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Nov. 14, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:10
Edition 590 - Michelle Souliere

Author/researcher Michelle Souliere in Portland, Maine - with an update on that beautiful State's unique Bigfoot history - and other strange stories...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Hope that everything is good in your world.
We're well and truly into November and I'm recording this after a couple of hours' sleep after my radio show.
So look, if I sound like I'm missing anything, please let me know, won't you?
It all adds to the fun of it, really.
In my radio days, when I used to do an awful lot of live news, sometimes you would have to go to events in the evening and then you would have to come back and you would have to perform first thing in the morning, and I mean like kind of 6 a.m.
So I got used to that kind of thing.
So this is a walk in the park, I think is what I'm saying.
Thank you very much for all of your emails, the points that you make, they are noted.
You can always go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and follow the link.
Send me an email from there if you'd like to communicate.
Suggest a guest for the show because I'm doing my own guest setup now.
So, you know, any help that you might be able to provide, gratefully received.
Theunexplained.tv, the website, there's a link on there for sending emails.
And Adam is the guy who designed, devised, and maintains that website and also gets the shows out.
You couldn't do it without him.
Guest on this edition, somebody who was on the radio show.
And occasionally I have somebody on the radio show, and for various reasons we don't get them on for long enough.
And I got that feeling with Michelle Solier, who I spoke to, I think, about three months ago.
And I said that I would get her back for a longer, more considered conversation on the podcast.
So that's what we're about to do.
Michelle Solier is an artist illustrator, the editor of the Strange Maine Gazette, and its companion blog, which she founded in 2005.
In 2010, she wrote and illustrated her first book, Strange Maine, and has since written one book about Bigfoot in Maine and is in the process of writing another book about Bigfoot in Maine.
Now, if you've listened to this show before, you will know that I have a bit of a soft spot for Maine, because it is, especially in the winter time, but every season of the year, really, an incredibly beautiful place with a lot of trees and in the wintertime a lot of snow and ice, a lot of desolation, a lot of clear blue skies.
And of course, it's very close to Canada.
So you kind of get that northern feel to it.
I liked it very much.
I stayed for a couple of nights in Portland.
And that is one of Michelle's places.
So we'll talk a little bit about Portland.
But, you know, Maine is a great experience and very unlike a lot of other parts of the United States.
And if you want to compare like Florida with Maine, then they could be in completely different universes.
I like both, but they're both very different experiences.
So strange stories from Michelle Soliere, who works very hard to gather them in Maine coming up on this edition.
Don't forget, if you email me for any reason, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
All right, let's get to Maine now.
And Michelle Solier is there.
Michelle, thank you for coming back on my show.
I'm delighted to be able to spend some time with you again.
Well, really nice to be able to do this.
And I was always guilty that we didn't have enough time to talk last time.
So we're going to get into not only the Bigfoot stuff this time, but also some of the mysterious stuff.
First of all, though, I said that I thought Maine was a rather beautiful, somewhat remote looking, certainly, you know, for a British eye, you've got a lot of space there, a lot of trees, and in the wintertime, you can be knee-deep in snow before you know it.
But it seemed to me to be the kind of place where people depend on each other, as you have to in a hard environment at times, and stories get passed around.
Is that just a romantic impression that I've got, or is that the way Maine is?
I think because, I mean, a lot of us probably work on a fairly lonely basis.
Like, you know, anybody who's out working the fields or working the boats and, you know, various typical Maine, you know, beyond the regular blue-collar work in the urban areas, you spend a lot of time alone.
And so when you get together with people, then yeah, it's the tendency is to, you know, share all these little tidbits that you've been saving up on during the time in between.
Yeah.
So there's a really good storytelling culture in Maine and there has been for a very long time.
Yeah, and a very warm, friendly place from what I remember.
I remember going to, I mean, look, Starbucks, they make good coffee, but it's not a place really where you're going to meet strangers, particularly.
It's a place where you don't get your coffee and you maybe sit there and read the paper or you get the coffee and you take it on the train, whatever you do.
But I remember sitting in Starbucks in Portland and it was a really warm and friendly experience.
And I thought, this is not like other places.
So I can understand all of that.
How did your interest in stories of strangeness and paranormality and cryptozoology, how did all that begin?
Oh, well, I mean, I, you know, even as a kid, I was reading books about strange things like the Loch Ness Monster and, you know, ghosts and UFOs.
And then as I got older, you know, went to school, had to work a lot.
And then things kind of shifted gears for me and I was able to start reading more for my own pleasure.
And I picked up Lauren Coleman's book, Mysterious America, read that, loved it, and started looking around for stuff like that about Maine and was discovering that there really wasn't much beyond a few collections of ghost stories and stuff like that.
Nobody was addressing all the weird anomalous little bits of Maine history that I knew must exist.
And so when I started my Strange Maine blog, it was to kind of start putting some of that stuff on record.
And that's, I've been doing that ever since.
I mean, it does seem if you look at it from the UK and our knowledge of America is probably incomplete, just as your knowledge of the United Kingdom might be somewhat incomplete.
I mean, you might be an expert on it, but I doubt that you would know every nuance and detail.
So if you look at it from over here, you get the impression that all of the good stuff happens In places like California and Florida and New Mexico.
Those are the kind of states where you get weird stuff.
Sasquatch, Bigfoot, all of those things.
And nobody ever mentions Maine.
And it sounds to me like you thought that was all wrong.
Well, I mean, I knew that we had just as many interesting stories and just nobody had really paid attention to them yet.
