‘Beast of Busco’
Turtle Town title began with hunt for giant
Devon Haynie | The Journal Gazette
By all accounts, the Oscar saga started July 27, 1948, when Ora Blue and Charlie Wilson claimed to see a giant turtle while fishing in a Churubusco pond. The men told Gale Harris, their brother-in-law and owner of the property, that they saw a turtle with a body as big as their rowboat and a head as big as a child’s surface near their boat.
Later, Harris went searching for the turtle and claims to have briefly caught it in a chicken-wire trap before it escaped.
Oscar was spotted again in 1949. Local newspapers and news services got wind of the story, and soon hundreds of people throughout the region flooded to Churubusco, eager to watch the hunt unfold.
The Journal Gazette named the turtle the “Beast of Busco,” and letters began arriving in Churubusco addressed simply to “Turtle Town USA.”
Harris, Wilson and Blue are dead, but Jim Guiff, a 97-year-old man with a smooth complexion and blue eyes, remembers the turtle hunt well. Since 1927, he’s lived on property that borders Fulk Lake, the pond where the turtle was allegedly discovered. Oscar was named after Guiff’s uncle, Oscar Fulk, who owned the farm before Harris and told the media that he had seen the turtle in 1900, 50 years earlier.
(Guiff remembers Harris as an honest, humble man. He won’t say much about his uncle, other than that he was a “character.”)
Guiff, who was in his late 30s during the turtle saga, remembers at least two times when people tried to catch the turtle. He recalls watching a man, perhaps Harris, steer a boat toward a trap one night while about 12 men stood watching. And he remembers someone shining a light into the trap, only to illuminate the murky water.
“A few months later, they got a deep-sea diver to come out there,” Guiff recalled. “But the bottom of the lake is all muck, and his feet would kick up sediment so he couldn’t see.”
That deep-sea diver was one of several who came to the pond in the next few months. Professional trappers came, too, as did zoo officials and airplane pilots, trying to spot Oscar from above.
Guiff says automobile traffic outside his house was bumper to bumper. At one point, he says, the state police had to close a portion of the road near the lake out of fear that it would collapse.
“Harris got a lot of people excited,” Guiff says. “It caused a lot of publicity. We had newspapermen out here and radio people. People from Chicago and Indianapolis and all over.”
The third and final time Guiff went to the lake was the day Harris attached water pumps to his tractor and started to drain the pond.
Harris had almost completed the project when he suffered appendicitis, which put him in the hospital.
It was a rough year for the Harrises, Guiff said. They also lost their crops that year because onlookers had trampled their fields.
“They wouldn’t give up on it,” Guiff says. “We drove over when they were finished (draining the lake), and there were little puddles here and there. And they didn’t find the turtle.”
Guiff wasn’t surprised; he never really expected his neighbors to find Oscar.
“I was always suspicious about the turtle being as big as he was,” he says. “I used to hunt for snapping turtles when I was a kid, and I never saw them that big. I never disputed them, though, because maybe I was wrong.”
By the time Harris had drained the lake, Guiff said, he’d lost a great deal of money trying to prove Oscar’s existence. For that reason, Guiff will never discount the possibility that his neighbor was telling the truth. ...
