Speaker 1: People like to call Appalachia quiet, but locals no better.
When the sun goes down, the mountains don't sleep. They
watch Follow Me down the rabbit Hole about the Appalachian Mountains. Hello, friends,
and welcome back to the rabbit Hole. I'm your host, Danny,
and today we are talking about the cryptids in the
Appalachian Mountains. Because I got this cute little doll. I
guess I wouldn't call it cute, and I probably wouldn't
call it a doll either, this little figurine of the
flat Woods Monster, and so it kind of sent me
down this rabbit hole about cryptids in the Appalachian Mountains.
I started in West Virginia. Some of them branch out,
but actually most of them are in West Virginia, So
I don't know what's going on there. But if you
live in West Virginia, could you send me some folklore
like what's happening there. But thank you Dan and Lawnes, Kristin, Gabrielle,
Dolores Silas and Todd for requesting this episode. And Todd,
thank you for sending me the flat Woods Monster figurine.
I appreciate that. And of course, before we get started,
I love to think our sponsors. So thank you Wise
with Gold for sponsoring my podcast. Guys, if you want
gold and silver delivered straight to your front door for
as little as fifty dollars a month, you can go
to rabbit Hole dot gold right now. That helps them
know that you're shopping with me with my podcast, and
it really helps us support us over here at the
rabbit Hole. So we really appreciate that. The Appalachian Mountains
are older than bones, older than trees, older than memory itself.
They stretch from Alabama to Canada like a scar across
the continent, eroded, hollowed, and riddled with caves, mines, tunnels
that run deeper than maps can even follow. We're not
talking about just one cryptid. We're talking about a whole
pattern of cryptids, a cluster of encounters spanning century where
people report creatures that don't fit biology, folklore, or logic.
Some are ancient, some arrive suddenly, some seem to follow disaster,
and almost all of them are still being seen. The
most well known of these cryptids is Mothman. On November twelfth,
nineteen sixty six, near Clinton and West Virginia, five men
were in the local cemetery preparing a grave for a burial.
They looked up and saw something that looked like a
brown human being lifting off from some nearby trees, and
then it kind of like flew over their heads and
was gone. They said it didn't appear to be a bird,
more like a man with wings. And then three days later,
on November fifteenth, nineteen sixty six, the most infamous sighting
occurred near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Two young couples, Roger
and Linda Scarberry and Steven Mary Malette, reported this like
large black creature whose eyes were glowing red, standing at
the side of the road near the area. So the
TNT area was actually the site of a former World
War two munition's plant, and it's very important for this story.
They described this creature as being quote shaped like a man,
but bigger, maybe six or seven feet tall, and it
had big wings folded against its back end. Quote. However,
they were unable to discern its face due to the
hypnotic effect of its eyes. In fact, the creature's eyes
didn't seem to be on its head because it didn't
seem to have a head at all, and it didn't
have a neck. It just seemed like the eyes were
like in its chest. Freaked out by the creature's movements
because it was moving toward the door of the TNT plant,
the group sped away from the scene. They were like,
we gotta get out of here. Then they watched as
the creature spread its wings and rose into the air
to follow the car. The creature kept up with them
while they were going upwards of one hundred miles an hour,
screeching all along the way. When they got to the
city limits of Point Pleasant, the creature just stopped and disappeared.
And they weren't the only ones to see the creature
that night. Another group of four also witnessed this quote
unquote bird three different times that same night. After the
reports of this made the local newspaper, more people came
forward with similar sightings. Two volunteer firemen reportedly saw a
large bird with red eyes. A contractor, Noelle Partridge, reported
that he was watching TV when the screen suddenly went
dark and then this weird pattern filled the screen and
he heard a loud whining sound outside. He described it
like a generator winding up. His dog also started to
like howl from the front porch, so he was like,
I should go out and see what my dog's howling at. Like, obviously,
something weird is happening. So he pointed his flashlight in
the direction of where his dog was howling, and he
saw these two red circles that looked like eyes or
maybe like bicycle reflectors. Either way, he knew they weren't
animal eyes, and he was freaked out, but his dog
chased after this thing with the eyes. He went back
inside to get his gun to chase after his dog,
but decided that he was just way too scared. He
wasn't going after his dog. His dog would probably come back,
except the dog never did. And all this happened on
the same night as the other sighting is November twelfth.
