Our Wilder Selves — The Hunt for Sasquatch in Middle America

I’ve never taken a baseball bat into the woods. Never felt the need. But my dad has—a Louisville Slugger that’s seen better days. The grip wrapped in duct tape, he carries it by the handle, scanning for the perfect snag to give a sturdy thwack. He ambles up to one of the decomposing trees, tapping its remnants gently. “They’re called wood knocks,” he tells me, and they’re just one of the ways you can communicate with a Sasquatch.

He hands me the taped-up end, gesturing at the dead oak. I give it a wallop—then two, bettering my swing—and the knock echoes across the Iowa forest. Had anyone been around, “errant gunshot” might’ve been their best explanation. But not even a ranger was on duty; this was a 20-degree February day we had to ourselves.

And we knew it, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to look for something we didn’t think was there. The point was to see what we might find if we bothered to look.

He takes the bat from me, the semi-frozen snow cr-uuunching as he moves a few feet up the ravine. 

“So, do you want to hear a howl?”

IOWAN WILDS

Iowa’s Yellow River State Forest stretches for nearly 9,000 acres, maple-basswood and oak-hickory mazes running toward the Mississippi River on its eastern border. Steep and rich with valleys and coldwater streams, it’s the kind of place many assume can’t coexist with cornfields, state-fair butter cows, and campaigning politicians. But even though soybean cities dominate—over 90% of Iowa’s land is used for agriculture—impossible-to-tame limestone canyons and bluff-lined rivers like the Yellow do exist, and miraculously. These wild places have inordinate value both to humans and to wildlife: endangered monarchs rely on their milkweed; cerulean warblers sing through their trees; bobcats and coyotes find their feast. 

Not 200 years ago, this land ran bigger and wilder, though, with wolves, antelope, and elk roaming freely. Hundreds of animal-esque effigy mounds—earthen Indigenous sites shaped like bears, bison, lynx, and panthers—tell this bestial story in the state’s northeastern corner, right at Yellow River. Originally part of the state forest, 1,500 acres were handed over to the National Park Service in 1945 and redesignated as Effigy Mounds National Monument. In this dirt, the land reminds us of what’s been lost. 

As for what’s never been found, it’s true that no effigy takes the form of Sasquatch—a word that can be traced to the Sts’ailes peoples in British Columbia. The Midwestern Ojibwe do have a word for the gargantuan creature, though: Sabe. They believe the giant walked among humans, a reminder for us to remain true to our wilder selves.

A WILD IDEA—OR A HUMAN ONE?

To research Bigfoot sightings, there’s one place you start: the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO). Data from all across the U.S. and Canada comes organized by 49 states (save Hawaii), province, and county. There’s even a small collection of international reports. Color-coded maps organize sightings into categories that act like a sliding scale of confidence:

• Class A is the most clear-cut when it comes to spotting a Bigfoot, defined as “clear sightings in circumstances where misinterpretation or misidentification of other animals can be ruled out with greater confidence.”

• Class B is less reliable—cited as incidents when “a possible sasquatch was observed at a great distance or in poor lighting conditions and incidents in any other circumstance that did not afford a clear view of the subject.”

• Class C is fuel for skeptics, and is marked at the lowest level because they’re second-hand or third-hand reports, “or stories with an untraceable source.”

Every state has at least one Sasquatch report: At five each, Rhode Island and Delaware tie for last place. Washington, with Bigfoot’s legend embedded in nature and local lore, reigns champion at 710. Oregon? 257. California? 461. Most of these observations place the creature where it may be most expected, near lakes, forests, or crossing a road between green spaces. Of course, there are outliers: In 2017, one description ranked as Class A was filed in Kansas when two motorists reported they spotted a Bigfoot among cornfields by The World’s Largest Ball of Twine.

“Wherever we find open spaces that allow for our imaginations to roam, it seems Bigfoot has the potential to be a passerby.”

