Bigfoot Sighting in Wisconsin
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on June 11th, 2007
Big Foot sighting raises hairs
LIMA TOWNSHIP-Along McCord Road, where a marsh and woods offer a wildlife sanctuary, a Delavan couple stepped into the realm of the unknown.
For Lenny and Stacie Faytus, who own and operate the Richmond House restaurant in rural Delavan, the encounter with a brown, hairy creature they describe as being 7-feet tall and weighing about 350 pounds was a life-changing experience.
But it took them two years to work up the courage to share their story with anyone other than family and close friends.
It was a story that Tom Biscardi, a California resident, couldn’t resist checking out for himself.
Biscardi, a nationally known Bigfoot hunter, arrived in early May with a film crew to investigate the sighting. The crew walked the Lima Marsh, a public preserve, along County KK because the land on McCord Road east of the marsh is privately owned.
“We spent the better part of the day searching the areas for signs of the creature but with little evidence found,” Biscardi said. “Often, people in cars would drive by and after seeing the signs on our rig, would shout out to us: ‘We know it’s there,’ or ‘We’ve seen it, too.'”
But none of the locals contacted by The Janesville Gazette said they have heard or seen anything out of the ordinary on their land or in the marsh.
One area man, however, said his former boss used to talk about hearing an unearthly howl and scream coming from the marsh at night.
“It made the hair on the back of his neck stand up,” said Daniel Weidner.
Seeing the creature stride across McCord Road had the same effect on the Faytuses.
“The hair on my neck and arms was standing up straight. As was the hair on my head,” Stacie said.
The couple was driving north on the rural road late one afternoon in March 2005 when about a quarter-mile ahead they saw what they first believed was a deer walking from the woods.
“It was a dull brown,” Lenny said. “I told my wife to look at the deer.”
Then it stood up, Lenny said.
His next thought was that it was a person cutting brush along the road.
But when the creature crossed the road in two easy steps, the couple knew it wasn’t a man or any animal they’d seen before.
They had no idea what it was.
“He never looked our way,” Lenny said. “I didn’t see a face. I just focused on his legs. They were longer compared to a human’s legs. He had a different walk, too.”
Although the couple reached the spot where the creature crossed within seconds, they couldn’t see him anywhere in the cultivated field, Lenny said.
The creature had stepped into a ditch overgrown with weeds and bramble about 4 feet below the road, Lenny said.
It was at this point that the hair on Lenny’s neck stood up. He was convinced the creature was hiding a short distance below the road among the bramble.
Stacie just wanted to leave, she said.
For years they mostly kept quiet about what they had seen that day.
That’s a normal reaction, said Matthew Moneymaker, president and founder of The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization based in Laguna Beach, Calif.
“Americans are not intimated by threat of force, but the fear of ridicule will make them cower and run,” Moneymaker said.
When people in Europe encountered a Bigfoot, they can’t wait to share their stories, Moneymaker said.
Chances are many Wisconsin residents have seen a Bigfoot or heard one in the night, Moneymaker said, because it’s possible the state is home to up 200 of the creatures.
He is familiar with the back roads and rural areas of Wisconsin after leading a research expedition in Phillips last summer.
“We definitely had some action there,” Moneymaker said. “At one point, they (Bigfoot) approached our tent. We heard them. They were around. We caught a blip on some thermal footage behind a bush. The image was very tall.”
The goal, he said, is not to capture or shoot any Bigfoot.
“All we do is try to spot and film,” Moneymaker said.
Although Biscardi’s crew found no evidence among the bogs and tamaracks in Lima Marsh to substantiate the Bigfoot sighting, he plans to make a return visit.
As for the Faytuses, they have no doubt that what they saw wasn’t human.
“I think about it all of the time,” Lenny said. “We’re going to try and find out exactly what it was.”Carla McCann
The Janesville (WI) Gazette
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Anything connected to Biscardi smells to high heaven…
Something weird is going on in Delavan.
Over this last weekend (June 9-10, 2007), the town was in the news because of the discovery of seven people found shot there (six dead).
Also, Delavan, it was revealed in those stories, was the founding site for P. T. Barnum’s “The Greatest Show on the Earth.”
Furthermore, I did a little digging to discover at one time the International Clown Hall of Fame was located in Delavan.
hey everyone interesting new wisconsin sasquatch sighting article. good evening . bill green
interesting BF sighting.
and Loren: very interesting, weird, and sorta chilling(shudder) information on Delavan. seven people that is really strange. i think you are right some thing is going on there.
Name game, anyone?
