Appearance Of The Fouke Monster

This is another side of the Fouke Monster story, as we used to live in the Bossier City area when the monster started showing up.

We had a friend who worked as a brakeman on the railroad and every night he worked a freight train. It started out in Shreveport and went north to somewhere up in southern Arkansas and then they returned southbound with another train.

Here goes the story, as they had to switch tracks out in the middle of nowhere in the area where the monster was seen. There was a thriving business in the making of moonshine. A small highly superstitious minority population also lived in the area. where everybody knew everybody else, so if a stranger showed up it was automatically figured they might be revenuers. That was when the monster showed up. The minorities would shoot at anybody or anything that moved so the strangers never stayed around very long for their own safety.

My friend’s train was the only one through that night and he never went into great detail. He never actually knew who he was dealing with, but when they were changing tracks, the switching had to be done manually. He would leave money behind and a few hours later when they came back through, there would be two gallons of moonshine waiting which he and the engineer took home and sold and split the profits.

That was the only time I ever tried moonshine and it felt like a red hot ball bearing went down, and in about a minute I could hardly stand up.

I had not even thought about this as it happened about 40 years ago, so that is the true story of the Fouke Monster.

Surely, nobody would make moonshine today in McDonald County, or would they? Ed Malcom

Pineville