Aside from the idea that a Sasquatch could be as intrigued by a roadside attraction as any cross-country tourist, the variety of locales where it’s claimed to be found troubles the assumption that the densely forested Pacific Northwest has a monopoly on the creature. Even a “non-Squatchy” region like the Midwest has states surpassing Oregon, led by Ohio at 320. “Possible vocalizations” were recorded near Detroit Metro Airport in 2012, where just to its southwest, sandwiched between tarmacs and the suburbs extending out of Ann Arbor, is a series of large parks and two lakes that run for miles. 

No matter how these instances are classified, there remains a human commitment to try and explain the unexpected things people see or hear when out in any kind of wild, be it forest or urban sprawl—note that Washington’s King County (which features Seattle) and Oregon’s Clackamas County (which includes a portion of Portland) are where the state’s reports concentrate. Wherever we find open spaces that allow for our imaginations to roam, it seems Bigfoot has the potential to be a passerby. Nearly 5,600 sightings have been logged by BFRO, and each one represents a combination of curiosity and hope. From any corner, from any state.

THE HOWL

We’re following a dry creek bed deeper into the valley—where one can howl without feeling too conspicuous, where the narrowing topography readily funnels the sound. On the way, my dad continues Bigfoot 101: Only a few thousand are thought to be on the entire North American continent and, should you run into one, they have been known to throw rocks. Their smell can be a giveaway: “You’re covered in hair and you haven’t taken a bath in 18 years?” he asks, with the answer easily hanging over the question like the heavy stench he conjures for our imagination. He notes that a Bigfoot’s circadian rhythms differ from our own—they sleep during the day—but they also exist in small family units, like us. And also like locals, they have to survive the injustice of an Iowa winter.

Most people talking like this might seem like they’ve lost it, but not my dad. All worlds intrigue him, and when he was put to the job of entertaining cryptid-obsessed grandkids, he found a new world to investigate. The kids’ phase lasted a few months; my dad’s turned into a late-night TV hobby and vacation inspiration—“I swear, the best travel shows are Bigfoot shows. The landscapes!” His point is immediately felt amongst the wonder of the woods.

“Shoot, is that a bald eagle?” 

I fumble with his vintage binoculars. The soaring creature draws my attention to the woodpeckers—downies, hairies, pileated—flitting about the treetops. I gawk at them happily; these are new creatures to my woods. Just a few years prior, they weren’t in my awareness: There were birds in my woods, not pileated woodpeckers, not golden-winged warblers. There were trees, not ironwood, red oak, white ash. I’d have to get lucky to have mushrooms, and then there were certainly never lion’s mane or golden oysters. Growing up in Iowa, somewhere between shopping malls and cornfields, the woods of my past are little but chaos in shades of brown. If there were a wild thing in my woods, I wouldn’t bet on myself to see it. But that’s changed over time, and especially in these moments with my dad.

“Growing up in Iowa, somewhere between shopping malls and cornfields, the woods of my past are little but chaos in shades of brown. If there were a wild thing in my woods, I wouldn’t bet on myself to see it. But that’s changed over time, and especially in these moments with my dad.”

“Exactly, Jacq. Most people walk around oblivious to the world around them. Who looks for something they don’t think is there?” The answer is us, and we chuckle a bit, walking further into the valley, about a mile off the main road. We’re following raccoon, deer, and squirrel tracks—though nothing moves on land, only in the sky, magnifying the ground’s stillness. That could’ve been what spurred his next words. 

“You know, how many people are out at night in Yellow River?” He gets ahead of me, strangely deft in his old Filas. No one’s out here looking and listening, he adds, and even if they were, they’d attribute any noise to something else, something explainable—”that’s gotta be, you know, a cow.” There’s little culture here to think any differently—say you heard Sasquatch, and you’ll be laughed out of town.

We come to a place where the valley narrows further and the creek bed becomes more difficult to navigate. We stop, my dad walking to an open patch of snow, me hovering near a limestone ledge. It was clearly the spot—there was no going further without scrambling up the hillsides. We had arrived.