And I feel like wherever you are, I feel like your location undoubtedly has stories like that somewhere hidden away, that if you go looking for them, you'll find them.
I think so.
And one of the points you made in your Strange Main book, I think it was that I looked at today, was that actually you would be surprised that a lot of these stories are chronicled and archived and written down.
All you've got to do is go and find them.
Yeah, there is a lot of, you know, little records here and there squirreled away in old historical societies and archives and bizarre old newspaper articles, which as everything's becoming more digitized are becoming easier to find.
So there's, yeah, there's, they're there.
And my goal, like there's also a lot that I know have gone missing over the years because a lot of it is part of oral history and never made it into documentation.
And so I'd like to, Mike, I would like my contribution to be to get some more of the unwritten stories down for future generations to ponder in future eras.
And that's something to your credit.
You have done that.
You have actually gone and talked to people for all of your research.
Yes, yeah, I have.
And there have been some interesting adventures.
And I never know what's going to happen next.
All right, let's get into it then.
Bigfoot.
Now, you've done one book on Bigfoot.
You've got another one in the works that we will talk about.
What's the interest in Bigfoot?
I mean, does Bigfoot have a presence in the mythology of Maine?
Surprisingly, it does.
When I first heard or first read about accounts that purportedly took place in Maine, I was astonished.
And, you know, I'm very curious and anything anomalous piques my interest.
And it seemed to me that, you know, from what I knew of Maine, that was something anomalous.
It wasn't something that fit the general day-to-day Maine historical picture.
And so I was like, really?
So I started looking into it.
And, you know, I've been digging around.
I think my first post about Bigfoot in Maine was back in 2005.
So it's been 16 years now that I've been digging around after stories.
And just when I think I've, you know, plumbed the depths and found everything there is to find, I discovered there's a whole new slew of stories that I have never encountered and were just waiting for me to find them.
So yeah, that part of it is really exciting.
And some of those stories are real, real doozies.
They're real cool stories.
So we'll start telling them.
One of the nice things about you and what you do is that you don't assume that people know what Bigfoot is.
You actually give a definition, and I've got the definition here, part of it anyway.
You can fill in the blanks for me.
The basics.
The creatures are large, covered in hair, bipedal.
Average height noted by witness between five and seven feet tall.
Well muscled, large in mass, faster and more powerful than humans.
Physical features noted, long arms, large hands and feet, posture slightly different from a human gait or stance.
The most common trait mentioned being a slight bend to the knees.
That's just part of it, yeah?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think one of my eyewitnesses described it as looking like they were sort of bent over but not off balance.
Like it was their, it's as though their center of gravity is a little bit different from ours.
Because from the accounts that I've, and you put that beautifully, the accounts that I've heard, some people suggest in what they're saying that Bigfoot moves like a primate, but that's not so.
It's a different kind of motion.
It's influenced by that, it seems to me.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And while, you know, most of the people who I've talked to, who have seen them, they've been striding along bipedally like a human, but with a slightly different posture.
Less people that I've talked to have seen them doing what might be considered more primate-like movement, sort of running on all fours or, you know, crouching, spending time closer to the ground, which is, I think, a lot of us consider primates to either be spending a lot of time on the ground or up in the trees.
And I keep hoping I'm going to see one up in a tree.
But so far, not yet.
Okay, you talk in the first book, and I know the second book isn't published yet.
You're still working on it.
But in the first book, you talk about a kind of dividing line.
You talk about the encounters pre-1950 and the ones before 1950.
And the ones before 1950, I mean, you must have done a lot of research to talk about these.
But, I mean, for example, J.W. McHenry, or just known to his friends as McHenry, had his 15 minutes of fame, you say, in 1855 when he wrote to the, is it Thomaston or Thomaston Journal?
Thomaston.
Thomaston.
Of course it is.
You see, I was up so early in the morning.
I'm just...
The Thomaston Journey claiming to have captured a small, shrieking, hairy creature while he was out chopping wood.
Yes.
Yeah.
And that, I think, is probably the most famous early main mystery primate account because there was a great amount of detail, enough for me to, you know, look at it and try to determine potentially if it was simply a monkey, what type of monkey that might be.
Because he described the man that found this creature and eventually managed to convince it to come into his home.
He described the things it would eat, the things that it was not interested in Eating, you know, the sounds it made.
Like, it's a very detailed description for somebody who, you know, had this encounter in an afternoon.
Did he keep any?
I mean, if you had something like that in your domestic environment, I guess, as a curious person, you would keep bits of hair or toenail clippings or something like that.
Are there any known remnants of this creature?
There are not.
And in fact, I have not been able to trace anything about where it wound up.
My theory is that it might have been brought to Maine by a sailor because Maine's seafaring men were in and out of ports all over the world at that point.
And we know that there were monkeys who were on ships that were brought to Maine and Boston and places nearby.
So I kind of wonder if this was somebody's onboard pet that got loose and found its way into this, because it is near a port town.
And yeah, but so as far as what happened to it afterwards, I have no idea.
I mean, it would be really interesting to find out down the road that it wound up in living permanently with somebody or wound up in somebody's traveling circus because there were circuses at that time bringing animals around to different small towns that were very exotic.
But given the naval or seafaring possibilities with this, then it might have been something that people probably hadn't seen in those days.
It might have been a, I don't know, a baboon or a chimpanzee that was brought in from overseas.
But it's interesting that there it is recorded in the record in 1855.
Yeah, yeah, very clearly.
Very clearly.
I mean, it wasn't just something he caught a glimpse of in the woods.
