The Hawley Him: Rocks, a Rifle and a Seven-Foot Ape-Man at the Abilene Boys Ranch

Hawley sits in the southeast corner of Jones County, Texas, about 13 miles from Abilene. Around it lies brush country. The worst of it had a local name. The "chinry." A tangle of oak five feet high or more, passable only on game trails. In the summer of 1977, two boys were hired to clear brush for an electric fence on the Abilene Boys Ranch property near town. Larry Suggs was 15. Tom Roberts was 14.

July 1977. About 10 in the morning. The boys were resting in the shade when small rocks began to hit them. One struck Suggs in the leg. Then something came out of the woods. They ran to Ed McFarland's house. His daughter Renee, 15, fetched a deer rifle. The three went back.

Suggs described what they saw. "Whatever it was, he looked like kind of an ape, but still a man. He had huge arms. They hung down to his knees." Shaggy brown hair. A flat face. About seven feet tall. From about 40 yards, Suggs fired and missed. The recoil knocked him backward onto the ground. The creature took off running back into the thick brush.

In 2025, Renee McFarland, now Renee Miller, told KTAB and KRBC her version. The smell came first. "At first you could just smell a smell, and it smelled like rotten eggs." She saw only its back. Long hair from the top of its head all the way down. She remembers the shot differently. "They shot the gun up in the air, and that's when we actually saw it." It turned and took off into the shinnery. Afterwards she could not stand to go back out there.

Ed Nash and his stepson David Woods went into the chinry. Woods found fresh prints. "The prints clearly showed the impression of four toes and the ball of a foot as if whatever made the tracks walked upright on its toes." About five inches wide. A stride of some four feet. Nash chose his words with care. "There is something out there and he is running around barefoot. Whether it is a monster or a man in a bigfoot disguise I can't say."

Ranch manager Bob Scott reported 21 goats missing from a pen. A few carcasses turned up in the brush. About 18 were never found. Abilene oilman Jack Grimm offered $5,000 for the live, unharmed capture of a species unknown to science. "I don't want to pay a reward for a bear or a gorilla that escaped from the zoo." Nobody collected.

Jones County Sheriff Woodrow Simmons said neither he nor his deputies had seen the creature. He reportedly believed the three teenagers had made it up to pull one over on the residents of Hawley. His officers blamed coyotes for the goat carcasses but had no answer for the missing animals. A sceptical newspaper column cited geologist Dr. Frank Conselman suggesting an ocelot. Others spoke of a man in a suit, or an escaped convict. Even the date is unsettled. Some accounts say July 6. Others say July 7.

Over about four months, the activity attributed to the creature moved to Merkel, some 20 miles southwest. On November 26, 1977, Eugene Danielski reported his collie taken. Near the end of FM 1235, a resident saw "an upright, tall, hairy thing running along the side of the road before turning and jumping over a fence."

Back in Hawley, the First Baptist Church invited children to draw the Hawley Him on its Vacation Bible School invitations, and a record 109 came that summer. Hunters arrived from across the country. The craze lasted about six months. Today the Hawley Him stands beside the 1964 Caddo Critter as one of the region's own answers to Bigfoot. Never captured. Never explained.