Monroe — On May 18, 2025, a man and his son went down to Plum Creek. They heard sirens above them, so the father pulled out his phone to listen to his police scanner app. Suddenly, a large animal thudded next to him. His dog went wild. He turned and could only make out the creature’s silhouette before it took off up through the woods and over the train tracks.
Monroe had entered the list of towns with a Bigfoot.
The legendary beast has whispered about in Monroe for 60 years. In August 1965, Christine Van Acker and her mother were driving near Cottonwood Creek and went over some railroad tracks. Because they had a bald tire, they drove slowly to avoid blowing it.
Van Acker, who was 17, turned and saw a dark figure coming up from the ditch next to her. She slowed down to see what it was. To Van Acker, the figure looked about 7-feet tall. She described the figure as weighing about 400 pounds with long dark hair. It hurriedly hobbled over and whacked the car before grabbing Van Acker and beating her against the door. She reached up to protect herself and received a bunch of quills into her wrist. The beast fled the scene, leaving Van Acker with a black eye.
There have been at least 16 sightings in Monroe County, many of them after Van Acker’s account. Yet this teenager is one of the few who received any press. In the following weeks, armed monster hunters stormed into Monroe, looking for signs of the “Monroe Monster.”
Police had tried to keep everything under wraps, but Van Acker’s claim that there were quills on her scratched skin sparked a monster craze. The mother and daughter took polygraph tests, one on a radio show which they passed and another with the police which they failed. Yet, Van Acker and her mother insisted. “I know what I saw and no one can change my mind,” she said in response to the accusations.
Later, pranksters placed a 6-foot ape-man figure in a local field, which largely ended the craze. Another police officer cynically remarked that Van Acker’s red mark was poison ivy. It seems the police were eager to end the affair.
But today’s Bigfoot enthusiasts are discontent with the police’s handling of the events. Some of the sightings could be a result of Van Acker, but some of them were before her incident. That same summer, a similar incident took place with a girl driving in nearby Temperance, where a beast fitting the description of the Monroe Monster jumped onto the car, smashed the windshield, and scratched the girl’s arm. With stories like these, modern Bigfoot believers are still asking questions.
One such person is Jody Feaganes, the son of Christine Van Acker. Though Van Acker is still alive, she is unwilling to talk to reporters because of her trauma from the attack. But Feaganes has long pondered his mother’s story. Because of the quill marks on her wrist, and law enforcement’s quick closing of the case, he is a believer in the monster and a defender of his mother.
This latest incident in May 2025 took place 60 years after Van Acker’s encounter with the beast. Even Mr. Feaganes admits that many of the incidents are fakes, with drunkards pranking people in Bigfoot costumes. But the encounters are too much to discount. For example, Monroe’s sightings seem to be near marshes and railroad tracks no matter what decade they take place.
Odds are, most of the Bigfoot sightings in Monroe County are genuine. They believe they saw something. And, they probably did.
But there could be another explanation. Today, Monroe Township has 18 cannabis dispensaries.
Near the 2025 Plum Creek sighting is Uniq Cannabis, which hosted a sale for the Monroe Monster. Anyone who brought photo evidence of Bigfoot would receive a free pre-rolled joint. Just like back in 1965, when a local restaurant sold steak dinners for anyone who caught the creature alive, Uniq decided to cash in on the frenzy.
But the excitement of 1965 is most interesting because it took place before the famous Patterson-Gimlin film came out in 1967 (footage of a supposed female Bigfoot in Northern California), which meant that the “Bigfoot” phenomenon wasn’t quite set in stone. Van Acker was ahead of the times.
But it’s possible teenagers in 1965 weren’t just smoking cigarettes. All of the Bigfoot believers seem to ignore that hallucinogens could affect their vision.
We live in a fantastical world. There was once a time when Europeans didn’t believe in the Silverback Gorilla. But one day, those Europeans found it, thought they had found some primordial beast, and then documented it. The legend became science, and materialistic Darwinism ruled out all possibilities of the uncanny. This is the default mindset of most people. Yet some of us have encountered the unexplained.
The first time a man sailed out to sea and saw a great white shark or a humpback whale, he wrote the lore about sea monsters. Just because the Great White has a scientific Latin name doesn’t make it any less canny than the Loch Ness Monster.
Bigfoot is American mythology. Yet it came from someone seeing something. The people of Monroe saw an ape-man. Maybe it was all a hoax. Maybe it was drugs. Or maybe it was a little bit of both. But it was something lurking in the shadows that terrified a whole town. And they liked it.
This past October, downtown Monroe held a festival called Nomadic Night-Mares and used Bigfoot in its advertising. They even hired a 7-foot-tall man to wear a costume at the event. Monroe apparently wants its monster to stay in town.
Noah Wing is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.
