I’ve just finished watching another episode of “Mountain Monsters”. This time our hillbilly hunters pursue the Headless Monster of Grafton County, West Virginia, and discover his revolting culinary habits.
Here is the team……..
In charge is Trapper, with Jeff as researcher, Willy as trap builder, Buck is the rookie, Huckleberry is the security expert, and the absolute star of the show is Wild Bill. Anything is possible for an ex-Marine.
It didn’t take very much googling to find some original reports from way back in the day. The webpage is entitled “The Grafton Monster sightings of 1965”
I have copied and pasted the best contributions to save you the trouble of looking for them, and because they are just so interesting.
Kurt McCoy, from Morgantown, West Virginia, wrote…
“I recently ran across reports of “monster sightings” in the Grafton area, back in June of 1965. Robert Cockrell apparently wrote two articles for the Sentinel about the sightings, one of which was his own.
The “monster” was described as being between seven and nine feet tall with white or light gray skin, “slick like a seal’s”. There were several sightings, but not much publicity and the events have been all but completely forgotten.
Now, since it’s roughly 50 years since those sightings, and given the popularity, and tourist/commercial value that has been given to other better known West Virginia “monsters” (like the Flatwoods “Green Monster” and Pt. Pleasant’s “Mothman”, it seems like a not altogether awful thing to try to preserve and record whatever information can still be gleened about Grafton’s weirdest visitor.
So, anybody remember hearing about the Grafton Monster? Any relative, friends, or neighbors who saw it? Any actual witnesses out there?
If so, let’s hear about it!”
A second contribution from Kurt was…
“The original Grafton Monster sighting was on June 16th, 1964. A newspaper reporter rounded the bend coming on to Riverside Drive and saw a huge white, living Thing on the grass by the river. The Monster was described as having slick skin like a seal’s and no apparent head. The witness sped away, but returned later with two friends and found nothing but grass matted down by the river bank. As they investigated the scene, however, a strange whistling sound seemed to follow them about. The original witness had no intention of reporting the incident for fear of ridicule, but word leaked out from the two friends and, grudgingly, a brief report of the sighting was published in the local newspaper (The Statesman? have to check the notes on that).
Almost immediately there was a wild “monster craze” with bumper to bumper traffic along Riverside drive and dozens of people roaming about the town armed with shotguns, crowbars, baseball bats and other potentially harmful toys. The local authorities, understandably unhappy with this potential disaster, did everything possible to dampen the monster mania. The newspaper printed a follow up story maintaining that the whole thing was just a misidentification of someone pushing a pile of white boxes on a hand cart. The hysteria died down and the whole thing was soon forgotten.
The original witness continued to investigate, however, and found about twenty other witnesses whole described seeing something almost identical to what he saw. A week earlier a man in Morgantown had seen an identical beast in the Mon (sic). The reporter exchanged letters with Gray Barker about the incident (those letters are in the Gray Barker Collection in Clarksburg). Eventually the ridicule and official resistance proved too much and the reporter dropped his investigation–and refuses to talk about it to this very day.
The newspaper reports are real–you can find them on microfilm. The incident was real, whether or not the Monster was.”
Woodsman, of Saint Joseph, Missouri, wrote…
“I have seen the creature called “The Grafton Monster” several times when I was a young man and it is very real. My first encounter I was with my Father cutting wood. We had finished and we’re loading the truck, when our two dogs started barking. We stood there and listened, something was walking, getting closer. My Dad told me to get the gun from the cab (He carried a double barrel 10 gauge with 00 buckshot).Whatever it was had picked up it’s pace and continued toward us. All we knew for sure was, it was big and wasn’t scared of us, the dogs or the chainsaws .It stopped about 50-55 yards from us in the tree’s and went quiet. My Dad pulled both hammers back and stood in front of me, told me to be ready. The next thing that happened I’ll never forget. It stepped out, looked at us, took 3 strides in our direction, turned and walked back into the tree line. That was my first sighting of the beast and I’ll never forget it. My 2nd encounter was about 2 months later at night, fishing alone.”
The Headless Horror is not always quite as headless as he is portrayed. It’s more a question of poor posture, apparently…
Our heroes prepare for the hunt…
They talk to a rather scared eye witness…
Both Trapper and Buck get the chance to try out some of the local goo…
Afterwards, there follows a reasonable post-match examination of events, although I would have liked more attention to have been paid to what appeared to be excellent thermal images from the special camera.
Unfortunately, at the end of the day, our heroes are left with no physical evidence of their huge adversary. Personally, I wish that they had captured the Headless Horror’s Hat…
“Mountain Monsters” is on Animal Planet Channel every Thursday at 10.00 p.m. (Sky 523).
John Knifton 