The Fouke Monster Attack on the Ford House

Fouke is a small town in Miller County, in southwest Arkansas. In the spring of 1971, Bobby and Elizabeth Ford moved into a rented frame house just outside town. They had been there less than a week. The house was full. Skeptoid describes two newlywed couples plus friends, among them Bobby's brother Don and hunting companion Charles Taylor.

Saturday, May 1, 1971. Late at night, Elizabeth Ford, 22, was asleep on a couch in the front room. "I saw the curtain moving on the front window and a hand sticking through the window," she said. At first she took it for a bear's paw, but it had "heavy hair all over it and it had claws." Its eyes "looked like coals of fire ... real red."

The men chased it off, then saw it behind the house by flashlight and fired. They called the Fouke constable, Ernest Walraven, who brought another shotgun and a stronger light. They waited on the porch. It came closer. They fired again and thought they saw it fall.

Shortly after midnight, it returned. It grabbed Bobby Ford across the shoulders on the porch and threw him to the ground. "I felt a hairy arm come over my shoulder and the next thing I knew we were on the ground," he said. He crawled free. "I was moving so fast I didn't stop to open the door. I just ran through it." Skeptoid attributes a similar account to Don Ford. Bobby told the constable the thing was man-like, about 7 feet tall and 3 feet across the chest. It breathed heavily. It moved very fast.

Bobby was taken to St. Michael Hospital in Texarkana, Texas, with scratches across his back and in shock. Reporter Jim Powell got a tip about the visit. He and Dave Hall of KTFS radio drove out to the house. They found a terrified family moving out.

Three-toed footprints lay near the house. There were scratch marks on the porch and damage to a window and the siding. Despite the shooting, no blood was found. Powell's stories in the Texarkana Gazette and the Texarkana Daily News named the creature the Fouke Monster, and AP and UPI carried it nationwide. Hunters poured in, Sheriff Leslie Greer imposed a temporary no guns policy, and radio station KAAY offered a $1,090 bounty.

The debate began at once. On May 3 the Texarkana Daily News ran "Monster may be mountain lion." In June, three-toed tracks 13.5 inches long appeared in a soybean field near Boggy Creek. Archaeologist Frank Schambach said there was "a 99 percent chance the tracks are a hoax," since all primates have five toes. In 1986, Fouke mayor Virgil Roberts and former sheriff Greer both called the tracks man-made.

Joe Nickell argues the Fouke reports fit black bears, which stand upright and sniff the air. Elizabeth Ford's own first thought, after all, was a bear's paw. Brian Dunning notes that Powell's 1971 article was the first published account. The monster, he concludes, "fits very poorly with the model of a living animal, but fits very well with a local legend."

In 1972 Charles B. Pierce released The Legend of Boggy Creek, restaging the Ford attack from newspaper accounts. Sequels, books and documentaries followed. Nickell files the creature among the southern "skunk ape" variants of Bigfoot. Since 2013, Fouke has held a Fouke Monster Festival.