The Flintville Monster

Flintville is a small community in Lincoln County, Tennessee. It sits about 10.5 miles southeast of Fayetteville on State Route 275, close to the Alabama line. In 1976 the first strange story reached the press. A local woman told police that a "giant, hairy monster" had broken her car antenna. Then it jumped onto the roof of her car and began bouncing up and down. Her name has not survived in the accounts.

Monday, April 26, 1976. Four-year-old Gary Robertson was playing in the family yard. His mother, Jennie Robertson, heard him scream. She ran outside.

The first thing she noticed was the smell. It reminded her of a skunk, or of "dead rats." Then she saw it. A huge, apelike figure, bounding across the yard toward the house.

Her statement to investigators was plain. "It was 7 or 8 feet tall, and seemed to be all covered with hair. It reached out its long, hairy arms toward Gary and came within a few inches of him." She grabbed her son, got him inside and locked the doors.

She was not alone. Melvin Robertson, Jennie's husband, saw the creature. So did Stan Moore and Deputy Sheriff Homer Davis. A six-man posse formed quickly. They chased the creature for quite a distance. They even shot at it. No hit was ever confirmed. What remained were tracks. Footprints sixteen inches long. One later account adds that police found blood, a claim no other source supports. The Nashville Tennessean followed the sightings in a run of stories, and Stan Moore went on to become the local Bigfoot expert, reporting "lots of hair, huge footprints and scat."

The Robertson encounter was not the beginning. In the fall of 1973, Ray Steelman watched a creature for about 10 minutes on a hunting trip. "We'd shine a flashlight over there, and those eyes just beamed," he recalled. Nor was it the end. Through the 1980s came reports of car attacks, pounding on doors and smashed windshields.

A church pastor's car was reportedly wrecked in 1989. David Golden, principal of Flintville School, had sightings between 1986 and 1989 with his brother and cousin, including a "solid white" figure. "We watched it walk for a while," he said. The last reported encounter came in 1993.

Along the way, plaster footprint casts, fecal samples and hair were collected. No results have ever been reported.

No formal sheriff's report or official conclusion has surfaced. No hoax was ever alleged for the 1976 events. Golden weighed an albino Bigfoot against a camper in white clothing, though the camping family said they had seen no such person. Later retellings added glowing red eyes, sharp teeth and an "August 1976" date that the earliest accounts do not support. The original newspaper coverage has proved hard to retrieve, and much of the story now rests on secondhand summaries.

Flintville stands beside the Fouke Monster of Arkansas as one of the aggressive Southern Bigfoot waves. The Birmingham Post-Herald revisited it in 1992. In 2025, Bobby Dizzle of The Caffeinated Cryptid Podcast premiered The Flintville Monster: 50 Years Later, with interviews from witnesses of the wider wave. Half a century on, Flintville is still telling the story.