STU NEVILLE crosses the country on a quest for the British Bigfoot as sightings continue to come in from Bristol to Bolam Lake, from Tunbridge Wells to Wallasey. But is there any decent evidence for a Big Hairy Monster in these Isles? And if not, then just what are people seeing in the woods?
In the autumn of 2012, reports began to emerge from a particular area of a shadowy, hulking figure stalking around wooded areas and giving walkers a fright. Local newspapers spoke excitedly of an apeman that “towers eight-foot [2.4m] tall, is covered in hair and has red demonic eyes”.
All of this sounds very familiar to anyone who follows such reports, and indeed wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows had it come from the Pacific Northwest or the Caucasus. However, this hotbed of Bigfoot activity was a little less expected: Royal Tunbridge Wells.
Kent Online was on the scene fast, asking if local residents had seen a “Yeti-like” creature, helpfully printing a picture of a big hairy manlike beast and one of Tunbridge Wells High Street for comparison purposes, just in case the juxtaposition was too much to imagine.1 There was a lively spurt of correspondence and speculation – was it a prank, a misidentified tramp, a bird-watcher in a ghillie suit, and did it have planning permission to live in the woods? This was, after all, the Home Counties.
As the country was in a post-Olympic slump, news-wise, this kind of thing was picked up quite quickly by the national press, with the Independent, Daily Mail, Metro and Daily Telegraph all reporting (though all seemed to cite the Sun as the original source): as with all such flaps, though, it quickly died down and things got back to whatever is considered normal in that comfortable corner of Kent.
It transpired, however, that this wasn’t a new thing. There actually was a history in the area of such sightings, one going back as far as 70 years when, according to local website Tunbridge Wells People, a couple sitting on a bench “became aware of a shuffling noise behind them… turning around they saw a tall, ape-like creature with eyes that were burning red moving slowly towards them. They both fled – terrified” (see FT298:16-17).
Indeed, such British Bigfoot sightings weren’t confined to the southeast either, although these were among the first to be brought to the attention of a wider audience: prior to this, the best documented and researched had been the encounters at Bolam Lake in Northumberland some 10 years previously. These sightings in turn flushed ou
