46: Batsquatch and St. Elmo Ghost Town

Episode 46: Batsquatch and St. Elmo Ghost Town

Hello and welcome to where our minds wander all you fellow Wanderers. 

I'm Wes and that's my lovely wife and Co host beth.

B:Hello everyone 

Thank you for taking the time and listening to our podacst we appreciate each and every one of you. And for those of you who purchased our bonus episode Thank you very much. 

For those of you that are new to our podcast each week Beth and I delve into stories about ghost cryptids UFOs anything strange and unusual that peaked our curiosity.

B: We also have a Facebook page where our minds wander where you can check out the newest upcoming episodes each week. There's a good group of people there. So go Check it out . 

Also Don't forget to leave a review and a comment if you like the show on your favorite listening platform.

B: Well with that said Wes where did you find your mind wandering for this episode. 

D:Well since it's start to look like spring out the Lady bugs have been gathering all of the the house windows and the ducks and geese are all gathered in the river out front I'm excited to get out for drives around the back roads of the Adirondacks. 

There always beautiful but a bit desolate and creepy at times so this story kinda seems fitting. 

Imagine: Yourself driving down a lonely Washington state road. The full moon casts an eerie glow through the tree branches arching overhead. 

With only your headlights casting a dim glow in front of you, you drive cautiously through wisps of fog, keeping your eyes on the winding pavement in front of you.

 There are no houses for miles- and you crank up the radio to keep you company on the last few miles until you reach civilization again. 

Suddenly, a massive shape fills the road, and you slam on the brakes, tensing as your brakes screech louder than Steven Tyler through your speakers. 

As you sit, alone and isolated, your eyes widen as your brain tries to make sense of what you're seeing: 

There before you

 standing in the middle of the road is an unbelievably tall creature, easily topping nine feet.

 At first, you think it must be a wolf on its hind legs - with its canine-like face and tufted ears.

 As you stare, it’s gaze meets yours - and its yellow eyes seem to shine with unmasked anger. 

Then, it opens its mouth to reveal huge, sharp white teeth. 

Your instincts kick in and as you lift your foot off the brake, ready to put pedal to the metal, your car- your trusty, never-failed-you-before-car… dies. 

You quickly hit the door lock and place your hand back on the wheel, your knuckles white. 

Your heart hammers as  another wisp of fog floats across the road. 

Your eyes burn, you’re straining so hard to see if the beast is still there- because you have to be imagining this, right? 

It has to be your imagination. A trick of the trees and the moon and shadow. What you saw can’t really be there. 

But as the fog wafts by, your stomach lurches- the beast is moving closer to you and the only protection you have is the  glass and steel  of your vehicle between it and you - 

which seem like very little protection against the muscular, powerful beast that comes to a stop not twenty feet away.

 It easily must weigh the same as two grown grizzly bears and the reality becomes instantly, terrifyingly clear: this is no wolf. 

But what is it? 

What could it possibly be?

B: it's a werewolf! Or dogman! 

As panic rises in your throat, the menacing beast crouches slightly and your eyes dart to its feet. 

Still expecting to see massive canine paws, your brain whirls and your heart hammers as you take in what you’re seeing:

 huge, taloned bird feet.

You frantically turn the ignition key hoping praying the engine will sputter to life. 

Nothing. 

You try again. Nothing. As you consider unlocking the door and running for your life, you look up - and as a perfect beam of moonlight illuminates the impossible creature before you, you see it  but you don’t want to see it - you can't help to notice that its fur is blue. 

The beast is still slightly crouched, its powerful arms bent. Almost as if in slow motion, the creature rises, and as it stares at you with those uncanny yellow eyes, it unfurls… colossal… black… wings. 

B: what??? That's no werewolf! 

They spread out to either side like a bat’s - and from tip to tip, they easily span 12 or 15 feet. 

Before you can scream, before you can fumble for your phone, before you can do anything, the beast gives you one long pitying stare, before launching itself into the air. 

You sit.

You breathe.

Perhaps you panic-cry a little.

You jump as your car springs back to life, the radio breaking the silence on full blast. Your headlights flicker, once, twice, before coming back on completely, illuminating the road once again. 

As you try to calm yourself, try to remember how to put your foot on the gas, try to remember how to live your life, now that you know creatures like this are really out there - it dawns on you: you have just had an encounter with…Batsquatch. 

B: Batsquach! It sounds like a cartoon! 

