True Giants: Is Gigantopithecus Still Alive?

Do the Berwick, Nova Scotia series of sightings fit into the True Giants file?

As I first wrote here in July 2007, during the 1960s, I shared what I was researching and discovering, in terms of old and new articles, with fellow researchers John A. Keel, Ivan T. Sanderson, Jerome Clark, Bernard Heuvelmans, and John Green.

In 1970, Keel compiled a book, Strange Creatures From Time and Space, which contained Bigfoot-type stories, a third of which I’d passed along to him. I was reminded of one of them about a Nova Scotia sighting of a “giant” when reading a recently located archival article found by Clark.

Here are the two:

Berwick, Nova Scotia, sounds exotic and faraway. Actually it is on the Canadian peninsula lying just off the coast of Maine. In April 1969 a giant eighteen-foot-tall figure was seen by many residents on the outskirts of that little town in the Annapolis valley, according to the Evening News. It was allegedly a “tall, very dark form” seen striding about the landscape at a speed of about twenty miles per hour. After the initial witnesses reported the “Phantom,” as it became known, local police had to assign two cars to the area to control the bumper-to-bumper traffic. John A. Keel. Strange Creatures From Time and Space, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970, pages 10-11.

The people of Cole Harbor, N[ova] S[cotia], were much excited and terrified about a strange animal that, so they say, appeared in the woods near that place. The animal was “seven feet high, and looked like a gorilla.["]“All Sorts and Sizes,” an excerpt, Davenport Morning Tribune, Davenport, Iowa, April 5, 1892.

Cole Harbor is a community of Halifax Regional Municipality, southeast of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, at the western end of the province. The Annapolis Valley and Berwick are located on the southern shore of Nova Scotia. The two sites are about 78 miles (about 125 kilometers) distance from each other. There are 77 years between the two incidents.

Thanks for this historical item from

Jerome Clark.

Illustration from Maritime Monsters by Steve Vernon.
Update: Was this nothing but an elaborate boys’ prank? There is one answer to the Berwick giant of 1969, via a 2010 CFI blog. Click here, via Frosstman.