Skeptoid #1058: Tracking the Honey Island Swamp Monster

Tracking the Honey Island Swamp Monster

0:00Stories of giant, hairy, ape-like monsters are found in every country in the world, and yet not one has ever made it into a zoo or a natural history museum. One such creature comes from the swamps of Louisiana, where it is called the Honey Island Swamp Monster. Today we're going to track it down and find out whether there's actually something real in the swamps or if there might be some other explanation for the story. And in our extended content

0:31for premium members, we explore why the United States has so many ape-like cryptids in a country that doesn't have any native apes or monkeys. All of that and more is coming up right now on Skeptoid.

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2:09You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid dot com. Tracking the Honey Island Swamp Monster. Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not. From the depths of the Louisiana swamps comes a tale of yet another Bigfoot-like cryptid hiding out in remote parts of North America, the Honey Island Swamp Monster.

2:40The swamp is home to all sorts of megafauna. Alligators, black bears, cougars, wild boars, snapping turtles, and snakes of all kinds like the Cottonmouth and the Speckled Kingsnake. But towering above them all is a giant, ape-like creature, rumored by many, seen by a few, and caught on film only once. There's also one more very special factoid about this particular swamp monster and about

3:12this episode. It's one of a very few episodes that I'm personally going to take you on a trip to go see. In December 2026, I'm leading a Skeptoid adventure to New Orleans, and one of the planned destinations is the Honey Island Swamp. Will we spot the monster? There's only one way for you to find out. In fact, we'll do it together. Come to skeptoid.com slash adventures for complete details. The Honey Island Swamp is named for a bunch of honeybees someone once saw on one of

3:47the many islands, and the name stuck. The swamp is the delta of the Pearl River and comprises a narrow strip of the bottom 20 or so miles of the delta. The many distributaries of the Pearl River wind throughout. The islands at the northern end are heavily wooded, and as you go farther south toward the mouth of the river, the islands are little more than low mudflats. It's in those northern islands where the monster has allegedly been sighted. In 1980, a reel of Super 8 film was found among the

Super 8 film and early encounters

4:19belongings of the recently deceased Harlan Ford. It shows what appears to be the silhouette of a person, or a person-shaped being, moving through the dense woods of what appears to be the local Honey Island Swamp. But Ford's family knew what it was right away. It was the creature that Ford had long claimed to have encountered in the swamp more than once. Six years earlier, in 1974, Ford and his friend Billy Mills had encountered the beast, and gone back later and made plaster casts of its footprints.

4:53In this undated interview, Mills told of the very first time that he and Ford saw the creature back in 1963, when they were on a hunting trip in the swamp. And as we rounded a bend, with bushes on each side of it, naturally, about 20 yards ahead, we walked up on something, and it was like it was down in its all fours, in the bushes there, doing something. And I never thought nothing about it, because there's a lot of

5:25wild hogs and such in the swamp there. And I thought it was just a great old big hog.

5:34From the portion that I could see, it was brown in color. Then it stood up. It had air all over its face, trees, and hanging down. And I stopped, and Harlan stopped. And I didn't know what to think. And then just about as quickly as we saw it there, and it's staring at us, it disappeared behind the bushes.

6:02Mills told of two more encounters. Once when squirrel hunting with his father-in-law, Papa Joe Gresham, they heard a wild hog squealing and what sounded like something beating on it. He told Ford about it, and Ford went back on his own and made a plaster cast, which was a large Bigfoot-like footprint cast, but with only three big toes. The other time, Mills was in camp one night with a group of guys, and one reported seeing some eye shine. One of them, Mr. Jim, took a shotgun and went after whatever it was. They heard him shooting

6:33and took the boat to go find him. And he was scared half to death, and it took us for an hour or so to get him calmed down. And Mr. Jim wasn't somebody that you could scare. He was fought in World War II. He was a fighter pilot and been in there. And I never seen him scared of nothing, but he was certainly scared of whatever it was at night. Then in 1978, Ford was featured on an episode of In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy and told of his incredible encounter. He was able to

7:07show the plaster footprint casts he'd made. With that TV appearance, the Honey Island Swamp Monster became a permanent fixture in pop culture.

7:18The monster's principal cheerleader is Dana Holyfield, granddaughter of Harlan Ford and author of Encounters with the Honey Island Swamp Monster. She has self-produced a couple of short documentary films about it, 2007's The Legend of the Honey Island Swamp Monster, and 2017's Encounters with the Honey Island Swamp Monster, in which she interviewed some other swamp people telling various stories. There may be a few stories, but still no evidence of a creature, except for Harlan Ford's Super 8 footage

7:50and plaster footprint casts. Holyfield describes the feat as a cross between a primate and large alligator. So let's have a look at those. In 2003, two filmmakers, M.K. Davis and J. Michael, were working on their own documentary called Tale of the Honey Island Swamp Monster, released in 2009, and someone showed them a big fake three-toed monster foot made of resin and attached to the bottom of a shoe. Shocker, Davis and Michael examined

8:22a number of plaster casts and were satisfied that the resin shoe foot contraption was responsible for all of them. Harlan Ford died in 1980, so details about how and where and when they were shown this shoe, or who it belonged to, are very scarce. All I could find was a 2008 movie review of Holyfield's 2007 film, which stated, with no useful context, The shoe was in the possession of a local, and they later learned from Dana Holyfield that the

8:53shoe may have been the property of her grandfather, Harlan E. Ford. Regardless of the fuzziness of this last revelation, the fact that the fake foot that made the footprints is now on the record tosses anything coming from Ford, Mills, or any of their fishing buddies into the bin.

