They weren't the first boy and girl to seek seclusion in Proctor Valley. It was nothing but a dirt road coursing through acres of rolling fields about 10 miles east of Bonita. It was the kind of place kids find at the edges of small towns. A place boys lured their dates or drank beer. A place far from street lights, parents and police. When the young couple decided to return to town, the car wouldn't start. The boy warned the girl to lock the doors and stay put while he sought help. The longer he was gone, the more frightened she became, isolated in darkness. The eerie silence was punctuated only by the sound of . . . . Were they tree branches scratching against the roof? The girl's fright turned to panic and finally to abject terror. When sheriff's deputies helped her from the car the next day, she saw that the scratching on the roof had been her boyfriend's fingernails – his arms dangling from a body torn and bloody and hanging upside down from a tree, the victim of a bestial attack. More specifically, the victim of the Proctor Valley Monster. That's one version of the story, anyway. South County's leading bit of folklore sometimes appropriates the narrative from popular urban legends and grafts on geographic particulars to give it its local flavor. It's not plot or setting that's responsible for the tale's pervasiveness and persistence. The story can change to the old hook-in-the-door-handle legend, the scene can shift from woods to lake. It's the fun and fear of a bogeyman in a community's collective imagination that's kept the Proctor Valley Monster alive for at least a half-century. The third-hand, word-of-mouth accounts and the Internet sources that continue resuscitating the myth describe an elusive 7-foot-tall hairy beast that walks upright.
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