The next day, on November sixteenth, Ralph Thomas and his
family spotted a funny red light and the sky that
moved and hovered above the t and tea plant. A
friend of the family, Marcella Bennett, said, quote it wasn't
an airplane and they couldn't figure out what it was
end quote. So she drove to the Thomas household with
her baby in the back seat, and as she was
getting out of the car. She was getting her baby
out of the car, this figure appeared near her car.
She said, quote it seemed as though it had been
lying down. It rose up slowly from the ground, a
big gray thing, bigger than a man, with terrible glowing eyes.
End quote. This creature scared Marcella so badly that she
actually dropped her baby. She quickly recovered. She grabbed her
baby off the ground and then like ran inside into
the Thomas household because she was freaked out out and
obviously the whole Thomas Stanley's like watching this encounter from
inside the house, so they're freaked out too. As soon
as she gets in the house, they locked the doors,
They called the police, and mothman had vanished by the
time the authorities had arrived. Marcella really didn't recover from
this event for months. She was so distraught that she
sought medical attention at the time. They didn't diagnose her
with it, but I think that she probably had PTSD
because of the memories and anxieties that haunted her from
that night on. She even swears that the creature visited
her own home on other occasions outside of this one occasion,
because it sounded as if like there was this woman
screaming outside of her house every now and then, like
just like weird sounds were happening, and it freaked her out.
But again that could be the PTSD trying to explain
it away. And because of one of the original four's
descriptions of this creature, they literally called it a bird.
A Mason County Sheriff George Johnson believed that the sightings
were just this like large green heron, So I looked
up a green heron, and green herons, compared to other herons,
are short and stocky, with relatively short legs and thick necks.
This thing didn't really have a neck, but the way
that the heron kind of holds its head, it holds
its head really close to its body, as if it
doesn't have a neck, And because it holds its head
in a certain way, maybe you couldn't tell that it
has a head. Maybe it just looks like it's all
just part of one body. But they're also only like
sixteen to eighteen inches in length, and they have yellow eyes,
not red eyes. They don't fit the description of being
this like seven foot tall thing with glowing red eyes.
Plus green herons can only fly up to thirty miles
an hour, so it would not have been able to
keep up with the car going one hundred miles an hour.
A wildlife biologist from West Virginia University, Robert L. Smith,
told reporters that the descriptions sounded more like a sand
hill crane. This is a bit more plausible because a
crane stands almost like four feet high, and it has
a wingspan of six and a half feet, and they
do have red eyes. But typically they only fly somewhere
between like twenty five and thirty five miles an hour.
They can get up to fifty miles an hour with
the right tailwind. But it just doesn't make a whole
lot of sense still because everyone describes the saying as
being like six to seven feet tall, like bigger than
the average man, with a huge wingspan, and that's making
weird noises. Smith says that the bird could have wandered
out of its natural migration pattern and then ended up
in Point Pleasant, and because it's not a common bird
that everyone would see all the time in that area,
maybe that kind of adds to it. But the bird
would have left eventually, right like, it wouldn't have just
hung out for days. It would have eventually left on
its migration pattern going back to wherever it's supposed to be, like,
why would it have stayed for so long? The press
dubbed the flying creature Mothman, after the character from the
popular Batman television series of the day. It was believed
that Mothman was living in the old T and T plant,
which is why the original foresaw him heading toward that door.
Why so many people kind of saw him in the
same area, And this would also be a great place
to hide because of the several hundred acres of woods
in large concrete domes that surrounded it. There is also
a network of tunnels in the area that made it
possible for the creature to move around underground without being seen.
