THE BIGFOOT RESEARCHERS OF THE HUDSON VALLEY
Gayle Beatty was 15 or 16 and running away from home.
It was the 1960s, and she was mad at her parents over something she doesn’t remember. She packed up some gear and hiked up nearby Stissing Mountain in New York’s Hudson Valley, alone, just to get away for the night. Her family was from downstate — Westchester County — and up here, she might as well have been a city girl. But she took quickly to country living in the years that she had lived here, and she felt safe on the mountain.
She set up camp, pitched a tent, and settled in as the sun set.
It was nearly dark when she heard an owl outside her tent — only, it was louder than any owl she’d ever heard. Much louder, and somehow different.
She calmed herself. Just an owl. Nothing to be afraid of.
Then came a “god awful frightening” howl, so loud that it vibrated in her chest and froze her to the spot in fear.
“I’d never heard anything like it,” she says, driving back toward that mountain in 2019 in search of the thing she believes made that noise. “It wasn’t natural to this world.”
She doesn’t know how long she sat there in fear. But at some point, she decided to make a run for it.
She bolted out of the tent, slid helter-skelter down a ravine, and kept running until she was home, shaking, facing angry, confused parents.
She didn’t hear anything like that howl again until 2011, when she was washing dishes, a small TV on the kitchen table playing Bigfoot Hunters idly in the background.
Then she heard it again. They were playing a recording of what was allegedly a bigfoot call. The memory came right back.
That’s it. That’s what I heard.
Her life was never the same.
This is better in print
Gayle Beatty, founder of Bigfoot Researchers of the Hudson Valley, at her home in Red Hook, NY. Below: Gayle’s front yard.
Gayle has told this story so many times.
To me, at least twice. To various local journalists whenever a bigfoot sighting trend catches on, about once a year or so. But mostly, to other people like her: people who spend their free time investigating the existence of the creature commonly known as bigfoot.
The bigfoot of pop culture — alternately known as sasquatch — is a large, manlike ape that lives elusively in deep forests. While it’s often conceptualized cartoonishly as a single creature, any theory of its existence has to begin with bigfoot as an undiscovered species.
But even this — the idea of a “missing link” living secretly in the unexplored depths of our wilderness — barely scratches the surface of the phenomenon described and discussed by Gayle and her fellow investigators.
Today’s bigfoot is so much more. To cut right to the chase: modern bigfoot is seen as an interdimensional being of great power capable of feats such as cloaking, teleportation, orb travel, and infrasonic disruption. And it is not alone. It has a menagerie of fellow travelers, including wolfmen and, possibly, aliens. Or maybe they’re one in the same.
Or maybe what we call bigfoot or fairies or aliens are just various expressions of our world interacting with another, points of contact and intrusion that may be as confusing to them as they are to us — a version of the “thin place” idea that will be familiar to anyone with an interest in the paranormal.
Brian Herbst, another researcher that joins Gayle’s group for the investigation, puts it in terms of scientific discovery that we just haven’t quite worked out yet. “A subtle physics,” he says.
Or maybe it’s another kind of subtlety altogether: an old story, from a time of interaction between early man and not-quite-man, echoing from generation to generation, carried forward by our soft fascination with the shadows of the deep forest and the shadows of our nature.
Maybe it’s just more interesting to live in a world where, perhaps, something unexplained lurks just out of sight.
Brian Herbst listens for signs of activity during an investigation. Below left: Brian speaks with Gayle’s husband, Gary, before setting out on the investigation. Gary believes in bigfoot, but leaves the investigating to Gayle; he’s happy to leave it alone, he says. Below right: Gayle’s cat keeps an eye on me while we talk in her kitchen and the conversation turns to the spirits she believes linger in her home.
“Never do this at home. That’s the first rule. When you do things like this, you invite things in. Never do it at home.” - Brian Herbst
Brian does not expect anyone to take his word for any of this.
“Everyone has to come to belief on their own,” he says.
He was a skeptic, too, at first. Of course, this is a common start to a conversation with a bigfoot researcher. Origins as a nonbeliever lend credibility to the story that is about to come.
Brian’s story takes place on Slide Mountain, the tallest peak in the Catskills. He was at a cabin on the mountain, about 1,000 feet to the 2,500-foot summit, talking to a pair of hunters. One of these hunters was telling about a time his daughter called him from their home. “Dad, where’s the shotgun?” she asked. Worried, he asked why. “I’m upstairs on the second floor and I seen this big tall hairy thing come down off the mountain, and it’s downstairs looking in the window.”
Brian found the source credible, and the story consistent with his growing collection of personal, borderline unexplainable experiences.
