“At 8 a.m. on Sunday, January 12th, 1969, I drove with Jaye P. Paro and Barbara LaMonica of Huntington, New York, to the area of Mount Misery for the purpose of taking photographs of the landscape. We pulled our car into a partial clearing on the left side of Mt. Misery Road, then decided to continue on foot. We decided to photograph an area which was located about five hundred feet from our car.
Jaye was ready to take her first shot, when through the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a moving black object. Knowing we were completely alone in this desolate area, we were very scared. Immediately Jaye turned and snapped the first two pictures. The three of us were horrified to see the figure of something that resembled a human, disfigured face, wild black hair, and dressed in a long black garment.
It retreated immediately further into the bushes, made no sounds, and made no attempt to communicate with us. Frozen in her tracks, Jaye dropped her camera. I picked it up and shot the two remaining pictures. Barbara started to run to the car. Jaye and I followed and we took off in a cloud of dust.” Signed; Richard Dimartino.
Beyond magazine published one picture from the series in July, 1969, along with an article by Paro on other unexplained events on Mount Misery. The picture showed a dark figure with very bushy hair extending its pale, long-fingered hand toward the photographer.
One night in June of 1970, a farmer, known only by the initials, D.K., drove the short distance to his future wife’s home in Sharpsville, Indiana. While the two were visiting, they were both inexplicably struck by intense feelings of “dizziness, moodiness and fear.” They were at a loss to explain these unwarranted sensations, so they decided to drive out to the farm in hopes of shaking them by taking in some fresh summer air.
It was a dark night, with patches of fog hanging lazily over the lonely country road. Suddenly, they came upon an “even darker area” which extended upward from the ground. When they entered it they were surprised to see that the vehicle’s headlights didn’t seem to extend as far beyond the car as usual, and the air had grown strangely warmer. To top off the bizarre evening, when they returned home the family dog, Zipper, attacked them twice, even though it had known the man since it was a puppy and had never before shown hostility towards him or its owner. “Both of us were pretty shaken up,” he told two investigators six years later.
About a year after the events of that strange evening, the ‘creature’ first appeared. “One night around 10:00 or 10:30 pm. in June or July, (1971) all the dogs started barking,” he recalled. “I went outside to investigate and there was my dog lunging at a thing that was standing in a low spot. It was still taller than I was.” When the witness stepped out of the door of his home the creature, which was standing only twenty-five feet away, turned around and looked at him.
“It was big, real big. The head wasn’t shaped like an ape’s and I don’t think it looked like a man’s head either. It looked like a helmet but it was furry. It didn’t look natural to anything zoological on earth. It just didn’t look right for the ape-looking body that it had. It didn’t look like an ape’s head or a human head. It was dark and I couldn’t see too well for all the details.”
Moreover, the thing stank to high heaven. “The smell of it almost made you want to barf,” D.K. said, “like a decaying meat and vegetable combination.” The monster, which was nine feet tall, had no neck and long arms and was covered with stringy, dirty looking hair, stood there stooped over like an ape, growling in a “deep rumbling manner” and swinging at the dog with its long arms.
“It would swing at the dog,” the witness claimed. “It was funny the way it swung. Kind of like it was slow motion. Its strokes were coming close to the dog. It wasn’t like a prize-fighter throwing a haymaker at an opponent. It was, you know, more like a slow motion type of thing. The dog would run up to it and lunge, teeth and paws out, but seemed like before it got there, it would hit the ground and jump back. And before it jumped back, the thing would swing and barely miss it. And this went on for two or three minutes.”
D.K. stood watching the bizarre, unnatural scene as if entranced. It was as if the creature was confused or uncertain, “like an animal or human that was put on the spot and really didn’t know what to do.” Recovering his senses, the witness ran back into the house, desperately searching for the shells to put in his shotgun. By the time he returned outside, the creature was lumbering off in the direction of the creek. Even though he knew it to be pointless since the monster was now out of range, he fired two shots at it as it departed.
