Kansas — Sinkhole Sam
About this episode
The episode explores the legend of Sinkhole Sam, a creature seen by fishermen in Kansas, and the geological phenomena that underpin the story.
Everybody thinks Kansas is flat, empty, and solid. They're wrong on all three, and the wrongest one is solid. Underneath a lot of that state sits a bed of Permian salt a quarter of a billion years old, and groundwater has been eating it away in the dark for longer than anyone's been around to notice, leaving hollow rooms that one day drop their ceilings and swallow a circle of pasture whole. That's the ground we drive across in this one. And that's where the story starts, because the monster is almost beside the point. The real horror here is the floor. Out past Inman, in McPherson County, there's a shallow drying pond the locals called the Big Sinkhole, and in the drought summer of nineteen fifty-two two young Mennonite fishermen watched something long and pale as thick around as an automobile tire come up out of water you could wade across. One of them put a twenty-two into it. It didn't care. The papers named it Sinkhole Sam, a satirist named Ernest Dewey buried it under a punchline about a made-up creature called the foopengerkle, and the joke got so loud that seventy years later nobody remembers there was ever anything under it worth taking seriously. We strip the joke off…
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- Bigfoot & The Hunters
- Maine: Cassie & Bigfoot
- The Allagash Abductions
- Louisiana: The Rougarou & Bigfoot
- Kentucky: The Pope Lick Monster & Bigfoot
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