Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: If you've been riding along with me for a while,
Speaker 1: you know how this works. By now, every stop we
Speaker 1: pull into a new state, we find the thing the
Speaker 1: locals whisper about, and we dig into it the way
Speaker 1: I dig into everything. We've stood on the banks of
Speaker 1: a lake in Idaho waiting for Charlie. We've walked the
Speaker 1: fields outside Van Meter, Iowa, where a winged thing with
Speaker 1: a glowing horn shot out of an old coal mine,
Speaker 1: and terrorized a whole town for a week.
Speaker 2: We've circled Folk Lake.
Speaker 1: In Indiana hunting a five hundred pounds snapping turtle named Oscar.
Speaker 1: We've chased sinkhole serpents across Kansas weak Country, and stood
Speaker 1: in the dark timber of northern California listening for footsteps
Speaker 1: that were too heavy to be a deer. Tonight we
Speaker 1: crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky. And before I say
Speaker 1: one more word about this, stop, I need to do
Speaker 1: something I've never had to do on this show, not
Speaker 1: like this. I need to give you a warning, and
Speaker 1: I need you to actually hear it. Because tonight's location
Speaker 1: is not in a lake or an empty stretch of
Speaker 1: forest road. Tonight's location has killed people, real people, teenagers,
Speaker 1: a young woman on vacation with her boyfriend. Their names
Speaker 1: are in the newspaper archives and their families are still
Speaker 1: out there, and every single one of them died in
Speaker 1: the same place, on the same structure, chasing the same story.
Speaker 1: I'm about to tell you. So here's the rule, and
Speaker 1: it is not negotiable. Do not go to the pope
Speaker 1: Lick trestle, Do not climb the fence, do not walk
Speaker 1: the tracks, do not stand under it at midnight with
Speaker 1: your phone out, and do not, under any circumstances, set
Speaker 1: one foot on that bridge. The trestle is private property
Speaker 1: owned by an active freight railroad. Trains cross it day
Speaker 1: and night with no fixed schedule you can count on.
Speaker 1: There is no walkway, there is no railing, there is
Speaker 1: no safe spot to stand when a train comes, and
Speaker 1: a loaded freight train cannot stop for you, no matter
Speaker 1: how hard the engineer lays on the brakes. By the
Speaker 1: time you hear the math is already against you. You
Speaker 1: can hear this whole story from your couch. That's the
Speaker 1: entire point of this show. I go so you don't
Speaker 1: have to. And in this case, I didn't even go
Speaker 1: on to the structure myself because I've seen what a
Speaker 1: train does to a human body. Nobody needs to see that.
Speaker 1: Nobody needs to cause that. Okay, warning delivered, and I
Speaker 1: mean every word of it. Now, let me tell you
Speaker 1: about the goat man. Because Kentucky has a lot of monsters.
Speaker 1: It has more bigfoot reports than most people would ever guess.
Speaker 1: It has lake creatures and hill haints and a whole
Speaker 1: catalog of things screaming in the hollows after dark. But
Speaker 1: there's one legend in this state that stands apart from
Speaker 1: all of them, and it stands apart because it's the
Speaker 1: only one where the body count is real, documented and
Speaker 1: still climbing. They call him the Pope Lick Monster, half man,
Speaker 1: half goat. He lives under a railroad trestle on the
Speaker 1: eastern edge of Louisville, and according to the legend, he
Speaker 1: doesn't chase you. He calls you, he gets inside your head,
Speaker 1: or he mimics a voice you trust, and he draws
Speaker 1: you up onto that bridge, out over the creek, out
Speaker 1: onto eight stories of open steel with no way down,
Speaker 1: and then the train comes. That's the legend. Stay with
Speaker 1: me tonight, because by the end of this episode I'm
Speaker 1: going to make the case that the Pope Licked Monster
Speaker 1: might be the most honest monster in America. Whether he's
Speaker 1: flesh and blood, whether he's a ghost story, or whether
Speaker 1: he's something the community built on purpose. He tells you
Speaker 1: exactly what he is going to do to you, and
Speaker 1: people keep going anyway. Let me set the scene, because
Speaker 1: the location matters more in this story than in any
Speaker 1: other episode we've done. Drive East out of Louisville on
Speaker 1: Taylorsville Road, out past the subdivisions, out to where Jefferson
Speaker 1: County starts to loosen its collar and turn back into
Speaker 1: farm country. There's a little community out there called Fisherville,
Speaker 1: rolling ground creeks, hardwood bottoms. Running through it is a
Speaker 1: stream called Pope Lick Creek, which feeds into a bigger
Speaker 1: stream called Floyd's Fork. If the name sounds strange to you,
Speaker 1: a lick in old Kentucky talk is a salt lick,
Speaker 1: a place where the ground held minerals and the deer
Speaker 1: in buffalo would come to work it with their tongues.
Speaker 1: The Pope family owned land along the creek way back,
Speaker 1: and so it became Pope's Lick, and eventually Pope Lick.
Speaker 1: Nothing sinister in the name at all, just settlers and
Speaker 1: salt and deer. Then there's the bridge. The Pope Lick
Speaker 1: Trestle is a railroad bridge built to carry a rail
Speaker 1: line across the valley of Pope Lick Creek, and it
Speaker 1: also passes over South Pope Lick Road down below. The
Speaker 1: original crossing there goes back to the eighteen eighties, and
Speaker 1: the steel structure standing today has been rebuilt and reinforced
Speaker 1: over the years into the thing you can see now.
Speaker 1: It is enormous. The span runs somewhere in the neighborhood
Speaker 1: of seven hundred and seventy feet from end to end,
Speaker 1: which is longer than two football fields, and at its
Speaker 1: highest point it stands roughly eight to nine stories above
Speaker 1: the creek bottom. It's a working freight line currently operated
Speaker 1: by Norfolk Southern, and trains still cross it regularly, long
Speaker 1: heavy freight trains, the kind that take a mile or
Speaker 1: more of track to come to a stop once the
Speaker 1: engineer dumps the air. Now here's the part I need
Speaker 1: you to understand, because this detail is the trap at
Speaker 1: the center of the whole legend. The trestle is single track.
Speaker 1: There is no pedestrian walkway. There are no refuge platforms,
Speaker 1: no bailout spots, no ladder you can scramble down. The
Speaker 1: ties are spaced so you can see daylight between them
Speaker 1: all the way down to the creek. If you're standing
Speaker 1: in the middle of that span and a train enters
Speaker 1: the bridge, you have three options, and all three of
Speaker 1: them are terrible. You can try to outrun a freight
Speaker 1: train across hundreds of feet of open ties. You can
Speaker 1: lie down and pray the train passes over you, which
Speaker 1: does not work because the equipment hanging under those cars
Speaker 1: rides lower than a human body.
Speaker 2: Or you can go over the side, and.
Speaker 1: The side is a drop that has killed and broken
Speaker 1: people all by itself. There's one more cruel detail. People
Speaker 1: who live near that valley will tell you. The trestle
Speaker 1: plays tricks with sound, the way the ground rolls, the
Speaker 1: way the creek bottom channels noise. A train can be
Speaker 1: almost on top of the bridge before you hear it clearly.
Speaker 1: Add to that a myth that has floated around Louisville
Speaker 1: for decades, the idea that only one train a day
Speaker 1: uses that line, and you have a perfect machine for
Speaker 1: killing trespassers because the one train a day story is
Speaker 1: flat wrong.
Speaker 2: Always was.
Speaker 1: The trains come when they come at all hours, and
Speaker 1: the people who climbed up there, believing they had checked
Speaker 1: the schedule, found that out in the worst way a
Speaker 1: person can find anything out.
Speaker 2: So that's the stage.
Speaker 1: A giant steel bridge over a quiet creek in the
Speaker 1: farm fringe of Louisville deadly by design, not because anyone
Speaker 1: designed it to kill, but because it was designed for trains,
Speaker 1: and only trains and human beings keep putting themselves on it.
