A 35-year-old man from Mansfield, Ohio, Andrew Baum, said he has spent much of his life in the outdoors and had never seen anything like the creature he saw on Dec. 28 in a Washington Township field, just south of Mansfield. Baum, while perched in a 17-foot-high tree stand, believes he saw a bigfoot walking purposely and quickly across the open field about 1,000 feet from his position.
“It was taking real long strides. His head was kind of down, moving down the hill. It had a big head. I lost it when he walked into the treeline,” the Mansfield native told Richland Source. It’s the third such local sighting reported to Matt Moneymaker’s Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization since 2021, with the previous two coming in Ashland County.
Those encounters, coupled with a 2022 Bigfoot Basecamp Weekend at Pleasant Hill Lake Park in Perrysville, have made north central Ohio more of a hotbed for sasquatch sightings.
Baum, who was in the woods late in the afternoon with his stepfather to build the tree stand for future hunting use, said he immediately knew what he was seeing. Though it was late afternoon, it had been a bright, sunny day, he said. In other words, the visibility was excellent in the area near Hanley and Woodville Roads, just east of I-71, especially with no leaves on the trees. “I know every animal. It was not a bear. It was not a monkey. It was black or even brown in color. I was shocked. A bigfoot is not something that just pops up in your head,” he said.
“It took me a moment to focus my eyes. Then I knew. It was too big and moving too fast. A man would have to be running full speed to cross that field that quickly,” Baum said.
After losing sight of the animal, Baum climbed down from the tree stand and rejoined his stepfather. He told his stepfather about what he had seen, but it was gone by the time the older man climbed into the stand.
“When I got back down, I couldn’t believe it. I was like kind of shocked. I wasn’t scared. I told [my stepfather] and he was like, ‘man, that’s crazy,’ but we had to get out of there. It was getting dark early.
“We finished what we were doing and we left. I kept looking over my shoulder,” Baum said. “I was thinking about it the whole way home. I knew I had to report it. There are a lot of people doing research on [bigfoot] and I want to help,” he said. (Richlandsource.com, 7 Jan 2025)
