Soon after the talk with the neighbor we found ourselves once again packing up our belongings and moving back to the safety of the city. This time ten years would pass before we made one final attempt at country living in western Kentucky.
The Reisz Farm
In 1985, we moved back to Reed, Kentucky less than ten miles from the Booth Farm, this time near the banks of the Ohio river. All hell would break loose here, as this stately old two-story home on Carlinsburg Road was haunted on the inside as well as out. A spectral entity was seen by a sister in law one evening while everyone else was sleeping. She described it as a dark figure standing in the corner of the room wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a cape.
Spectral footsteps, screaming, violent knockings from behind the walls. All these things soon became commonplace. There would often come knocks at the front door at all hours of the day and night, but there was never anyone standing there when the door was opened. While UFOs routinely buzzed overhead and black panthers roamed the woods beyond the yard, Bigfoot put in a few appearances as well. My former brother in law, while driving down Ohio River Rd No.2 in broad daylight, saw what he at first took to be a deer standing alongside the road. Then it stood up on two legs and ran off into the thick brush. It was six or seven feet tall, he said, covered in brown hair and very fast.
A similarly-described beast, this one with glowing green eyes, approached my four-year-old daughter, her mother and my sister one evening as they were gathering clothes off the line. The two grown women were so frightened that they ran off and left the child standing at the clothesline. Thankfully, my sister ran back, grabbed her under one arm and rushed into the house where they immediately closed and locked all the doors and windows. Unfortunately, I happened to be away that night practicing for an upcoming musical engagement.
Around midnight one evening the entire family was awakened by a thunderous crashing sound that thoroughly shook the entire house. It was so loud that we actually thought that someone had lost control of their vehicle and crashed it into the house. It was strange that the three dogs we had didn’t bark a single time. We looked out the windows but saw nothing. We heard nothing. There was no vehicle. My father insisted that no one go outside until morning, when we found the garage door had been ripped off its metal tracks and was lying on the garage floor. It took a week’s worth of work with a ball-peen hammer before we could hang that door again.
While artifact hunting alone in the bottoms one day I came across a trail of immense footprints crossing a muddy field. The mud was a foot deep so I could make no positive identification of them but the creature that made them walked on two feet and had an extremely lengthy stride which I was completely unable to match.
On another occasion my stepmother was out in the barn checking on one of the dogs that was being kept there when the dog suddenly began howling in misery. Seconds later something “growling and making the weirdest noises” entered the open bottom level of the barn beneath her feet. The sound made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, she later told me, and then whatever this thing was began walking around the barn and coming her way.
She was terrified beyond words, which was totally out of character for her. So much so, that she actually climbed into the pen with the dog and hid her face beneath the straw as this thing approached. She remained this way until the creature, whatever it was, eventually wandered away. Even though she didn’t see it she could tell that whatever it was walked on two legs and was tall. In 1989, after repeated sightings of black panthers, she’d had enough and moved out shortly afterward. The Spottsville Monster, however, chose to remain in the area, with numerous sightings and reports taking place as recently as May 30th, 2009.
In 1999, while driving down Hwy. 60 East one afternoon in Baskett, Kentucky, only a few miles from the previously described events, I happened to look over into a beanfield on my left and was surprised to see two large, hairy creatures standing in the beans about ten feet from the top edge of the field. Both were brownish-gray in color and were positioned with their backs toward me. One was squatting down, apparently doing something to the ground or digging around in the beans; which were tall enough to obscure whatever its hands were doing.
Both these creatures were very big, at least six or seven feet tall and, since the highway was full of afternoon traffic coming home from work, I’m sure that other motorists must’ve seen these things as well. If this is so, however, it seems that none of them felt particularly inclined to come forward. This happened only a few miles from the previously described events.
