Idaho man sells Bigfoot collection to museum
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MOSCOW (Lewiston Tribune) — If Fred Schuellerman ever felt alone in his interest for Bigfoot, he chased off that idea with one Facebook Marketplace post: “Attention Bigfoot Enthusiasts!”
Overnight, Schuellerman, 60, of Moscow, earned dozens of responses to his offer to sell a collection of plaster casts of footprints from famous Bigfoot sightings and other memorabilia. He is moving to a new job in Rathdrum and simply doesn’t have a place for the collection he spent the past 16 years building.
The collection of 20 plaster cast footprints, and some handprints, in display cases went for $4,200. The purchaser was a soon-to-open museum in Forks, Washington, (of “Twilight” vampire film fame) which will be connected to a gift shop called “Sasquatch the Legend.”
The museum didn’t quite get the entire collection. A Lewiston buyer snatched up two tracks — including one track that was said to have been left near Keuterville, Idaho, in 2001 — before the museum offer arrived.
From his property management office, Schuellerman has enjoyed people asking questions and wandering by to see what he has. And, he has zero concerns about people thinking he’s loony.
“The superpower older people get is they just don’t care,” Schuellerman says. “I mean that the older I get, you don’t care what people think. It’s kind of liberating and free.”
That doesn’t mean his enthusiasm for Bigfoot lore translated to the whole family. When his son, who is highly skeptical of Bigfoot’s existence, was a teenager, Schuellerman dragged him along to a Bigfoot conference in Montana.
“We were sitting in the audience — and you get all kinds of characters,” Schuellerman recalls. “And some guy in a Bigfoot costume walks in and he’s like, ‘Oh my God,’ and he sits right down next to my son. The look on his face.”
On the other hand, Schuellerman’s daughter was a big fan of his obsession and got a kick out of attending events with him.
In some ways, even as his Bigfoot plaster casts move to the Olympic Peninsula, the casts were already in the true epicenter of the Bigfoot phenomenon. For instance, Washington State University professor of anthropology Grover Krantz, who died in 2001, published books on Bigfoot, a creature he believed existed. The academic tradition was continued by Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University, who also studied Bigfoot tracks. Schuellerman bought many of his replicas from Meldrum, who died at age 67 in September of 2025.
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Schuellerman is happy that his collection will go someplace where people can appreciate it. And he figures he probably broke even on what it cost to put together. He’s also clear that he’s only giving up his collection, not his belief.
“You know, if one person is telling the truth about what they saw in the woods, there’s something to it, right? There’s plenty of hoaxers, but I’m sure not everybody’s a hoaxer.”