While most Bigfoot fans know the best state in the U.S. to hunt for and possibly see the elusive Sasquatch is Washington, the best place to hear the famous Bigfoot howl is in Ohio, where two of the recognized best recordings of the patented Bigfoot roar were made. That list may get bumped up to three soon as a longtime Bigfoot hunter has revealed she set up a recording device in the woods where she claims to have seen the creature many times and, after a long and mysterious absence, it returned this past 4th of July weekend and announced its arrival with two minutes of roars. What is it about the Buckeye State that makes Sasquatch scream with joy? Or is that a more menacing kind of howl?
“It’s not a very expensive recorder. If I’m out, I always have a recorder going. I’ve been doing this for nine years. In all that time, I had not recorded anything decent.”
Suzanne Ferencak is not a weekend Bigfoot hunter. This longtime resident of Loudonville, about 80 miles south of Cleveland, lives near the Mohican River and Mohican State Park, where Bigfoot sightings have been reported for many years. She tells the Mansfield News Journal she and her husband moved to the beautiful area to escape the big city and never expected to be neighbors with Bigfoot. That changed on May 14, 2013, when she saw something run across Township Road 211.
“It jumped across the road. It was in midair,” she said. “It was just big and black with Superman arms. It had stringy hair, fur.”
A few weeks later, Ferencak claims her brother-in-law was outside her home at night when he yelled – and got a yell back that they both heard. She described it as “a big screech into a howl” and that terrifying call eventually led her to investigate Bigfoot, join the Bigfoot Research Organization and participate in “The Back 80,” a film about the numerous Bigfoot sightings near Loudonville in 2013 in an area of merely 80 acres.
“Then all of the activity stopped. Wow, where did it go?'”
The movie came out in 2017 and Ferencak says she and others heard knocks and howls frequently around her home and reported sightings in the woods behind her property. There were other sightings near the Mohican River, including one in May 2021 when a woman leaving a 24-hour fitness center at around midnight claimed to have encountered an 8-foot-tall creature she believed was a Bigfoot moving quickly through a wooded area next to the parking lot. It could be that Bigfoot decided to move away from Ferencak’s home because she was getting serious about finding it by investing in her inexpensive audio recording device. She says she’s accumulated more than 20,000 hours of sounds from her back yard, but “In all that time, I had not recorded anything decent.” Then came July 3, 2022.
Ferencak describes it as a typical 4th of July weekend night with a lot of loud fireworks echoing in the Mohican valley. She decided to camp outside that night and 3:42 a.m. she claims she heard first one, then many howls. Her trusty recorder heard them too, and she played it for the Mansfield News Journal reporter. (You can hear the Bigfoot howl for yourself here.)
“You hear some howls. Then you hear a chorus of coyotes and then you hear howls again.”
An anonymous Bigfoot audio specialist Ferencak knows analyzed the two-minute recording for her and had this to say:
“There are a couple of potential wood knocks in there, but hard to confirm given the quality of the recording. I do hear a responder after the third howl that suggests a second (Sasquatch) in the area — not a coyote. That responder makes a low, flat howl that ends with an upwhoop. Then the coyote chorus kicks in.”
According to Ferencak, that puts this recording in the category of “high potential” for containing the sound of one Bigfoot calling to another. Her BFRO experience tells her the sound is not a male, so the calls could be between a female and young Bigfoot who got lost or her young offspring. It is not surprising that Suzanne Ferencak knows a Bigfoot sounds audio analyst – Ohio is home to two of the best Sasquatch howl recordings as recognized by Bigfoot experts. In 2015, a recording was made of an alleged Bigfoot howl in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park just south of Cleveland, Ohio, and about 60 miles east of Loudonville. In 1994, an alleged Bigfoot howl was recorded in Columbiana County about halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, about 100 miles east of Ferencak’s home in the Mohican valley. (You can listen to both of those recordings here.) Bigfoot in Ohio is often referred to as the Ohio Grassman – so named for the small, hut-like living structures or nests it builds out of Ohio’s tall grass. Its history dates back to Native American tales of a race of bipedal ape-men called the “Wild Ones of the Woods” that that they left food for so the creatures wouldn’t bother them.
Suzanne Ferencak isn’t leaving food outside her Loudonville home, but says she plans to invest in a more expensive audio recorder. She told the Mansfield News Journal she will be discussing her recording and other Bigfoot experiences at the upcoming “Bigfoot Basecamp Weekend” on the weekend of Sept. 9-11 at Pleasant Hill Lake in Perrysville, Ohio – a village also in Ashland County. Her appearance is at the request of the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District to help address the many recent reports of Bigfoot or other mysterious creatures in the areas.
“It’s one of the first times a government agency has ever come out and supported a Bigfoot event.”
Ferencak says she hopes her appearance will convince others this is a safe and welcoming forum to share the Bigfoot experiences with others. She says she’s aware of at least three people from the Mohican area who are planning to tell their stories for the first time at the community town hall meeting to be held during the weekend. These encounters occurred during the past six months and could be related to her howl recording.
“If we can start connecting some dots along the way, then we can develop a pattern. That’s part of the research of finding out why it does what it does. I want to know about its habitation and I want to know where it’s going. It’s fascinating.”
That’s a good answer for when your friends ask you why you’re so interested in Bigfoot. Suzanne Ferencak is definitely interested. Does her recording get YOU Interested?
