Move Over Bigfoot, Here Comes Sheepsquatch
The McClintic Wildlife Management Area is over 3,000 acres of woodland, farms, and wetland in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, population 4,350. In the dense forest you’ll find animals, hunters, partying teenagers, and the occasional explosive bunker. Locals call McClintic the “TNT Area” because the grounds were once used for munitions manufacturing in World War II. The explosives were stored in bunkers covered in sod, and their humps still mar the landscape of the TNT Area. Occasionally, they blow up. But it’s not a careless hunter or even an exploding bunker that tops the list of scary things lurking around the TNT. No, it gets a lot stranger than that.
“The TNT Area itself is just chock full of amazing weirdness,” says Kurt McCoy, author of “White Things: West Virginia’s Weird White Monsters.”
White Things are exactly what they sound like. They are indefinable creatures the color of ghosts, crisp tablecloths and pure driven snow. Such stories crop up all over the U.S., but McCoy says they are especially prevalent in West Virginia. Over the years, McCoy has amassed many tales of White Things.
“I ran across everything from something that was described as a huge stingray that was white, to an owl-type thing. The archetypal White Thing is shaped sort of like a badger with a bushy tail and ranges in size from a large dog to slightly larger than a person,” says McCoy. “There was a headless monster in Grafton which was white, but had seal-like skin. And then, of course, there’s the notorious Sheepsquatch.”
Sheepsquatch first reared his oblong head in the 1990s.
Legend has it that a car full of women were making their way home after a family reunion through the TNT Area. There was snow on the ground and they crunched along the treacherous roads at just a few miles an hour. And that’s when it stepped out of the woods.
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http://modernfarmer.com/2013/12/move-bigfoot-comes-sheepsquatch/
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Having been mistaken for 'ol Squatchie a time or 2 myself, having seen some living anomolies (i.e. albino deer, "pre-comeback"Eastern coyote), and having had a couple pulls on the jug ("from a genuine copper coil"
from down that way - You gotta be careful about what you think you see, 'cuz hallucinations are everywhere.
One of the weirdest things that ever happened to me was deep in West Virginia. I was on deserted a one-lane "highway" (Rte 72, the "Cheat Valley Highway, which becomes the "Dry Fork Road" in a deep, deep river gorge, limping a moped overloaded with camping gear up a steep incline at about 8 mph, when the bike started to run out of fuel. It was between rainstorms and I was soaked to the skin, and the road was still wet.
I stopped the bike and filled it with my last gallon of gas, when I noticed a rivulet of blood in the road, and farther up, a small pool of blood and a bloody knife just sitting in the middle of the road. I stopped the bike there, and peered over the no-guardrail cliffside where it looked like a body had been dragged and dumped, but it was straight down and all I could hear was the far-distant roar of the angry creek far below.
I hadn't seen a vehicle in at least half an hour, and it couldn't have stopped raining much earlier than that (the rain would have washed away the blood). So, I told myself calmly, someone must have hit a deer coming down the hill, got out and put the creature out of its misery, set the knife on top of his truck, dragged the deer over to the cliff and dumped it, and left without picking up the knife.
Yeah, that's what happened, I said. But just in case I carefully put the knife in a ziploc bag and got the hell out of there--at eight excruciatingly slow miles per hour, certain that some creepy highwayman was going to run me down and fillet me like a sunfish. But I'm pretty sure I never saw a single vehicle along that stretch of road, and scarcely a place wide enough for a car to pull over, and it was raining again within minutes. Creepy.
I was less than halfway home on a truly insane ride which I shall never again attempt, and I'd been adding to a "list of things that can kill me in the road" the whole way out and back, much of which I still remember: walnuts, squirrels, rabbits, turkeys, juvenile box turtles, carcasses and the vultures (and an eagle) feeding on them, oil, vehicle parts, rain, gravel, a fogged helmet, deer, 18-wheelers, people on cell phones, potholes and eroding roadsides, floods, falling rocks, people standing in the road on cell phones, and then the bloody knife and then the shiny bear eyes at the bend of the mountain pass, in the dark and rain, out of gas and hoping to make it past the top so I could dead-stick it into Franklin. Wild and wonderful that week was.
What happened then? Why was there a bloody knife and a possible body in the middle of the road? Was it *really* a deer? Or was it murder victim? And did the bear come out to "chat" with you, or was it just the eyes you saw?
You can't leave a story like this hanging! Please, continue!