Speaker 1: The question tonight is why, and the answer Louisville has
Speaker 1: been giving for about eighty years is that something lives
Speaker 1: under that bridge, something that wants you up there on
Speaker 1: the ties. When the rail starts to sing, every telling
Speaker 1: of the Pope Lick Monster agrees on the basics, and
Speaker 1: after that the versions scatter like buckshot, which, if you've
Speaker 1: listened to this show for any length of time, you
Speaker 1: know is exactly what a real folk legend looks like.
Speaker 1: Tidy stories come from one author. Messy stories come from
Speaker 1: a community. The basics are these. The creature is a hybrid.
Speaker 1: From the waist up, mostly a man, though a wrong
Speaker 1: looking one, with pale or grayish skin, a heavy brow,
Speaker 1: and short, sharp horns growing out of a forehead framed
Speaker 1: by greasy hair. From the waist down, a goat, furred
Speaker 1: legs that bend the wrong way, ending in hoofs that
Speaker 1: can grip steel and ballast better than any boot ever made.
Speaker 1: Some tellings give him wide set eyes with rectangular pupils
Speaker 1: like a real goat has, Some give him a bleeding,
Speaker 1: broken voice. Almost all of them put him on under
Speaker 1: or around that trestle, and almost all of them agree
Speaker 1: on his method.
Speaker 2: He doesn't run you down. He lures you.
Speaker 1: In some versions, it's outright hypnosis, a gaze or a
Speaker 1: sound that empties your head and walks your legs up
Speaker 1: the embankment for you. In others it's mimicry. And to
Speaker 1: me this is the creepier version by a mile. The
Speaker 1: goat man calls out in a voice you know a
Speaker 1: friend who wandered ahead in the dark, A kid crying
Speaker 1: your own name, said the way your mother says it.
Speaker 1: And you follow the voice up the slope, and you
Speaker 1: follow it out onto the ties, and somewhere around the
Speaker 1: middle of the span, the voice stops, and that's when
Speaker 1: you feel the rail humming under your feet. Some versions
Speaker 1: arm him with a rusty, blood crusted axe and say
Speaker 1: that if the train doesn't get you, the axe will
Speaker 1: version say he doesn't need any of it, that he
Speaker 1: simply drops from the underside of the trestle onto the
Speaker 1: roofs of cars passing on the road below. And there
Speaker 1: are people in Louisville who will swear to you they've
Speaker 1: heard of dented roofs and claw marks and paint I've
Speaker 1: never seen a police report or an insurance claim to
Speaker 1: back that one up.
Speaker 2: But I'll tell you this much.
Speaker 1: If you park under that trestle at night and you
Speaker 1: look up at eight stories of black crisscrossed steel with
Speaker 1: a flashlight, you will absolutely understand why that version exists.
Speaker 1: The underside of that bridge looks like a place where
Speaker 1: something waits.
Speaker 2: Where did he come from?
Speaker 1: The origin stories are where the legend really shows its
Speaker 1: age and its fingerprints, because there are at least three,
Speaker 1: and they don't agree with each other at all. The
Speaker 1: first and most popular origin says the goat man was
Speaker 1: a circus freak. In this telling, sometime in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds, a traveling circus was
Speaker 1: moving through the area by rail, and among its attractions
Speaker 1: was a captive half man half goat creature billed as
Speaker 1: a freak of nature, caught somewhere wild, sometimes Canada, sometimes
Speaker 1: deeper backwoods that nobody names. The story goes that a
Speaker 1: storm came up, lightning struck the tracks, or the train
Speaker 1: derailed right there at the Pope Lick crossing cars went
Speaker 1: off the trestle, and in the wreck the creature escaped.
Speaker 1: Everyone else died. He lived, and having been caged and
Speaker 1: prodded and gawked at by humans for years, he took
Speaker 1: up residents under the bridge that freed him and started
Speaker 1: evening the score, one trespasser at a time. I want
Speaker 1: to pause on that version for a second, because as
Speaker 1: a researcher, I love it, and I don't believe a
Speaker 1: word of it. Circus train wrecks were real. They happened,
Speaker 1: and some of them were horrific. But a circus train
Speaker 1: wreck at Popelit Creek would have made the Lieusville papers,
Speaker 1: and it isn't there. What that version does beautifully, though,
Speaker 1: is explain the creature's grudge. He isn't evil for no reason.
Speaker 1: Humans made him a prisoner and a spectacle. The revenge
Speaker 1: is personal. Folklore loves a monster with a reason. The
Speaker 1: second origin is darker, and it's pure Southern Gothic. This
Speaker 1: one says there was a farmer out in that country,
Speaker 1: and in some tellings folks even hang a name on him,
Speaker 1: a man usually called something like Silas Cooper, though the
Speaker 1: name floats from telling to telling. The story says he
Speaker 1: raised goats, and that he didn't just raise them, he
Speaker 1: sacrificed them. Made deals in the dark, the kind of
Speaker 1: deals Hill preachers warned about, trading blood for power or
Speaker 1: money or land, and the deal went the way those
Speaker 1: deals always go in these stories. Whatever he was bargaining
Speaker 1: with collected. Either the farmer was twisted and merged into
Speaker 1: a goat bodied thing as punishment, or the thing he
Speaker 1: summoned killed him and stayed. Either way, the debt lives
Speaker 1: under the trestle now and it's still collecting. The third
Speaker 1: origin skips the biography entirely and just says he's a reincarnation,
Speaker 1: a rebirth of that same sacrifice. Farmer sent back wearing
Speaker 1: the shape of the animals he butchered on the altar,
Speaker 1: same idea in cheaper packaging. Sin comes home wearing hoofs.
Speaker 1: And then there's a four thread quieter that you hear
Speaker 1: from older folks and from people who like their monsters biological,
Speaker 1: which says, forget all the theater. Something lives in the
Speaker 1: Floyd's fork bottoms always has it's big, It walks on
Speaker 1: two legs, It screams at night, and the goat business
Speaker 1: got stuck onto it by teenagers and drive in movies.
Speaker 1: File that thread away, because we're coming back to it
Speaker 1: in the second half of tonight's episode, and it's going
Speaker 1: to take us straight into Kentucky's sasquatch problem. Yes, Kentucky
Speaker 1: has a sasquatch problem, a big one. Here's something a
Speaker 1: lot of Louisville folks don't realize their monster has cousins.
Speaker 1: The goat Man is not a Kentucky invention. He's a
Speaker 1: recurring American character, and he shows up in places that
Speaker 1: have no connection to Pope Lick at all. The most
Speaker 1: fame famous relative lives in Maryland, in Prince George's County,
Speaker 1: where the Maryland goat Man has been blamed for slaughtered
Speaker 1: dogs and stalked lovers lanes since at least the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties. The Maryland version comes with his own
Speaker 1: origin story, and it's a beauty of the atomic age.
Speaker 1: He was supposedly a scientist at the Agricultural Research Center
Speaker 1: in Beltsville whose experiment on goats went wrong and merged
Speaker 1: him with his test subjects, and he escaped into the
Speaker 1: woods with an axe a government lab an experiment gone wrong,
Speaker 1: an axe. That's not medieval folklore, that's nineteen fifties America
Speaker 1: processing its brand new fear of what the men and
Speaker 1: lab coats were up to. Texas has won two. In
Speaker 1: the summer of nineteen sixty nine, the town of lake
Speaker 1: Worth outside Fort Worth went absolutely sideways over something people
Speaker 1: called the lake Worth Monster, a white, scaled or shaggy
Speaker 1: goat man that allegedly jumped on a car hood, terrorized
Speaker 1: parked couples, at one point supposedly hurled attire at a
Speaker 1: crowd of onlookers from a bluff. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. That
Speaker 1: flap made the newspapers drew armed crowds out to Greer
Speaker 1: Island and produced one famously blurry white photograph. Louisiana has
Speaker 1: goat mantails tied to train bridges too, and so do
Speaker 1: pockets of Alabama and Arkansas bridge goat man. The same
Speaker 1: three cards keep getting dealt all over the country, and
Speaker 1: if you pull the thread back far enough, it doesn't
Speaker 1: even start. In America, a creature with a man's torso
Speaker 1: and a goat's legs and horns is one of the
Speaker 1: oldest characters human beings have ever drawn. The Greeks called
Speaker 1: them satyrs and fawns and put them in the wild
Speaker 1: margins of the world, the places past the last farm fence,
Speaker 1: where the rules of town didn't reach. Pan himself, the
Speaker 1: goat legged god of the wild, is where we get
Speaker 1: the word panic. His voice in the trees, they said,
Speaker 1: could fill a traveler with sudden, unreasoning terror. And when
Speaker 1: Christianity moved through Europe, the old goat legged wild gods
Speaker 1: got repainted as the devil, which is why the devil
Speaker 1: in a thousand years of art has horns and hoofs.
