Finding Bigfoot At the Flea Market: An Encounter from 1977

When I was a kid my parents often took my brother and me to flea markets and yard sales. It was the 1970s and I guess this was the thing to do. Quite often we didn't find anything good, but every now and then we'd get some great stuff. I still have a large teak Buddha I found, and we definitely found plenty of old paperbacks about weird occult and paranormal topics.

I never had an actual paranormal experience at a flea market, but apparently they do happen. Or at least they did, back in the 1970s.

On the evening of May 7, 1977 a Lowell, Massachusetts man named Gerald St. Louis arrived at a flea market site in Hollis, New Hampshire. St. Louis had brought his wife and two sons with him. The flea market began the next day, and the St. Louises wanted to get a good spot to set up their table early in the morning. After sunset they went to sleep in their pickup truck. Attached to the truck was a small trailer.

They were awakened that night when their truck began shaking. Standing next to their vehicle was a large humanoid. Mr. St. Louis later described the creature as being 8 or 9 feet high, brown-colored, and covered in long hair. When he turned on the headlights it became startled and ran across the parking lot, jumping easily over a four-foot high fence. Once over the fence it stood and stared at the truck.

Needless to say the St. Louis family got out of there fast. They drove to the Hollis police station and reported their sighting to Chief Paul Bosquet. The police inspected the area, but found no sign of the creature. The ground was covered in pine needles and not even any footprints could be seen. Well, at least according to the press at the time. I've seen at least one article online that says 16-inch footprints were found in the soil.

Chief Bosquet said he thought the family had seen a bear. Whatever it was, it seriously spooked them. They left Hollis quickly and didn't even take their trailer with them. I guess they got more than they bargained for at that flea market. (Get it? Bad pun.)

Was it just a bear? I have no idea, but someone else had a similar experience a few days earlier. A woman named Regina Evans was camping in Hollis on May 5, 1977 when she was awakened in the middle of the night by someone shaking her trailer. She did not see the culprit, but large footprints were found nearby.

Andre the Giant and Lee Majors in The Six Million Dollar Man.

The 1970s was a heady time for paranormal phenomena. The occult and metaphysical movements of the late 1960s had paved the way for Bigfoot, UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle to conquer America. Bigfoot was featured in movies like The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972),  In Search of Bigfoot (1976), and just plain Bigfoot (1970), where a biker gang tries to save women captured by the cryptid. Bigfoot also showed up on TV. He was actually a bionic robot created by aliens on an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, while on the kids' show Bigfoot and Wildboy he fought crime.

As a result of all this, most Americans knew what Bigfoot looked like and what he did - jump out of the woods, scare people, and then disappear. Were the experiences of the St. Louis family and Regina Evans colored by the media? It's very possible, but something really did shake their vehicles in the middle of the night, and the St. Louises seemed legitimately scared.

Perhaps it was pranksters enacting the role of Bigfoot. It's a time-honored tradition. In ancient Greece people dressed like satyrs and in the Middle Ages they dressed like leafy, hairy wildmen. Dressing in an ape costume and running through the woods might just be part of our cultural heritage. We all think there are monsters in the woods, so someone needs to play the part.

Or who knows? Maybe there really are creatures lurking in the woods, and they are the ones who change costumes over time, appearing as whatever we expect, a goat-footed daemon to the ancient Greeks and a huge hairy monster to someone who just wanted to go to a flea market.

Bigfoot was not seen again in Hollis, but happily he's still out there somewhere, lurking behind the trees and evading easy categorization.