The White Bigfoot of Mason and Fleming Counties, Kentucky

Autumn 1980. Rural Mason County, in northeast Kentucky. Over a few weeks, families here and in neighbouring Fleming County told the same story. Something very tall, upright and covered in long white hair was coming onto their porches at night.

Early October. The Fulton home at Slip Up, near Mays Lick. The family was watching television when one of the children came in and said someone was turning the back door knob. Charles Fulton, 39, thought the child was joking. "A few minutes later, something liked to have tore my front door off," he said.

He opened the door and saw the creature with one of his roosters. It either dropped or threw the bird as it jumped off the porch. Fulton went outside and saw it standing between the house and an outbuilding, with long white hair and glowing, animal-like eyes. He fired two shots with a .22-caliber pistol, but they seemed to have no effect. It loped off at a "slow-motion kind of gallop."

His mother-in-law, Anna Mae Saunders, 60, saw it from inside with the three children. "It just looked like a big white, fuzzy thing standing there on the porch," she said. "I never saw it's face; it was above the 7-foot-high door." Later accounts gave it pink eyes and put its weight at more than 400 pounds.

October 10, 1980. Ewing, Fleming County. James "Chink" Tumey's family chased a creature from their enclosed porch into the night. Tumey fired warning shots from a distance. He described it as manlike and big, making a "thumping noise as it ran."

Two loaves of bread, a frozen chicken and a pack of hot dogs were missing from the freezer. Neighbours came running at the gunshots. Searchers Estill Helphenstine and Johnny Burke found bare footprints in the creek bed, about 14 inches long. "We both saw that, and there is no denying it," Helphenstine said.

On November 5, Noble Clay, a truck driver from Alabama, was heading west on U.S. 68 near Maysville. He took a figure by the road for a hitchhiker, until it came into his high beams. He reported a six to seven foot, ape-like creature with white hair. He had never been to the area and knew nothing of the other reports. He notified the Maysville police.

Fleming County Sheriff G. W. White came to Ewing. Police and neighbours went into the woods with guns and good lights and searched into the early morning, but found nothing. Hair recovered at the Tumey home went to the Kentucky State Police and was reportedly human. Maysville police took Clay's statement and believed he was serious. Fulton never went to the authorities because he feared no one would believe him.

UPI carried the story across the country, and the Chicago Sun-Times ran it on October 12. In Maysville, The Mirror put the creature on its front pages, with an artist's rendering on October 11. A woman said it chased her around a parking lot at the laundromat. One man at a tobacco warehouse said he saw it carrying a burlap sack and smoking a cigar. Looking back in 2015, publisher David Cartmell said: "We had fun with it, even though it was probably a hoax."

The white Bigfoot of Mason County was never found. Saunders spoke of similar sightings across the Ohio River in Aberdeen, Ohio. To Anna Mae Saunders, it was simply a big white, fuzzy thing on the porch.