HASTINGS, NE — There’s one specific word Harriet McFeely listens for when she talks to guests at her museum in Hastings.

“Weird is the key word here. I always say to people, ‘you ever have anything weird, you ever hear anything weird?’ Then they always throw out, ‘there was this one weird thing,’” McFeely said.

And one weird thing after another is what led to the creation of the Nebraska Bigfoot Crossroads of America Museum. The latest peculiar exhibit comes courtesy of Garrison, Nebraska, a tiny town about 95 miles northeast of Hastings.

The flag at the local cemetery was discovered torn up. Garrison resident Jim Daro initially blamed a recent thunderstorm, but then he looked closer. The flag was braided.

“The three large braids are tied in very hard knots at the end, which is amazing itself, but then if you look closer and there’s very tiny braids - single strands of fabric that are braided, and then knotted and then braided again,” Daro said.

When a museum visitor relayed the story to McFeely, she knew she needed to see the flag.

“I saw this picture, and that big knot up there," McFeely said. "That’s all I saw and I knew it. I knew it. It was the same.”

The same as the horse braid exhibit already at the museum. McFeely says horses across the world sometimes show up with unexplained braids in their hair. She says the braided horses could be connected to Bigfoot creatures.

“All I know is all of these places… every place where there is horses that have been braided we’ve also found footprints that we’ve made casts out of, people have taken pictures (of Bigfoot),” McFeely said.

So she visited Garrison and got Daro to donate the flag. While there, locals told McFeely of several other mysterious sightings. Two people shared unexplainable stories from nearby Stromsburg and Seward at McFeely’s news conference Tuesday.

It’s all enough to get Daro thinking.

“It lends some credence to the idea of (Bigfoot)," Daro said. "That’s as good of an explanation as any.”

Some might buy into a Nebraska Bigfoot population, some might think the museum’s logic is a little too weird. Regardless, McFeely is undeterred.

“It doesn’t even matter if they believe or not, because I do,” McFeely said.