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Showing posts with label Lon Strickler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lon Strickler. Show all posts

Saturday, 9 November 2013

The Sykesville Monster, Early Man Bigfoot

Lon Strickler, Phantoms and Monsters, the 1981 Sykesville (MD) Monster
http://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2012/06/sykesville-monster-bigfootor-something.html

Monday, June 11, 2012

The 'Sykesville Monster': Bigfoot...or Something Else?


Many of the readers of 'Phantoms and Monsters' and listeners of 'Beyond the Edge Radio' can recall my description of my 1981 encounter with a Bigfoot type being. If not, here are a few links:

My Bigfoot Encounter - Spring 1981
Man witness confrontation between Bigfoot and stray dog, near Sykesville, MD
The 'Sykesville Monster'


At the time, I called it a 'Bigfoot' because, frankly, that was the only way I could have described it. It wasn't human...it wasn't an ape. For over 30 years my encounter with this being has left a strange hole in my understanding of nature and reality. I have tried to comprehend exactly what it was I witnessed.

Over the years, I have tried to gather more information on my sighting as well as other sightings in the general area. Since my sighting in 1981 there have been two (2) more BFRO 'Class A' reports along the Patapsco River Valley and another four (4) general reports and sightings in the same area from 1972-1979.

I interviewed and got to know several of the witnesses of the 1972-73 flap after my personal encounter in 1981. Many of these witnesses have since passed away. There were other unreported incidents in the general Sykesville and Gaither, MD areas. I personally took statements to eight (8) more sightings / encounters between 1972-1979, including a home invasion on Norris Ave. and a utility shed break-in on Oklahoma Ave...both in Sykesville. There were also several chicken pens broke into up and down the South Branch of the Patapsco River in Gaither, MD - Sykesville, MD - Woodstock, MD - Daniels, MD and Ellicott City, MD. Most of the sightings have been within the Patapsco State Park...which has a history of unusual activity (UFO, paranormal and cryptid) throughout the park. I still live within 15 miles of all the locations.

Over the past few months, I decided to come to grips with my encounter and have a sketch or image of the being's face created. I knew that if the image was similar to what I actually witnessed there would be controversy and doubters...but I can't let that bother me.

After making a few inquiries, I was directed to a retired police forensics artist who is now a private investigator in Florida. The image would be created digitally. I forwarded all the facial descriptions that I had gathered from the witness' sightings and subsequent interviews.

On Saturday, I received the image with a note from the artist that read 'are you sure this is what you witnessed? It looks like a rendering of early man except for a few features'. I called him and assured him that this is what I witnessed...this is what we all witnessed. This was the 'Sykesville Monster'. Lon

 


Hunt Still in Progress

Baltimore Afro-American - Jun 9, 1973

Sykesville, Carroll County, Maryland

Sykesville, Maryland - The fear and uncertainty that has gripped residents here the past two weeks has been intensified by two new reports of monster sightings received by police Friday.

The "Sykesville Monster" was seen Friday evening by an out-of-state truck driver who described him vividly.

Of high significance is the fact the 1,400-population town, 20 miles North of Baltimore, Maryland in Carroll County, has jumped into nationwide headlines in the National AFRO and other news media. Following the Baltimore zoo assistant director Dr. Ted Roth called to say that he went to Sykesville and determined the footprint is by a large human foot "with fallen arches." He said he would report after he takes another trip to Sykesville to determine "what the balance of the body may be."

A Baltimore scientific research firm is also in Sykesville checking AFRO caller's from 'educators to the man-on-the-street' are on their way to the small town.

TRUCK DRIVER'S REPORT

According to the truck driver, (who requested anonymity), the "it" stood approximately seven to eight feet tall and appeared to be dark brown in color." It could have been a man on stilts." he said.

The driver stated that whatever it was seemed to be "caked with mud from the waist down."

Although he was unable to pinpoint the exact location of the sighting, the driver said it appeared to be sitting down. According to the driver, the "thing", which was evidently minding its own business, stood, turned around and sensing danger, dashed into the woods.