It was something that, you know, he brought into his home and spent time with, interacting with.
I mean, you know, how ahead of its time, I guess you could say.
And then there's a whole couple of decades.
Let's try and condense this, where there are in Maine reports of so-called wild men.
I'm guessing that like newspapers and chroniclers had to find a way of describing whatever this was.
Yes, yeah.
And while a lot of that could be either feral or displaced humans, there's certainly some accounts from around that same era where the creature was clearly described as a gorilla-like, a large ape-like creature.
So the accounts all kind of get mixed together, but the wild men accounts certainly seem to have some of the hallmarks of the, you know, the hairiness, the foraging behavior, the sticking to the wooded areas that, you know, that we associate with a typical Bigfoot milieu.
Things seem to get really interesting in 1940.
And we did talk about this on my radio show, and I had my attempt at pronouncing the name of this place.
Medibemps?
Medibemps, yeah.
Medibemps.
Wonder where that name came from.
Medibemps, okay.
Two women.
Quotes, the beings were described by these women as, quotes, two fathers high and covered in black, shiny hair.
They had huge, hairy, black hands with fingers as big as the fish we caught.
They had big feet and they had no clothing.
Talk to me about that.
Oh, yeah.
And that's, I think in some other accounts, they've been referred to as the Metabemps Howlers because people in the area, you know, knew and were aware that at certain points in time, there would be these strange sounds that were emanating from the area, which could be tracked back to these creatures.
And I think in the story, they sort of, after startling the girls, they made off with all the fish they had caught.
So, you know, very opportunistic foraging behavior that, you know, it would certainly take you by surprise and, you know, put you in a position where you would probably be too shocked to even think to try to stop them, which is probably a good thing.
But nothing in any of these early reports to suggest things that started to be reported later.
You know, the idea that perhaps the creature looked at you in a knowing way or you got some kind of feeling that it was communicating with you.
There was none of that at that point.
Yeah, no.
And even in the, there are some Victorian era stories by Charles Asbury Stevens where he talks about woodsmen and campers encountering creatures like this.
And it's always, there's a great separation seemingly between the humans and these creatures where, you know, they're watching the humans and the humans are watching them, but there's not an interaction.
There's obviously curiosity about what these humans are doing in their territory.
There's behavior that almost expresses kind of this ennui, this forlornness, being alone and wild, but there's not an interaction talked about directly like people have been trying to cultivate today with Bigfoot habituation.
It's very, very different.
You talked about how much you love, and I love it too, when you can actually go and stare into the whites of somebody's eyes and get the story from them directly.
So we fast forward to 1963 to 1970.
A woman called Susie, you traveled on that Down Easter train that I love so much to meet her in person.
Now, her experience was much more detailed, much more intimate almost, and over an extended period with a creature that she nicknamed Wabu.
Yes.
Yeah.
And those interactions started, well, they all took place when she was a child.
And it seems like, at least from speaking to people here in Maine, the creatures certainly have an amount of curiosity about human children.
And in Susie's case, what becomes a real relationship, a protective relationship, almost a guardianship outside of her normal human life.
Okay.
Can we fill in a few blanks in that story?
Because I know that she really did feel close to them.
And for the first time, I think, A sort of empathy.
Absolutely.
Her experience as a child at that point in time was that she and her mother and her mother's new husband, so her stepfather, had moved to a very remote location around a local pond.
I think she said there were only a few other houses, maybe two or three other houses on their road, and not all of them were lived in year-round.
So it was a lot of camps.
It was that remote of a location.
And so her stepfather would throw parties in the evenings because he was involved in the liquor industry.
And they would have guests and her mother would be the hostess.
And so during those points in time, which of course were in the evening, Susie would just wind up in the backyard, even when it was dark out, sort of playing by herself away from all the adults having their cocktail party.
And it was during those times when she was out in the yard playing by herself, either during the day or at night, that she first became aware of the creature she wound up calling Wabu.
And at first, she just noticed him watching her from the edge of the woods.
And then later, they began interacting.
She would, if she went out, she would, you know, kind of call or make a particular noise to let him know that she was outside.
So if he was around and wanted to interact, he knew she was there.
And they, over the years, she, there was, because of the pond being nearby there, she would spend time in the water in the summer because it was, you know, so hot outside and there wasn't always adult supervision at that point.
And he would sometimes spend time with her at the water.
And when he discovered that she couldn't swim, he apparently took it upon himself to, in his own way, teach her how to swim.
And that was, if I'm not remembering wrong, he would sort of raise up with her on his shoulders and sort of toss her into the water and then, you know, make the motions and show her what she was supposed to be doing to paddle back to him across the water.
And that's how she learned to swim.
And, you know, at the same time, she was able to observe the eating habits.
Like they, she said that they were very interested in even dead fish that came up from the bottom of the lake.
They would eat the fish, they would eat the algae, the freshwater clams that are very prevalent in Maine ponds.
And so she learned about them and they taught her.
And Wabu eventually began bringing the rest of his family with him, including a youngster, which I think might have been a little bit younger than Susie herself, and the mother, the female.
It's a real bond, isn't it?
It's the kind of thing that we see between maybe zookeepers and primates in captivity.
But to see that in real life outside a zoo is quite astonishing with a seven-foot creature and the seven-foot creature's family.
What about the rest of Susie's family, though?
I mean, they must have seen all of this going on, mustn't they?
Her stepfather was, they did not get along very well.
And there were times when he would be out in the yard being, you know, fairly verbally abrupt and abusive with her, trying to get her to come inside.
