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.

Tomorrow morning (08:15 a.m.) , the 3rd of August , 2011,  I am going to be a guest on  the Ryan “Rybread” show on 107.1 WEAI FM which broadcasts locally from Jacksonville, Illinois. For those outside the listening area the interview can be listened to in archive here: Ryan “Rybread” show.

The interview is in regards to a series of five possible bigfoot related incidents in the Chatham, Illinois area.

Is Bigfoot In Chatham?

I was contacted to do a short interview with  WCIA TV 3 News, from Champaign, Illinois about the possible recent bigfoot activity here in Central Illinois.

Please click on link below to watch the video:

For the reports about the recent footprint found in Chatham, Illinois please see:

Footprints in Chatham

Messing with Sasquatch may not be such a good idea 

Guest on 100.5 WYMG – Springfield’s Classic Rock

Recently, the 3rd of July 2011,  I was contacted by a friend of mine about an odd occurrence. Her niece lives near Staunton, a small town in Central Illinois. The niece was  gone for the weekend and when she returned home found that something had broken into her chicken coop and killed 24 chickens by pulling their heads off and laying them all in a straight line, all laying in the same direction.

This is a disturbing incident. What could be so brutal as to not only slaughter all of her chickens? But also what or whom would leave them all in a row. That suggests purpose and intelligence.

This Central Illinois incident left few clues. Their neighbors had also lost rabbits which were housed in hutches in their back yard, and unusual sounds had also been noted.

Map of Staunton, Illinois located about 40 miles northeast of St.Louis, Missouri.

Are there other similar cases perhaps in other parts of the country? And if so what conclusions were drawn?

In May 2010 the following article appeared in the Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News.

Mystery surrounds 26 headless chickens in North Pole

COOP: Bodies laid in a lollipop pattern, heads gone; three survived.

By James Halpin

Twenty-six chickens were mysteriously beheaded at a North Pole chicken coop this week. Then things got weird.

Troopers say they were called to a home on Sharon Road on Monday to a report of a mass chicken slaughter, with the carcasses laid out in a peculiar pattern on the ground.

The homeowners, who live in a semi-rural wooded neighborhood with large lots, had 29 white chickens in a backyard coop, said Trooper Ken Vanspronsen, who responded to the scene.

Sometime overnight Sunday, someone crept in and tore their heads off, but the homeowners told troopers they didn’t hear anything unusual. They woke up Monday and went out to feed the chickens, when they discovered 26 of them dead.

“They were very concerned as to why somebody would do it, and kind of spooked,” Vanspronsen said.

There was no sign of the heads, troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters said. The carcasses had been laid out in a north-south pattern — oriented with the coop — in a roughly 12- to 15-foot line on the ground with a circular arrangement of corpses at one end, in something of a lollipop pattern.

“It’s kind of a mystery as to why somebody would tear off chicken heads and then arrange the bodies in a linear pattern,” Peters said. “It’s certainly something that is perplexing. … It’s unsettling, to say the least.”

Troopers wouldn’t name the homeowners, saying they didn’t yet know if the act was a threat against them or if it was simply motivated by vandalism.

There was no damage to the coop itself and just three chickens survived the incident. It wasn’t clear if the suspects had been interrupted in their work of if the surviving chickens held some unknown significance.

“It’s kind of hard to say why anybody would do it in the first place, let alone why they’d stop,” Vanspronsen said.

The chicken carcasses when found were buzzing with flies in the warm Interior day and the meat was not salvageable. The display was photographed and the chickens were thrown out, Peters said..

I have been in contact with the reporter and in the last year nothing new has been added to the story.

In March of 2008  I visited a rural home near Springfield, Missouri and spoke with a lady who over a period of weeks had lost a large number of both chickens and ducks that were housed behind her home.  In this location only a few chickens were taken each night and none were laid out with their heads pulled off. I felt sorry for the two remaining chickens who roosted on her front porch and as close to her door as possible.

This family in Missouri had heard loud wood knocks and roars coming from the dark ravine behind their home. Large footprints and stick structures have been found by researchers on their property.  They sold their home and the new owners have been reporting strange sounds as well

In November of 2010 I gave a public talk in Belleville, Illinois. One of the attendees related to me that she was losing 5 or 6 chickens at a time. She also reported hearing odd sounds like a baby “crying in the woods” as well as other unusual and unidentifiable sounds. Their home is located in the woods near Red Bud, Illinois.

From Paul Graves, well known bigfoot researcher in Washington State comes the following note:

Hi Stan , my friend still lives in the cabin where he had a white sasquatch tear into his chicken pen and take 5 chickens and it layed them in a perfect row in the snow with all there heads pointed in the same direction , they shot bird shot over it’s head because they were scared and didn’t know what it was, they ran back in the cabin and when they came back three of the chickens were gone and two were left on the snowbank, his story was redone on “Monster Quest” show critical evidence, and the very first Monster Quest also .

This incident was also reported in the local newspaper (Wenatchee, Washington) the Wenatchee World 26th of January 1977.

So what are we left with? Were these chickens, killed by having their heads pulled off and laid out in a row, killed by a sasquatch?

I would think that the folks involved would much rather know that they were perhaps dealing with an animal, such as a sasquatch, than what so many suggest, some type of satanistic cult.