As the result of the AFRO story Friday, an investigating organization, Odyssey Scientific Research, Baltimore, is on the scene. John Lutz, director of Odyssey, talked to the truck driver, and said there is an additional witness in Anne Arundel who reportedly saw the monster.

TALKING WITH EYE-WITNESSES

Although reluctant to classify the "thing" which has been running loose in Sykesville, Mr. Jutz did state that at the present time, his corporation is, "listing the incident as an unidentified prowler until more information is gathered and more positive identification was made."

Mr. Lutz added that tape recordings are being made of each witnesses account in order to form verbal records, which will be studied, by veterinarians, zoologists and biologists.

According to Mr. Lutz, the entire incident could be the work of a prankster. "It's very possible that a prankster will call the police department and say it was all a big joke," he said.

AFRO RETURNS

As of Sunday, when two AFRO reporters returned to Sykesville's "Oklahoma Hill," citizens were hardly joking about the situation, which they feel is very real.

Mrs. Agnes Dorsey, mother of the' young man who first saw the "thing" said she thought more should be done to effect its capture and or destruction. They should have- -gangs of men out looking for it," she said, "I hope it's caught!"

According to Anthony Dorsey, the monster has also been seen in Woodstock, and Marriotsville, Md., located 6 miles from Sykesville, Md.



Lon Strickler - My Bigfoot Encounter - May 9, 1981 and BFRO report

Michael Frizzell - A Synopsis of the History, Reports, and Investigation of Claims of Unknown Hominids in and about the State of Maryland

History of the Maryland Bigfoot

BFRO - The Woodstock, MD Encounter

Sources:
Carroll County Times
Baltimore Afro-American
Baltimore News-American
Mark Opsasnick - The Maryland Bigfoot Digest: A SURVEY OF CREATURE SIGHTINGS IN THE FREE STATE Mark Opsasnick - "Monsters of Maryland: Bigfoot" - Strange Magazine 3 (1989)


NOTE: I am not going to place a copyright on this image. I sincerely hope that those people who wish to use it will include the actual story behind the rendered image. I think the big question is 'are these natural beings or are we seeing interdimensional examples of early man or other hominids from another time?'...Lon Strickler
 
[OK, so here we have a clear case by a prominent witness who saw an "Early Man" kind of a bigfoot. These sightings are far more common than the general media would have us believe. The COMMONEST kind of Bigfoot in the Eastern and Southern USA is the "Early Man" type.-DD]

Friday, 7 December 2012

Bigfoot...or Another Unknown Humanoid?

From Phantoms and Monsters

Bigfoot...or Another Unknown Humanoid?

Friday, December 07, 2012


This image was posted on the Chasing Trophy Whitetails Facebook page. The brief commentary attached to the image is posted below. What do you think it is?

What did Chasing Trophy Whitetails fan Michael Rogers catch on his gamecam?

This is one of several pics that my buddy got on his game camera back in November. It came by on November 11 and then again on November 18. Has anyone else seen anything like this before?

No location was provided, which is understandable. I'd like to say that this is it a Bigfoot-like hominid, though it is rather odd in appearance. Frankly...the legs and the body type remind me of the 'Goatman' descriptions from Prince Georges Co, Maryland back in the 1970s. Is this an image of a unknown humanoid? It could very well be. I'm currently investigating several sightings of strange humanoids (that resemble Bigfoot-type hominids) near unidentified flying craft that descended to the ground. There have been footprints similar to Bigfoot as well as another unknown being that has prints that resemble those of a turkey or chicken...but over 12" in length and width! That report is forthcoming...as soon as the timeline of the sightings and encounters have been established and recorded. Stay tuned...Lon

The Cryptoterrestrials: A Meditation on Indigenous Humanoids and the Aliens Among UsThe UFO Singularity: Why Are Past Unexplained Phenomena Changing Our Future? Where Will Transcending the Bounds of Current Thinking Lead? How Near is the Singularity?The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestial Pop Culture
-Actually I would be OK with the idea it was a Bigfoot with scraggly legs that was being called "Goatman" AND that is the same reason for Satyrs and other "Goat People" of Europe (Up to Scotland and including some Scandinavian TROLLS) to be described as having "Goat Legs". The typical bent-kneed Bigfoot gait might have something to do with such visual impressions.-DD.