Because of Mothman, along with other UFO sidings and the
fact that men in black were visiting the area, after
some of these events, people started to believe that it
was all related. This brought a lot of attention to
the area, with researchers, investigators, and monster hutters all flocking
to see if they could capture Mothman or at least
get a glimpse of him. Author John Neil was one
of the most famous authors to write about Mothman. He
said he doesn't believe that Mothman is an extraterrestrial. He
thinks we have been having encounters with the supernatural first
centuries and Mothman is just another one along the lines
of like an elder god that comes in the full
of UFO aliens, monsters, demons, angels, and even ghosts. However,
the origins of Mothman may have been found two centuries
before these incidents with the Cornstock curse. Chief Cornstock was
a prominent Shawnee leader in the Ohio Country during the
seventeen sixties and the seventeen seventies. He is known for
his role in defending Shawnee lands against colonial expansion. He
led forces in Lord Dunmore's War, including the Battle of
Point Pleasant. He was defeated, but advocated for peace afterwards.
He wanted his tribe to stay neutral in the Revolutionary War.
He was not choosing sides, and in seventeen seventy seven
he visited Fort Randolph to negotiate with American authorities, but
was imprisoned by the fort's commander instead. After a militia
man was killed near the fort, which they blamed on
the Shawnee people. Chief Cornstock and three others were murdered
by angry soldiers despite being promised safe conduct while they
were being held at the fort. He was shot eight
times before he fell on the floor, and as he
lay there dying in this smoke field room, he was
said to have pronounced his curse. He looked up to
his assassins and spoke to them, saying, quote, I was
the border Man's friend many times. I have saved him
and his people from harm. I never warred with you,
but only to protect our wigwims and lands. I refuse
to join your pale face enemies with the red coats.
I came to the fort as your friend, and you
murdered me. You have murdered by my side, my young son,
because his son was also at the fort with him.
For this, may the curse of the Great Spirit rest
upon this land. May it be blighted by nature, May
it even be blighted in its hopes. May strength of
its peoples be paralyzed by the stain of our blood
end quote and legend has it. As soon as he
finished speaking these words, he died. The other natives he
was with were tossed into the river, but Chief Cornstock
was actually buried near the fort on Point Pleasant, and
he stayed there for decades while the town was built
up around him where the old fort once stood, until
eighteen forty when they dug up his remains and then
moved him. After moving his remains a couple of times
because they moved him twice after the original burial, they
placed a grave for him in the two Indie Way Park.
This isn't the only monument made for Chief Cornstock. Another
monument that stands eighty six feet tall, was dedicated in
August of nineteen oh nine. It was a month behind schedule, actually,
because the night before the original dedication ceremony in July,
there was like a beautiful clear sky. Then all of
a sudden, lightning erupted and struck the upper part of
the crane that was supposed to put the final piece
of the monument in place the next day during the dedication,
they had to wait for the crane to be completely
repaired before they could actually dedicate the monument. The day
it was finally dedicated, another bolt of lightning struck the monument,
damn the capstone and some granite blocks. Many believe that
the lightning was vengeance tied to the curse and I mean,
the southeastern corner of Ohio and the surrounding area of
West Virginia are considered to be extremely haunted, even though
Native Americans regarded this land as a quote haunted spot,
plagued with ghost lights, phantoms, and strange creatures, Mothman being
one of them. Many tragedies and disasters were blamed on
the curse. The nineteen oh seven coal mine disaster that
happened in Manonga, West Virginia. It was actually the worst
coal mine disaster in American history, with three hundred and
ten miners being killed, and the nineteen forty four tornado
that killed one hundred and fifty people in the area,
and so many more disasters. It seems like anytime there's
like a natural disaster or just like any sort of disaster,
they blame it on this curse. Well, after a year
of torment and reports of Mothman sightings, everything seemed to
come to an end with the collapse of the Silver Bridge,
which is also blamed on the curse, but also kind
of blamed on Mothma a little bit so. On December
fifteenth of nineteen sixty seven, just over a year after
the first reported sidings of Mothman. Around five pm, a
seven foot bridge linking point Pleasant to Ohio, crossing the
Ohio River collapsed. Unfortunately, this was at the height of
rush hour, so dozens of vehicles were dropped into the
river and forty six people were killed. Now, some people
blame this tragedy on the Cornstock curse, while others think
maybe Mothman was an omen trying to warn them that
something might happen, because after the bridge collapsed, the sidings
completely stopped. But what was really odd about the bridge
collapse is that the family that lived near the T
and T plant, which, by the way, it was like
really desolate out there. It wasn't like a lot of
people lived near the TNT plant. It was kind of
in the middle of nowhere. So there was a family
that lived near and they had seen more than twelve
eerie lights that flashed above their home and vanished into
the forest at the same time as the bridge was collapsing.