Believe it or not, Batsquatch was once Washington state’s official cryptid. 

And people have been telling stories of its existence for decades. But the once-elusive Batsquatch doesn’t just stick to Washington’s borders - even though people claim it originated there - it’s been seen in California and as far east as Pennsylvania. 

So where did it come from and how long has it been here? 

Many people believe that the batsquatch is a cave-dweller and it was living happily hidden for centuries - until one catastrophic event - the 1980s eruption of Mt. St. Helens. 

On March 27, 1980, the top of Mount St. Helen’s exploded, sending a 10,000 foot plume of ash into the air. 

Earthquakes followed and lighting storms raged for months afterwards.

 On May 18th, a 5.1 magnitude earthquake caused a portion of the volcano to landslide, moving at 115 miles per hour. This caused some areas to be covered in 600 feet of stone. 

The earthquake also triggered another eruption - this one rising 80,000 feet into the air and the resulting ash blanketed the surrounding area in 2-5 inches of ash. Half an inch of ash covered an area from New Mexico to Minnesota. 

B: I remember that as a kid- it was horrible. 

But what does the catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens have to do with Batsquatch? 

Well, many believe that the eruption destroyed not just humans’ homes, but the Batsquatch’s as well. Sightings began almost immediately. 

But the most publicized encounter happened 14 years later, in April of 1994 in the foothills of Pierce County, Washington.

 18 year old Brian Canfield was driving a truck on back roads, miles from the nearest town, when suddenly the truck died.

 He tried several times to restart it. 

As he was about to get out and pop the hood, he froze as something very large swooped in front of his headlights. Assuming it was a very large bird, he moved to open his door again - and what could only be a Batsquatch landed on the hood of the truck. 

He told reporters that it was easily nine feet tall, humanoid in shape, but covered in blue tinged fur.

 It had the face of a bat with glowing red eyes and white fanged teeth. And it had impossibly large wings. 

In an interview with The News Tribune out of  Tacoma, WA he said, “It was standing there staring at me, like it was resting, like it didn’t know what to think. I was scared, it raised the hair on me. I didn’t feel threatened. I just felt out of place. It’s looking right at me like in a deep stare, like right through me. It’s standing perfectly still. It stood for—how long?—a few minutes. Several minutes. Then its fingers twitched and its wings began to unfold. 

Those wings were as wide as the road. It turned its head and looked back at me and started flapping its wings. A few minutes later the truck just started. I took off as fast as I could.”

The Batsquatch took off with such force that it shook the entire truck.

Canfield returned to the area the following day with his mother and a neighbor to look for evidence but found nothing. 

Once Canfield’s encounter was published, other locals began to tell their own encounter stories. 

A liquor store owner named Butch Whittaker said he was flying his personal plane in the middle of the day when he saw something that perfectly matched Batsquatch’s description. He said the creature flew beside the plane for several minutes before veering off and disappearing. 

In 1998 another sighting was reported by a trucker in Oregon who was hauling logs. He said he actually hit Batsquatch - but his description of the cryptid was different from Canfield’s. The trucker claimed the creature was 15 feet tall, with a purple nose and purple eyes. He said its wings were much smaller than the original report of 12 feet. 

A group of hikers at Mount Shasta had their own encounter in 2009. They said the humanoid bat-like creature they spotted had the physique of Hulk Hogan with leathery wings. It also had a bat-like face. But they estimated (and possibly over-estimated) its wingspan as 50 feet. 

Two years later, a local man was in his yard with his dog, one day in June, when he claimed to see “something flying in the sky. It had bat wings, blue fur, and had a face similar (to batsquatch) with eyes glowing red.It was about 9 feet tall at the least. After I watched, it just flew away.” 

Most recently, in 2014, as far east as the Archbishop Hoban High School in Akron, Ohio, an entire class watched a giant black mass zoom by their classroom window. They had no explanation for what they had seen other than Batsquatch. 

So - some cryptozoologists draw parallels between batsquatch and another winged cryptid - Mothman. 

B: yes- it does sound Mothman-like! 

D: There are some similarities. 

Mothman was spotted for about a year during the 1960s in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. He, too, was a humanoid shaped creature with massive wings. Other physical similarities between the two are their glowing eyes. 

Shortly after being seen by several witnesses, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people.  Whereas Mothman is considered by many to be a harbinger of catastrophe, batsquatch appeared after a catastrophe. But that’s more than enough for many in the cryptozoology field to believe they are the same kind of creature.

