I’m used to writing fiction. It’s an escape from reality. Writing a non-fiction account of a supposed “fictional” creature is new for me.
For one thing, this creature isn’t one of fiction. I know because I saw it.
I recorded that account in the post here.
After writing my story, it made me realize that this story isn’t over. There are too many questions left unanswered.
That’s why I decided to go back to Narnia. As a quick refresher, Narnia is a place in the woods my sisters and I discovered. We discovered what we called “houses” AKA “Tumnus’s cave.” They were two little caves made of limbs and pine needles. Who built them? It was a question left unanswered until I happened to encounter a being I had no name for. He was about my height—a little over five feet, covered in dark hair, thick shoulders, black eyes with no pupils, and terrifying to a thirteen-year-old girl.
Fast forward thirty years. I kept the secret of what I saw except to tell a few people. Still, it was hard for me to wrap my mind around it, and I wondered, are the little caves still there? What about that being I saw? Bigfoot, I had learned his name years later.
So, I went back.
The caves are gone. My dad told me that almost a decade ago, the paper mill came through and took all the trees. The horsey tree was still there, but almost unrecognizable. The pasture had been sold, a house built, another trailer house put near the spot where I’d seen Bigfoot. We didn’t tell the neighbors what I saw.
But Mom and Dad still own some of the land, including a pasture that has now grown into a forest, where my dad says he heard wood knocks.
Our journey wasn’t over.
We made our way into the woods. The underbrush and thorns were tricky to navigate, but it was a surprise to find that the paper mill hadn’t taken all the trees. There was a small corner of forest that remained, and some of the older trees stayed.
That’s where we found our first structure.
It was made of tree limbs that hadn’t been cut, and they were stacked evenly between two trees as if to make a wall. (See pictures below.)
Nearby, we found another structure that was reminiscent of the caves we’d found. It wasn’t as well-built, but there were a few oddities about it—two limbs of the same size propped perfectly parallel against it, and the other limbs and brush assembled rather than randomly placed to form a dome.
As we continued walking through the woods, I walked towards what I thought was a spider web, but as I got closer, realized it was made of coarse black strands. They were at eye level, and as I started to pull them down, realized they were about a foot or two above me stuck in the limbs of the tree.
As I pulled as the strands, I tried to understand what I held. The closest thing I could describe it as was horsehair. In appearance, that’s what it most closely resembled, but to the touch, they felt nothing like horsehair. It didn’t have the same texture, and horsehair has a very distinct texture.
I collected the hair and brought it back to Mom and Dad’s house. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to find much, and now, with the strange hair in my pocket, I wasn’t sure where to go next. I was in a bit of shock. Sure, you read about these things and see them on TV, but I’m no researcher or scientist. I did, however, remember something I’d seen on TV. (Hey, watching all those Bigfoot shows comes in handy after all!)
Dr. Jeff Meldrum, who’s one of the only scientists in the world who actually studies Bigfoot, has done investigations on Bigfoot hair. The hair he studied was different from human hair because, under a microscope, Bigfoot hair has no core, and human hair has a very distinct core. The only other hair in the animal kingdom that has no hair belongs to chimpanzees and gorillas.
At this point, my husband David arrived, and my dad decided to pull out his old microscope. We placed the hair I collected on the slide, plus my daughter offered her hair, and we even took some hair from a doll, just to compare it to synthetic hair.
Under the microscope, it wasn’t a surprise to find the hair I found had no core. The synthetic hair looked even less like either my daughter’s hair or the forest hair.
What do I make of this?
I don’t know.
I wish I knew, but I’m also not a scientist. My next step would be to send the hair to a lab somewhere, but that will take some research.
The rest of the story is stranger.
(To be continued in a follow-up post.)
