In the autumn of 2012, reports began to emerge from a particular area of a shadowy, hulking figure stalking around wooded areas and giving walkers a fright. Local newspapers spoke excitedly of an apeman that “towers eight-foot [2.4m] tall, is covered in hair and has red demonic eyes”.
All of this sounds very familiar to anyone who follows such reports, and indeed wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows had it come from the Pacific Northwest or the Caucasus. However, this hotbed of Bigfoot activity was a little less expected: Royal Tunbridge Wells.
Kent Online was on the scene fast, asking if local residents had seen a “Yeti-like” creature, helpfully printing a picture of a big hairy manlike beast and one ofTunbridge Wells High Street for comparison purposes, just in case the juxtaposition was too much to imagine.1 There was a lively spurt of correspondence and speculation – was it a prank, a misidentified tramp, a bird-watcher in a ghillie suit, and did it have planning permission to live in the woods? This was, after all, the Home Counties.
As the country was in a post-Olympic slump, news-wise, this kind of thing was picked up quite quickly by the national press, with the Independent, Daily Mail, Metro and Daily Telegraph all reporting (though all seemed to cite the Sun as the original source): as with all such flaps, though, it quickly died down and things got back to whatever is considered normal in that comfortable corner of Kent.
It transpired, however, that this wasn’t a new thing. There actually a history in the area of such sightings, one going back as far as 70 years when, according to local website , a couple sitting on a bench “became aware of a shuffling noise behind them… turning around they saw a tall, ape-like creature with eyes that were burning red moving slowly towards them. They both fled – terrified” (see ). Indeed, such British Bigfoot sightings weren’t confined to the southeast either, although these were among the first to be brought to the attention of a wider audience: prior to this, the best documented and researched had been the encounters at Bolam Lake in Northumberland some 10 years previously. These sightings in turn flushed out another, in which (as related by Nick Redfern) a witness called Neil, along with two companions, “had been fishing at Bolam Lake one night four or five years previously… he had been making his way back to the car-park when they encountered a Neil went on to have further encounters in the following years, and this in many ways marks the start of what’s become known as the British Bigfoot phenomenon: but such sightings in the UK are absolutely nothing new.
