Massachusetts’ ‘Monsterland’ where locals have seen Bigfoot and UFOs

Deep in the heart of Massachusetts is a spooky place known as ‘Monsterland’ – a five-mile stretch famed for its paranormal activity.

For centuries, the eerie woods that line the small city of Leominster, near Boston, have been a hotbed for rumored sightings of UFOs, strange glowing orbs and even BigFoot himself. 

Some say these mysterious tales first began surfacing in the New England town in the 1800s, with locals sharing stories about a berry-eating beast. 

But suspicions really took off in the 50s after a man claimed in a local bar that he had encountered a ‘monster’ – before vanishing when he left to track it down. 

Since then there reported supernatural sightings have only increased, earning the area its ominous nickname and attracting Big Foot hunters from all over the country. 

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Ronny Le Blanc, 66, grew up a few hundred yards from Leominster, around the time the sightings first started. 

After his first supernatural experience there when he was 11-years-old, he has since made it his mission to get to the bottom of the unexplained activity.

‘I think because these things have happened to me personally, it’s created this obsession where I need to find out more,’ the author of 2016’s Monsterland told CBS Boston of his experiences in the now-infamous area.

‘The reason it gets its name is there were sightings of Bigfoot creatures going back to the late 1800s,’ he explained – before producing a cast of footprints he claims came from the fabled sasquatch.

He further claimed: ‘What I started noticing is that there was a lot of activities and stories in and around Leominster State Forest, which connects to Monsterland through the powerlines.’

After that bit of geography, he joked that a lot of locals like himself used to call it ‘Monstah-land’ – donning a trademark Boston accent to do so.

‘It goes back to the ’50s,’ he continued, ‘[when] there was a gentleman that supposedly disappeared after seeing a strange creature by Old Mill Road.’

The legend surrounds an unnamed man who entered a Leominster bar one summer night visibly agitated.

When the barkeep asked him what was wrong, the man reportedly responded that he had just seen a ‘terrifying monster’ on the now notorious Old Mill Road that bleeds into Leominster State Forest and the surrounding areas.

He asked the proprietor to call police but instead of waiting he declared he was going out to go kill the monster himself and bring back the creature’s body as proof. 

But he was never seen again. When the cops arrived, the bar manager told them what had happened, spurring them to drive down to Old Mill Road.

There they found the man’s car parked by the side of the street with its lights on and no one inside.

Balking at the concept of venturing into a largely uncharted 4,300-acre forest at night, the officers decided to wait until morning.

But the man never returned and the case remains a mystery to this day – with the legend helping to earn the street and surrounding area its Monsterland nickname.

Today, that road still stands – and according to Le Blanc and countless others, it is still a hive of unnatural activity.

Claims of apelike creatures, humanoid footprints, and car engines suddenly giving out are now rife – with several, including Le Blanc, spotting strange orbs floating overhead.

He believes the latter and the at-large beast are indelibly linked, citing other reports of people actually spotting the monster holding these ‘orange spheres’.

Different objects described as ‘flying saucers’ have also been reported, with some caught on camera.

Le Blanche suspects they are all related, and claims to have witnessed the floating orbs at least nine times over the years.

Several other sightings have been reported since, including one on July 3 of 2012, and another almost ten years later on April 13, 2022.

Both occurrences were caught on camera, and the orbs in each are eerily identical.

All the more alarming is that the strange orange objects – reminiscent even from afar of fireballs – fit the descriptions of countless Leominster residents over the decades, including several whom have spoke to Le Blanc.

‘People have seen Bigfoot holding an orb,’ he told the outlet during a tour through  the area in 2022. ‘They look like a basketball with plasma swirling around and they’re silent. I’ve just seen them hovering over the sky and just blink out and disappear.’

Descriptions offered by others are strikingly similar – with the citizen who spotted three unidentified objects between 8:30pm and 8:45pm in 2022 saying: ‘There was no sound as they kept coming from a north west mountain area traveling south east.

‘They would all change their direction and head west /south west as if they were programmed to all do it at the same exact time.

‘Some were faster than others and some flew lower than others,’ he went on, after recording the UFOs over his home in South Leominster near so-called ‘Monsterland’.

‘My estimation is they were about one hundred feet above tree top level,’ he recalled.

‘They would pause in formation for a while and then break off and head West as other came over the mountain area.’

After several minutes of hovering in his footage, the objects disappear.

The resident, 52-year-old Corey Tourigny, added: ‘I called over [a local police officer that lived next door] to see what these things could possibly be, but he had no explanation as well.’

At least a dozen others who have had alleged encounters with the orbs also had a similar lack of luck in deciphering their significance.

Le Blanc, however, has a few ideas – referencing the case of late Leominster resident Betty Andreasson, who claimed  that on January 25, 1967, she was abducted by extraterrestrial aliens from her South Ashburnham home about a dozen miles from Monsterland.

She also claims to have had a close encounter in 1944 in Leominster – as did several others around the time of time of her second sighting, which somewhat coincides with the clips captured on film.

‘There was a huge UFO wave in 1967 in Central Mass,’ Le Blanc in 2020 said.

‘People were seeing UFOs over ponds and lakes and there was a lady in Fitchburg saying there are UFOs coming out of the reservoir.’

