3rd Annual West Virginia Bigfoot Festival Draws Huge Crowd

The third annual West Virginia Bigfoot Festival was held in downtown Sutton this Saturday, June 24th, and possessed the largest crowd of guests to date.
This year’s festival featured nearly 100 vendors, multiple food trucks, live music, and a researcher symposium in the Sutton Volunteer Fire Department Annex. The festival opened at 9:00am and concluded around 4:00pm.
The Sutton Volunteer Fire Department ensured Main Street was safely closed and hosted a fundraiser. The BCHS Cheer Squad, led by Coach Erica Toler, also participated and held a fundraiser by managing guest parking in the field across the river.
David Petolicchio, one of the owners and organizers of the event, said this year was one of the smoothest festivals they’ve managed, “We are very thankful for the assistance from the fire department and the BCHS Cheer Squad for helping us manage this event. Traffic flow and parking are always some of our biggest challenges but this year it actually went incredibly well.”
“We have had some substantial jumps in attendance,” Petolicchio said. “We are roughly estimating that we had 6,000-7,000 attendees this year. We had to turn away a lot of vendors too because we simply ran out of room.”
The festival was directed by Laurel Petolicchio, who managed vendors and a lot of the event logistics “We are very excited to see how well this event does and how many good folks we’ve had participate in the event. We look forward to continue growing it and meeting more great vendors next year!”
The West Virginia Bigfoot Festival was first started in June of 2021 and was an immediate success. Since then, the event has grown to one of the region’s largest cryptid festivals.