A Yeti Jailed in Arcadia

From Yeti & Bigfoot News (1977)

Back in the early 1930s, a Yeti was supposed to have been captured by some cowboys on a ranch somewhere in DeSoto County that was killing and eating cattle, and then taken to the jail in Arcadia and kept there for awhile while they tried to tame it. They called it, “The Wildman.” Every time that it got mad, it would throw out this putrid odor and smell up the place. They finally got tired of fooling with it and took it out in the woods and turned it loose.

I understand that a full scale investigation has taken place in Arcadia to try and look up the records on the incident. Although I’ve written to the newspaper there for information, they’ve just ignored me to date, although I’ve talked with people who claim to have been there at the time who told me about it. There has been much interest in this incident over the country and more information will be published as I’m able to run it down.

The Yahoo’s of the Bahamas

Several years ago, I spent a weekend in the Bahamas on business and showed copies of my former YETI NEW LETTER to a businessman there and he wanted to know if I knew about the Yahoo’s and I said “No,” to tell me. He said that there was a tribe of little people three feet high living in caves on Lubbermans Island over near the southern end of the island of Abbaco. He told me a tale about a man who had been kidnapped by them as a boy and taken to this cave and kept for three days, (and how) they fed him bananas and then released him. The boy said that they played the most beautiful music on reed instruments.

All through the Bahamas, women tell their children that they had better be good or the Yahoo’s will get them. They are supposed to have two eyes in back of their heads as well as in front and their feet are turned the other way. Besides Lubbermans Island, they are also known to be living on an island in the South Seas. What their origin is, no one knows.

[Editor’s Note: The above two intriguing items appeared sometime ago in the former Yeti & Bigfoot Newsletter (Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1977), written by it’s editor L. Frank Hudson of St. Petersburg, Florida. If anyone has any further information on these two sensational sounding tales then I’m all ears! Brent Raynes]

[Greg Little's note: While on Andros Island, Bahamas in 2006 we interviewed an individual who told us about a reported Bigfoot encounter on that remote, large, and essentially uninhabited island that took place in the late 1970s. While others supposedly had seen the creature, the individual claimed to have found and followed its footprints along a shoreline. Just a week later my wife and I were going through all of the issues the Bahamas Journal of Science at the University of Florida library at Gainesville. Oddly, I stumbled across a series of brief articles detailing several reports of Bigfoot on Andros and several other islands in the Bahamas. We also interviewed two older individuals at Andros who told us in their youth they had both seen—clearly seen—a Chickcharnie. Neither of these people wanted to do videotaped interviews because they feared the creature. The Chickcharnie is described as a three-toed elf or a birdlike creature with a lizard's tail and human head that hangs upside down from trees. It builds its nests by joining together the tops of two trees. Even more oddly, during our expeditions deep into western Andros unexplored forests, we found and filmed what appeared to be a huge nest made from the tops of two trees that were bent together and somehow attached at the top. It was a very odd discovery which we never put on our documentaries. The tree tops were attached at the top and what looked like a huge nest was entwined into the trees. It struck all of us—all 5 of us who were present—as quite bizarre. Most scientists believe that the Chickcharniew is based on a 3-foot tall owl known as tyto pollens. It is supposedly extict today.]