YEAR: 1943

SEASON: Fall

MONTH: August

STATE: Ohio

COUNTY: Ashland County

LOCATION DETAILS: Somewhere between Cleveland and Columbus in one of the little campsite areas along State Route 3, from what he recalls. (He called back to describe the Mohican Memorial Forest as the likely general area.)

NEAREST TOWN: Probably central Ohio

NEAREST ROAD: Possibly state route 3 then

OBSERVED: I would be happy to send you a copy of a colored picture I drew when I was 5 years old back in 1943 of what possibly could have been a bigfoot. I was lost out in the woods while camping with my parents somewhere in central Ohio and this large female ape-like creature put me back in our camp. Then I started screaming and my parents who were out looking for me heard me and came back to the camp and found me. I have not showed this picture to many people because they would have thought I was crazy. I was a lawyer here in Summit County for nearly 40 years and I did not need any aspersions cast upon my sanity. I have had two cancer surgeries in the past six months and I would now like to leave the original of this picture as a bequest in my will to the right kind of museum before anything else happens to me. I also hope that this picture might corroborate the testimony of people with similar experiences whom nobody would believe before. If you don't have the time to look at it, please let me know the address where the picture can be sent by parcel post or UPS. I am grateful to that blessed creature for my life and would like to honor her memory in some way.

OTHER WITNESSES: My dad thought that he might have seen some tracks of some kind.

OTHER STORIES: currently activity he has heard about in reservoirs around Akron.

TIME AND CONDITIONS: Night cold rainy maybe a few hours before dark.

ENVIRONMENT: woodlands

An aerial view of the Campground fifty years later.

Follow-up investigation report:

Subject stated he remembers being picked up by something.
He saw its arm and he was carried.
He described that it looked to him like a gorilla woman. She had deep set big brown eyes. Since it was so long ago, he doesn't remember details except that she had a fox-like color of brownish red. It was covered in coarse hair.

He remembered being carried for what he thought had to be over a minute. He described her as fast, strong and bigger than his father who stood five feet eight inches tall. He recalls being held; an odor commonly described as dead or rotting meat. He stated that her teeth looked stained and she had bad breath. I asked, why a woman, and he said he didn’t know but she acted that way. She had no enlarged breasts. He also kept saying she had deep brown eyes but not so deeply cut into her skull.

He said she took him and cut through the forest. He was terrified, she held him in her right arm. He remembers how fast she walked and that she cut through the forest like butter and she knew where she was going. He said he cried hard, was terrified, but she did not hurt him. She took him to a place where his parents eventually found him and she put a heavy branch on his legs so he could not move. Then she left. I asked about her build and he said she was solid with "good shoulders". Since it was so long ago there was a lot he couldn't remember, but he feels she was (even though she looked so hairy) a woman.

This witness went on to say he spent the rest of his life not sharing his story but after retiring, he thought "What the Hell" and began sharing his experience. He mentioned that he could not get his parents to believe him. They passed it off as imagination. The only adult he mentioned as believing him was his kindergarten teacher and his father was thought to discredit her by the beliefs she held.
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The question "What did your parents think of you being pinned down by the log or branch?" was recently asked of this man. He reminded me that his parents were from the city and in a state of panic (even hysterics) because he was missing. Being frightened so much of the woods in the dark in the rain, they would have figured he would have never survived being lost. He presumed that his parents thought it might be a natural situation such as a branch being blown down by the trees, regarding him being pinned by a heavy branch. . As unlikely as that sounds, it is certainly more acceptable than what he described as happening to him at the time. He feels this report is important in that it may help to influence young people to share any unusual experiences they have had. Back then, he had nowhere to go with it and nobody to talk to about it. When he tried to talk about it he was met with rejection so after awhile, he completely stopped since he only met one adult person who would believe him.

Below is the witness' drawing, done in 1943 with the assistance of his kindergarten teacher, Mrs. King.

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