Sasquatch Central: High Strangeness at a Northern Minnesota Homestead

1

OPENING

Randy Bauer was a very healthy and active 60 years old when I first met him in December 2019 at his rural home a few miles from the town of Blackduck (population 820) in Beltrami County, Minnesota. This is about a half hour’s drive from the larger hub of Bemidji (population 16,350) and nestled firmly within the heavily forested upper third of the state, just north of the upper border of the Chippewa National Forest. Minnesota loves to display giant animal statues, and true to form, Blackduck has a couple of big black ducks to welcome visitors. There is a mixture of civilization and wilderness here, with small towns few and far between and wildlife everywhere. One might expect people living in this rugged region to be cattle farmers or lumber mill workers, and many are, but not Randy.

Randy is a musician. He plays saxophone, keyboards, and accordion, does sound engineering and manages what I think I can safely call a country-flavored swing and boogie-woogie band called Smokehouse. As such, he does quite a bit of traveling, playing different venues around the country. He even sometimes does solo work as a sound engineer for other acts, even famous celebrities at times, and two names he casually dropped during one conversation I was witness to were Alice Cooper and Dwight Yoakam. Two of many.

He is also a very dedicated and prolific family man. He and his first wife, Tina, were married from 1979 to 1999 and had six children. In 2010 he married his current wife Teri, who also had children from a previous marriage, and in all, Randy ended up with eleven grandchildren. It is a blended and complex family but one that seems to function very well and with a lot of love. Randy is a friendly and outgoing guy who comes across as being a very good and decent man, with just a bit of a saucy sense of humor. He is a patriarch, a man to be respected.

Apart from his musical career, Randy enjoys nothing more than spending time in the woods that surrounds him. When I met him, he had lived on his property for over 20 years and regularly hunted it. The yard of his bright red house contains a plethora of decorations, including an Indian totem pole and various animal statues and cutouts, and on the inside, the house is a sportsman’s abode with taxidermy mounts on the walls, including a deer head and bearskin. His property comprises 40 acres, a standard size for plots of land in the area. It is all forest, with two rivers winding through it and also an arrow-straight powerline corridor cutting through that offers some open space. Some people own more than one plot, such as a farmer Randy has as a neighbor who has pasture land for cattle, and one of Randy’s daughters lives just a quarter of a mile or so up the road from him with her husband and kids. He has good relations with his neighbors and has permission to hike and explore and hunt on those properties that border his own. He has been doing this for many years, a typically experienced woodsman who has been observing nature and the changing of seasons and the habits of animals and becoming someone who can speak with authority about them.

It was a world he understood well. At least until November of 2013.

2

BLOOD MASSACRE

While deer hunting just across the river on his farmer neighbor’s property, Randy suddenly made a deeply disturbing find. He knew how to recognize spots where deer bedded down to rest and the impressions they made in the ground when they did so. The ground was snow-covered, and in a spot where three deer beds were evident, there were signs in the snow showing that all three deer had been suddenly and violently killed before they could even manage to try to run away, the snow and surrounding leaves being littered with hair and splashed with blood. The spot was between Randy’s land and a cedar swamp that lay a little farther on, and he stood there pondering what this gruesome sight could possibly mean. There was nothing solid left of the deer but hair and blood. No meat, no bones. It was eerie, and he couldn’t come up with an explanation except to wonder if there might be a wolf pack in the area. When he tells the story, he uses the term blood massacre.

A few months went by, and the winter was a cold one. The snow was deep, and with his curiosity piqued, Randy wanted to get back out and see what else he might find, but he waited until February 2014 and then went out on his snowmobile to create hard-packed trails that he could confidently walk on. When he returned to the area of the deer kill, he found something even more surprising and disturbing than before.

