The Winsted Wild Man

Summer 1895. Winsted, a town in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on the road north to Colebrook. Its local paper, the Winsted Evening Citizen, employed a reporter named Louis Timothy Stone. He was 19 years old.

On or just before 21 August, selectman Riley Smith was picking blackberries near Colebrook with his bulldog. Suddenly the dog ran to him and cowered between his legs. Something came out of the bushes. According to the 1895 report, it was "a large man, stark naked, and covered with hair all over his body."

Smith described a figure about six feet tall. Long black hair hung to its shoulders. Its body was thickly covered with black hair. It was muscular and remarkably agile. With fearful cries it made for the woods at great speed, and in seconds it was gone.

The New Haven Register ran the story on 21 August. The New York Herald followed the next day.

On 23 August, coach passengers on the isolated road between Winsted and Colebrook reported the wild man again. Two days later, on Sunday, armed men gathered on Lake and Main Streets in Winsted. More than a hundred by one count, two hundred by another. They searched Injun Meadow and Cobble Hill. In a cave on the Beardsley farm they found fresh bones, one old shoe and bare footprints.

The reports kept coming. Around 30 August, two women from New York City watched a large animal cross their path, turn, stand on its hind legs and stare at them. They described black hair, large white teeth and a height of about 6 1/2 feet. On 3 September, the Boston Journal reported that the wild man had sat all night on Mrs. Culver's doorstep in Colebrook while she perched on the roof. She remembered a "savage face, almost brute in expression."

The wild man grew with every edition. A New York Herald headline declared "His Eyes Swim in Red Fire." Later versions gave him a terrible club, a beard and rags, and arms that hung to the ground. Explanations multiplied: an escaped gorilla, a circus baboon, the hermit Mort Pond, or Arthur Beckwith, a painter who had escaped an asylum. On 11 October 1895, the New York Herald reported that Connecticut's wild man had been sentenced, saying that a man who had lived in a hut and stolen was going to prison.

Many credit the story to Lou Stone. The Museum of Hoaxes says he needed to make $150 quickly and believed big city papers would never buy real Winsted news. He went on to report a hen that paid its train fare with an egg, a tree that grew baked apples and a cow that gave ice cream. He became known as the Winsted Liar. When he died, a bridge was named after him.

But researchers Michael T. Shoemaker and Gary Mangiacopra have suggested Stone was not responsible for the wild man. One folklore account describes coach passengers near Winsted on 28 August 1891 watching a creature on two legs leap a fence, years before Stone's career began.

The wild man never quite left. In July 1972, Wayne Hall and David Chapman watched an 8 foot hairy figure near Crystal Lake and Winchester Road for about 45 minutes. "It was no bear," they insisted. In 1974, four teenagers at Rugg Brook Reservoir reported a hairy creature about six feet tall. In Litchfield County today, Winsted Wildman is a local name for Bigfoot.