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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...

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...

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...