South-central Kentucky Wampus Cat?

A panoramic view of the sighting location

From Dave in South-central Kentucky comes a strange tale of something making "odd whistling night-calls and screams" and leaving "oversized, apparently three-toed footprints," in "a pretty remote and heavily wooded region that has seen BF-like activity off and on for at least the last 50 years or so." Dave advises: "There's a long-standing legend about a [monster] in this area, but descriptions run along the lines of 'mystery kangaroos''" and "giant monkeys."

This is how Dave described the events to me in an email:

I have pix and video of the tracks (with scale markers) and site and a decent cast of the second track I found. Both full tracks and a partial only appeared as a result of something stepping down with considerable force and/or weight onto large mole-trails along the fence row and under a black walnut tree. They appear to only show three distinct toes with the possible impression of a fourth in one track. If anything, they seem to look more like the classic Yeti track. The area surrounding them is mostly grassed and hard-packed gravel roadbed. They occurred at the intersection of two farm gates, one of which is our property and the other my cousin's place. The fencing is at its lowest point there-- no cattle are housed in this area-- and if you're bipedal, you can easily step over it; [the area is] surrounded by some smaller cedar thickets. The two family farms comprise about 500 acres and there are several other farms in the region that are either lying fallow or converting to managed forest land. The human population is actually quite a bit less here than it was 50 years ago in my grandfather's day and, of course, hunting is at nothing like the levels it used to be. HUGE deer population, coyote, and wildcats (including possible cougar) returning to the area along with rumors of black bear.

My first thought was a distorted bear track, but when I came across the second print and it matched the first, I had to reconsider. It's also much, much larger than a bear track should be, running about a full foot in length. Black bear rear prints shouldn't be much bigger than my hand and should have five distinct toes with claw marks (as I'm sure you know) and cats don't enter the picture due to size. My business partner is a primary keeper of large cats (and polar bears) at the Louisville zoo and he's mystified. We have reference casts of everything from Amur tigers to the polars and nothing matches up. Given the local folklore about the [local] Monster circa around 1970, the odd vocalizations at around 3:30 AM (which I haven't recorded yet, but seem to match some of the higher-pitched BF vocals I've listened to) and a broken fence reinforcement at the gate next to the second print, I'm preparing to set up a game cam to see what's up.

I asked some follow up questions, and Dave very kindly wrote a detailed account of his experiences:

I had a free weekend last year and decide to travel down to [the farm] alone to just check up on things. I hadn't visited the farm in nearly two years and wanted to dine at one of my favorite greasy-spoons. . . that had been written up in a book about KY classic diners. I spent the night at the farmhouse and was awakened at around 4 AM by an odd noise right outside the house-- seemingly right outside the window I was sleeping under. I can only describe it as a sort of "gabbling" sound-- something like the noises that Taz made in the old Warner Bros. cartoons! There was the burst that woke me, then another short burst, then silence. I got up, looked out the windows and checked out front. There's a security light on a pole outside, but I saw nothing. It wasn't really a scary event at all, just puzzling, so I did get back to sleep. I'm familiar with a lot of animal calls, and this wasn't the "screaming sound" I'd heard so much about.

Then, while sleeping in a tent in the front yard of the farmhouse, he had another chance to hear the mystery creature:

I turned in very early as we'd had a long day and was sound asleep until I woke at 3:30 with every dog in the region worked up over something. There are no dogs within about a mile, so these were all distant barkings, but they were from all directions. Then I hear a very odd, high-pitched wavering cry that I can't even attempt to duplicate. It sounded more avian or small-monkey-like in origin, but I could clearly see (or hear, I suppose) how someone could take it for a woman screaming crossed with a sort of slow horse-whinny sound. It seemed to originate around the end of the road (to my right) but was moving closer, seemingly up the road towards my position. It was either being made by something traveling the road, or the field on the other side. I looked out of the screen window of the tent, but saw nothing for the duration of the calls, which I would say lasted 7 minutes or so. They were not deafening by any means, but loud enough to be heard clearly. "Unearthly" comes to mind when I attempt to describe them. The loudest of them occurred when whatever it was passed the house and was around the bend in the road to the left. I then heard a return call in the far distance to the left as well. They called back and forth at least two times, with all of the dogs barking around the region, and then fell silent. The dogs kept up for a while longer, but ceased within around 15 minutes.

