Author’s Note: Although my family wasn’t living in the area in 1964, the legend of a Bigfoot-like creature haunting the woods around where I grew up in Sister Lakes, Michigan loomed large with us neighborhood kids. Years later, I became curious about the origin of the stories and wrote this piece based on the 1964 newspaper accounts. The article never found a home in print. My target in approach and tone was Fortean Times, who probably still have a copy of this in their slush pile.

The sleepy resort town of Sister Lakes, Michigan boasts a meager population of 1,000. That number increases six-fold during the summer months when vacationers invade in mass to enjoy the beauty of the area’s ten lakes, abundant woods, and rolling farmland. Sister Lakes is such a popular destination for summer fun seekers from nearby Chicago that store owners post signs reminding visitors that this southwest corner of Michigan does indeed run on Eastern Time, not on Illinois’ Central Time. During the summer of 1964, a visitor of the nine feet tall, black leathery face, and hairy body variety joined in the fun, briefly turning Sister Lakes into Monster Town USA.

The June 1964 Sightings

On the night of Tuesday, June 9, 1964, Mrs. Evelyn Utrup summoned Cass County sheriff deputies to her family’s farm south of Dewey Lake in Silver Creek Township. Some of the farm’s seasonal workers—25-year-old Gordon Brown, his 17-year-old wife Mary, his brother Randall, and a neighbor girl—pulled into the Utrup farm and caught a glimpse of a large creature between the barn and a shed. According to Gordon Brown, he and his brother found a flashlight and chased the creature for 300 yards. They noticed a tree where one hadn’t been before and quickly realized it was the monster standing still. The courage of the Brown brothers gave out, and they ran away.

This wasn’t the first monster sighting in Sister Lakes. Since 1962, several local residents had seen a large hairy creature walking on two legs among cherry orchards, berry patches, and swampland on the south side of Dewey Lake, but kept quiet for fear of ridicule. The description given to the deputies by the Browns fit with other sightings: nine feet tall, roughly 500 pounds with a black leathery face and eyes that glowed red. It sounded like a crying baby or sometimes a honking goose.

Evelyn Utrup told deputies that she had never actually seen the monster, but frequently heard it outside in the summer. It had once chased her into the house. The impact of the monster’s stomping shook the ground and the house. A track found on the Utrup farm the night of June 9th measured three and three-fourths inches across at the heel and six inches wide in the middle. Cass County deputies made a plaster cast, but the ground was too sandy for an accurate impression.

Story of the monster sighting quickly spread. The next day helpful locals posted a “Monster” sign with an arrow pointing the curious and skeptical toward the Utrup’s farm. Deputies quickly removed the sign, but the crowds kept coming. A radio newscaster in nearby Benton Harbor made an erroneous request on behalf of Cass County authorities for assistance in stalking the creature. That night carloads of armed monster-hunters from as far away as Ohio trolled the roads of Sister Lakes armed with shotguns, hunting rifles, tire irons, and knives. County deputies who had planned their own monster hunt instead spent the evening directing traffic and persuading would-be posse members to go home before someone got shot by mistake. Auxiliary deputies were called into service and officers from neighboring Van Buren County were tapped for support in quelling crowds, which finally abated around 3 am.

The monster made a rare daylight appearance only a few hours later at 9:15 am on Thursday, June 11th. A group of three 12 and 13-year-old girls—Joyce Smith and sisters Gail and Patsy Clayton were walking along a road in the area when the monster emerged from the woods and crossed in front of them on two legs. Joyce Smith saw the creature first and fainted. The Clayton sisters revived her and the three girls ran to a nearby house to call the police. A search of the area turned up nothing. Patsy Clayton, who had the best view of the monster, described it as seven feet tall with a black face and definitely not human.

A final monster report came in the evening of Friday, June 12th when Robert Walker of Dowagiac found what he described as big ape tracks in the woods near Dewey Lake. Like Mrs. Urtup and the Brown brothers, Walker admitted that he had seen the monster during the previous summer but had been hesitant about coming forward until sightings earlier in the week. He also claimed to know the monster’s nightly routine and feared the recent commotion would upset the creature: “It hasn’t showed up for two nights: it shows he is scared. He’s hiding in those woods and somebody might just get killed. His normal routine has been broken.”

