Jefe's House

9" to 10" footprints with three claws. Note the apparent blood droplets at top left. Click images to see full size.

“I am not used to seeing the kind of tracks in my back yard like the samples I’m attaching here. Any ideas?  Looks BIG.  Gulp.”

So read the email I received last week from my close friend S. with 4 photos attached (the one above was also a Coast to Coast AM Photo of the Day on 1/27/11).  He lives in Franklin County, Ohio near Columbus, works in a highly visible profession and is too shy to post these images himself — but he’s also alarmed by the footprints he and his wife found in their back yard last week after the last big snowfall. Knowing of my keen interest in the ridiculous-yet-hard-to-explain, he sent them to me.

He’s been perusing BFRO’s site for sasquatch sightings in his area looking to make some kind of sense of this, but to no avail.

“The right track has blood on it — the right foot seems to indicate a foot injury,” his email continued.  “We are kinda freaking out.  We have spent hours combing through wild animal track books, trying to isolate and identify the tracks, hoping to come up with an explanation. WHOA.  Freaking.

S.”

He says the tracks crossed through his yard and stopped at a large tree.  Sadly there was no shivering juvenile squatch hiding in the tree when he looked up — but then where did it go? Did it fly away? Jersey devil? Mothman? My two cents — these aren’t sasquatch, Jersey devil or mothman prints; they’re clearly dogman prints. Perhaps it leapt from the tree onto another tree or onto his roof (he didn’t think to look there for more prints) and was gone.  (UPDATE 1/27/11: I just searched and found this regarding Ohio’s “Loveland creature,” a reptilian spotted in 1955 and 1972, so I’m switching my opinion from dogman to lizardman.)

They’re real. It’s not a hoax. Your theory?  He’s open to your explanations.

Apparent blood droplets, top left, spattered all along right foot path.

I was thrilled to return to the verdant and lonely shadowland that is the New Jersey Pine Barrens for Labor Day weekend. Three days a’campin’ in the sasquatch-infested Bass River State Forest where I went a’hikin’ and a’fishin’. I kept a big pickerel and threw back a coupla baby cats along the squatchy shores of Lake Absegami.  No cryptids — neither a squatch nor his winged cousin the Jersey Devil (pictured right) — reared their ugly heads, and I searched in earnest, including a night walk around the lake and some daytime recon along the Barrens’ many isolated footpaths for my next visit.  Bigfoot had given me the brush-off, but I did find some sasquatch scat on the Batona Trail. Or was it a load of horse shit? I never can tell.     

More to the point, summer ended with a lovely weekend outdoors.  

Some visual foreshadowing above Lake Absegami. The cloud fish foretold of my...

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...reeling in a keeper moments later.

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*[photos via coasttocoastam.com, cryptomundo.com, and me]