Recent Bigfoot sightings at Wintergreen were a hoax. But these men say they’ve seen the real thing in the woods of Virginia

Daniel Benoit and Terry Arnold are “knowers,” people who say they are certain Bigfoot is real. In this regard, they live by sight, not by faith.

Benoit first saw Bigfoot 10 years ago, he said. 

In May 2014, Benoit and Arnold, both Bigfoot investigators since 2012, were camping with a group of four others in Augusta County when they encountered multiple Bigfoot creatures, they said.

“My son, he gets terrified. He starts shaking,” Arnold said. They heard heavy footsteps nearby, moving closer and then backing away before the creature eventually left the area.

The animal was large, with two eyes that shone red in the glare of Arnold’s flashlight. 

Arnold and Benoit are just two of Bigfoot’s many fans and investigators. 

Benoit and other guest speakers will share their knowledge Saturday at Wintergreen Resort’s inaugural Blue Ridge Bigfoot Fest. The family-friendly event comes less than a year after a slew of hoax Bigfoot sightings in the area. The elusive creature’s intrigue and pop-culture appeal led resort staff to plan the event. 

In other places, events celebrating the hairy cryptid’s popularity have drawn skeptics looking to disprove his existence and lecturers touting their favorite evidence. Vendors sell T-shirts, miniature Bigfoot feet and bags of what they say is Bigfoot poo to the crowds.

“People have found a way to make a market out of it,” Arnold said. 

Still, Bigfoot remains as elusive as Elvis: There are many impersonators, but nobody can pin down the real one. 

* * *

Last December, some Wintergreen residents discovered they had a new, rather hairy neighbor. Doorbell cameras recorded Bigfoot sitting on their patio furniture, walking past their homes and hiking through the woods. 

The sightings took place one ordinary day, just before Christmas. Residents immediately began sharing videos to social media, showing a broad-shouldered humanoid lumbering around the neighborhood. The Wintergreen Police Department received an influx of calls reporting Bigfoot sightings. 

The antics only lasted a day. One resident posted a picture on Facebook that showed oversized footsteps in the snow. That photo divulged the prankster’s identity. 

Officers called Bigfoot into the station. They had a polite conversation, and the activity ceased. A Facebook post made by the Wintergreen Police Department confirmed the sightings were a hoax to entertain the community, but kept Bigfoot’s identity a secret.

Community members have suspected one person all along; Bigfoot’s secret is hidden behind a thin veil of side-eyes and smirks. 

“I’m the guy who ran around the mountain in a Bigfoot costume,” Wintergreen resident and artist Dave Brown recently admitted with a laugh. “I think every single person here knows me. …” 

“I’m a real old man. I’m trying to do fun stuff while I can,” he added.

“[The sightings] created a buzz,” said Wintergreen Resort marketing manager Josh Ellwood. 

“Woods, mountains, Bigfoot, right? Just made sense,” he said, regarding their motive. His friend shipped him the costume, and Brown also created a giant set of Bigfoot feet so he could leave realistic prints. In addition to taking advantage of his neighbors’ doorbell cameras, Brown created videos to post on social media. 

“What nobody can see is me laughing so hard tears were rolling down my face,” Brown captioned one video, a shaky scene showing Bigfoot lumbering by while onlookers can be heard exclaiming, “What’s that?!” and “That’s not a bear, is it?”

“It was kind of funny,” he added. The social media reception had appeared to be positive.

Ellwood said that Bigfoot is welcome to drop into this weekend’s festival — he would probably have fun with it.

Brown said he will probably attend but as a spectator. 

“You’re going to definitely be seeing some Bigfoots around,” he added. 

The Wintergreen Bigfoot may come out of hiding, though Brown swears he won’t be in the suit. As a teaser, Bigfoot was recently seen searching the Wintergreen mountainside for edible mushrooms, Brown said. As Bigfoot’s social media manager, he promptly posted the picture to Facebook. 

As for skeptics? There’s a place for them at the festival, too. 

“You’re always going to get skeptics. We welcome them, as long as they’re being nice about it. We think it’ll be a fun time for everybody,” said Ellwood.

“I’m not sure where I stand, but I absolutely love hearing about [Bigfoot],” Ellwood said. “I’m certainly open to the idea,”

“There might be a real Bigfoot out there. I don’t know,” said Brown.

* * *

In Virginia, Bigfoot encounters have mostly been reported in wooded areas. The creature is said to make its presence known through various wood knocks and vocalizations, as well as by throwing pebbles, said Benoit, who lives in Augusta County. 

