Not that darkshines necessarily meant to imply it was a gorilla, but it amazes me how many people do respond to a bigfoot story with that concept.

I mean, how many escaped gorillas can there be? And has there ever, really, been any bona fide account of an actual gorilla escaping into the woods? Anywhere?

A friend and I had a “near” encounter in 1981 at Kickapoo State Park NW of Danville, IL. Here’s the abridged version: We were fishing and had a sense of something on the hill behind us, and soon we went over and I lifted up overhanging foliage and shined a lantern up the hill while my friend looked. He backed up into me and said let’s get the hell out of here and took off to my car.

After we peeled out and got 4 or 5 miles down the road he said he saw what looked like 2 hair covered tree trunks till he saw they had human like knees and they started moving at which point he freaked and backed into me. He maintained they were not deer and nothing else that big lives in that region. Someone pulling a hoax would likely make more noise or commotion I’d think. We went back the next day armed with a compound bow and BB pistol and climbed the hill, finding large mashed down foliage at the top and evidence of something disturbing the soil going down the opposite side of the hill down to the river on the other side of the fishing area.

We were met with the usual ridicule by family and friends, with few exceptions, one a great uncle of mine who told me how my grandfather, who died in 1940 when my dad was only 7, had been part of a posse in the early 30’s hunting a “wild hairy man” about 7-8 miles south along the same river my friend and I had our little encounter. They found prints and their hunting dogs acted strange but found nothing else.

I’ve checked several other squatch sites with searchable state databases with sightings from eastern IL/western IN, and thrown out the question on local blogs and such, and from what I’ve gathered I think that the area is majorly overlooked with consistent, if not significant sasquatch activity.