Badly shaken, the witness immediately called the sheriff, who openly laughed at the witness and his story. Though the thing returned a total of five more times over the course of the following year, D.K. never again notified the authorities for assistance.
One evening around midnight three or four weeks later, the inhumanoid reappeared. D.K. was watching television when he heard the dogs barking furiously outside. He grabbed his shotgun and stepped out. One of the dogs appeared to be tracking the thing so he followed it as it ran barking toward an old cemetery that was close by.
“When I got down to the creek,” D.K. said, “the dog started running up alongside the creek, barking and looking down in it. I couldn’t keep up.” He heard splashing in the water of the creek, knowing it wasn’t the dog, and again smelled the sickening stench of the monster. “I knew the creature had to be a few yards ahead of him (the dog). I proceeded to follow him. I followed him clear back to Beatty’s woods then I turned around and came back; the dogs were restless part of the night, probably an hour or so afterwards.”
The monster’s next appearance was later that same year, as D.K. was awakened one morning around 4:30 a.m. by the barking of the dogs. Looking out the bedroom window he saw the creature for the third time moving around down by the creek. By this time he was determined to kill the beast, if only to prove to his friends that he was no liar. Some of them had sat up all night with him on occasion, in the hope that they would see the monster themselves, always to no avail. He armed himself and hurried outside, tracking the beast until he lost the trail in the thick woods. He didn’t know it until later, but his mother had watched him leave that morning, and saw the thing double back on him and trail him from behind for a short distance before it disappeared back into the trees.
That winter, as he was out rabbit-hunting, he discovered a small pond which had mysteriously dried up. Even more mysterious was the thirty to forty-foot circular depression he found beside it.
Inside the depression all the dead, crushed weeds and grass were laid down in a perfect counterclockwise swirl pattern. He was at a loss to explain it, of course. He had never even heard of ‘crop circles’ and/or their association with alleged UFO landing sites.
One evening in the spring of 1972, the creature apparently tried to break into the farmhouse while D.K.’s now wife and sister-in-law were alone inside. After returning from a night on the town, the two brothers found their wives in an hysterical state and learned that the women had heard the thing trying to pry open an aluminum storm window just minutes before.
Grabbing the guns and flashlights the brothers immediately went to investigate. The putrid smell of the creature still lingered in the area, they said, and they found that one corner of the screen had, indeed, been pulled out away from the frame. But “It wasn’t pried out,” D.K. claimed. “There were no marks on it. The screen on the inside wasn’t cut or anything. It didn’t look like anything had happened using a tool; no marks on the wood around the frame. That’s what led me to believe it had to be something super to do it. No marks on the window and it got me shook up again.”
The next time he saw it, a week or two later at 11:30 in the evening, it was again moving along the creek in the same direction it always went. This time he decided to leave it alone. When it returned again the following autumn, however, D.K. once again grabbed his gun and gave chase. “But I never did get a shot at it.” he recalled. “Seems like every time I’d try to shoot...it always got somethi
ng in between me and it. It was cunning. It knew just how far to keep away from me and what to keep in front of me to keep me from firing on it. This last time I chased it, it went through the cemetery. I was by myself, no dogs, and I again chased it up toward the woods. Then I doubled back to the cemetery and waited, but it never did come back.”
The witness also reflected on how the creature only seemed to come around during fair weather, and never appeared during the winter months.
On July 25th, 1972, a Pekin, Illinois resident claimed to see something “big” swimming in the Illinois river near Peoria. Later on that evening, Leroy Summers of Cairo claimed he saw a ten-foot tall, white, hairy creature standing upright next to the Ohio River Levee. Two nights later, on the 27th, two reliable witnesses told police that they’d seen a ten-foot-tall “something” which looked like “a cross between an ape and a cave-man.” They further described it as having a gray face with long, U-shaped ears and thumbs with elongated second joints. One witness said that the creature smelled like a “musky, wet-down dog.”