Arnold grew up in Pulaski during the 1980s. Sometime around 1986, he and his dad started hearing vocalizations — loud shrieks, higher in pitch than a mountain lion’s or bobcat’s screams, he said. His dad thought it might be a dying deer, but the noise continued for three weeks, longer than it would take an injured deer to die. 

His interest piqued again while watching shows like “Finding Bigfoot,” which aired from 2011 to 2018. He identified his childhood memory as a Sasquatch vocalization after watching an early episode of that program. 

That’s when Arnold, who now lives in  Wytheville, started digging into the research. Beginning in late 2012, he spent a year and a half doggedly pursuing evidence of Bigfoot. During that time, he spent 375 days in the woods, he said. 

“Passions can become an obsession,” Arnold said. 

Arnold’s passion for Bigfoot led him to cross paths with Benoit in 2013. They began planning the 2014 group trip to Augusta County. The area had been known for Bigfoot activity, Benoit said. Along with Arnold and his 13-year-old son, Benoit invited four other folks along. All hoped to encounter a Bigfoot.

The night of the 2014 encounter, Arnold and his son were fishing by the lake. Other campers set up surveillance positions in teams. One camper called into the woods — “like a screaming banshee or something,” Arnold recalled. “We got an instant response, not identical to hers, but a higher-pitched scream-call, like a woman being murdered.” 

Right after that, Arnold and his son heard those heavy footsteps, and they saw red eyes glowing at them. Arnold’s night vision goggles failed to work. He saw nothing other than that red eyeshine — the light bouncing off of the creature’s eye was crimson.

Out of all the Bigfoots that Arnold said he encountered on that trip, the ones that would bother him the most were the ones he couldn’t see, the ones with the red eyeshine. He believes that the cryptid’s temperament influences the color of their eyeshine; red indicates an ill-tempered being, he said. 

The creature moved on, and the group reconvened. Just past midnight, all six campers began hiking back to camp.

A deer appeared on the road, walking toward them. Benoit took note; the moment felt strange, he said. 

He noticed a fleck of yellow shining out at him from the edge of the thick woods. He thought it was a park sign, marking the end of the road, but that wasn’t the case.

A few steps on, the group saw three sets of eyes huddled together in the thick woods; their headlamps couldn’t pick up many details. The creatures were staggered in height: 4, 6 and 8 feet tall, Benoit said. All three sets of eyes glowed yellow.

The smallest looked up at the middle-sized creature, as a child would look up at its mother, Arnold said. “It was like a family.” 

Benoit’s light caught the outline of the tallest of the three as it turned away. It had broad, wide shoulders. A thick, round head. 

Arnold spoke first. “This has to be a Squatch,” he said. 

“Without a doubt, we saw three Bigfoots,” Benoit said. 

* * *

Arnold continued searching for Bigfoot off and on for six years after that. 

He spoke with two different people about his sightings, people he respects as Bigfoot believers. The first person told Arnold to leave Bigfoot alone. The second gave him a message.

“He said, ‘You got lucky and cursed,’” Arnold said.

“‘You’re drawing attention about what you’re doing, and that will draw bad people to the Sasquatch to hurt them,’ he told me,” Arnold said. “‘You’re being watched by a lot of people who want to do nothing but destroy nature.’” 

In 2020, Arnold began to see more outdoor enthusiasts flocking to the woods. Much of the increased traffic was likely due to the pandemic, though he thinks that several of those folks were also looking for signs of the mysterious creature. 

“They want to be left alone, and they don’t want to encounter humans, so just leave them be. Let them take care of nature and woods and respect that,” Arnold said.

By 2020, his social media presence had picked up. He loved posting live trail-cam videos that were 12 to 18 hours long to let people see what he was experiencing in the woods, he said. 

The videos accumulated views. People watched them through the night until the cameras went dead, he said. The trail cams picked up clicks, wood knocks, even a tree bash.

Then the letters started coming. 

“They had watched me so closely they were going to … give me the heebie-jeebies every time I went in the woods. They were leaving letters for me to find, talking about what they had seen me do,”  Arnold said. 

He gave up his relentless Bigfoot search. 

His biggest takeaway is that you’ll rarely see a Bigfoot, he said. And also, that there are a ton of fake casts of Bigfoot prints out there. People make copies of castings quite often, Arnold said. He’s seen it over and over again. 

But now he has more time to garden, to raise chickens and ducks, to spend with family. 