In February of 2005, I interviewed Roy, the neighbor who helped us time and again during ‘The Spottsville Monster’ episode, and my late father’s good friend. It had been 30 years since I had seen him. He was older but still pleasant, intelligent and cordial. And extremely credible. He still lived in the same house that he lived in back then and is a God-fearing Christian with no reason to lie and no want of any publicity whatsoever.
After promising never to reveal his name, and because I was Red Nunnelly’s son, he had agreed to grant me the interview and tell me ‘everything’ that had happened to him during and after our ordeal in 1975. What he told me about his further encounters with TSM astounded me. He claimed that he had seen the beast several more times after my family left. Moreover, he said that what he had seen with his own eyes went far beyond anything that he had ever dreamed possible.
One day he was walking along an old fence-line next to a field and noticed a strange area that looked like “heat waves rising from a hot, summer road.” The area was only a few yards wide and to either side everything looked normal. According to Roy, as he was watching, one of the creatures stepped out of this strange wavy area like stepping out of a doorway. One second nothing, and the next... there it was looking right at him. It growled at him and, at the same time, screamed inside his head to “leave me alone!” Then it turned around and took a step back into the strange looking “doorway” and disappeared.
After that he began watching this same area from a distance using binoculars as often as he could. In all he claimed to have witnessed several different monsters using this interdimensional ‘doorway’ a total of three different times, always appearing or disappearing, seemingly, into thin air. These huge, bizarre creatures would later be seen crossing his own property and tripping the sensitive motion detecting security lights in his yard. His last sighting was in August of 2004.
When asked if I could see the trace evidence I received another revelation. Soon after the media coverage back in ‘75, he said, he was visited by the State Police and a couple of other men whom he took to be DNR officials. He was shocked when they demanded that he immediately turn over all evidence concerning TSM to them, which he did with great reluctance.
Moreover, they stated that if he ever talked to anyone else about the subject, especially the media, he would be arrested without hesitation, thrown into prison on a ‘made up charge’ and would never see his wife and two young daughters again unless it was through prison bars. In addition, a statement had been prepared for the local paper in his name stating for a fact that what he had seen was nothing more than a large, black bear.
Not easily intimidated, he at first balked at the whole thing, reasoning that this was America and his rights were being grossly violated. But the officials were very persuasive and, in the end, he had little choice but to go along with the charade for the sake of his family.
Over the years he had tried to get the items back with no luck. One time he and his family came home and found a large freezer bag on the front porch. It held the remains of the plaster cast he had taken on my family’s farm; smashed into powder. The statement was released to the local paper which proudly proclaimed the mystery of TSM solved. The hordes of monster hunters melted away leaving behind only the body of a dog, someone’s family pet accidentally shot by monster-hunting teens. Everything quieted down and TSM faded into memory.
Roy never talked of TSM again, and still f
ears the threats made thirty years ago to this day as he now owns a successful business which he does not wish to jeopardize. He blames the inability to speak of his encounters on a heart attack he suffered in 1985, which left him, for a brief time before he was resuscitated, clinically dead. He also claims that his near death experience left him with a certain degree of formerly dormant mental abilities.
As I sat listening to his story and sketching the beast, it struck me that here was a man who was highly successful and content. He seemed almost embarrassed by the whole situation and genuinely feared the possibility of his name being released to the public again and suffering through the same treatment that he endured back in the 70’s; or worse. Then, why was he speaking to me about it at all? I asked. His reply was simply because it was the truth and people had a right to know the truth regardless of how many choose to believe it or not. I honestly agree with him.
It must also be noted, before we leave the western Kentucky events behind, that all three locations mentioned here are within ten miles of each other and have played host to other Fortean events of which I am aware. Skyfalls, for example. One summer morning after a violent thunderstorm, while living at the Mound Ridge Rd. location, we awoke to find that all the roadside ditches and mud puddles were filled with three types of tropical fish, most notably goldfish. Thousands of them. So many that we could only conclude that they had fallen with the rain.
