Was Bigfoot in Baltimore County? 50 years ago, residents say they spotted Sasquatch

What’s nine feet tall, green-eyed and smells like a cesspool?

Or, wait ... maybe it was eight feet tall with a pair of red peepers and a sulphureous stench?

A bear? A deer? Then again ... are either capable of producing a “gorilla-like piercing scream?”

Joshua Bell will tell you it was Bigfoot.

Probably.

“People that have these weird paranormal experiences always talk about ... feel[ing] like they’re being watched, turn around and see something there,” he said. “Not something catches their attention, but something tells them that someone, or something, is there before they can see it.”

A Dundalk native, Bell has lived next to Middle River’s Harewood Park neighborhood — the scene of the Sasquatch, if you will — since 2024.

On a gloomy, humid Saturday last month, Bell walked from his house down to an abandoned pumping station across from the train tracks on Twin River Beach Road. Fifty years ago, a young couple spotted Bigfoot at the same location.

Later that day at the Heritage Society of Essex and Middle River, Bell delivered a lecture on Bigfoot’s alleged spree of public appearances and mild tomfoolery across eastern Baltimore County in 1976.

The 50-year-old compares his fascination with the uncanny — ghost stories, UFOs, monsters and scientific experiments gone awry — with an avid cruciverbalist, someone who does crossword puzzles.

“For me it’s like a big puzzle,” Bell said. “I like to sit around and ponder ... what’s bullcrap, what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense and what things could’ve possibly happened.”

A supernatural side gig

The supernatural is Bell’s side gig. The former warehouse manager became a kindergarten assistant in Essex six years ago.

“I work with 5-year-olds every day,” he said with a laugh. “Which is immature, and you could say believing and thinking about the paranormal’s kind of immature, too, so maybe it’s connected.”

The self-described “big nerd” wrote a book, “Mysterious Middle River,” on all things otherworldly — inspired by the oddities around his neck of Baltimore County woods.

The bulk of his research about the ‘76 Bigfoot sightings stems from an article in the Baltimore News American that details how Baltimore County Police responded to reports of a “mysterious creature ... lurking near county watershed areas.”

Residents reported varying descriptions: from the sound of snapped branches and the accompanying smell of rotten eggs to a seven- or eight-foot beast throwing trash cans at an approaching cab driver.

It all started, Bell said, when a grocer named Wade Bowers, who ran the since-shuttered Harewood Park Market, contacted the media.

Bowers allegedly led police, journalists and researchers across the many swampy areas in Middle River where Bigfoot was spotted, according to Bell’s book.

Then, as quickly as he started talking, Bowers clammed up.

In the News American article, Capt. Jack C. Freeland said he was confused by residents who were shy to report.

“Many are reluctant to talk about their sightings,” he said. “They’re afraid people will think they’re crazy.”

Residents recall rumors

Skip Loeffler remembers rumblings about the furry fella.

The 72-year-old Catonsville native attended Bell’s lecture at the museum, which is also home to the Baltimore Paranormal Society.

Loeffler never actually spotted Bigfoot but was downtown when Baltimore City Police shot and killed a black bear on Lombard Street a few blocks from the Inner Harbor in 1959.

“People were finding bear tracks all over Baltimore City and everyone thought they were crazy,” Bell told the audience last month.

“I remember that,” Loeffler said. “I was there.”

Bell’s neighbor, Frank Krepner, also heard about Baltimore’s rogue black bear, shot just a few years before he was born. It took more than 50 officers and 100 shots to take down the 250-pound mammal, according to a June 1959 Baltimore Sun article.

But Krepner is more skeptical that Bigfoot followed the bear’s reign of terror two decades later. He also remembers his sister and the next-door neighbor planting fake paw prints around the neighborhood.

Plus, he added, you could never really rely on the average person’s sobriety back then.

“Drugs were big at that time,” Krepner said. “And a lot of people stayed messed up.”

Hoax, military experiment or real?

The question of who, or what, wandered Harewood Park all those years ago still entices Baltimore County residents.

John Lutz, a Bigfoot researcher, was quoted in the News American article saying: “We have to separate fact from fiction.”

In May 1979, the Baltimore County Public Library asked Lutz to present a program at its Essex branch to explain whether Bigfoot was a “myth or a real monster,” according to another Sun article.

Bell argues that there isn’t one explanation but many. After the initial attention, Bell said, many residents and police officers quoted in the original News American article stopped talking or changed their stories — just like Bowers, the grocer.

“So, was the Harewood Park monster a hoax? I think a lot of it was,” Bell said during his lecture. “The most obvious thing is that change in behavior. All the people involved: the paranormal investigator, the police, [Bowers], all of a sudden just stopped.”

But that doesn’t tie up all of the loose ends.

For about 30 years, the U.S. government conducted a series of Cold War-era experiments on military personnel and civilians at Edgewood Arsenal, a historic army facility located across the Gunpowder River in Harford County.

The goal was to develop the country’s capacity for chemical warfare by testing the impact of various nerve agents — including mustard gas, LSD and PCP — on people.

The program was dismantled in 1975, just a year before Bigfoot was spotted in Middle River.

“Harewood Park is a small, isolated community,” Bell said. “So if you’re going to run an experiment just to kind of see how people would react to a weird situation ... it might happen. I don’t know!”

Loeffler — sporting a Bigfoot ball cap emblazoned with the phrase “Reigning Hide and Seek Champion” — explained that not seeing the Sasquatch back in the day did not quell his appetite for the supernatural.

In fact, he passed the bug down to his 14-year-old granddaughter, Candyn Johnson, who tagged along to Bell’s lecture.

“We’re Bigfoot people,” Loeffler said, pointing to his hat, “ever since she was small.”