Wednesday, 17 October 2012

Growing Up With Bigfoot-From Global Warming Site

Growing Up With Sasquatch
Posted: 16 Oct 2012 12:00 AM PDT

From Global Warming and Terraforming Terra
Ohio Grassman-DD substituted photo

 
What is now happening, is that the increased publicity and the internet has made it possible for shy witnesses to come forward to well established data collectors such as Lon on the Natural plane Blog. Substantial and important reports are now coming out and all have the internal veracity of producing completely new information that is also highly consistent.

This one confirms an expected datum and an unexpected datum. The expected datum is that the creature is able to take advantage of garbage in the same way as bears do but is also able to be generally surreptious about it. Successful penetration of security is no surprise though. I have met groundhogs that cute and this creature has our hands.

That they toss stones and make noise to scare off unwelcome kids is also no surprise. They are not lethal to us fortunately. Do not think for a second that they can not use that stone to take your head of in an eye blink. They are quite able to live next door and not disturb us at all and appear also careful not to. That is an additional reason to think that they are way more plentiful than we imagine.

The unexpected datum is that they practice field craft in terms of dealing with excrement. We had a single hint of that in the past but this report makes it totally clear that that is just what they do. They dig pits and bury it. This also means that they have a preferred base somewhere and that they are in the habit of keeping it tidy.

This report shows us a temporary base camp with a nest built in the grass. Again seen before, but not in conjunction with a close by human settlement.

The lack of scat had bothered me for a long time and that is now well answered.

As an aside, I have been monitoring reports for new data for over fifteen years and have come to know this creature very well. Most reports pick up on roaming males likely out foraging. I suspect that a lifeway similar to the gorilla troop is to be expected but we have not had direct confirmation at all. What we have though is a male with a female and cub out together on the prowl.

The evidence so far supports a nuclear family of sorts living as hunter gatherers and the possibility of several hunters working together for certain hunts. What I am seeing though is profound flexibility and a surprisingly low level of aggression.


Cryptid Encounters: Growing Up With Sasquatch - Marysville , Ohio

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2012


The following story is presented unedited. This is just an example of the many real-life encounters included in Phantoms& Monsters: Cryptid Encounters

“Hello - I saw the e-mail link at the bottom of your page and wanted to sent these accounts to you. Though I’ve lived in Florida for just over 12 years now, I grew up in Ohio . I’m convinced that we had a Sasquatch that would pass through the area on a regular basis. This conviction is due to both sightings of it (them?) and other evidence. I had actually e-mailed Autumn Williams with these accounts several years ago after watching a few episodes of Mysterious Encounters when it was in production. She never bothered to write back in response, so I don’t even know if she received the message. Since then, I contacted a researcher in Ohio with these events. Sorry to say, I don’t recall the man’s name. He was excited about it when he replied back to me with questions, but I’ve heard nothing since.


My parents and I moved into a house that was only a couple hundred yards from an abandoned railroad bed in Marysville, Ohio when I was 5-years-old. It wasn’t long after that we, my friends and I, started our forays to the railroad bed. During the Summer months, the weeds there would grow far taller than we were. For us, it was akin to being in a forest. Each Summer, we’d carve a path through, using sticks to hack and slash at the weeds, cutting out a narrow, curving path and a larger open area where we’d gather to talk and whatnot.


When the Sasquatch first turned up, or, I should say, when we first noticed it, we were still young. We had no idea what was there. We felt that something was there on occasion ,watching us. But for a long time we saw nothing. Then one of my friends reported having seen something large and hairy there one night. He saw it from a distance and only briefly. The rest of us didn’t take him too seriously at first. He kept hounding us with it, though. Then another friend, a girl whose grandparents lived in the lot adjoining the railroad bed, saw something one night. She mostly lived with her grandparents due to family issues and her bedroom window looked right out at the old railroad bed. Having a second report of something large and hairy up there at night made us all take it more seriously. Still, we were young and stupid. And the railroad bed was our place to go to get away from our parents. It was our place. We weren’t going to give it up easily. Being so young still, we had no idea what we had. We started calling it a Troll. As we never had the impression that it was there full-time. So, we learned to live with it.

