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Bigfoot clips stir monster memories

4 min read

There are monsters in everyone’s life. While rummaging around in some old files the other day I came across some stories I had written in the early 1970s while working for a competing publication. Usually, I only glance at any clippings I might find and slip them back where they were.

I did a double take on these, however.

I was writing about the search for Bigfoot.

In the mid-1970s in an area near Mount Pleasant north of Scottdale in Westmoreland County, sightings were coming in that a very large, hairy, extremely smelly creature, was stumbling around the countryside, mostly in the early morning hours and in the swampy areas between those two towns. Of course there were the ever-present but unconfirmed reports about dogs disappearing, chickens cackling and then instantly going quiet, a rotten egg smell that permeated the nighttime mists and so on. State police logged many of the reports, which gave it a sort of official status. How extensively they probed the incidents, well, that’s up to conjecture.

But it reminded me that just about every age has its monsters.

When I was a scant lad of about 5, I left the docile and protective environs of home and TV cartoons for my first year in school. There was no kindergarten where I attended school. That meant I went straight into first grade. And straight into my first “real’ monster scare.

It seems prowling about the area was some awful creature that, contrary to physical laws, got smaller the closer it came to you and larger as it moved farther away. Now one would obviously assume that if it got smaller coming towards you that by the time it reached where you were standing it would be so small you (a) couldn’t see it or (b) it could hardly do you any harm.

Well, that kind of logic has no place in a 5-year-old’s brain when he knows his mommie is all alone at home and could become this beast’s next victim. Although I don’t remember what the beast was supposed to have done.

So a buddy and myself promptly banged on the door of the teacher’s lounge and reported the horrific news. We were assured it was just a rumor (like a 5-year-old knows what that means) and sent on our way.

I suffered that afternoon until I got home to find that all was well.

Some years later the next creature invading my existence was a headless woman prowling about the countryside, but only at night. I think my late brother just made that one up to scare the bejeebers out of me, which it did. He was always doing that. As dusk approached each day for several weeks I made a beeline back into the safety of our home, making sure to stay away from windows – just in case he wasn’t really pulling my leg.

Most of the monstrous misanthropes of my childhood were mythical, things that had no basis in fact but sent chills up and down my pre-pubescent spine. I wasn’t the only one to succumb to these tales. My chums had heard about them, too, and were justifiably worried.

Of course, no one ever mentioned what these monsters would have done if they had caught us unawares. Sucked our blood? Eaten our brains? Dragged us off to become miniature zombies?

None of that ever happened and we all grew out of monsters and boogeymen hiding in the bushes or under the bed.

But it makes me wonder what kids today view as monsters when they can look at virtually every type of strange, horrible and artificial creature imaginable. I have seen things in film clips for new movies, stuff on the Internet, and even Saturday morning cartoons that would have paralyzed me and likely stopped my heart when I was 5 years old. Or 9, or perhaps even 11 or 12. I remember more than two decades ago watching a matinee of one of the Indiana Jones action/adventure films where in one scene a mad holy man of some sort literally ripped a beating heart from his victim’s chest. Also in the theater were dozens of kids of all ages. None went screaming out the door crying for his or her mommie.

So what could these kids possibly fear?

I know. Pennsylvania legislators grabbing another pay raise for themselves.

Now that scares the bejeebers out of me.

Sorry. I couldn’t resist adding my two-cents worth to the discussion. Know what I mean?

Have a good day.

James Pletcher Jr. is business editor at the Herald-Standard. He can be reached at 724-439-7571 or email at jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.

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