What you need to know about the legend of the Vergas Hairy Man

For roughly the past 50 years, a series of wooded trails and minimum maintenance roads between Maplewood State Park and Vergas, Minn., have produced some of the region’s eeriest sightings, ranging from robe-clad cults to shifting paths and whispering trees.

As many locals will attest, though, the most famous of these legends is the Sasquatch or Bigfoot-like creature said to roam those parts, where it’s known as the Vergas Hairy Man.

Witnesses of the Hairy Man typically describe the creature as a large hominoid or ape that scavenges the forests and terrorises the residents. Given its size, standing somewhere between 6 and 9 feet tall and weighing more than 300 pounds, and its propensity to chase humans and roar, it elicits a fair amount of terror.

Historical research and documents recently released by the FBI point to the breadth and depth of its larger footprint and legend.

On June 5, the FBI Records Vault tweeted a single word, “Bigfoot,” and linked to a trove of documents from its Bigfoot file, opened in response to the August 1976 request of Peter C. Byrne, then-director of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in Oregon.

The year prior, 1975, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ "Washington Environment Atlas" referenced an alleged FBI analysis of Bigfoot or Sasquatch tissues. Byrne wanted confirmation from that analysis.

In his 1976 exchange, Byrne learned that the FBI had not analyzed those samples, so he enclosed samples he also believed to belong to Bigfoot. The FBI’s analysis concluded that his samples belonged to something from the deer family.

The timing of Byrne’s request reflected many Americans’ growing interest in the creature, even though references to hairy, ape-like wildmen have decorated human histories for millennia. Scholars today often point to Bigfoot predecessors like Enkidu in the ancient Mesopotamian "Epic of Gilgamesh", Nebuchadnezzar II in the ancient Aramaic and Hebrew "Book of Daniel", or the monstrous races in the ancient Roman and Greek histories of Herodotus and Pliny the Elder.

Joshua Blu Buhs, author of "Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend", who even includes modern incarnations of Santa Claus in this list, notes how these characters clearly influenced popular sensations like P.T. Barnum’s “What Is It” creature that exploited these legends in carnivals, freak shows, and circuses.

The modern American Bigfoot encounter began to take shape in the 19th and 20th centuries at the edge of the British and American empires. As British military and industry moved through India into the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal, Tibet and Sikkim, they encountered rumors of the “Yeti,” a hairy, tail-less demon roughly the size of a human.

These early rumors prompted investigation by explorers already eager to climb Mount Everest and amplified the frequency and detail of Yeti encounters to readers abroad. A 1951 exhibition led by British mountaineer Eric Shipton yielded what some believed to be a Yeti track.

The photo Shipton shared of this track proved popular around the world and generated enough interest and funding for both the 1957 Peter Cushing film "The Abominable Snowman" and a 1960 Himalayan expedition led by famous New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary and American zoologist Marlin Perkins. The evidence they collected, purported to be Yeti remnants, proved to be tissues from bear and goat-antelope.

In the United States and Canada, a similar process unfolded among loggers, miners and fur traders who encountered First Nations stories of wild giants in the Pacific Northwest, including the Yeti-like “Sasquatch” popularized by a Chehalis Indian Reservation teacher named J.W. Burns in a 1929 article entitled, “Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants.” The term “Sasquatch” was an Anglicized form of the giant’s name in the Halkomelem language.

In September of 1958, Yeti and Sasquatch sightings took an important turn when Andrew Genzoli and Betty Allen of northern California’s Humboldt Times gave birth to the name “Bigfoot.” The columnist and reporter had started covering a sequence of strange sightings, including a logger’s discovery and subsequent casting of unnaturally large, human-like footprints similar to those of the 1951 Shipton expedition.

Readers ate the story up, and as a result the Humboldt Times covered the story throughout the year, including 18 pieces in October alone. Some issues even carried more than one Bigfoot story. The small newspaper had birthed a celebrity and renamed a legend.

Driven by regular appearances in TV, film and magazines, Bigfoot’s celebrity exploded throughout the 1960s, despite a growing chorus of skeptics and a growing list of sightings and samples that were proven to be hoaxes.

In 1967 that celebrity grew even further with two major developments: 53 seconds of grainy footage shot on Oct. 20 that purportedly showed a female Bigfoot walking across a shallow river in northern California as well as Frank Hansen’s traveling exhibition of an ice-encased creature known initially as the “Siberskoye Creature” and “The Creature On Ice.”

The first of these developments would come to be known as the “Patterson-Gimlin Film” and the second of these would come to be known as the “Minnesota Iceman.”

Both were distributed to the curious, paying public of the Midwest and Pacific Northwest for several years thereafter, just as the Vergas Hairy Man began developing a name of its own.

Outside of vague references to unknown sightings from the 1940s and ‘50s, the earliest Hairy Man report comes from the late Ken Zitzow, who claimed to see the creature in 1966 while driving County Road 130 west of Vergas with his brother Duane and Duane’s girlfriend Pam.

Zitzow described it in a 1991 Detroit Lakes Tribune interview as a “Bigfoot-looking thing.” After the creature walked out of the woods and hit Zitzow’s trunk hard enough to leave a dent, Zitzow drove away before returning for another look.

Zitzow claimed to have later tracked the animal’s den with his brother. They found an abandoned shack containing an old mattress and “thick with wild animal smell” and burned it to the ground.

In the same 1991 Tribune piece, Dave Bruhn is quoted as having seen the creature up close in 1967. It jumped on the hood of his car from a cutting. A few swerves knocked it off.

In 2012, an investigation for the SyFy TV show "Haunted Highway" prompted another round of Hairy Man coverage in local media. Witnesses added to the Hairy Man legend, including former Tribune reporter Brian Wierima, who reported on several sightings and added photographs of a strange skull from the Vergas Trails to the Hairy Man legend; Cheryl Hanson, who claims to have been chased by the creature while snowmobiling as a child in 1972; and Mike Quast, who claims to have seen the creature near Strawberry Lake north of Detroit Lakes as a child in 1976.

Both Hanson and Quast have become enthusiastic proponents of the Hairy Man’s authenticity. Today Quast might even be best described as a Bigfoot researcher, having authored two books on the subject: "The Sasquatch in Minnesota" and "Bigfoot Chronicle: A Researcher’s Continuing Journey through Minnesota and Beyond". His research offers a wonderful compilation of Hairy Man sightings, including many that venture northward through Ulen-Hitterdal toward Crookston and Reamer, where the Bigfoot legend lives even larger.

Quast believes the Hairy Man and Bigfoot to be the “most human-like ape species in existence today” (besides homo sapiens). When asked about hoaxers, or people who might just share a sighting for the attention, Quast points out that the attention is often ridicule. “It’s not the kind of attention you want,” he said.

Emily Beurmann, program director for the Becker County Historical Society, is aware of the many legends coming out of the Vergas Trails and notes that, “A lot of reputable people have reported sightings.” That said, she’s hesitant to speak to the veracity of the Hairy Man, pointing to the general absence of documented sightings and physical specimens.