The Big Thicket is roughly 3.5 million acres and includes several counties in Southeast Texas.
- Size of Big Thicket National Preserve: 113,114 acres
- Date of establishment: October 11, 1974
- Average yearly rainfall: 55 inches
- Number of plant species: 1,320 (currently known)
- Number of endangered species: 3
What makes The Big Thicket special.
The big ticket is where several major North American ecological regions meet and intermingle. you have the Southeastern swamps. the deciduous forests of the East. planes and prairies in the central part of the big thicket. and the Piney Woods that dominate the ecosystem of East Texas. In addition, there are dry sand hills unique arid habitats that support a whole different plant community. this has created an exceptional biodiversity that is unusual and unique in the entire United States of America. a high diversity of mammals, reptiles and amphibians, invertebrates and 300 different bird species.
The Big Thicket has been a hotspot for many legends lore and factual stories for all of time.
One of those is that of what has been called The Wild man A big hairy, human-like creature of a mysterious nature has been spotted in the Big Thicket for generations. sightings date back to the early days of European settlement and probably in the unrecorded past of our indigenous Americans.
People have said the wild man was an escaped convict who had managed to survive in the woods eating whatever the woods could provide or a crazy old hermit who delighted in scaring people, or a mental patient who couldn’t adapt to normal society but somehow was surviving in the Big Thicket. These are not uncommon projections conjectures onto what the sightings were. The thicket has a long history of being a hideout for outlaws and antisocial types which help contribute to these Legends.
The sightings were typically brief glimpses caught from a moving car or a hunter or a hiker.
An example of a sighting would be the story of a young couple who had innocently gone to look for the ghost lights that are often seen in the Big Thicket when something large and hairy suddenly pounced on the hood of their car and glared them through the windshield. the couple was definitely scared luckily the gentleman involved just happened to have his shotgun on the rack in the pickup and without hesitation pulled it down and empty both barrels at the base through the glass of his window shield. Later it would be revealed near the bullet holes in the window on the surface of the pickups Hood were handprints or claw marks scratched deeply into the paint surface of the pickup Hood.
Another lady from Saratoga said that she didn’t know what it was but one night something huge and menacing chased her son and some of his Hunting Buddies out of the nearby Garcia woods. they managed to make it to their pickup before it could catch them but they heard a loud thump and felt the truck Shake as they were treated. The thing had apparently kicked the rear bumper and left a considerable dent in it.
A group of boys said they had seen the 8th in quotes on three occasions. One was from a distance of several hundred yards across a rice field as they were riding in the back of a pickup truck between Saratoga and sour lake. The creature was running on all fours. as they were sort of realizing something was unusual and it didn’t make sense it disappeared Into the Woods. The second time they could see it much closer near an abandoned bridge that crossed the Bayou near the Big Thicket preserve. It was just a quick sighting, but it looked much like the first sighting. The Third sighting too was near the abandoned Bridge.
This 2022 article in the Beaumont Enterprise has a map of the ‘Bigfoot’ sightings in Texas
The state with the most reported “credible” Bigfoot sightings is Washington and the Northwest in general including Oregan and Idaho. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) has documented 708 such sightings in Washington. Everywhere in Appalachia which encompasses many states.