The East Peoria Police Department claimed that they’d taken more than 200 calls concerning the creature the following evening. After that, monster reports were frowned upon in the area with the police commissioner threatening to administer alcohol testing to anyone making such reports. The following year, when a White County resident reported another sighting, Sheriff Roy Poshard, Jr. threatened to arrest him on the spot.
Pennsylvania wasn’t the only place forced to endure a monster scare in 1973. At about the same time as the events in PA were taking place, a similar monster scare was unfolding over in south-western Kentucky where, in the fall of that year, farmers around the small town of Albany were confronted with another ‘impossible’ beast. This one left large, three-toed prints, could walk on both two legs and all four, had a taste for killing livestock, and was even seen in the company of its mate and “cub.”
The male of the ‘family unit’ reportedly stood, when on all fours, three feet tall at the shoulders; when it walked on two legs, around six feet in height. It was covered in dark brown or black hair, and its tail, which it carried like a cats, was long, bushy and black. According to one witness, it had a head shaped “like an ape/human with a flat face and nose and large nostrils. Its ears are like mule ears and will perk up.” One eyewitness, a man named Rick Hall wrote to the Indianapolis Zoological Society concerning the Kentucky events, and was referred to investigator Loren Coleman. Hall later related to Coleman:
“This animal is very cunning, agile and strong. It can toss a 300-lb sow around with ease and can leap over fences, with a good distance between foot tracks; 10 ft. to 15 ft. It has wiped out two herds of pigs and has been said to have killed a calf and a dog. At night when it is in the area the livestock all start running the pens, while all the wildlife seems to have disappeared from the local area. The grandfather of the girl I’m engaged to owns the mountain, and it’s supposed to be loaded with wildlife. But since the sightings the wildlife has moved and I’m not sure why.
We tried to track this animal with several dogs, but after they caught its scent, they wouldn’t track it, acted scared. The farmers have seen this animal watch them as they work in the fields as well as engineers who are building a new road in the area. My girl’s aunt went home one evening and found it just outside their back door eating old table scraps. She shot at it six times with a pistol and 17 times with a .22 rifle and she says she missed it. But the animal ran about 100 yards and sat at the edge of the woods and cornfield, sat on its haunches and watched her, but disappeared when her husband went after it.”
Hall also claimed to have seen two adult creatures and one “cub,” and it was the local opinion that the things dwelled in the caves and abandoned mines in the area.
In late October eighteen-year-old Gary Pierce was allegedly chased down off the mountain by the beast, traumatizing him so badly that he had to be put in the hospital and treated for hysteria. Finally, a farmer named Charlie Stern spotted the creature on his farm as it killed his livestock. He reportedly fired on the beast, which then ran away on two legs leaving nine-toed prints (!) behind. It was also covered in dark hair and had a bushy tail. Stern then tracked the prints to a nearby cave but, wisely, chose not to enter.
The quieting effect inhumanoids sometimes have on their surroundings have also been noted many times. I remember that, as a child living on Mound Ridge Road, every creature in the area, every bird, frog and cricket, would suddenly become silent when the monster was near. Allen V. Noe, writing in the January 1974 issue of Pursuit magazine, spoke of a particular spot of woods in Ohio from which the cries of a hairy inhumanoid were often heard:
“The woods where the cries were heard seems to be dying, and many trees have fallen. There appears to be an almost complete absence of birds or animals in this woods, yet across the field there is another wooded area where everything is lush and green, and where animal and bird-life abounds.”
Hardly a sighting of Bigfoot takes place without the witness noticing the apparent lack of a neck on the creature, describing how the head just seemed to sit right on top of its wide shoulders. What, then, was it that was seen in the Kootenay National Park in British Columbia, Canada, in September of 1975? According to a local newspaper, The Echo, a witness had spoken of an encounter he had had with a bizarre, man-like animal between Marble Canyon and Eisenhower Junction.
