Mary Beth Pope knows what she saw. On a clear night in November 2007, while hiking on an overgrown logging road in Sumter National Forest with four fellow members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, she heard a crunch of leaves and twigs, glanced to her left, and saw an eight-foot-tall creature walking alongside her.
By Paul Bowers from The Charleston City Paper
It had shaggy fur and arms that swung down by its knees, and it was perhaps 30 feet away. She froze in her tracks and tried to stay calm.
Pope, who runs a sustainable-food wholesale and retail business on Pawleys Island, moonlights as a sasquatch investigator with BFRO, which is perhaps the largest group of Bigfoot believers in North America. Formed in 1995 by a man in Ohio named Matt Moneymaker, the BFRO sends its members into small towns and backwaters to check out reports of Bigfoot sightings and either confirm or debunk them. According to the group's website, the state with the largest number of reports is Washington, with 525. The one with the fewest is Delaware, with two. South Carolina has 49.
For this particular investigation, the team drove to the end of a forest service road and began hiking single-file toward a meadow clearing where skookum activity had been reported (skookum, like skunk ape or knobby, is just one of the many regional names for sasquatch). The researchers maintained a distance of 20 to 30 feet between each other and kept silent as they made their way through the pine forest. Pope was fourth in line, and she didn't want to spook the intimidating beast that had appeared to her left.
"I didn't want it to know that I knew it was there, so I started walking again," she says. "When I started walking, it started walking. It kept its head straight ahead." She quickened her pace to catch up with the third person in line, but he shushed her when she tried to get his attention.
"I could see the meadow and our people coming to the end of their hike, and all I wanted to do was get there, get where I could be close to other people," Pope says. Just before she got to the clearing, the creature peeled off and disappeared into the woods.
That night as they camped out in the clearing, she told her fellow researchers about the encounter. They believed it. Back home, her tales usually fall on skeptical ears. She remains unshaken. "For me, I don't feel like I have to convince anyone, because I know what I saw," she says.
Pope estimates that she has contributed to 75 to 100 reports since joining BFRO in 2007, although most are not publicly available on the BFRO website. She says the point of the data collection is not to prove the existence of Bigfoot — the members already know where they stand on that issue. Rather, the group is tracking data like rainfall and deer migration patterns to learn what it can about America's best-known cryptid.
Pope, who runs a sustainable-food wholesale and retail business on Pawleys Island, moonlights as a sasquatch investigator with BFRO, which is perhaps the largest group of Bigfoot believers in North America. Formed in 1995 by a man in Ohio named Matt Moneymaker, the BFRO sends its members into small towns and backwaters to check out reports of Bigfoot sightings and either confirm or debunk them. According to the group's website, the state with the largest number of reports is Washington, with 525. The one with the fewest is Delaware, with two. South Carolina has 49.
For this particular investigation, the team drove to the end of a forest service road and began hiking single-file toward a meadow clearing where skookum activity had been reported (skookum, like skunk ape or knobby, is just one of the many regional names for sasquatch). The researchers maintained a distance of 20 to 30 feet between each other and kept silent as they made their way through the pine forest. Pope was fourth in line, and she didn't want to spook the intimidating beast that had appeared to her left.
"I didn't want it to know that I knew it was there, so I started walking again," she says. "When I started walking, it started walking. It kept its head straight ahead." She quickened her pace to catch up with the third person in line, but he shushed her when she tried to get his attention.
"I could see the meadow and our people coming to the end of their hike, and all I wanted to do was get there, get where I could be close to other people," Pope says. Just before she got to the clearing, the creature peeled off and disappeared into the woods.
That night as they camped out in the clearing, she told her fellow researchers about the encounter. They believed it. Back home, her tales usually fall on skeptical ears. She remains unshaken. "For me, I don't feel like I have to convince anyone, because I know what I saw," she says.
Pope estimates that she has contributed to 75 to 100 reports since joining BFRO in 2007, although most are not publicly available on the BFRO website. She says the point of the data collection is not to prove the existence of Bigfoot — the members already know where they stand on that issue. Rather, the group is tracking data like rainfall and deer migration patterns to learn what it can about America's best-known cryptid.
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