You Have the Head of What?
Posted by: Loren Coleman on November 3rd, 2005
How many heads of "Bigfoot" are floating around this country? Is the Minnesota Iceman still available for exhibition? Does your local curio shop have the "stuffed head of Bigfoot"? What if one was real? Are we overlooking some piece of evidence here?
Back to the days of the "Nondescript," strange heads of hairy seemingly bipedal man-beasts have turned up as curious items on display. The Nondescript was supposedly part of the shoulders and head of a monkey-like creature that had a long tail and thick fur. Charles Waterton had collected it in his travels in deepest, darkest Guiana. Unable to collect the whole body, Waterton brought just the upper torso and head out, he said. He wrote about it in 1825 in Wanderings in South America.
The Nondescript, of course, was a taxidermy hoax. While it looked almost like a bearded man in an Inuit hood, it was constructed from the head of a South American howler monkey, badly mounted. And perhaps most interesting, Waterton displayed this head frequently at a Jesuit preparatory school he had attended, Stonyhurst College, located in a fairly remote part of Lancashire. This school also had one member who had come after Waterton, and therefore would have been treated to this taxidermy hoax. That member of the Stonyhurst alumni was Arthur Conan Doyle.
While Sir Arthur Doyle may be remembered for his Sherlock Holmes stories, he is also considered one of the possible suspects involved in the Piltdown hoax, which occurred eight miles from his home. One of the most frequent visitors to the site was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And he was a friend of many of the "major players" in the Piltdown melodrama. Nondescript = evidence of a missing link, Piltdown = evidence of a missing link. Humm.
Fast forward to the contemporary. According to a recent story in the Nashville Scene by Justin Jones, I’m reminded of alleged taxidermy hoaxes still being pulled today, trying to prove a "missing link" is out there. Take for example, the head of the "Creature of Sugar Flat Road." Supposedly, this Bigfoot-type creature was hit on Sugar Flat Road near where its final resting place is located. The head was "preserved" in a mounted fashion. You can see it today in the window of Cuz’s Antique Center in the Lebanon Public Square, Lebanon, Tennessee.
Are there any in your neighborhood curio shops? Let me know about it. Maybe one, someday, just might be authentic.