So are there other batsquatches out there in other parts of the world? 

Well, there have been tales of supersized bats since the 1920s on Java island in Indonesia.

 In 1925, naturalist Ernest Bartels was exploring a waterfall on Java when he reported in his journals that a giant bat flew over his head - and he could not identify it. 

Two years later he reported encountering it again, this time around 11:30 at night. 

He heard it making an “ahooooool” sound and went outside his thatched hut to catch sight of it- which he did. He proposed that it could be a species of undiscovered bat or possibly an owl - but a hundred years later, no one has confirmed either of those theories. 

Probably because its body is reportedly about the size of a human toddler with a wingspan of 12 feet. The Ahool’s head is said to be monkey-shaped but it has a very human-looking face. It also had two backwards pointing feet (which is creepy.) They are nocturnal by nature and eat fish that they catch while skimming over the water. 

Some believe that this all-black, bat-like creature resembles a pterosaur in a lot of  ways, with the exception of its monkey-like head and human features.  

So, the Ahool is a mystery - but, like I said, it’s mostly a bat.  That doesn’t mean that these three creatures aren’t related somehow

And if Sasquatch lives out in the wilds of Washington State, why couldn’t Batsquatch live there, too? 

Hey did you know? In Poland recently, an archaeology team unearthed a very unusual skeleton. She was a woman from the 1700s, with a very expensive silk hat still perched on her head, indicating that in life, she was wealthy. But that didn’t help her neighbors from suspecting she was a vampire. The woman’s neck was pinned to the ground by a sickle and a padlock was attached to a toe on her left foot. The sickle was there to prevent her from rising from the dead - if she did, she most certainly would have lost her head. But why the padlock? It’s speculated that it could literally keep her earthbound, by locking her to the ground. 

Who Da thunk it?

Almost 10,000 feet in the Sawatch mountain range of Colorado, the quiet town of St. Elmo hasn’t changed much in over 100 years. Sure, there’s a gas station, but it hasn’t been operational since the 1950s. 

The last customer at the Miner’s Exchange General Store steps off the stoop, clutching their purchases, gets into their car, and drives away, soon followed by the owner of the store - who locks up and also leaves. 

Within minutes, the already quiet town settles back into eerie stillness. Not a soul leaves the church. No children walk past the school. No neighbors walk the streets in the warm summer evening. 

St. Elmo is a ghost town. Literally. 

And if you’re not careful, you might just catch a glimpse of Annabelle “Dirty Annie” Stark  strolling down the main street with her shotgun over her shoulder, continuing to keep a watchful eye over her town.. 

D: Now that's a awesome name. Dirty Annie. 

St. Elmo was originally named Forest City when gold and silver were discovered there in 1880. 

But when the post office was put in, they objected that too many “Forest Cities” already existed, so the town was renamed by one of its original founders, Griffith Evans, who picked it because he was enjoying a book with the same name. 

The town quickly grew to 2000 residents, mostly men, in search of gold and silver.

 Saloons sprang up, as well as dance halls and brothels.

 When the railroad built a station there, the town grew even larger, supporting several mercantile stores, a telegraph office, five hotels, two sawmills, five restaurants, a schoolhouse, a newspaper office and a town hall.

 The saloons and dance halls continued to thrive. 

And so did the gold and silver trade. As well as copper and iron.

 There were over 150 patented mines in the area, but the 4 principal mines were the Mary Murphy, which shipped as much as 50-75 tons of ore per day out to smelters, totaling 60 million dollars.

There was also the Therese C., The Molly and the Pioneer. 

St. Elmo was your typical booming mining town - with rowdy nights and all kinds of deals by day. 

In 1881, Anton Stark arrived, driving a herd of cattle through St. Elmo. 

He fell in love with the town and decided it was the perfect place to raise his family. 

Soon, his wife Anna and their three children: Roy, Annabelle, and Tony (yes, Tony Stark) joined him. 

Anna sounds like an interesting woman. 

While Anton worked as a section boss in the mines, she ran the Miner’s Exchange General Store and the Home Comfort Hotel. 

The hotel was deemed the nicest in town, with the cleanest rooms and best food. 

Because Anna ran a tight ship - and seemed to think that she was quite a bit better than everyone else, the Starks became what we would call “elitist.” 

They did have quite a bit of money and attended church regularly, but it wasn’t that.

