Oct 20, 2011

“Gorilla” marketing: Chatham Sasquatch playing promotional role for upcoming Halloween events

By Jenn Pointer

Springfield – The State Journal-Register

CHATHAM – The Chatham Sasquatch has taken a liking to Funilla Ice’s seasonal candy corn milkshakes according to one of the business’s owners.

Owner Rhett Mays said Bigfoot sightings at the business have increased since Oct. 10, when the 1980s and 1990s-themed ice cream shop and miniature golf facility held a Chatham Sasquatch Day for area students to raise funds for the not-for-profit organization, Kailey’s Krew.

The Chatham Sasquatch watched the Glenwood High School Titans win the Central State Eight Conference battle for second place after defeating Rochester High School 35-25 on Friday, Oct. 14, 2011.

“Our manager, Julie Smith, did most of the coordinating for the event, “ Mays said. “We sent flyers out to schools in the Ball-Chatham School District (and) raised $231.”

The Sasquatch event attracted more than 100 people with some additional marketing help spearheaded by his seven part-time GHS student employees, including Mays’ son, Nolan, and Trevor Dowell, who are both GHS soccer players. The students’ promotional efforts have since led to Bigfoot sightings at high school football games.

To promote upcoming Halloween events, both Funilla Ice and the Chatham Jaycees are using the Chatham Sasquatch as a marketing tool.

The Chatham Sasquatch will be making appearances at the Chatham Jaycees Haunted Hayride on Saturday, Oct. 29, at Chatham Community Park, and Funilla Ice’s Spooky Golf, which will run until the business closes for the season on Nov. 1.

Funilla Ice will be open from 4 to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursdays; 4 to 10 p.m. on Fridays; noon to 10 p.m. on Saturdays; and noon to 9 p.m. on Sundays.

“We have the course decorated and spooky music playing. It is ‘gorilla’ marketing at its best,” he laughed.

Oct 18, 2011

Chatham Jaycees Haunted Hayride is back – and so is the Sasquatch

By Jenn Pointer

Springfield – The State Journal-Register

CHATHAM – The Chatham Jaycees Haunted Hayride is back, and the organization says it is prepared to awaken the spirit of Halloween – and a few monsters – by resurrecting the old community tradition Saturday, Oct. 29, at Chatham Community Park.

Hayrides will be held from 5 to 9 p.m., with friendly rides available from 5 to 6 p.m. The route will begin and end at the main entrance of Chatham Community Park by the parking lot behind the baseball concession stands. The Park Street entrance will be closed.

The Chatham Jaycees Haunted Hayride will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, at Chatham Community Park. The Jaycees will be setting up many “scare stations” and several monsters will be roaming in the park, including the mysterious Sasquatch who was last seen by the Jaycees Oct. 6 at Fulgenzi’s heading to Funilla Ice. Have you seen the Sasquatch since?
Tickets are $4 for adults and $2 for children ages 3 to 12. Children ages 2 and younger ride free. Tickets will be sold until 9 p.m.

The Jaycees will be setting up many “scare stations” and several monsters will be roaming in the park, including the mysterious Sasquatch who was last seen by the Jaycees Oct. 6 at Fulgenzi’s heading to Funilla Ice.

There will be a bonfire and ghost stories by the Friends of the Library.

Hotdogs, bratwursts and a variety of fall treats will be sold, including Apple Barn cider and caramel apples. Popcorn, hot chocolate and baked goods will also available for purchase.

The Ancient Athletics, a unit of the St. Andrew’s Society of Central Illinois, will be setting up a scare station and donating the use of a party bus to provide tours for the elderly.

History of the event

The Haunted Hayride dates back to 1988 and was “the brainchild” of Chatham Jaycee Terry Burke according to longtime member John Moore.

The original route started at the village square, toured decorated neighborhoods west of Route 4 and south of Main St., and wove its way back to the square, where members of the Friends of the Library told ghost stories around a campfire.

Volunteers from the Chatham Fire Department towed the wagons and the Jaycees followed in chase cars.

Moore said the Jaycees and other groups set up displays and Halloween scenes along the route, which later led to the participation of residents.

“Residents who lived along the route during the early days of the event would often plan and execute scenes on their own. Some of these became very elaborate,” he said.

“Halloween parties took place in driveways and costumed guests got involved in scaring the hay riders.”

The Jaycees determined in the mid 1990s that public roads were too dangerous for hay riders, and the event was shelved.