And then a strange looking guy who was short, dark skinned,
vaguely oriental, and dressed in a black suit and tie
showed up at the office of a local reporter asking
her questions about the incident, and kind of like all
the UFO sidings in the area. So she was super
busy at the time, right because this bridge had just collapsed.
She's trying to deal with national reporters coming in, and
she's like the local liaison for all these people. She
didn't really have time for some guy who had no
credentials to wander into her office asking her about all
the UFO sidings in the area. So she just like
handed him as file folder full of like all the
clippings from all the sightings that people had reported. Was
like here you go, my guy, Like, I don't really
know what to do. I can't help you right now.
But he was pissed. He was like, no, I want
to talk to you about what you know about all
these UFO sidings. Well, she just kind of sent him
on his way. So he started going to all the
people's houses, like all the people that had reported something
about a UFO. He started visiting them and asking them
like very specific questions. But this man made people feel
super uneasy and uncomfortable. He claimed to be a reporter
from Ohio, like specifically like this tiny little town right
outside of Columbus, Ohio. But then when people would talk
to him about Columbus. He's like, oh, I don't know
where that is, which Columbus is one of the biggest
cities in Ohio. So and for you to say that
you lived in this tiny little town just miles away
from Columbus, you're lying. There's no way. But as with
everything they tried to explain away Mothman, the favorite excuse
was that it was an owl and not a creature.
But the size again just doesn't add up. And it
wasn't just Mothman that was being seen. There was also
poultrygeist reports, UFO sidings and strange lights and sounds happening
all throughout the same time. And what's up with this?
Like man in black showing up and asking all these questions,
like something is important about all these things. Mothman has
left such an impact on the community that they still
have a festival in his honor every single year. They
also have a museum in Point Pleasant dedicated to Mothman. Next,
we have the Flatwoods Monster. At seven to fifteen pm
on September twelfth, nineteen fifty two, brothers Edward and Fred May,
along with their friends Neil Nunley and Tommy Hier, were
playing in the lawn of the flat Woods Elementary School. Suddenly,
a bright object crossed the sky and crashed into a
hill on the property of a local farmer, ge Bailey Fisher.
The boys were only twelve and thirteen years old at
the time, and curiosity got the better of them, as
would happen with little boys, so they decided to go
check it out. Well. On their way to the crash
site just happened to be the may household, so like
Edward and Fred's house, so they went in. They told
their mom, like, hey, we just saw this crazy thing.
Their mom, Kathleen, was like, mm, you're not going by yourself,
let me come with you. So Kathleen decided to accompany
the boys, but she all wasn't gonna go alone either,
so she called her cousin, who happened to be a
West Virginia National guardsman, Eugene Lemon. They also took their
dog Richie with them like for good measure. When they
got to the hill, they saw a pulsing red light
and Eugene then shined his flashlight up the hill to
see what they could find, and what they saw was terrifying.
They saw a ten foot tall creature with a head
shaped like a spade. It was wearing what appeared to
be a dark metal dress, and this creature's hands were
twisted and clawed, and it seemed to have eyes that
glowed an eerie orange yellow color. This creature didn't walk, instead,
it actually levitated off the ground and this strange, sickening
mist just hung in the air. It did not smell good.