Speaker 1: So think about what the pope lick Monster actually is. Structurally,
Speaker 1: he's a goat legged figure who lives at the edge
Speaker 1: of town, in the wild margin, whose voice makes people
Speaker 1: lose their reason and walk to their deaths. That is Pan, folks.
Speaker 1: That is a four thousand year old character wearing Kentucky
Speaker 1: clothes and squatting under a Norfolk Southern trestle. I'm an
Speaker 1: evidence guy. You all know that, and I'm not telling
Speaker 1: you the ancient Greeks were reporting a real animal. I'm
Speaker 1: telling you that when human beings need to explain why
Speaker 1: the wild edge of the map keeps eating people, we
Speaker 1: reach for the same shape every single time. Horns, hooves,
Speaker 1: a voice that calls you off the safe path. Kentucky
Speaker 1: just gave him a railroad bridge, and the railroad bridge
Speaker 1: is what made him lethal. Nobody can point to the
Speaker 1: first telling of the popelic monster. That's normal, legends don't
Speaker 1: have birth certificates. But folklorus and local historians who have
Speaker 1: worked on this one generally trace the oral story back
Speaker 1: to at least the nineteen forties and fifties, when the
Speaker 1: land around the Trestle was still working farm country and
Speaker 1: the bridge was already an old fixture. Farm kids dared
Speaker 1: each other out there. Older brothers scared younger ones. The
Speaker 1: story got passed down at sleepovers and scout camps and
Speaker 1: in the beds of pickup trucks, and every generation added
Speaker 1: a code of paint.
Speaker 2: By the sixties and seventies, the.
Speaker 1: Trestle had become what folklors call a legend tripping site.
Speaker 1: That's the academic term for a very old teenage ritual.
Speaker 1: You take the scary local story, you load up a
Speaker 1: car full of your friends, and you drive out to
Speaker 1: the place where the story lives to test yourselves against it.
Speaker 1: Every region has one, a haunted bridge, a witch's grave,
Speaker 1: a cursed stretch of road, the trip is the point.
Speaker 1: The screaming and laughing on the drive home is the point.
Speaker 1: It's a rite of passage, and for the most part,
Speaker 1: at most sites it's harmless. Pope Lick is the exception,
Speaker 1: because at Pope Lick the legend trip has a live
Speaker 1: rail line running through the middle of it. The test
Speaker 1: of courage isn't standing in a dark graveyard. The test
Speaker 1: of courage the way it evolved out there was walking
Speaker 1: the trestle itself, and that turned an ordinary rite of
Speaker 1: passage into a game of chance with a freight schedule.
Speaker 1: Nobody actually knew then. In nineteen eighty eight, the legend
Speaker 1: went from local to national, and it happened.
Speaker 2: Because of a movie.
Speaker 1: A Louisville filmmaker named Ron Shield Connect made a short
Speaker 1: film about sixteen minutes long, called The Legend of the
Speaker 1: Pope Lick Monster. It's a moody little piece shot around
Speaker 1: the real trestle about teenagers, the dare and the thing
Speaker 1: under the bridge. It premiered in Louisville at the tail
Speaker 1: end of December nineteen eighty eight eight and before it
Speaker 1: even screened, it kicked up a fight that made the
Speaker 1: papers Norfolk, Southern the Railroad that owns the trestle was
Speaker 1: not amused. The company worried out loud and in writing
Speaker 1: that a film glamorizing the trestle would send waves of
Speaker 1: kids up onto the tracks, and they pushed for warnings.
Speaker 1: The premiere ended up carrying a disclaimer hammering the point
Speaker 1: that trespassing on the trustle was illegal and could get
Speaker 1: you killed. And the whole dispute, of course, did exactly
Speaker 1: what disputes like that always do. It advertised the monster
Speaker 1: to everybody who'd never heard of him. I want to
Speaker 1: be fair to shield Necked here, because I've read his
Speaker 1: comments from back then, and he wasn't being reckless. He
Speaker 1: grew up with the story. He treated the film partly
Speaker 1: as a warning in itself. But the Railroad wasn't wrong either.
Speaker 1: Telling a story about a dangerous place always cuts both ways.
Speaker 1: The story warns some people off and it draws other
Speaker 1: people in, and you cannot control which listener is which.
Speaker 1: That's why why I front loaded the disclaimer tonight instead
Speaker 1: of tucking it at the end. If you take one
Speaker 1: thing from this episode, take the warning, not the dare.
Speaker 1: After the film, the monster never went back in the box.
Speaker 1: He showed up in newspaper halloween features. Year after year,
Speaker 1: he got chapters in books about Kentucky ghosts and monsters.
Speaker 1: When the Internet arrived, he got forums, then creepypasta rewrites,
Speaker 1: then video after video of people doing exactly what Norfolk
Speaker 1: Southern feared, filming themselves at the trestle. In the twenty tens,
Speaker 1: the city built a beautiful string of parks along Floyd's
Speaker 1: Fork called the park Lands, and one of those parks
Speaker 1: sits close enough to the trestle that visitors can see
Speaker 1: it foot Traffic near the bridge went up. Interest went up,
Speaker 1: and the railroad kept raising fences and posting signs and
Speaker 1: people kept climbing over them with cameras, Which brings us
Speaker 1: to the part of this episode I've been dreading, and
Speaker 1: the part that makes Pope Lick different from every other
Speaker 1: stop on this road trip. Everything I've told you so
Speaker 1: far as folklore. What I'm about to tell you is not.
Speaker 1: These are real people. I've pieced this together from newspaper
Speaker 1: archives and reporting over the years, and while the details
Speaker 1: in old coverage don't always line up perfectly, the outline
Speaker 1: is solid. In early nineteen eighty seven, a seventeen year
Speaker 1: old student named Jack Charles Baum. The second was on
Speaker 1: the trestle when a train came. He had no chance.
Speaker 1: He was struck and killed on the bridge, seventeen years old.
Speaker 1: Just months later, in the spring of that same year,
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old named David Wayne Bryant was up
Speaker 1: there with friends when a train entered the span. He
Speaker 1: did the only thing left to do and went over
Speaker 1: the side to escape it. He survived the fall badly hurt,
Speaker 1: and he fought his injuries for months. He died of
Speaker 1: them the following year. Two young men the same bridge,
Speaker 1: the same twelve months. And here's the detail that ties
Speaker 1: it to our story tonight. The coverage from that era
Speaker 1: makes clear these weren't kids who wandered on to some
Speaker 1: anonymous bridge. The monster legend was part of the landscape.
Speaker 1: The trestle was the place you went because of the story.
Speaker 1: The deaths didn't stop there. In the year two thousand,
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old man fell from the trestle and
Speaker 1: was killed. Over the years, there have been other falls
Speaker 1: and other close calls that ended in emergency rooms instead
Speaker 1: of funerals, and those mostly don't make the archives. But
Speaker 1: talked to Louisville area first responders, and they'll tell you
Speaker 1: the trestle has been a repeated dress for a long time.