And at one point, Wabu didn't like the tone of his voice and threw a branch, a very large branch at the back of the house, which broke part of the back door.
And he just basically went, the stepfather just basically went inside.
Like he just, he didn't want to deal with any of that.
So, and I think Susie told me that she tried to talk to her mother in later years about what she had experienced and, you know, ask her mother, you know, did you ever see anything?
And, you know, her mother sort of brushed it off and just said, you watch too much TV.
So there wasn't, and I don't know if it was just because they weren't paying attention.
But not a great deal of understanding.
No, certainly not.
No.
No.
Which is very different than some of the other stories that I've spoken to people about where the parents were, you know, believed the child and in some cases encouraged them to talk about it with them.
So you spoke to Susie more or less 50 years after the events.
She clearly wanted to tell you the whole story.
What impression did you get of the impact it all had on her through her life?
She definitely looked at it as a very positive influence on her life.
I think she, in fact, said that attributed to Owabu the fact that she had survived as long as she did because he taught her self-dependence and, you know, skills that nobody else bothered to teach her.
And I think also gave her a meaningful relationship where she was living a very lonely existence by herself with her parents who were obviously otherwise occupied most of the time.
So, yeah, this wasn't some kind of fantasy coping strategy of a child who maybe had some issues at home.
I, you know, I can't say one way or the other whether that's the case.
It's certainly something that occurred to me, but I know Linda Godfrey has also spoken with her and actually went to the site with her and experienced some very strange phenomena while she was there.
So I think, you know, while yes, obviously in cases like this, there's always a chance that this was a fantastic retreat from reality.
I think there are too many interesting clues that are attached to this that, you know, back up what Susie was saying.
She had items with her that she had saved from childhood, from when she lived in the woods near them, and including basically a ball of hair that she had with a stick,
a very interesting tree branch formation that I think had been given to her as a gift at one point, and a small tonka truck that Wabu had found in the woods somewhere abandoned and brought to her because he knew she liked toys.
And so that, as well as Linda's experience when she went and visited the site with Susie, which was, you can read about on Linda Godfrey's blog, which is very interesting.
So there's, and it's in a location that is adjacent to other encounters.
So it's consistent.
So there's a good amount of circumstantial evidence here in all of this.
And, you know, here we see Bigfoot, as we like to think of Bigfoot, really, Bigfoot being an empathetic character, having some understanding of us, but wanting to stay aloof from us.
I mean, that's a nice picture.
Not all of the encounters are like that.
You've got in the 1970s Mike Ledbury seeing something that absolutely scares the Bajabis out of him, this huge, great thing.
And you say his mind reels and latches onto a local story from a couple of years before.
Could it be the Durham ape, which is another famous case?
His mind wrestles with this and leaps sideways and lands onto the concept of Sasquatch.
So he knew or had a thought that he knew what he was seeing.
I think he was quite young when this happened, but he turns and runs.
Yes, yeah.
I can imagine a first encounter like that, especially when his previous encounters had been very encounters with very aggressive territorial behavior, when he hadn't had a visual sighting yet.
He'd run across, he'd been out trying to sleep out in a field near his house overnight one night.
And everywhere he tried to settle down, something would be in the woods snapping very large branches, like intentionally, loudly, and then eventually roaring in a way that clearly said, you're on my turf, get out of here.
So his earlier experiences were not friendly experiences before he had visual confirmation.
So yeah, so he was probably understandably a little spooked when he first had his visual encounter.
But when he has those visual encounters, he says their eyes are dark, large, and quotes, very intelligent looking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he was a teenager.
And he was coming from a history of, in his home, they had a lot of different animals.
His mom was very into National Geographic.
They had a subscription to the magazine and watched the TV shows.
So he was well versed in the current generation of primatologists, such as Diane Fossey and all of that crowd.
And so he, you know, being curious and not wanting to give up roaming around in the outdoors, which he loved so much, he decided he was going to try to take some of those practices and put them to work to try to solve his question of what was out there in the woods with him.
Some of these stories are scary.
John Hawkins, 1978.
And I think were they camping?
They were in a tent, I think.
And this is the story as you write it.
Whatever it was, it was tall.
They heard it reverse towards their tent and stop.
What was it doing?
Just standing there?
Then it walked around their tent in the narrow margin between the thin nylon walls and the underbrush.
It stepped slowly, one foot after the other.
The nylon above their heads pushed in where its hands rubbed around it.
The thing was huge.
John and his friend silently panicked.
I'm not surprised.
It circled their tent four times with its hand on the fabric high above them.
Finally, it paused, and as they held their breath, it went downhill, resuming its interrupted journey.
So this was something checking this guy, John Hawkins, this young man, I'm presuming, and his friend camping in a tent, checking them out.
Yeah, yeah, very clearly.
You know, they had set up their tent on a game trail in a small level clearing, which now knowing more as I do about outdoorsmanship, you don't want to put your tent on a game trail.
It's usually a bad idea.
And yeah, and found themselves in the path of something that as it came down the slope towards their tent initially, it vibrated the ground underneath their sleeping bags.
They could feel every footstep as it pounded down the slope.
And it wasn't worried about the noise it was making.
So it obviously wasn't afraid of any predators.
It wasn't a smaller animal by any stretch of the imagination.
And it was its own territory.
It knew the trail very well and was very perplexed to find this strange nylon contraption smack dab in the middle of it on its nightly commute.
But at least it decided to continue on its way.
Yes, I was about to say they were very lucky that it decided that it would probably go away eventually, and it was right.
But these encounters leave an impression.
