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STATEWIDE — Tales of the seldom-seen, mythical apelike beasts known as Bigfoot, Sasquatch and other names are found in Maine folklore.

While the pop culture phenomenon surrounding Bigfoot really took off in 1967 when a film reportedly of the mysterious creature surfaced in California, Maine natives have been telling Bigfoot stories since the beginning of time.

“We have stores that go back of living, of times when we lived on ice,” said John Bear Mitchell, a Penobscot Indian and University of Maine professor. “Our stories of interacting with Bigfoot go back to that period of time. So we’ve had coexistence in our stories and a certain amount of respect and protection for each other, but a certain amount of distance because we’re different.”

Mitchell says each culture has stories.

“Our native beliefs, our Wabanaki beliefs, whether it’s Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Micmac or Maliseet, our stories that are associated with Gwakcoo, what we call Gwakcoo,” Mitchell said. “It refers to he or they who eat a lot. They are always hungry.”

He added later, “They’re just another species, one of many in the woods that we don’t see very often.”

The Bigfoot name came from California sightings. Sasquatch is from British Columbia, and Yetis are from Tibet and the Himalayas. Natives have hundreds of names for the legendary creatures.

“There is something like 470 individual tribes or bands or clans, they all have different names,” said Loren Coleman, an American Cryptozoologist who opened the International Cryptyzoologist Museum in Portland.

Native American sightings from the northeast U.S. are numerous.

“There is a long history of the native people having Bigfoot-like reports,” Coleman said. “Oftentimes called Wendigo, which is Algonquian Indian word for giant, or hairy giant or cannibal giant.

“Looking at the old Wendigo reports, most of those sightings, the very substantial Wendigo sightings, were actually in Canada so you can kind of see patterns certain times of year where it seems as if the Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Wendigo would migrate down into Maine, be seen by a few people and go back home. So that pattern seems to still be here.”

“The stories are continuing to happen throughout Maine,” said Michelle Souliere, a Portland blogger who writes “Strange Maine.”

Souliere is a Portland author collecting oral histories of Maine sightings for a book.

“There is really a lot that hasn’t been recorded,” she said. “And there are stories and experiences that people have had and as they get older, when they disappear the stories disappear too. So, I realized it was important to record some of those before they are lost forever.”

Mitchell says the native stories handed down from one generation to the next also are warnings.

“They’re hunter-gatherers, they are not a war society,” Mitchell said. “They don’t see taking life, at least according to our stories, as necessary when you are not going to eat what you are killing because they did eat us.”

He added, “But it was a rare thing that that ever happened.”

Many stories involve Mount Katahdin.

“When someone did disappear in the woods … we understood that something around that mountain, on that mountain took them,” Mitchell said. “So we would always offer to that mountain and hope and pray that the offering was a truce – that they wouldn’t take our people, we would be safe, we could live, co-exist in a good way.”

Mitchell, who says he has seen Bigfoot, added, “There is no doubt when you do see these, you realize they’re more physically masterful than you ever could be … I think that’s a respect that people need to understand.”