Upon seeing the group, the creature hissed and glided quickly
toward the witnesses, and with that the group was like, nope,
we are out of here. Some of the members of
the group actually suffered from throat irritation, vomiting a nausea,
which persisted for days after the sighting. The incident was
reported to local authorities as usual, and they went out
that same night allegedly to search for whatever the group
had seen, but claimed to have found nothing, literally nothing.
They didn't see anything, they didn't hear anything, they didn't
even smell anything. The next day, a local reporter went
out to the site and claimed to have found skid
marks in the field and a quote old gummy deposit,
which were attributed to a flying saucer by local UFO enthusiasts,
not necessarily by that reporter. Remember that this is all
happening like five years after the Roswell incident, and the
idea of UFOs had kind of been floating around and
being talked about by so many people. UFO enthusiasts were rampant.
Everybody wanted to see one. So locals thinking it was
a UFO was like this huge deal. They're like, we
have a UFO now. This creature sighting sparked national news,
as it would after Roswell. It was in the newspapers
across the country and on radio broadcasts on large networks. Reportedly,
hundreds of phone calls were received from all parts of
the country, and this story was ranked at number eleven
of the year. People from all over came to question
the may family, a minister from Brooklyn, a special reporter
from Pittsburgh, and UFO writers came to the area to investigate. Eventually,
the light was dismissed as an airplane and the creature
was dismissed as an owl sighting. But that just doesn't
make any sense. Have you ever seen a ten foot
owl ever? Besides like statues like the one at Bohemian Grove,
which we won't get into, I don't know, like maybe
you can dismiss the other attributes to an owl, like
the eyes and the gliding, but not the size, and
that doesn't explain the weird missed smell and the symptoms
the group was having. And of course these symptoms were
just said to be like a side effective hysteria. But
you know what else can cause these type of symptoms.
Mustard gas. Mustard gas is technically a viscous, oily liquid,
not a gas, but when it's dispersed, it disperses like
this fine mist of liquid droplets. That way, it can
remain airborne for hours, but it's heavier than air, so
eventually it settles. It can smell like garlic onion mustard,
or have no smell at all. Although not directly reported,
I'm sure it can also probably smell like sulfur because
it's actually a sulfur chemical, and its symptoms include nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, ie, irritation,
swelling or pain, difficulty breathing, coughing, shortness of breath, hoarseness,
and so on. The Symptoms of the gas actually depend
on how long a person is exposed to it, and
because this group was only exposed for a short time,
that could account for their few symptoms. But the mustard
gas theory doesn't really add up either, because the police
went out to investigate the site that same night and
smelled nothing. If it was mustard gas, it would have
still smelled like something, probably, or at least they probably
would have slipped on it, because it's supposed to be
this oily liquid and once it settles on the ground,
wouldn't it have made the ground slick? Even if the
ground is grass, it would have made the grass slick.
And the police were like, no, we didn't see anything,
nothing out of the ordinary. That is, if the police
actually went to investigate that night and I couldn't find
if they did or if they didn't, I don't want
to say that they don't not try to call them liars.
But that's not to say that it was even mustard gas.
The creature was drawn by Kathleen May. There's how we
get this depiction of it today. But this siding wasn't
the first siding of this monster. Not long before the
most famous siding of the monster, a woman named Audra
Harper reportedly saw this same monster. She said she saw
it walking through the woods near her home, which was
closer to the town of Heaters. Heaters is about five
miles north of Flatwoods. Harper and her friend were walking
to the door, but the road was just like not
in very good condition, so they actually decided to cut
through the woods instead, which actually made their trip shorter too.
About a half mile into their trip, they noticed this
ball of fire on one of the hills they were passing.
At first, they dismissed it because it could have been
anything somebody burning something like it literally could have been anything,
they thought like at the time it was probably a
neighbor fox chasing, but when she glanced back at it,
the fire had completely vanished. In its place stood a tall,
dark silhouette of a man shaped figure. The pair ran terrified.
