As a young boy, we used to frequent my uncle's general store at Pilgrim,
Kentucky in rural Martin County. We would gather around a pot-bellied stove
and the older men would converse about politics, etc. One night I
specifically remember a story told by a Baptist Minister who lived in one of
the most remote areas of the county. His home was about 8-10 miles from
where we lived. The house he lived in at the time was about 2-3 miles from
the nearest neighbor's. When the story took place (years before I was born)
I don't know how far the next house would have been.
The area was in southeastern Martin County near the Pike County line and is
a very remote area. A large tract of this land was and is owned by a large
landholding company for its natural resources (coal, timber, natural gas, etc.)
Anyway, here is the story as it was told to all of us sometime between (1979-83).
This man was a Baptist minister as I remember (or at least he became one
not long after). He said that when his oldest daughter was maybe 3 years
old (she was probably 25 at the time, thus it probably happened in 1956-57).
He had just came into his home after doing some chores on his farm (feeding
his hogs I think) and the sun was beginning to set. His wife was in the
kitchen preparing dinner and the children were milling about. All of a
sudden, the hairs on his neck began to rise and he felt as if he was being
watched. Soon after, his wife screamed and dropped a pan in the floor. She
froze and looked out the kitchen window, a exclaimed for him to look up the
hill. He came to the window and looked up on the side of the hill. What he
saw there scared him to his very bones. About 75-150 feet up the hill was
an animal that stood upright on two legs.
He immediately told his wife to get the children and bring his gun,
slowly. He stayed at the window watching this being. While he watched it,
it stared back at him. He said it had brown fur all over its body except
for its face (which looked like a man's as best he could see at that
distance. He said its eyes looked red. He also said that it must have been
7 or 8 feet tall! At first he admitted he thought it was a bear or
something, but what happened next changed that thought altogether.
As his wife returned asking him what it could be, they both watched it
walk over to a tree stump he had recently cut (he had clear-cut the hillside
in that area). Once it reached the stump, it sat down on it! This is how
he knew it wasn't a bear. This man and his wife did not have a car at the
time so they stayed there in front of the kitchen window. They said the
thing stared (watched) them until it was too dark to see it. He said he
stayed up all night there in the kitchen with his wife and children watching
and waiting to see what it would do. He added that they were both scared to
death and several of the children were crying. His only protection was a
shotgun or deer rifle (I'm not sure which he said). When dawn came the next
morning, the thing had left and they didn't know where it went. He said
that some people could claim that they didn't believe in Bigfoot, but the
Baptist Minister did because he had seen it and he would swear it exists.
I've grown up in this man's community and he has never been known to
lie, drink, or anything. He seems honest and forthright in his conduct and
was in total command of all of his faculties at this time. He is probably
in his 60's or early 70's now. He had no motivation for telling any tall
tales to us. And he was addressing the older men with the story, not
creating a story for us young boys. I just listened in as he was recounting
it. He almost seemed as if he had tears in his eyes as he told it. Yet I
did find it odd that he left that night to go back to the same home he had
been in when he experienced it. Oh, one more thing, he said he hadn't seen
it since then but he had seen some "signs" (tracks) of it from time to time
after the event. Again, this is a second hand account of a story that is
over 40 years old and it may not benefit you. However this is an extremely
remote area and huge parcels of it have no settlement on them whatsoever.
This area is used often by local hunters, 4-wheelers, etc.
Story emailed to Bobbie Short by Kevin G. Lowe (pandy@kih.net), Thu, 28 Dec 2000