“Okay, keep quiet. If there’s a response, it might be 2,3,4,5,6—10 seconds later. Are we ready?”

“I’m so ready, dad.” I contain my laughter, but my shit-eating grin is a bit too wide.

He cups his hands around his mouth, moving slowly, deliberately, disbelief oozing from his dark-brown eyes. He’s never done this before—it’s a moment you can’t exactly replicate in good society. “Man,” he whispers, “you don’t get an opportunity like this in Black Hawk County.”

With a deep inhale, he erupts. An eight-second howl courses down the valley, my grin drops, and my right hand flies to my mouth. I had expected something else—something absurd. This, though, was mourning. This was rage. This was thick, guttural, from the stomach, cathartic, deep, a vomit of noise, almost like he was expelling 68 years of grief. It was an untamed roar that could only exist in this kind of space.

He brings his hands down to his sides, and we wait. 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11—

Knock.

“IOWA WAS A HOTSPOT”

“1978 seems to be the peak of the Iowa sightings,” says Leo Landis, state curator of the State Historical Society of Iowa. Growing up in the central part of the state, he remembers the small-but-active local Bigfoot community. He pulls up a 1977 clipping from the Des Moines Register quoting Cliff LaBrecque, who co-founded Iowa’s short-lived Bigfoot Information Center:

“When Bigfoot is caught, it will be caught between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The habitat is right, food is abundant, and there are few forests and mountains for trackers to contend with.” 

“When Bigfoot is caught, it will be caught between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The habitat is right, food is abundant, and there are few forests and mountains for trackers to contend with.”

LaBrecque, along with Kevin Cook, started the organization in 1977; with little funding, they mostly toured the Midwest with a Bigfoot replica, designed by Smithsonian-favorite Neal Deaton, until money ran out. Back then, Sasquatch sightings were common in the region—after sending me off with scads of articles, Landis points me to Jeremiah Byron, an Iowa-based Bigfoot researcher, to get thicker into the details. Does Iowa still have Bigfoot culture? Why did it fade? And what was up with the 1970s?

“Iowa was a hotspot,” Byron confirms, pointing to famed Bigfoot researcher René Dahinden’s 1978 meeting with Cook and his team to discuss local findings. Byron’s favorite account is one in the pile of documents Landis showed me about a family from Humboldt, Iowa, a small town about 100 miles northwest of Des Moines. That same year, members of the Dodrill family saw figures and heard howls around their home so regularly, they eventually called the local sheriff, who heard it himself. “These people definitely saw something,” said Humboldt County Sheriff Marvin Andersen, “but I don’t know what.”

The reports lessened but didn’t stop, says Byron, calling out a viral 2021 photo from Whitewater Canyon Wildlife Area—about 90 minutes south of Yellow River—where a two-legged shadow climbs the wooded hillside. Despite constant sightings in the 70s decreasing to yearly or less, there’s still a small-but-active community of Bigfoot enthusiasts here, he affirms, and they believe Iowa has the goods: The state’s massive white-tailed deer population is an abundant, year-round food source; and though public lands may be few, there are miles and miles of humanless terrain. Iowa is the least-populated state on the entire Mississippi River. 

When I ask him about our human perception of “wild” places, he knows precisely what I’m getting at. “We call this having ‘Bigfoot on the brain’,” Byron says. If Bigfoot is thought to be in a certain area, people become prone to seeing or hearing the creature, or finding Bigfoot evidence. In the Pacific Northwest, that means a constant slew of “blob-squatch” photos, debunkable footprints, and misinterpreted audio, like chattering barred owls. In other words, humans are terrible narrators of their own reality. Only when they expect to find things—including mythical creatures—do they find things. This places a particular emphasis on what it means to surround yourself in a space like Yellow River, where “wild” exists but culture doesn’t see it. These expansive spaces allow us to reflect on what it is we see and, ultimately, believe.

The more I ponder Byron’s answers, the more it gets me thinking: If you didn’t want to be found, maybe your best bet is living where no one thinks you exist.

