Late to the Game(s) - Retro! Reissued! Remastered! Oh my!

Looking for Mr. Sprinkle's silver If the world of numismatists – coin collectors – has a white whale, the Sprinkle dollar could rightfully lay claim to the title. Carter County has a rich history of outlaws and counterfeiters, but Jacob Sprinkle's silver dollars hold a unique spot in that history. Sprinkle's dollars weren't counterfeit in the traditional sense. Most counterfeit coins used base metals in place of precious metals, and they were made to look like legal U.S. tender. Not Sprinkle's coins though. His dollars were not replicas of the silver dollars coming out of the U.S. Mints, but featured their own design. An owl was inscribed on one side of the coin, and a six pointed star on the other. A one drachma coin with an owl. They weren't made from base metals either. They were minted from precious metal. In fact, during the court case against Sprinkle for counterfeiting, which took place in Grayson around 1840, it was found that the purity of the si...

  Lights in the sky puzzled farm workers and spouses Something atypical was going on in 1922. Local people were seeing strange lights in the sky, according to an article appearing in the Carter County Herald. But what they were, no one could say. The word UFO hadn’t entered the lexicon yet.  The modern UFO era wouldn’t begin for another 25 years after the article in question – almost 25 years exactly, when Kenneth Arnold spotted nine objects flying over Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947 that he described not as saucer shaped, but as moving like “a saucer skipping over the water” inadvertently helping coin the term “flying saucer” – but in July 1922 the Carter County Herald reported on some strange lights spotted on the edge of town by Bennie Gearhart and Willie Sexton. Gearhart and Sexton fetched their wives to see the lights too, which the two couples watched for several minutes as they moved about, merged together, and changed color; behaving for all the world like ...

 Big Bone residents share photos of strange lights in the sky (originally published in 2018) Joan (not her real name) claims that something weird is happening on her property near Big Bone in northern Kentucky. The fifty-nine-year-old witness says that, for the last two years, she has been seeing lights in the sky around her home, which borders Big Bone Lick State Park, and she isn't alone. Her husband, nephew, niece, and a neighbor have all seen them too, and they have photos to back up their sightings. It all started with her neighbor. She lives alone, with a large dog, and during the summer of 2016 the dog began going berserk at night. He would bark loudly at something in the dark, but when her neighbor would look out, she saw nothing. A university was conducting digs in the nearby state park, Joan explained, and at first her neighbor thought it might be their activity riling up the dog. To make sure, however, that no one was trespassing on her land, she set up trail cameras on ...

Exploring reports from the Pacific Northwest to the TriState The author pauses by a pool in Area X during a 2009 outing with the NAWAC (nee TBRC) to           check  camera traps.  When you say the word "Bigfoot" most people think of the Pacific Northwest (PNW). After all, that's the area where the phenomenon of big, hairy bipeds was given that particular name, after Californian Jerry Crew began finding large footprints around his road building equipment while constructing logging roads in the remote forests of his state. After taking casts of the prints, and going to the local newspaper with them, the name Bigfoot was coined and interest in the monster spread like wildfire. Soon northern California, Oregon and Washington would become ground zero for the quest to document the elusive creature.  But Bigfoot sightings aren't restricted to the PNW. In fact, there are reports of ape like creatures from every state in the union, with the exception...

 Bigfoot meetup draws witnesses and the curious This cast of a partial footprint was collected  by Tabatha Steagall and Chuck Everman, in  March of 2019, after following up on reports of strange sounds coming from around a Carter  County home. (Photo by Jeremy D. Wells) How many Bigfoot sightings have there been in and around Carter County? More than you might think! It's common enough that one Grahn woman, Tabatha Steagall, has started researching the sightings in her free time, and several dozen witnesses from Carter County – and a few from Greenup, Boyd and Elliott – showed up at her house last month for a get together to share their stories, thoughts, and pet theories on what folks might be seeing.  While it's more common than you might think, there is still some stigma attached to admitting you've seen an animal that mainstream science isn't yet ready to accept. So many of the witnesses, while eager to share their tales, aren't so eager to have their names ...

