YEAR: 1978

SEASON: Fall

MONTH: October

DATE: 28

STATE: Texas

COUNTY: Bowie County

LOCATION DETAILS: Texarkana, Texas in Bowie County around Beechwood Rd. in the Liberty-Eylau area.

NEAREST TOWN: Texarkana

NEAREST ROAD: Beechwood Rd.

OBSERVED: I was about 14 years old when these incidents occurred. They happened in about a span of a month, never before or never after has anything like this ever happened to me.

The first incident occurred at my friend Tom’s house who lived 3 houses down from me. Me and Tom were playing football in the front yard of his house at dusk one evening when I kicked the football over the roof of his house. Tom ran around the house to retrieve the football and his dog followed after him. In a couple of minutes the dog came running from behind the house squealing and ran under a car. Then Tom appeared also running and looking scared. I asked him what was wrong and he told me he had seen something on the wooded hill behind his house. I asked him what he meant by “something” and he told me he didn’t know except that it was big and moving. We got the dog out from under the car and went in the house. At first I thought he was just messing around but thinking of how the dog had acted kind of scared me.

I spent the night with Tom that night and around 9:00 or 10:00 PM he motioned me to the back door which he had opened. He told me to listen and what I heard was a lot of crashing around out in the woods behind his house. Now I was really becoming pretty scared with all the things that had happened on that evening especially knowing something had scared the dog the way it did. We went on to bed and the rest of the night was uneventful.

A few days later Tom called me and told me to come over that he wanted to show me something. When I got there he took me around to the back of his house and there in a muddy area by his sister’s bedroom window were large footprints. The footprints were about an inch to an inch and a half deep and about fifteen or so inches in length. It looked like a human print except for its size and I remember it being wide from toes to heel. We knew something strange had been there and we started talking about maybe it had been the Fouke Monster, a creature that had been seen around a small community about 30 miles south of Texarkana for years.

The next incident occurred about 2 weeks later early on a Saturday morning. Me and a friend Royce took my .22 rifle to go squirrel hunting in some woods off of Flower Acres Rd. about a mile and a half from my house. We walked through the woods several hundred yards to a large oak flat and sat down next to a big tree. Thats when we noticed the woods were quieter than normal, there wasn’t any squirrels and hardly any birds. We decided to shoot into some squirrel nests so I shot several rounds into a nest and about 30 seconds after that we heard a large roar. I have never heard anything sound like that in my whole life, it seemed to shake the whole woods and I couldn’t tell what direction it had come from. Me and Royce looked at each other and both asked “what the heck was that?” we looked around but didn’t see anything and then we started running. We heard the roar again but we never looked back we just kept running. We came to a small farm and the cows were acting strange, they were bumping into each other and seemed confused. We didn’t stop running until we were back at my house. We told my parents what we had heard, but they didn’t take us seriously and just thought we had overactive imaginations. To this day I can still remember how that roar sounded and I probably won’t ever forget it.

The last incident didn’t happen to me but to two of my friends, one of who lives at the small farm I mentioned earlier. One day I was telling my friend Tracy about my experience in the woods hunting and he said that he and another friend Tony had seen something in the woods also. Tracy and Tony were riding their bikes along some trails that went through the woods. These trails are always very dimly lit because of the canopy created by the tall pine trees. They had parked their bikes along the trail and were just shooting the bull when they heard a noise about a hundred yards up the trail. When they looked they saw a figure that Tracy said looked like a big man in an eskimo coat. He said it seemed to look their way and then took of running through the woods opposite of where it had emerged. They jumped on their bikes and rode like hell until they were out of the woods. I have told this story many times and most people don’t believe me, but I know what I heard and saw and I believe that there was some kind of creature that passed through this area for a short while. I have been in and around these woods all of my life and this was the only time these strange events occurred. To this day when I am in the woods and think about it I still get chills.

OTHER STORIES: Fouke, Arkansas is a small community about 30 miles South of Texarkana. For many years a creature terrorized this community and was dubbed the "Fouke Monster". A movie was made about these incidents called The Legend of Boggy Creek. There was also a sequel to this movie.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: The weather was fair during all incidents.

ENVIRONMENT: The area is heavily wooded with many creeks and bottoms. These woods interconnect to the Sulphur River bottoms which are very deep and vast.