Speaker 1: Then came April of twenty sixteen, and the case that
Speaker 1: put Pope Lick back in national headlines. A twenty six
Speaker 1: year old woman named Roquel Bain was visiting Louisville from Dayton,
Speaker 1: Ohio with her boyfriend. They'd come down for a haunted
Speaker 1: attraction tour at the old Waverley Hills Sanatorium, and while
Speaker 1: they were in town they went looking for the famous
Speaker 1: goat Man trestle.
Speaker 2: They climbed up.
Speaker 1: They were out on the span when a train came.
Speaker 1: Her boyfriend managed to get over the edge and hang
Speaker 1: from the side of the trestle while the train passed
Speaker 1: over him, and he survived. Roquel didn't make it. She
Speaker 1: was struck on the bridge and fell to her death below.
Speaker 1: The engineer saw them. The train by the time it
Speaker 1: stopped was something like a half mile past the trestle.
Speaker 1: That's what stopping distance means for a freight train, and
Speaker 1: that's why every warning about out running one is written
Speaker 1: in past tears. And it still didn't stop. In May
Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen, a fifteen year old girl named Savannah
Speaker 1: Bright was killed on the trestle and the friend with
Speaker 1: her was hurt going off the bridge. And since then
Speaker 1: there have been more injuries, more falls, more rescues, enough
Speaker 1: that the railroad added taller fencing and more signage, and
Speaker 1: local officials have gone in front of cameras practically begging
Speaker 1: people to stay off the structure. At least five dead
Speaker 1: across four decades, multiple serious injuries, and every single one
Speaker 1: of them one hundred percent preventable. No other legend we
Speaker 1: have covered on this road trip has a ledger like that.
Speaker 1: The van meter visitor never killed anybody. Oscar the turtle
Speaker 1: never killed anybody. Charlie never pulled one swimmer under the
Speaker 1: Pope Lick Monster, or more precisely, the pilgrimage to him
Speaker 1: has a body count that a real predator would envy.
Speaker 1: Let's do what we came here to do. Let's get
Speaker 1: into the encounters. Because for all the history and all
Speaker 1: the tragedy, people out there in the Floyd's Fork Bottoms
Speaker 1: have been seeing and hearing things for a long time.
Speaker 1: Some of it sounds like teenage theater, some of it
Speaker 1: does not. The first account I want to share with
Speaker 1: you comes out of the early nineteen nineties from a
Speaker 1: man I'll call Danny, who grew up off Taylorsville Road,
Speaker 1: when that country still had more cattle than cul de sacs.
Speaker 1: Danny was sixteen the summer this happened, and he told
Speaker 1: this story the same way for thirty years to family,
Speaker 1: to a local researcher, and eventually in writing, and the
Speaker 1: details never wandered. As a former cop, I pay attention
Speaker 1: to that liars improved their stories, witnesses repeat them. It
Speaker 1: was a Friday night in July. Danny and two friends,
Speaker 1: his cousin Mark and a kid named Toby, had ridden
Speaker 1: bikes down toward the creek to shoot bottle rockets because
Speaker 1: it was July and Kentucky, and that's what sixteen year
Speaker 1: olds did. They ended up in the low ground, maybe
Speaker 1: a quarter mile downstream of the trestle, on a gravel bar,
Speaker 1: with the bridge visible against the sky. Whenever the moon
Speaker 1: got clear of the clouds around eleven, they ran out
Speaker 1: of rockets and started messing around in the shallows. And
Speaker 1: that's when Toby stopped and said, you all hear that
Speaker 1: they stood still from up the creek from the direction
Speaker 1: of the trestle. Somebody was calling a name Danny said
Speaker 1: it took him a minute to make it out over
Speaker 1: the water, and then it came clear. It was calling
Speaker 1: Toby the way your mother calls you in for supper
Speaker 1: when you've drifted too far down the property. Toby's house
Speaker 1: was a good two miles the other direction, and his
Speaker 1: mother did not go walking creek bottoms. At eleven at night,
Speaker 1: the boys stood in the water and listened to it
Speaker 1: call four, five, six times, evenly spaced patient coming from
Speaker 1: the black tangle where the creek bent toward the bridge.
Speaker 1: Mark hollared back, who's there. The calling stopped. They waited, nothing,
Speaker 1: just the creek and the bugs. Then it started again,
Speaker 1: and this time, Danny swore to his dying day it
Speaker 1: was closer, same two notes, same name, but it had
Speaker 1: moved one hundred yards downstream toward them without one sound
Speaker 1: of brush breaking. And here's the detail that stuck with
Speaker 1: me when I first read his account. He said, the
Speaker 1: voice was right, but the spacing was wrong. Nobody calling
Speaker 1: for a lost kid calls in perfect rhythm. Real people
Speaker 1: speed up, they get scared, they get angry, their voice cracks.
Speaker 1: This didn't same interval, same pitch, over and over, like
Speaker 1: a recording. The boys got out of that creek without
Speaker 1: discussing it. Danny said Toby was up the bank and
Speaker 1: on his bike before the other two had their shoes on,
Speaker 1: and Toby was the kid who talked the whole ride
Speaker 1: down about wanting to see the goat man. They pedaled
Speaker 1: the gravel road in the dark, and Danny said that
Speaker 1: about half way out the calling behind them changed. It
Speaker 1: stopped saying Toby's name, it started laughing. He described it
Speaker 1: as a laugh that broke apart at the end into
Speaker 1: something like a bleat, And he said all three of
Speaker 1: them heard it, and that Toby never went back to
Speaker 1: that creek again, not that summer, not ever, as far
Speaker 1: as Danny knew. Now, my instinct as an investigator says
Speaker 1: a great deal of that can be explained. A barred
Speaker 1: owl can make a noise you would swear as a
Speaker 1: woman being murdered. Sound carries strangely along water. Some older
Speaker 1: kid could have followed them down there to run a prank,
Speaker 1: and the perfect rhythm was a teenager doing his best
Speaker 1: spooky voice. All plausible, But I'll give you the two
Speaker 1: things that don't sit right for me. One the voice
Speaker 1: knew which boy to call, and called only him and
Speaker 1: two whatever moved one hundred yards down a brushy Kentucky
Speaker 1: Creek bank in July. Did it without making a sound,
Speaker 1: and I've walked brush like that. I can't do it.
Speaker 1: You can't do it, but something out there could. The
Speaker 1: second account is a sighting, and it comes from an adult,
Speaker 1: which matters. This one was reported by a man in
Speaker 1: his forties, a delivery driver, and it happened in the
Speaker 1: fall in the late two thousands, in the last usable
Speaker 1: light of the day. He was driving south Pope Lick Road,
Speaker 1: the road that passes under the trestle. He'd driven at plenty.
Speaker 1: He knew the bridge, knew the legend, thought it was
Speaker 1: a good story for scaring his kids, and nothing more.
Speaker 1: On this evening, he came around toward the underpass and
Speaker 1: caught movement up top on the trestle itself, and his
Speaker 1: first thought was, exactly what yours would be. Somebody's on
Speaker 1: the bridge, Some idiot kid is up there. He slowed down,
Speaker 1: partly out of concern and partly, he admitted, because of
Speaker 1: a train. He didn't want to watch what happened next.
Speaker 1: The figure was out near the middle of the span,
Speaker 1: and it was crouched, not sitting, not standing, crouch down
Speaker 1: on the rail itself. He said, balance the way you'd
Speaker 1: balance on the balls of your feet, except nobody holds
Speaker 1: that pose comfortably. And this thing looked planted against the
Speaker 1: gray sky. He could see the outline clearly broad through
Speaker 1: the shoulders, head slightly down. He stopped the truck under
Speaker 1: the edge of the trestle and rolled his window down
Speaker 1: to yell up at the kid to get off the bridge.