Also in that location, my brother Dean and I saw a castle in the sky one afternoon as the family returned home from a trip to town. The clouds just parted, forming an opening and there it was. So clear we could count the flagstones. It was turreted with two tall spires, each topped with a red pennant that streamed in the wind. It had a large, rounded, wooden door gilded in iron. As the car rounded a curve in the road the sight was lost behind some trees. When the sky came back into view only the clouds remained.
Myself and several others all observed a strange wolf-like beast while artifact hunting one day back in the 1980s at the Carlinsburg Rd. location. We had startled it out of a creek next to a field that we were walking. It was gray-colored, very heavy-looking with thick, muscular back legs and a large, bushy tail. My brother Dean, who was closest to the creek and got the best look at the thing, described the front quarters as smaller than the back and said that its head looked like a wolverine’s more than a dog’s.
In a bizarre twist, about a minute or so later a huge ‘dust devil’ swirled up from the creek about a hundred feet in front of us. The dust cloud drew all our attentions and we thought it must have been caused by the thing we’d just scared up, so we halted in our tracks. Then, to our complete astonishment, up from the creek leapt a six or seven-foot-long black panther.
We all saw it very clearly and there was no mistake as we stood there, eyes and mouths agape, and watched it lope across the field taking what seemed like leisurely strides of 10 to 12 feet. There was absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind as to the identity of the animal. It was long and skinny, had short, dark hair and a very slim three-foot-long tail. Definitely a large cat. It looked old and possibly malnourished, covered in dried dirt and dust which gave it a dark gray appearance. We watched as it ran 500 yards or better across the field, jumped a ditch and headed for the woods.
Finally, tiny infant-sized footprints and ‘Pygmy flints’ were found at both the Booth and Reisz farms, reminding us that not all inhumanoids are oversized beasts that are given really scary names.
Ancient Amerindian petroglyph seems to show that Native Americans of Kentucky were well aware that giant, four-toed inhumanoids inhabited the area. Photo by Dr. Fred E. Coy, from “Rock Art of Kentucky.”
Another curious 1971 creature report comes from Lawton, Oklahoma. This time the thing was wearing human clothes. The incident began at 11:00 p.m. on the evening of February 26th when C. Edward Green and his wife were driving home along Lake Avenue and spotted a strange figure walking beside the road.
A short time later Green told investigator, Jerome Clark that the thing was walking bent over like a gorilla, “but not on all fours. He wore black pants that were cut or torn off at the knees and he had a big beard; it began higher up on his face than beards usually do; and long hair, very unkempt.” On reaching their apartment a short time later the couple assumed that they had seen a mentally deranged person and called the police. At 11:15 p.m. Green, hearing the sound of police sirens, got up and pulled back the curtains to look outside; only to see the same hairy figure staring back at him from outside the house.
“He was crouched down in the hallway,” Green later said, “and while I was startled myself, I noticed that the person, or whatever, was either extremely frightened or not oriented to his surroundings. There was a glazed expression in his eyes as if he didn’t quite understand where he was. His hair and beard were very black, and he himself was dark-complexion. He was barefooted; his feet looked normal and he stood at least six-feet tall. When he saw me he jumped to the gravel below. Now that’s about a fifteen foot jump, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He must’ve been very strong.”
Other Lawton residents saw the creature as well, including a group of Fort Sill soldiers as they were leaving a grocery store and a group of passers-by that observed the “monkey-like” entity as it ran down a nearby street, dodging cars and hiding in the bushes. The very next evening the creature appeared again, this time to thirty-six-year-old television technician, Donald Childs.
At 11:00 p.m. he heard a noise outside and, thinking it might be a prowler, stepped out to investigate. It was a ‘prowler’ but not at all the kind he was expecting. “It was huge,” he later recalled, “way over six-feet tall. He was trying to get a drink from the pond. But the pond was empty. He had long hair all over his face. Maybe he had a beard too. I don’t know. It was dark and I couldn’t tell for sure. He was wearing dark-colored pants that were way too little, and a plaid jacket that was kind of too small. His legs, what I could see of them, seemed hairy.
