Dack, the Adirondack Bigfoot Corpse

Charles "Snake" Stuart calls himself a cryptozoologist and "Snake the Bigfoot Hunter." He is the author of The Bigfoot Bible. His story is not a sighting of a living animal. It is a claim about a body.

Fall 2024. Some accounts narrow it to October 1. Stuart says he and his team were in the Ha-De-Ron-Dah Wilderness, "not far from Enchanted Forest Water Safari" near Old Forge, in the Adirondack Mountains. There they found it. About 8 feet tall and 300 pounds. A thick, layered coat of hair. Padded feet and "predator's teeth."

It "was sitting in a poison ivy patch… absolutely disgusting," Stuart said. From the decay he judged it had lain there about two days. "It did smell quite bad." Beside it, he says, were multiple sets of footprints of different sizes. His theory is that it died of injuries from a fight with "an even larger Bigfoot." He named it Dack, after the region, and took the body home.

July 2025. Stuart went public with a press release calling the find "one of the most monumental biological discoveries in recorded history." Soon the body lay in the Horticulture Building at the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse, under the sign "BIGFOOT'S REMAINS." Admission was $9.31. A glass case held a footprint cast, hair samples and a bone about 9 inches long that Stuart calls a baculum.

Visitors came. Some treated it as an art installation. CNY Central reported that many came out as "believers." Stuart later claimed about 60,000 people saw the display, a figure no one has verified.

In 2026 Stuart announced that DNA testing at Cornell had found the creature to be "58.5% Neanderthal/Denisovan, 41.5% human." Cornell denied it. "Cornell did not conduct any testing for [Stuart,] or present a report," a spokesperson told the New York Post. A year earlier, Jose A. Andres of Cornell's Environmental DNA & Genomics Core had written: "I never thought I would be writing an email on this topic." His unit had done no such analysis.

Stuart's reply came in capitals. "CORNELL IS FLAT OUT LYING," he wrote. "I WILL NOT BE SILENCED." His website links a document describing a $10 million lawsuit against the university. No independent source confirms it was ever filed.

Bigfoot researchers were unmoved. BFRO founder Matt Moneymaker wrote: "No, he doesn't actually have bigfoot remains. It's just a cheesey fake dead bigfoot." Loren Coleman of the International Cryptozoology Museum said: "Any serious researcher involved in cryptozoology would not be interested in showing an authentic specimen of a Bigfoot at a State Fair." Steve Kulls and Chris Bennett of Squatch-D TV pointed to a Google Voice number, a hotel IP address and the difficulty of carrying an 8-foot body out of the wilderness. Kulls suspected "a performance artist with a history of such stunts."

One unconfirmed report linked the website to New York artist Brian Andrew Whiteley, who once staged a Prospect Park Bigfoot video as performance art. No mainstream outlet confirms any role. Critics of the photos saw no insects, no scavenging, no trauma. To them the body looked "deflated."

Moneymaker compared Dack to Tom Biscardi's famous fake dead bigfoot, the 2008 Georgia costume stuffed with roadkill. Stuart frames his fight with Cornell as "a David VS Goliath story" and announced a second showing at the 2026 fair. No forensic examination of the body has ever been published.