9:16Hey everyone, Brian here. Quick news, I'm teaming up with guest expert Curly Tlapoyawa this December for Mysteries of the Maya, an on-site educational adventure running December 6th through the 13th. And we don't want finances to be the reason someone misses out. We're offering a limited number of scholarships, and we're strongly encouraging students and educators to apply. Here is what you'll need. Get yourself to New Orleans, be at the port ready to board by 1 pm on

9:48Sunday December 6th, share a double occupancy cabin, and cover 10 or 50 percent of the standard ticket price. Applications are reviewed in the order we receive them, so don't wait. Apply now at Skeptoid.com slash events. That's Skeptoid.com slash events. Now back to the show.

The genesis and fake footprints

10:13But of course, discovering that one line of evidence is a hoax says nothing about any other evidence and does not disprove anything. The thing here is that there was nothing else out there to disprove. Ford and Mills' stories appear to be the genesis of the creature. Not a single print reference to its existence can be found prior to 1974, when the local St. Bernard News ran a story or two with a picture of Ford in his odd three-toed footprint casts. A 2003 master's thesis by folklorist student

10:46Frances Leary is one of the better texts on the swamp monster, and she was able to turn up no mentions of the creature in any books older than the 1978 Monsters of North America by Elwood Bowman. The only stories Bowman wrote about were two of Ford's, and one other that appears to be Mills' other one, but Bowman gave no names. So basically, the Honey Island Swamp Monster isn't even the story of a fabled monster, so much as it is the story of a couple of proven hoaxers. There weren't any other

11:17stories out there for Bowman to report. Yet, following Bowman's publication, just about every book on American monsters includes a chapter on the Honey Island Swamp Monster, although none has a whole lot to say on the subject. The 1999 edition of Lauren Coleman and Jerome Clark's Cryptozoology A to Z gives it only a single paragraph, and mentions only the in-search-of appearance, and not a single thing since. Yet, pick up any tourist book on the Honey Island Swamp, or walk into any gift store, and the legend is

11:53everywhere. Surely it must have some solid ground under it somewhere. Some fabled cryptids are considered by their believers to be naturally occurring animals, like the Loch Ness Monster, thought by some to be a relict plesiosaur, or the Mokele Mbembe, thought to be a relict sauropod, or the Himalayan Almas, thought to be a population of surviving Neanderthals. Others have a definite origin story. The Jersey Devil was alleged to be the devil's spawn of a cursed mother. Death Valley's

12:26Borax Man was a giant Chinese laborer horribly scalded in a vat of boiling borax. The Algonquian Wendigo is an ordinary human guilty of greed and is punished by transformation into a skeletal cannibal.

Examining the origin stories

12:40The Swamp Monster is one of those with a definite origin story. Several competing origin stories, in fact. The most popular one, which is repeated in virtually every article you might read about it, states that a circus train derailed near the swamp in the 1920s, some say the 1940s, and several apes, possibly including chimpanzees and orangutans, escaped. Unfortunately, it's demonstrably false. Our friend Blake Smith of the Monster Talk podcast and occasional

13:15skeptoid guest host decided to really dig into the circus train story. No sources are given whenever the claim is reprinted, so he went all in and spent months going through newspaper archives to find all the circus train crashes in the United States prior to 1950. He found 68, of which 21 resulted in animals escaping. Although a few did not specify the types of animals that escaped, only one mentioned primates specifically. A crash in Putnam, Connecticut in 1886. There were none at all in Louisiana.

13:52Fans of the escaped primate hypothesis tend not to look any further than the unsourced, and now we can also say false, claim of a circus train crash, and forget that primates can escape from other places as well. The Tulane National Biomedical Research Center, formerly the Delta Regional Primate Center, in Covington, Louisiana, has had quite a few breakouts over the years, including two dozen rhesus monkeys in 1998, two dozen more in 2003, more than 50 in 2005, and 21 more from a truck that

14:28crashed leaving the center in 2025. But nothing earlier than that, and the center didn't even exist prior to 1964. Another origin story given in some retellings is that it's essentially the same creature as the Rougarou, another Louisiana swamp monster, and for which there's a complete skeptoid episode number 1042. The Rougarou came to the area along with the French Catholics, the Akkadians, ancestors of today's Cajuns. Its role in that culture is to enforce morality.

15:01If you didn't go to mass, for example, you might get turned into a Rougarou, which is kind of like a werewolf, but with a dog's head and a muscular human body. Sometimes the Rougarou is used by parents to frighten their children into obedience. In her thesis, Leary cited at least four contemporary swamp tour boat captains who all told her that their parents warned them the Rougarou would come and get them if they misbehaved, and one gave it as part of his normal tour spiel when she went on his tour boat. It doesn't say a lot for the

15:33possibility of the Honey Island swamp monster being real, that even the local tour guides have to borrow from a neighboring legend to find enough to say about it. It's also telling that it's never really been given a name. I suggest Honey Boo, as nothing more terrifying can be derived from the pieces we're given. So, if you feel you are brave enough to personally go and hunt the Honey Island swamp monster, which is obviously incredibly elusive, come do it with me this December 2026 on Skeptoid's New Orleans

16:08escapade adventure. Come to Skeptoid.com slash adventures to show that you are brave enough to face the world's most terrifying swamp monsters.

16:23We continue with a look into why the U.S., a country with no native apes or monkeys, has so many ape-like cryptids, in the ad-free and extended premium feed. To access it, become a supporter at Skeptoid.com slash go-premium.

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