Rewind: May 1, 2026 –
“Why Whitehall, NY Loves Bigfoot”
by Jackson Stanclift
Whitehall, New York is a sleepy little town of about 4,000 people on the Vermont border, right on the southern tip of Lake Champlain. At first glance, the town feels like the typical American former mill town taken to the extreme, with a third of its citizens below the poverty line and having such a poor economy that even the local McDonald’s and dollar stores have closed down. However, on an August evening in 1976, at a road just a few miles outside of Whitehall called Abair Road, something would leave a mark on Whitehall’s culture for decades to come.
Three teenagers, Bart Kenny, Paul Gosselin, and Marty Paddock were walking across Abair Road one night and reported a most peculiar creature. One of the teenagers saw “a large, hulking form,” and they all heard a vocalization they described as “like a woman being molested or a high-pitched pig squeal.”
Paul’s brother, Brian Gosselin, was a police officer that responded to those reports and later saw the creature himself, which he described as “almost 8 feet tall, with long, hairy limbs like an orangutan, black lips, a muscular buttocks [something Gosselin feels compelled to mention several times] and glowing, electromagnetic red eyes the size of mayonnaise jar covers.” That incident became the talk of the town, and over the years several other townsfolk started to come out with their own stories of Bigfoot sightings, with one expert identifying fifty reported sightings in or around the Whitehall area.
Nowadays, the quiet town has completely embraced Bigfoot-mania. Since 2004, the town has had an annual Sasquatch Festival, attracting thousands of visitors each September, where festival-goers can buy food, Bigfoot-themed memorabilia, and compete in a Sasquatch Calling Contest. Going through the town, you can see a 1,000 lbs metal statue of Bigfoot carrying a baby Bigfoot on his back, which changes costumes with the seasons (such as wearing a Santa hat during Christmas, holding a US flag during the 4th of July, or even wearing a mask during the height of COVID).
Even Whitehall’s government has embraced Bigfoot in recent years. As a way to pay tribute to the town’s history with Bigfoot, they passed symbolic legislation in the early 2000’s protecting Bigfoot (as well as Champ, the Loch Ness-esque creature that legend states lives in Lake Champlain); making it illegal to hunt and harm Bigfoot within the town’s borders.
While some people may look at Whitehall’s bigfoot obsession and see it as simply an odd quirk of a town that embraces their prominent amount of large creature sightings since the ‘70s, I believe that there is a much deeper reason for why Whitehall’s relation to Bigfoot evolved into what it is now. The rise of Bigfoot in the town seems to chronologically line up almost perfectly with when Whitehall’s economic woes started to become particularly bad, and I have a theory that this is not a coincidence.
Whitehall was not always just some small town with a Bigfoot obsession. In fact, the town had quite a history when it comes to industry and transportation. In 1775, back when the town was still called Skenesborough, Benedict Arnold (yes, that Benedict Arnold) directed the town to build thirteen ships that would later make up the majority of America’s first naval fleet. To this day, Whitehall still claims to be the birthplace of the U.S Navy. After the war, Whitehall continued being a shipbuilding hub into the early 19th century. The completion of the Champlain Canal in 1823, which connected Lake Champlain with the Hudson River, led to Whitehall having an economic boom from the amount of canal traffic as the town became the last stop on the canal before Lake Champlain itself.
However, the rise of railroads in the Whitehall area in 1848 led to the canal taking a back seat as Whitehall quickly morphed from a thriving port town to a thriving rail town. And then, in 1887, the Champlain Silk Mill was built in Whitehall, which created tons of jobs in the area by “providing employment for women which complemented the male-dominated railroad industry in town.” And then, in 1916, a second silk mill was built in the town, creating even more industry for Whitehall. In 1920, the combination of the railroad and the silk mills led to Whitehall reaching its economic peak.
However, no empire, no matter how small, lasts forever. Whitehall’s troubles started in 1932, when a railroad realignment separated North and South Canal Streets (nowadays called Main Street and Broadway, respectively) from each other, which devastated Main Street. However, it wasn’t until the 50’s that things started to get really bad for Whitehall. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway system crystalized cars and trucks as the method of transportation of people and goods in the USA instead of railroads and “did to the railroad what the railroad did to boats” in Whitehall, but in 1951, both of Whitehall’s silk mills shut down due to a combination of the rise of synthetic fibers and wars in Asia making silk cocoons significantly harder to obtain. However, despite all of this, Main Street businesses continued to thrive during the 50s and 60s.
