For whatever reasons, my home state of North Carolina has been a Bigfoot hotspot recently. Over the last few years, western North Carolina has caught Bigfoot fever, hosting the first ever WNC Bigfoot Festival last September following several high-profile sightings and other Sasquatch-related strangeness. Has He-Who-Has-Big-Feet done as so many other aging bipeds do and retired into the Appalachian mountains, or are these sightings reflective of a larger resurgence of Bigfoot belief? It’s hard to say. One thing is for sure, though: North Carolinians just can’t get enough Bigfoot. The latest NC Bigfoot news comes out of the rural town of Mocksville, population 5,000. Mocksville isn’t exactly in the mountains, but that hasn’t stopped Bigfoot from making an appearance. Well, sort of.
Law enforcement agencies in Mocksville including the Davie County Animal Services received multiple calls about a hairy bipedal creature standing around 8 feet tall (2.4 m) lurking in the woods off of Pine Ridge Road. Many witnesses said the creature’s eyes appeared to glow with a deep red color, visible from a distance even in the dead of night. The calls grew so frequent, so Animal Services decided to investigate. Did they find proof of the legendary creature that could put the speculation to rest forever?
Depends on which side of the Bigfoot debate you stand on. While Davie County Animal Services didn’t find footprints, fur, or Bigfoot in the flesh, they found a massive wooden statue placed in the woods. The statue’s eyes have been embedded with red glass marbles which reflect the light of passing cars and scare the pants right off of Bigfoot believers. The Davie County Animal Shelter found the statue and posted pictures of it to Facebook along with the following advisory:
This handsome fellow stands on Pine Ridge Road. If you are traveling this road at night, please be advised that the eyes appear to glow. If you see this phenomenon, you do not need to call animal control to report seeing Bigfoot, Sasquatch or any other large creature. Thank you.
This incident may have merely been a prank, hoax, or misunderstanding, but it highlights just how prevalent Bigfoot has become in our cultural consciousness. Why do we love Bigfoot so much? What does it say about us that we see (or pretend to see) mythical ape men in the woods? Has the digital age separated us so much from the natural world and our primal selves that we like to imagine that hairy, big-footed wildmen still exist just at the edges of our human reality? Is Bigfoot a reminder of the pre-internet, pre-Twitter world to which we all long to return?
Maybe. Maybe Bigfoot just reminds us that there are still mysteries out there in a modern world where it can feel like everything has already been said, done, or found. Maybe Bigfoot reminds us that it’s ok to disconnect and go play in the woods, that its ok to not conform, to leave the phone at home, to keep our wild sides intact.
Maybe we should all strive to be more like Bigfoot in 2019.
Brett Tingley (CLICK HERE TO READ AND SEE MORE)
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