‘When I started researching, I found out that Betty Andreasson had this thing happen down on Howard Street (in Leominster)’, he added.

‘During this time, this area was also getting a wave of Bigfoot sightings and reports from the state police.’

One such case surrounds a couple who saw a UFO over St. Leo’s Cemetery in Leominster – a few miles north of Monsterland – in March 1967 and another in the ’70s when another pair spotted a rectangular UFO with lights by a hillside in Ashburnham.

‘They’re looking at this thing and they’re just dumbfounded how something so large could just be hovering silently there,’ Le Blanc said of the Ashburnham incident.

‘Flash of light and all of a sudden the UFO is gone and they look at each other and the wife notices that they have missing time, about 20 minutes. 

‘But, the other thing, now their car is on the opposite side of the road, like they were put back but in the wrong place.’

‘This ball of light… this mental telepathy and these gray aliens, [there’s] stuff happening in the forests in Westminster and South Ashburnham.’

In terms of an explanation, he said: ‘There are a lot of different theories… but the reality is something is happening. People are seeing [the UFOs and Bigfoot]. They are leaving tracks.’

Several people claim that have encountered massive humanoid footprints on the footpath at the center of Monsterland, Old Mill Road near the Lancaster border where Walmart and other businesses sit.

One set of prints were found by Bill Penning and his wife, Julie, during an innocent hike in the nearby forest in June 2010.

Le Blanc helped the couple cast the prints two years later, in what may be the only physical evidence of the encounters countless are reporting

‘People who have claimed to have a Bigfoot in their sights of the guns said they can’t pull the trigger because they looked too human,’ he said, after the Pennings told him they found the prints after investigating sounds and movement coming from the forest. 

He continued: ‘I always found that fascinating and I feel like for something to be this elusive and so evasive this long, it has to be a more human than animal for it to do that.

Le Blanc added of the nature of the prints and the other sightings: ‘This is something more alien, something more interdimensional.

‘Ninety-nine percent of these could all be made up. But if you have that one that is legit, this whole thing is real.

‘Then it’s a game-changer and it’s a paradigm shift on how we see the world and how we fit in it in this universe, really,’ he concluded.

The Pennings, meanwhile, recalled a distinctly eerie feeling after coming across the tracks that made them flee the area.

The sensation was described by the couple in a 2010 interview with the Leominster Champion.

‘Where it was early spring there was a lot of brush and berries around us, but not a sound could be heard by anything, no birds, or other animals, just a weird feeling,’ Julie told the local paper of how she was overcome.

Bill, meanwhile, recalled feeling disorientated, remembering how he and his wife felt the desperate urge to urge to get out of the woods instead of investigating further.

‘I was kind of scared,’ he conceded.

Their account is remarkably similar to one described by Le Blanc after a strange encounter behind a local elementary school that still haunts him to this day 

While aged 12, he heard a strange sound in the forest Fallbrook Elementary School – near a bridge on Old Mill Road that still stands today.

‘Before they put Samoset (Middle School) there, there was a bunch of tracks that would connect to Monsterland that would go to the sand dunes where people would go partying,’ he said of the site, adding that there people had ‘reported seeing strange things,’ such as UFOs, shadow people, and, balls of light.

‘There was one particular track I always used to avoid,’ he continued. ‘It always had a very dark, ominous feeling to it. It would be a beautiful day, and you look down this thing and it looked dark.’

One day, while biking along this trail, Le Blanc was astounded by the stark silence.

‘I start going down this trail with my bike and I just could hear the bike squeaking,’ he said. ‘I noticed there are no other sounds in the forest. Nothing.’

At this point, Le Blanc recalled coming to a stop. Stuck with an uneasy feeling, he stayed silent and looked around.

‘At that moment, something crashed through the woods right in front of me,’ he continued.

‘I could feel it reverberating in the soles of my feet. It was pushing trees and shrubs, went across the trail and onto the other side. But I couldn’t see anything. That’s what was disturbing.’

Like the Pennings, he fled the area – and more than four decades later, he’s still looking for answers.

He maintains that the Bigfoot sightings are linked to the UFOs, citing other sightings across the country that coincide with the unnatural orbs and sounds people are encountering in the forest.

The forest, meanwhile, has a history dating back to the Native Americans, and much of it to this day is officially uncharted.

He told the Telegram of his suspicions that the sightings – here and across the country – are connected.

‘As you dig deeper into Bigfoot, you’re start talking about cloaking and the fact that they can vanish before people’s eyes,’ he said

‘These stories go back hundreds of years where all of a sudden a posse has this creature cornered and the tracks just disappear in open field, like something just came and picked it up and took it away

‘All these stories start to intertwine. A lot of these people are talking about these similar encounters that I had’. 

‘It sounds crazy, like something in science fiction,’ he added.

He went on:  “Leominster people know what’s going on. People talk. But they also keep their mouths shut and don’t say sh*t either,”

‘So, for me to write Monsterland, to actually come forward, was a little bit of a risk and gamble, in the sense people are going to think I’m crazy,’ he said of his 2016 tome. ‘Whatever.’

Bigfoot believers with similar experiences can contact Le Blanc anonymously on his website, www.ronnyleblanc.com, where he is still hunting evidence to support residents’ mysterious claims.