This is the transcript for the above video. The interview is of Richard Mason of Colchester, Illinois in 2021. It was conducted by Dr. Lorenzen, University Archivist at Western Illinois University with the assistance of Bruce Ackers.
Later on, my nephew came from Oregon to visit, and he doesn’t believe in Sasquatches. One night around 12:30 a.m., I suggested we go out and do some howling near the east side of the lake by the gun range where people shoot clay pigeons. I gave a small whoop, and almost immediately a clear whoop came back from about 100 yards away. It was one of the best responses I’ve ever heard, and I knew there were no people out there—there was only one house nearby. My nephew asked what it was, and I told him it was the only thing I knew of that could make a sound like that. He admitted he hadn’t believed in them before, but after hearing that, he wasn’t so sure.
Another night, we returned to the same area near the Lemoyne River, about half a mile south. I gave another whoop, and this time a long howl-scream—lasting about ten seconds—came back from down in the bottom. It sounded like a dominant male, and even though it was far away, the sound carried clearly up to us. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That was probably my most memorable experience at Argyle.
There are more cases listed on the BFRO website, including one involving a primatologist who named what he encountered. I also found a track there that measured about 17 inches long and made a cast of it, which is now archived at Western Illinois University. There’s also a smaller cast with visible dermal ridges—like the fingerprints on your hands and toes—that we found north of Macomb in November. The ridges are difficult to fake. Although they aren’t easy to see in the cast I made, the original track was clear. It was cold, there was ice in the water, and we were bow hunting. I can’t imagine anyone walking around barefoot in those conditions.
At one point, a woman from Hancock County contacted my son. She claimed there was a family of Sasquatches living near her home west of Route 336. She said they had seen and heard them howling at night and were afraid to go outside. My son and I set up trail cameras and found three sets of tracks crossing her backyard in a single-file line—two large sets and a smaller one off to the side. The tracks eventually led into the timber where she said she had seen them peeking from behind trees. We never captured anything on camera or heard more activity, though her high school–aged sons claimed they heard them during the summer. The timber behind her home was old growth by local standards, with some of the biggest and oldest trees in the area. Eventually, she chose not to file a report or have her name listed and later moved away.
We also had trail camera photos of those tracks. Curtis, who wears a size thirteen shoe, noted that the tracks were much larger than his feet. In another incident west of Plymouth in Hancock County, I had a trail camera set up on a deer scrape. After two weeks, I returned to find the camera turned 180 degrees, flipped so the lens faced the tree, and raised about four feet higher than I could comfortably reach—and I’m six feet tall. When I took it down, I noticed a large clump of long, blackish-gray hair stuck to the bark where the camera had been. Some strands were nearly a foot long. There are cows in the area, but the hair didn’t resemble cow hair, and there are no horses around.
A couple of years later, my son and I were hunting there again. On opening morning, before daylight, I was in my stand on top of a bluff when I heard a single wood knock about 500 or 600 yards to the west. A few minutes later, I heard another one about 50 yards to my south. After that, everything went quiet as the sun came up and we continued our hunt.
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