Walker wasn’t alone in fearing that someone or something might get hurt or killed. Cass County sheriff’s deputies concentrated their time disarming the most rambunctious monster hunters and farmers kept their livestock locked up. The only report of gunplay came when a hunter mistook a black Shetland pony for the monster and shot at it twice. His eyesight was luckily just as bad when aiming his gun and he missed both times.

Cashing in on Monster Mania

Fueled by local press coverage and reporters from Detroit and Chicago television stations, Sister Lakes’ Monster Mania was in full swing by the end of the week and area businesses moved quickly to cash in. Several taverns did a brisk trade selling Monster Brew. Reid’s Drive-in Restaurant erected a stuffed effigy of the monster to advertise their new menu item – the Monster Burger. Harvey’s East variety store cobbled together $7.95 Monster Hunting Kits that included a baseball bat, a wooden mallet, an arrow, a net, and a flashlight. St. Joesph’s WSJM radio station featured monster-themed music and periodic live reports from Sister Lakes. Dowagiac’s movie theater ran a double-bill of The Horror of Party Beach and The Curse of the Living Corpse. A group calling itself the Monster Boosters was set up to promote the monster, prompting the Sister Lakes Chamber of Commerce to deny playing a role in the stories.

Local beer distributor Jack Handly put up a $1,000 reward for the live capture of the monster by 5:00 pm, June 22nd. He soon rescinded the offer at the request of exasperated Cass County Sheriff Robert Dool, who found himself inundated with phone calls from people all over the world wanting monster information.

Not every business profited from the hype surrounding the Sister Lakes Monster sightings. A rumor started among superstitious migrant farmer workers that the monster had eaten four people. Entire families packed up and left the area out of fear, leaving berry farmers short-handed during the peak of harvesting season. The workers that stayed were reluctant to enter the fields and many slept in their cars with the doors locked and windows rolled up.

An Uncouth Image

The doubts about the young girls’ story and the Walker tracks reflected the over-arching skepticism that greeted the Sister Lakes monster sightings. Most people enjoyed a good chuckle about the hairy beast being a deranged Beatles fan or any of a host of other monster jokes. Others were just embarrassed because the sightings played into negative stereotypes about rural people being unsophisticated country bumpkins. A column in the Dowagiac Daily News underscored this: “They call us ‘Beast Town’ now in Detroit. It fits with ‘Dogpatch,’ now that we think of it. Gives us a rather uncouth image doesn’t it.”

Uncouth and less-than-intelligent were exactly how the people who saw the monster were portrayed in the Chicago’s American newspaper, where Gordon Brown’s account of his encounter is written in colorful regional dialect: “It was an extreee giant looking thing, a whale of a joker…I yelled: ‘Lookie there!’…Well, wowee! This thing was a-standing there. Well we hightailed it right out of there.”

Chicago’s American reporter Michael McGovern had Gordon’s young wife Mary draw a picture of what she saw using a small notebook balanced on an oilcan. The drawing was crude and child-like and looked more like a large woman in a dress or Grimace, the large smiling purple character from McDonald’s Restaurant, than a scary monster.

Mary Brown’s picture was published on the paper’s June 12, 1964 front page with the heading “Have YOU Seen THIS Monster?” The message to readers was loud and clear: the Sister Lakes monster sightings were a joke.

Zoologists Weigh In

Much to the relief of Cass County deputies, Saturday and Sunday passed without additional monster sightings. Disappointed monster hunters returned to their day jobs and the residents of Sister Lakes returned to their fishing, swimming, and water skiing, but the question remained: What did everybody see that week in June of 1964?