A long line of footprints was impressed into the snow, about eighteen inches long and appearing to be made by something walking on only two feet. Melting snow is known to distort and enlarge animal tracks, but the weather was still cold, and there had been no melting. The snow conditions were not quite right to show a crisp outline of the exact shape of the animal’s feet, but the stride between prints was far too wide to be the bootprints of a human being, an astounding six to eight feet between impressions. In deep snow like this, it would have been especially impossible for a human. Randy took several photographs, feeling later that he hadn’t done a good enough job of documenting the find in that he’d let his own prints mingle with the mysterious ones a bit too much, but he also planted sticks in the snow next to each of a series of prints to show the massive stride. He followed the track maker’s trail for a long distance, finding that it came to the river and crossed it, whether by jumping or simply stepping across. From there, he continued to follow through the thick woods until he came to a spot where he lost the trail, not because of ground conditions but because the prints just seemed to end. In snow, this seemed impossible, and as far as he could tell, there didn’t seem to be any way that the thing could have taken to the trees or had any other way for its footprints to simply vanish the way they did.

Randy was mystified, could not fathom what he was seeing, and for the first time, he allowed a certain thought to enter his mind. Though he was vaguely aware of the phenomenon, as are most people in America, he had never given it any serious thought before or formed any kind of opinion about it. But now, as he stood here looking at these giant footprints, he had to wonder- "My god, is this Bigfoot?"

Wondering if a legendary giant monster had paid a visit and if it might be responsible for the previous deer kills was daunting enough without the added mystery of its tracks simply vanishing into thin air. This kind of strangeness would occur again farther down the line, but for now, Randy turned to the source most people in the modern age turn to when they want answers- the Internet.

Randy uses sticks to mark the stride of tracks in deep snow.

I gather that Randy did a general search on the topic of Bigfoot in Minnesota. If he had searched a little more in-depth, he might have found me then and there, but my time as the main Bigfoot researcher in Minnesota was a few years in the past. Instead, he found the Minnesota-based Sasquatch Research Association (SRA) headed by Jim Hebb. He e-mailed Jim, told him the story, and showed him the photos of the mysterious tracks. Jim responded with a classic quote:

You’ve got a squatch.

3

STICK STRUCTURES & DEER KILLS

Randy estimates that it was in April of 2014 that he started to find something throughout the area that would become a hallmark of this story. Even before the Bigfoot episode began, one of his favorite activities was hiking the woods and just enjoying being out in nature. Now he was doing even more of it, and here and there, he began to notice odd arrangements of tree branches that did not seem to him to be likely to have just fallen into place naturally.

This is a bit of a controversy within the Bigfoot field and has been a matter of contention for several years. Some researchers believe these structures are artificially manufactured by Bigfoot creatures, while others are sure that wind and the falling of dead trees and other factors are capable of depositing branches in all kinds of crazy ways and that people are simply reading too much into them. It is certainly true that forest debris can be a complex jumble of shapes and patterns that do happen entirely on their own, but sometimes there are structures that just seem to defy logic as to how they could have possibly formed naturally, and for creatures as intelligent as Bigfoot is alleged to be it is not really difficult to imagine them making such things. As a researcher myself, I try to keep both views in perspective.

To say that Randy’s finds of this kind are many would be a massive understatement. Once he first started to notice them, they became a nearly constant occurrence. He has carefully kept track of where each of them has shown up, documented them with photographs, and speculated about their meaning. For the purposes of this book, however, to delve into each individual find would become tedious. I think it suffices to say that the finds have continued unabated for years. They consist partly of structures resembling teepees or pyramids, sometimes incorporating and leaning against live growing trees and sometimes just free-standing, the unlikelihood of their having just fallen that way seeming to be in the extreme. Along with those are a huge number of structures in the shape of letters of the alphabet, namely X and A, sometimes lying flat on the ground but more often standing up vertical. I feel it’s important to point out that there is no implication here that the creatures understand our alphabet and that the structures depict those letters literally, only that these are fairly simple shapes that just happen to look like those letters, and whenever these are found they appear perfectly balanced and symmetrical.

Also found frequently in association with these structures have been small broken off sticks in the shape of the letter Y. With the way twigs branch off of larger limbs, it is, of course, possible to find the y-shape literally everywhere in the forest, but these seem to have been trimmed to depict only that shape and are often found hanging from larger structures. Randy feels that the y-shape has some kind of special meaning to the creatures, and he has even found these sticks left in seemingly deliberate ways that he’s felt were meant to convey some kind of message.

