Bring Me The Head of Bigfoot
Posted by: Loren Coleman on August 12th, 2008
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. 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 2005 article 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.
Back in 2005, you could see it in the window of Cuz’s Antique Center in the Lebanon Public Square, Lebanon, Tennessee. Images of it are at top and below.
Is there a Bigfoot head in your neighborhood curio shop? Let me know about it. Maybe one, someday, just might be authentic.
- Similar Phenomena:
Although inconclusive, it looks real enough. Then again, taxidermists are known to be skilled folk at sowing together fake animals.
It wouldn’t surprise me if one did turn up being real. There have been some pretty incredible things that have turned up in private collections and even filed away and forgotten in museum collections. There have been fossils of newly recognized species, for example, that were found among fossil remains already in a museum’s possession. Sure, fossils aren’t a head, but I often wonder if there is some sort of physical evidence of sasquatch out there that has managed to slip through the cracks and go unnoticed somewhere.
This reminds me. Wasn’t there an article here awhile back talking of an actual taxidermed sasquatch body that was allegedly found in the basement of a Russian museum? (presumably locked away in a vast, box filled catacomb next to the Lost Ark of the Covenant). Wonder what ever became of that one.
Loren, speaking of specimens left in basements of museums. The first baby T-Rex skeleton was found in the basement of a museum misidentified, who knows what else is out there already found?
“Hard Copy” did a story about the Sugar Flat Road creature, and someone was good enough to post the program on YouTube. I’ve provided the link here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCNny9sDAXY