The one that you know that the one I like most, and we talked about, we didn't have a lot of time on the radio, so we have to squeeze it in.
But I love this story from, and we have to say these stories, these encounters are going on to this day.
But this is 2008.
And this, I'm seeing this, every time I've read this, it kind of conjures up an image of Fargo to me, you know, because you've got, isn't it Beth who's driving a bus?
And there's a passenger, Stephen Lombard Jr.
It is 2008.
And they drive towards what they think is a road accident.
But then the quote of it all is Beth, and you say, as the bus slowed further, Beth had the first view worth anything through the long panes of the bus's glass door and exclaims, that's a foot, as in Bigfoot.
Yeah, yeah.
And Steve was, you know, at first disbelieving, because what are you talking about?
And she's like, no, that is a Bigfoot.
and so he's, you know, scooched up to the entryway door there where the longer panes of glass allow you a lot more field of vision.
And he sees it too.
And they were expecting that it was a deer or something like that hit at the side of the road.
And instead, what they saw was basically something that appeared to be a very human-like foot, but with wispy hair coverage on it, not too dissimilar from an orangutan fur color and texture.
So the foot was, the foot and the leg that it was coming from were covered in long fur, which, you know, didn't match a human, certainly didn't match a deer.
And yeah, a very perplexing, very perplexing incident.
Very perplexing and very recent.
I mean, it is the kind of thing that you just, I guess if you've gone, if you've been sitting on that bus, whether you were driving the bus like Beth or whether you were a passenger like Stephen, you're not going to forget this.
No, no.
And especially because, you know, the field behind the foot was lit with work lights so that it was, there was illumination that almost spotlit this foot for them.
And so I'm sure that seared into their brain when Steve was telling me about it, it was, you know, he was clearly reliving it and he would reiterate things because, you know, he kept coming back to that foot and that image of the foot with like a little bit of the hair knocked off of it lying on the ground next to it and the little bits of hair on the leg wisping in the wind.
It clearly haunts him to this day.
And it's what, we're like 10 years or 10 years.
It was about 10 years later when I talked to him.
So, yeah.
So a decade had passed and the details were still vivid.
But the foot, the big foot, that was presumably hit by something, lying by the side of the, did it get up and walk away?
What happened to it?
They had to keep driving because there was traffic approaching from behind them.
But it was inert.
It looked like it was the foot of something that had fallen into the ditch and the foot was left kind of hanging up over the edge of the ditch.
Yeah.
Was this in an area where something like that could occur?
And, you know, if a creature came to a nasty end and it went down a bank, then nobody would find it.
Is that the kind of location we're talking about here?
Well, I mean, obviously it's Route 1, so it's, although it's not busy, it is commonly trafficked by commuters going from town to town on the Midcoast area.
So it's such a puzzling, puzzling case.
It's an area where there are commonly deer hits because there is a big wilderness corridor that kind of comes down towards the water and empties out there.
So they were used to seeing wildlife collision scenes, which is what they at first assumed they were going to be seeing.
So that's not uncommon in the area.
So a lot of people would just drive past that and not even register it.
Yeah.
And having been to the site, there's a gully that sort of swings down off of the roadway.
And so anything in that gully would be concealed from view because the undergrowth in it kind of, you know, sticks up over the edge of the road.
And so it was just this one foot that was sticking out that was visible to them.
And everything else was below in the gully.
We didn't talk about this on the radio show.
And I don't know when this happened.
You will.
Matthew Mancy, somebody who was used to the great outdoors.
And we've talked on my show many times about the sorts of haunting noises that these creatures make, you know, in places like the Rocky Mountains and others where people have observed them.
In fact, there's a bunch of outdoorsmen who go to the same, well, story has it, they go to the same location every year.
They have for decades to experience this, and they listen to the noise.
And this description from Matthew Mancy, whenever it was, staccato, piercing, whooping noise that no coyote has ever made, like something from the deepest jungle, not the northern woods.
It was more like a gibbon's cry than anything else.
Yeah, and that was one of his later encounters.
That was not a visual encounter.
He had previously had a visual encounter.
And he was in a fairly remote area near a gravel pit with wooded areas around it.
And they were looking for coyotes at night.
And yeah, he imitated as close as he could the sound for me.
And it was just, you know, it's nothing.
It's nothing from the Maine woods.
There's no correlation with hosting main species.
That is a good question.
It was the early 2000s.
So, you know, this stuff is all contemporary then.
It's all recent.
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And it's continuing, you know, to this day.
There are people that, you know, have reported accounts within the past few weeks.
So it's ongoing.
Well, I presume the accounts in the last few weeks, presumably for book two, that I wanted to move on to now.
So let's talk about the latest book.
And I'm presuming, but I might be presuming wrong, that there's a lot of very current stuff going on in that.
So, you know, give me an outline of book two.
Oh, sure.
Book two, as soon as I finished book one, I still had people contacting me about their experiences.
And so I continued to do interviews starting the beginning of this year.
So I've talked to people who have had encounters ranging from the 70s up through the late 90s and then some more recent stuff.
The weird thing is, is that it's all or most of what I've talked to people about has happened in a section of Maine that I didn't cover much in the book.
So it's kind of filling in a blank.
And they're all within 20 or 30 miles of each other, a whole bunch of sightings.
So that's been really exciting.
And none of these people know each other.
You know, they're all from different places doing different things.
And they all approached me independently and began telling me their stories.
So, you know, and some of them are the very basic, you know, driving down a dark road at night and a Bigfoot crosses the road in front of you, in front of your headlights.