“Any one of those things you could rationalize,” he says, telling a story of his own that involved strange smells, knocking sounds, and snapped trees. “But put them all together, and you just wonder…”
The group of four investigators stop in the woods. Two head off up the trail, where it gets overgrown and less traveled. Brian pulls out a random word generator, used in paranormal research to catch spiritual, psychic, or otherwise otherworldly intention.
He turns it on and looks at the screen.
The word “vast” appears.
Then “providence”
“Filter”
“Foot”
These words could work — we are flirting with something vast; it’s providence that we’re here; our perception is filtered, or maybe “filter” is a bad translation of “veil”; Foot — come on.
Were these the only words that came up? I don’t think so. But they’re the only ones that struck me as interesting enough to write down.
They’re the only ones that worked for the story.
Top: A view of Stissing Mountain, where Gayle had her first unexplained encounter as a teenager. Bottom: Brian and the others tell stories on the trail, and try a few things to provoke a response.
Gayle’s true conversion came a few years later.
Since that day when she heard the bigfoot call on TV, she had been exploring the phenomenon and was becoming slowly more convinced that there was something, maybe, to this theory. She founded Bigfoot Researchers of the Hudson Valley to formalize her explorations and help educate others.
She had been in touch with a resident of a nearby town, whose property was reportedly a hotbed of activity. She heard story after story about his encounters.
One day in 2014, she and a handful of researchers took some gear, including a thermal imaging camera, to make a serious attempt to document whatever was happening there. That’s the day that Gayle lost all doubt.
The group began the night by having dinner. While at the table, indoors, she and another person saw something pass by the window — something big, light-colored, and manlike.
When they got outside, Gayle immediately heard commotion in the trees, sounds like knocking and cracking, a tree splashing into the creek.
They powered up the thermal camera and, Gayle says, captured footage of five creatures in the woods before the camera shut off. She has the footage, but has not released it due to privacy concerns of the homeowner.
Seemingly worked up by being observed and filmed, the creatures “went wild,” breaking trees and knocking them around.
Then everything went silent, and a blue light shot up into the sky.
Startled, confused, disoriented by the inexplicable, the group scrambled for the relative safety of the house to regroup.
“It changed all of our lives that night,” Gayle says. “If there was any doubt, it was out the window.”
Gayle with collections of evidence in her headquarters, which is also a local bait and tackle shop.
Then everything went silent, and a blue light shot up into the sky.
(photo illustration)
What’s the Holy Grail of proof for the existence of bigfoot?
Gayle talks about work being done on DNA evidence — samples that appear to have human motherhood but unknown fatherhood.
Brian is a little more direct: a sighting. He just wants to see it, with his own eyes.
As they walk the trails together, they stop to examine what they consider indirect evidence of the creatures. There are several instances of crossed or bent trees, lots of broken trees, some potential tracks.
Dave, the researcher from Virginia, ventures off on his own a lot, charging up the trail to an isolated spot and making various calls and taunts, trying to provoke some kind of response.
“Never do this at home,” Brian says as he tinkers with the random word generator. “That’s the first rule. When you do things like this, you invite things in. Never do it at home.”
They don’t really expect to see anything with their eyes. They’ve done this too many times to expect that. What they will do is go home and examine the footage, captured on handheld video cameras and GoPros strapped forward and backwards on their bodies and hats, staring at pixels for evidence of something lurking beyond human perception.
There is an element of fear, for sure. Gayle is uncomfortable with the idea of taunting the creatures, especially wolfmen. She would not want to be out here alone, especially at night, and she fears for her sons who, as hunters, spend a lot of time alone in the woods.
“People just walk around here, and they have no idea,” she says, gesturing to the woods around her. “They have no clue.”
This is not a secret trail, by any means. There are families hiking here, too, and people with dogs. All oblivious to the possibilities hiding just behind the trees.
Brian looks up and down the trail, straight as an arrow.
“People stay on paths,” he says. “They travel the same little paths. Something could be anywhere.”
“People stay on paths. They travel the same little paths. Something could be anywhere.” - Brian Herbst
People don’t call the police when they’ve seen something they can’t explain. They call someone like Gayle.
When Brian spoke to that hunter on Slide Mountain, he gave him Gayle’s number. Who else are they going to talk to? They need someone that will take them seriously.
And Gayle takes this very seriously.
While her personal work is focused more on investigation, the work she does for others — always for free — is more akin to deterrence. Most people do not want strange things in their life, or outside their house at night.
Gayle helps them install cameras and take other measures that bigfoot generally do not like, and, most often, the problem goes away.
But not always.
The house where she had her first intense encounter in 2014, with the blue light projecting into the sky, the house she said she would not accept a million dollars to sleep in, is now up for sale.
“I wonder why,” Gayle says.
The group exits the woods a few hours after entering, with little action. They discuss travel plans and directions. Dave, from Virginia, leans on his white van.
“I’m just waiting for something big to happen,” he says.
