Monstrum

(host) The year is 1924.

In a fog-draped gorge near the foothills of Mount St. Helens, a group of gold prospectors encounter a pack of ape men near their remote cabin.

Fearing for their lives, one of the group, Fred Beck, fires his rifle at the beasts, wounding one and scaring them off for the moment.

Later that night, the prospectors wake to their cabin under attack.

Having returned under cover of darkness, the beasts hurled stones and pounded on the walls for hours, finally retreating after sunrise.

The terrified prospectors fled back to their Oregon town and told their tale to all who would hear it, earning the remote spot the name Ape Canyon after the incident.

This was not the first story of an encounter with massive bipedal hairy ape-like beasts in North America.

Other stories go back centuries across the continent, but why does the legend of this cryptid endure?

And what can Sasquatch teach us about the anxieties we may have about the wild world around us and our place in it?

[triumphant music] I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is "Monstrum."

Sasquatch is often described as a large bipedal primate or dark hair-covered humanoid varying in height from 6 to 15 feet with broad muscular shoulders, little or no neck, and long ape-like arms.

Many sightings report that the creature appears more human than beast, while others report glowing eyes or a salivating blood thirsty moth.

Our modern cultural consciousness positions this mysterious creature solidly in the 20th century, placed there by the mass media who often fail to report that this monster origin stories go back hundreds, if not thousands of years, and predate European colonization of the new world.

The Sts'ailes people are a First Nations community located in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, Canada.

They tell of a shape-shifting forest protector known as Sasq'ets.

Sasquatch is an anglicized version of Sasq'ets, which translates roughly to hairy man in the Halkomelem language.

The Sts'ailes people revere Sasq'ets as a wild and elusive guardian of the wilderness who possesses supernatural abilities to protect and guide those who respect and honor their natural environment.

In their culture, Sasq'ets is the very embodiment of the benevolent spirit of the forest.

A little over 1,000 miles to the south, at the Tulle River Indian Reservation in California, ancient rock paintings or pictographs depict a small group of Sasquatch known as The Family.

It is believed to be one of the earliest recorded appearances of the monster.

The largest creature in the pictograph is thought to represent a paternal figure and is accompanied by a mother and child.

Like Sasq'ets, this hairy man figure embodies traditional human characteristics like bipedal walking, humanoid physiology, and community building, while also evoking the more elusive wildness of nature.

In some legends, they even had a hand in humanity's creation.

But not all origin stories from North American indigenous folklore depict Sasquatch as a benevolent guardian.

Some feature the being as a darker lurking malevolent force.

The Lummi people of coastal Washington state tell of massive bipedal stalkers with furry white faces who carry misbehaving children off into the night.

Several Iroquoian and Algonquian language peoples share stories of cannibalistic humanoid giants known as stone giants, stone men, or the Stoneclad.

Depending on the story, these forest dwellers cover themselves with stones or rub sand on their bodies to callous their skin.

In other traditions, they were born with impervious skin, while still others say their fur is so matted, it serves as pseudo-armor.

All of these conditions make stone giants resistant to human weapons.

Some of the most aggressive versions of these monsters have a particularly grizzly penchant for twisting the heads off their human prey.

And legends of bipedal beasts persist for centuries, even after European colonialism arrives in the Americas.

Sixteenth century Spanish explorers and Mexican settlers told of creatures called Los Vigilantes Oscuros or dark watchers, tall shadowy beings that appear on the peaks of California's Santa Lucia Mountains during twilight, watching over the land and its inhabitants.

The lore of the watchers even made its way into a 1938 short story by John Steinbeck called "Flight," which describes the monsters as menacing but relatively harmless figures who wouldn't bother a visitor of the forest if they stayed on the trail and minded their own business.

In 1847, Irish Canadian adventurer and artist Paul Kane recounted stories told to him by the Chinook people about Skookums, wild men who lived on the peaks of Mount St. Helens and engaged in cannibalism.

Kane offered cash rewards for anyone who could take him on a journey to find the fabled Skookums.

But no such trek ever took place and the stories remained legend.

And perhaps the most infamous account came from none other than former president Teddy Roosevelt.

In his 1893 book, "The Wilderness Hunter," Roosevelt details a story told to him by a grizzled old mountain man named Bauman.

Bauman fearfully recounts his personal experience with a foul-smelling bipedal creature that ransacked his trapping camp, left large prints, stalked him, and ultimately killed one of his men by snapping his neck.

While neither Roosevelt nor Bauman named the creature, these descriptions have become hallmarks of Sasquatch lore, namely the foul smell and oversized footprints.

This brings us to the 20th century.

After the Ape Canyon incident of 1924, the next couple of decades were relatively quiet in terms of Sasquatch lore, but advancements in media starting in the mid 20th century allowed for broader dissemination of mysterious monster sightings.

The 1948 introduction of the Polaroid instant camera alongside the development of colored broadcast television and the growing presence of TV sets in the American household made it easier to feed a growing appetite for tabloid tales.

Like when in 1958, a Bluff Creek California logger named Jerry Crew discovered a series of oversized human-like footprints near a bulldozer on his job site.

