bluefield – A restored atrium with some touches of Bigfoot and a new mural are now ready for students at Bluefield Middle School.
Several years of work went into restoring the school’s outdoor atrium and creating a new mural for it along with some Bigfoot that were celebrated Tuesday with a ribbon cutting ceremony.
“Well, our atrium was in poor condition, so a few years ago I took it on as a project,” Sherry Bradley, a social worker for Communities in School, said Tuesday. “It was very overgrown and not usable, so I asked for permission to reinvigorate it.
“We started to get a vision for it. It was very labor intensive, way more than I was able to take on myself and just by chance I encountered Candice Harless from Community Connections. She had contacts through Recovery Point and so she was able to help with the labor.”
Harless told Bradley about a campaign Community Connections was doing and offered to help find some funding for the project. Recovery Point provides counseling and addiction treatment.
“We worked together with Recovery Point,” Bradley said. “She and I bounced ideas off one another. She listened as far as what vision I had for the atrium and we tried to make it happen together.”
Harless painted the mural with help from Recovery Point participants.
“I also wanted to pay tribute to our principal Kim Miller. She’s been principal here for a a number of years. She’s currently on medical leave due to a cancer diagnosis,” Bradley said. “She loves Bigfoot, so I wanted to bring in an artistic flair and do a Bigfoot painting in the same style as the mural.”
Students with the Mercer County Technical Education Center created metalwork for the atrium, Bradley said.
Clearing the atrium was not a quick and easy task.
“It actually took a few months because we started with this big green area and a bunch of stones and trees, so we had to go in and get an idea of what we wanted it to look like,” Harless said. “The mural took only about three days.”
The mural is part of a campaign that Community Connections runs through Marshall University.
“It’s called Break Through Addiction and we’re really honored to bring that to the school because it’s to break down stigma,” Harless said. “The message on that (mural) says Break Through Isolation with Community and I think that’s really important to our population. It’s really good for the middle school to break down stigma and show the kids that they’re not alone because a lot of them have family members that struggle with substance use so the Break Through Addiction is relevant for our area.”
Miller thanked everyone who worked on the atrium restoration as well as those who created the new art.
“I am thankful for everything you’ve done, she said. “And until you’ve had an experience with Bigfoot, you don’t know why you like him. I kept that experience to myself for a long time and I finally told my husband about it a couple of years ago and then I told Sherry about it. He’s something to see and not as hateful as you think he is. He and I have a lot in common.”
There have been reported Bigfoot sightings throughout southern West Virginia and Southwest Virginia. After the ribbon cutting ceremony, Miller described an encounter she had years ago with the legendary cryptid. She said it happened one evening as she was driving through the McComas area of Mercer County.
“I was going home after work,” she said. “It was in the fall, starting to get dark but it wasn’t quite dark. He ran off of a hillside, right across the road and into a laurel thicket on the other side of the road. It was amazing.
“It took it a while to sink in and I kept it to myself a long time before I told my husband about it. And then I told Sherry, Sherry Bradley, and she shared her Bigfoot adventures with me.”
Bradley said her husband, the late Brian Bradley, reported seeing Bigfoot near their Mercer County home.
“We lived in Speedway and he saw him a few times at our house,” Bradley said. “We had footprints outside our den window and lots of weird occurrences at our house. Most people think you’re crazy. Ms. Miller and I started talking and she also had had an encounter. We had a little bonding moment over Bigfoot.”
Contact Greg Jordan at