Speaker 1: And when he stuck his head out and looked up,
Speaker 1: the figure stood. He said, it came up too smooth
Speaker 1: and too fast for the crouch. It had been in
Speaker 1: in one motion, no hands, no wobble on a railhead
Speaker 1: maybe three inches wide. Standing it was tall. He put
Speaker 1: it well over six feet, judging against the trestle framing
Speaker 1: he'd driven past a thousand times. And on the head
Speaker 1: silhouetted there were two points short ones yup, saying that
Speaker 1: in his report they were short like a young goat's horns,
Speaker 1: a few inches curved slightly back. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. He
Speaker 1: never saw a face. What he saw was the thing
Speaker 1: turn its head and look down at him, hold that
Speaker 1: look for a couple of seconds, and then walk away
Speaker 1: down the rail toward the far bank, walking the rail,
Speaker 1: not the ties, the rail heel to toe if it
Speaker 1: had heels, without one hitch in its stride, until the
Speaker 1: framing swallowed the silhouette. He sat in his truck a minute,
Speaker 1: and then he did something I respect. He got out
Speaker 1: and he looked at the ground under the trestle, and
Speaker 1: he checked the embankment on the far side for anybody
Speaker 1: climbing down, because he wanted a kid in a costume.
Speaker 2: He wanted it badly.
Speaker 1: There was nobody, no car parked anywhere near, no bike
Speaker 1: ditched in the weeds, no laughter from the brush. He
Speaker 1: got back in the truck and went home and didn't
Speaker 1: tell his wife for three days. When he finally reported
Speaker 1: it to a local researcher, he opened with a line
Speaker 1: I've heard in one form or another from hundreds of
Speaker 1: witnesses across forty years of doing this. He said, I'm
Speaker 1: not asking you to believe me. I'm telling you what
Speaker 1: I saw so I can quit carrying it by myself. Folks,
Speaker 1: hoaxers don't say that. Attention seekers don't sit on a
Speaker 1: story for three days and then tell it with embarrassment
Speaker 1: in their voice. Could a very committed prankster in a
Speaker 1: costume balance on a railhead eight stories over a creek
Speaker 1: at dusk to fool one delivery truck? I suppose I
Speaker 1: wouldn't bet a dollar on it. Anybody with the balance
Speaker 1: to do that has better ways to die. And now
Speaker 1: the hardest category, the one that gives this legend its teeth,
Speaker 1: the survivors who say they didn't decide to walk on
Speaker 1: to that trestle, They say they were drawn. I've collected
Speaker 1: several of these over the years, second hand in first hand,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to give you one in detail. Young
Speaker 1: woman I'll call Aaron, who was nineteen when this happened
Speaker 1: in the mid twenty tens, and who told her account
Speaker 1: to a Louisville area researcher on the condition her name
Speaker 1: stayed out of it. She wasn't proud of any of it.
Speaker 1: That comes through in every line. Aaron and three friends
Speaker 1: went out to the trestle on a Saturday night in
Speaker 1: October for the usual reason the dare the legend. They
Speaker 1: parked off the road, walked the fence line, found the
Speaker 1: spot where everybody crossed, and climbed the embankment to track level.
Speaker 1: The plan, she said, and I've heard this exact plan
Speaker 1: from other survivors, and it makes me sick every time
Speaker 1: was to walk out just a little way, just far
Speaker 1: enough for a picture. Everybody always thinks the bridge works
Speaker 1: on a dimmer switch a little danger, then a little more.
Speaker 2: It doesn't.
Speaker 1: The moment your foot leaves solid ground, you're all the
Speaker 1: way in the trap. They stood at the end of
Speaker 1: the trestle, passing a phone around, taking photos of the
Speaker 1: span in the dark, and Aaron said that while the
Speaker 1: other three were laughing and talking, she stopped hearing them,
Speaker 1: not that they went quiet. She could see their mouths moving.
Speaker 1: She described it like the volume on them was turned
Speaker 1: down and the volume.
Speaker 2: On the bridge was turned up.
Speaker 1: She could hear the creek below, she could hear the
Speaker 1: steel ticking as the night cooled it, and she could
Speaker 1: hear very faint from somewhere out in the middle of
Speaker 1: the span what she took at first for a radio,
Speaker 1: because it had a rhythm to it. She took two
Speaker 1: steps out onto the ties to hear it better, then
Speaker 1: a few more, she told the researcher. She remembers thinking
Speaker 1: clear as anything. It's not that far, that exact phrase,
Speaker 1: sitting in her head like somebody had said it there,
Speaker 1: it's not that far. She was forty feet out over
Speaker 1: the drop at night, stepping tied to tie with her
Speaker 1: arms out for balance, before her friends realized she wasn't
Speaker 1: standing with them anymore.
Speaker 2: What snapped her out of it, she said, was light.
Speaker 1: The rail in front of her lit up, a thin
Speaker 1: white line running out ahead of her along the top
Speaker 1: of each rail, brightening, and one heartbeat later, the sound arrived,
Speaker 1: the horn, and the whole bridge started to buzz under
Speaker 1: her shoes. The train was coming from the far side.
Speaker 1: Her friends were screaming behind her. She turned around on
Speaker 1: the ties, and she said, turning around took longer than
Speaker 1: any single act of her life before or since, and
Speaker 1: she ran heeled a toe on railroad ties with gaps
Speaker 1: to the creek showing between every step, with the horn
Speaker 1: hammering and the light throwing her own shadow out in
Speaker 1: front of her like it was running away from her too.
Speaker 1: Her friends grabbed her arms and hauled her the last
Speaker 1: few feet off the span, and all four of them
Speaker 1: tumbled down the embankment into the brush, and the train
Speaker 1: went by above them. For what she guessed was two
Speaker 1: full minutes, car after car after car after car.
Speaker 2: Nobody talked.
Speaker 1: On the walk back to the vehicle, one of the
Speaker 1: boys threw up next to the fence. And here's what
Speaker 1: Aaron said about the pull the thing that walked her
Speaker 1: out there, Because the researcher asked her straight out if
Speaker 1: she believed the monster had called her. She thought about
Speaker 1: it a long time, and her answer is one of
Speaker 1: the more honest things I've ever read in this field.
Speaker 1: She said, I don't know if something called me onto
Speaker 1: that bridge. I know I didn't decide to walk out there.
Speaker 1: There was no moment where I chose it. And both
Speaker 1: of those things are true at the same time. And
Speaker 1: I don't know what to do with that. Neither do
Speaker 1: I Errin. But I know the twenty sixteen case, the
Speaker 1: one that killed Roquelbane, has an echo of the same
Speaker 1: shape in it, a couple that went up for a
Speaker 1: look and ended up out over the middle. I know
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighty seven cases put two young men in
Speaker 1: the exact same fatal geometry.
Speaker 2: Whatever you want to.
Speaker 1: Call the pool, whether it's a goat legged thing with
Speaker 1: a voice like your mother's or the plain human catastrophe
Speaker 1: of curiosity plus bad information about train schedules. The result
Speaker 1: on the ledger reads identical people who meant to take
Speaker 1: one step, take forty. Keep that in your back pocket.
Speaker 1: We're going to come back to it at the end,
Speaker 1: but right now, we're going to do what I promised
Speaker 1: at the top of the show. Because the goat man
Speaker 1: is not the only thing walking the dark bottoms of Kentucky.
Speaker 1: And if you pull back from that trestle and look
Speaker 1: at the wider country around it, the woods start filling
Speaker 1: up with something a lot more familiar to this show.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Kentucky Sasquatch. When people rank Bigfoot states,
Speaker 1: they name the same ones every time, Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio.
Speaker 2: If they know their stuff.
Speaker 1: Kentucky almost never makes the list, and that has always
Speaker 1: struck me as flat wrong, because Kentucky is close to
Speaker 1: a perfect Sasquatch habitat on paper. Look at the map.
