Post by Graveyardbride on Jul 18, 2021 16:54:12 GMT -5
Whitehall, N.Y.
Bigfoot in the Adirondacks
During the year 2020, 113 New Yorkers reported Bigfoot sightings and because many choose to keep man-beast encounters to themselves for fear of ridicule, the actual number who saw, or think they saw, the bipedal creature is undoubtedly much higher. Fortunately for cryptid hunters and afficionados, Michael Guimond of Massena, in St. Lawrence County, harbored no such fears and when he posted his experiences on Facebook, others were encouraged to share their sightings.
According to Guimond, who saw the hairy hominid around 11:30 on the night of Saturday, June 20, 2020, when he was driving along Route 37, “Something bipedal ran across the road within 50 feet of my car. This thing was extremely fast. I was going 60, it crossed the road from right to left in less than a second. It was not a deer, I’ve seen plenty of deer. This thing was brown or grey, shaggy, and had arms and legs that moved in a circular motion.”
Aric Lauzon admitted he had never believed in Bigfoot before moving to Louisville, N.Y., also in St. Lawrence County, where he remained for four years. “I lived there in 2011 and I started walking my dog outside at night around 8:30,” he posted. “The woods at the back of my house went on for miles and miles. I was out there a couple nights and I kept hearing a loud screaming noise. It sounded like nothing I have ever heard before in my life. It sounds like a mix between an elephant and a bear, it goes right through you, it’s deafening.
“The summer of 2013 was when it started getting really bad,” he continued. “Every night I would have company over and every time we were outside, we would hear this thing screaming. One day I came home from work at 8 a.m. and my neighbors were all outside. While I was at work, one of them ran through my yard ... and destroyed my birdhouse. There was big footprints through my whole yard and hair stuck in my fence.”
Lauzon finally contacted Dean Gleason, director of Seaway Valley Bigfoot Research, and requested the organization conduct a week-long investigation. “The DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) came with him,” Lauzon explained, “and they all went back into the woods around 3 a.m. They were doing tree knocks and the thing was doing tree knocks back. One of them threw a rock into the brush and a minute later something threw the rock back at them and let out a huge roar.”
Gleason began Seaway Valley Bigfoot Research for people to report their sightings and experiences. “I’ve been doing Bigfoot research for quite a number of years,” he said. “I’ve had six sightings in this area. I used to have a Sasquatch sticker on my Jeep, and I had 40 to 50 people come up to me throughout the community and tell me their stories. A lot of people think Bigfoot research is a big joke, people laugh at me, some of my own family doesn’t even believe me.”
After researching the furry hominids for 10 years, Gleason is convinced the creatures are harmless unless irritated. “I don’t want any of them to get hurt or people trying to find them and mess with them,” he emphasized. “I really feel that they don’t bother people unless they’re provoked. I’ve only ever had one get aggressive with me. I’ve been in the woods with a lot of them and they’ve always left me alone.
“The United States has a lot of habitat for them,” he added. “They’re a worldwide phenomenon, every country has a belief in an animal like this. There’s a lot of credible evidence and as DNA technology advances, I think a lot of people are going to be surprised.”
There have been Sasquatch reports on the North American continent for hundreds of years, beginning with those of the American Indians, and some would say New York’s Adirondacks, from Saranac Lake in the north to the village of Whitehall near the Vermont border, has as many Bigfoot sightings per capita as anywhere else in the United States.
The small village of Whitehall, population approximately 2,300, has been something of a Bigfoot Mecca for close to a half-century. According to Bruce G. Hallenbeck in his book, Monsters of New York: Mysterious Creatures in the Empire State, the Bigfoot encounters in and around the Washington County community began on August 24, 1976, when three teenagers, Martin Paddock, Paul Gosselin and Bart Kinney, were driving on Abair Road (County Road 11 between Whitehall and Fair Haven) just outside town, when they saw a “large human form” standing on the side of the road. Unable to believe their eyes, they turned around to get a better look and the thing commenced squealing and screaming as it advanced in their direction. Paddock was driving and when Gosselin yelled they needed to “get the hell out of here!” Paddock became so unnerved he floored the accelerator, burning 57 feet of rubber.
