This one's for you, Simon!


Incident at Black Mountain

The evening of April 15, 1976 began ordinarily enough at the small community of Black Mountain, Kentucky. The weather had been mild and clear. The evening sky saw the rise of a bright, nearly full moon. Little did any of the community’s inhabitants suspect the terror that the evening would bring to some of them.

At around 7:30, give or take a few minutes, Roy and Glenda Watson were driving along Porter Valley Road about three miles outside of Black Mountain. Roy drove cautiously along the narrow, winding road that evening. As the car slowly rounded an especially sharp turn, the Watsons saw a strange figure in the road. It stood upright, at least seven feet tall, and appeared covered with dark hair. It was moving along the road directly in front of the approaching car.

Roy Watson hit the brakes and brought the car to a halt only a few feet away from the figure. Both he and Glenda saw its eyes glinting in the headlights. The figure appeared as surprised by the encounter as they were. For a long moment they eyed each other. Then the figure turned and headed up the road in the opposite direction. It moved, the Watsons later said, with an odd, loping gait unlike a normal human walk or run.

Over Glenda’s protests, Roy found a nearby place to pull off of the road and contacted the office of the Buell County sheriff on his citizens’ band radio. Sheriff’s Deputy Clyde Tidwell was dispatched to the scene of the sighting. As he was some miles away at the time, it took him over twenty minutes to arrive. The Watsons showed Tidwell where they had seen the creature.

While Deputy Tidwell was en route to the scene of the Porter Valley Road sighting, a quartet of local youths—Ray Morgan, Joe Fisher, Rhonda McAlister, and Linda Mitchell—were taking in the moonlit evening at a nearby public boat access ramp on the Green Lick River. A sound from the edge of the woods alerted them to the arrival of a figure answering to the same description as the one encountered by the Watsons. The youths variously estimated its height as between seven and eight feet.

Terrified, they made haste to lock themselves in Joe Fisher’s car. The creature walked slowly around the car, peering into the windows. Rhonda McAlister got a particularly good glimpse of its face. She described it as looking “Kind of like a monkey’s face, but not exactly.” At one point the creature slapped the car’s hood with a massive hand.

Driver Fisher started the engine and turned on the headlights. This sudden action seemed to startle the creature. It quickly disappeared into the woods near the river bank. The witnesses described it as moving in a manner like that observed by the Watsons.

Fisher and his passengers also lost no time in departing the scene. A few minutes later they happened across Deputy Tidwell on Porter Valley Road. Tidwell was stunned when they reported sighting the creature that the Watsons had earlier seen. He noted on inspecting their vehicle that they did not have a CB radio that would have enabled them to learn beforehand of the Watson sighting. He also noted that there was no sign that any of the youths had had any controlled substances on hand.

The third sighting of the evening occurred a little after eight-thirty at the Waller residence, not quite a mile upstream from the Green Lick boat access. Iola Waller was in the kitchen of the house when she heard a crashing noise outside. As she glanced at the kitchen window, she saw a “horrible inhuman face” pressed against the glass. A huge, paw-like hand was also pressed against the window.

Iola’s screams brought her husband, Larry, on the run from the living room. He arrived just in time to see something moving back away from the window. Iola just managed to gasp out an explanation of what she had seen before hyperventilating too badly for further speech.

While Iola sought a paper bag to breathe into—this was not her first episode of hyperventilation under stress—Larry ran to get and load his deer rifle. From just outside the kitchen door he saw a tall figure standing in the moonlight on the edge of the yard. He gauged from the trees beside which it stood that the figure was at least six and a half feet tall, perhaps more.

Larry was preparing to shoot at the intruder when it occurred to him that it might be a human prankster. He fired a warning shot into the air instead. The deer rifle’s report prompted the creature’s immediate departure. The family’s oldest son, Wade, arrived at the door just in time to see it flee. The younger children did not see anything (Though that did not prevent younger son Wayne from subsequently getting into trouble at school for regaling his friends with highly embellished accounts of the family’s experience).