The organization has held alternative Halloween events since, including an indoor event at the Chatham Community Building and a Halloween walk called the “Goblin Gathering.” Hayrides were brought back briefly beginning in the late 1990s during the construction of Chatham Community Park, but ended after a few years.

Moore said Chatham residents remember the tradition of the Haunted Hayride because of the amount of community participation and the creativity that was put into displaying “scare areas.”

This year, the Chatham Jaycees plan to present an event with the same atmosphere as the original haunted hayride, Moore said.

“While providing plenty of frights, the Jaycees always tried to add a little humor and kept the event very family friendly, too – fun and frights, not a lot of gore or violence.

“There will be something for everyone to enjoy, from the very young to grandparents.”

For more information, visit the Chatham Jaycees on Facebook.

On the 21st of June 1998 Lake Springfield hosted an Ironhorse Triathlon. The outcome was the largest epidemic of leptospirosis in the nations history. Other lake users also had symptoms. Dr.Donald Graham, head of infectious diseases of the Springfield Clinic believes that all 346 with symptoms  had the disease.

You can read the full article  Troubled Waters from the Illinois Times.

Leptopirosis bacteria is carried in the urine of mammals. The investigation lasted for months and hundreds of animals, both wild and domestic were tested but to no avail.

Highlights from this article are:

Does a microscopic monster lurk in Lake Springfield?

“The medical community was stunned that these people had leptospirosis”

“The strain of leptospira bacteria was so unusual you had to have some unusual mammals causing it,” explains Graham.

“it was not obvious” there were any sewer mains at the sparsely populated end of the lake where most people were contaminated.

Bridgeview Beach, in the branch fed by Sugar Creek, was the site of the triathlon in 1998, and it was the only area of the lake to yield a water sample testing positive for pathogenic leptospira.

Wetlands just before it flows into Lake Springfield and close to several sasquatch reports.

From my reading of several articles about this incident it appears that the final conclusion was:

1. It was a stunning medical event.

2. It was unusual strain of bacteria from an unusual animal.

3. The bacteria was not from sewage.

4. The area of most concern was the Sugar Creek drainage.

–  references to Leptospirosis and Lake Springfield include:

Leptospirosis in Emergency Medicine

Leptospirosis: Background and History of the Disease

Leptospirosis Information Center

Leptospira Molecular Genetics Server!

Leptospirosis – USA (Illinois & Wisconsin)

Outbreak of Leptospirosis among Triathlon Participants and Community Residents in Springfield, Illinois, 1998

Troubled Waters

Update: Leptospirosis and Unexplained Acute Febrile Illness Among Athletes Participating in Triathlons..1998

Z o o n o s e s !

According to the Illinois Department of Public Health the strain of Leptospirosis was Leptospira kirschner serotype grippotyphosa.

So what am I getting at?

Anyone who has been following my posts about Chatham, Illinois this summer knows that there have been several tracks found, rocks being thrown, vocalizations being heard and possible sightings of sasquatch all along Sugar Creek and it’s branches.  How much urine does an 800 lb mammal produce or for that matter a family unit of four or five?

Now I don’t what the source of the  leptospirosis bacteria was back in 1998 but I do agree with Dr. Graham when he said  “you had to have some unusual mammals causing it”.

Conclusions: 

Was the unknown mammalian carrier of leptospirosis that infected 346 lake users in Lake Springfield in 1998 a Sasquatch / Bigfoot?  Obviously you can not answer a mystery with another mystery but there have been dozens of reports suspected sasquatch activity in Sangamon County and over a dozen in the Sugar Creek area.

The largest outbreak of leptospirosis ever in the continental United States baffled dozens of doctors and scientists and remains to this day without a conclusion. The mammalian host species remains a mystery.  Or is it?

When the Illinois Times article Troubled Waters asks “Does a microscopic monster lurk in Lake Springfield?” my answer would be:

“No, the monster lurks in the woods along the shores of Lake Springfield”

On Monday, the 12th of September, 2011, Tom (not his real name) was in his backyard in the small town of Chatham, Illinois. He happened to look back towards his patio and saw an odd sight.  Clearly someone or something had destroyed a section of his downspout. The downspout had blood splattered on it and several hairs were still attached.

At this point most of what happened is open to conjecture. It would appear that something ripped the downspout apart in an attempt to perhaps get at a squirrel.

Everything is a wild guess at trying to understand a very strange occurrence.

Photo of the downspout still partially attached to the side of the house.

One section of the downspout showing tooth impressions.