Speaker 1: You've got the Appalachian Ranges stacked along the east. You've
Speaker 1: got the Daniel Boone National Forest running north to south
Speaker 1: like a green spine, seven hundred thousand acres and change
Speaker 1: of ridges, gorges, rock shelters, and hollows that no casual
Speaker 1: hiker ever touches. You've got the western wetlands and river
Speaker 1: bottoms along the Ohio and the Mississippi, the huge wooded
Speaker 1: peninsula at Land between the Lakes, and cave country in
Speaker 1: the middle, riddled with more holes in the ground than
Speaker 1: anywhere else on earth. Water everywhere, deer everywhere, massed crops,
Speaker 1: feral hogs, thin rural population in the exact places that matter.
Speaker 1: And sure enough the reports are there, hundreds of them.
Speaker 1: Kentucky researchers and there are some good careful ones working
Speaker 1: that state have logged sighting reports from a large majority
Speaker 1: of Kentucky's counties going back generations. Long before anybody coined
Speaker 1: the word bigfoot, Kentucky settlers and hunters were telling stories
Speaker 1: about hairy wild men in the hills. There are old
Speaker 1: accounts and traditions that reach back toward the frontier era,
Speaker 1: tales of the Yahoe and wild men that mothers used
Speaker 1: to keep children close to the cabin. This is old
Speaker 1: lore in that state, folks. It did not arrive with
Speaker 1: the Patterson film. It was waiting there when the cameras
Speaker 1: showed up. So for the rest of tonight, we're going
Speaker 1: to road trip inside the road trip four stops across
Speaker 1: Kentucky four encounters, starting with the most famous case in
Speaker 1: the state's history. Henderson County, far western Kentucky, right down
Speaker 1: on the Ohio River. There's a little community there called Spottsville,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen seventy five, a family living in a
Speaker 1: farmhouse near the river bottoms went through something that Kentucky
Speaker 1: researchers have been documenting ever since. It stands today as
Speaker 1: the state's flagship case. The family, the Nuntealies, had moved
Speaker 1: into an old farmhouse near Spottsville, close to the Green
Speaker 1: River bottoms, thick timber and slew country behind the property.
Speaker 1: Almost immediately things went wrong in ways of farm family notices.
Speaker 1: Chickens and rabbits started disappearing from pens, and not the
Speaker 1: way a fox takes them. Pens tore open, animals gone entirely,
Speaker 1: or left in a state I won't describe in detail,
Speaker 1: but a fox doesn't do it. The family dog wouldn't
Speaker 1: leave the porch after dark, and then the scream started
Speaker 1: out of the bottoms at night, and the family described
Speaker 1: them the way witnesses always seemed to describe them, as
Speaker 1: something between a woman screaming and a siren winding up
Speaker 1: loud enough to feel in your chest. Then they started
Speaker 1: seeing it, multiple family members on multiple occasions over a
Speaker 1: stretch of months. What they described was consistent every time,
Speaker 1: a very large, upright figure covered in dark hair, broad
Speaker 1: long armed, watching the house from the tree line at
Speaker 1: dusk and after dark. The children saw it, the adult
Speaker 1: saw it. One of the boys, Larry, was a child
Speaker 1: during the events, and he grew up and kept telling
Speaker 1: the account, the same account into adulthood and middle age
Speaker 1: to researchers with recorders running decades of consistency. I keep
Speaker 1: coming back to that standard tonight because it's one of
Speaker 1: the few tools we have in this field, and the
Speaker 1: Spotsville case passes it. The encounters escalated to the point
Speaker 1: that the family said the thing came in close to
Speaker 1: the house at night, that there were heavy impacts against
Speaker 1: the walls, that the father sat up armed. Depending on
Speaker 1: the account, shots were fired toward it at least once,
Speaker 1: with no evident effect except a temporary retreat. Eventually, the
Speaker 1: situation pushed the family off the property, and the bottoms
Speaker 1: kept producing reports. Spottsville and the surrounding Henderson County River
Speaker 1: Country show up in Kentucky sighting databases again and again
Speaker 1: in the decades since, right up into recent years.
Speaker 2: Whatever the family ran.
Speaker 1: Into down there, that corridor of the Green and Ohio
Speaker 1: River bottoms stayed active. Move south from Henderson County and
Speaker 1: you hit one of the strangest pieces of geography in
Speaker 1: the Eastern United States. Land Between the Lakes. It's a
Speaker 1: peninsula forty miles long, pinch between two enormous reservoirs, Kentucky
Speaker 1: Lake and Lake Barkley, straddling the Kentucky and Tennessee line.
Speaker 1: When the government dammed those rivers in the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: whole communities were bought out and removed, and what got
Speaker 1: left behind is roughly one hundred and seventy thousand acres
Speaker 1: of managed forest with almost nobody living inside it. Old
Speaker 1: home sites, going back to woods, cemeteries in the timber,
Speaker 1: a restored elk and bison range, and two giant bodies
Speaker 1: of water fencing the whole thing in. If you were
Speaker 1: going to design a containment area for a large shy
Speaker 1: omnivorous primate in the mid South, you could not do
Speaker 1: much better. And the report record agrees Land between the
Speaker 1: Lakes has a sasquatch tradition that predates the lakes themselves,
Speaker 1: going back to when the area was called between the Rivers,
Speaker 1: and it has a darker reputation layered on top, including
Speaker 1: a widely retold and never officially substantiated story about a
Speaker 1: family in a camper meeting a violent end out there
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen seventies. That story has grown a
Speaker 1: beard and a life of its own online, and I
Speaker 1: treated as folklore until somebody shows me a case file.
Speaker 2: But underneath the.
Speaker 1: Campfire layer, the ordinary ports from land between the Lakes
Speaker 1: are steady, numerous, and mundane in the way real data
Speaker 1: is mundane. Campers hearing bipedal movement, circling tents, rock impacts
Speaker 1: near shore lines at night, vocalizations that clear out a campground,
Speaker 1: fishermen seeing tall dark figures cross gravel roads, and two steps.
Speaker 1: I'll give you one from that country, an account from
Speaker 1: a bow hunter i'll call Ray from the fall of
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. And I like this one because nothing in
Speaker 1: it is spectacular. Ray was in a climbing stand on
Speaker 1: a ridge finger above a creeked drainage inside the recreation area,
Speaker 1: an hour before dark October, Acorns dropping squirrels had been
Speaker 1: working the flat below him all afternoon. Then the squirrels
Speaker 1: quit all at once, he said, like somebody hit a switch,
Speaker 1: and the woods went so quiet he could hear boat
Speaker 1: traffic miles off. From up the drainage, came a knock,
Speaker 1: one sharp, wood on wood loud. Ray had heard limbs
Speaker 1: fall his whole life, and it wasn't that a single
Speaker 1: clean impact. And then maybe thirty seconds later, an answer
Speaker 1: from the opposite ridge, same sound.
Speaker 2: Farther off.
Speaker 1: Then footsteps below him in the leaves, heavy two legged,
Speaker 1: unhurried moving up the drainage bottom toward where the first
Speaker 1: knock had come from. He never saw hair or eyes.
Speaker 1: What he saw was a walnut sapling about wrist thick,
Speaker 1: bend over near the bottom of the flat, and spring
Speaker 1: back up twice, the way a sapling moves when something
Speaker 1: pushes past it. And he watched the leaves stir along
Speaker 1: the line going away from him for fifty or sixty yards.
Speaker 1: Ray sat in that stand until full dark because climbing
Speaker 1: down did not seem smart, And then he came down
Speaker 1: and walked out with his flashlight off because turning it
Speaker 1: on seemed worse. That's a real detail from a real woodsman.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: The whole walk out roughly a mile, the wood stayed silent,
Speaker 1: and one time, off his right shoulder, something big shifted
Speaker 1: its weight in the leaves and stopped. He didn't stop.