Larry went back into the house and called the sheriff’s department. The dispatcher there sent Deputy Tidwell to the Waller house. By the time he arrived the Wallers had been joined by a neighbor, Billy Don Gilbert, who had heard Larry Waller’s warning shot. On hearing that the creature had earlier appeared downstream at the Green Lick boat access, Gilbert suggested that it might be heading further upstream to the Aniston Campground, a small church camp site about half a mile as the crow flew from the Waller house. There were no other residences between the two locations.

Tidwell agreed to check out the Aniston Campground. Gilbert accompanied him; Larry Waller did not wish to leave his family. It took several minutes for Tidwell and Gilbert to take the roundabout county road route to the access road that led to the campground. As they approached the access road they saw a very bright light shining through the woods from the campground. It was by now well after nine.

There followed a brief pause as Tidwell and Gilbert debated the wisdom of driving the short distance to the campground. They had just decided to try it when the light faded. They arrived at the campground to find it completely deserted. A quick (And, both men later admitted, rather nervous) inspection by flashlight uncovered no signs of either creatures or vandalism.

A daylight inspection of the Aniston Campground the following day found a peculiar area of flattened grass in a field on the premises. It was roughly circular and about forty feet in diameter. Nothing else was found out of order.

At the Waller house odd smudges were found on the kitchen window. Daylight also revealed that a bird feeder and its stand in the yard outside the kitchen had been knocked over. This was presumably the source of the crash that Iola Waller heard.

At the Green Lick access searchers found what appeared to be several huge, human-like footprints in the mud beside the river. They were not very well-defined. It is difficult to tell from photos whether they really were indistinct giant footprints, or whether there was a certain amount of imagination involved in their identification.

Notwithstanding the frustrating lack of physical evidence, the Black Mountain sightings are some of the most remarkable on record. What sets them apart from any number of local Bigfoot flaps is the extreme concentration of the sightings in time. Skeptics often invoke “mass hysteria” to explain multiple sightings that occur in the same locale over a period of days or weeks. They have a point. It is plausible to suppose that, in some situations, a sensationalized initial report might create a climate of fear and excitement that increases the chance of subsequent misidentifications.

It is difficult, however, to see how that could have been the case at Black Mountain. Four different sets of witnesses saw the same thing in as many different locations, within the space of only about two hours. Moreover, the first three sets of witnesses had no way of knowing about each others’ experiences. The Green Lick witnesses had no citizens’ band radio to learn about the initial report before their own sighting. The Waller household did have a CB radio, but it was not at that time in operation (Larry Waller later admitted that he “wasn’t much good at wiring stuff up”).

In that age before cellular telephone service, then, there was simply no way that the witnesses could have influenced each other so quickly to create a “contagious hysteria.” For this reason, the sheer number of sightings on a single evening assures the Black Mountain sightings of a continuing special place in Bigfoot lore.


The children were safely asleep in their travel compartment. She had known that they would be, of course, but a mother could not resist the urge to check once the craft was safely in space and on its way. Now she and her husband would have a while to relax before they were far enough away from any planetary bodies to perform the jump to the next system. She stepped back into the craft’s little control center where her husband and Blackie were.

Blackie (The unimaginative name had been the children’s idea) lay curled up in his sleep space at the edge of the control center. For a time his master and mistress had had their backs turned to him as they monitored the craft’s controls. Now the craft was on autopilot, and they could give him their attention. They could see that he remained awake. His entire two-meter form expressed his sadness over the chastening that he had received after running away from them during their rest stop planetside.

She caught Blackie’s sad eyes with her own. “We’re going to have to re-name you Rover!”

“We’re going to have to pick a more thoroughly isolated landing site, the next time we let him out for exercise on a populated world,” her husband said. His voice expressed his annoyance.

She resisted an impulse to remind her husband that she had suggested as much in the first place. She could tell by his tone that he was annoyed—not only at Blackie, but at himself for having ignored her advice. An “I told you so” would serve no good purpose.

Husband’s expression softened as his eye- and nostril-slits dilated slightly. He left his control seat and approached Blackie’s bed. Bending, he reached down and tousled the shaggy, dark hair on Blackie’s head.
“All right, old fellow, I believe you’ve been punished enough,” he said indulgently.

The touch and softened tone of voice were all it took. Blackie was happy again.

This is excellent. Thank you so much!