You go to the local incinerator, the dump, and same thing, you're driving up the little, you know, one-lane approach to the old incinerator and something comes across the road in front of you in your headlights.
So you can see it clearly.
And it's not, it's not a bear, it's not a moose, it's not a deer for sure, and it's not a human in some sort of ghillie suit.
It's, you know, it's a tall bipedal humanoid shape covered in fur.
So it's been really fascinating.
And, you know, some of them are very innocuous kind of experiences like that, where you see it, it sees you, it keeps going.
And then there have been other sightings where somebody was in a really remote area, kind of hunkered into a little, you know, natural blind area, getting ready to do some deer hunting and running across something that was not a deer, that was not expecting to find you there, and has additional company with it, that proceeds to let you know that you should not be there at all.
Loud territorial noises, roars, trees being broken, you know, all the typical warning signs that you should not be where you are.
When you talk about additional company, are you like talking about a gathering of Bigfoot, a family of Bigfoot?
Yeah, presumably.
The one he saw directly was a very large male and very mature.
And then he thinks the ones that were with it were probably slightly younger males from their behavior and the difference in the sound they made as they were pushing through underbrush and stuff like that.
He did not think they were as big as the one that he actually saw himself.
Anything really incredibly scary like some of those stories in the first book?
There are, and it's going to be, I'm excited to have it all wrapped together and put out.
I've talked to at least one person who has had, I think, four encounters over the course of their life, and some of them were fairly innocuous.
You know, a Bigfoot peeping in the window at them while they were sleeping, or in the neighborhood in the early hours of the morning before everybody was up, or at night in the neighborhood when you're, you know, trying to go through your cellar door and you encounter something under the stairs that was not the neighbor's dog.
And then others where they've been in a very remote location and encountered something that as soon as they came up over the ridge and saw it, it made the most horrible noise and threw the carcass of the creature that it was eating at them to make them go away.
But you're not going to forget that in a hurry.
No.
No.
So there's plenty for book two then, which you're still working on.
Yes.
Yeah, there is.
There is plenty.
And I'm looking forward to, you know, talking to more people, kind of putting pieces together.
It's been really interesting to have the multiple sightings over multiple decades in an area that I had nothing for before.
That's been very, very interesting.
And I'm hoping to actually go there and visit some of the locations in the next year or so because, you know, field trips, they're important.
What I remember of that wonderful trip on that snowy March day on the Down Easter into Portland, coming from Boston and coming all the way up through the snowy landscape, was that from my memory, and my memory might be wrong, because your memory plays tricks on you, but I remember we almost came out of the snow and the trees and the countryside.
And then suddenly, bang, there you are at Portland Station and you're ready to get the taxi that's going to take you to the hotel.
And there's not a lot of space between the countryside and the trees and the town.
So, well, or the city.
And what I'm getting around to here is, are there tales in Maine, maybe in Portland, of Bigfoot impinging on towns and cities, you know, walking down Main Street?
Yeah, not so much.
Portland, I think people on the outskirts of Portland, where you get into the more wooded areas, have reported some tracks and some sounds that they found very interesting.
But other than that, Portland is fairly free of that because it is such, as you noticed, it's such an abrupt transition between the marshes and the woods.
And then all of a sudden, Portland, you know, which isn't a huge city, but it is, it's the heart of Portland is pretty well built up in a very concentrated area.
So we have a very different environment than almost any other main town.
There are a few other larger cities, but nothing that's as large as Portland.
We are the largest city in Maine.
And, you know, being in the south and being easy to access from Boston, we have a lot of people there all the time.
I love the indoor market.
This is just going off on a tangent.
I love the indoor market there.
It's a fabulous place.
There's some really wonderful, wonderful little elements there.
But yet, but you go out of town 10 minutes out and suddenly you're in the country again.
That's why I thought I wondered if Bigfoot ever kind of got mistaken and arrived on the fish key one day, but perhaps not.
All right, let's move now to, for those who want to hear more than just Bigfoot, great stories though they were, let's talk about your book, Strange Tales.
What is it?
Strange, let me just get the title right.
Strange Tales from the Pine Tree State.
Love the title.
You've got a whole bunch of these.
There is one graveyard, this is in Portland, isn't it, where there is a grave that people say may have belonged to a witch Or a vampire.
Talk to me about that, the witch's grave.
Sure.
Yeah, and it's funny, that grave has come up a lot in conversation in the last week or two.
I've been talking to people who talk to people who live in nearby Westbrook, who grew up in Portland, who in the 80s, you know, their friends would dare them to spend time near the grave at midnight because it was supposedly the harbor of some dark spirit, cursed individual or entity of some sort.
So I've had verification from additional sources of the original urban legends that led me to look into the story.
And then I've also talked to people who didn't know much about the grave except for that it existed and had their own experiences there very recently, which they found quite eerie and unsettling.
So even though I started to dig into the real history of who was buried at the site, and it's a remarkable site compared to the rest of the cemetery, the legend seems to have legs of its own and continues on even decades later.
So it's a...
which the shape of the sarcophagus over the coffin mirrors.
So, yeah, so he came, they brought him back from the UK to rest in his home soil.
So why this mystique about the grave?
Well, it's a very Gothic scene when you see it.
In its original state, it had a big, like a red sandstone Celtic cross, very ornate, lots of ornamental engravings around it of like this very weird looking, some of it's knotwork, and then some of it is this bizarre sort of, I can't think of anything else it looks like except for like cellular structures.
It's a very peculiar motif.
So there's this big Celtic cross, you know, the size of a person.
