Hastings Bigfoot Museum / Crossroads of America Bigfoot

Harriett McFeely, the Bigfoot Lady, said she was “like other people” and “always thought Bigfoot was just in California, Oregon, places like that.” Then she added, “But that’s not true. They’re all over.” McFeely, known as “the Bigfoot Lady,” runs the Bigfoot Crossroads of America Museum and Research Center in Hastings, Nebraska, on her own property, with the entrance in the driveway of a private home. Roadside America says she opened it on September 12, 2018, her 73rd birthday, while Nebraska Public Media says the museum has been operating since 2019.

She first became entranced with the creature when she was eight, when her father was watching a news story on the ascent of Mount Everest, and the footage showed a footprint. “I was just hypnotized,” she told the Necronomicon podcast. She’d believed in Bigfoot since 1953 but waited over 60 years to say so in public, after she saw two Bigfoot on a Colorado camping trip. “It seemed to me that once I said, ‘I am a Bigfooter,’ it freed a lot of other people,” she said.

Her collection had taken over the house before it became a museum. “I had no place to put another bone,” she said. “They were all over my kitchen, and my dining room table. I didn’t have very many people who wanted to come over for dinner.” The bones, found during her Bigfoot field investigations, provide decor for the museum Bone Room. She calls the calcified remains of deer, raccoon, possum and turtle “Killing Fields.” “They eat lunch and they just toss those bones,” she said.

McFeely pins reported sightings on a Nebraska road map in the museum and believes the real number of encounters is many times higher. She estimates “way more than a hundred” Bigfoot live in the state. “There’s all kinds of habitat and food, and also a lot of old, abandoned barns and houses where they could hide,” she said. She has yet to spot one in Nebraska herself.

The exhibits include footprint casts, rare handprint casts, photos of tree arches and fallen log arrangements she says Bigfoot made, and a plywood cutout traced from a footprint over 18 inches long found in the Sierra Nevada. There’s a near life-size Bigfoot mom and toddler named Patty and Sassy, a photo of “Patty” from the 1967 film, Central and South American elongated skulls donated by her friend Joe Taylor, and an exhibit on Zana, “the Wild Woman of Russia.” A tattered flag brought to the museum in 2020 by its owner, Jim Daro, was braided into tiny knotted strands, which McFeely compares to her collection of braided horse hair. Wherever horses have turned up braided, she told News Channel Nebraska, “we’ve also found footprints that we’ve made casts out of.” The flag is the subject of her book, “A Walk on the ‘Weird’ Side in Nebraska.”

Every visitor gets a guided tour from McFeely, “because I have a lot of evidence,” she said. In October 2020, Governor Pete Ricketts proclaimed October 20 “Bigfoot Crossroads of Nebraska Day” and named her the state’s official “Nebraska Bigfoot Lady.” Just before Christmas 2021, photographer Carol Highsmith’s team called to document the museum for the U.S. Library of Congress Archives. “I thought, instantly, that it was a scam. I almost hung up,” McFeely said. She and museum researcher Kenny Collins met with Highsmith the next day.

Scientists typically attribute sightings to hoaxes or to misidentifications of known animals and their tracks, particularly black bears. A study comparing sighting reports with bear habitat found a very close match with the ecological parameters of the American black bear. In the first systematic genetic analysis of thirty hair samples suspected to be from Bigfoot-like creatures, only one was of primate origin, and it was human.

The museum hosts the state’s annual Nebraska Bigfoot Conference. Admission is $5, cash only, and construction is ongoing for a planned garden, an accessible and interactive outdoor space.