By Eddie Middleton

Memphis UFO Examiner

Update on little-known Illinois Bigfoot hotspot

Big Foot activity in the environs of the old castle grounds outside of Hartford, Illinois has not abated since my first report on some astounding sightings occurring in this area back in late June and early July of this year [see previous article].  My key correspondent is the lady who works guard duty at the gate of a large warehouse right across the road from the area adjacent to the old castle grounds.

For a long time now she has been hearing throughout the wee hours of the night all kinds of Bigfoot related sounds and getting strong whiffs of the famous foul odor often associated with him, but now she herself has just recently had her own first ocular encounter with one of these creatures. And this happened in broad daylight. This lady works day and night shifts, and her sighting occurred at approximately 10:30 am about three weeks ago during her morning shift.

She was standing outside of her guard gate and happened to look across the road at the long field that extends to a wooded area that’s about a couple of hundred yards southeast of the old Hartford Castle. About a hundred yards straight ahead she saw a humanoid-looking creature at the very edge of the woods standing on his or her two legs directly confronting her gaze. This “Bigfoot” was covered in gray/black hair but was mostly gray in appearance. The witness estimated he was about five and a half feet tall. A short Bigfoot! This is practically an oxymoron. But she could have been wrong about this because at that distance, it would have been hard to estimate the height of someone standing. And conceivably this could have been a young Bigfoot. Apparently a whole family of them lives in this area. He was not moving, just standing very still and staring back at her. Then after about a minute or two, he suddenly turned and went back into the woods.

The exact location where he re-entered the woods just happens to harbor possibly the largest, lushest, motherload of blackberries in the world! My correspondent who had discovered huge footprints around the mote area of the old castle [see previous article] has seen this blackberry paradise with his own eyes and assures me it contains such an astonishing abundance of this sweet/tart fruit that it is no exaggeration to estimate that it exceeds the million mark in numbers.

And it is a well-known fact that BF’s are great lovers of fruits and berries. There have been numerous sightings of these big hairy fellows shaking apples out of trees and raiding people’s private gardens and orchards for other fruits and vegetables. Being at the very spot he was sighted, and in the middle of the summer growing season, one has only to put two and two together here to come up with the very plausible deduction that the creature our witness saw that day was out on a picking expedition into what must be a sacred precinct for them.

All the more reason these Bigfoots would be jealous to protect this habitat of their’s. Some strong indications of their dislike of man’s presence in this area will be pointed out in my next update tomorrow on the encounters with these beings, both direct and indirect, that continue to this day in the area of the Old Harford Castle.