When dad asked my sister what the thing looked like, she said, “Frankenstein,” but it was known thereafter as ‘The Brown Man.’ This location, I later learned, was a very active one regarding monster activity with sightings dating back to the 1960’s and continuing on to the present.
In 1968, another (or possibly the same) creature was seen there by the previous family, the Driskells, and giant five-toed footprints were found.
Late one winter night in 1971, my mother closed the Christmas catalog she had been looking through with Diona, and rose to leave the room. It was after 10 p.m. and everyone else was either asleep or in bed. As she switched off the light she noticed a strange red glow coming in through the window from somewhere outside. She walked over and looked out. What she saw frightened her enough to wake the entire household, load us all into the car and flee the location in terror, never to return.
According to her, what she saw was a glowing red, disc-shaped object as it slowly descended from the night sky and landed behind an old, overgrown barn. An overwhelming feeling of fright had come over her as she watched. The family dogs, which usually barked at and accosted any outside visitors to the property, were strangely silent. What I remember most about this night is all of us huddled together in the kitchen in the darkness waiting to leave. Mom had wanted to rush out to the car immediately but dad had refused saying that, if she really saw a flying saucer land, the aliens could be outside waiting for us.
He knew well that, around this time every night back then a river barge would slowly and loudly make its way up the Green River, blowing the barge-horn and shining the huge spotlight all around. Sure enough, we had stood there quietly in the darkness for less than five minutes when the sound of the barge-horn blasted the stillness of the night and outside the bright spotlight began sweeping through the trees and across the fields between our house and the river.
Dad yelled, “Let’s go!” and there was a sudden, frightful rush for the front door and the car parked just outside. I looked back at the house from the backseat as we plunged madly down the gravel road. The barge-light was still sweeping the landscape, casting immense shadows through the woods next to the house. We had left the front door wide open.
The Spottsville Monster
After that my family moved to the relative safety of the city. There were no ‘flying saucers’ in the city; no ‘Brown Men.’ But by early 1975, we were all pretty much fed up with the constant bustle of city life. The cars and the noise and all the people. Despite our experiences on Collins Road, which now seemed little more than a bad memory, when dad heard about a farmhouse on the outskirts of Spottsville that was coming up for rent, everyone was happy about the notion of moving back to the country. This house, like the one in Reed, was also situated close to the confluence of the Green and Ohio rivers and, when Dean and I heard there were Indian arrowheads to be found there as well, we were more than ready to leave the city.
I remember the first time we drove down Mound Ridge Road in the early winter of ‘75. Snow was on the ground and everything seemed so gray. I was almost nine years old. We were going to look at the house, which would be empty in a week or so, and meet the family that lived there. As soon as we arrived the car was immediately surrounded by several large, vicious-sounding dogs.
“Don’t none of y’all dare open them doors yet!” my dad yelled back at us. Then a small, bespectacled man stepped out from around the corner of the house, called off his dogs then led us into the house through the back door. After introductions, coffee was made for the adults and treats for the youngsters. They talked for a while, then dad casually asked why the back screen door was boarded up like it was. The man, whose name was Buzzy White, now deceased, refused to say while us kids were present. After we were bundled back up and ushered back outside by White’s two oldest daughters, he told my parents a strange story which my father later related to me, word for word:
“Last summer, I was here sittin’ in the kitchen drinkin’ coffee by myself one day,” he said. “The wife and girls had gone off to town for groceries and such. I had my back to the door there, when all of a sudden, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. You know...like you can feel somethin’ watchin’ ya? I turned around and standin’ right outside that door was this...big, hairy fella...”
My parents were stunned.
“Yes sir,” he continued. “He was just standin’ there lookin’ in at me. Looked somethin’ like a man but...not quite, ya know? Anyway...I was scared shitless. This thing was big. Eight foot tall at least. Probably better. I had my rifle propped up next to the door there; so I grabbed it up and emptied it right through that screen door. I had sixteen shots in the gun...I fired every one of ‘em an’ I know I had to hit it with at least seven or eight...but it just walked off without makin’ a sound. When I got up enough nerve I walked out to where it was standin’...about ten feet from the door...to see if I could find any blood. But there wasn’t any. Nor even a single footprint...and it had to weigh at least four or five hundred pounds.”
Dad was a tough man, even though he was losing his eye-sight to Glaucoma. He wasn’t worried. He remembered the ‘Brown Man’ from the Booth place; remembered that it had run away when he had fired at it. Less than two weeks later we were moved in. Everything seemed fine, especially when spring arrived. There were fruit trees everywhere on the property; apple, peach, pear, cherry and plum. And there was a big patch of wild strawberries out behind the closest barn. My parents planted their garden and eight acres of tobacco, bought a few dozen chickens and,
The Nunnelly farmhouse, circa 1975, site of one Kentucky family’s terrifying 11 month-long nightmare with giant, hairy inhumanoids.
suddenly, it was as if we’d never left the country.