After the September twelfth siding, there was a siding near
Strange Creek, about twenty miles south of flat Woods. George
and Edith Nadowski, along with their eighteen month old son,
were driving in a rural area between Clay and Braxton
County on Route four when their car suddenly died out
of nowhere. So George tried to restart the car like
anyone would, but it wouldn't restart, and it didn't help
that it was night time, so there's no one around,
and there wasn't going to be anyone around for a
while because they're like on this rural route. So the
couple were trying to figure out, like what do we
do next, Like how do we get We can't get
the car to start, Like we don't have cell phones,
so do we just like take off walking with our baby.
That's when they smelled this foul, sulfurous smell. Then a
bright light filled the air and a ten foot tall
creature hovered in front of their car. In their description,
the creature didn't have a spade shaped hood as usually
depicted and as described by the other group, but instead
its head was reptilian and bony. It dragged its lizard
like hand across the hood of the car before drifting
away into the woods. Oddly enough, as soon as the
monster was gone, the car restarted without any issues, and
then the couple, of course, like sped away. This creature
has become folklore in Braxton County. There is an ice
cream shop where you can take pictures with a painted
iteration of the mom Monster, and a museum that operates
in the town of Sutton, a few miles south of flatwoods. Unfortunately,
the monster has not been reported since the original incident
in nineteen fifty two. However, it has left its mark
on the community. They say, if you stand outside at night,
you can still almost feel it. Next, we have the
Grafton Monster. On June sixteenth, nineteen sixty four, around eleven pm,
Grafton Sentinel reporter Robert Cockrail saw a mysterious creature near
the Tiger Valley River outside Grafton, West Virginia. He was
on Riverside Drive outside of Grafton when he saw this creature.
It was a road that he knew really well. He
often took it home after work, and that's exactly what
he was doing that night. So as a reporter sometimes
you work odd hours, so it was like eleven PM
when he's driving down this road he sees this creature.
He reported that he rounded a slight curve around the
road when quote, as I glanced up, my highbeaws picked
up a huge white obstruction on the right side of
the road, standing between the road and the river bank
on a cleared off section of grass. It was very large,
standing seven to nine feet tall and about four feet wide,
and it was white with seal like skin skin that
had this like sheen to it, and it didn't have
a discernible head. Instead, its features were planted in the
middle of its chest, much like Mothman. Terrified, he rushed
home and immediately wanted to lock himself in. He wanted
to lock his doors and just like be done, but
he reports on things like this, so instead he called
his friends to come help him investigate this creature further
and where the creature was found. But when the group
got back to the scene, the monster was gone and
the only evidence to prove the monster was there and
wasn't just made up was the fact that there was
some grass and bushes flattened around in the place that
Robert said it was standing, but there were no tracks
of this monster. As they looked around more because they
were there for over an hour trying to do an
investigation into this creature, a low whistling sound seemed to
follow them, and they felt like the sound was actually
coming from the river. The next day at work, Robert
was quiet, like he didn't really want to say anything
because he was worried what people might think, like maybe
he's crazy, or maybe it was a hoax. Maybe he's
like trying to make it up for a good story. However,
Robert said, quote, it was news and it was my
duty to report on it. So he wrote an article
and gave it to his editor, who printed the story.
But the print piece was cynical of the monster at best.
Authorities were notified to the monster and did a routine investigation, which,
of course, like turned up nothing. But after reading of
the monster, over one hundred teens from the area took
up the search for the beast, and over twenty of
them reportedly caught glimpses of it. Naturally skeptical of teenagers,
he questioned several of them quote and found their reports
tallying to the finest detail end quote. There were other
reports of sightings from adults and more teens, and while
some he believed to be actual sightings, others didn't seem
to match, like they were just looking for attention. Interestingly,
a week prior to Robert seeing the monster in Gaft
in West Virginia, a nine foot tall monster was reported
in Michigan. This monster had been reported in the Sister
Lakes area of Michigan on and off for the two
years leading up to this article. In nineteen sixty four,
a local lady claimed to have been chased by this
nine foot tall, five hundred pound monster into her house
until her dog barked at it and scared it away.
