Just Guyton

I have questions.

This should surprise absolutely no one who has spent any amount of time around here. 😂

I ask one innocent question, find one interesting answer, and suddenly I’m seventeen tabs deep wondering why a county government once had to concern itself with the legal ramifications of killing Bigfoot.

You know. Normal activities around here. ☕️🐇🕳️

This particular rabbit hole started because I heard something that sounded absolutely ridiculous: apparently, there are places in the United States where cryptids have some form of legal protection.

Bigfoot has laws?

Werewolves have laws?

Somebody somewhere sat through an actual government meeting and discussed this?

Naturally, I needed receipts.

And here’s the first thing I learned: the internet uses the word law rather generously.

An ordinance is not the same thing as a statute. A legislative resolution is not necessarily a criminal law. A proclamation isn’t automatically enforceable. And something repeated on 500 websites doesn’t magically become true because Google got tired of arguing.

So I went looking for the paperwork.

And, y’all…

There is paperwork. 😂📜

Let’s begin in Skamania County, Washington.

On April 1, 1969—and yes, I checked the date because April Fool’s Day makes this entire situation immediately suspicious—county commissioners adopted Ordinance No. 69-01 concerning Sasquatch.

Not a festival.

Not a tourism slogan.

An ordinance.

The county had been receiving publicity over reported Sasquatch sightings, and that attention was attracting people to the area—including hunters carrying weapons.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Whether Sasquatch was wandering through the Washington wilderness was one question.

Whether humans with guns were wandering through the Washington wilderness looking for Sasquatch was considerably easier to establish.

The original ordinance made the premeditated, willful or wanton killing of Sasquatch a felony punishable by up to five years in jail, a $10,000 fine, or both.

Apparently Bigfoot didn’t just have protection.

Bigfoot had consequences. 😂🦶📜

There was, however, a slight problem.

County commissioners eventually acknowledged that they may have gotten a little ambitious with that felony.

In 1984, Skamania County adopted Ordinance No. 1984-2, revising the earlier measure. The new ordinance declared Sasquatch—also identifying names such as Bigfoot and Yeti—an endangered species of Skamania County and designated the entire county a Sasquatch Refuge.

It also replaced the original felony scheme with penalties that fit within county authority.

Imagine showing up to work that day.

“What are we doing this morning?”

“Budget. Roads. Fixing the jurisdictional problems in our Bigfoot legislation.”

😂

But underneath the comedy was a legitimate public-safety concern.

The county’s own reasoning discussed the danger created when armed people entered the area looking for a creature whose existence wasn’t established.

And that is where this rabbit hole became much more interesting to me.

Because the government didn’t actually have to prove Sasquatch existed to have a problem.

The armed humans existed.

Because people be peopling.

And Washington wasn’t finished with Bigfoot.

Decades later, a group of fifth graders decided Sasquatch needed some help too.

Teacher Andrea Andrews turned the subject into a classroom project involving research, persuasive writing and civics. Her students didn’t simply get told, “Bigfoot is real, go save him.” They examined arguments, debated the subject and learned how citizens can bring an issue before local government.

Then they actually did it.

Students helped persuade Grays Harbor County in 2022, followed by Clallam County in 2023, Mason County in 2024, and Clark County in 2025, to take official actions recognizing Sasquatch protection or refuge status.

Let me tell you something.

If I had come home in fifth grade and somebody asked what I did at school that day, “helped convince the government to protect Bigfoot” would have carried me emotionally for the remainder of the academic year. 😂

Clark County gives us a particularly good receipt.

Resolution 2025-06-02, signed June 3, 2025, recognizes Bigfoot as a protected creature and Clark County as a refuge.

But the resolution does something I find genuinely thoughtful.

It leaves room for the possibility that Bigfoot may not exist.

The county essentially recognizes that even if the creature itself isn’t real, the folklore can still represent respect for wilderness, mystery and environmental stewardship.

In other words:

We don’t know if he’s out there.

But maybe leave him alone anyway. 🌲😂

Honestly, somewhere an Appalachian granny just nodded approvingly.

Because some of us were raised with a very simple wilderness policy:

If you don’t know what it is, quit messing with it.

Arkansas apparently needed a version of that advice too.

Enter the White River Monster.

For generations, people around Arkansas’s White River have reported seeing something unusual in the water. Reports became especially famous around Newport in the early 1970s, drawing enormous public attention.

And with public attention came people.

And with people came…

Guns.

And, according to historical accounts, dynamite.

Because apparently somebody looked at an unidentified creature supposedly living in a river and thought:

“You know what this situation needs? Explosives.”

Sir.

No. 😭🧨

In 1973, Arkansas Senator Bob Harvey sponsored Senate Resolution 23, establishing the White River Monster Refuge.

The resolution declared it unlawful to molest, kill, trample or harm the creature while it was within the refuge.

I would particularly like to discuss trample.

What exactly was the anticipated scenario here?

You find the mysterious White River Monster and your first instinct is to run over and stomp on it?

Again:

People be peopling.

There is an important legal distinction here, though.

Arkansas passed a Senate resolution. That isn’t the same thing as adding a conventional criminal statute—with a defined offense and penalty—to the Arkansas Code.