Dean and I walked the fields after they were broke. With each good rain our artifact collection grew. We went to school and read comics, climbed trees and walked the fields when we weren’t working in them. Besides the fact that the house didn’t have an indoor bathroom, and we had to use that damned outhouse, we were perfectly content. Our parents were content as well, despite the steady disappearance of dad’s chickens, which was attributed to weasels and such at first.
Then Dean and I began to find the carcasses of dead dogs in the fields when we were out looking for arrowheads. The bodies were strangely mutilated, being sliced from groin to gullet with all the internal organs removed, including the eyes and tongues. No blood or footprints could be seen around these grisly discoveries, even though most were found in open, well cultivated fields.
Also strange was the fact that no scavenger would eat the eviscerated remains. Not even a fly would land on them to lay its eggs. Before the episode was finally over in January 1976, my family would lose over 200 chickens, one goat and one pony and find the remains of eight dogs, a pig, and a goat; all mutilated.
One day my parents heard what sounded like something big drinking water from the small creek just inside the woods out behind the house. By the sound of the loud ‘gulping’ noises it was making, dad judged whatever it was to be at least as big as a horse or cow. Soon afterwards we began to hear strange noises coming from the fields and woods outside. Sometimes they would come from close by, sometimes from far away. The two vicious and highly treasured guard dogs that we owned could be heard bumping their heads on the floorboards as they scurried beneath the house in fear of whatever was making the sounds.
This caused dad much concern. As a precaution, when my older brother Harold arrived that spring to add on a bedroom and an indoor bathroom to the house dad invited him and his family to move their trailer on out and set it beside our house. As his eyesight was none too good, he felt that we would be safer with another grown man there who could shoot a gun if the need arose. He could also help with raising the tobacco. They moved the trailer in soon after and placed it very close to the house under dad’s direction.
One day a stranger came walking from the far tree line across one of the fields. He was
holding a shotgun, broken down, and walking towards the house, his other hand up in the air in a friendly gesture. It took both the adults to finally calm down the dogs when the stranger approached and introduced himself as Roy, (not his real name), a neighbor who lived less than a half mile up the road. He told my father that he had just been squirrel hunting in some nearby woods and had scared up something big and hairy that ran away on its hind legs.
As it was heading in this direction and he hadn’t the slightest idea what the animal could be, even though he’d been hunting the area his entire life, or how dangerous the thing might be, he felt it was his Christian duty to come and warn us. He didn’t get a look at the thing’s face, Roy said, but it was big, hairy and ran away like a man. Dad liked Roy immediately and invited him back for coffee when he had the chance. The two became great friends and this new acquaintance would play a pivotal role in the drama that was about to unfold.
The first sighting by someone in my own family happened around eight o’clock one evening when mom stepped out onto the front porch to call Harold and his wife and three children over for a late supper. Everyone had been working in the fields all day. She looked to her left and saw a giant, hairy shadow at least eight feet tall standing in the darkness near the smokehouse. It was looking at her. She screamed like a panther herself at that moment, then ran back inside and locked the door. Harold soon rushed over holding his rifle. Dad grabbed the shotgun, trying to get her to spit out what the hell was wrong. Shaking, mom called the police.
After briefly looking around close to the house and finding nothing, the State Police left, most probably laughing at the crazy story. But they would be back several more times in the upcoming months as events escalated into an almost nightly visitation by the creature, or creatures. Eventually, even though it was later learned that sightings of a similar nature were taking place all along the Green river in towns such as Bluff City and Hebbardsville, the police refused to respond to any more ‘monster’ calls and my family was left to fend for ourselves.
Mom saw it again at dusk not long after as it ran from a field by the garden area and jumped an old fence-row. It even chased dad and one of the dogs out of a tobacco field that he was tending alone one day, but it was my brother, Dean who had the closest encounter. He was standing in the front yard one afternoon trying to take some garden hoes away from a couple of the younger girls when he heard a tremendous crashing through the trees out behind him, followed by a complete and unnatural silence that settled over the entire area.
It was then that he saw the monster standing in a small gully by an old farm truck parked behind the smokehouse. He described it as being muscular and tall, with a square jaw and small, close set eyes. It was covered in reddish gray hair, thin and patchy in spots as if it was very old. He said it was as tall as the wooden rails on the farm-truck, which were around eight feet off the ground, and it was standing a couple of feet down the slope of the gully.
All of us children saw it one morning while waiting for the school bus. It was standing in a cornfield out front. It towered above the full grown corn and seemed to sway slightly from side to side as it stood there. I remember how once a group of men, which included Harold, a cousin and several others, camped out on top of the roof one night in an effort to shoot the beast. They lay quietly in wait for several hours and nothing happened. Then, just as they were about to give up, the yelp of a dog in pain and then a huge roar erupted from the forest only a few feet away. It sounded like a small war had erupted on our roof that night as all the men on the roof opened fire at once.
The monster had scared the once brave men so badly that they had accidentally knocked down the ladder and were trapped on the roof, yelling for help and firing their guns. One of them had fallen off the roof and was banging loudly at the front door while the male adults armed themselves and ran out the back door to help. The next morning we found the carcass of another dog, exsanguinated and eviscerated as all the others, just inside the woods.
