Summary
On the night of 1 May 1971, Bobby Ford, 25, told authorities that a hairy, manlike animal had grabbed him at a rented house on U.S. 71 near Fouke, in Miller County, Arkansas. He put it at about seven feet tall and three feet across the chest, with red eyes. His wife, Elizabeth, said a hairy arm with claws came through a window while she was on the couch. He was treated at St. Michael Hospital in Texarkana for scratches and mild shock and sent home. Deputies found claw scratches on the porch and a set of strange tracks. They found no blood. Jim Powell’s account ran in the Texarkana Gazette on 3 May. The next day’s paper is the first to use the name Fouke Monster.
Background
Fouke is a small town in the Sulphur River bottoms, about ten miles south of Texarkana. Boggy Creek and the older name Jonesville sit in that same country. Before the Gazette story, later collectors call the local telling the Jonesville Monster. The earliest dated remark anyone has from a named person is not a 1946 police file. Leslie Greer, who was sheriff from 1967 to 1974, said that in 1946, while he was campaigning for tax assessor, a woman on a porch between Fouke and the bridge told him she had seen an animal go down into a low, brushy place. She said it looked kind of like a man and walked like a man, and she did not think it was a man. He repeated that years afterward. It is his memory of a conversation. Livestock kills, nighttime shrieks, and a creature roaming since the early twentieth century are later color. They are not in that remark.
The Fords had been in the house less than a week. Ford said something had been around the place for several days. On the Saturday night, he, his brother, and a hunting companion put a flashlight on a figure at the back of the house, fired, and thought it fell. They started toward it. The women screamed. Ford ran for the house and said the animal met him there, threw an arm over his shoulder, and grabbed him. He broke loose and went through the front door so fast he did not open it. The men fired again. Elizabeth Ford said she had been asleep in the front room and woke to a clawed arm in the window and to red eyes. Powell and Dave Hall of radio station KTFS found the family moving out.
The sheriff’s office searched. Officers had the porch scratches and the tracks. They did not have a body, hair, or blood to show that any of the shots had hit. A trail of three-toed prints turned up in the weeks after, including tracks associated with a soybean field. In mid-June, Frank Schambach, an archaeologist at Southern State College in Magnolia, looked at Gazette photographs of the prints. He told the Associated Press there was a 99 percent chance they were a hoax. Primates have five toes. He also said the monkey family is active by day, and the Fouke reports were of something moving at night. A three-toed cast is not a point in favor of an ape. It is the detail he used to set an ape aside.
The story left the county at once. The Associated Press and United Press International moved it. Little Rock station KAAY posted a bounty of $1,090. Hunters and dogs went into the bottoms. The dogs did not carry a line. Farmers complained of trespass in the crops, and Sheriff Greer put a temporary stop on guns. On 28 June, L. H. Harvin, Floyd Thomas, and Robert B. Williams were fined $59 each for a false report that the creature had attacked them. Greer had found blood under their fingernails. That false report is separate from the Fords. It shows how fast the month produced stories that did not hold.
In 1972 Charles B. Pierce shot The Legend of Boggy Creek in and around Fouke, from a script by Earl E. Smith. It is a staged picture that uses the Ford night and local talk, and some residents appear in it. Made for about $160,000, it is reported to have taken in about $20 million. The film is why the name outran the county. It is not a record of what was on the porch.