And then coming down from the base of the cross is a sarcophagus with a big gothic cross on the top of the sarcophagus.
So, I mean, it looks like Dracula's grave.
And then there's a wrought iron fence around it, and it's all kind of falling apart.
And there's a weird bit where there's kind of a crack in the side of the sarcophagus and looks like there's a hole that goes down into it.
And so, of course, your imagination runs wild.
Well, it makes you wonder, what was this person whose body was brought back from the UK and buried there?
What was he into?
Yeah, and you're not given many clues because it's the text on the grave and around, there's script around the coffin in like ornate black letter script, and it's all in Latin.
So the average citizen is not going to be able to make heads or tails of that.
And now it's so decrepit that a lot of that script has been worn away by weathering.
And so you kind of have to piece together little pieces of it.
It's, yeah, so it's very mysterious as a whole.
So there's more to be found out about this.
Now, listener discretion advised, if you are listening with children, please skip this bit or turn it off now because it's fairly bloodthirsty.
But, you know, I tend to think of people in Maine as being so nice.
But there have been some famous very bloodthirsty murders, killings there.
You write in the book about the Puritan Axe murders.
This place, Purritton or Purrington, or Purrington, it can be pronounced either, I understand.
A series of axe murders in 1806 that shook the local community in a place called Augusta.
Yes, yes.
And this account was very unique.
I mean, both from the violence and the horror of the scene, but also because of the immediateness of other people encountering it.
At the time, Augusta, which is now the state capital, was still a farming community, but a lot of people had kind of clustered in that area.
And the Purrington family had a farm where they'd been working for a few years, and it was not going great.
And the aftermath of this stress on the family was far beyond anything you could ever conceive and was almost immediately discovered by neighbors because one of the children actually escaped wounded and escaped to a neighbor's house.
And then by the time the neighbors got back to examine the scene of the crime, everybody in the house except for one other daughter was dead, including the husband who had perpetrated the entire crime.
Good lord.
And has this left an impression to this day?
In other words, is there a sense that something bad's happened in that location?
Are there strange noises?
Is it something that you would be aware of today?
That is something I've tried to do some research on, but there doesn't seem to be much current trace of it.
But there is the awareness that it happened, the legend.
The husband was buried in the crossroads.
He was not buried in the churchyard with the family.
And the local historical society, I believe, found an axe a few years ago that they thought might actually have been the murder weapon, which the husband was buried with originally.
It was that and a straight razor.
Yeah, and the whole thing and the aftermath was very public because everybody found out about it.
The family's bodies were placed in a local building and everybody in the community streamed past the coffins and observed the murdered family.
And the husband was left out on the porch.
The husband's body was out on the porch, isolated from the family that he had killed.
So, the entire community witnessed the aftermath, observed the bodies, went to the funeral, and then almost immediately also went to all the inquests and the trial because they had to do something to sort of officialize what had happened and to nail down the facts of what people observed after the crime and before the crime.
So, how many victims were there?
Remind me?
I believe there were, oh my goodness, I think there were four or five children and then the wife and the husband.
Let me open it to that page.
But the broadsheets that were produced at the time, because there were ballads written about it and many printed accounts that were sold by the sensational press, they used icons of the coffins on the front of one of the brochures, you know, ranging in size from the adult size down to the tiniest of the babies that was killed.
And then at the very bottom of the front page, by itself, again, isolated, was the husband's coffin with the outline of an axe and a straight razor across the front of his coffin as he was buried.
So it was, it was a hugely what a macabre thing to do.
Yeah, it was, so six children.
So he killed his wife, himself, his six children.
Eight people died.
Yep, and he had, there were two survivors, a son and a daughter.
I don't know what it must have been like for them.
Boy.
Okay, as I said, listener discretion advised in this segment.
This is the last of these bloody stories, but I have to tell this one.
This is Headless Halloween, you call it.
54-year-old man, John B. Phelps, gets into an argument with his 16-year-old stepdaughter, who I think was Alzada, and it ends with her being, well, I mean, I don't know how else to describe this.
And as I say, if you don't like bloodthirsty material, turn off now.
She ends up headless.
Yeah, they, you know, we've all, you know, had arguments with our parents about what we want to do on Halloween night or, you know, going out with our friends and doing things other than staying home.
And in this case, it went horribly, horribly wrong.
Her name was Alzaida Pauline Young.
She was known to her friends as Pauline.
And she, I mean, she must have just thought she was, you know, sticking up for herself and, you know, holding her ground with her stepfather.
And it went very, very wrong.
He later, when he was discovered, claimed that he had done it in self-defense, which, you know, one can hardly believe.
And his guilt drove him so that he did not want any of this to be discovered.
And he actually dismembered her, hid some bags with her body parts in various locations near the house.
And then they never found her head because that he took down to the end of the main central wharf and just dumped it in the water.
And it's, to my knowledge, has never been found.
Oh, boy.
Okay.
The listener discretion advised part has now ended officially.
So you can, if you've bookmarked this point, then you can bring the kids back now.
You're working on a book about ghosts.
Have you got a couple of really good chilling ghost stories to leave my listener with?
Oh, sure.
Maine has a lot of fairly famous ghost stories.
And those are some of the ones that I also like to tackle from a historic angle because a lot of the times as they've been written, they don't cover the actual historic context and facts.
They tend to be these weird mutated versions that have come through the decades to us different than they started out.
There's one in particular that took place in Northport.
Interestingly enough, the same place as our kind of very X-Files-ish Bigfoot in the Ditch story comes from.
So only maybe a mile or two from that occurrence.