Soon afterwards the neighbor from down the road, Roy, agreed to try and track the monster down for the sake of the safety of the Nunnelly children. He encountered it one day at an old, abandoned house far back in the woods. It was stooping down inside the house looking out the window out at him. Just as he was about to fire, he blinked his eyes and in that same instant the creature simply vanished.
Shaken by the sighting, he went home where he dared not mention the incident to anyone, not even his wife. He didn’t give up, however, and eventually claimed to have found trace evidence in the form of hairs and a claw, or tooth, and he was able to make a plaster cast of a partial footprint. The print was impressive and showed the clear impression of a large, four-toed foot which resembled a huge dog.
By this time the local T.V. news had heard of the events from the police band radio and decided to send a camera crew and sketch artist out to our house. The artist drew a hairy, man-like animal with no face and a segment about the affair was featured on the evening news. The next day a crew of reporters from the local newspaper descended on our farm to get the scoop.
The morning edition of The Gleaner dubbed the beast ‘The Spottsville Monster’ and the accompanying article treated the sighting fairly, despite some misquotes such as calling the monster ‘green’ and misnaming the road on which my family lived. Ironically, this sent the crowds of gun-toting ‘monster hunters’ which then descended on Spottsville searching everywhere for a location which did not exist. As I recall, not a single one of them ever made it to Mound Ridge Rd.
When the news coverage began, dad referred the reporters up to talk to the neighbor, which they did. After his name appeared in print he, like my own family, suffered through an embarrassing period of public ridicule. We children were endlessly taunted at school, and Roy, who worked at a local fire department, fared much the same.
Partial cast of Spottsville Monster print taken by family friend and later destroyed by state officials.
The Spottsville Monster, a tall, hairy inhumanoid which has been described alternately as a man/ape type figure and a more wolf-like one, has terrorized the western Kentucky bottomlands along both the Ohio and Green Rivers for nearly 100 years; and is still active today with the last reported encounter taking place in the spring of 2010. Sketched by author under the direction of actual witness © Barton M. Nunnelly.
Strange things were seen and heard for the next several months but the events finally came to a conclusion, for my family at least, when Roy told my father about a bizarre encounter with the creature he had experienced a couple of weeks prior, followed by a short stay in the hospital. He had been looking for the thing one day, he said, when it started to rain. He was walking a tree line at the time and there was nearby a long-abandoned old barn into which he went seeking shelter from the rain. Little did he know that the creature had had the same idea.
He stood only for a moment at one end of the open-ended barn, when suddenly the feeling that he wasn’t alone washed over him and the often-described sensation of the hair rising on the back of witness’s neck and arms. He slowly turned around and found himself staring into a huge, hairy mid-section. He stood six feet, three inches tall but he had to look almost straight up to see the creature’s face.
It was a horrible sight and deeply unsettling, he later told me. It had a short muzzle, something like a bear or dog’s, with long pointed fangs set into both its upper and lower jaws, black skin and strange red eyes that chilled and frightened him to his very soul. He reached for the rifle strapped on his shoulder but suddenly found himself unable to move as those terrible eyes froze him in their gaze.
Roy thought that he was surely done for but, despite the beast’s alarming appearance, it spoke to him without using its mouth at all, but some sort of mental telepathy and said, “Don’t be afraid... I will not harm you.” Then it turned around and ran out the end of the barn that was facing the open, well-plowed field, now muddy from the rain.
It was a few moments before Roy
could move again but at last he was able to shake his head and clear the vision of those red burning eyes from his mind. When he had composed himself somewhat, he walked to the doorway through which the creature had run, hoping to see for the first time the creature’s complete tracks in the muddy field. There were none.
It must be noted that the entity witnessed by Roy appeared drastically different from the “square jawed” more human-like entity seen by Mr. White and my brother Dean. What Roy seemed to be describing sounded more like a ‘werewolf,’ or ‘Dogman’ than anything else, and illumined the fact that there was more than one type of monster on the loose in Spottsville.
Dad, after hearing this and realizing this was no ‘ordinary’ animal, asked Roy if he thought it might come up one night and try to steal one of his children. The man replied that it was not likely, as they had been there for nearly a year already and the thing seemed content with killing the animals and merely scaring the people. But, he told him, if the creature ever did decide to do that, there would be nothing anyone in this world could do for them. They would just be gone. Period.
For weeks dad had kept a five gallon bucket of kerosene and a mop near the kitchen door in case the creature tried to get in and attack the members of the household. In the event that he could not drive it away with bullets or fire, it was his intention to kick the bucket of fuel over and set it ablaze, burning the house to the ground with the whole family inside rather than losing one or more of us to the creature and trying to live with the loss. Better, he reasoned, that we should all die and go to heaven together than trying to live without a single member of the family. All of us had agreed. Thankfully, it never came to that.
The Inhumanoids Page 39
