With a narrow entrance and hollowed inside, the lair is buried half under the ground in the wild woods of the Tonto National Forest on the Mogollon Rim.
Discovered in June of 2010 and featuring on Animal Planet's current 'Finding Bigfoot' series, the footage of the large mysterious den unfortunately offers up little evidence that the fabled giant ape ever dwelt inside.
Filmed by Arizona researcher and Bigfoot expert Mitch Waite and his wife, Susan Farnsworth, the nest is reputed to be of the big-foot type creature called the Mogollon Monster, who crypto-zoologists believe inhabits the south west of the United States.
Sightings of the creature have been reported for decades by cowboys, drifters and forestry workers and some claim that the creature has attacked and mauled people.
The first reported sightings were in the early 1900s and continue to this day. Apache and Navajo native American people's have told the legend of the 'Big Hairy Man' or 'The Old Man of the Mountain' for hundreds of years.
According to Waite and Farnsworth, the Mogollon Monster has been seen in every corner of Arizona, however most center around the Mogollon Rim.
This is an escarpment that exists on the edge of the Colorado Plateau that runs 200 miles from Flagstaff into New Mexico.
The monster itself is described at standing seven to ten feet tall, with mostly brown and red hair. The creature is also described as having a strong musky odor.
In addition, reported witnesses have seen the monster engage in rock throwing, howling and chest thumping, all of which are behaviours observed by primate experts.
Waite has collected footprints, hair samples and feces with the help of his investigative team and claim to have put together a series of photographs and videos which back up their claims.
On a camping trip near to Young, Arizona in 2008, Waite and Farnsworth claim to have had their tent collapsed by a marauding Bigfoot/mogollon monster.
When they returned they found a 19 inch footprint and what looked like an area the creature had used to sleep. - Daily Mail
VIDEO CAN BE FOUND AT - IS THIS THE LAIR OF BIGFOOT IN ARIZONA?
MOGOLLONMONSTER.COM
THE MOGOLLON MONSTER
In central and eastern Arizona, Bigfoot is known as the "Mogollon Monster".
According to Weird Arizona: Your Travel Guide to Arizona's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets the reclusive creature is described as being at least seven feet tall, hairless in the face, but otherwise covered with a long, thick coat of either dark or reddish brown hair. He travels with a wide, inhuman stride, sometimes leaving footprints measuring 22 inches in length. Often, reports of the elusive beast involve a piercing, sometimes deafening scream or howl unlike that produced by any known wildlife.
Those who say they've crossed paths with the beast regularly describe an eerie silence prior to their encounter, an appreciable stillness in the woods that commonly surrounds predatory animals. Even more common are reports of a strong, very foul stench, which has been described as that of dead fish, a skunk with bad body odor, decaying peat moss and-by someone with an exceptionally keen sense of smell, apparently-the musk of a snapping turtle.
Most sightings of the Mogollon Monster, as suggested by the name, occur in and around the Rim country. The lumbering giant reportedly covers territory stretching from Prescott up to Williams, east over to Winslow and down to the Heber area, but most agree he generally sticks to the vicinity of Payson, near the Rim's edge.
It was near Payson where the creature was spotted by cryptozoologist Don Davis, whose run-in is generally accepted as the first known encounter with the Mogollon Monster. Davis said he witnessed the tall, hairy beast during a Boy Scout trip in the mid-1940s, when he was about 13 years old. As he and his fellow Scouts were camping near Tonto Creek, something in the night woke him while rummaging through the boys' belongings. When Davis called out to the noisemaker, who he thought to be a fellow Scout, the figure approached him and stood over his sleeping bag. Davis later described what he saw:
There, standing still less than four feet in front of me was a monster-like man....The creature was huge. Its eyes were deep set and hard to see, but they seemed expressionless....His chest, shoulders, and arms were massive, especially the upper arms-easily upwards of 6 inches in diameter, perhaps much, much more.
Davis also reported being overwhelmed by the Monster's incredible odor, although he believed at first he had simply messed his sleeping bag.
An even earlier report has surfaced from a 1903 edition of "The Arizona Republican." In it, a visitor to Arizona by the name of I.W. Stevens recounts his confrontation with what he referred to as the "wild man of the rocks." Though his encounter occurred further north, within the Grand Canyon, the story may be one of the earliest written records of such a sighting.
Stevens described the wild man as having "long white hair and matted beard that reached to his knees." When he approached for a closer look, Stevens saw that the creature "wore no clothing, and upon his talon-like fingers were claws at least two inches long." He also noted that "a coat of gray hair nearly covered his body, with here and there a spot of dirty skin showing." While this is not a traditional description of the beast we've come to know in recent years, we could perhaps infer that Stevens had run across an elderly Sasquatch, possibly suffering from a touch of the mange.
Stevens went on to tell how the canyon dweller threatened him with a large club and "screamed the wildest, most unearthly screech" he had ever heard, after Stevens discovered the beast drinking the blood of two young cougars that he had just beaten to death.
Another tale, regularly told secondhand at Boy Scout summer camp, involves an Arizona pioneer named Bill Spade. Spade supposedly built a log cabin on land adjacent to what is now Camp Geronimo, a Scout facility. Spade was attacked one night by the monster, who left no trace of his victim, save for Spade's face, which was torn off and left hanging from a tree. The cabin remained for decades afterward and the Mogollon Monster could often be spotted loitering nearby, waiting for a new inhabitant to deface.
