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 

Iowa Bigfoot Newspaper Project: Ape-Like 'Creature' Scaring Ottosen

- 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 investigate it. -

Ape-like 'creature' scaring Ottosen

By Dave Brown

Original article in Des Moines Register

A shaggy, ape-like creature has scared the daylights out of some residents of the tiny Humboldt County community of Ottosen in the last week.

Sheriff Marvin Andersen said a group of men looked for the creature Monday night and Tuesday night. The only trace that has been found of it, he said, are foot-prints with three toes in front and one in back.

"What it is, I don't know," Andersen said Wednesday. "I don't know what to think."

He said several Ottosen residents have reported sighting the creature. It has been described as about five feet tall, with dark and shaggy fur, piercing, deep-set eyes, long arms and thick legs.

If it is a hoax, the sheriff said, the prankster could be in danger if he returned, because he believes some Ottosen residents are keeping guns ready.

"These people are mad enough so it would be pretty dangerous now to go up there and try to pull a trick," he said.

The creature was first spotted last Thursday night by Donette Hankins, her mother, Jan, said Wednesday.

Hankins said her nine-year-old "got a real good look at it" that night, and came in the house looking "like death warmed over."

Sunday night, her oldest daughter, Dawn, 11, was riding her bike after dark when she came face-to-face with the creature, her mother said.

"She came back in screaming. She was in hysterics," Hankins said.

She said she and a relative went outside to see what had scared the girl. The two adults saw something "staring out at us" from behind a vacant building.

"It looked like an ape," she said. "I'm convinced there's something here." Asked if it could have been a person in a costume, she said, "the face was too real. There was nothing artificial about it."

Monday, shortly after noon, three Ottosen boys, aged 10 to 12, also saw the creature, according to Mrs. Gary Masters. Masters was the first resident to report the sightings to the sheriff's office. She would not identify the three boys.

She said she called the sheriff "to see if anyone had lost a monkey."

The sheriff said he has checked to see whether any circus or carnival animals have been reported missing recently, and has contacted the 165 conservation commission for advice.

He said the three boys who saw the creature Monday reported it dropped down on all four legs when it an away from them.

The sheriff said some residents "afraid to go out at night."

Hankins said her oldest daughter "still wakes up at night" because the experience.

"If it is a hoax, we'd like to stop because it just isn't funny," she added.

Des Moines Tribune - August 2, 1978

Iowa Bigfoot Newspaper Project: Bigfoot Phenomenon is Very Much Alive in Iowa

- 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 investigate it. -

Bigfoot phenomenon is very much alive in Iowa

By STEVEN KLAUS / Map by STAN KLUENDER

The original article from the Des Moines Register

During the past three months Iowans have heard a lot about Bigfoot, the legendary, ape-like creature purported to roam the countryside at night in search of food.

Some of the stories were generated by Bigfoot sightings reported in July and September near the small town of Ottosen, where several Humboldt County residents said they either saw Bigfoot or heard strange screams in the night.

Many dismiss Bigfoot as a myth. Others, who believe there is a Bigfoot, Yeti or Sasquatch that occupies a place between man and ape, argue the creature lives only in the Northwest and could not possibly survive in the Midwest.

Nevertheless, the Bigfoot phenomenon — whether fact, fiction or hoax — is very much alive in Iowa.

Since last January, Bigfoot has been reported near at least 10 Iowa communities.

Deeds attributed to Bigfoot range from a pile of dead chickens found near the Mitchell County town of Riceville to the dark face that peered at a woman through the kitchen window of a farm home near Ottosen.

There is even one unsubstantiated report from a Sioux City research group that a man wounded a Bigfoot with a deer rifle in 1974 near Stone State Park, on the northwest edge of Sioux City.

In every case, authorities have been unable to establish conclusively that Bigfoot exists. Yet they have not completely accepted other explanations for the events.

Some law officers, like Humboldt County Sheriff Marvin Andersen, are just relieved when the Bigfoot phenomenon moves out of their area.

Andersen, who spent a good part of three months chasing down Bigfoot reports near Ottosen, said last week, “We haven’t had anything now for about three weeks.”

Andersen said he never was able to draw any conclusions from the reports. “I still feel like these people definitely saw something but I don’t know what,” he said.

That was also the opinion of Iowa Conservation Officer Bill Basler of Algona, who talked to some of the people involved with the Ottosen sightings.

“I believe, too, that these people are seeing something, but I don’t know yet just what it is,” Basler said.

Most of the Bigfoot incidents reported in Iowa during the past year have been investigated by members of the Bigfoot Information Center, a group of Bigfoot enthusiasts who joined together last summer under the direction of Kevin Cook, 25, of Des Moines.

The center currently has four members, including Cook, who are collecting data on each new sighting. Cook and his crew believe there are small groups of Bigfeet or Bigfeet traveling by night through the Midwest, generally following the Missouri and Mississippi River basins.

Since last winter, they have checked out Bigfoot reports near Moulton, Harvey, Oskaloosa, Chariton, Clarion, West Bend, Humboldt, Hardy and, of course, Ottosen.