The word poltergeist comes from the German language and means, literally, noisy ghost. It’s an apt term for the phenomenon. Whereas traditional ghosts might move silently along the ramparts of a castle or down the hallway of an old home, where they can be seen reliving certain moments of their lives with little noise or other interaction with their environment, poltergeists let the inhabitants know when they are there. Not only are poltergeists noisy, causing crashes and bangs and moving items about, they’re more likely to be heard and experienced than seen. In fact, some paranormal researchers don’t consider poltergeist activity to be hauntings at all, at least not in the traditional sense of being the spirit of a deceased entity. Instead they class poltergeist activity as a form of psychokinesis, or the moving of objects without physically touching them. When famed psychic Uri Geller claimed to be bending spoons with nothing more than the power of his mind, this was an example of psy...

Devil lore is rich and old. In the early Christianization of Europe (4th to 8th centuries CE), traditional beliefs died hard. While folks might have given up openly worshiping or honoring the old gods and nature spirits, they kept their beliefs and traditions alive as superstition, legend, and folklore. At the same time the early church demonized these old spirits and beings, conflating them with the devils of the new, Middle Eastern religion poised to sweep the continent. Fast forward 800 to a thousand years and, while the superstition, fear, and mysticism remained, all the superficial traces of paganism had been neatly laid over with a thin Christian veneer. In this new paradigm there was no room for ambivalent spirits, no space for tricksters that taught while also tormenting. There was simply good, and there was evil. Misfortune, illness, tragedy, all could be (and were) attributed to the Devil. We see this in the 1638 case of the thunderstorm at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, in Dartmo...

The area of Blue Run/Morris Lane is still fairly rural and secluded. (image courtesy of Google Earth) On the Evening of August 17, 2004, according to the late investigator Kenny Young, three ladies from Lucasville ventured outside to check out what they believed to be headlights or powerful flashlights from someone illegally trespassing on their property. There had been a number of thefts in the area recently, according to their report, and their initial concern was that someone was there looking to steal something. Little did they know how that evening, and those to come, would play out. The lights Lisa, her roommate Sheila, and Sheila’s friend Della (last names withheld by the investigator for privacy reasons) had been spending the evening socializing at the home near Blue Run and Morris Lane when they first spotted the lights. After watching them for quite some time, as they reflected off of a mailbox, they moved into the kitchen to see if they could determine exactly where t...

Lucasville, Ohio (image courtesy of Google Earth) In December of 1896, Scioto County, Ohio would see one of its oddest, and least explainable, reports of an apparition. While presented as a sort of ghost story, it doesn’t fit your typical haunting. In fact there are some elements that seem more akin to modern Bigfoot sightings, such as late night screams and vocalizations, and others that seem to indicate an abduction or disappearance. You can’t even begin this story without addressing inconsistencies in the early reporting. While some sources list the story as first appearing in the December 14, 1896 issue of the Portsmouth Times, a review of microfiche in the local history department of the Portsmouth Public Library reveals the story actually ran in the December 16 issue. If only this were the end of the confusion, but this story leaves more questions unanswered than answered. What we do know is that the events of the evening in question began at the home of a Mr. Henry Crowe. ...

(Originally published in edited form in October, 2017 in the   Ashland Daily Independent ) On the evening of December 9, 1965 witnesses across the Midwest – from Windsor, Ontario to Kecksburg, Pennsylvania – reported spotting a bright reddish orange orb zoom through the night sky. Kecksburg, a small town along Chestnut Ridge in the Appalachian Mountains, was where it finally came to rest, crashing along the area now known as Meteor Road. A meteor is all it was, if you believe the official reports. But the people of Kecksburg say it was something entirely different. If reports from the small community are to be believed, it was the sight of Appalachia's own Roswell-type event, complete with the crash of an acorn-shaped unidentified flying object and a military response and cover-up. If the events of December 1965 were the only odd thing to happen on Chestnut Ridge, it would still be an interesting story. But according to the folks who live there, the area of Chestnut R...