This monster was described by others as being covered in
black hair up to its neck and having eyes that
glowed like an animal that had light shined in its eyes.
This Michigan monster made noises like a crying baby or
like a tamed goose. Deputies in the area were determined
to find the monster and solve the case. However, the
idea of the monster was so tantalizing that people had
come from all around to see it, and the traffic
was so outrageous the deputies could barely get through to
the sighting of the monster because so many people wanted
to see this monster. At the time of the article,
there had been ten credible witnesses of the Michigan Monster.
Because that article had been published by the Grafton Sentinel,
it may have led to more excitement. When Robert published
his article about the monster he had seen. Like others,
this creature was dismissed. They chalked it up to a
quote combination of spring fever, lack of recreational facilities, and
the recent publicity of the monster in Michigan. Although some
researchers believe the Grafton Monster is part of the same
phenomenon as the flat Woods Monster because it appears humanoid, mechanical,
and silent or silent when it's seen at least, even
though there seems to be noises when you can't see it,
I think we can all agree that something weird is
going on in the area, especially because it seems to
be running through the entire state of West Virginia. Between Offman,
the Grafton Monster, and the Flatwood's Monster, this next cryptid
kind of runs throughout all of Appalachia. He's the Bigfoot
of Appalachia. Now, long before the term bigfoot existed, Appalachian
settlers told stories of the wood Booger, a towering, foul
smelling creature that screamed from the ridgelines. This bigfoot like
creature is said to roam the forest of southwest Virginia
and carries off small children. Like the Boogeyman, the wood
Booger originally meant ghost or haunt, but by the late
nineteen sixties it also meant monster or animal. In the
southern US, this creature is also called a Yahoo sometimes
which is generally associated with wild men. In Australia. It
is the Australian word for devil or evil spirit. The
indigenous tribes actually spoke of the Yahoo a wild man
that stole food, followed hunters, and punished those who disrespected
the forest. Unlike the Pacific Northwest big Foot, the Appalachian
variants are described as being more aggressive, more vocal, and
more territorial. This creature has been seen in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee,
and Kentucky, as well as parts of Georgia. Is described
as a large, hairy, bipedal humanoid and it's somewhere between
eight and twelve feet tall, with dark or black fur
and glowing eyes that are either red or green. Witnesses
claim that it is half ape, half man. The signing
of this creature is normally in dense forests and remote terrain,
which provides ideal cover for the creature. Now, I'm not
gonna go super far into this because I've already done
an entire episode on Bigfoot. I'll link that in the
show notes. This creature is just Bigfoot of Appalachia. Lastly,
we're going to talk about the moon eyed people. Or
like the White Beings. They are a group of bearded,
white skinned people who are said to have lived in Appalachia,
that is, until the Cherokee expelled them. The stories of
these creatures have largely been passed down orally through the
Cherokee people. These moon eyed people were said to have
been unable to see during certain phases of the moon.
They also couldn't see during the daytime. They could only
come out at night when the moon was not full.
They built fortifications in the mountain, but during the phase
of the moon where they were unable to see, the
Creek people annihilated the race. It's been long assumed that
these people were an albino race because another description described
them as very small people who were perfectly white, and
every description has them having really big blue eyes. Most
of the sightings happened in Georgia and before the removal
of the Cherokee people. What's interesting about this Cherokee lore
is that they described these creatures as being a separate
race of people, rather than the supernatural beings that are
fairly common in Cherokee mythology. After the attack of these
creatures by the Creek people, whoever was left actually fled
to the smoky mountains and we're never seen again. All
this to say that we have these monsters, But what
if these monsters are real? What if they're not just
made up? It's easy to dismiss something that we've never seen,
but there have been so many witnesses to these creatures
that it's hard to believe that this many people would
have made them up. Could they be aliens or vampires
or just different creatures that are hiding in the forests
of the mountains. Often the question or comment arises about
people coming forward after an initial sighting. A lot of
people believe that this is just like copycast sightings, that
they're coming forward they want attention. But I think there's
a logical explanation for this. People are scared they won't
be believed. We see this in UFO sidings, CRYPTID sidings,
and so many more. They don't speak up because who
would believe them. Plus they are probably second guessing themselves,
so they're wondering if they actually saw what they saw.
