| Flannel Shirt Sasquatch | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Background | |
| Type | Cryptid |
| Continent | North America |
| Country | United States |
| One-Time? | No |
| Theories | · Dishevelled human · Cryptid · A parapsychological phenomena |
The term Flannel Shirt Sasquatch denotes a rare sub-category of North American hominid sightings in which the mysterious creature appeared to be wearing human clothes, most consistently a ragged flannel shirt or otherwise animal skins.
Appearance[]
In the 1960s and 1970s, reports from the American West would occasionally surface of hairy bipedal Bigfoot being seen with tattered plaid shirts and ragged shorts on their bodies. In some research, there were intriguing attempts to relate these to files of paranormal encounters with sightings of upright entities said to be wearing ‘checkered shirts.’ (Within parapsychology, there is a subfield of study regarding ‘checkered shirted ghosts.’) [1]
Possible Explanations[]
There are several explanations as to what the creature could be. Theories include:
- An undiscovered species (a Cryptid) wearing self-crafted or appropriated human clothes.
- A human mistaken for a cryptid[2]
- A shared hallucination or ghost similar to the checkered shirt figures seen worldwide
Sightings[]
- One of the most fascinating of all such encounters occurred in California at the turn of the 1950s. The story came from a woman who, at the time of the incident, was a young girl. Her story was told by cryptozoologist and Bigfoot authority, Ivan T. Sanderson: “I entered the meadow and proceeded to cross it in order to reach a small knoll at the other side. When I approached the foot of the knoll I heard a sound. It was the sound of someone walking and I thought perhaps my little brother had followed me and was going to jump out and try to scare me. I hollered, ‘All right, stinker, I know you’re there.’ Needless to say it was not my brother that appeared. Instead it was a creature that I will never forget as long as I live. He stepped out of the bushes and I froze like a statue. He or ‘it’ was about 7 ½ to 8 feet tall…However, there was one thing that I have not mentioned, the strangest and most frightening thing of all. He had on clothes! Yes, that’s right. They were tattered and torn and barely covered him but they were still there. He made a horrible growling sound that I don’t think could be imitated by any living being. Believe me I turned and ran as fast as I could. I reached camp winded and stayed scared all while we were there."Janet and Colin Bord, noted Bigfoot experts, say of this downright weird affair: “If Bigfoot – and the creature in this report really does sound like a Bigfoot – is as well adapted to living in the wild as most reports suggest, why does he need to don tattered clothes?”[3]
- The Reno Evening Gazette of March 27, 1907 ran a story about a frightening apeman seen in Lexington, Kentucky by a farmhand. The 'wildman' was said to be wearing a raccoon skin across its loins.
- John Baptist saw a man-like creature with a long, dark beard near Fort Liard, Northwest Territories, in April 1964. It uttered a wild growl and fled, leaving tracks. The following month an Indian woman saw the same wild man, and in June outside Fort Simpson a 14-year-old boy and his father saw a small, dark creature with a long beard who carried a stone club and wore a piece of moose skin around his waist.
- Primitive clothing in the form of an animal skin was mentioned in some pre-1911 reports of the “Tano” giant, a “True Giant” (in Coleman and Huyghe’s classification) from the Upper Tano in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The Tano Giant, according to Coleman and Huyghe (The Field Guide to Bigfoot…, p. 98), was described as a ferocious, aggressive “white ape of extraordinary stature”) with arms as thick as a man’s body, a white skin under black hair, a monkey-like head and face with big teeth, and four-fingered hands with seemingly no thumb. Despite its seeming thumblessness, it was said to carry around the skin of a “bush cow,” which it wrapped around itself when cold. Its seeming lack of a thumb, Coleman and Huyghe suggested, might have simply meant that it had a very small or reduced thumb.