The boys immediately reported the incident to the police, who were skeptical of their story, and some locals suggested the teens had likely been smoking something other than tobacco.
After the teenagers reported what they had seen, Wilbur Gosselin, Paul’s father, admitted that a year earlier, he and two other men encountered the hairy creature at Abair Road when they went to investigate strange screams coming from that direction. It isn’t surprising the trio chose to keep their encounter to themselves.
On the night of August 25, Brian Gosselin, a member of the Whitehall police force and Paul’s older brother, decided to check out the area down in the meadows, where his brother and father had seen the monster. A state trooper was positioned at the top of the hill on Abair Road and the two were communicating by radio. After approximately an hour-and-a-half, they heard a horrendous noise and the trooper barked over the radio, “Brian, what the hell is that? I’m heading out of here!” The trooper then sped away and although he didn’t leave skid marks like Paddock did the previous day, he wasted no time putting as much distance as possible between himself and whatever was “out there.”
Gosselin remained, determined to find out if his brother and father had been exaggerating or if there was, indeed, some sort of monstrous animal stalking Abair Road. He proceeded to shine his spotlight in the direction of the bloodcurdling noises and got the shock of his life. “It was over 7-feet tall, probably around 400 pounds,” he recalled. “When I put the spotlight on it, it raised its hands, they weren’t paws, they were hands, I could see the fingers, to cover its eyes. They were red and about the diameter of a mayonnaise cover, they didn’t glow like a deer’s eyes in headlights though.”
At this point, he estimated the animal – or man-beast – was no more than 30 to 35 feet away. “It let out such a deep, deep, deep-toned guttural howl, roar, whatever you want to call it,” he continued. “It’s impossible for a human to make that noise. This thing showed no aggression though. If it wanted me, it could have had me. Let’s put it that way.”
In 2018, Brian Gosselin, assisted by Sue Gosselin, recounted his experience in Abair Road: The True Story.
While the 1976 encounters are certainly the most spectacular Sasquatch sightings in the Whitehall region, they are by no means the first. In 1975, Cliff Sparks, owner of the Skene Valley Country Club, reported seeing a tall, hairy, man-like creature with big red eyes on Hole 1 of the golf course. Following the sighting, Sparks added a caricature of Bigfoot to his company’s logo.
Through the years the Northern Sasquatch Research Society has collected numerous accounts of Bigfoot encounters in the Adirondacks. One man reported a Sasquatch threw basketball-sized rocks at him and one of them hit his vehicle. In another report, a woman driving in a remote area near Saranac Lake back in the 1960s came upon something large and furry lying in the road. When she got out to see what it was, the creature – which had apparently been knocked unconscious – arose, stood up on two legs and came after her. Although she managed to get back into her vehicle, before she could drive away, the angry beast ripped the door off her car. Fortunately, another vehicle frightened the monster and it ran off into the woods.
Dan Gordon, a former Whitehall police officer, waited 23 years before revealing what he and another officer saw back in February 1982. According to Gordon, he and his partner were driving north on Route 22 about a half-mile from East Bay around 4:30 a.m. Suddenly, a tall, hairy creature scampered across the road on two legs and up a steep embankment. At the time, they were approximately a hundred yards from the Washington County Highway Department Garage. In Gordon’s estimation, the lanky, narrow-shouldered beast was 7½- to 8-feet-tall with dirty, mangy, dark brown fur. When he made his sighting public, some suggested it was probably someone in an ape suit, but Gordon was adamant, “There’s no way in hell that I could believe this was a man in a fur suit.” The animal, he recalled, slouched and its arms were long and swung as it walked with what appeared to be remarkable speed. He got out of the car and drew his weapon with the intention of tracking the animal, but quickly scratched the idea when his partner made it abundantly clear he had no intention of leaving the safety of their cruiser.