All of a sudden he saw me and he was as scared of me as I was of him. He didn’t even stand up or get any kind of running start; he just sprung from his squatting position and jumped clear over the pond. The next day I measured it and that pond is twelve-feet across. He could run really fast,” Childs also mentioned. “He ran kind of hunched over like an ape in a Tarzan movie. He wasn’t running on all fours.”
A police officer later told Childs that they had received nearly twenty calls from people reporting sightings of the creature. After a local newspaper ran an article concerning the creature, on March 2nd, Childs was contacted by a farmer who lived three miles south of Lawton, and was told that every month for the past year he had found either a calf or a full-grown cow lying dead in his field with one of their legs ripped off. The carcasses were otherwise unmarked.
It was almost as if, the man speculated, someone or something with incredible strength had approached the animals, ripped off their legs and left them to die in the field. No prints or tracks were ever found in association with the carcasses, leaving the farmer in complete mystification as to the killer’s identity.
Twenty years earlier, in 1950 or ‘51, a ten-year-old girl had an encounter with a similar inhumanoid near the Eel River Just above Eureka, California. Nine years later she described it to the late Ivan T. Sanderson as a tall, hairy, red-eyed beast “...with the strangest looking fangs that I have ever seen. However, the strangest and most frightening thing of all; he had on clothes! They were tattered and torn and barely covered him, but they were still there.”
Also from 1971, inhumanoid witness, Miss Linda Milne of England, briefly encountered a manbeast near the Wantage Canal, Oxford, as it walked hurriedly away from her and disappeared into the woods. It was tall and hairy, she claimed, and walked on two legs. A short time later two fourteen-year-old boys came forward to claim that they were chased by the creature in the same general area. Moreover, they also claimed to have witnessed an odd ‘flying disc’ in the skies of that location shortly before the encoun
ter.
One January night in 1972, a deputy sheriff and another volunteer were driving down a desolate stretch of road in Drexel, North Carolina when they spotted a very strange creature cross the road in front of them. According to them, it walked on two legs and was very large, covered with gray fur; and had no head.
In August of 1972, another monster scare was taking place in West-Central, Indiana in the tiny town of Roachdale, Putnam County. The incident was sparked by the sighting of a mysterious glowing object which silently exploded over a cornfield just outside of town. Two hours later the ‘thing’ was heard in the yard of a young couple who lived nearby, and allegedly made nightly appearances in the area for the next two or three weeks thereafter.
Mrs. Lou Rogers and her infant son had gone outside to roll the car windows up one evening in early August. The sky had clouded up and it was sprinkling rain. As she stood there she heard a growling noise, low and deep, that sounded like “boo,” or “oo.” She thought nothing of it until she heard it again and realized that the sound was coming from a human voice not an animal’s. Her son was terrified.
Suddenly, it felt like someone was breathing down the woman’s neck. She quickly turned; but there was no one there. Greatly alarmed, the two beat a hasty retreat back inside the house.
Strange noises were soon being heard around their house. “It sounded as if someone was going around the place pounding on the siding and windows,” Mr. Rogers said. “Whatever it was, it must have gotten braver each night because the noise got louder and louder each night.”
Rogers borrowed a shotgun and was ready the next evening. After hearing the pounding noises, he rushed outside only to catch a fleeting glimpse of an enormously broad-shouldered, six-foot-tall shadowy figure as it disappeared into the cornfield. This happened many times. “At a certain hour,” said Lou, “it would always come around; between ten and eleven-thirty at night. You could feel it coming, somehow. It’s hard to explain. The feeling would just keep getting stronger and stronger, and then when it got strongest you knew something had to happen; the knocking would start. This happened every night for two or three weeks.” One night, as Mrs. Rogers was washing dishes, she saw the creature ducking up and down on the other side of the window at her face.
The Inhumanoids Page 40
