and the inspiration behind it.
Hardcover $26.99
The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster
The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster
In Stock Online
Hardcover $26.99
A fascinating read about a familiar concept from a fresh angle, The Secret History of Bigfoot is a deep dive into American myth making. Told with sharp, engaging prose reminiscent of the best travel writing, it has multiple entry points, from the supernatural to the more traditional outdoors.
A fascinating read about a familiar concept from a fresh angle, The Secret History of Bigfoot is a deep dive into American myth making. Told with sharp, engaging prose reminiscent of the best travel writing, it has multiple entry points, from the supernatural to the more traditional outdoors.
Some years back, at a yard sale in Woodstock, NY, I found a beat-up copy of The Bigfoot Casebook, by Janet and Colin Bord. Maybe you’ve come across it yourself somewhere. It’s one of those ubiquitous yard sale books, along with The Andromeda Strain and Horn of the Moon Cookbook. This was before I knew anything about Bigfoot. But I was taken with the Bords’ funky mishmash of black-and-white photographs and “firsthand eyewitness accounts,” many of which barely cohered. At a glance, it struck me as a poignant document of American mythology, one that bounced between actual research and performance art.
What really got me was the cover. I didn’t know it then, but it was an image from the famous Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin film, shot in Bluff Creek, CA, in 1967. Probably you’ve seen this, too, or a snippet of its maddeningly wobbly, sepia-toned verité. Arguably the best-known and most hotly contested piece of Bigfoot “evidence” in existence, the film captured what Patterson and Gimlin said was an actual Bigfoot striding across a sun-scorched streambed while casting a determined glance over its right shoulder.
I remember thinking the Bords’ cover image of Bigfoot was beautiful (Later on, I learned it was frame 352 from the PG film, which gave us our iconic profile of the Big Guy – or Big Girl. “Patty,” as she became known, turned out to be female). That something so otherworldly, so seemingly unknowable and yet familiar, had popped up on a 59-second-long “documentary”…the feeling was a little like waking from a dream that’s oddly lifelike.
So, I bought the book, thinking I’d eventually have a use for it in my work, but then quickly abandoned it on a shelf. In the years gone by, I’d almost forgotten about it and the impression it had made on me. But The Bigfoot Casebook was, in essence, what started me down this path, and it was among the first books I turned to while researching my own, The Secret History of Bigfoot: Fields Notes on a North American Monster.
Mostly because of the Bords’ exhaustive record of eyewitness “sightings” – more than 1,000 in the U.S., they asserted, between 1818 and 1982. Who were these people who claimed to have seen Bigfoot? Were they serious? Did they actually believe what they said they believed? I knew I wanted to meet people like them – today’s “Bigfooters” – who claimed either to have seen the elusive creature or that they wanted to see one. I went to Bluff Creek, where a group of filmmakers was attempting to reshoot the PG film in order to determine how it’d been made. I met Bigfooters in the Massachusetts Berkshires, in Washington State’s Northern Cascades, in East Texas, in upstate New York, and in an undisclosed locale in central Kentucky. All told, I spoke to around one-hundred Bigfooters while researching my book. The Secret History of Bigfoot is, I hope, a faithful recounting of their unique way of looking at the world.