Speaker 1: He kept the same pace, heart going all the way
Speaker 1: to the gravel. No monster leaping out, no red eyes,
Speaker 1: just a chain of small wrong things adding up in
Speaker 1: country famous for exactly those wrong things. In my experience,
Speaker 1: that's what ninety percent of credible sasquatch encounters actually sound like.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Swing all the way east into the Daniel Boone National
Speaker 1: Forest to the Red River Gorge country, cliff lines, natural arches,
Speaker 1: and hundreds of rock shelters, the same overhangs that sheltered
Speaker 1: human beings in that gorge for thousands of years. It's
Speaker 1: some of the most rugged terrain in the Eastern United States,
Speaker 1: and it produces reports year after year. The account I'll
Speaker 1: share comes from two backpackers, a married couple in the
Speaker 1: spring of twenty eighteen. Experienced hikers, both school teachers, camped
Speaker 1: legally and well off trail near a cliff line in
Speaker 1: one of the quieter drains. They'd hung their food properly,
Speaker 1: They'd done everything right, stay tuned for more Backwoods big
Speaker 1: foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Around two
Speaker 1: in the morning, the wife woke up because something was
Speaker 1: walking the bench above their camp, along the base of
Speaker 1: the cliff line. She lay there and counted footfalls, and
Speaker 1: she told the researcher who took her report that she
Speaker 1: got past thirty slow spaced, heavy enough that she felt
Speaker 1: a couple of them through the ground pad. Her husband
Speaker 1: woke and they lay still, and the steps stopped directly
Speaker 1: upslope of the tent. Then it screamed, she said. The
Speaker 1: scream started low like a moan, and climbed until it
Speaker 1: was a ragged, whooping howl that bounced off the cliff
Speaker 1: opposite and came back at them from two directions, and
Speaker 1: it went on longer than a breath should last. Their dog,
Speaker 1: a sixty pound Shepherd mix, who had growled at bears
Speaker 1: before without backing up an inch, did not growl. The
Speaker 1: dog crawled into the foot of the wife's sleeping bag
Speaker 1: and shook that detail right there is the one I'd
Speaker 1: take to court. You can coach a witness, you cannot
Speaker 1: coach a dog. The scream came twice more over the
Speaker 1: next few minutes, each one a little farther along the
Speaker 1: cliff line, moving away. And then the drainage went quiet
Speaker 1: and stayed quiet till a gray, very welcome dawn. In
Speaker 1: the morning, the husband walked the bench on a patch
Speaker 1: of moss and thin mud at the cliff base. He
Speaker 1: found part of one track, the front half toes and
Speaker 1: pad pressed deep. He put his own boot next to it,
Speaker 1: a size eleven, and photographed both, and the impression made
Speaker 1: his boot look small, no claw marks, five toes. They
Speaker 1: packed out early, and the wife said something on the
Speaker 1: trail that has stayed with me. She said, it knew
Speaker 1: exactly where we were the whole time, and it wanted
Speaker 1: us to know.
Speaker 2: It new.
Speaker 1: Whether that's projection or a dead accurate read of primate
Speaker 1: display behavior, I'll let you decide, but I'll point out
Speaker 1: that every thing that animal did that night, the approach,
Speaker 1: the positioning above them, the vocal display, the departure, matches
Speaker 1: intimidation and escort behavior we can watch in the great
Speaker 1: apes we do have in hand. Nothing about it matches
Speaker 1: a bobcat, a coyote chorus, or an elk, and a
Speaker 1: screech owl does not put a sixty pound shepherd into
Speaker 1: a sleeping bag. And now let's bring the sasquatch thread home,
Speaker 1: because I promised at the top of the show that
Speaker 1: the two halves of tonight's episode were going to meet,
Speaker 1: and here's where they do. The Popelic Trestle crosses a
Speaker 1: tributary of Floyd's Fork, and the Floyd's Fork Corridor is
Speaker 1: a genuine greenway, a ribbon of creek bottom, floodplain, forest,
Speaker 1: and steep wooded slope running for miles through eastern Jefferson County,
Speaker 1: stitched into bigger woodlands south of the city. In plain
Speaker 1: wildlife biology terms, it is a travel corridor. Deer use it,
Speaker 1: coyotes use it. Everything uses it because it's continuous cover
Speaker 1: and water running through developed country. And over the years,
Speaker 1: quietly that corridor has produced upright hairy figure reports of
Speaker 1: its own. Not goat men, no horns, no hoofs, big dark,
Speaker 1: two legged, and gone fast. The account I'll leave you
Speaker 1: with came from a utility contractor, and it happened just
Speaker 1: a few years ago. Early on a February morning, cold
Speaker 1: with snow dust on the ground. He was checking an
Speaker 1: easement along a creek bottom in that corridor alone around
Speaker 1: seven in the morning, good gray light. He came around
Speaker 1: a bend in the access path and standing at the
Speaker 1: edge of the timber on the far side of the creek,
Speaker 1: maybe sixty yards off was what he took for one
Speaker 1: full second to be a man in insulated coveralls. Then
Speaker 1: it took a step, and he stopped thinking that. He
Speaker 1: said the step was too long. That was the first thing,
Speaker 1: before size, before anything. The stride was wrong for a person,
Speaker 1: and the arms swung through an arc no coverall allows,
Speaker 1: and it covered the open gap between two stands of trees,
Speaker 1: a gap he'd later paced at over ten yards in
Speaker 1: three steps, without ever appearing to hurry, dark brown snow
Speaker 1: dust kicking up at its feet, head slightly forward, and
Speaker 1: it never looked at him. It crossed the open ground
Speaker 1: and was in the far timber, and the bottoms were
Speaker 1: empty again. He stood there, and then he did the
Speaker 1: practical thing. He crossed on a downed log and went
Speaker 1: and looked at the ground.
Speaker 2: Where it had walked. In the snow.
Speaker 1: He found the line of impressions, and he measured the
Speaker 1: distance between them with his tape, and the number he
Speaker 1: got between prince.
Speaker 2: Was over five feet.
Speaker 1: He took pictures on a phone that he freely admits
Speaker 1: took terrible pictures. He finished his inspection, and he sat
Speaker 1: in his truck with the heater running for a while before.
Speaker 2: He drove off.
Speaker 1: He never reported it to any agency. What was he
Speaker 1: going to say? He told a researcher about it two
Speaker 1: years later, almost in passing, and when asked why he'd
Speaker 1: sat on it, he gave the answer I have now
Speaker 1: heard in one wording or another for four decades.
Speaker 2: I like my job.
Speaker 1: I like people thinking I'm sensible that sighting happened in
Speaker 1: the same watershed as the pope Lick Trestle. A few
Speaker 1: miles of continuous creek bottom. That's all that separates them.
Speaker 1: Strip the horns and the circus and the Devil's bargain
Speaker 1: off the pope Lick Monster, and underneath you find the
Speaker 1: same report Kentucky has been generating since the frontier, something tall,
Speaker 1: hairy and bipedal, moving through the bottoms at the edge
Speaker 1: of settled land, screaming in the night, seen for seconds,
Speaker 1: and gone. It is at least possible, and I'd put
Speaker 1: it stronger than possible, that the oldest layer of the
Speaker 1: goatman legend started with exactly the kind of sightings the
Speaker 1: Floyd's Fort corridor still produces, and that the goat parts,
Speaker 1: the horns and hoofs and hypnosis got bolted on later
Speaker 1: by generations of storytellers who needed the thing under the
Speaker 1: bridge to be a devil, because a devil explains dead
Speaker 1: teenagers better than a train does, which brings us finally
Speaker 1: to the question. This whole episode has been walking toward.
Speaker 1: What is the Pope Lick Monster? Longtime listeners know how
Speaker 1: I close these episodes. I lay the possibilities on the table,
Speaker 1: I tell you which way I lean, and I let
Speaker 1: you make up your own mind. Tonight, there are three doors,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to walk through each one honestly, including
Speaker 1: the one that makes me uncomfortable, Door number one. The
Speaker 1: monster is real, a flesh and blood something or a
Speaker 1: supernatural something that lives around that trestle and lures people
Speaker 1: onto it. Here's my problem with the flesh and blood version,
Speaker 1: and it's the same problem I.