Cook expects more sightings this winter. "Because of the snowfall people don’t want to set tracks, and there’s not the vegetation in the winter as in the spring and fall so the tracks are a lot more visible,” Cook said.

He also is betting that some reports will come from hunters and snowmobilers, especially in the heavily wooded regions of southern Iowa, where the Bigfoot phenomenon has flared up in the past.

Several Bigfoot reports were logged last winter in south-central Iowa, and a sighting was reported in the fall of 1975 near the Jefferson County town of Lockridge in southeast Iowa. At that time, at least three persons said they saw a large, ape-like creature in the Turkey Creek area.

The following is a summary of Bigfoot incidents that have been reported in Iowa since last January:

OSKALOOSA

Matt Ver Steeg of Knoxville, a member of the Bigfoot Information Center, checked a report around Jan. 1 that a woman who lives northeast of Oskaloosa near the Skunk River had seen a Bigfoot. Cook and others showed her the drawing of a heavy snowstorm. She described the creature as weighing 600 to 700 pounds and standing 8 to 10 feet tall. A few days later, another resident in that area heard unusual noises and found strange tracks in his yard.

HARVEY

Around Feb. 20 some residents of Harvey, a Marion County town near the Des Moines River, reported strange howls and tracks in the snow on the edge of town. Ver Steeg visited the area after a 14-inch snowstorm and found tracks that were 20 inches long, 9 inches wide and had a five-toed stride. He followed the tracks in a snowmobile for several miles. “It looked like the creature was moving cautiously the way the tracks were because of the zigzagging,” Ver Steeg said. Deputy Sheriff Dick Gilman said that after analyzing some hair on a fence, authorities concluded the creature was a cow. But Ver Steeg contends a cow could not have made those tracks and set such a pace.

PELLA

Around Feb. 25, Ver Steeg was summoned to the old Pella Bridge, which crosses the Des Moines River a few miles north of Harvey, to investigate a report that a 10- or 11-year-old boy had seen Bigfoot on the road near the bridge. The boy said the creature had stopped to look at him, then disappeared into the woods. Ver Steeg followed tracks into the woods but they filled in with new snow and it was impossible to make any kind of determination. Ver Steeg said the boy was frightened and would not leave the house for several days.

CHARITON

Throughout the year, Ver Steeg and Cook have received numerous reports of sightings and strange sounds in a section of Stephens State Forest a few miles northeast of Chariton, in Lucas County. The sightings have never been verified.

MOULTON

Two Moulton-Udell High School students reported seeing a creature about 10:30 p.m. Aug. 28 on a dirt road in a remote area south of Moulton known as Dean Bottoms. They said it was 7 to 8 feet tall and weighed about 400 pounds. The next day their science teacher accompanied them to the area, where he found a footprint about 14 inches long with three toe impressions, some corn that had been stripped clean down to the cob, and an area where some brush had been trampled. Gary Hagler of Des Moines, a member of the Bigfoot center, visited the area and confirmed those findings.

OTTOSEN

In all, nearly a dozen persons reported seeing a Bigfoot-like creature in the Ottosen area from July through the middle of September. This case received the most publicity of any sighting. There were reports that Bigfoot was seen in town on at least three occasions and in the countryside twice. Farmers in the area also said they were awakened at night by strange sounds made by something that left farm dogs terrified. There were reports of mutilated animals, strange footprints and stampeding cattle.

WEST BEND

During the period of the Ottosen sightings, a fisherman found about two dozen footprints along a bridge over the west branch of the Des Moines River near West Bend. Plaster casts were made of the tracks, which were 16 inches long and 6 inches wide.

HUMBOLDT

In mid-September, a family that lives about three miles northeast of Humboldt reported that something released strange howls while moving through a ravine near their home at midnight. The creature followed the woods to within a few yards of the home. The sound — a hoarse howl — was so loud that Sheriff Andersen could hear it through the telephone when the family called him. Andersen visited the area the next morning and found places where brush had been trampled but no tracks.

HARDY

A few days later, a 16-year-old boy told authorities he saw a Bigfoot-like creature near dike in a Beanfield on a farm near the Humboldt County town of Hardy. He said he scared the creature off by honking the horn and flashing the lights of a pickup. The next day, Sheriff Andersen visited the field and found footprints that looked odd. Ken Taylor of Iowa Falls, another member of the Bigfoot center, looked into that report but was not convinced it was a legitimate sighting.

CLARION

In early October, a Clarion woman told police that a dark image had peered through her kitchen window about 10:30 one night. The window, at the rear of the house, is seven feet off the ground. The next afternoon, police officers obtained a plaster cast of one unusual track in the backyard. Clarion is the seat of Wright County, which is adjacent to Humboldt County, where the Ottosen sighting occurred. The Bigfoot center’s Hagler and Taylor looked into the sighting and determined someone could have been perpetrating a hoax. They reported that the impressions they found were of right feet only.

Des Moines Sunday Register — November 12, 1978