The 16 inches long footprints frightened and intrigued Crew and his fellow loggers.

When he returned to town, he brought his story to Andrew Genzoli, a reporter for the Humboldt Times newspaper.

Genzoli interviewed the loggers and published an article about the event complete with a photo of Crew holding a cast of one of the footprints.

It was in this article that our monster earned its new name, Bigfoot.

When given an English language-based name that was both simple and evocative, the monster became a national sensation.

Under the new moniker, older alleged sightings, including the 1924 Ape Canyon incident, became widely known and new encounters were reported via the emerging mass media network of American TV, newspapers, and radio.

Less than 10 years later in 1967, another new technology, home movie cameras, gave rise to the most famous piece of documented Bigfoot lore that exists to date, the one virtually everyone has seen or seen spoofed, the Patterson-Gimlin film.

Shot on October 20th, 1967, in Bluff Creek, California by two friends and Bigfoot enthusiasts, the film clip captures what appears to be a large bipedal creature trudging along a wooded hillside in broad daylight for almost a minute.

To this day, it remains the most iconic and controversial piece of evidence of the existence of Sasquatch.

It doesn't take a film forensics expert to see that the Patterson-Gimlin film could easily be replicated by any small group of people with a camera and a bit of costuming know-how.

While there have been confessions and recently even AI evidence that the footage does not depict a mysterious monster, for many, it still stands as evidence of Bigfoot's existence.

Some other familiar sightings have been much more reliably debunked.

In 1982, a retired logger in his 80s, Rant Mullens, admitted to having tormented a small group of gold prospectors in Ape Canyon when he was a young man.

He said that he and his uncle had thrown stones at their cabin from a rocky overlook in a playful attempt to scare them.

Then later, having heard that the prospector's tale about fearsome ape men made national news, Mullens claims to have perpetrated several other Sasquatch hoaxes in the region in the years that followed.

In 2002, the family of Ray Wallace, a deceased coworker of our footprint-finding logger friend Jerry Crew revealed that they had found a collection of large carved wooden feet stored in his basement, which Wallace had purportedly used to make the infamous footprints in Bluff Creek back in 1958, meaning even the origins of Bigfoot's name was the result of a well-perpetrated hoax.

And yet, despite all the evidence against its existence, Sasquatch remains firmly fixed in our cultural psyche to this day.

Why, and why does it seem that the public perception of the monster has shifted over time, from friendly to fearsome and back to friendly again?

Many films portray Sasquatch as a fearsome monster, like "The Legend of Boggy Creek," the much maligned "Cry Wilderness," and the properly terrifying 2013 indie horror "Willow Creek."

And the image of Sasquatch as a terror has inspired some gripping novels as well, like "Devolution" by Max Brooks and "Roanoke Ridge" by J.J. Dupuis.

But the version of Sasquatch many are most familiar with today is much more benign and friendly.

It's one that we see as a mascot for sports teams or as a spokesperson for snack foods or beer or a playful character appearing in video games.

We might owe this return to a somewhat softer image of Sasquatch to the 1987 film, "Harry and the Hendersons," which imagined the monster as a benevolent and lovable creature of the woods whose existence is threatened by human encroachment.

This iteration of Sasquatch coincides with growing public concerns about environmental issues in the 1980s.

The film's protagonist is a reluctant hunter who falls in love with a titular monster after hitting him with the family station wagon on a weekend excursion.

He and his family fight against malevolent outside forces hunting the beast and are the only ones who recognize Bigfoot as a precious and vulnerable entity, much like our natural environment and wilderness spaces who need saving.

In a way, the lore of Sasquatch has come full circle as our modern perceptions of the monster are an embodiment of respect for our mysterious natural surroundings.

Much like the earliest lore of Sasquatch from the indigenous cultures of North America.

Debunked sightings, hoaxes, and an often cartoonish representation in pop culture, and yet the legend of Sasquatch still has fervent believers.

Why is that?

Ecologist Robert Pyle contends that, "There seems to be a general human need "to create folklore about larger than life creatures "with names usually translating to something along the lines of wild man or hairy man."

He writes that, "These mythical creatures "represent a symbolic link "to the untamed wilderness that surrounds us, "a connection to our world that modern society has largely lost."

It also wasn't so long ago that our ancestors were evolved to walk upright.

Using folklore, particularly monsters, becomes a way to outsource or displace our primal fears of the unknown world, our unknown past, and our unknown future.

We are scared of these creatures that are not human but act human and look more like us and our ancestors than we may want to admit.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the ancient lore of Sasquatch evolved and endured right alongside the last century and a half of North American industrialization and modernization.

From our fears of the unknown American frontier to our modern anxieties about humanity's effects on our fragile environment.

Whether Sasquatch is a malevolent monster or a misunderstood beast just trying to protect his realm, one thing seems clear.

The lore is likely to be around for a long time to come.

Reminding us to keep an eye on the big footprints that we leave behind as we move through this world.

In the Halkomelem language.

Halkomelem.

Halkomelem.

Should we do that again?

I think we should just do that again for posterity.

Halkomelem.