It’s been suggested to me before, upon sharing these events, that the Sasquatch may have been young itself. I don’t know.


Several years went by. We were easing into our early teens. That’s when things started to pick up. Maybe there was a juvenile. Maybe it was just watching us grow and decided that, while it was willing to allow young children to play there, it wasn’t going to be so tolerant of older children. But the girl who lived right next to the railroad bed had several more night-time sightings. She was actually so afraid of what she saw that she convinced herself that she dreamed these, rather than truly admit that there was something there. I had three sightings of it/them over the years. She was with me for the first. We were in her grandparents’ yard, walking up the short, gentle hill to the railroad bed. She froze and put her arm across my chest, stopping me. I looked at her. She was staring, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, pointing straight ahead. Through a narrow gap in the weeds, I saw what looked like the head and shoulders of a large humanoid figure with dark black hair. It was either sitting or crouched, holding perfectly still. We were seeing its profile. We backed slowly down the hill until it was out of sight, then turned and ran.


After that, she refused to ever go back up there. Not even as part of a group. The following day, we told another friend. He wanted to see the spot where the creature had been seen. It was broad daylight, so I took him up there, albeit reluctantly. The only sign we saw of it was a large patch of flattened grasses where it had been.


Somewhere in there, he and I also found what we referred to as the “vine cave”, which I now believe to have been a nest. From our point of view, it simply popped into existence literally overnight in the large, open area we’d carved. He and I actually crawled into it a few times, but always felt very uncomfortable in it and always left quickly. Not long after the discovery of the “vine cave”, a couple of rival kids destroyed it, thinking we’d built it. I think that may have well caused the increase in encounters with the Sasquatch and it’s attempts to chase us away.


My second and third sightings were spaced out over the next few years. Each time I saw it was in broad daylight. I was in our driveway, pulling weeds that were growing up through the gravel. Movement from up at the railroad bed caught my attention. I looked up there to see a tall, humanoid being with long arms walking along the hill, moving to my right. It was covered in dark black hair. I’ve always suspected it was the same creature I saw on my first sighting, but don’t know for sure. I watched it walk for a few seconds until it was blocked from view by a neighbor’s storage shed. Then I turned and ran into the house. I didn’t go back up to the railroad bed for weeks.


My third sighting was from a far greater distance. On the other side of the railroad bed was a fenced-in area of cow pasture and the local water tower. Beyond that was a trailer court. I was in our upstairs back bedroom one afternoon, again, during broad daylight. I saw what I first took to be a rolled-up rug by a trash can back in the trailer court. I could just barely see it, due to the distance. I looked away, and then looked back. What I was seeing seemed shorter, as if it had sagged, or crouched. I kept looking away, and then looked back, wanting to see if it moved. I couldn’t tell if it was moving or not. Finally, I looked away for about ten minutes. When I looked back, whatever it had been was gone.


Another friend of mine lived in a house just beyond the far side of the trailer court. A wooden privacy fence divided his back yard from the trailer court. He once told me that he and his family would sometimes smell a heavy, musky scent at night. They would sometimes hear what sounded like heavy footfalls outside their house at night. He said his mother even claimed to have heard a loud heartbeat on occasion.


All in all, we were lucky. We gave it plenty of incentive to lash out at us. Luckily, it never did anything to hurt us. Just scare us, employing fear tactics. We were just too dumb and stubborn to pay close enough attention. Even after we’d all seen it.