I had begun to encounter stick structures in other Bigfoot cases before I met Randy, as well as the heated debate about them. Some within the field even angrily assert that reading meaning into every weird jumble of sticks one might run across makes us look gullible as researchers, and I can certainly understand that concern and have discussed it with Randy. But he stands firm in his discoveries and has gestured around at the woods surrounding us, talking about how he knows a windfall when he sees one, pointing out how some of the branches in the structures are driven into the ground without any root structure evident showing that they did not come from the spot where they are found, how certain branches are woven together in ways that are just impossible naturally, and just generally defending himself in a convincing way that makes one feel that he knows what he is talking about.

I was on the fence about stick structures, but this case has convinced me that at least some of them are Bigfoot related while others are probably natural and misread. I honestly can’t say whether I had seen these structures during my many years of exploring the woods because before they started to be associated with Bigfoot, I don’t think I would have even noticed, but Randy’s case has changed that.

There was a second thing besides the stick structures that became a regular occurrence. The deer kill Randy found in November 2013 was not a singular event, and this is actually a quite sinister recurring theme in the story. Randy started finding other deer kills, lots of them, all consisting of a massive area of deer hair littering the ground over several yards with no solid body parts present. His first find in 2013 that seemed to indicate three deer killed at once was splashed with blood, and he’s had no other finds like that, but he assumes that one was very fresh and that the blood dries and fades over time.

A teepee or pyramid type structure.

What I had a skeptic in an online debate tell me that these finds were just deer beds where the deer shed their winter hair. Randy laughed at that, as he should have. I have seen these sites, and there is far more hair on the ground than would result from shedding. I think they indicate the deer being killed, all of their hair being stripped off, and then their bodies carried away to be eaten elsewhere. Randy reports that he typically finds seven or eight of these sites a year, in all seasons.

An A structure.

Added to this is that while just in the act of hiking around the area, Randy has also found and collected deer skulls on a semi-regular basis, both bucks and does, decapitated heads just left in random places in the woods. It would be next to impossible for poachers to be operating on this piece of private land, and even if they were poachers, don’t leave the antlers behind. Randy has such a collection of these skulls that it kind of makes me worry about game wardens seeing them someday and asking him how he came to have them. He says that if they ever do, he will have quite a story for them but that he’ll never bring it to their attention unless he has to.

He finds is not normal for known predator kills. There are bears and mountain lions in the area that do prey on deer and Randy has seen their kills. They leave partially eaten bodies behind that are torn apart, not just masses of plucked hair on the ground.

I am writing this in 2020, at which time Randy has found about two dozen skulls and close to 50 kill sites. I would not want to be a deer on his property.

4

FIRST SIGHTING?

Summer came to 2014, and in spite of the strange goings-on around Randy’s property life and the process of earning a living had to go on. Smokehouse had gigs to play, and in June, a guitarist who was with the band at that time was staying with Randy briefly.

Chris Cornish

Chris Cornish is as prolific a musician as Randy, hailing from Rapid City, South Dakota, and having played with many well-known artists over the years, as well as now having his very own band. His sound is adaptable, ranging from country to rock. He was 38 years old when he stayed at Randy’s, sleeping in a trailer house just across the yard from the main house that is maintained for guests. Randy, new to the bizarre phenomena going on around his home and not sure what to think about it, was keeping it very close to the chest and had told Chris nothing about any of it. If a first sighting had to occur to confirm the presence of Bigfoot on the property, then it seems to be lent credence that it was by a witness who was untainted with suggestibility.

However, and unfortunately, there is some controversy with this incident. I contacted Chris via Facebook in preparing this book to get his recollections, and he first stated that the place had a spooky and unnerving feeling to it and that he heard some strange nocturnal animal noises that sounded like they came from something large, close to the trailer, and somewhat similar but not exactly identical to the noises made by the