Oklahoma: The Octopus & Bigfoot

Every lake in this episode was somebody's pasture once. On this stop of the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip, Brian King-Sharp drives into Oklahoma, where the three lakes said to hide the Oklahoma Octopus were all built by the government inside living memory.

Lake Tenkiller, Lake Thunderbird, and Oologah Lake are reservoirs, not natural water, and under every one of them are drowned roads, standing timber, fence lines, and the foundations of houses that were dry ground three generations ago. That's the ground this legend grew on, and it's why this is a don't-swim-after-dark episode.

The stories start on the Fourth of July, 1978, with a seventeen-year-old girl floating on her back off a houseboat on Tenkiller when something wraps her leg from ankle to knee and pulls her under. From there the episode follows a bass fisherman in the drowned timber at Thunderbird who watched an arm feel its way around a dead oak, a scuba diver who cut himself loose from something in the old river channel at thirty-five feet and came up with sucker marks pressed into his wetsuit, and a farm kid on Oologah who saw two arms come over the tops of his family's flooded fence posts and pull the wire down.

Between the encounters, Brian traces the real paper trail behind the legend, which is thinner and stranger than the television version. It starts with a June 2, 1982 item in the Daily Oklahoman about two boys and a dead saltwater octopus found in the Verdigris River near Lock and Dam 18 on the barge canal, runs through a 1987 article by Kiowa writer Russell Bates about a horse-sized, reddish-brown creature said to drag people into sandstone caverns, and picks up again in 2007 with two cryptid books that named the three lakes without citing a source, a reporter at the Oklahoma Gazette who found that no park manager or diver on those lakes had ever heard of the thing, and Loren Coleman's guess that it all began with a planted carcass.

Then in January 2009 Animal Planet's Lost Tapes turned it into a monster with a name. Along the way the episode looks at why man-made lakes breed this kind of story, from the cold water sitting in the old channel to the drownings that happen every summer in water nobody can see into.

The second half leaves the water for the timber. It begins with the Noxie Monster of September 1975, when farmer Kenneth Tosh, Sheriff Robert Donald, researcher Hayden Hewes, and two dozen witnesses in Nowata County put a seven-foot hairy creature on the wire services and a