The Whitehall Bigfoot

Wednesday night, bored with all the manufactured hoopla that is the American Idol finale, I channel surfed and stumbled upon Monster Quest, a show on the History Channel that I’ve watched every now and then. This one was about sasquatch – a cryptid whose existence I mostly find doubtful but keep open an outside chance of plausibility. Specifically, this episode dealt with a bunch of sightings that took place in Whitehall, in upstate New York.

Wait a minute. Whitehall … that sounds familiar.

My parents had a weekend house just north of Lake George, which itself is just north of Whitehall. They had it for ten years and would go up just about every weekend. I would go now and then, and spent a couple of week-long vacations up there by myself.

Good Heavens! I was sequestered alone right in the very heart of Bigfoot country!

The weekend house sat on the forefront of three acres of land, just off a two-lane, moderately-traveled road. A crescent of woods surrounded the property, in a radius of about a hundred yards away from the gently upward sloping hills. Directly behind the house was a small, web-encrusted woodshed, and about thirty or forty feet diagonally past that was your traditional, red-painted barn. There was a screened-in porch in the front a few yards from the road and a small patio in the back. The kitchen had several large exposed windows looking out over the patio and on to the fields up to the woods. Our nearest neighbor was probably a half-mile away. Their house, that is. I don’t think I ever saw its occupants.

It was a perfect get-away place. During the day, during those beautiful Adirondack summers (and springs and falls, too), it was absolutely gorgeous. At night, though, it did get a little spooky. There was a quality to the sheer quiet that even a suburban dweller like me finds a little unsettling. And the darkness of the night sky, particularly if it was a cloudy night, threw a blanket over the mountain deeper, darker, and denser than anything I’ve ever experienced. In contrast, on clear, moonless nights, the sky sparkled with dazzling gem-like stars so bright and colorful it could rival any ancient royal jewelry box.

Alone up there it was downright spooky. The quiet, the dark, the isolation … and those woods. All these elements combined perfectly to create an eerie environment if you allowed yourself down that path. I always had an inkling, a little tickle of certainty, that there was something lurking out there, silently weaving in and out of the pine trees come down from the mountain. Who knows? Perhaps it had the courage to come close to the house, enticed by the light and the warmth and the smells of cooked food. Perhaps it even stepped up on the patio and peered into those kitchen windows. I know I was always a little on edge walking in to that kitchen after the sun went down.

And now my suspicions have been confirmed, thanks to Monster Quest. I mean, if there were sightings in Whitehall, why not forty or fifty miles north, where I stayed? After all, half of New York state is one giant forest.

Did anything happen while we had that house? Anything concrete? Footprints? Anybody hear anything – howls, growls – or see anything, like a big, shadowy figure at the wood line? Wellllllll … not exactly.

There were two odd little occurrences, both of which, even if explainable with the most strangest of possibilities, are probably completely unrelated to our Whitehall friend. Shortly after purchasing the house (which was built in colonial times or close to it), my mother was alone in the half-renovated living room when she heard someone – or something, BWAHAHAHA – yell at her either “Hey!” or “Hey you!” Scared, she turned around, but no one was there. She looked for my stepfather, but he was in the barn, fifty feet away. We doubted her at first, but she insisted she heard something. She thinks it was the ghost of the original owner, upset at all the renovation. I’m not sure she’s entirely jesting, either.

A couple of years later I was up there with a girlfriend and some friends, and we were partying. This was during my dry days, after my first, original “conversion,” so I was living clean: the designated driver in those days. It was night, we went for a walk down the road in the inky black darkness. There were streetlights, though, spaced far apart. Suddenly, my girlfriend stopped, frozen in place. She had been drinking but was not drunk, but she was acting weird. Pointing down the road, she asked me what that light was. I said it was the streetlight. She said, no, the light just past it. I turned and looked again, but could only see the streetlight. I told her so, but she insisted there was another light. Coming closer. There were no cars on the road; it was completely quiet. Covered in goose bumps, I suggested we return to the house. Where it was safer, I suppose.

A bunch of anecdotal evidence, sure. Possibly due to emotional stress, suggestive mental states, or even, in the case of my girlfriend and I, mass hysteria. Hey Spock, whoever said we are rational and logical creatures?

But the closest I came to actual danger, I think, would have been my encounter with the Toothless Meatman. No, he was not a sasquatch, but I do not doubt he was slightly more closely related to the missing link than, say, you or I.

Bigfoot, ghosts, flying saucers, and toothless meatmen. Ah! What a great time we had at that little house by the woods!