And it has to do with a house, sort of a mansion, a very opulent house, which was owned by a family and burned to the ground, I think it was in the 50s, and seems to sometimes appear again.
There's a story of people who were out picnicking one day and found this really nice location with a house nearby it and had their picnic and then later found out when they tried to find the spot again, there was no house there.
They had been picnicking next to a ghost house.
There's purported to be a photo in a diner in the town which shows the house, although I don't know if it was from one of its reappearances or its original state.
And it was a family who had ties to a very well-off portion of one of the families that ran a prescription drug type, like a pharmacy type industry firm.
And so they had plenty of money and came up to Maine with their children.
And then they had gone out of town and left the kids in the charge of a couple of their employees at the house who, you know, who ran the house for them.
And there was a horrible fire while the parents were gone.
And the children were killed.
So the real story is a very sad story.
The romantic story of the ghost house appearing and disappearing, I almost wonder if it wanted the full story to come out someday, because in the version that's in one of the main classic ghost story collections from the 70s or the 80s, it doesn't, it's a very Different version of the story than what really happened.
So I'm hoping to kind of throw some light on some elements of that that were previously left in the shadow of decades ago.
But the idea that, I don't know, Uncle Frederick, who was the black sheep of the family and dies in mysterious circumstances, might occasionally reappear.
That's one thing.
But for an entire house to be reputed to reappear, well, that's, I haven't heard another story like that.
Yeah, it is.
It's very fascinating.
And I would love to.
I've gone looking for the house site before in the past and not been able to find it yet.
But I'm hoping with a little more time and a little more detective work, I can actually figure out where it was located and go to the site myself and see for myself.
Okay, so the book of ghost stories is a work in progress, like we said.
We've got time for one more if you've got one.
Oh, sure.
There's also a little-known story that doesn't appear in any of the other classic Maine ghost story collections, which is about what amounts to a poltergeist haunting in Kennebunkport.
There was a family, a husband and wife and a teenage daughter, who were living in a house in this area that used to be part of Kennebunkport, but is now part of Arundel.
And the husband worked nights, had started working nights at the local train car, the car barn for all the trolleys.
And he'd be away at night.
And while he was gone in the house, these disruptions would occur.
Sounds, scratchings, bangings.
Furniture would move.
There would be pounding so hard that plaster from the ceiling would fall onto the bed in the bedroom.
Very peculiar.
They brought, you know, after, you know, initially the wife raising the alarm about this going on, the husband brought a co-worker in, some other local people from the neighborhood to witness these things.
So, you know, multiple people witnessed the phenomena and it got so bad that they couldn't, you know, the wife was basically in the care of a doctor because she was in nervous frustration.
And they tried moving the wife and the daughter temporarily into the car barn to sleep in one of the train cars simply to get away from the phenomena.
And then it purportedly also followed them there.
So that was a fascinating little nugget from Kenneth Bunkport history that I've been digging into.
I have located the house and I'm hoping that I can talk to the folks that currently own it and see if any of that is still repeating or if it really was attached to the young girl and then maybe find out what the rest of her life was like because sometimes these things are.
Yes, sorry.
Yeah, it's, I mean, the whole family's photo was in the Boston Post.
There's a lot of documentation about it.
There were a couple of fairly famous authors who spent summers in the area, who became interested in it and interviewed the family.
So there's somewhere out there, there's really interesting material that I've been digging around for for months trying to find.
So I'm hoping, cross your fingers for me, that I can get a little bit more digging done on that one because it's a really interesting story.
You are busy.
You're going to be even busier by the sounds of it, Michelle.
The last question's a bit unfair, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
Has anything spooky or weird or whatever, you know, whole gamut, ever happened to you?
Never as much as I would like.
I had, you know, strange little weird things.
The house I grew up in here in Portland in later years when I talked to my youngest brother who was left in the house alone after we all, you know, grew up and moved out.
And he was like, absolutely, that house was haunted.
He and my mom used to hear footsteps upstairs over them when nobody else was in the house and odd things would happen.
But I had been upstairs one day when we were all still living there and it was broad daylight.
The rest of the family had gone out to do something together, maybe shopping.
And I came downstairs and the kitchen light was on, which doesn't sound like much, but it put the hair up on the back of my neck because it was so not normal.
Our family was very energy conscious, very thrifty.
You did not leave lights on ever.
And it was broad daylight, so the light wouldn't even have been on in the first place.
And so, and it just set this weird radar off in me, and I always wondered about that.
So it was interesting to find out from my brother later that things were not as quiet as I thought they were in that house growing up.
Well, that'll do as we say here to be going on with.
Michelle Solier, listen, thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to speak with you in Portland.
One of these days, maybe I'll be able to come back, stay in that hotel, and go to that Starbucks again.
And also go into the market, the indoor market on a snowy day.
But thank you for this.
If people want to check you out online, have you got a Michelle Solier website?
Remind me.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
The Strange Maine blog lives at strangemaine.blogspot.com.
I also have a Facebook page for Strange Maine, so you can keep up with me there.
I'm on Instagram.
If you want to follow any of my Strange Maine type stuff and lots of cats and books and monsters, you can find me at M Sulier.
So M-S-O-U-L-I-E-R-E on Instagram.
And yeah, I'm pretty easy to find.
Just ask for you in Portland.
Somebody will know.
Michelle, thank you very much indeed.
Please take care.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Michelle Solier in Maine.
Your thoughts about her and all the guests, welcome.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link.
You can send me an email from there.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been the unexplained, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, my recommendation is that you stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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