Bigfoot sightings daily? This strange market on a Georgia highway has turned heads for years
She sells cement Sasquatches.
Say that fast three times.
Or drop by Sherry Parramore’s roadside stand, Rubber Necker’s Market, where her spread of statuary, from garden gnomes to gargoyles to Georgia Bulldogs, is lorded over by Bigfoots.
Two of the marble-like, large-as-life monsters guard the driveway. They’re concrete, actually, and several more of them stand frozen in their fur.
Though she sells dozens, maybe hundreds, of other lawn-adorning objects better known as yard art, Bigfoot is her big draw.
By design.
“There’s a reason why this place is called Rubber Necker’s,” Parramore says.
She wants head-turning sights.
With her ape-like array out front along Georgia Highway 96 near Houston County High School in the western reaches of Bonaire and southern Warner Robins there is no need for a sign. So she doesn’t even have one.
“And,” she says, referring to the Bigfoots, “he don’t eat nothing. He don’t need no electricity.”
The two Bigfoots by the highway are almost 5 feet tall and weigh half a ton. They go for $2,350 and are stained brownish. From not far away, they can pass for “real.”
Another pair in her inventory, are about a foot shorter and, unfinished, sell for $650.
Though she has some Bigfoot molds and can pour them herself, she buys most from wholesalers who make everything from concrete birdbaths to stepping stones.
So what’s fueling the Bigfoot boom?
“Documentaries” on their existence (or not) have for decades captured the attention of wide audiences.
These days, supposed “sightings” go viral on social media.
Perhaps it is the allure of the odd and the unknown.
Whatever the reason, lately Bigfoot aficionados seem to be coming out of the wood, well the woods.
“It’s either a revival or people are coming out of the closet,” Parramore says. “It’s becoming more accepted.”
People are buying all things Bigfoot.
One customer at Rubber Necker’s recently purchased a 450-pounder and placed it in her back yard so her husband could get a chuckle each morning when he gazed out while drinking his coffee.
Parramore sells smaller Bigfoots, too. Ones seated that can hold fishing poles. Some foot-tall Bigfoots are females with pigtails.
The most massive Bigfoot she has owned was nicknamed Bubba. He was better than 6 feet tall and weighed more than a ton.
He was, Parramore thought upon seeing him for the first time at another dealer’s market, “the coolest thing I had ever seen.”
She never intended to sell Bubba. Then one day not too long ago, a farmer from Crisp County made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. The farmer hauled Bubba away and set him up on some land where Bubba would, he hoped, become a conversation piece. The farmer said he wanted something creative, something funny, for his grandchildren to remember him by.
Others interested in her Bigfoots have deeper, more mysterious motives.
“Some people,” Parramore says, “have actually seen Bigfoot.”
Do what?
“I’m not gonna disagree with them,” she says of occasional customers’ claims.
While she is no true believer, Parramore, 62, an auctioneer by trade who has spent a career dealing in flea market-like wares, is not a nonbeliever.
“I did a little bit of research, and about 65 million years ago there was a critter named giganto-something. ... If you look at him he looks like a Bigfoot,” she says. “Now science is forever finding things that they say were extinct 65 million years ago, but yet they are finding little pockets (of surviving beings). So I’m not gonna say that he’s not out there.”
Then she adds that she knows for sure where Bigfoot does exist.
“I know,” she says, “he’s at Rubber Necker’s.”
This story was originally published October 23, 2023 at 6:50 AM.