“I turned into a Sasquatch. When I see somebody coming, I’ll run the other way,” Arnold said.

* * *

“There is a fine line between what is known versus the unknown,” Benoit says repeatedly.

To say that the creatures he encounters are Bigfoots, or to label any evidence as that of Bigfoot, Benoit uses a process of elimination. He is primarily a self-taught North American wildlife researcher, as those are the skills he says are most useful to him for field identification. 

“It’s easy to have Bigfoot on your brain all the time, especially when you drop into the woods, because there’s that excitement,” Benoit said. Confirmation bias plays a real role in Bigfoot investigations. Researchers must enter the field with a mindset of enjoying the woods, and the unknown may ultimately reveal itself from there. 

Benoit has learned to identify scat, tree signs — the marks left on trees by passing animals — calls or vocalizations, and tracks of common North American animals. He passes those skills onto campers who attend his annual week-long investigative expeditions, which occur every autumn in an undisclosed location in Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains. 

Benoit has particular experience in identifying bear tracks and human footprints. A Bigfoot track will look like neither. 

Bigfoot has a midtarsal break, while the human’s ankle is further back on the foot, Arnold explained. Bigfoot’s midtarsal break is in the middle of the foot and has a key, a bone, that comes off the midtarsal.

If it has an arch in the cast, it’s not real, Arnold said.

“The Bigfoot solution should always be your last consideration with a lot of our findings,” Benoit said.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, founded by “Finding Bigfoot” star Matt Moneymaker, has collected observations and reports of Bigfoot activity since 1995. That information is available in an online database of sightings that their researchers and scientists deem credible based on interviews and investigations. 

The U.S. database lists 5,650 historical encounters; 87 of those are in Virginia. The most recent claim in Virginia occurred just south of Fredericksburg on Aug. 9. 

Washington has the most sightings listed, at 721. 

“If this thing exists, it has a pan-continental distribution, like a wolf, and yet, no one has ever found a tooth of this thing,” said Matt Cartmill, an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Duke and Boston universities who has compared Bigfoot evidence to that of known species. 

Bigfoot researcher Peter Byrne found a snagged piece of skin with a tuft of hair back in the 1970s, according to The Washington Post. He sent it to the FBI to investigate. In 2019, he heard back. It was deer hair. 

Hoaxes happen. Brown is evidence of that. People also make up stories, though investigators try to winnow those out, Arnold said.

Even well-known researchers have been fooled by false evidence. In his 2006 book “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science,” anthropologist Jeff Meldrum admits to falling for two sets of faux Bigfoot casts created by now-known hucksters. 

The meat of Meldrum’s book, according to Cartmill, is an understanding of Bigfoot’s existence through a process of elimination, a more anthropological version of the field investigations conducted by Benoit. 

It is hard to prove that something does not exist.

Cartmill walks through a discussion of Meldrum’s evidence, a Guess-Who game circulating around what sort of creature Meldrum’s Bigfoot could be.

A larger-than-human foot with the big toe in line with the four other toes: must be related to humans.

Sit marks left in soft dirt or sand that indicate the creature sat for a while and reveal protruding buttocks, indicating fatty blobs on the butt cheeks: must be related to humans.

Flexed knees, like those seen in the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film that purports to have captured scenes of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest: must be related to primates; humans walk with an extended knee.

“If this thing is real in the film, then it’s an Australopithecine. It’s not a hominid,” Cartmill said. Australopithecines had human feet and walked with flexed knees, but none have ever been found outside of Africa. 

“Very implausible,” Cartmill said.

“On the face of it, there is no plausible biological story that you can tell that will put a giant ape with human-like feet and backside in the forest of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington,” he said. 

Or Virginia, for that matter.

“It’s just barely possible, and I hope that Jeff Meldrum finds one and proves us all to be dummies. That would be really exciting, right?” Cartmill said.

* * *

Cartmill wonders if the legend of Bigfoot is popular because it points back to the importance of our culture. 

He referred to the Green Man of medieval Europe, a naked person covered with leaves instead of hair.

“It’s a figure representing the wild, the wildness in symbolic composition to the world of culture, the world that we inhabit, the world of being human,” Cartmill said. 

“It doesn’t have a soul, and it’s scary and hairy. And those are fun things to play around with, you know?” he said.

Why do we pass these tales along, if they are so scary? Why do we keep looking, keep searching for Bigfoot? 

“If you start trying to make sense out of myths, you go crazy,” Cartmill answered. 

“Everybody who has ever done it has gotten obsessed in one way or another,” he added.