Then somebody else says something about it, they're like, no,
I did see that same thing too, So they're almost
like looking for validation of what they had seen. We
have other questions as to why all this is happening
in this region, Why in the Appalachian Mountains. It's believed
that the veil is thin in this region, The supernatural
veil that usually keeps them in their place and us
in our place slips sometimes, and Appalachia just seems to
be like the perfect place to do that, just because
it feels, like I said at the beginning, a scar
across the continent. Maybe that's where the veil isn't as thick.
And this also happens with timelines and dimensions as well.
Locals talk of places where the earth breathes, where compasses spin,
and where radios crackle with voices that aren't really there.
So is this just like a very supernatural place? But
what if it's not supernatural at all? What if they
have always been there? I mean, the entire region is
riddled with natural cave systems, salt mines, coal seams, abandoned
rail tunnels, and sealed military corridors that don't appear on
public maps. Since the seventeen hundreds, entire mountains have been
hallowed out, sometimes to the point of collapsing, while others
are sealed or just simply abandoned during the Cold War,
these tunnels became valuable because they offered natural shielding from radiation.
They were remote with low population cover, and no one
really tracked like what was going on with these tunnels anymore.
Everyone just kind of like abandoned them and left. So
it was a perfect place to go if there was
going to be a nuclear attack. Declassified documents confirm underground
weapons storage, radar installations, and communication hubs throughout the Appalachian region.
The problem is we don't know exactly what was being
tested in this region, and that could be the thing.
What if they were and chemicals of some sort to
create these creatures like Mothman. It really could be straight
out of comic book. Why else would they write such
strange things in comic books if they weren't leading us
to something. Here's the thing. We seem to have clusters
of sightings, So for Mothman, the sidings cluster around that
TNT area which was the former weapons manufacturing plant, the
power plant, and the river crossing The Flatwood's Monster sightings
occurred during a period of intense military radar testing. There
are commonalities about all the sightings of the cryptids, even
though they weren't exactly close to one another, so they're
typically seen near a fault line, quartz rich rocks, and
some sort of water source, be that a river or
like an underground water movement of some sort kind of
makes you wonder, like, what's in the water. Why are
all these cryptids near water? And maybe they just need
water to survive like we do, but it seems interesting
these conditions generate electromagnetic anomalies like people missing time, equipment failures, hallucinations,
and severe dread. But something we really need to talk
about or add in is the RQZ. So the RQZ
is the National No Radio Quiet Zone. It's about thirteen
thousand square miles in parts of eastern West Virginia, Western Virginia,
and a bit of Maryland where radio transmissions are restricted
to protect scientific and intelligence facilities, especially the Green Bank
Observatory and the Sugar Grove Site. In fact, Green Bank
is so shut down that you can't even use a
cell phone, Wi Fi or a microwave near it, Like
that's how secure it is in that area. Although some
of the cryptids we talked about are located outside of
the zone, there have been some sightings inside this quiet zone.
And that's not to say that these creatures don't live
inside the zone and then like kind of use the
tunnel system to maneuver and make trips I guess outside
of the zone. Just makes you wonder, like, what's going
on with this no radio quiet zone. What we know
for sure is that these cryptids try to keep to
low civilization zones, including dense forests, old mining regions, and
areas of strong geomagnetic variations. They don't want to be
seen or found. They want to be left alone. But
what do you think are these creatures of this world?
Are they supernatural? Are they real at all? Is it
all just made up for attention? I think that's too far.
I think that's going too far with all the witnesses.
But I'd love to know your opinions, your comments. Leave
them below, and until next week, stay skeptical, my friends,
and I'll see you all then. Hey, friends. The rabbit
Hole is an independent podcast written, hosted, and produced by
me Danny Mercy. Special thanks to Lindsay for research and writing.
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