The following morning, Dave looked around but didn't find anything. The next day, however, he and his whole family were more successful when they went out searching for evidence:

I looked down at the ground near the fence-line and saw what looked like an odd animal footprint. A big one. I said out loud "That looks like a footprint..." and my wife and father agreed it did. I got down and examined it closely and declared that it definitely was a print as I could see dozens of small twigs that had been depressed into the ground and had popped back up, leaving prints of their own within the track. I don't think it was particularly fresh, but it is hard to tell due to the dryness of the ground down there. [I]t was on top of a mole trail and that caused the dirt around it to be particularly loose and dry, but does not figure into any real distortion of the size and shape, which can be seen in the photos. I hadn't notice it the day before, but I hadn't been right up next to the fence, either. It did stand out, so maybe it had been made since the day before. I really cannot say.

One of the prints found at the location

Since we have just had Nick Redfern here talking about how he finds reports of man-like creatures are often associated with locations important to ancient man, I asked Dave if there was anything nearby of interest.

The farm this land lies on was VERY important to ancient man and local tribes. There are, I believe, at least three natural springs on the property, one of which was carved out by someone into a small stone catchpool you can drink from. It's like having a water fountain in the middle of the woods. My grandfather plowed up hundreds of arrowheads and flint knives over the years, mostly in the field adjacent to the house and main spring (which still serves as the main well) and it was probably a semi-permanent hunting camp area for hundreds of years if not longer...

I also asked whether there had ever been UFOs associated with the area, and it seems as if the association is minimal, though Dave did recall "that there was a pretty active UFO flap in the same area around 1978 or so. Vehicles followed, light beams in fields, that kind of thing."

Whatever the creature was, it returned again, leaving more evidence. Dave had been investigating other areas of his land, and upon returning to the footprint location:

I immediately noticed that a cedar crossbeam was broken down next to the gate. Now I hadn't seen that earlier and was pretty sure it hadn't been that way when I left for the back fields, which was something like 90 minutes earlier. It was hit hard enough to split it in the middle, like something had tried to put weight down on it and it broke. The light moss on the top surface was also scraped off. When I crossed the gate and walked around to look at it I saw another print. This one was facing the area of the beam and gate and was in a half-bare patch of loose earth and twigs etc. It was not as detailed or deep, but seemed to match the original in size and general shape. I immediately did a casting with plaster and reviewed my videotape that I was shooting that day-- I didn't have the digital camera as I had left it with my wife. It's not easy to see, but I do believe the post is visible, unbroken, on the tape I shot from the farm road looking back at the gate.

The broken beam

It's a strange story, especially when looking at the footprints. The complete print has been found twice so it's doubtful it could be an overprint of a bears front and back paws. And because of its size, it can't be any bear native to Kentucky. It doesn't look like a bigfoot print either. Dave did tell me about the legend of the Wampus Cat:

The Wampus Cat is one of those malleable critters that started out in Native American folklore --an Indian maiden follows the tribal shamans to a forbidden meeting and is punished by them and turned into a half-woman half-cat being that walks the hollows, screaming in the night-- and found its way into crypto/fortean references as an upright walking big cat, sometimes associated with a small ball of light that it follows down lonely country roads, screaming, of course...

Apparently people have seen something like this in other Southern states.

The strange cries, the oversized footprint -- what are we to make of a tale like this? As a bigfoot researcher, I do get these odd tales from time to time, of creatures that don't fit the bigfoot mold, but that leave their own evidence. I can recall offhand the strange story of the "Beamer" of West Virginia, a tall, man-like creature with a canine snout. I'm always disturbed by these stories. It's strange enough to think of bigfoot roaming the woods undetected, but perhaps not impossible to imagine one large creature that has evaded us. But how do we adjust our thinking to allow more of them out there, roaming the countryside, leaving evidence, disturbing the night air with their cries?