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

Exploring Kentucky Bigfoot reports By Jeremy D. Wells We’ve previously discussed some possible local mystery primate sightings and the Ohio Grassman, but our neighbors across the river have had their fair share of Bigfoot sightings too. These tales stretch all the way back to the early exploration and founding of the state, when Daniel Boone reported shooting one of the large, hair covered man-like critters in 1782, along the modern Montgomery and Powell County borders. Boone called the creature he encountered a “Yahoo”, after the uncivilized man-like creatures featured in “Gulliver’s Travels”, one of the explorer’s favorite books. Sightings have continued since, including several reports from the Daniel Boone National Forest, a modern hotspot for Bigfoot sightings in the state. Parts of the forest are, in fact, located within Powell County, near where Boone’s historic sighting took place. Moving closer to home, Carter County has been the location of several reported sightings. Althoug...

From the opening moments of On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Journey , you get the feeling it’s going to be a little different than the other Small Town Monsters productions.  Over the last several years, Small Town Monsters (STM) have released a number of films, on a variety of subjects from Bigfoot to Mothman to Dogmen and the weirdest of the weird in classic UFO sightings. But it all started with a trilogy of Bigfoot documentaries. Director/Producer Seth Breedlove and his crew have stayed busy since then, pumping out several films a year with the production value and content steadily improving.  But Whitehall, New York, and its Bigfoot sightings, the subject of Breedlove’s second film, the 2016 release Beast of Whitehall , has never really let go of the filmmaker. In his newest release, On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Journey , Breedlove returns to those upstate New York woodlands to explore the history and depth of reports from this region. Along the way he examin...

  The Small Town Monsters (STM) films are among my favorite cryptid and folklore documentaries. Over the years director/producer Seth Breedlove and crew have looked at everything from the Bell Witch to UFOs, and Mothman to Bigfoot. But it’s that last one that got STM started. Breelove’s first three films, Minerva Monster , Beast of Whitehall , and Boggy Creek Monster , all focused on this particular cryptid.  While STM has branched out since then, they’ve come back to Bigfoot type creatures again, with MOMO: The Missouri Monster and their On the Trail Of…Bigfoot mini series.  It’s one they’ll be coming back to again with two new feature films in the On the Trail Of… series, On the Trail Of Bigfoot The Journey , and On the Trail Of Bigfoot The Discovery as the year progresses.  While we have to wait to see what those new films will bring us, those jonesing for some STM Bigfoot content prior to the full public release of The Journey this June (Kicksta...

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 ...

Original sketch of the Loveland Frog.  Some sources  attribute  this  sketch to Ray Shockey,  others to  his sister.  In Loveland, Ohio, along the banks of the Little Miami River, people claim to see Frog Men. Since at least the 1950s, if not earlier, the Loveland Frog has been a fixture in the imaginations of people living in this small, quiet, river town. Like with most legends, there are some variations  in the first story associated with the Loveland Frog. What we do know is that the witness, identified in many accounts as a Mr. Robert Hunnicutt, encountered the creatures he saw along the banks of the Little Miami River in the early morning hours (3:30 to 4 AM in some versions) during the Spring or Summer of 1955. Depending on the source, the night in question may have been in March, May, or July. He saw three or four creatures, either along the side of the road, on a bridge, or standing under a bridge, again depending on the source. R...

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...

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...