After coming forth and admitting what he had seen, Gordon’s sighting was reenacted on the History Channel’s Giganto documentary. Three years later, he was administered a polygraph test – which indicated he was being truthful – and appeared in the MonsterQuest episode, “Bigfoot in New York.” The Whitehall encounters also have been featured on several other TV programs, including Unsolved Mysteries, Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot, the Outdoor Life Network’s Mysterious Encounters and the 2015 Beast of Whitehall produced by Small Town Monsters. More recently, Seth Breedlove of Small Town Monsters included Whitehall in his latest film, On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Journey, which premiered April 15, 2021.
In an account from 1996, two individuals rowing on Pine Pond at the base of Ampersand Mountain saw what they initially believed was a black bear at the edge of the water. However, as they rowed toward the creature, it stood up and they realized it “had been crouching there on its feet like a catcher from a baseball team.” Standing on its hind legs, the beast was at least 7-feet-tall with dark brown fur, a face with fleshy upper cheeks and dark eyes that “had a brightness about them.” The monster, they claimed, looked at them for at least 10 seconds and appeared to be “sniffing the air.” Then what sounded like snapping twigs startled the beast and it spun around before “darting into the wood line like a cat.”
In an interview several years ago, Tim Albright of Castleton, Vermont, a retired security guard who called himself an amateur cryptozoologist, said he had no doubts about the Whitehall sightings. “Bigfoot has a very wide range,” he explained. “There are reports of the creature in the Adirondack foothills as well as in the Taconic and Green Mountains. ... There are legends of mysterious stone giants as well as sightings of ape-like giants all along the St. Lawrence River and on through the Great Lakes. Even Samuel de Champlain reported seeing a Sasquatch in Canada during the 1600s.” Albright even has a cast of a footprint he discovered at Vanderburg Pond near Whitehall. “The footprint,” he insisted, “looks nearly identical to the giant prehistoric ape Gigantopithecus blackii. This hairy guy was the original King Kong of the Ice Age. Cavemen probably tangled with him.” Additionally, Albright seemed convinced a giant apelike mammal freely traverses forests between US Route 7 in Rutland County, Vermont, and the eastern shore of New York’s Lake George.
Albright admitted he preferred to work alone and had little patience with some Bigfoot hunters. “Some of the research groups have good intentions,” he acknowledged, “but then they go barreling into the woods with ATVs and kids in tow. Heck, that’s a sure way of chasing away Sasquatch. These creatures are very secretive.”
Following decades of sightings, in the 21st century, the village of Whitehall decided to capitalize on its notoriety. In 2004, a law was enacted making the hunting of Sasquatch-type creatures illegal, but it was another 13 years – on December 5, 2017, – before a gigantic (11'8") Bigfoot statue was erected on Route 4. A few months later, Bigfoot was declared Whitehall’s “Official Animal” and a “Bigfoot Appreciation Day,” to be celebrated during the month of September, was created. Although the 2020 celebration was canceled because of the pandemic, the festival, which includes a Sasquatch Calling Contest, usually attracts approximately 2,000 visitors to the area – not bad for a village the size of Whitehall. The next Sasquatch Festival is scheduled for Saturday, September 28, 2024.
Sources: Hailie Addison, The Watertown Daily Times, June 26, 2021; Dan Pfeifer, Investigating Bigfoot, May 1, 2021; Ed Balint, The Repository, April 15, 2021; Mark Mulholland, WNYT, December 27, 2019; Pamela Merritt, Saranac Lake, March 9, 2015; Mark Price, The Charlotte Observer, July 16, 2018; Eric Jenks, The Schenectady Daily Gazette, June 28, 2018; In In Search of Bigfoot; Bill Toscano, The Glen Falls Post-Star, September 21, 2016; BigfootBase.com, December 6, 2015; Loren Coleman, CryptoNews, February 5, 2014, and June 2, 2015; and Skene Valley Country Club.