He described the thing as being seven feet tall, upright and hairy with a long neck. It was a rusty-tan color, he claimed, and had an ape-like face and long arms. He was sure of the details because the sighting had taken place during the day, “...in good light.” About fifteen feet from the edge of the timber the creature, on seeing the witness, backed slowly into the woods with a “half-step, full-step motion” and disappeared from sight.
A Rochester, Minnesota woman and her children saw a truly frightening hairy inhumanoid while driving home one night in December 1979. It was seven feet tall, she later told Olmsted County police, and very ugly with a huge mouth and upturned, pig-like nose. “It tried to cover its eyes from the headlights,” she claimed, “The arm didn’t bend like a normal arm.”
The Sturgis Vampire
What was it that paranormal investigator Jan Thompson witnessed while driving alone along the back roads of western Kentucky on a snowy Christmas Eve back in 1983? It was certainly no animal that she had ever seen or heard of. The blood-flecked, albino creature looked like something out of a nightmare and ran and stood on two legs like a man, glaring at her with its fiery red eyes, breathing heavily, fangs exposed. The vision of the bloody, inhumanoid creature standing there in her headlights has haunted her for over twenty five years, yet it still seems like only yesterday to her.
“It was while traveling these back roads between Sturgis and Morganfield Kentucky in Union County,” she told me, “that a decidedly remarkable creature crossed my path. The incident left me in such utter terror that, from then on, I refused to drive alone at night along any deserted or isolated country roads again. This wasn’t an apparition...
It was snowing that evening along Hwy 60 on my journey from Evansville Indiana, where I worked at the time, back to Kentucky to see my family for the holidays. Although it was very late, close to midnight on Christmas Eve, 1983, the roads were well traveled. Not bumper-to-bumper congestion, but enough of a line that it got on my nerves. The cars ahead of me evidently were not sure of the surface of the road, as it was snowing, and they were keeping to an extremely safe speed, almost 30 mph below the limit. I could not see the beginning of the line as it stretched along into the darkness ahead, nor the end that drew out behind me. It was just a steady flow of cars going about twenty-five miles per hour.
I was confident that I could travel safely at a higher rate of speed, so I decided to take an old country back road that would cut around the parade of cars and hopefully leave me ahead of the traffic where it joined Hwy 60 again about 15 miles down. The old back road I chose ran past some of the
abandoned Peabody Coal Mines. The snow itself had been powdery enough that it scattered in whirlwinds as I drove through it, revealing a relatively dry pavement underneath. The heavier snowfall must have stayed north of this road because Hwy 60 had been much more slippery and slushy in spots. This allowed me to do at least 35 to 40 miles per hour.
The digital readout on the dash read 12:17, and I thought to myself ‘Merry Christmas.’ At precisely that time I caught a movement in my peripheral vision coming from a field on the left side of the road. My first impulse was that it was a deer running over the expanse of the field and leaping upwards and over clumps of brush. Being familiar with the road, I knew that up ahead was a very sharp curve to the right. Letting up on the accelerator and lightly touching the brakes I slowed my vehicle down to about 20 miles per hour to anticipate the ‘deer’ crossing my path as it was traveling closer to my side of the road. It remained a murky object until it reached the beam from my headlights and I saw that this was not a deer. Nor was it a four-legged animal of any type. It ran on two legs; human-like legs.”
As the creature deliberately moved towards the road from the field just inside the curve, she feared a collision would ensue. So she hit the brakes hard, fighting to keep control of the vehicle, then came to a stop a few yards in front of the strange figure, which had now jumped onto the pavement and was standing at a halt in the beam of her headlights.
“It appeared to be a naked man, relatively tall; about six and a half feet in height,” she claimed, “with milky-white flesh that blended in with the snow. He was raised up on the balls of his large feet with his legs slightly spread apart as if preparing to pounce, and his particularly hairy back was hunched over slightly with his arms elevated half way up from his sides for balance.
The Inhumanoids Page 44