AFTER THE REPLY

My dad and I glance at each other, each of us making sure that faraway noise wasn’t in our heads.

“What was that?”

“I heard a knock. Is that what you heard?

“It came from back in there.”

“Is there somebody messing with us?”

“I don’t think someone would know to knock in return.”

We stare into the middle distance, unsure what happened, unsure what to do next. A few more moments pass, and my dad fixes his grip on the Louisville Slugger. Bracing for a home run, he climbs over to the limestone and absolutely thwops the bat against the rock’s flat face, a second crack floating down the empty valley. It was game on.

No response. The woodpeckers resumed bashing their heads, a gentle nothing by comparison. Tap tap tap tap tap. 

We trade absurd ideas in whispers: wood-pecking eagles or boulder-bashing raccoons. Half-listening to nothing, we start walking back, chasing daylight before the sun sleeps behind the hills. We take a few more swings to do our due diligence; once it becomes clear no one and nothing’s responding, we toss in a few for fun—it’s not every day you get to walk around taking swings at whatever you please.

“You know, dad, I don’t want to ask you straight up if you believe in Bigfoot. There’s no mystery in that. But what draws you to it?” The kids who got him into it are practically adults now—he’d had a decade to explore this world and call it good.

“You have the majority that’s mostly never thought about it; you have a small group of believers; and you have the hopefuls. I always—I always—want to be hopeful.”

His brows furrow, considering, and he looks askance, making a “mmmmph” sound through his nose. “You have the majority that’s mostly never thought about it; you have a small group of believers; and you have the hopefuls. I always—I always—want to be hopeful.” I let him know the “hopefuls” includes dozens if not hundreds of Indigenous tribes, every country’s folklore from Australia to China, even Jane Goodall. 

“Jane Goodall? Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” He takes up my shit-eating grin.

WHAT MYTHS OFFER US

“Euro-Americans who came [to Iowa] viewed anything that existed prior to their arrival as wild,” says Landis, the curator from the State Historical Society of Iowa. “The grasses, the animals, the native people, and the land were all wild.” Almost all of that is gone now, and maybe there’s something to that: As we erase the roots of our humanity, we need to find new ways to tune into our wilder selves. Maybe searching for Bigfoot fulfills a human need to live amongst the unknown. Or at least visit for a few hours, a momentary connection to a wilder human life.

Or maybe we need ways to hope. Maybe belief in Bigfoot is a natural response to soothe us from the increasingly endangered world we’re creating, where chemicals line rivers and rivers light on fire and fire fills our air. What’s more beautiful and hopeful than believing that the wildest of creatures can hang on in cornfields and 13-square-mile forests, despite all we’ve done? What could possibly be more human than that?

“Bigfoot offers us a chance as humans to have one last mystery as a culture,” says Byron, whipping up images of childhood most of us can relate to—when downed logs were castles and streams were the Amazon River and concerns were abandoned in tree forts. “Who doesn’t want to think there’s something undiscovered in their own backyard?”

GOING HOME

Making our way from the deep of the forest, we never do come to a conclusion on the reply’s origins, and no other attempts yield any “action,” as it’s called when a Sasquatch communicates in some form. We amble back to the trailhead parking lot, get in the warming car to feel our fingers and wolf down sandwiches, and I go through my recordings: The reply is audible. 

More satisfying than that, though, I run into a moment where I get to hear my own happiness, my shit-eating grin audible through shivers and goosebumped skin. “This is fun,” I hear myself saying. “This is a lot of fun.”

The chase—before, after, and regardless of the knock—felt exactly like tracking pink dolphins or exploring enemy castles, with nothing but a baseball bat to defend ourselves and assist our imaginations. It was a chance to abandon, if but for a few hours, the seriousness of adulthood, the cornfield jungle beyond my periphery, the commercialism of the outdoors, the cynicism of the world, the computer at my desk. The chance to tune into the simple beauty of the planet was a privilege; the chance to remain true to my wilder self, a gift.

Words by Jacqueline Kehoe
Illustrations by Colette Holston