I acknowledged that we were already acquainted with one another. Although my principal teaching assignments were classes in creative writing and journalism, in 1963 I had also been an instructor in the Freshman English Core Program—where everyone, from future medical doctors to physics teachers, studied the classics of world literature. Bob had been in one of my classes, and even though he was a very polite and pleasant young man, he never made it a secret that he was a science major, concentrating on biology.
Although Dostoyevsky and Goethe may not have held an enormous amount of interest for him, when called upon in class, Bob’s answers were concise and demonstrated that he had been paying attention. And now, four years later, in his senior year, his excited girlfriend was dragging him into my office and pressuring him to relate the details of an experience that he obviously he felt very awkward discussing. Finally, after a bit of coaxing from Carla and my assurance that I was no longer grading his work, he told a remarkable story—that weekend he had encountered a creature that was nowhere to be found in his biology texts.
He had been driving on Minnesota Highway 52 on his way to Decorah, Iowa. It was about ten o’clock in the evening, and he was a short distance from Rochester when his headlights picked up the form of someone crouching at the side of the highway. Bob’s first thought was that someone might be injured or ill, and he pulled his car onto the shoulder of the highway only a few yards from the person to see if he might be of assistance. When the headlights caught the “someone” in full illumination, Bob saw that he had encountered something beyond his knowledge.
“I could see that its features were apelike,” Bob told us. “There was no snout on its face. Its features were definitely humanoid, and its shoulders were heavy. The thingran up the steep embankment to the shelter of the woods as easily as if it was running up a flight of steps.”
Bob walked a few feet to the spot where he had seen the creature crouching and saw that the thing had been kneeling over a recently killed rabbit. Bob picked up the rabbit, and the thing standing on the embankment raised itself up to its full height and barked what sounded like a harsh cough of anger and protest. “It obviously thought that I was going to steal its dinner,” Bob said, “and I wasn’t about to argue with it. I dropped the rabbit and ran back to my car.”
On his way to Decorah, Bob had time to ask himself a lot of questions in an attempt to explain away his impossible encounter. He decided that the creature could not have been a bear or a wolf—predators that would have been rare in southern Minnesota. “That thing had been crouching in a humanlike position,” Bob said. “That was why I thought that I had seen a human being in trouble. When my car approached, it turned to look over its shoulder. The creature’s head had definitely turned on a neck.” Bob explained why such an action was strangely significant. As a biologist and an outdoorsman, he knew that neither a bear nor a wolf can look over its shoulder—they have to turn their entire bodies to see what is behind them.
“The thing that really capped it for me,” Bob said, “was the fact that while it was running away from me, I saw well-developed buttocks. Buttocks are a distinctly human characteristic. No bears, wolves, or apes have buttocks. What I saw could only be described as a naked, hairy wildman!”
Bob was an intelligent young man. As his former English teacher, I could say without pronouncing any taint of disapprobation that he was not a highly imaginative student. Although always attentive, Bob’s lack of participation in class discussions made it quite clear that he was a rationalist, a scientist, who was only intellectually respectful of the imaginative works of great literature—and who would not indulge in wild stories to entertain his buddies or his girlfriend.
What Bob saw that night I believe to have been the same type of creature, the same kind of hulking man-beast that has always lurked in the shadows and seems always to have been with us. Over 25,000 years ago, the Franco-Cambrian artists may have been expressing their awareness of such creatures in the portraits of two-legged entities with the heads of animals that they painted on the walls of their caves.
Perhaps the earliest written record of a man-beast appears on a Babylonian fragment circa 2000 B.C.E. which tells the story of King Gilgamesh and his wolf-like friend, Enkidu. The Epic of Gilgamesh remains to date the oldest known literary work in the world.
Pieced together from 30,000 fragments discovered in the library at Ninevah in 1853, the story tells of Gilgamesh, the legendary Sumerian king of Uruk, and his quest for immortality. Deciding at first that he will be guaranteed a kind of physical immortality by fathering as many children as possible, Gilgamesh becomes such a sexual predator from whose advances no woman in his kingdom was safe. The goddess Aruru, troubled by the situation, forms the beastman Enkidu from clay and her spittle in order to create an opponent powerful enough to challenge Gilgamesh.
Bigfoot greets visitors to the Cryptozoological Museum in Portland, Maine (photo by International Cryptozoology Museum/Loren Coleman/Jessica Meuse).
Gilgamesh soon learns of this powerful, hairy wild man, and he begins to have uncomfortable dreams of wrestling with a strong opponent whom he could not defeat. When Enkidu eventually arrives in the city, the two giants engage in fierce hand-to-hand combat. The king manages to throw the beast man, but instead of killing him, the two become fast friends, combining their strength to battle formidable giants. It is the jealous goddess Ishtar who causes the fatal illness that leads to Enkidu’s death.
The hero finally abandons his search for immortality when the goddess Siduri Sabitu, dispenser of the Wine of Immortality to the gods, confides in him that his quest will forever be in vain—the cruel gods have decreed that all mortals shall die. Although the life of each human must end, the memory of the man-beast with whom our species struggles has never been extinguished.
There are many possible interpretations of the epic of Gilgamesh. Perhaps the saga lives in our collective consciousness as the memory of ancient struggles with Neanderthals and with other hominid species not yet discovered, species that were seemingly part human and part beast?
In 840 C.E., Agobard, the Archbishop of Lyons, declared the “giant people of the forest and mountains,” as demons. He recorded that the wild men were stoned to death after being displayed in chains for several days. In his Chronicles, Abbot Ralph of Coggeshall Abbey, Essex, England, wrote of the discovery of the corpse of a “strange monster” whose charred body had been found after a lightning storm on the night of St. John the Baptist in June 1205. He stated that a terrible stench came from the beast with “monstrous limbs.”
Villagers of the Caucasus Mountains have legends of a “wild man” that goes back for centuries. The Tibetans living on the slopes of Mt. Everest and the Native American tribes inhabiting the northwestern United States have their own stories of a giant man-beast. The Gilyaks, a remote tribe of Siberian native people, claim that there are creatures that are half-man, half-beasts that inhabit the frozen forests of Siberia and who have human feelings and travel in family units.
Do the appearances of the man-like beasts in our wilderness provoke our awareness that there are creatures essentially human in appearance that have survived for thousands of years and remain as our hidden cousins or even our ancestors?
Reports of Bigfoot-type creatures in California go back to at least the 1840s when miners reported encountering giant two-legged beastlike monsters during the gold rush days. Sightings of the Oh-Mah, as the native tribes called them, continued sporadically until August 1958, when a construction crew was building a road through the rugged wilderness near Bluff Creek, Humboldt County, and discovered giant humanlike footprints in the ground around their equipment. For several mornings running, the men discovered that something had been disturbing their