It wasn’t until the 1970s that economic woes further devastated the town. Delaware & Hudson Railroads, which owned Whitehall’s train station, got out of the passenger rail business in 1971, marking an end of an era for Whitehall as traffic, and therefore money, in the rail station rapidly dried up as the station was sold to Amtrak.
Around the same time, shopping centers popped up in the nearby cities of Glens Falls, New York and Rutland, Vermont, which caused Whitehall to start hemorrhaging business and people. Even worse, during the 1970s, shipping in both the railroads and on the Champlain Canal came to a screeching halt as companies began favoring the Adirondack Northway for transporting goods, which completely bypasses Whitehall, And just to add insult to injury, the railroad completely closed in 1981. While it was eventually bought out by Canadian Pacific who started to maintain the tracks once more, the damage had already been done, and Whitehall was a rail town no longer.
Unfortunately, it appears that since the ‘70s and ‘80s, Whitehall’s troubles have only gotten worse. In an interview with The Post Star in 2014, Whitehall resident Tammy Stevens seems to actively be nostalgic about the late ‘70s, saying that “Main Street seemed to have it all back then…There was Sach’s Jewelry Store, Chase’s Market, Woodcock’s…Newberry’s and more. Around the town, there was Ed’s gas station, IGA, Grand Union, the Silver Diner. Whitehall was a busy place.” In 2024, blogger Chris Johns lamented that “There is little employment if you aren’t working for the nearby state penitentiary, the local meat processing plant or running an import/export heroin business between Upstate NY, Vermont and nearby Canada. The town’s only consistency appears to be the all-too-common site of teenage couples pushing their stroller across the town’s bridge,” and that Whitehall feels like a ghost town now despite having about 4,000 residents.
This history of continuous economic decline is important because there appears to be an inverse correlation between Whitehall’s prosperity and how popular both Bigfoot sightings and Bigfoot himself are in the area, as well as how much of a cultural influence Bigfoot has in Whitehall. It appears that sightings of Sasquatch-like creatures have been a thing in the Whitehall area since before Europeans had even colonized it, as Samuel de Champlain himself took notes of tales from the indigenous Iroquois of the area that would soon become Whitehall about “a giant, hairy man-beast they called the Gougou that roamed the woods and might have, from time to time, dined on human flesh.”
However, it does appear that Whitehall did not get any sort of Bigfoot themed publicity until August of 1976 with the Abair Road incident, which perfectly lines up with when Whitehall started to get particularly bad economically. The earliest known newspaper article regarding the Abair Road incident is an uncredited article from The Post Star. Surprisingly, the article, which was on the front page but not the headline, was pretty low-key. There is no mention of any sort of Bigfoot-mania happening in Whitehall yet, and the article seems to focus on the police investigation just as much as it does about the creature itself, and not even Brian Gosselin seems to have thought that the creature was bigfoot at the time. This article implies that when the first widely reported Bigfoot sightings were happening in Whitehall, it did not immediately create a huge culture around the town.
However, you can see the evolution of Whitehall’s relation to Bigfoot if you look at newspapers throughout the decades. In a Post Star article from 1992 about Whitehall Sasquatch expert Paul Bartholomew’s hunt for the elusive creature, while journalist David Blow mentions that there had been several witnesses to Bigfoot in Whitehall, the story is mostly framed as Bartholomew being on a sort of one-man crusade to prove Bigfoot’s existence to the people of Whitehall, including his own skeptical but still supportive older brother, Bob Bartholomew, who mentions his fear of the Bigfoot witnesses in town being ridiculed by the rest of Whitehall.
As we move into the 21st century, news articles about Bigfoot in Whitehall show how Bigfoot had since ingrained himself into Whitehall’s culture. An article from The Post Star in 2004 discusses Bartholomew’s lobbying of the Whitehall town government in order to pass a law to protect Bigfoot. In this article, it is mentioned how the Bigfoot sightings in Whitehall got a massive boost in publicity after a film crew from the Outdoor Life Network went to Whitehall for a segment of a show called “Mysterious Encounters.” In the segment, the film crew talked about the Abair Road incident and tried to find Bigfoot off of Route 18, albeit to no avail. In this article, Bartholomew mentions how “Whitehall has a rich history of [Bigfoot] sightings,” while the president of the Whitehall Chamber of Commerce talks about how a law like what Bartholomew proposed would help Whitehall’s economy by drawing Bigfoot-loving tourists to the area.