Speaker 2: Have with every hybrid.
Speaker 1: Cryptid biology doesn't build half man half goat. Primates and
Speaker 1: goats sit on branches of the family tree that split
Speaker 1: tens of millions of years back, and no amount of
Speaker 1: Backwood's mischief.
Speaker 2: Crosses that gap.
Speaker 1: Everything I've spent forty years arguing about sasquatch works precisely
Speaker 1: because sasquatch requires no man. A large, undiscovered North American
Speaker 1: ape is unlikely, It is not impossible. A satyr is impossible.
Speaker 1: And I say that as a man who watched a
Speaker 1: sasquatch cross a Washington State trail just ten feet away
Speaker 1: from me just two short years ago, and had his
Speaker 1: whole life rearranged by it. My standard didn't get looser
Speaker 1: after my sighting. If anything, it got tighter, because now
Speaker 1: I know exactly what a real encounter costs a witness,
Speaker 1: and I refuse to spend that on a creature. Evolution
Speaker 1: can't produce the supernatural version, the demon, the cursed farmer,
Speaker 1: the reincarnated sacrifice. I don't believe in curses or devils
Speaker 1: at the trestle or anywhere else. I know some of
Speaker 1: you do, and I respect you. And you'll notice I
Speaker 1: told those origin stories tonight with a straight face, because
Speaker 1: they're part of the record and they matter to the history.
Speaker 1: But I can't sell you a demon. I don't own one.
Speaker 1: What I'll grant door number one is this, some of
Speaker 1: the witnesses are telling the true truth about their experience.
Speaker 1: Danny heard something called his friend's name in perfect rhythm.
Speaker 1: The driver saw something crouched on a railhead that stood
Speaker 1: up like nothing he'd ever seen. I don't think those
Speaker 1: people are lying. I think a barred owl, a prankster,
Speaker 1: a misjudged silhouette, and eighty years of expectation can do
Speaker 1: heavy lifting. And I think there remains a residue and
Speaker 1: a few of these accounts that I cannot fully explain.
Speaker 1: And I've told you before, I'm comfortable saying I don't know.
Speaker 1: A man who can't say I don't know has no
Speaker 1: business in this field. Door number two, the monster is psychological,
Speaker 1: and this door deserves more respect than it usually gets.
Speaker 1: There's a documented, boring and genuinely frightening thing the human
Speaker 1: brain does around heights and rails, And if you've ever
Speaker 1: stood somewhere high and felt a little tug toward the edge,
Speaker 1: you already know it. Psychologists have studied that pull. Most
Speaker 1: people who feel it aren't suicidal, and it passes in
Speaker 1: a second. But he fully agrees on why the brain
Speaker 1: generates it. Now put a nineteen year old on the
Speaker 1: approach to a seven hundred and seventy foot trestle at
Speaker 1: night with adrenaline up with friends watching, with a legend
Speaker 1: in their head that says the monster calls people out
Speaker 1: onto the span. The legend hands the pull a name
Speaker 1: and a voice. Aaron said it perfectly. She never decided
Speaker 1: to walk out there, and she also was never dragged.
Speaker 2: Both true.
Speaker 1: The story she'd been told her whole life gave her
Speaker 1: feet permission. There's also plain sensory failure that valley bends.
Speaker 1: Sound trains arrive faster and quieter than intuition says they should.
Speaker 1: Rails hum and shine before the noise makes sense, and
Speaker 1: a brain primed for a monster has a whole library
Speaker 1: of explanations ready before the correct one, which is run,
Speaker 1: gets its boots on. Under door number two, the goat
Speaker 1: man is real in the only place he needs to
Speaker 1: be real to kill you.
Speaker 2: Between your ears.
Speaker 1: Door number three, the monster is a warning that got
Speaker 1: out of hand. This is the folklore door, and it's
Speaker 1: where I put most of my chips. Communities build monsters
Speaker 1: to guard dangerous places. They always have. Kentucky river towns
Speaker 1: told kids about creatures in the water so they'd fear.
Speaker 1: The current mining country told stories about knockers in the tunnels.
Speaker 1: The goat legged figure at the wild Edge, remember, is
Speaker 1: four thousand years old, and his job has always been
Speaker 1: the same, mark the boundary. Whatever the very first Pope
Speaker 1: Lick story was, and I've told you I suspect a
Speaker 1: hairy bipedal siding in those bottoms may sit underneath it.
Speaker 1: At some point the community pointed the story at the trestle,
Speaker 1: and the message was never subtle. That bridge kills stay
Speaker 1: off it. The monster was the fence before Norfolk Southern
Speaker 1: built one, and then the warning inverted.
Speaker 2: That's the tragedy. At the middle of this episode.
Speaker 1: Somewhere between the campfire and the car culture and the
Speaker 1: film and the Internet, the story stopped saying stay away
Speaker 1: and started saying come see. The monster became the attraction,
Speaker 1: The fence became the challenge, and the trestle went right
Speaker 1: on doing the one thing it has always done to
Speaker 1: human beings on foot, with a mechanical indifference no demon
Speaker 1: could match. Jack Baum, David Bryant, Roquel Bain, Savannah Bright.
Speaker 1: The monster didn't kill any of them. The legend, working
Speaker 1: exactly backward from its original purpose, put every one of
Speaker 1: them in front of a train. So here's my verdict
Speaker 1: for whatever one old cops verdict is worth. I believe
Speaker 1: there may well be a real animal in Kentucky's bottoms
Speaker 1: and hollows. And I believe the state's sasquatch record from
Speaker 1: Spottsville to the Gorge deserves far more serious attention than
Speaker 1: it gets. I believe the thing under the Pope Lick Tressel,
Speaker 1: the goat legged one, is us our oldest boundary marker
Speaker 1: posted at a genuinely lethal boundary, doing its job in reverse.
Speaker 1: And I believe the deadliest sentence in this entire episode
Speaker 1: is only four words long. It's not that far. That's
Speaker 1: the monster's whole voice, right there. Not a bleat, not
Speaker 1: a hiss, not your mother calling your name, just that quiet,
Speaker 1: reasonable thought on the edge of the span. It's not
Speaker 1: that far. The train schedule says, we're fine. Everybody does
Speaker 1: this one picture and we're gone. If you ever hear
Speaker 1: that voice near a railroad track anywhere, that's him. That's
Speaker 1: the goat man. And now you know what he sounds like,
Speaker 1: so you can turn around and walk away, which is
Speaker 1: the one power every victim in tonight's episode had right
Speaker 1: up until the second they didn't one more time because
Speaker 1: it bears repeating. And then some stay off the pope
Speaker 1: lick trestle, stay off every trestle. Don't walk tracks, don't
Speaker 1: pose on tracks, don't fly drones over cruise, don't test fences.
Speaker 1: You can love this legend. You can visit the park lands.
Speaker 1: You can see that bridge from a legal distance and
Speaker 1: feel every bit of the shiver it's earned, and you
Speaker 1: can go home to the people who love you. The
Speaker 1: story works fine from the safe side of the fence.
Speaker 2: I just proved it.
Speaker 1: We spent this whole night together and neither one of
Speaker 1: us set foot on a single tie. Kentucky, you were
Speaker 1: everything I hoped. A monster with the deepest roots in
Speaker 1: human storytelling, a real tragedy that demands respect, and a
Speaker 1: sasquatch record hiding behind it. All that could fill five
Speaker 1: more episodes. I suspect we'll be back someday. Next stop,
Speaker 1: another state line, another set of back roads, another thing
Speaker 1: waiting in the dark that somebody swears they saw. Until then,
Speaker 1: keep your eyes on the tree line, keep your feet
Speaker 1: off the tracks, and I'll see you down the road.
Speaker 2: Didn' the