Aside from the direct sightings of the creature(s), we had other evidence that it was there as well. Once, when I was in my teens and at the railroad bed alone, something that sounded very large was in the weeds and brush ahead of me, thrashing at the weeds, causing them to move and make a lot of noise. I thought at first it was the same friend who’s wanted to go check out the site of my first direct sighting of the Sasquatch. About the same moment I realized that whatever was ahead of me was too large to be him a rock about the size of my fist was thrown at me, just narrowly missing hitting me in the head. I ran and refused to go back to the railroad bed for weeks after. Next time I was there alone I was in the same place and the same weed-thrashing occurred again. Luckily, no rock was thrown that time. Another time that same friend who wanted to see the spot of my first sighting and I were at the railroad bed by ourselves. There had to have been at the very least two of the creatures with us, one on either side of us. Nothing was thrown at us, but the same weed-thrashing noises started up to each side of us.Oddly, this time, nothing was moving that we could see. Both of us clearly heard the sounds, but couldn’t see a thing moving. Still, after holding our ground for only a few moments, we both ran.


This same friend also decided to step up our own claims on the railroad bed after he had found a rock cairn built on our path one day. The cairn was small.My friend spouted his usual line of, “No f^*&ing monkey is going to chase me away!” and promptly kicked the cairn, scattered the stones. We gathered up new stones and built a new, larger cairn in place of the one we’d found. We left and went back the next day to find our own cairn scattered and a new, larger one in its place. My friend immediately kicked it apart and we built a new one, larger still, in place of the one we’d found. This went on for days; each day we’d find that the cairn we’d built the day before had been wrecked and new, larger, one would be in its place. Each day my friend would scatter the new one and we’d build our own, larger yet, in place of the most recent one we’d found. Secretly, I thought he was going back up to the railroad bed later and building the new cairn we would “find” the next day and he thought the same of me. Finally, after this had gone on long enough that the cairns were getting to be a bit larger than shoebox size, my friend decided to go one better and scent mark the cairn we’d just built. He told me what he was going to do and promptly unzipped his pants and urinated on the rock cairn we had just built. Afterward, we left and went to his house. We hung out on his front porch for two or three hours, talking, then decided to go check on the new, scent marked cairn. The smell hit us when we were still a good hundred yards, maybe more, from the cairn. We knew what we’d find and it scared both of us. As we’d been together for the entire intervening time, each knew that the other had not gone back to the railroad bed to do anything. The scent was an overpowering musk that was so strong it made us sick. Think skunk concentrate. We held our breath, ran in, saw what we knew we’d find - a new cairn that was noticeably larger than the one we’d built a few hours prior -and ran back out into clear air to breath. That stench lingered for days, but that ended the rock cairn war.

There were other times, before and after that, when my friends and I would be at the railroad bed and smell what smelled like a skunk. We also once found what looked to be shallow, crude pit toilets. We saw what looked to be finger marks in the mud and suspected they’d been dug out with very large bare hands. Several of the toilets contained what looked to be human fecal matter, only far larger.


The next door neighbors we had while I was growing up were very wasteful people. They didn’t believe in leftovers from meals. If something wasn’t eaten, it went into the trash, not the refrigerator. Their trash was torn open many, many times. They went to the expense of having a 5-foot-tall brick wall built around the area they kept their trash cans in. There was a green picket gate on the front for the garbage collectors to open to get access to the trash. They also bought trash cans with locking lids. None of it did any good. Whatever kept tearing into the trash would sometimes open the gate, leaving it open, and knew how to unlock the locked trashcan lids. I have often wondered if their trash wasn’t why the Sasquatch liked that area and if it wasn’t using the railroad bed as a convenient staging place to raid both their trash and trash from the aforementioned trailer court.


I have no evidence to support these claims. We were young and never thought to gather any evidence - something I kick myself for to this day. Having a Sasquatch passing though so closely so often didn’t seem special to us because we were growing up with it.


The address for the house my parents and I lived in while all this went on is (redacted). We moved in when I was 5-years-old and moved out in 1998 when I was 22, only days before my 23rd birthday. Later I was told the railroad bed area has become even more abandoned and overgrown. But I have no idea if the Sasquatch is still there, or not.” - S.H.

NOTE: Since receiving this narrative, I have kept in contact with the witness and believe him to be very credible. Lon