In August 1973, a woman in Derry, Westmoreland County, woke up to find a face looking in through her open bedroom window. In the account later logged in a regional researcher’s files, the face was hairy and ape-like, the eyes were red, and a smell like rotten eggs hung around the house for days. A week earlier, according to the same list of reports, witnesses in Greensburg told newspapers that a huge gorilla-like creature had stepped out of the woods about 40 feet away in daylight. Within weeks, the State Police were taking calls about tall, hairy figures from Latrobe to Greensburg, and a UFO investigator named Stan Gordon was fielding a flood of phone calls of his own.
That summer is the center of Western Pennsylvania’s Bigfoot story. It is also a good case study in how to separate what can be shown from what can only be repeated. This piece sorts every claim into one of five labels, because “Bigfoot in Pennsylvania” is a mix of real documents, honest witnesses, folklore, and a few outright frauds.
How to read the labels
FACT means something that can be checked in a record: a published article, an official statement, a founding date. REPORT means a person said they saw or heard something, and someone wrote it down. A report is evidence that the person said it, not that the creature exists. LEGEND means a story that has grown in the retelling and has no documented origin. DISPUTED means the sources conflict, or the claim is contested by serious people. HOAX means someone has been shown or has admitted to faking it.
Here is the bottom line, stated up front. No Bigfoot body, bone, or confirmed DNA sample has ever been produced anywhere. The Pennsylvania Game Commission says it has never received evidence of one in the state. What does exist in Western Pennsylvania is a large, well-documented body of reports, going back at least to the 1970s, and a lively community of people who investigate them.
Before anyone said “Bigfoot”
FACT: The word “Sasquatch” entered English in the 1920s, when British Columbia teacher J. W. Burns adapted a Halkomelem word, sasq’ets, usually translated “hairy man.” It reached a wide audience through a 1929 magazine article. “Bigfoot” came later, in 1958, when a Northern California newspaper, the Humboldt Times, ran a story about giant footprints found at a logging site. HOAX: After the logging contractor Ray Wallace died in 2002, his family said that he and his brother had made those tracks with 16-inch carved wooden feet. Wallace’s own children said so, and researchers who had long doubted him were not surprised. Some Bigfoot researchers say this does not disprove everything else.
The word “squatch,” which you will hear in Pennsylvania, is simply a shortening of Sasquatch. Bigfoot enthusiasts’ glossaries credit the TV show Finding Bigfoot with spreading “squatching” for going out to look and “squatchy” for a promising spot. It is a modern hobby slang, not an old Appalachian tradition, and I found no evidence that it is older than that.
Pennsylvania did have an older “wild man” tradition, and it is worth keeping separate. REPORT: In the 1870s, newspapers in Berks, Chester and Lancaster counties wrote about a hairy “wild man” on Welsh Mountain, and an August 1871 article noted a Pennsylvania Dutch belief in a “hairy man” who climbed trees and frightened children. Even then, editors were skeptical. A West Chester paper wondered whether the man was simply mentally ill and said “a great deal” of the talk was exaggerated. Other “wild men” turned out to be reclusive people living rough. Those stories sit in eastern and central Pennsylvania. They show that the idea of a hairy creature in the hills is old. They are not early Western Pennsylvania Bigfoot sightings, and I would not call them that.
DISPUTED: Local investigators say the first Bigfoot report from Chestnut Ridge dates to 1931. That claim comes from Eric Altman of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society, as quoted in a 2022 PennLive article, and I could not find the 1931 report itself.
The summer of 1973: Westmoreland County
FACT: In the early 1970s, Stan Gordon, of Greensburg, ran the Westmoreland County UFO Study Group, which kept a hotline for sightings. (Gordon is best known for his work on the Kecksburg incident of 1965.) In the summer of 1973 his group began to get reports of something else: tall, hairy, two-legged creatures. Gordon has said he sees a link between a “massive outbreak of UFO sightings” in 1973 and a surge of Bigfoot sightings the following summer.
REPORT: A list of Westmoreland County reports from 1973 to 2003, compiled from Gordon’s files and from investigator Paul Johnson, shows how the wave looked at street level. In August 1973, witnesses in Latrobe, Greensburg, Derry, Luxor, Whitney, Herminie and other places described a seven- or eight-foot creature, often with glowing red eyes. Several entries say witnesses went to the State Police. On September 21, according to that list, two boys near the State Police barracks in Greensburg saw what looked like the upper body of an ape-like creature, and troopers found footprints. The list is secondhand. It is a researcher’s compilation, and it includes items that come from “a newspaper article” without a citation.
LEGEND (or at least unverified): The same lists include some of the stories that grew taller each time. A husband shoots at a creature point-blank and it takes no notice. A creature steps over a 48-inch fence “without breaking its stride.” A hovering light appears beside a creature. These are reports of what witnesses said. I found no police record, photograph or physical evidence that confirms any of them. The reported smell of rotten eggs and red or green glowing eyes recur so often in the 1973 entries that researchers have noticed the pattern. They disagree on what it means.
DISPUTED: Gordon’s own view is that some cases pair creatures with UFOs, and he has said the cause could be something like “inter-dimensional” beings. That is his hypothesis, stated in a 2014 Herald-Standard interview, and not an established finding. Skeptics point to the obvious alternative: a news-driven, suggestible summer, in which a story in the paper produces more people ready to report what they saw in the dark.