Hi Everyone,
I know something about this couple since they told me about it last summer and it’s been fully posted on my cnb-scene.com website for some months.
It was also written about in an article in the Chicago Reader in October 2006. The paper sent a full crew here to interview the Faytus’ and me and did a large feature story. A full story will also appear in the forthcoming book Strange Wisconsin.
The reason Biscardi was involved is that he had decided to come here and hunt for Manwolves on Bray Road and contacted me about it. I’m unable to make personal appearances right now and do not have time to coordinate witnesses for people, but I suggested he stop at the Richmond House and talk to the Faytus.’ He did and then filmed a recent segment with Milwaukee’s NBC affiliate with himself and the Faytus.’
While their restaurant is technically located in rural Delavan, it is also close to Whitewater. The Lima Marsh is between Whitewater and Milton and I’m sorry, but it is ludicrous to make any connection between the domestic violence that recently occurred in the city of Delavan and these unknown creature sightings between Milton and Whitewater. Not that Delavan doesn’t have its share of weirdness.
The Faytus’ by the way are extremely credible people, just hard-working business owners. They have not erected a Bigfoot statue at their restaurant or used it for business. They do have the best fish fry around.
Please check out the web page for other Bigfoot sightings in this vicinity that I’ve been keeping track of.
Best regards, Linda Godfrey
I looked up Delavan in Google Earth. It isn’t in the northwoods of Wisconsin, as I had assumed.
It is practically on the Illinois border between Madison and Chicago, and is in an intensively farmed, very flat region. There are a couple of rivers with patches of woods along them, and a couple of lakes with woods. But nothing that could suggest a population of Napes living in the area, without every one knowing about it. There just isn’t enough cover.
Could population pressure make them wander, the way the cougars, wolverines and wolves are?
I found what Loren said to be pretty uncomfortably bizarre. Bigfoot, shootings and clowns? I just can’t get the “Twilight Zone” music out of my head.
I live about ten miles from Delavan and go there frequently. I’ve also researched it for years. There have been several Bigfoot sightings in the vicinities north and west of Delavan but none in the city itself. The Clown Museum is long gone but the city’s main cemetery has special markers for the graves of circus people. I’ve written about a possible secret colony of former circus”attractions” people, visited by someone I know personally in her youth, but that was on Delavan Lake to the south of town. I’ve also written about a haunted downtown building and the life-size giraffe, elephant and clown statues on Main Street. And of course The Week, the newspaper in which I broke the story of The Beast of Bray Road, is located in Delavan. There was also a sea monster scare (based on a swimming horse, it turned out) in the little lake just north of downtown.
But weird things aside, the recent, tragic story of the killings was a case where the couple was separated, the man was jealous and crazed and decided to kill himself and his young family, and a couple of others got in the way. I used to report on family violence quite a bit in the county. It sadly occurs anywhere and everywhere, and again, I just can’t see a link between this horrible and isolated tragedy and Delavan’s local oddities.
– Linda Godfrey
Thanks for confirming that the shootings were unrelated, lorelady. I suspect that the clown/circus-related stuff is similarly unrelated. If it wasn’t for the fact that the museum is long gone, I could easily see someone pitching the idea of a person learning how to walk in oversized clown shoes to help them hoax giant footprints, though.
Hmm … Delevan, WI – Home of the Bed & Breakfast. Oh, and it looks like the couple in question OWN a B&B. Now, if I wanted to generate business for my B&B …
Delevan was originally a trainstop for the circuses of old which apparently bedded down there for the winter. Maybe it’s the decendant of some side-show freak? Bearded-lady great-grandchild?
Whereabouts were these sightings NW of town? In the middle of a field, fencerow, or along a river? Can you make a .kml file in Google Earth for us and upload it here?
Well, if you say it’s unrelated, it must be. I think the idea of irony is what was expressed.
sschaper responds:
“There just isn’t enough cover.”
“The couple was driving north on the rural road late one afternoon in March 2005”
Late afternoon in March, so it was getting dim, or dark. Large nocturnal feeders are getting restless, emerging from their daytime lairs and moving along the ditches, fences, river undergrowth and into the woods towards their hunting grounds.
I lived and hunted in Southern Wisconsin, and believe that a wary nomad could easily travel across the fields, waterways, woods and Kettle Moraines there in complete secrecy. There are no mountains, but the rolling hills and river bottoms can conceal anything!
“…nothing that could suggest a population of Napes living in the area…”
Evidence suggests that Squatch may be solitary most of the time, at least in daily hunts and travels, much like most cryptids – cougars, wolverines, wolves, thylacines, werefolk etc…