Down the rabbit hole
Bigfoot · Washington, District of Columbia · 1867
7 documents · 1 independent account
7 documents tell this story. They trace back to 1 independent account.
The route
- One encounter the reported sighting this case is about
- 7 documents that tell it, as we collected them
- 1 independent account behind those documents
- 6 copies reprints or cross-posts of the same text: not extra witnesses
Copies are not confirmations: thirty papers printing one story is still one account.
Each shape is one document; open it to go to where we found it. The same graph as a list is below.
Why these records are connected
- 6 copies: the copy detector found the same words in a later document, so it sits in the same row as the account it copies.
Every document, as a list
- Account 1 7 documents
- Earliest found The Weekly Ottumwa Courier (Ottumwa, Iowa) Newspaper · Feb 16, 1865
- Reprint Daily Ohio Statesman (Columbus, Ohio) Newspaper · May 24, 1867
- Reprint The Fairfield Herald (Winnsboro, S.C.) Newspaper · May 29, 1867
- Reprint Daily National Intelligencer (Washington City [D.C.]) Newspaper · Jun 5, 1867
Image 2 of Daily national intelligencer (Washington City [D.C.]), June 5, 1867 - Reprint The Lancaster Ledger (Lancaster, S.C.) Newspaper · Jun 12, 1867
- Reprint Saint Mary's Beacon (Leonard Town, Md.) Newspaper · Sep 26, 1867
- Reprint Evening Star (Washington, D.C.) Newspaper · Nov 14, 1929
How to read this
- Time runs left to right by publication date. Very long empty stretches are cut short (the axis shows how many years were skipped); undated documents sit in their own column.
- One row per independent account. A reprint, re-upload or cross-post carries the same text, so it stays in its account's row and never counts as a second witness.
- Earliest found (ringed) is the earliest document we hold for that account. It is not proof of the first telling: an earlier one may exist that we haven't collected.
- Arrows run from a document to a source it names. A dashed shape is a source a document cites that we haven't found yet; its link searches a public archive for it, and a hit there is a lead, not a confirmation.
About the numbers
- Only documents we've collected are counted; retellings elsewhere on the web aren't counted yet.
- Documents are matched by shared text and by the sources they name, by plain rules with no model in the loop. A match can be wrong; tell us.
Where next
- Back to the case
its summary, sources and discussion - Back to the map
opened on this case - Bigfoot · North Adams, Massachusetts · 1879
Another trail, same creature: 5 documents · 1 independent account - Other Flying · Whetstone Mountains, Arizona · 1890
The next-deepest trail: 7 documents · 1 independent account
Every rabbit hole → · How we tell copies from independent accounts