That’s why saying, “Arkansas has a law that will send you to jail for killing a river monster,” would make a great headline but a lousy explanation of what actually happened.

The government really did act.

The monster really did get an officially designated refuge.

But the paperwork matters.

Then there’s Champ, the legendary creature said to inhabit Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont. 🌊

Champ has generated reported sightings for generations, and government bodies around Lake Champlain have passed resolutions calling for the creature’s protection and encouraging scientific investigation.

Again, though, you’ll sometimes see this transformed online into something much simpler:

“It’s illegal to kill Champ.”

The real story is more nuanced.

We’re dealing largely with governmental resolutions expressing protection for a potentially rare unknown creature—not a Skamania-style penal ordinance laying out a specific Champ crime and punishment.

And honestly?

I think the real version is more interesting.

Government officials weren’t necessarily announcing:

“We have scientifically established that a lake monster lives here.”

They were saying something closer to:

“If something unusual IS living in this lake, perhaps don’t immediately kill it. Let somebody study it.”

Which seems reasonable.

Apparently reasonable required paperwork. 😂📜

And then we arrived in Massachusetts.

Oh, Massachusetts.

The internet will happily tell you that it’s illegal to own a werewolf in Massachusetts.

And technically…

Well…

This one is hilarious.

Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 131, Section 77A, regulates certain wild canids, felids and hybrids, including wolf hybrids.

The statute itself does not say “werewolf.”

I repeat:

Massachusetts legislators did not sit down and write a werewolf prohibition into state law. 🐺😂

But in October 2024, the Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries published a Halloween-themed piece exploring spooky Massachusetts laws and raised the werewolf question using that real statute.

So the internet claim isn’t entirely invented.

There really is a Massachusetts law regulating wolf hybrids.

There really is an official Massachusetts legal source jokingly applying that law to werewolves.

But somewhere between those two facts and social media, nuance packed a suitcase and left town.

“Massachusetts regulates wild canid hybrids” became:

MASSACHUSETTS HAS A WEREWOLF LAW.

And this is exactly why we check the receipts.

Because sometimes a bizarre law is real.

Sometimes a real law has a bizarre interpretation.

And sometimes the internet takes one sentence, puts it in a blender and serves whatever comes out.

Which brings us to New Jersey.

For years, claims have circulated that New Jersey officially designated the Jersey Devil its “state demon” in 1939.

That sounds believable enough to make every weird-law list on the internet.

There’s just one tiny inconvenience.

The law doesn’t appear to exist.

The New Jersey State Library investigated the claim and couldn’t find a 1939 law officially making the Jersey Devil the state demon.

New Jersey absolutely recognizes the Jersey Devil as part of its folklore and cultural history.

But recognition isn’t legislation.

This appears to be one of those beautiful examples of folklore developing around folklore.

We have a legendary creature.

Then we developed a legendary law about the legendary creature.

Honestly, that’s impressive. 😂

And the Jersey Devil wasn’t the only famous cryptid where the legal trail dried up.

I went looking at Mothman, the Skunk Ape, Ohio’s Grassman and others.

There’s plenty of culture.

Festivals. Tourism. Stories. Reported sightings. Local identity.

But I couldn’t substantiate comparable protective legislation for them that met the same standard as our strongest examples.

Mothman is especially fascinating because the original Point Pleasant, West Virginia, wave of reported encounters in 1966 and 1967 involved numerous alleged eyewitnesses. You’ll frequently see claims of more than 100 witnesses, although reconstructing an exact, independently verifiable head count decades later is difficult.

And that’s another lesson from this whole adventure.

“Reported” matters.

Saying that 100 people reported seeing something is not the same thing as saying we have proved what those 100 people saw.

I don’t need to decide for somebody else what exists in the woods, rivers or night sky.

I just want to know what people reported, what history recorded, what governments actually did about it—and whether somebody kept the paperwork.

Because that’s where this entire rabbit hole surprised me.

I started looking for funny laws about monsters.

Instead, I found something much more human.

Some governments really have taken official action concerning creatures whose existence hasn’t been scientifically established.

Sometimes it was an ordinance.

Sometimes it was a resolution.

Sometimes it was a proclamation.

Sometimes it was an official legal source having a little Halloween fun.

And sometimes the “law” never existed at all.

But several of the genuine stories share one very familiar character.

Us.

Humans.

We hear there might be something enormous walking through the forest?

Grab a gun.

Something strange swimming in a river?

Apparently somebody grabs dynamite.

Something unidentified lives in a lake?

Somebody wants to catch it.

And eventually a government official somewhere has to pull out a piece of paper and essentially say:

Can everybody please stop messing with the unidentified creature?

Maybe our Appalachian grannies had it right all along.

You don’t know what that is?

Don’t chase it.

Don’t poke it.

Don’t shoot at it.

Definitely don’t bring dynamite.

Just mind your business and go home. 😂🌲

Whether you believe in Bigfoot, Champ, Mothman, river monsters, werewolves—or none of them at all—the government records themselves are real.

And sometimes the strangest thing in the woods isn’t the cryptid.

It’s us.

Because people be peopling.

—Guyton