Part of the ripped apart downspout showing apparent splattered blood.

I met the homeowner at his home and he agreed to the following interview. His real name is not “Tom”.

Tom – You see how close I am to the lake. This is pretty much all woods, there are like three ponds that drain into this one that is right back here. And that pond actually drains into that ‘s’ curve that you see that is connected to Lake Springfield. There is all kinds of deer up through here. I didn’t know what it was, I was kind of freaked out for my dogs.

My dogs pretty much stay in the yard, they won’t leave, but it ain’t going to stop anything else from coming in. You can walk through straight to the pond through all these yards.

Stan – What was the series of events.

Tom – It happened like Sunday night, and I noticed it Monday. I came out the door and I said “What the heck?” They pulled both screws out and only had one left.  No one heard anything, my son’s bedroom is right there. I mean to have that much damage and no one hear.

Stan – Any reaction from your dogs?

Tom. No. That’s because they were inside. But sometimes the dogs come out here at night and their always barking down there towards that direction. She always runs out there near that green thing.

Stan – So, is there always one direction they bark?

Tom – Oh, yeah! Always, when they come out this door she comes flying out this way, she always faces that way. That’s that big swampy area, down through there.

Stan – Have you ever heard any unusual sounds?

Tom – You hear, in this neck of the woods, all kinds of sounds. You hear coyotes. There used to be a zoo (Grindstone Valley Zoo). I’ve had giraffes in my yard, and you would hear like lions at night.

Stan – How long has that zoo been closed?

Tom – I would say at least four years.

Stan – So, how did you happen to contact me?

Tom – I talked to one of the guys at work, Mike. Mike says “You have to call the police and find out, because I am telling you I have hunted my whole life and I have had dogs my whole life and their ain’t no dog that did that to your downspout.” Because some of these teeth marks and just the way it mangled it. Mike knows you and that is how I got your number.

Wetlands area behind the home where Tom lives.

Tom – As you can see it is very dark back here.

Stan – Have you ever smelled anything unusual?

Tom – You get that a lot around here, I find dead raccoons all the time, dead squirrels.

Tom – Mike said what was funny is that his dog didn’t even want to smell that piece of pipe. They didn’t want to have anything to do with it. It didn’t, and this is a German Shepherd. He said she isn’t usually afraid of anything, but whatever was on that pipe the dog didn’t want anything to do with it.

Tom – This whole area where we live, we have the wildlife sanctuary, that’s a protected area, all the deer, this is just a bountiful area here and cover.

Stan – What gave you the idea it might be related to the other possible sasquatch reports in the Chatham area.

Tom – When I showed the downspout to Mike, he said “That ain’t no dog, that is some type of other animal. You should probably call the police so they could figure out what is going on, because that is no dog.” We had talked about the other sasquatch report in the area close to here. So Mike said he had this friend who was involved in research and could take a look at that, let me send him the photos. So that is kind of how it happened.

Stan – Well, thank you very much for contacting me and allowing me to come to your home and look around.

The downspout along with blood and hair samples have been submitted for DNA analysis. At this point I am guessing that the blood belonged to the possible squirrel that was in the downspout.

The following posts were extracted from an online hunting forum. I did a search for Keith’s comments and arranged them as to their particular thread and date. As I have camped extensively in Colorado I found them to be very interesting. Keith Foster has given me permission to post his writings here.

1. BIG FOOT!

2. Bigfoot may be dead!!!!

3. Bigfoot Sightings

4. Bigfoot Tracking

5. Colorado Bigfoot?

6. Colorado Bigfoot Again

7. Forgot Bigfoot-Grizzly Spotted!

8. It’s Bigfoot Tracking Season

9. New Bigfoot Info

10. Sasquatch Hunt

Stan – a week after the Incident at Cumberland Sugar Creek Cemetery (June 25th, 2011)  I was contacted by Larry Wilson and we talked about an investigation and findings that he and Chris Mason had been involved in at the cemetery. I asked Larry if he would like to write up a report and allow me to post it here. The following is that report.

__________________________________________________________________________

Date of Incident

Two miles south of Sugar Creek Covered Bridge, and also along Sugar Creek  in southern Sangamon County, Illinois lies the little country cemetery known as Cumberland Sugar Creek Cemetery. On Saturday evening, June 25th, 2011 Jenny Lowery Bertoni and four friends arrived at around 10 p.m. to do a little ghosthunting.

