Cold Case Files: Tales of Bigfoot-like creatures roaming Cherokee country preceded a documented 1979 sighting
On the night of September 6, 1979, two friends sat among the stones at Jumper Cemetery, about a mile east of Jay, Oklahoma, at the bottom of a hill off State Highway 20. It was early evening, between 8 and 9 p.m., just about dark, and a full moon lit the oaks, maples, and mixed hardwoods that framed the little graveyard.
A hog-wire and barbed-wire fence about four feet high enclosed the grounds. Along the west side, trees had grown up against the fence row. Farther down stood a wooden platform between two huge oaks, the kind used to set food out during funerals.
The cemetery sits in Cherokee country. Jumper is an old family name on the stones. The Kenwood Reserve, held in trust for the Cherokee Nation, lies only a few miles away, bordered by City of Tulsa land and, south of Lake Eucha, the Spavinaw Wildlife Management Area.
People here have long spoken, when they speak at all, of large beings that keep to the timber and the ridges. In older Cherokee tradition, the best known of those figures is Tsul Kalu, the slant-eyed giant, called the lord of the game. Hunters named him in formulas before they went out.
He was said to own the animals of the mountains, to hear what was said of him, and to show himself only on terms he set.
James Mooney, writing down Eastern Cherokee stories around 1900, also recorded talk of a race of slant-eyed giants, nearly twice the height of ordinary men, who once came from the far west. Those stories belong to the southern mountains more than to a Delaware County hillside.
They are not a simple map of what two men saw in 1979. They are the older language this country already had for something huge, hairy, and hard to look at straight.
One of the men at the cemetery heard what he took for a deer coming down the ridge from the direction of town.
"Listen! There's a deer coming down the hill," he told his friend.
They sat still and followed the sound as it dropped into the hollow on the west side of the cemetery, then started up again between the fence-row trees and the funeral platform. What stepped into view was not a deer.
A large, white, hairy, man-looking figure walked up to the fence and stepped over it. The animal stank tremendously. It crossed the cemetery toward a huge tree in the middle. When it passed under that tree, its
head cleared just beneath the lowest branch. Only then did it seem to notice the two men. It turned its head and looked over its right shoulder at them. It did not run. It began to walk very fast toward the southern border, stepped over the fence again, and crashed into the timber, breaking limbs and making a terrible racket.
The first witness looked at his friend and asked if he had seen what he had seen. The friend said he thought that he had.
Years later the witness described the figure as about eight feet tall and 350 pounds or more, muscular and filled out, with a thick, gorilla-like neck. Its shoulders were about three and a half feet across. The proportions were man-like except for longer arms and a torso that looked longer than the legs.
No facial features could be made out in the moonlight. When the creature turned to look at them, it had to twist its whole torso. The odor was a strong musky, dirty-hair smell unlike anything he had known. Its approach had been soft and padded. Once it knew it had been seen, the demeanor changed. It left in a hurry and made an aggressive noise once it reached the trees.
The white coat set the story apart. Most later Oklahoma reports, and most neighboring tribal names for a wild man of the woods, speak of dark hair. Among the Choctaw farther south the old phrase Hattak Lusa Chito means a big black man.
The figure at Jumper Cemetery did not match that color. It did match the older habit of treating such a being as something you do not advertise. The witness kept the story to himself for a long time. He feared ridicule, not only because they believed they had seen a Bigfoot, but because the one they saw was white.
About ten years later, while teaching at Kenwood, he watched a video called "Legends of the Ozarks." A recreation of an incident said to have happened near FayettevillE looked, he said, exactly like what he and his friend had watched walk through Jumper Cemetery.
After that he spoke with elderly friends and relatives who had lived in the area all their lives. Some of them admitted they, too, had seen the beast at some point and had said nothing for the same reason he had stayed quiet.
That silence is part of the local pattern. Cherokee citizens in nearby counties have told of seeing a massive figure by a lone tree or hearing things in the timber that elders would rather leave unnamed. Some speak of a secluded people in the woods. Others use the modern word Bigfoot and leave it there.
The point is not that every old story and every night sighting are the same thing. The point is that this ground already had a way of talking about a tall forest presence that does not belong to town, that does not like to be stared at, and that people who have seen it often refuse to discuss.
He never softened the claim. "I know what I saw; it doesn't matter if I am believed or not. I myself was incredulous at the time. My mind had a hard time accepting what my eyes were seeing. I can see this in my mind today, just as if it had happened moments ago."
The account was submitted on March 19, 2010, and recorded as Class A Report 27477. Investigator Sybilla Irwin interviewed the witness and called him very credible and articulate. The witness also said there had been a large wave of similar reports around Jay and Kenwood in 1974
.
He wondered, looking back, whether the animal had come out of town that night looking through garbage for food. In the old hunting stories, the giant who owns the game provides or withdraws according to whether people keep faith with the woods.
No one at Jumper Cemetery that night was hunting. They were sitting under a moon among the graves of families who had lived on this land a long time.
Whatever crossed the fence left two men with a memory neither of them could shake, and it left the older question hanging in the same hills: whether the thing that walks the timber is a stranger to this country, or whether this country has been trying to name it for generations.