Other stories making the rounds attempt to explain the origins of the Mogollon Monster. They vary in detail, but for the most part implicate a tormented Indian bent on revenge. One variant tells of a prehistoric tribe who, for untold reasons, exiled their own chief. The chief called upon the spirits and was transformed into a hirsute bogeyman, which enabled him to scare away his former clan. He lives on today, continuing to defend his territory.
In other versions, it was the tribe's medicine man who performed the transformation, enabling the chief to seek revenge on a rival who had stolen his wife. Further variations identify the Mogollon Monster as a pioneer who was the victim of an Indian attack; he escaped into the woods, but was cursed by the spirits and went insane. In a strange amalgamation of stories, the monster is the phantom of a white man who, as punishment for murdering an Indian woman, was hung from a tree by his hands, stretched to a height of eight feet, then skinned alive and left to die. Damned by the spirits, his ghost continues to roam the woods.
NOTE: HERE IS A LINK TO AN ALLEGED ENCOUNTER WITH THE MOGOLLON MONSTER...LON
'FINDING BIGFOOT' COMES CALLING
March 2012 - The search for the fabled shaggy, seven-foot-tall, yetish, yowling, howling, discombobulating Mogollon Monster will hit Payson on Thursday at a "town hall" hosted by the Animal Planet television network, seeking locals with a link to the legend.
The show's producers say they've already talked to 20 people who have had close encounters with Arizona's version of the Abominable Snowman - and hope to collect more anecdotes at the 7 p.m. Thursday session in the Oxbow Saloon.
Presumably, the proceedings will at least entertain the ghost of the long-dead madam said to haunt the dark corners of the Oxbow.
"We do our research before we come," said one of the show's producers who insisted her name remain mysterious. "We wouldn't come here if we didn't know there were a lot of sightings."
She said the 20 people they've already talked to have had close encounters with the beast between the early 1970s and "a few weeks ago." The sightings are scattered from Payson and Strawberry past Show Low and into the White Mountains.
"Some people have videos," said the producer, "some people have photographs. Some have recordings of howls."
She said the show will probably not actually air until next year - or maybe in "a few months."
Better hurry: We need help with the tourist season this year. Picture the banner outside town: Payson, home of the Tonto Natural Bridge and the Mogollon Monster.
Although scientists doubt its existence, the creature did make it into a 1966 song written by Arizona's official balladeer Dolan Ellis as part of an anti-littering campaign.
Sightings have persisted for years, but no one has ever produced hard evidence to convince the many skeptics, who insist a giant, nocturnal, omnivorous, hominid could have escaped notice, even in the wilds of Rim Country. In the Wikipedia entry on the Mogollon Monster, Northern Arizona University Professor Stan Lindstedt said, "I put that in the category of mythology that can certainly make our culture interesting, but has nothing to do with science."
However, one of the "consultants" on the video search for Rim Country's very own Bigfoot, is self-declared Arizona Cryptozoologist Alex Hearn, says he's seen the beast twice during an obsessive, six-year search.
Hearn says he moved to Arizona in part in hopes of finding the Mogollon Monster. The Gilbert father of six maintains a Web site (AZCRO.net) with accounts of his expeditions in search of supposedly mythological monsters.
In 2008, Hearn said he came eyeball to eyeball with a maybe seven-foot-tall Mogollon Monster just off Highway 288 about 20 miles south of Young.
"He had reddish brown hair - the most unique thing that I saw. I don't know if this means it's a female," he said. "It was very upright: I looked to my left and there was this brown head and shoulder, raising its arm up in almost a swimming motion, lifting the branches out of the way."
Hearn insisted: "It had human-looking eyes - very dark and big. It did have a huge, huge brow - that seemed to be more brownish skin. The eyes were deep and stared right at me: I was caught in this glance. It didn't look away. Its eyebrows went up."
He said on that trip he also made a plaster cast of a footprint and got a hair sample by hanging a trout about 15 feet up in a tree next to an arrangement of duct tape. He said he'd submitted the hair sample to a group of Bigfoot researchers for DNA analysis, but couldn't yet release the results.
Hearn said he saw another monster in May of 2008, while investigating a cluster of sightings on the White Mountain Apache Reservation.
He was heading for a campground with a caravan of vehicles when he heard screams. They fanned out, moving toward the sound. The group included several people with thermal imagers. Hearn said he was equipped with a night vision scope.
Hearn caught a glimpse of something standing behind a tree. The creature stepped out from behind the tree at a distance of about 20 feet, said Hearn. He said the creature was much thinner - about six feet tall.
At that moment, the team with a thermal imager warned him on the radio that something was approaching him from behind, said Hearn. "I heard some twigs break. I just didn't know what to do, but I started running towards what I heard - and whatever it was went the other way. I don't know what made me think that way: I'm certainly not brave enough to chase one of these things if I think about it."
Hearn said that despite the close encounters, they collected no physical evidence. - Payson Roundup
The Mogollon Monster, Arizona's Bigfoot