The entrance to the cemetery in rural Sangamon County, Illinois

GPS Coordinates -39.6200, -89.6845

From a phone interview:

Jenny – There was five of us all together,  four girls and one guy. We just went out to look around. We had done our walk-through, we sat down in the drive-through along the rocky road under some trees. We were all sitting down in a horse-shoe shape.

Jenny - We heard this horrendous branches breaking. Our first instinct was that some deer had come through the forest into the cemetery though we didn’t see anything until we saw a really dark shadow, a really big dark shadow, and we heard really heavy footsteps. We couldn’t really see well, and the whole time we aren’t thinking anything except ghost.

Jenny - All of a sudden from behind, but way up high we all get pelted with these really big rocks and dirt. We all got hit in the head and the face and the body with the rocks and the dirt. And then we heard this horrendous shuffling noise and we were booking it to the car.

Stan – And what time of night was this.

Jenny – It was probably about 10 o’clock, it wasn’t very late.

Stan – And what did the shadow look like.

Jenny – It was large, just huge. We saw the shadow running through the cemetery from where we heard all the brush fall.

Stan – I have been in that cemetery several times, can you describe to me exactly where it was?

Jenny – Where you first pull in you can park right there. You can then turn to the right and start walking down that way. Straight ahead of you in that fence line, that brush area, is where he came out of and ran towards us.

Cumberland Sugar Creek Cemetery

# 1 – location where the witnesses were sitting when pelted with the rocks.
# 2 – area in which they heard the branch breaking and saw the large shadowy figure.

Stan – And when you say “shadow” do you mean”dark figure”?

Jenny – Yes, because it was so dark outside.

Stan – But you could see it’s figure.

Jenny – Yes, and it was big. It was at least seven feet tall, if not taller than that. He was running in the dark, we couldn’t see features. And we could hear it, it is like it’s feet were really heavy, he was making so much noise with every footstep as he would run.

Stan – I don’t think these animals are dangerous, but they do like to scare people.

Jenny – Well he certainly did that. The rocks and the dirt did not come from where we were, they were really big rocks. We were sitting in little white rocks. It sounded like he circled around behind us. The way the dirt and rocks came down it was right above us but yet back quite aways, so he had to be really tall to make that throw.

Stan – And were the rocks large?

Jenny – Oh yes, they left a big welt underneath one of the girls eyes. These weren’t huge rocks, they were just bigger than the rocks we were sitting in. The rocks we were sitting in were like little white driveway rocks and what was thrown at us was like rocks you would find in the dirt.

Jenny – Until my mom said that bigfoot likes to do that, it hadn’t even dawned on us that that is what we were dealing with.

Jenny – Before the rocks were thrown we did hear a growl of some kind, we didn’t know where it came from. It was a weird, very strong growl.  And that did happen right before we got hit with the rocks and dirt.

Stan – Thank you for allowing me to interview you about this interesting incident.

# 1 is Cumberland Sugar Creek Cemetery showing its proximity to Sugar Creek.

When looking on a satellite map of this location one is immediately struck by how open the country is. As in many areas of Illinois this is farm country, large fields of corn and soybeans bisected by wooded creeks.

One day (16th of June, 2011) after a large footprint was found in a backyard in Chatham, Illinois two miles south hikers found a large footprint along Sugar Creek at a historical site known as the Sugar Creek Covered Bridge near Glenarm, Illinois.

Sugar Creek Covered bridge was built in 1880 and is one of a few covered bridges still in existence in Illinois.

GPS Coordinates - 39.64036, -89.66230

A young lady was walking with her teenage nephew along a recently flooded trail when he noticed a large impression in the mud.  He showed it to his aunt who was carrying her camera. They were impressed by the apparent huge size of the print and that the toes were visible.

The footprint was about 18 inches long and 8 inches wide. The teenager’s shoe (which I measured myself) was 12 1/2 inches long. The imprint of the toes is barely visible on the left of the photo.

[Photographs are horrible at showing details of footprints. Then the problem arises, do you show poor quality pictures to the public and listen to a thousand complaints or do you post them anyway for those readers who are intensely interested in what may be happening in their local area?]

The father of the teenager contacted me and we set up a time to visit the area with his family. Several days had passed since the footprint was found and with recent rains the imprint was gone.

This park, although nestled along a heavily wooded creek, also sees a high amount of human foot traffic because of its historical significance in this part of Central Illinois.

Was this footprint from the same individual who left an imprint underneath an apple tree one day earlier two miles to the north? As both prints measured 18 inches x 8 inches it would lead one to think so.