Fayette County: Uniontown, October 25, 1973
REPORT: The best-known Fayette County case is a UFO story as much as a Bigfoot one. According to Gordon’s account in the Herald-Standard, about 15 people watched a large red object lower slowly to the ground near Uniontown at around 9 p.m. A farmer’s son and two young boys went to look. They said they saw two tall, upright creatures, one over eight feet, with long matted hair and glowing green eyes, walking toward them along a fence, making a sound like a baby crying. Gordon’s account adds that when the larger creature reached toward a tracer light, the object vanished. That is one researcher’s telling, decades later, of what the witnesses reported.
REPORT, with a note of caution: In 2010, the Herald-Standard reported a new run of Fayette County sightings, including four around Dunbar, two near Jumonville, and others in Confluence and Connellsville, after an anonymous woman’s account of a sighting north of Uniontown was published. The paper itself asked whether the reports came from “the power of the pen, the power of suggestion or the promise of anonymity.” The Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society’s director, Altman, said members went back to the sighting areas five or six times after a snowfall and found no additional footprints.
The Laurel Highlands and Chestnut Ridge
Chestnut Ridge runs through Westmoreland, Fayette and Indiana counties, and it is where much of the lore gathers. Altman calls it “the Twilight Zone of Pennsylvania” in the PennLive piece, a ridge where people report strange lights, big cats, a “thunderbird,” and Bigfoot. (For another side of that tradition, see our article on the Thunderbird legend.)
REPORT: Two emergency medical workers told Altman they saw a creature cross a road at Indian Head, Fayette County, around 12:30 p.m. on May 20, 2021, in three strides, leaving a bad smell. Altman said he found impressions in the grass the next day. In 2003, members of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society said they found large humanlike tracks in snow on the ridge and followed them about two and a half miles. These are the society’s own accounts. Casts exist, but no independent laboratory or university has, to my knowledge, validated them.
FACT: One Laurel Highlands report did get an answer. In Somerset County, police in Paint Township were called one May (I could not confirm the year) to look at tracks a man believed were Bigfoot’s. A regional newspaper reported that they turned out to be black bear tracks.
Who investigates: the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society
FACT: By its own history, the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society was founded in 1998 by Steve Anderson and Henry Benton as an all-volunteer research and investigation group, with a focus on Western Pennsylvania. It merged with the Keystone Bigfoot Project in 2016; in 2020 the Keystone project went back to being a research effort and former members relaunched the society. Its members say they include law enforcement veterans, scientists, hunters and first responders. It collects reports and conducts field outings; it does not claim to have produced a specimen. I treat its sighting records as REPORT, not proof.
FACT, with limits: Counts of reports are not counts of animals. Newspaper coverage from the Tribune-Review and PennLive has put Pennsylvania among the top few states in the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization database, at roughly 1,300 or more reports at the time of those articles; the counts change as people submit more. That is a database of what people submitted. It does not verify them. Gordon says at least 1,800 Pennsylvania newspaper accounts of Bigfoot sightings go back to the 1800s. I did not check that count, and, as above, many of the earliest are “wild man” stories.
What is known about hoaxes and misidentifications
It is a long list, and some of the best examples are Pennsylvania ones.
- HOAX: In 1985, a sighting scare in Enola, near Harrisburg, ended, according to a news account preserved by the hoax archive hoaxes.org, when police identified 24-year-old Craig Brashear as the creature. He had bought an ape suit and a fanged mask and stood where headlights would catch him, to “stir up more activity,” the police chief said. Residents had locked their windows and some had taken up weapons. This is Central Pennsylvania, not the west, but it is a reported Pennsylvania case of a man in a suit.
- HOAX: In 2022, fake warning flyers about Bigfoot, printed on forged Department of Conservation and Natural Resources letterhead, turned up in state parks and forests. The department said it had not posted them, called them a hoax, and had rangers take them down. It also said, “Bigfoot is not real.” DCNR does run Bigfoot-themed programs, including a geocaching event at Kinzua Bridge State Park.
- DISPUTED: The famous 1967 Patterson–Gimlin film is not from Pennsylvania, but it shapes everything. In 2004, a Yakima man, Bob Heironimus, said he wore a gorilla suit in it. Bob Gimlin’s lawyer called that “absolutely false.” Researchers still argue about it.
- FACT: In 2014, a genetic study led by Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes tested 30 hair samples attributed to Bigfoot, yeti and similar animals. As reported at the time, every sample matched known animals, including bear, raccoon, horse and one human. The Pennsylvania Game Commission has said it has no tracks, trail-camera photos or other evidence of Bigfoot in the state. It also points out that Bigfoot is not a listed game species, so shooting one would be illegal.
What to make of it
The skeptical explanations are not mysterious. Black bears stand on their hind legs. Tracks change shape as they melt in snow. Screams in the woods can be foxes or owls. A paper that prints one sighting gets more. And a few people lie, for fun or attention.
The believers’ case rests on witnesses, many of whom are plainly sincere, many of them hunters, police and EMS workers, and who often say they are reluctant to speak because they fear ridicule. It is also true that no explanation fits every report in the files. But “no explanation fits every report” is not the same as “there is an unknown ape in the Laurel Highlands.” The record supports the first sentence and not the second.
What is solid is the folklore itself. In the summer of 1973, people in Westmoreland County were frightened enough to call the State Police about something in the woods, and a regional tradition of watching for it grew out of that year and has not stopped. That is a real piece of Western Pennsylvania history, whatever turns out to be walking the ridge.
