WESTMINSTER — Sightings of Bigfoot are guaranteed this fall when this tiny Upstate town hosts its second festival celebrating the legendary elusive creature.
Beyond the food, craft vendors and live music that are common to festivals, events setting this one apart include contests to see who can look, sound and be judged most like Bigfoot.
There’s also a non-subjective, literal big foot competition: Men and women are invited to step on stage, take off their shoes and get measured.
Organizers of the Oct. 23 South Carolina Bigfoot Festival in Westminster say the purpose is to showcase the town of 2,500 and surrounding Oconee County in a way that offers something different than the hundreds of other festivals statewide.
There are festivals that celebrate jumping frogs (Springfield), racing turtles (Allendale), and albino skunks (Greenville). Other festivals exalt South Carolina food staples, including okra (Irmo), collards (Gaston), watermelon (Hampton) and pulled pork barbecue (Kingstree), to name a few. For the more adventurous stomach, there’s Salley’s Chitlin Strut. (To the uninitiated, chitlins are pork intestines.)
The Pee Dee town of Bishopville celebrates another fabled creature: Lizard Man, a 7-foot-tall reptile indigenous to rural Lee County, first reported in 1988. Due to COVID-19, the Lizard Man Stomp, like many festivities, has been postponed until next year.
“We want to preserve the legend. Let’s not let him die,” said Margaret Copeland, one of the organizers. “I love the Lizard Man. People ask, ‘Can you prove he’s real?’ I say, ‘Can you prove he’s not?’ That’s not the point.
“We just need to get people together and have fun,” she said. “People have forgotten how to have fun.”
Two hundred miles away, residents in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains have decided to hitch their town to the hairy, human-like beast that folklore says has roamed forests across North America for centuries, including throughout the Appalachians.
“This festival fits,” said Dale Glymph, who came up with the idea in a brainstorming session in 2018 on how to bring people downtown. What started as a joke morphed into serious planning after the group learned that an inaugural Bigfoot festival in western North Carolina was a big hit.
“The more we put it together, the more people got excited. It gives us the opportunity to bring in this kind of weird, fun atmosphere,” Glymph said. “Some people believe. Some don’t. Even those who don’t have fun with it. They love the story — the ifs, ands and buts. Maybe there is something in the woods wandering around.”
An estimated 20,000 people attended Westminster’s first festival in 2019. Despite the drizzle, Bigfoot enthusiasts came from as far away as Idaho and Colorado. Local businesses reported doing quadruple their normal Saturday sales, Glymph said.
After taking a year off due to COVID, organizers hope for a bigger turnout, and better weather, this fall and in years to come. COVID precautions include handwashing stations and a tongue-in-cheek request to “be like Bigfoot and avoid people,” or, rather, social distance “when at all possible.”
Robert Seiter, who moved to Oconee County in 2010, readily admits he’s been infatuated with the creature for three decades, ever since a harrowing late-night bass fishing trip in the Catskills of Upstate New York. By himself at midnight, he said he heard something coming toward him with “very heavy thumping” on the ground.
“The thump, thump started getting closer and closer, real slow,” he said. “I was so terrified, I couldn’t even turn my flashlight on. I saw a shadow of something huge. It started growling. I ran all the way back to my car. I’ve never been so terrified.”
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Days later, he figured it had to have been Bigfoot.
“I think I took it’s fishing spot and he wanted it back — and he got it back,” Seiter said, noting he told no one, not even his wife, for years.
Now he runs the 44,400-member private Facebook group titled Bigfoot the Real Truth, a forum free from the “goofy stuff,” he said, where people are invited to share their stories without fear of getting ridiculed.
And he becomes a quasi-celebrity himself when he and Glymph put on Bigfoot costumes to promote the festival.
“Everybody wants a picture of Bigfoot,” he said.
As for Glymph, he’s been a Bigfoot fan since seeing the 1972 documentary-style film “The Legend of Boggy Creek” at a Greenville drive-in theater.
“I can’t say I do believe in him, but I can’t say that I don’t,” he said. “I lean more toward there is something out there, now than I did before. Even if there’s not, it’s a great story.”
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