July 26, 2016 had all the makings of a typical Tuesday at
The Evergreen Courant until our office manager Cheryl Johnston came back from
the post office with the mail. When she returned, she handed me a white,
standard-sized envelope that was addressed to me, and I noticed right away that
the envelope didn’t have a return address.
I opened the envelope with my trusty pocketknife and pulled
out two sheets of paper that would ultimately have a big, but unusual, impact
on the local community. Here’s what the 176-word letter had to say.
----- 0 -----
Mr. Peacock,
In June, you printed a story regarding possible Bigfoot
sightings in this area. I don’t know if this is the same thing, but on the afternoon
of Sat., July 23, 2016 at around 2:30 or 3 p.m., a friend and I were traveling
west along Highway 84 East. As we approached Sepulga River, we saw a moving
figure run straight across the bridge in front of us.
For a split second, I thought it was a person running across
the bridge, then I realized that the thing we were seeing was solid black. It
ran very quickly with its knees appearing to be bent while it kept its head and
upper body very erect. It jumped over the railing. It raised its arms to the
sides as it jumped and they seemed to be very shaggy. We lost sight of it after
that.
There were cars behind us on the road. We also saw parked
vehicles near the water. Possibly those people saw it too, though I couldn’t
say for sure if they did.
----- 0 -----
The letter, which was postmarked July 25, was unsigned, and
quickly became the subject of much discussion in the newspaper office. Our
general policy at the newspaper is not to print anonymous letters, but this
letter seemed very different. Although unsigned, it seemed to carry all the
earmarks of a writer who genuinely wanted to let us know about something
important without making their name public.
Not long after that, I was reminded that this was not the
first time that an unusual creature had been spotted near the Sepulga River.
According to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, a similar creature was
reported near the intersection of U.S. Highway 84 and the Sepulga River on Aug.
10, 2004. With that in mind, I decided to write a news story based on the
anonymous letter sent to the newspaper, and that story was printed on the front
page of the July 28 edition of The Courant.
As it turned out, the public’s response to that story was
unlike anything I would have ever expected. I was soon flooded by phone calls,
e-mails and personal visits from individuals who reported having seen
“Bigfoot-like” creatures in and around Conecuh County, most notably the Acreman
brothers of Pine Orchard. I even fielded questions from Bigfoot researchers
from as far away as Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi.
Local radio personality Luther Upton, who is also on the
Evergreen City Council, also took an interest in the Bigfoot stories as did
local Bigfoot enthusiast Ashley McPhaul, a Navy veteran who lives just over the
Monroe County line in Excel. The resulting wave of publicity even caught the
interest of Bigfoot researchers associated with the TV show, “Killing Bigfoot.”
Bigfoot hunters Donald McDonald of Mississippi and Michael
Humphreys of Oklahoma from the TV show “Killing Bigfoot” visited Conecuh County
in January 2017 and even put on a program about Bigfoot at Evergreen’s Collard
Green Festival. Based on a large set of claw marks they found in Pine Orchard,
they declared that there’s definitely “monsters” in the woods in and around
Conecuh County. All of this led to stories that went worldwide on AL.com and
other big media outlets, including widely-syndicated radio shows like Rick
& Bubba and Coast to Coast AM.
Around this same time, a group of local Bigfoot enthusiasts
formed an organization called the Southwest Alabama Bigfoot Hunters and in
February 2017, the Evergreen city council approved an official resolution
declaring the City of Evergreen to be the Bigfoot Capital of Alabama because
Evergreen seemed to be the geographic center of all the Bigfoot activity. All
the while, Bigfoot sighting reports continued to flow in and eventually the
Alabama State Senate declared Evergreen to be the official Bigfoot Capital of
Alabama.
All the while, you could go down to CVS and buys all sorts
of Bigfoot-related items including Bigfoot Capital t-shirts and caps. In the
years to come, there has been a Bigfoot statue erected at Exit 96 in Evergreen,
and Evergreen was also featured in Brandon Maughon’s 2020 documentary, “The
Town that Loved Bigfoot.”
I say all that to say that the anonymous Bigfoot letter sent
to the newspaper on July 26 was the tiny spark that started it all, and to this
day, I still have no idea who wrote that initial letter. I’ve saved the letter
and have even considered having it framed for posterity’s sake.
In the end, I’m asking for the author of that letter to
consider coming forward, so that I can ask them more about what they saw near
the Sepulga River on July 23, 2016. I think it’s important that we fully
document what you saw, and, who knows, it might even prompt more witnesses to
come forward with their own reports of Bigfoot sightings.
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