A number of possible explanations for the Sister Lakes Monster have been put forward, including a deer, a loose horse, an escaped elk, and prank-minded teenagers. Cass County officials at the time believed the most likely culprit to be a black bear that had strayed down from the northern part of the state. Dick and Dorothy Grabemeyer, farmers near the swampland of Dewey Lake, had seen bears in the area before. University of Michigan zoologist Dr. William H. Burt agreed with the bear theory and speculated that witnesses had misjudged the creature’s size: “When they get up on their hind legs, which they occasionally do to look around, they might be five or six feet.”

A key problem with the bear hypothesis is that each sighting has the monster moving long distances on two legs. Joyce Smith, the young girl who fainted did say that the monster looked like a bear, also said it moved on its hind legs. However, given the young age of Smith and the Clayton girls and the hysterical atmosphere at the time, deputies were sometimes skeptical of the girls’ story.

The Brown brothers were experienced hunters and adamantly maintained from the beginning that what they encountered was not a bear. Another member of University of Michigan’s zoology department, Professor Frank Eggelton, suspected it was a gorilla: “Bears don’t stand on their hind feet too often. I suspect from the description that it’s an escaped circus gorilla.” This would fit with the monster’s black leathery face as well as Robert Walker’s big ape tracks, although there were no reports of any such zoo or circus animal missing and deputies who saw Walker’s tracks thought they looked more like dog prints.

A Hoax To The North

The prank explanation gained some currency when another monster sighting a few days 130 miles to the north in Ionia, Michigan was proven to be a hoax. This “creature,” spotted by two brothers as it crossed I-96 early the morning of Wednesday, June 17th, was reported to be ten-foot tall with hairy skin. A state trooper later saw and gave chase to the same creature, which he described as around six-foot tall. The creature evaded capture, but dropped a glove and some dry hair probably from a dead hide instead of a live animal.

The Man in Monster Suit theory doesn’t explain the “glowing eyes,” which was a consistent detail in all of the nighttime Sister Lakes sightings and is common in many Sasquatch reports. The glowing eyes are best explained by the presence of a layer of tapetum lucidum at the back of retina. This layer helps improve low-light vision by reflecting light back to by the eye’s rods and cones. When the pupils are opened wide to collect more light in the dark, the tapetum lucidum layer reflects the light much like a mirror, creating the “eye-shine” effect familiar to anyone who has seen a nocturnal animal in the beam of a flashlight and headlight. Both bears and gorillas have tapetum lucidum, but humans do not.

50 Years Later

A few more houses and a few less trees aside, Sister Lakes hasn’t changed much in the past fifty years. Rumors of new monster sightings persist, though not as frequently as during the early 1960s and nothing as intense as the June 1964 monster frenzy. Whether it was an errant bear, a missing gorilla, or a Michigan Sasquatch, the Sister Lakes Monster is a local legend now, a spooky story passed on by children to scare one another. If something really does lurk in the swampy brambles, orchards, and berry fields of Sister Lakes, Michigan, it remains to be seen.

Article Sources

“Here and There about Dowagiac”, Dowagiac Daily News, 14 Jun 1964.
“Itchy Gun Fingers Blast Away at Pony”, Chicago’s American, 15 Jun 1964.
McGovern, Michael, “Michigan People Can’t Get Over This ‘Thing’”, Chicago’s American, 12 Jun 1964.
“Monster Chases Woman!”, The St. Joseph Herald Press, 10 Jun 1964.
“Monster Jabs Berry Farms in Farms in Pocketbook”, Chicago Tribune, 13 Jun 1964.
“Monsterland Business Good”, Chicago Daily News, 13 Jun 1964.
“Monster Panic Routs Michigan Berry Pickers”, Chicago Daily News, 12 Jun 1964.
“Monster Stalks Lakes Country”, Dowagiac Daily News, 13 Jun 1964.
“Policeman Says ‘No Monster’’, Dowagiac Daily News, 18 Jun 1964.
“Sightings Of ‘Creature’ Investigated By Police”, Dowagiac Daily News, 13 Jun 1964.
Schultz, Dave, “Daily News Goes On ‘Monster’ Hunt With Cass County Sheriff’s Men”, Dowagiac Daily News, 11 Jun 1964.
“Whatever That Thing Is – There It Goes Again!”, Chicago’s American, 12 Jun 1964.