Iowa Bigfoot Newspaper Project: Bigfoot lives near West Bend

 

- There have been several newspaper accounts of Bigfoot sightings in Iowa throughout the decades and by all accounts, they have been lost to time. As I find them, I will transcribe and post them here, for easy viewing. These articles paint a fascinating picture of historic Iowa Lore and the people who investigates it. -

Bigfoot lives near West Bend

But the costume is safely hidden from vigilante guns

By ART CULLEN

It was a dark, if not stormy, late July night 35 years ago when a nine-year-old girl from Ottosen in Kossuth County spotted a “short, hairy, ape-like animal with fangs and deep-set eyes” that stood in shadows a few inches away and growled.

Three nights later, the girl’s 11-year-old sister saw the same creature walking on Main Street in the village just east of West Bend on the Humboldt County line.

And in early August there were even more sightings of a short version — maybe five feet tall — of Sasquatch making grunting, squealing and whining noises.

By then the world’s media had swooped in on Ottosen. It already was a big story in Iowa.

“What she saw that night may have been Bigfoot, the beast rumored since July to be responsible for eerie night screams, broken fences, stampeded cattle, chewed-up cats, mangled rabbits and the death of a dog whose neck had been broken while it was chained near the home of its master. It — named or nameless, male or female or something biologically unknown — has been seen since. So have the terror and uncertainty,” wrote Steve Klaus in The Des Moines Register of the day.

Bigfoot was seen near Renwick in Humboldt County. It was seen near Boone and Atlantic and even in the dense woods of northeast Iowa.

“It was the biggest scam in the history of Iowa,” Jerome Kohlhaas, 62, told me at the bar of the Algona Country Club on Friday.

Kohlhaas knows who it was. The grin says it all.

And it was not a gorilla from the mists of the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.

It was a farmboy from St. Joe, Iowa, a hamlet on Hwy. 169 halfway between Algona and Humboldt.

The costume is around somewhere, but nobody is saying where.

Mr. Bigfoot hung up the hair once the guns came out. Defenders of home and hearth took to the gravel roads along the East and West Forks of the Upper Des Moines River with shotguns in search of their trophy.

“When they started shooting, the outfit disappeared,” said Kohlhaas, a cropdusting pilot who figures he has survived 35 lives. He has rolled so many cars, crashed so many planes and otherwise engaged in a life of hail and harrow that it makes him wonder why others die and he prevails.

“I guess there’s a reason I’m still here,” he said.

The bartender is putting six-packs of bottled beer into the cooler. Someone bids for a drink. The bartender leaves the sixers on the bar and Kohlhaas tries to hand them to women he knows. He is a merry prankster 24/7.

He knows nothing of mangled cats or strangled dogs. He pretty much knows Bigfoot’s range around Ottosen. He does not know how I might contact Bigfoot.

A woman from New York once approached him about writing a book. Kohlhaas said he didn’t know what she was talking about. Then he stops:

“Hey, everybody! There’s food in the other room! Let’s go get it!” he proclaims to the crowd at the bar.

Everyone falls in line behind the Pied Piper.

My old college chum Walter Bradley from Algona has a pretty good idea who Bigfoot was. He about cracks a rib laughing over the phone.

“Somebody said they saw Bigfoot walking down a road when a truck drove by hauling a wagon. Bigfoot flew into the wagon at full speed,” Bradley recalled.

He is an old buddy of Kohlhaas. But he ain’t spilling much, other than to say that Bigfoot was not the missing link. Bigfoot is short and balding with a bit of a beer belly.

Most people knew the gig was up when a girl riding her bike in Ottosen saw Bigfoot and screamed. Parents came out of the house. They searched near a shed. Someone heard a man’s voice say, “Anybody know what time it is?”

Nobody had a notion where the voice came from. Sasquatch speaks! The kids all scattered for safety.

And he was never heard from again.

But he is still out there. Eternally a teenager. A wise-guy smile etched on his lips at all times. And alive to tell about it.

Someday someone will out him. Maybe Jerome Kohlhaas will be the one with the courage to lift the veil of hair and rubber.

But probably not, so long as people still chase the legend. There’s even a TV show about Bigfoot sightings. Kohlhaas is one to savor a scam over letting it just end so cleanly. He just might like a TV cameo.

Storm Lake Times Pilot - February 25, 2014