The Fouke Monster
A creature reported around Boggy Creek in southwest Arkansas that pulled a man off his own porch in May 1971. A Texarkana ad man filmed the story for about $160,000 and it became one of the highest-grossing releases of 1972.
Field Guide Entry
The night of May 1, 1971
Elizabeth Ford was asleep on a couch in a rented house outside Fouke when something reached through the screen window. She took it for a bear. Her husband Bobby and his brother Don, coming in from hunting, chased it off.
It came back after midnight. Bobby Ford was on the porch when it took him across the shoulders and put him on the ground. He got loose and was treated at St. Michael Hospital in Texarkana for scratches down his back.
The reporter who named it
Jim Powell covered the story for the Texarkana Gazette and the Texarkana Daily News. He was new to the area and had no stake in local legend, and his coverage is what turned scattered talk about tracks and missing chickens along a bottomland creek into one named animal. Before the reporting there were incidents. After it there was the Fouke Monster.
A rented theater in Texarkana
Charles B. Pierce was an advertising man in Texarkana with a 35mm camera. In 1972, he shot The Legend of Boggy Creek in and around Fouke for roughly $160,000, casting residents and several of the original witnesses as themselves, and cutting it as a pseudo-documentary with narration laid over long quiet takes of the woods.
No studio would distribute it. Pierce rented a theater in Texarkana for a week and cleaned the building himself to open it. The film went on to take around $20 million, finishing among the highest-earning releases of that year, and it was reissued in 1975.
Fouke runs on it now. The Monster Mart on Highway 71 is a convenience store that doubles as the museum, holding plaster track casts, the original clippings, and the accumulated reports, with a life-size cutout outside for photographs.
Visiting Information
The Monster Mart on Highway 71 in Fouke is the only real stop and it is free to walk into. It sells gas and groceries alongside the casts and clippings, so it is a shop that tolerates visitors rather than an attraction with an admission desk.
Boggy Creek itself runs through private bottomland. There is no trail, no marker, and no public access to the places in the film, and the houses shown in it are people's homes. Asking at the store is the sensible way to find out what can be seen from a road.
Fouke sits a short drive south of Texarkana, which is where the food and lodging are. The Legend of Boggy Creek was restored and re-released in recent years, and watching it first makes the visit considerably better.
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