 Anna felt that her children shouldn’t mingle with the townsfolk at all, and although she did send them to school, they basically weren’t allowed to make friends or attend any functions. 

Their entire lives were to be spent indoors, either in the high society hotel, or in the house, away from the rabble outside. 

Like most mining towns, the silver, gold, iron, and copper ran out and by 1922 the town was nearly deserted because the railroad, which was used by the Denver, South Park, and Pacific lines discontinued their stops there. 

But the Stark family remained. For years, the two Stark brothers, Roy and Tony, tried unsuccessfully to reopen the mines. Eventually they opened the town to tourists, instead, leasing out the cabins to overnight guests. The Miner’s Exchange General Store remained open, still run by Anna, but eventually even the tourists didn’t bring in enough money, and Anna decided to send Annabelle to work in the telegraph office in Salida, 20 miles south.

Annabelle was considered quite attractive and it must have been a whole new world for her in Salida, after spending so much of her life in St. Elmo. She met a young man, fell in love, and got married in 1922. She then sent word to her mother by telegram that she and her husband were moving to Trinidad. And yet, two years later, with little explanation, Annabelle returned home to St. Elmo. 

By 1926 the railroad tracks were pulled up and replaced by nothing more than a dirt road. But still the Starks stayed, continuing to rent out the cabins to tourists. By 1930, the population of St. Elmo had dwindled to just seven. 

And after the death of Anna and Roy in 1934 (Anton had died years earlier), the two remaining Stark children, Tony and Annabelle, continued to stay. The hotel became a place to store trash and other discarded items. The general store was so outdated with expired canned food that it had a distinct sour smell. 

And Annabelle and Tony lived without running water or electricity. They themselves rarely bathed or washed their clothes. Annabelle would often patrol the town’s main street, armed with a shotgun. Area residents started to refer to her as “Dirty Annie.” 

The brother and sister remained in St. Elmo, becoming the last two residents, until 1952, when those same concerned area residents had Annabelle and Tony committed to a mental health facility. 

A friend of the family was able to convince the staff there that Annabelle and Tony were not dangerous, and the two were released into a nursing home. Tony passed away soon after and Annabelle passed away in 1960. 

But descendants of the Stark family, who continue to run the General Store on a seasonal basis, and visitors to St. Elmo claim Annabelle is still protecting their town. 

Stories of Annabelle’s ghost begin with that family friend who was able to get Annabelle and her brother released from the mental health facility. The friend's grandchildren were playing in the old hotel one day when they said every door in the room slammed shut and the temperature dropped 20 degrees. 

Another granddaughter decided to try and clean up the hotel a little bit, clearing out trash and giving the walls and floors a good scrubbing. The project took awhile, and she claimed that each morning when she and her helpers would enter the hotel, they’d find all of their cleaning supplies in the middle of the floor. They’d continue working for the day, put all the supplies away - and then return the next day to find it all back in the middle of the floor. I assume they were worried about trespassers or squatters, so they began padlocking the supplies in a closet. But even that didn’t seem to make a difference - they’d still find all of their supplies in the center of the room the next day. 

Maybe Annabelle was pleased that they were cleaning and wanted them to pick up the pace. 

A third story involves a skier who just happened to catch sight of a woman in white, standing in one of the hotel’s second story windows. She described the woman as very attractive, and that she seemed to be staring at something beyond the skier. When the skier followed her gaze, she spotted some snowmobilers riding up one of the streets. She flagged the group down, informing them that snowmobiling through St. Elmo was illegal. The group left and the skier looked back up at the hotel window. The woman in white nodded at her and then vanished. 

St. Elmo was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and still continues to offer some amenities through the General Store. They rent or sell ATVs that visitors can take along the old mining trails. There is good fishing in the creek that runs alongside the town and plenty of updated items for sale in the store. The cabins are still for rent if you choose to make a weekend of it. Although a fire destroyed some of the buildings in 2002, including the Town Hall and some of the Stark family homes, there are still plenty of original buildings left to explore. 

The Buena Vista Heritage Museum purchased some of them and is working to restore them back to how they looked in the 1880s. 

We can only hope that Annabelle Stark is pleased with how things are being restored. I think she would be - she certainly seems to love her town and want it safe.  

D: I Think she would be quite pleased with what they are doing with the town. 

D:Well I guess that about wraps it up for this episode Beth.

B:I guess it does.

D: join us again next week for an all new episode of where our minds wander.