The Spottsville Monster, Henderson County, Kentucky (1975)

Spottsville is a small community in Henderson County, Kentucky. It sits 11 miles east of Henderson along US-60, with the Green River as its eastern edge. In the summer and fall of 1975, the Nunnelly family rented a farmhouse on Mound Ridge Road, close to the riverbanks. Red and Rose Nunnelly lived there with their children. An older son, Harold, was doing remodelling work at the house. Corn and tobacco grew in the fields around it.

October 20, 1975. Five of the Nunnelly children saw it. They described something "about 7 feet tall, walking on its hind feet and of a dark green color." Bart Nunnelly later remembered it this way. "All of the children saw it one morning standing in a corn field out front."

It was not a single visit. The dogs were terrified and stayed under the porch whenever it came around. Strange noises came at night. It chased Red Nunnelly and one of the dogs out of a tobacco field. It jumped an old fence-row. The Gleaner reported 16 chickens and one goat lost. By November, an Evansville television station had shown what the Messenger-Inquirer called "a big green thing that peered at people over the cornstalks of Henderson County fields along the Green River."

Bart Nunnelly was a child in 1975. He grew up to become the case's chronicler, and his account is darker. He describes "a giant, hairy shadow at least 8 feet tall" with a square jaw and "reddish gray hair, thin and patchy in spots." Small, close set eyes. Red, burning. "It was horrible and deeply terrifying with a short muzzle, long pointed fangs." In his count, the losses ran to more than 200 chickens, a goat and a horse, along with the mutilated remains of 8 dogs and a pig. On the Sasquatch Chronicles podcast he said organs, eyes and tongues were taken. His father had a plan to use kerosene if the creature got into the house.

Then comes the strangest part. The account says the creature "took a step back into the strange looking 'doorway' and disappeared." A witness received a telepathic message. "Don't be afraid... I will not harm you."

According to the family, the state police came out at first, then refused to answer more calls. Later, state police and "a couple of other men whom he took to be Federal game officials" demanded all evidence. Hair samples. A claw. A plaster cast of a four-toed partial footprint. Nunnelly says it was all taken. No official record of this has been found. In the end, "Red and Rose gathered their children and belongings and moved back to the 'safety' of the city."

The 1975 press offered simpler answers. A man who had been tracking the animal told the Messenger-Inquirer it was a brown bear or a small grizzly. Mrs. Bob Bolds, wife of the Henderson game warden, doubted there was any bear in Henderson County at all. She put "the bear, monster or whatever" down to coon hunters wanting to get a jump on the opening of coon season.

A statement later appeared in the local paper in Red's name. It said what he had seen was nothing more than a large, black bear. The family says it was prepared for him, not written by him. The gaps between the 1975 reports and the later account, in colour, in height, in the losses and in the doorway, have never been resolved.

The Spottsville Monster lived on. Bart Nunnelly wrote about it in Mysterious Kentucky and Bigfoot in Kentucky, and directed the 2019 documentary The Spottsville Monster: Encounters with Kentucky's Bigfoot. Monsters and Mysteries in America featured it in 2015, the same year Frank Boyett revisited the case in The Gleaner. Researcher Lonnie Hawks collected a footprint photo in November 2012. Locals still report large figures near Baskett Lane and KY-136, in the country where the Nunnellys once said Bigfoot walked.