By the 2010’s and 2020’s, at a time when Whitehall’s economy became so thoroughly deteriorated that even the town’s McDonald’s closed in mid-2015, it seemed like Bigfoot-Mania had gone full-swing. In a 2019 ESPN about the aforementioned Bigfoot Calling contest, which started three years prior in 2016, it is mentioned that Whitehall had then-recently declared Bigfoot their official animal and the article claimed that “Other towns in the area have apple picking, fall foliage, antiquing or outdoor sports as their economic draws. Whitehall’s business is Bigfoot. The article also quotes Paul Bartholomew, who says that “Bigfoot is part of our culture, tradition and heritage in this area.”
By looking at articles over the decades, it is clear that Whitehall’s history with Bigfoot is something that was not fully embraced until relatively recently, and I believe there are two reasons for this related to Whitehall’s continuous spiral of economic decline. First of all, as both Fleming’s ESPN article and Youker’s Post Star article imply, Whitehall’s history as a Bigfoot hotspot has become one of the few economic drivers the town still has, and events such as the annual Sasquatch festival attract dozens of vendors and thousands of visitors, which can do relative economic wonders in a town where normal industries have been lost.
The other reason is that the embrace of a myth like Bigfoot is something that can connect the residents of a dying town like Whitehall together. Just like its sketchy claim of being the birthplace of the U.S Navy, these Bigfoot sightings have become an important part of Whitehall’s culture and identity that holds the people of Whitehall together even during the most trying of times. Chris Johns’ Substack article about Whitehall sums this up perfectly by saying that “it is in the town’s unofficial mantra of “Believe [mainly referring to Bigfoot in this context],” that invisible bond that welds us together despite it all.”
That is what I feel is at the heart of the construction of this historical narrative around Bigfoot in Whitehall: these are just people living through trying times just trying to find something, anything, to keep them together. And, over the years, Bigfoot has fit that niche in Whitehall, and that, alongside the boost in Bigfoot-related tourism the embrace of Bigfoot has brought, is why Bigfoot is so huge in Whitehall.
Works Cited
Bloated Toe Enterprises. “BTE Whitehall Site – Whitehall History.” Bloatedtoe.com, https://whitehall.bloatedtoe.com/whhistory.html . Accessed 25 Apr. 2025.
Fleming, David. “Inside the World’s Premier Sasquatch Calling Contest (Yes, That’s a Thing).” ESPN, 10 Apr. 2019, https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/26479629/inside-world-premier-sasquatch-calling-contest-yes-thing.
Higgins, Dan. “Whitehall’s Sasquatch Festival Is a Big, Hairy Deal.” Adirondack Life Magazine, 23 Sept. 2022, https://www.adirondacklife.com/2022/09/23/whitehalls-sasquatch-festival-is-a-big-hairy-deal/.
Johns, Chris. “We’ll Always Have Whitehall.” American Pilgrimages, 29 Jan. 2024, https://chrisjohns.substack.com/p/well-always-have-whitehall.
“Whitehall, NY (WHL)”, Greatamericanstations.com, https://www.greatamericanstations.com/stations/whitehall-ny-whl/. Accessed 25 Apr. 2025
Blow, David. “In Whitehall, history speaks the loudest”. The Post Star, 6 May 1991, p. A1+
“The Beast of Whitehall- DIRECTOR’S CUT (BIGFOOT SASQUATCH PARANORMAL MOVIE).” Youtube. Uploaded by Small Town Monsters, 23 Nov. 2020, https://youtu.be/z6LClQQkqhA?si=ihMGir4jaszAlmKt
Toscano, Bill. “Whitehall: Chugging along, leaving the past behind.” The Post Star, 20 Apr. 2014, https://poststar.com/news/local/whitehall-chugging-along-leaving-the-past-behind/article_17aa0c60-c8ce-11e3-bc6f-0019bb2963f4.html
“Sasquatch in the Adirondacks.” ADK Taste – The Best of the Adirondacks, 25 Sept. 2023, https://www.adktaste.com/blog/sasquatch-in-the-adirondacks.
Kovalosky, Serena. “The Rise and Fall of an Industry: The Champlain Silk Mills of Whitehall, NY.” Artful Vagabond, 18 May 2023, https://artfulvagabond.com/2023/05/17/champlain-silk-mills/.
“Officers Track Creature”. The Post Star. 30 Aug. 1976, p. 1
Youker, Darrin. “Whitehall man calls for law to protect Bigfoot”. The Post Star. 28 Jan. 2004, p. A1+
Blow, David. “On the Trail: Bigfoot expert Paul Bartholomew seeks credibility for unusual quest”. The Post Star. 3 Aug. 1992, p A1+
Lehman, Don. “Whitehall McDonalds to Close”. The Post Star. 20 Aug. 2015, https://poststar.com/blogs/don_lehman/article_297c3f62-473f-11e5-aa9a-4f4b5d72522b.html